Not a lot of music links today...I had to go into town anyway so I accepted the offer to join an evening car pool and spend the day online in McDonalds'. They have their own music. My e-friends pick better songs!
Black History
James Talarico does not know his Black American History. Why else would he talk as if an armed thief were an innocent victim of racism--the young man was shot while fleeing from police onto private property, brandishing a firearm, under which circumstances the homeowner who shot him "in self-defense" might not even have noticed his skin color--while ignoring real victims of attacks on Black business and property owners in the early twentieth century?
Well...for one thing, Google is low on names. Black Americans who had worked and saved and brought up families were targeted, by the Ku Klux Klan and by random troublemakers, North and South, East and West, just for having succeeded by following the rules for success teachers, preachers, and politicians had been preaching to everybody. Google pulls up the stories of civil rights activists who were attacked in the 1960s, like Vernon Dahmer of Hattiesburg (Mississippi), but in the 1920s and 1930s most of these people were private citizens who didn't want to be famous while they were alive--they feared that attention to their cause might provoke even more violence, and at the time this was probably true. Their stories remain to be researched from primary sources...police reports, city maps and census records, any surviving children or grandchildren who remember the victims' own words.
The historian who tries to write that book will have a challenging task. In the 1920s and 1930s being a victim was not in fashion. People who deserved sympathy didn't ask for any. Victims of violent crimes often blamed themselves, sometimes actually believing things like "if I hadn't counted the change in the store, giving him a chance to see that I had some cash, he wouldn't have robbed me." People whose houses were burned down as a punishment for being successful while Black couldn't count on support for their being victims of racism; those who felt "old" cursed their luck and died believing that Black people weren't allowed to succeed, those who felt "young" moved to different places where they hoped to encounter less prejudice.
While the Tulsa incident discussed here has received attention lately...
...similar attacks, most on a smaller scale, occurred in many cities. Wikipedia notes Chicago, New York, and Duluth as the sites of the largest-scale riots in the 1920s and 1930s. This would be because they were the largest cities. If you've lived in a city in the Eastern States you know how the story tends to go. Relatively fewer acres were burned and people were killed, and people like to downplay the violence and suggest that their townsfolk generally got along well with one another...but everyone knows where the riot took place. Those who don't remember can still see.
Music
"Flower duet."
Rumors
Andy, Maurice, and Robin Gibb died so young that it's not surprising that people believed an unconfirmed Internet rumor that Barry Gibb died last week. He is apparently alive and well and living in Miami, age 79.
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