John Oliver Presents "Harding"

YouTube

Thanks, Marc

2017 | The Pit Of Man's Fears

Via FB

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

Getting Woke | The 7 Stages of White People Getting Woke

Urban Dictionary

Jamie Varon in Complex:

We all watched as Matt McGorry went from the cute prison guard in Orange is the New Black to that woke white guy who’s using his celebrity influence to raise awareness around injustice and inequality. Thanks to the Internet and the removal of media gatekeepers, we’ve seen a growing number of prominent celebrities ... wake up to the harsh realities that people of color face. Anyone who can access the web has a voice now, and while the Internet can be a breeding ground for hatred, it's also a place where we can learn from each others' experiences. 

I know I'm not alone in waking up to the subtle and insidious ways that racism permeates the lives of so many Americans. Although I doubt most white people believe we're living in a "post-racial America," hearing stories from POCs about their experiences with racism is eye-opening. From rampant police brutality and heightened incarceration rates to socioeconomic inequality and job discrimination, there's an entire segment of America that many white people are unaware of. 

At least, that's until they wake the hell up, and see what's going on around them. When white people go from oblivious to activist, there’s a certain pattern that emerges. Here are the seven stages of getting "woke" ...

Varon's seven stages are recognition, research, feel, connect, defend, purge, and dream.

Read the rest of the article here.

Presented Without Comment | Wind And Wankpuffins

xkcd

Via FB

Edgar Mitchell, 1930-2016

from a fifth grader | via FB

Bad Reception | The New Yorker | Feb 2016

Wankpuffin is my new favorite word.

Afroculinaria | An Open Letter To Paula Deen

Michael Twitty by Jonathan M. Lewis

So it’s been a tough week for you… believe me you I know something about tough weeks being a beginning food writer and lowly culinary historian. Of course honey, I’d kill for one of your worst days as I could rest myself on the lanai, the veranda, the portico (okay that was really tongue in cheek), the porch..whatever…as long as its breezy and mosquito-free. First Food Network now Smithfield. (Well not so mad about Smithfield—not the most ethical place to shill for, eh, Paula?)

I am currently engaged in a project I began in 2011 called The Cooking Gene Project—my goal to examine family and food history as the descendant of Africans, Europeans and Native Americans—enslaved people and enslavers—from Africa to America and from Slavery to Freedom. You and I are both human, we are both Americans, we are both quite “healthily” built, and yet none of these labels is more profound for me than the fact we are both Southern. Sweet tea runs in our blood, in fact is our blood…What I understand to be true, a lot of your critics don’t…which is, as Southerners our ancestors co-created the food and hospitality and manners which you were born to 66 years ago and I, thirty-six. In the words of scholar Mechal Sobel, this was “a world they made together,” but beyond that, it is a world we make together. So I speak to you as a fellow Southerner, a cousin if you will, not as a combatant.

To be part of the national surprise towards you saying the word “nigger” in the past (I am a cultural and culinary historian and so therefore I am using the word within context…) is at best naïve and at worst, an attempt to hide the pervasiveness of racism, specifically anti-Black racism in certain currents of American culture—not just Southern. Take for example the completely un-Christian and inhuman rage at Cheerios for their simple and very American ad showing a beautiful biracial girl talking to her white mother and pouring cereal on the chest of her Black father. That Cheerio’s had to shut down the comments section says that the idea of inter-human relationships outside of one’s color bracket is for many hiding behind a computer screen—a sign of the apocalypse. So just like those old spaghetti sauce ads, yes, America, racism—“it’s in there” even when we were prefer it not be.

When you said, “of course,” I wasn’t flabbergasted, I was rather, relieved…In fact we Black Southerners have an underground saying, “better the Southern white man than the Northern one, because at least you know where he stands…” but Paula I knew what you meant, and I knew where you were coming from. I’m not defending that or saying its right—because it’s that word—and the same racist venom that drove my grandparents into the Great Migration almost 70 years ago. I am not in agreement with esteemed journalist Bob Herbert who said “brothers shouldn’t use it either..” I think women have a right to the word “b….” gay men have a right to the word “queer” or “f…” and it’s up to people with oppressive histories to decide when and where the use of certain pejorative terms is appropriate. Power in language is not a one way street. Obviously I am not encouraging you to use the word further, but I am not going to hide behind ideals when the realities of our struggles with identity as a nation are clear. No sound bite can begin to peel back the layers of this issue.

Some have said you are not a racist. Sorry, I don’t believe that…I am more of the Avenue Q type—everybody’s—you guessed it—a little bit racist. This is nothing to be proud of no more than we are proud of our other sins and foibles. It’s something we should work against. It takes a lifetime to unlearn taught prejudice or socially mandated racism or even get over strings of negative experiences we’ve had with groups outside of our own. We have a really lousy language—and I don’t just mean because we took a Spanish and Portuguese word (negro) and turned into the most recognizable racial slur on earth…in any language…because we have a million and one ways to hate, disdain, prejudge, discriminate and yet we hide behind a few paltry words like racism, bigotry, prejudice when we damn well know that we have thousands of words for cars—because we LOVE cars…and food—because we LOVE food—and yet in this language you and I share, how we break down patterns of thought that lead to social discord like racism, are sorely lacking. We are a cleaver people at hiding our obsessions with downgrading the other.

Problem two…I want you to understand that I am probably more angry about the cloud of smoke this fiasco has created for other issues surrounding race and Southern food. To be real, you using the word “nigger” a few times in the past does nothing to destroy my world. It may make me sigh for a few minutes in resentment and resignation, but I’m not shocked or wounded. No victim here. Systemic racism in the world of Southern food and public discourse not your past epithets are what really piss me off. There is so much press and so much activity around Southern food and yet the diversity of people of color engaged in this art form and telling and teaching its history and giving it a future are often passed up or disregarded. Gentrification in our cities, the lack of attention to Southern food deserts often inhabited by the non-elites that aren’t spoken about, the ignorance and ignoring of voices beyond a few token Black cooks/chefs or being called on to speak to our issues as an afterthought is what gets me mad. In the world of Southern food, we are lacking a diversity of voices and that does not just mean Black people—or Black perspectives! We are surrounded by culinary injustice where some Southerners take credit for things that enslaved Africans and their descendants played key roles in innovating. Barbecue, in my lifetime, may go the way of the Blues and the banjo….a relic of our culture that whisps away. That tragedy rooted in the unwillingness to give African American barbecue masters and other cooks an equal chance at the platform is far more galling than you saying “nigger,” in childhood ignorance or emotional rage or social whimsy. 

Culinary injustice is what you get where you go to plantation museums and enslaved Blacks are not even talked about, but called servants. We are invisible. Visitors come from all over to marvel at the architecture and wallpaper and windowpanes but forget the fact that many of those houses were built by enslaved African Americans or that the food that those plantations were renowned for came from Black men and Black women truly slaving away in the detached kitchens. Imagine how I, a culinary historian and living history interpreter feel during some of these tours where my ancestors are literally annihilated and whisked away to the corners of those rooms, dying multiple deaths of anonymity and cultural amnesia. I’m so tired of reading about how “okra” is an “African word.”(For land’s sake ya know “apple” isn’t a “European word” …it's an English word that comes from German like okra comes from Igbo and Twi!) I am so tired of seeing people of African descent relegated to the tertiary status when even your pal Alton Brown has said, it was enslaved Black people cooking the food.

Culinary injustice is the annihilation of our food voices—past, present and foreseeable future—and nobody will talk about that like they are talking about you and the “n word.” For shame. You see Paula, your grits may not be like mine, but one time I saw you make hoecakes on your show and I never heard tell of where them hoecakes really came from. Now not to compare apples and oranges but when I was a boy it was a great pleasure to hear Nathalie Dupree talk about how beaten biscuits and country captain and gumbo started. More often than not, she gave a nod to my ancestors. Don’t forget that the Southern food you have been crowned the queen of was made into an art largely in the hands of enslaved cooks, some like the ones who prepared food on your ancestor’s Georgia plantation. You, just like me cousin, stand squarely on what late playwright August Wilson called, “the self defining ground of the slave quarter.” There and in the big house kitchen, Africa, Europe and Native America(s) melded and became a fluid genre of world cuisine known as Southern food. Your barbecue is my West African babbake, your fried chicken, your red rice, your hoecake, your watermelon, your black eyed peas, your crowder peas, your muskmelon, your tomatoes, your peanuts, your hot peppers, your Brunswick stew and okra soup, benne, jambalaya, hoppin’ john, gumbo, stewed greens and fat meat—have inextricable ties to the plantation South and its often Black Majority coming from strong roots in West and Central Africa.

Don’t be fooled by the claims that Black people don’t watch you. We’ve been watching you. We all have opinions about you. You were at one point sort of like our Bill Clinton. (You know the first Black president?) When G. Garvin and the Neely’s and the elusive B Smith (who they LOVED to put on late on Saturday nights or early Sunday mornings!) were few and far between, you were our sorta soul mama, the white lady with the gadonkadonk and the sass and the signifying who gave us a taste of the Old Country-which is for us—the former Confederacy and just beyond. Furthermore, as a male who practices an “alternative lifestyle” (and by the way I am using that phrase in bitter sarcastic irony), it goes without saying that many of my brothers have been you for Halloween, and you are right up there with Dolly Parton, Dixie Carter and Tallullah Bankhead of old as one of the muses of the Southern gay male imagination. We don’t despise you, we don’t even think you made America fat. We think you are a businesswoman who has made some mistakes, has character flaws like everybody else and in fact is now a scapegoat. I find it hard to be significantly angry at you when during the last election the re-disenfranchisement of the Negro—like something from the time of W.E.B. Du Bois was a national cause celebre. Hell, today the voting rights act was gutted and I’m sure many think this is a serious win for “democracy.” If I want to be furious about something racial—well America—get real—we’ve had a good twelve years of really really rich material that the National media has set aside to talk about Paula Deen. Yes Paula, in light of all these things, you are the ultimate, consummate racist, and the one who made us fat, and the reason why American food sucks and ……you don’t believe that any more than I do.

A fellow Georgian of yours once said that one day the “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners would sit down at the table of brotherhood.” Well no better time than now. Paula, I don’t have to tell you redemption is yours to choose, to have and to embrace. As a Jew, I extend the invitation to do teshuvah—which means to repent—but better—to return to a better state, a state of shalem–wholeness and shalom–peace. You used food to rescue your life, your family and your destiny. I admire that. I know that I have not always made good choices and to be honest none of us are perfect. This is an opportunity to grow and renew.

If there is anything The Cooking Gene has taught me—its about the art of reconciliation. We aren’t happy with you right now. Then again some of the things you have said or have been accused of saying aren’t surprising. In so many ways, that’s the more unfortunate aspect. We are resigned to believe and understand that our neighbor is to be suspected before respected. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it doesn’t have to go on forever. As a species we cannot conduct ourselves in this manner. As creations of the Living G-d, we are commanded to be better. You and I are both the descendants of people who lived, fought, died, suffered so that we could be better in our own time. I’m disappointed but I’m not heartless. And better yet, praise G-d I ain’t hopeless.

If you aren’t busy on September 7, and I surely doubt that you are not busy—I would like to invite you to a gathering at a historic antebellum North Carolina plantation. We are doing a fundraiser dinner for Historic Stagville, a North Carolina Historic Site. One of the largest in fact, much larger than the one owned by your great-grandfather in Georgia. 30,000 acres once upon a time with 900 enslaved African Americans working the land over time. They grew tobacco, corn, wheat and cotton. I want you to walk the grounds with me, go into the cabins, and most of all I want you to help me cook. Everything is being prepared using locally sourced food, half of which we hope will come from North Carolina’s African American farmers who so desperately need our support. Everything will be cooked according to 19th century methods. So September 7, 2013, if you’re brave enough, let’s bake bread and break bread together at Historic Stagville. This isn’t publicity this is opportunity. Leave the cameras at home. Don’t worry, it’s cool, nobody will harm you if you’re willing to walk to the Mourner’s Bench. Better yet, I’ll be there right with you.

G-d Bless, 
Culinary Historian, Food Writer and Living History Interpreter
Michael W. Twitty

Afroculinaria via Jezebel

Cahokia

Photograph by Don Burmeister
Click image to enlarge

Glenn Hodges writing for National Geographic:

Cahokia was the apogee, and perhaps the origin, of what anthropologists call Mississippian culture—a collection of agricultural communities that reached across the American Midwest and Southeast starting before A.D. 1000 and peaking around the 13th century. The idea that American Indians could have built something resembling a city was so foreign to European settlers, that when they encountered the mounds of Cahokia—the largest of which is a ten-story earthen colossus composed of more than 22 million cubic feet of soil—they commonly thought they must have been the work of a foreign civilization: Phoenicians or Vikings or perhaps a lost tribe of Israel. Even now, the idea of an Indian city runs so contrary to American notions of Indian life that we can't seem to absorb it, and perhaps it's this cognitive dissonance that has led us to collectively ignore Cahokia's very existence. Have you ever heard of Cahokia? In casual conversation, I've found almost no one outside the St. Louis area who has.

Link

8 August 1974 | Nixon Resigns

YouTube | Scripps Archive

In an evening televised address, President Richard M. Nixon announces his intention to become the first president in American history to resign. With impeachment proceedings underway against him for his involvement in the Watergate affair, Nixon was finally bowing to pressure from the public and Congress to leave the White House. "By taking this action," he said in a solemn address from the Oval Office, "I hope that I will have hastened the start of the process of healing which is so desperately needed in America."

Just before noon the next day, Nixon officially ended his term as the 37th president of the United States. Before departing with his family in a helicopter from the White House lawn, he smiled farewell and enigmatically raised his arms in a victory or peace salute. The helicopter door was then closed, and the Nixon family began their journey home to San Clemente, California. Minutes later, Vice President Gerald R. Ford was sworn in as the 38th president of the United States in the East Room of the White House. After taking the oath of office, President Ford spoke to the nation in a television address, declaring, "My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over." He later pardoned Nixon for any crimes he may have committed while in office, explaining that he wanted to end the national divisions created by the Watergate scandal.

Read more here.

Wordle | September 11

Detail

From Gawker:

How do talk about 9/11, ten years later? What stories do we tell? What ideas grab us? We made a word cloud of editorials from 15 prominent local and national papers to see what came up.

The word cloud was made in Wordle using editorials from a number of local and national newspapers, including The New York Times, the New York Post, the New York Daily News, The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Chicago Tribune, Newsday, the San Jose Mercury News, The Dallas Morning News, the Houston Chronicle, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Boston Globe, and The Star-Ledger.

Click image to enlarge

Internet Archive Digital Library | 11 September

The Internet Archive is an organization that collects audio, moving images, and Web images for historical purposes.

The Archive recently announced the launch of Understanding 9/11: A Television News Archive of coverage of the attacks, without any filters, by national and international broadcasteers.

The Archive serves as a resource for scholars, journalists, and the public and features one week of broadcasts (3,000 hours from 20 channels over seven days.) Besides audio and video, the site also provides a chronology of events. Click here for longer clips, program guides, and an extended event chronology.

Tuesday 11 September 2001

8:48 a.m.
First news reports that American Airlines Flight 11 has crashed into One World Trade Center (north tower).
9:03 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 175 crashes into Two World Trade Center (south tower).
9:17 a.m.
FAA closes NYC area airports.
9:21 a.m.
NYC Port Authority closes all bridges and tunnels in NYC.
9:24 a.m.
President Bush calls crashes "an apparent attack on our country".
9:32 a.m.
New York Stock Exchange closed.
9:40 a.m.
FAA orders all commercial flights grounded.
9:43 a.m.
American Airlines Flight 77 crashes into the Pentagon.
9:45 a.m.
White House evacuated.
9:59 a.m.
Two World Trade Center (south tower) collapses.
10:00 a.m.
United Airlines Flight 93 crashes in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
10:10 a.m.
Portion of the Pentagon collapses.
10:13 a.m.
United Nations building evacuates.
10:22 a.m.
State and Justice Departments, and World Bank, evacuated in Washington DC.
10:24 a.m.
FAA reroutes inbound transatlantic flights to land in Canada.
10:28 a.m.
One World Trade Center (north tower) collapses.
10:45 a.m.
All federal office buildings in Washington DC evacuated.
10:48 a.m.
Police confirm Pennsylvania plane crash.
10:53 a.m.
New York's primary elections postponed.
10:54 a.m.
Israel evacuates diplomatic missions.
10:57 a.m.
NY Gov. Pataki announces closure of all state government offices.
11:02 a.m.
Mayor Giuliani urges New Yorkers to stay at home and orders an evacuation of the area south of Canal Street.

Stephen Colbert | Episode IV: A New Hope

YouTube

In June, Stephen Colbert's request to form a Super PAC (political action committee) was approved by the Federal Election Commission. This is the first ad funded by that Super PAC -- Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow.

Space Shuttle Discovery Flight Deck | 360 Degree View

Click image to enlarge

Detail

Click here for an amazing 360 degree view of the Space Shuttle Discovery's flight deck during decommissioning in the Orbiter Processing Facility

Thanks, Rick

The Family Leader | The Marriage Vow

AP/Salon

The Marriage Vow was created by the conservative Christian organiztion The Family Leader as a way for political candidates and others to secure its support. Rejected by Mitt Romney, the pledge has been signed by Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum.

Although the group recently dropped controversial language implying that black children were better off as slaves, I think it's important to read the Vow in its original form, as the authors intended. Click here to view the press release and document - complete with footnotes - as released by The Family Leader.

The Marriage Vow
A Declaration of Dependence upon MARRIAGE and FAMiLY

Faithful monogamy is at the very heart of a designed and purposeful order -- as conveyed by Jewish and Christian Scripture, by Classical Philosophers, by Natural Law, and by the American Founders -- upon which our concepts of Creator-endowed human rights, racial justice and gender equality all depend.

Enduring marital fidelity between one man and one woman protects innocent children, vulnerable women, the rights of fathers, the stability of families, and the liberties of all American citizens under our republican form of government. Our exceptional and free society simply cannot endure without the transmission of personal virtue, from one generation to the next, by means of nurturing, nuclear families comprised of sexually-faithful husbands and wives, fathers and mothers. We acknowledge and regret the widespread hypocrisy of many who defend marriage yet turn a blind eye toward the epidemic of infidelity and the anemic condition of marriages in their own communities. Unmistakably, the Institution of Marriage in America is in great crisis:

• Slavery had a disastrous impact on African-American families, yet sadly a child born into slavery in 1860 was more likely to be raised by his mother and father in a two-parent household than was an African-American baby born after the election of the USA’s first African-American President.
• LBJ’s 1965 War on Poverty was triggered in part by the famous “Moynihan Report” finding that the black out-of-wedlock birthrate had hit 26%; today, the white rate exceeds that, the overall rate is 41%, and over 70% of African-American babies are born to single parents -- a prime sociological indicator for poverty, pathology and prison regardless of race or ethnicity.
• About one million U.S. children suffer through divorce each year -- the outcome of about half of all first marriages and about 60 percent of remarriages, disproportionately affecting economically-vulnerable families.
• The taxpayer-borne social costs of family fragmentation exceeds $112 billion per year, especially when all costs to the justice system are recognized.
• Social protections, especially for women and children, have been evaporating as we have collectively “debased the currency” of marriage. This debasement continues as a function of adultery; “quickie divorce;” physical and verbal spousal abuse; non-committal co-habitation; exemplary infidelity and “unwed cheating” among celebrities, sports figures and politicians; anti-scientific bias which holds, in complete absence of empirical proof, that non-heterosexual inclinations are genetically determined, irresistible and akin to innate traits like race, gender and eye color; as well as anti-scientific bias which holds, against all empirical evidence, that homosexual behavior in particular, and sexual promiscuity in general, optimizes individual or public health.

Seth Meyers' Remarks At Correspondents' Dinner

YouTube

A Porcineograph Of The 48 Contiguous United States

THIS PORCINEOGRAPH is copied from the Census Surveys of 1870, adding only 3 feet of territory (?)

 resting on Cuba, Mexico and Sandwich Islands, and the Hydro-Cephalus from Canada.

Congressional Legislation is required to PERFECT this GEHOGRAPHY.

Click image to enlarge

Nothing remains of Ridge Hill Farm, once an 800-acre estate in Needham, Massachusetts. The only reminder is a street name in neighbouring Wellesley. Yet once it was the Xanadu of sewing-machine magnate W.E. Baker. One fine summer day in July 1875, Ridge Hill Farms hosted one of the grandest parties the area had ever seen.

Massachusetts governor William J. Gaston and Boston mayor Samuel C. Cobb were among the many dignitaries, foreign and domestic, attending Baker’s fête champêtre, which served a double purpose: it commemorated the centennial of the Battle of Bunker Hill, fought nearby; and it was the Corner-Stone Party for a 'Sanitary Piggery', one that Baker believed would inaugurate a filth-free future for the whole hog-rearing industry. As the patriotic coincided with the pig-centric, each of the 2.500 guests received a copy of this peculiar map of the United States as a ‘good cheer souvenir’ of the event.

Read the article at Big Think.

Recipe for a Culinary Archive | Big Map Blog

Interviews With South Carolina Republicans

YouTube | Dangerous Minds

Footage of interviews with Republican voters at a rally in Columbia, South Carolina on 18 April 2011. The rally was hosted by SC Republican Governor Nikki Haley and Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann.

Barack Obama With His Mother In Hawaii

Friends and family of Stanley Ann Dunham

From a New York Times article, Obama's Young Mother Abroad, by Janny Scott.

Source: @ditzkoff via TDW

If Fox News Had Been There ...

More at Banned in Hollywood

Via Dangerous Minds

Restoring America's Honor The Glenn Beck Way

 YouTube via TDW

On 8.28.2010, Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally was held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The purpose of the rally, which Beck claimed to be “non-political” despite featuring Tea Party-favorite Sarah Palin as a speaker and its being attended entirely by conservatives, was unclear. The participants spoke abstractly about the need to restore “honor” and “pride” to a country that had lost it. When pressed for when our country had lost its honor, most cited the election of Barack Obama.

8.28.2010 also represented the 47th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and Glenn Beck has been criticized by civil rights groups for trying to misappropriate the occasion.
Last year, Beck referred to Barack Obama -- our country’s first African-American President -- as a “racist ... who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.” When offered the chance to respond to Beck’s statements, his fans either agreed with him or simply refused to believe that he had ever made them.

While the speaker list was diverse, the overwhelmingly white crowd expressed paranoid and conspiratorial fears of multiculturalism—that atheists or black liberation theologists or radical Muslims or “free-loading” Latinos were going to ruin our country. There was the constant suggestion that white Christians and their way of life are somehow under assault, and that the attendees of this rally were here to put an end to it and return the country to what it used to be.

Interviews/film by Chase Whiteside of New Left Media.

Strange Fruit | Anniversary Of A Lynching | NPR

Lawrence Beitler/Bettmann/Corbis

Eighty years ago, two young African-American men, Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, were lynched in the town center of Marion, Ind. The night before, on Aug. 6, 1930, they had been arrested and charged with the armed robbery and murder of a white factory worker, Claude Deeter, and the rape of his companion, Mary Ball. That evening, local police were unable to stop a mob of thousands from breaking into the jail with sledgehammers and crowbars to pull the young men out of their cells and lynch them.

News of the lynching spread across the world. Local photographer Lawrence Beitler took what would become the most iconic photograph of lynching in America. The photograph shows two bodies hanging from a tree surrounded by a crowd of ordinary citizens, including women and children. Thousands of copies were made and sold. The photograph helped inspire the poem and song "Strange Fruit" written by Abel Meeropol — and performed around the world by Billie Holiday.

But there was a third person, 16-year-old James Cameron, who narrowly survived the lynching.

The mob grabbed Shipp and Smith first — and then came back for Cameron. He had a noose around his neck when he made an improbable escape. "After 15 or 20 minutes of having their pictures taken and everything, they came back to get me," Cameron told NPR in 1994. "Just then the sheriff, and he was sweating like somebody had throwed a bucket of water in his face. He told the mob leader: 'Get the hell out of here, you already hung two of 'em so that ought to satisfy ya.' Then they began to yell for me like a favorite basketball or football player. They said: 'We want Cameron, we want Cameron, we want Cameron.'

"And I looked over to the faces of the people as they were beating me along the way to the tree. I was pleading for some kind of mercy, looking for a kind face. But I could find none. They got me up to the tree and they got a rope and they put it around my neck. And they began to push me under the tree. And that's when I prayed to God. I said, 'Lord have mercy, forgive me my sins.' I was ready to die."

That's when some people say a local Marion citizen stood on the hood of his car and shouted, "He's innocent, he didn't do it." Whatever the cause, the mob decided not to lynch Cameron and he was taken back to the jail. Cameron was moved out of town, convicted as an accessory to the murder and served four years in jail. But the case was never solved.

Read the rest of the article or listen to the story at NPR.

YouTube

America In Color: 1939 To 1943

Tenement District, Brockton, Massachusetts | December 1940

Photo by Jack Delano

State Fair, Rutland, Vermont | September 1941

Photo by Jack Delano

Whinery Family, Pie Town, New Mexico | October 1940

Photo by Russell Lee

Young Boy, Cincinnati, Ohio | 1942 or 1943

Photo by Jack Vachon

Shulman's Market, N Street, Washington, D.C. | Between 1941 and 1942

Photo by Louise Rosskam

Woman Riveter, Tennessee | February 1943

Photo by Alfred T. Palmer

These images, by photographers of the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information, are some of the only color photographs taken of the effects of the Depression on America’s rural and small town populations. The photographs are the property of the Library of Congress and were included in a 2006 exhibit Bound for Glory: America in Color.

More photographs here.

Via Dangerous Minds