American Gothic - in St. Louis MO - June 30, 2020

Mark and Pat McCloskey defending their mansion in St. Louis Mo. Where are the cops when you need them?

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General, President, Slave Owner, Native Genocider Andrew Jackson's Statue in Lafayette Park Dodges A Demise

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Not Exactly Your Dad's GOP In Congress

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Cheating Black People in America - June 16, 2020

Cheating

Black People

from Slavery

to Wendy's

= America's Prime

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Trevor Noah on the Imminent Dangers of Being Black in America

On comment of many recent events and the deaths of unarmed African Americans at the hands of armed police...

"... maybe if you were not black, you still would be alive."
                                                                                                  ~~ Trevor Noah, 15 June 2020

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This Cultural Christian - Daily Commentary - June 15, 2020 - 15 June 2020

Jail = Chains

4 some Minorities. 

Reasons 4 Fear.

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Christopher Columbus - White Heroic Hero and Founder of the Feast of Gilded Age America

With all this talk of revisionist history and taking this or that statue down and that monument moved because it no longer survives purity testing on the PC(Policing) Left, may I propose that Christopher Columbus as an Italian symbol is largely an American Public Relations feat achieved around 1892 and after, and it covers many areas. 

In my own research of Gilded Age New York, regarding the rich Irish of the times in that city, I ran into this Columbus as a brave European Hero to discover and convert the savages theme. That the Italian Italians in Italy have a lot more choice when it comes to national heroes. That freshly arrived immigrants from Italy to America were already bombarded with a packaged PR "White" hero, that they could hardly refuse, and supported with statues from Italy for Columbus Circle built with subscription funds supposedly from the Italian masses like the "World's" subscription of pennies to build a base for Lady Liberty etc.  

That reading Wikipedia now one would not know that the public partyline on all that does not mention how the World's Fair in Chicago - the "White City" of cutting edge electricity housed in plaster Roman temples around a lake on Lake Michigan and called the "Columbian Exposition" after whoever Columbus was(?) - was much more than any volunteer Italian immigrant efforts of the time in that matter. 

This packaged white European myth was continued with the years with the occasional dream of Countess Annie Leary and her friend Hetty Green "the Witch of Wall Street" and the richest woman in the world when she died with 50 plus million dollars in 1916 from a lifetime of tightly managing her Quaker pennies from a lifetime of eating her own ---- , these stories fed to papers by Leary and Green, like to the NYT for fill more than for true fulfillment lent itself to the importance of a guy like the pirate from Spain ... that a proposed international college on top of a hill in Staten Island with the largest statue of the world of Christopher Columbus never got built - a proposed pet project of these two old crony rich ladies. 

One that a philanthropist like Countess Leary was never that rich as Hetty but gave more like ten million in her lifetime to Catholic Charities, one of them the Italian immigrants in the lower east side and Greenwich village, operating soup kitchens, a settlement house, schools, and the Italian parish of Our Lady of Pompei, single handedly in many times, the RC AD of NYC with its Irish Hierarchy looking the other way regarding Italian immigrant welfare and the Vatican who did notice and rewarded her on two successive occasions by two successive popes - with the title of Papal Countess - 

Countess Leary, the only R.C. on "the" Mrs. Astor's 400 society list along with her brother - Annie's late unmarried banker brother the source of her philanthropy to the tune of an estimated 7 to 20 million - Arthur Leary being a lifelong friend from childhood of "the" Mr. Astor married to "the" Mrs. Astor btw. 


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N.A.A.C.P. Annual Report 1921 - IV Race Riots Tulsa

IV

RACE RIOTS

TULSA

The greatest race disturbance during 1921 took place at Tulsa, Oklahoma, on June 1. On the afternoon of that date the City Editor of the New York Evening Post telephoned the National Office asking if it had any statement to make regarding the riot then taking place in Tulsa. At that time the National Office had no knowledge of the affair, but within six hours the Assistant Secretary was on his way to make an investigation for the Association. Meanwhile reports continued to come in which showed that one of the most serious race riots in the country's history was in progress. The newspapers reported that practically the entire colored residence section of Tulsa was in flames, that shooting was going on and that motor cars and airplanes were being used by the whites. The Secretary telegraphed Governor Robertson of Oklahoma asking that he use the powers of his office to stop the disorders and offering the full cooperation of the N. A. A. C. P. 

The Assistant Secretary reported that the riot was caused by an unfounded charge of attempted criminal assault, lodged by an hysterical white girl against a colored boy of 19. She claimed that the attempt was made in broad daylight in the passenger elevator of a public office building located on one of the main streets of Tulsa, a thriving and bustling city of one hundred thousand inhabitants. On hearing the rumor, a mob set out to wreak its vengeance with out pausing to question the truth or plausibility of the story. In its wild rampage, lasting a night and a day, the mob destroyed forty-four square blocks of property, the entire colored district, valued at more than $1,500,000, and looted and plundered homes and business places before setting fire to them. A number of lives, white and colored, were lost in the fighting. 

Back of the immediate cause of the riot were bitterness against Negro citizens of Tulsa and municipal inefficiency in checking the outburst. A number of colored men in Oklahoma had accumulated wealth through the oil wells and the business following new discoveries of producing wells. Poor whites were jealous of these members of a supposedly inferior race who had made greater economic progress than they. This was particularly true of Tulsa where there were a dozen colored men and women reported to be worth from $25,000 to $150,000. Another factor was the spirit of cooperation among the colored people and their refusal to do such business with white merchants as they could do with merchants of their own race. Combined with this was a determined attitude of aggression against disfranchisement, “Jim-Crowism,” peonage and lynching, which some of the whites thought was too outspoken. 

The corrupt political conditions in Tulsa played their part. Tulsa was controlled by a vice ring and completely dominated by bootleggers, hold-up men, proprietors of houses of ill-fame and gambling dens, while decent citizens showed little or no interest in local politics. At the time of the riot there were thousands of cases awaiting trial in a county with a population of but little more than one hundred thousand. With something like one indictment against six out of every one hundred citizens, the court dockets were so clogged that criminals worked with impunity, knowing there was little or no chance of their ever being tried, if arrested and indicted. 

A feud between the two local daily newspapers had contributed to the feeling of bitterness. One of them carried the story of the alleged assault as a scoop over the other paper, and it was this story that brought about the riot. A mob of whites formed around the jail to lynch the boy. On hearing of this, a group of colored men telephoned the sheriff offering to assist in protecting the jail and the prisoner. The sheriff refused the aid, but later, when reports reached the colored section of Tulsa that the mob was storming the jail, these colored men hurried over to disperse it. 

A fight ensued when a member of the mob attempted to take a gun from one of the colored men, but it was short. Early next morning the mob, estimated at ten thousand, attacked the colored settlement in force with airplanes and bombs, with machine guns, rifles, pistols, cans of dynamite and of oil. The fighting was fierce, the colored men defending their homes bravely, but the odds were too great against them. Murder, arson, plundering and pillage went on until state troops were summoned late the next day.

The colored boy accused of assault was placed on trial in Tulsa soon after the riot and was completely exonerated. Yet this unfounded rumor caused the loss of one hundred lives and millions of dollars worth of property. The Assistant Secretary was enabled to make a thorough investigation through his good fortune in being able to secure an appointment as special deputy sheriff in Tulsa. This enabled him to secure the facts at first hand. His findings were published in dispatches to the New York Evening Post, in The Nation and in the press generally, being quoted in The Literary Digest of June.

The Real King of Staten Island - Scott Matthew Davidson - 1968-2001

A Vision

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What an artist thinks…No…What an artist feels is what I perhaps now feel. I am connected with all the chaos below. I am floating. No I am standing in the midst of screaming, of blood dripping, of detached limbs and heads and emptied torsos, crushed oozing bodies, flames, of sirens sounding, of a thousand screams, no, ten thousand prayers to a living GOD. Where is God today in all this confusion? No answer. Perhaps an answer later. Perhaps.

Valley of tears is a phrase from a childhood prayer comes into focus to label this instant. Life on Earth can indeed become a trek through a great valley of tears. Lord have mercy. Amen.

An artist inspires. An artist touches the souls or is it the spirits of others when they look at his creation, his painting, his music, reads his book. At this moment I want to look away. I have no choice. I am part of this moment. The moment sculpts reality into eternal pictures.. Thoughts and photographic images, real in the human sense, real in the spiritual sense are being formed.

The living and the dead will no doubt in their own time stand back and admire or not understand or may even despise the art of this present moment. Where is the museum? It is here. Time stands still on this planet or at least slows down. Time pauses from second to second. A hundred lives passed in one second. Then two hundred lives passed on not the next second but the second after that. And so on an so forth. Statistics amass.

Amidst the screams and sighs and puzzled thoughts of the unexpected dead, a silence comes. I slip from this macro of life and fade into some micro aspect of my former existence.

I come to a bright sun filled prairie. A simple wood clapboarded, white washed house stands in stark contrast to clear blue sky and rich green vegetation textures. A woman with her back to me is hanging wet laundry on clothes lines a short distance from the house. A small barn is also in view. On a short stone wall sits an old woman in a plain white robe. She is watching a small child, a girl in a gingham dress walking about the yard area. The old woman looks in my direction. I recognize her. She is Myrtle. I had been her elder in a church I belonged to. The last church I had belonged to. Haven’t been to church for a long time.

She smiles a faint smile at me. I never made it to her funeral. She never had a funeral when she died at 94. Her body had been willed to science.

The thought occurs to me that she is perhaps dreaming about some scene from her own childhood in early twentieth century rural Illinois. Myrtle gives me non-verbal nods to my questions to her. She had made it to the other side. I would not consider donating my mortal coil to be entrusted to the likes of some smirking first year medical students…

The smell of charred meat. How I always hated that smell. Leaving the roast in the oven too long to dry up and then to burn.

More like a barbecue smell. The teacher in eighth grade wrote in chalk on the slate blackboard common American words that originated in other languages. Barbecue had Spanish origins I think. I remember this as the pungent smell of burning meat rolls off the olfactory senses of a wandering creature all bent over as if in pain. Clothed in a thick dark outfit, he climbs stairs, step after step after step after bloody, dusty step.

The fireman’s breathing is labored. He occasionally reaches for assistance in breathing from the tank hanging off his back. Crackling noise of walkie-talkie sounds mix with breathing, and hisses and the smell of burned meat dance around senses in a misty fog of smoke coming and going. The smell of burning petrol and plastic add to this undefinable barbecue sauce.

Why do I smell human smells if I am truly dead? Why am I suddenly connecting in consciousness to the senses of one living man, this fireman? Why am I connected back to the world of the living?

People push by on the dark stairs.

The fireman’s flashlight wavers back and forth to give momentary assistance to the descending surviving refugees of terror. The fireman’s goal is upward, ever upward. A ladder to heaven is not possible but in this behemoth structure heaven might in fact be at the top of this arduous climb.

America

One Person

No Vote

(Georgia, C.S.A.)

Old Bone Spur Club in NYC - One Of Donald Trump's Old Haunts - Now Defunct

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