Repost: Black History Month: Mildred and Richard Loving

Nearly sixty years ago it wasn't same-sex marriage, it was interracial marriage.

Mildred Jeter Loving and Richard Perry Loving were married in June of 1958 in the District of Columbia; they'd gotten married in DC because they couldn't get married in Virginia due to that state's Racial Integrity Act—a law banning marriages between any white person and any non-white person.

Oh yeah, Mildred was a Black woman; Richard was a white man.

After marrying, they returned to Carolina County, Virginia and were charged with violating the ban. Mildred and Richard Loving were asleep in their own bed in their own house when it was invaded by police officers who hoped to find them having sex—an altogether different crime.

Mildred Loving pointed to the marriage certificate on the wall in their bedroom. The police, rather than seeing they weren't committing some kind of interracial sex crime, used the certificate as evidence for a criminal charge since it showed they had been married in another state.

The Lovings were charged under Section 20-58 of the Virginia Code, which prohibited interracial couples from being married out of state and then returning to Virginia, and Section 20-59, which classified "miscegenation"—a mixture of the races especially through marriage, cohabitation, or sexual intercourse between a white person and a member of another race –as a felony punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years.

On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia.

The Lovings were being run out of town because of who they loved. Sound familiar? The trial judge in the case, Leon Bazile, said:

“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix.”

Using God as a way to keep people from marrying? Sound familiar now? Mildred and Richard Loving moved to the District of Columbia, and in November of 1963 the ACLU filed a motion to vacate the judgement and set aside the sentence because it ran counter to the 14th Amendment—equal protection under the law.

The case ultimately reached the Supreme Court and, in October of 1964, after their motion was still undecided, the Lovings began a class action suit in the U.S District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia.

In early 1965, the three-judge district court decided to allow the Lovings to present their constitutional claims to the Virginia Supreme Court of Appeals. Virginia Supreme Court Justice Harry Carrico wrote an opinion for the court upholding the constitutionality of the anti-miscegenation statutes and, after modifying the sentence, affirmed the criminal convictions. Carrico said the 14th Amendment didn't apply to the Lovings case because both the white and the non-white spouse were punished equally for the "crime" of "miscegenation."

But then the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the convictions in a unanimous decision, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia's argument that a law forbidding both white and Black persons from marrying persons of another race, and providing identical penalties to white and black violators, could not be construed as racially discriminatory. In its decision, the court wrote: 

“Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival.... To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discrimination. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.”

On June 12, 1967, the Supreme Court ruled unanimously in favor of the Lovings. 

Richard Loving died in a car accident eight years later.

On June 12, 2007, Mildred Loving issued a rare public statement, which commented on same-sex marriage, prepared for delivery on the 40th anniversary of the Loving v. Virginia decision of the US Supreme Court., saying in part:

“Surrounded as I am now by wonderful children and grandchildren, not a day goes by that I don't think of Richard and our love, our right to marry, and how much it meant to me to have that freedom to marry the person precious to me, even if others thought he was the ‘wrong kind of person’ for me to marry. I believe all Americans, no matter their race, no matter their sex, no matter their sexual orientation, should have that same freedom to marry. Government has no business imposing some people's religious beliefs over others. Especially if it denies people's civil rights. I am still not a political person, but I am proud that Richard's and my name is on a court case that can help reinforce the love, the commitment, the fairness, and the family that so many people, black or white, young or old, gay or straight seek in life. I support the freedom to marry for all. That's what Loving, and loving, are all about.”

Mildred Loving died of pneumonia on May 2, 2008. Her daughter, Peggy Fortune, told the AP:

"I want (people) to remember her as being strong and brave yet humble—and believed in love."

Part of the Washington Post’s obituary read:

“A modest homemaker, Loving never thought she had done anything extraordinary. ‘It wasn't my doing,’ Loving told the AP in a rare interview a year ago. ‘It was God's work.’"

It was just loving.

I Didn't Say It ...

Ben Shapiro, a conservative political commentator, media proprietor, and attorney, calling The Felon a liar:

“So here’s [The Felon] saying some stuff about Ukraine. [Plays clip.] I have some moral objections to the stuff that he is saying about Ukraine here because I don’t think that it is true. So for example, at one point during this press conference, he made the signally false statement that Ukraine started the war. This is not true. Ukraine absolutely did not start the war. You can argue with Ukrainian policy toward both Europe and Russia over the period 2013 to 2022. But Russia invaded a sovereign country and tried to take Kyiv and has killed tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people. [And] here’s  [The Felon] suggesting sort of the opposite that somehow Ukraine is the problem here.” 

He's a liar; he’s Putin’s Puppet; he’s a traitor to America and a disgrace to the world.

And a conservative is leading the charge.

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Alexis Ohanian, Serena Williams’ husband, responding to ESPN's Stephen A. Smith who said if his wife—he’s single, never been married—danced on a halftime show like Serena Williams he'd divorce her:

“I get it—you’re 57, and life didn’t turn out the way you imagined. That kind of disappointment must be exhausting. You’re the embodiment of peaked in high school, spending decades chasing validation from strangers through Likes and Digital Hugs, only to find that no amount of external approval fills the void. I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. Criticism only fuels your victim complex, reinforcing the comforting delusion that there's some grand conspiracy against you and your "brave ideas"—when in reality, you've just got terrible takes. It’s a cycle: outrage, backlash, self-pity, repeat. This is a lonely road. There’s still time to rewrite the ending — start by working on yourself first. You'll find that if you wake up every morning trying to be a little better, a little more curious, you won't have time for irrational hating — you'll be too busy winning.”

I love when unmarried confirmed bachelors want to tell men how their women should act. Smith ought to get a wife, treat her like his property, and then see how that works out before he opens his yap.

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Jessica Tarlov, one of a few sane minds at Fox News, taking on The Felon’s grandstanding:

“If Joe Biden showed up to the Daytona 500 while Kentucky faced devastating storms. He would have been crucified. In times like these Presidents shouldn’t be driving around a race car track while people are living under emergency declarations.”

Well, it is Mitch McConnell’s state and Mitch is now standing against The Felon so, or course, The Felon would go to Kentucky … being so butt hurt.

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Pamela Anderson, on her “breakout” roll in The Last Showgirl after over thirty years in the business:

“The ending is obscure for a beautiful reason. It lingers with you, like a song whose lyrics aren’t spelled out or explained. Everyone, whether it’s the audience, the writer, the director, me, or the other actors, will have their own interpretation. That’s the genius of [Gia Coppola]’s depiction. Our own experiences color the ending, and that’s what makes it so powerful. I just hope people can see past the nonsense and recognize what Gia Coppola saw in me, and that is a woman bursting at the seams, eager to express herself artistically,” she said. “I needed a project like this, something raw and authentic, something that wasn’t about trickery but about truth. All my co-stars on this film quickly became family. We will forever share an intimate bond. We truly impacted each other and made each other better. I fell in love with Jamie [Lee Curtis], Kiernan [Shipka], Brenda [Song], Billie [Lourd], and Dave [Bautista]. They will always hold a tender place in my heart. There’s no violence, no exploitation, just a story about a woman, and that’s enough. Every woman is a movie all on her own. And I’m thrilled that people are returning to the romantic theater experience. In a world that can be so harsh, we need simple, human stories told with a pure heart and a shared collective soul. I hope this is just the beginning of my career. I’m like a sponge, absorbing everything I can. My pockets are full, and I want to see what I’m made of.”

It's funny that scrubbing off her makeup has made people take notice of her more than they had when she was just a body.

Good on her for finding herself.

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Judith Butler, a leading scholar of gender and identifying as nonbinary, on The Felon’s hate-filled executive orders:

“Amassing authoritarian power depends in part on a willingness of the people to believe in the power exercised. In some cases, [The Felon]’s declarations are meant to test the waters, but in other cases, the outrageous claim is its own accomplishment. He defies shame and legal constraints in order to show his capacity to do so, which displays to the world a shameless sadism. Many of [his attacks] express fascist passions. Denying rights to healthcare, legal recognition and rights of expressive freedoms for trans, intersex and non-binary people attacks the very foundations of their lives. Even the conservative supreme court found that discrimination against trans and gender non-conforming people constitutes discrimination on the basis of sex. While there is every reason to be outraged, we cannot let that outrage flood us and stop our minds. The desire for a freedom equally shared; for an equality that makes good on democratic promises; to repair and regenerate the earth’s living processes; to accept and affirm the complexity of our embodied lives; to imagine a world in which government supports health and education for all, where we all live without fear, knowing that our interconnected lives are equally valuable.”

We can be outraged, and

angry and sad, but we need to harness those emotions to fight this tiny little man swinging his tiny little dick like it’s a redwood.

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Dan Savage, on fighting and resisting and dancing:

“During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night. The dance kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for. It didn’t look like we were going to win then and we did. It doesn’t feel like we’re going to win now but we could. Keep fighting, keep dancing.”

It’s still the dance we’re fighting for, even if it is a different fight, for our lives, our loves, our right to exist.

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Charles Pierce, American sportswriter, political blogger, liberal pundit and author, taking on The Felon:

"In my life, I have watched John Kennedy talk on television about missiles in Cuba. I saw Lyndon Johnson look Richard Russell squarely in the eye and say, ‘And we shall overcome.’ I saw Richard Nixon resign and Gerald Ford tell the Congress that our long national nightmare was over. I saw Jimmy Carter talk about malaise and Ronald Reagan talk about a shining city on a hill. I saw George H.W. Bush deliver the eulogy for the Soviet bloc, and Bill Clinton comfort the survivors of Timothy McVeigh's madness in Oklahoma City. I saw George W. Bush struggle to make sense of it all on September 11, 2001, and I saw Barack Obama sing 'Amazing Grace' in the wounded sanctuary of Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina. These were the presidents of my lifetime. These were not perfect men. They were not perfect presidents, god knows. Not one of them was that. But they approached the job, and they took to the podium, with all the gravitas they could muster as appropriate to the job. They tried, at least, to reach for something in the presidency that was beyond their grasp as ordinary human beings. They were not all ennobled by the attempt, but they tried, nonetheless. And comes now this hopeless, vicious buffoon, and the audience of equally hopeless and vicious buffoons who laughed and cheered when he made sport of a woman whose lasting memory of the trauma she suffered is the laughter of the perpetrators. Now he comes, a man swathed in scandal, with no interest beyond what he can put in his pocket and what he can put over on a universe of suckers, and he does something like this while occupying an office that we gave him, and while endowed with a public trust that he dishonors every day he wakes up in the White House. The scion of a multigenerational criminal enterprise, the parameters of which we are only now beginning to comprehend. A vessel for all the worst elements of the American condition. And a cheap, soulless bully besides. We never have had such a cheap counterfeit of a president as currently occupies the office. We never have had a president so completely deserving of scorn and yet so small in the office that it almost seems a waste of time and energy to summon up the requisite contempt. Watch how a republic dies in the empty eyes of an empty man who feels nothing but his own imaginary greatness, and who cannot find in himself the decency simply to shut up even when it is in his best interest to do so. Presidents don't have to be heroes to be good presidents. They just have to realize that their humanity is our common humanity, and that their political commonwealth is our political commonwealth, too. Watch him behind the seal of the President of the United States. Isn't he a funny man? Isn't what happened to that lady hilarious? Watch the assembled morons cheer. This is the only story now."

This is what criminals and grifters do, especially in a position of power, that We The People gave them.

Resist.

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Repost: Black History Month: Billie Holiday

The facts of Billie Holiday's early life are uncertain. The facts of her life, however, are not. Billie was an icon, a prostitute, a drug addict, a nightclub singer, a desperate figure; she was also one of the first African American singers to appeal to both Black and white audiences.

She was born Eleanora Fagan, maybe in Baltimore; maybe not. Her mother, Sadie Fagan, may have been just thirteen, and her father Clarence Holiday, may have been just fifteen. And they may or may not have ever married.

But Clarence Holiday, did play guitar and banjo professionally, and he joined jazz-band leader Fletcher Henderson in the early 1930s. So Clarence was on the road much of the time and was not conceivably a family man.

Eleanora, as Billie was known, had a delinquent adolescence,. She was sent to a reformatory at the ten, raped at eleven, and a prostitute by age twelve. In Baltimore, hoping for a new career as a singer, she assumed the first name of her favorite movie star, Billie Dove, and the last name of her father, and Billie Holiday was born.

Soon after, in 1928 or 1929, she moved to New York City with her mother, and together they struggled to make a living during the Depression. Sadie and Billie worked as domestics when they could get no other work, and whenever her father came to town, Billie would confront him, threatening to call him daddy in front of his girlfriends unless he gave her money.

In her mid-to-late teens, Billie began singing in New York clubs, and by the time she was old enough to drink legally she had established a reputation as a stirring jazz singer. Hers was a natural talent with excellent musical instincts and an earthy voice that matched the honesty of her songs.

Lover Man Oh Where Can You Be

God Bless The Child

Don't Explain

Fine and Mellow

By the age of eighteen her fans included, among many others, Benny Goodman, with whom she recorded in 1933, and record producer-promoter John Hammond, who observed that "she sang popular songs in a manner that made them completely her own." Her nickname in Harlem was "Lady," and saxophonist Lester Young, an admirer, added the appellation "Day."

She was "Lady Day," the hottest singer in Harlem before she was twenty.

Her best recordings were organized by Hammond, with pianist Teddy Wilson, and after those sessions, Hammond was devoted to promoting Holiday's career. He arranged for her to appear with the best musicians of the era, and by the end of the 30s, Billie Holiday had sung with Count Basie and his orchestra, and with the Artie Shaw Band.

But life as a big band singer was too restrictive for Billie, and in 1938 she became a solo act. In January 1939 she opened at the new Greenwich Village club Cafe Society, where she sang for nine months and introduced her classic protest against lynching, "Strange Fruit." The Cafe Society audiences were mostly white, and Billie found a whole new group of fans who hung on her every song.

Holiday was a success, but she was also living her music with disastrous effects. In August 1941 she married Jimmy Monroe, and by the time of their breakup soon afterward, she was an opium user and a heroin addict. She made over $1,000 a week in the early 40s and spent most of it on her habit; she was also at the peak of her career.

In 1943 she was voted the best jazz vocalist in the Esquire magazine readers' poll, and with that acknowledgement, Decca Records began making a series of thirty-six recordings that are regarded among the finest jazz vocals of the time.

Lover Man

Porgy

Now or Never

My Sweet Hunk of Trash, sung with Louis Armstrong.

But those Decca recordings also seemed to mark the beginning of the end of Billie's career. In 1945, she married trumpet player Joe Guy, and together they formed a band, losing much of Billie's money along the way. Business woes, her drug dependency, and chronic depression brought her career to an abrupt halt.

In 1947, Billie Holiday was arrested on a drug charge and voluntarily accepted placement in a federal drug-rehabilitation center for a year and a day. Ten days after her release she appeared before a packed house at Carnegie Hall—one of the first Black artists, and the first Black female artist to do so. But because of her drug arrest, her cabaret license had been suspended, and Billie was not allowed to play in Manhattan establishments that served alcohol.

The years of drinking and the ravages of drug addiction took their toll on her talent as well. Her voice lost its resilience, and oftentimes she would appear on stage unable to perform. She toured Europe in 1954 and appeared triumphantly at Royal Albert Hall before an audience of six thousand. But increasingly the power of her performances was attributable to the pity the audience felt for a once extraordinary talent that had destroyed itself; it was as if her music described a life too terrible to endure.

Billie’s autobiography Lady Sings the Blues reinforced that image and did not hide the embarrassments of her life, her drug addiction, the rapes, the bad marriages, the prostitution. In the mid-1950s her last marriage, to Louis McKay , fell apart and she was unable to drag herself from the world of drug abuse. By 1958 she was on her last slide downward.

Billie Holiday died on 15 July 1959 in a hospital bed where she had been under house arrest for over a month for possession of narcotics. She had $750 taped to her leg.

But before you feel sad for Billie Holiday, remember all that she did for women, and Black women; all she did to pave the way for every single female singer that came after her. And don't forget that she opened doors to a world of music and nightclubs that had once been closed to Black performers.

Hers was a remarkable talent, and a horrendous personal life, but it was all Billie Holiday and because I have loved her voice for years and years, here are some of her songs …

Bobservations

We lead an exciting life, Carlos and me; we are in the midst of having the gutters replaced on the house. Oh calm down. Don’t be jealous, we can’t all lead such fabulous lives.

Anyway, Carlos asked me if I had the name of the gutter company we were looking into and I said I’d get it off the computer after dinner. But, before checking, I went through the mail and laughed and Carlos said:

“What’s so funny?”

 “We were just talking about the gutters and here’s a flier in the mail for the same company! I’ll leave it on the counter and we can call tomorrow.”

Cut to the next morning, and Carlos said:

“You told me yesterday you were going to get the gutter company phone number.”

“I know, but then we got the flier in the mail and I told you I’d give you the number first thing this morning.”

“I don’t remember that conversation.”

I took out my cartoon frying pan, ready to thwap his melon and told him that he drives me insane.

“Do I?”

Thwap.

This Tuxedo Says is from August 2020 and, well, the same is true today, nearly five years later:

Tuxedo feels about the Occupant of the White House the same as his two Dads although he's slightly less profane …

That’s my boy!

Out there in Utah students in kindergarten would be required to learn about firearm safety in the classroom under a bill that passed the state House with overwhelming GOP support.

Yes, your five- and six-year-old would be required to learn how to handle a gun. What could possibly go wrong?

There is nothing like a pair of hot, romantic skinny dipping cakes while sitting by the ocean, eh?

After The Felon named himself chairman of Kennedy Center and removed Biden appointees from the board in favor of unqualified cronies including Second Lady Usha Vance and White House Chief of staff Susie Wiles, dozens of celebrities abandon the performing arts center in protest:

Actor Issa Rae announced that she is cancelling her "An Evening With Issa Rae" event slated for next month and that tickets will be refunded:

"Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I’ve decided to cancel my appearance at this venue."

Television producer and writer Shonda Rhimes has resigned as treasurer of the center's board, quoting JFK:

“If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him."

Adam Weiner of the band Low Cut Connie has also canceled an appearance at the center:

"Upon learning that this institution that has run nonpartisan for 54 years is now chaired by [The Felon] himself and his regime, I decided I will not perform there."

Legendary soprano Renée Fleming resigned as artistic advisor to the center, as did singer-songwriter Ben Folds, who  stepped down from his role as advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra.

This is just the kind of rejection that infuriates The Felon more than anything. He has long wanted to be accepted by America's cultural elites but they see him for the cruel, fascist, incompetent failure he truly is.

The National Park Service has removed ‘transgender’ from the website for the Stonewall National Monument in New York, a small park dedicated to an LGBTQ+ uprising that helped advance civil rights for our community. And not only did they remove the word "Transgender" but changed "LGBTQ+" to "LGBQ+".

The federal government is attempting to erase our trans brothers and sisters, and you can bet that next they will come for the rest of us.

This pride, we riot … again.

Unlike Google, which has followed the Fascist in Chief in renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, Encyclopedia Britannica has said it will continue to use Gulf of Mexico for a few reasons:

We serve an international audience, a majority of which is outside the US.

The Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water and the US’s authority to rename it is ambiguous.

And stupid.

Texas is reporting one of the biggest measles outbreaks in generations, with 48 cases, doubling since last week, with 13 hospitalizations.

The outbreak started in Gaines County, which has one of the lowest child vaccination rates in the state, and where 91% of the people voted for The Felon.

This is what happens when you trust MAGA over doctors and scientists.

Hunter McVey is a model and social media personality from Nashville who has discussed his struggles with weight and self-image, and his fitness journey, so Would You Hit it?

Repost: Black History Month: Matthew Henson

In 1878, at age twelve, Matthew Henson walked from his home in Washington, D.C. to Baltimore to get a job as a cabin boy on the merchant ship Katie Hines. The captain of the ship wasn't sure about hiring a twelve-year-old boy, but when Matthew told him that he was an orphan, Captain Childs relented.

Educated by Childs in in seafaring, math, history, and geography, Matthew Henson travelled to China, Japan, North Africa and the Black Sea, but when Captain Childs died, Henson gave up the sea—partially because the racism of some white sailors prevented him from furthering his career—and took a job as a clerk at a furrier in Washington, D.C. where he met Robert Peary, an officer in the U.S. Navy Corps of Civil Engineers.

Henson shared Peary's love of adventure, and so Robert Peary offered him a job as his personal assistant on an expedition to Nicaragua. Matthew Henson spent the next two years in Central America with Peary, honing his skills as a mechanic, navigator and carpenter. It was there that Peary, desperate to become the first man to reach the North Pole, offered Henson a job as a messenger at the League Island Navy Yard, with an eye toward having Henson available for future ventures. Henson accepted, and two years later, in 1891, Peary was granted  leave from the Navy to further explore Greenland and Henson joined him.

Henson accepted without hesitation, although it caused friction with his new bride, Eva Flint. Only married two months, Hensen left her to join Peary, and four others—including Dr. Frederick Cook and Peary's own wife—on an expedition of Greenland. Matthew Henson spent the next eighteen years travelling with Peary throughout the Arctic as the only remaining member of Peary's original team.

In Greenland, Henson's carpentry skills were used to construct a two-room house, dubbed Red Cliff House, which would serve as the expedition's headquarters. The following spring, Peary and his men left the camp, crossing Greenland from west to east to reach the northernmost point of the island. Henson was injured on the trip and returned to Red Cliff House.

At headquarters, there was conflict with another man, John Verhoeff, whom Peary declared insubordinate and had left behind on the expedition. Verhoeff resented a Black man taking his place on the team  and also resented the local Eskimo population. Matthew Henson, on the other hand, saw the value the native people had to offer, and quickly learned the Eskimo language, Arctic survival skills and local culture; this knowledge was vital in future expeditions.

In 1895, Henson, Peary and Hugh J. Lee finally discovered Greenland's northernmost point. Close to starvation because they couldn't find the food they'd hidden along the way under all the new snow, they continued onward, finally reaching the northern corner of Greenland. Peary had hoped to travel further, but the lack of food forced them to turn back and forced them to use the dogs that had once pulled their sleds as food.

Henson and Peary tried for the Pole several times over the next few years. In 1902, six Eskimo helpers died, the food ran out, and their progress toward the north was blocked by melting ice. In 1906 the team returned again, this time in a new ship, the Roosevelt, named for the new president, designed to cut through the ice. With this new ship, the expedition was able to get closer to the Pole than any other human being—within 174 miles—but melted ice blocked the final distance.

In 1908, they tried one final time, once more on the Roosevelt; with Peary in his 50s, and Hensen in his 40s, both men knew they were getting too old to continue much longer.

The men on the team knew that not all of them would reach the Pole, but Peary had stated from the beginning that "Henson must go all the way. I can't make it there without him." Robert Peary, Matthew Henson and 4 Eskimo men reached the pole on April 6, 1909, travelling four hundred and thirteen miles in sixteen days.

It took until July for the Roosevelt to free itself from the ice and head south. On August 17th the ship put in at Etah, Greenland where Peary and Henson heard some rather startling news: Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the same man who had been with Henson and Peary on an earlier Greenland trip, claimed that he had reached the Pole on April 21, 1908, a full year before Peary's party.

Henson interviewed the two Eskimo men that supposedly had gone with Cook. They admitted they had never gone more than 20 miles out on the icepack, and an examination of Cook's sledge showed it had hardly been used. It seemed obvious the Cook was telling a bold-faced lie.

But Cook took full advantage of the lie, and by the time Peary returned to the U.S., Cook had received several honors in Europe and his success was accepted by the public until the National Geographic Society investigated and determined Cook's claim was a hoax. A sea captain came forward and testified that Cook had paid him to produce sextant readings consistent with being taken at the North Pole. That, along with Matthew Henson's discoveries, lead to Cook being dishonored and Peary, eventually, honored as the first man to reach the North Pole.

Hensen, however, as a Black man, got little recognition at all. It wasn't until 1937—nearly thirty years later—that he got the credit he deserved. In that year he was made an honorary member of the famed Explorers Club in New York, and in 1946 he was honored by the U.S. Navy with a medal. His most-prized award, though, was a gold medal from the Chicago Geographic Society.

Matthew Henson died on March 9th, 1955, and was buried in a small plot at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. In 1987, Dr. S. Allen Counter, a Henson biographer, led a movement to have the remains of both Henson and his wife moved to lay adjacent to Robert Peary in Arlington National Cemetery, a more fitting location for an American hero.

On the seventy-ninth anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole, Matthew Henson was laid to rest near his old friend, Robert Peary, and on his tombstone is a quote from his autobiography:

The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart.

To me the trail is calling.

The old trail.

The trail that is always new.

Architecture Wednesday: Tintagel Church Conversion

It looks idyllic, living in a converted chapel along the Cornish coast just minutes from Trebarwith Beach.

The Old Chapel is for sale for a hair under $700,000 USD … less than the cost of a one-bedroom London flat and stretches across 2,200 square feet in the village of Trewarmett, Tintagel.

Tintagel and Trebarwith and Trewarmett, oh my; but Tintagel is famous for its ruined clifftop medieval castle, which legend says was home of King Arthur.

This unique  property, built with quarried stone dating back to the 19th century, has been converted, with character intact, into a three-bedroom home with an ‘upside-down’ layout; bedrooms are on the lower level, while the main floor houses an expansive living, kitchen, and dining area set beneath the chapel’s spectacular ceiling, with beams and ornate diagonal wood paneling between the rafters. In addition, Gothic arched windows offer panoramic views over Cornish fields and the rugged coastline in the distance, while long timber floorboards run the length of the room.

The gallery floor is a bedroom and a sleeping loft set beneath the roof, offering an up-close look at the ceiling panels. There are two additional bedrooms on the lower ground floor, featuring sash windows and a large landing area currently used as a games room.

It’s rough and rugged and historic but those arched windows and those views … for 700K? That price alone could get me into a church!

As always, click to emBIBIGGERate ...

The Spaces

Repost: Black History Month: Ida B. Wells-Barnett

An uncompromising woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker.

Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, Ida's parents were able to support their seven children after the war because her mother and father were skilled workers—as a cook and carpenter. When Ida was fourteen, however, Yellow Fever killed her parents and youngest siblings, and Ida took it upon herself to keep the family together. She took a job as a teacher, working to continue her own education at nearby Rust College.

It was in Memphis, where Ida moved to live with aunt and younger sisters, that she first began to fight—literally—for racial and gender justice. In 1884 the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company asked Ida to give up her seat to a white man—she was ordered into the smoking, or "Jim Crow," car.—and she told the man …

“I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.”

Ida Wells was forcefully removed from the train as the white passengers applauded.

Back home in Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad and won her case in the local circuit courts. But the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. This was the first of many struggles Wells engaged, and from that moment forward, she worked fearlessly to overturn injustices against women and people of color.

Her suit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company gave rise to a new career as a journalist. Many newspapers wanted to hear the story of the 25-year-old schoolteacher who stood up against white supremacy. Her writing career blossomed in papers geared to African American and Christian audiences.

In 1889 Wells became a partner in the Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper owned by Rev. R. Nightingale—the pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church. He "counseled" his large congregation to subscribe to the paper and it flourished, allowing her to leave her position as a schoolteacher.

In 1892 three of her friends—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—were  lynched because their grocery store, People's Grocery Company, had taken away customers from competing white business. A group of angry white men thought they would "eliminate" the competition so they attacked People's grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. Moss, McDowell and Stewart were arrested, but a lynch-mob broke into the jail, dragged them away from town, and brutally murdered all of them.

Ida Wells  wrote in The Free Speech:

“The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Many people took Wells' advice and left town; others in the Black community organized a boycott of white-owned businesses to try and stem the threat, the terror, of lynchings. Ida's newspaper office was destroyed as a result of her stories of the murder of her three friends and she opted to leave Memphis for Chicago, where she continued her blistering attacks on Southern injustices, especially through investigation to expose the fraudulent "reasons" given to lynch Black men, which by now had become a common occurrence.

In Chicago, she developed numerous African American women’s organizations, but she remained diligent in her anti-lynching crusade, writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She was also a tireless worker for women's right to vote and marched in the 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C. Not able to tolerate injustice of any kind, Ida B. Wells, along with Jane Addams, successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.

In 1895 Wells married the editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers, Attorney F. L. Barnett, and announced she would retire to the privacy of her home.. She didn’t stay retired for long; she continued to write and to organize, and in 1906 she, along with W. E.B. DuBois and others, further the Niagara Movement—a civil rights organization that fought against racial segregation and disenfranchisement for African Americans—and she was one of two African American women to sign "the call" to form the NAACP in 1909.

As late as 1930, disgusted by the nominees of the major parties to the state legislature, Wells-Barnett decided to run for the Illinois State legislature, making her one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States.

A year later, she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.

I wonder what she might have said about a woman running for president in 2008, about a Black man becoming president in 2008 and I like to think she was smiling and saying:

"I told you so."