Tulsa Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

May rambling: food and death

100 years since Tulsa, and one since George Floyd

vaccinated_2x — From https://xkcd.com/2460/

I’ve been thinking a lot about food and death. NOT death caused by food poisoning.

At my FIL’s funeral this month, someone told a story about how my parents-in-law met. They were both students at what is now UAlbany. She was a food server, he made deliveries of supplies. He came into the dining area, just as she was about to eat her fried egg sandwich. Instead, she offered it to him.

The next week, they went to the movies together. They lived happily for many years. It is a sweet story, but the telling was incomplete. The kicker is that he HATED fried egg sandwiches, but he ate it anyway.

My wife has discovered there were foods that were always in her parents’ house. One staple was spaghetti and meatballs. As it turns out, she HATES spaghetti and meatballs, but he liked them, so she served them. Now my wife has stopped buying them for her.

Arthur tells of taste obsessions and his late husband Nigel.

Some links

Generally, I have no energy for the Big Lie believers or the January 6 deniers who say those insurrectionists were tourists, blocking an investigation. But if Chuck wants to rant about Marjorie Taylor Greene – she’s beyond reprehensible.

Why Liz Cheney Matters.

We’ll Never Stop Trying to Cut Taxes for the Rich, Republicans Warn.

John Oliver: Stand Your Ground gun laws “exalt a white person’s fear over a black person’s life.” Also, sponsored product on the local news broadcasts.

I, too, rage America.

Avoiding Overtaxing Minorities When We Need Them Most.

100 Years: Remembering the Tulsa Race Massacre, which I wrote about here.

What to make of Israel/Palestine?

Wage theft is a huge problem that requires a creative solution.

Restaurant Workers Say They Won’t Return to Work Without a Living Wage.

If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.
– Jack Kornfield

And more

Working 55 hours a week can be deadly.

The Problem With Bitcoin.

Comics writer and journalist David Anthony Kraft passed away.

In honor of Ms. Ruby Hughes.

Adam Ragusea on converting recipes in liters and milliliters to pounds and ounces, and Vidalia Onions.

It’s going to rain. Can you smell it?

How to Conduct an Address Search to Access Data for your Location. Census Reporter is an option to find your block group, state and Congressional districts, and more.

Why you need to have your ancestor’s New York death certificate.

The filing cabinet was critical to the information infrastructure of the 20th-century.

Are you getting robocalls purportedly – and clearly not – from the Social Security Administration saying your number has been compromised? I’ve gotten a few dozen on my landline and my cell this year, from several area codes, mostly the 30-second version. Annoying, but also really pathetic.

Now I Know: The Forest Man of India and How Elephants Communicate From Miles Away and The Circle of Life and The Secret Ingredient is Curiosity and The Reason Florida Disavowed Space Oranges.

Music

Spring Ain’t Here – Peter Sprague, featuring Rebecca Jade.

Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door – Afro Fiesta feat. Twanguero and I-Taweh.

Main themes from Laputa: Castle in the Sky – Joe Hisaishi.

Coverville 1358: Cover Stories for Dave Mason, Donovan, and Graham Gouldman.

Danse slav from the opera The Reluctant King by Emmanuel Chabrier.

We Love the Drums – Peter Sprague, featuring Duncan Moore.

I Fought the Law – Bobby Fuller Four.

The Hamilton Polka – “Weird Al” Yankovic.

June rambling #1: love and math

Nation Wishes It Could Just Once Be Reminded Of Preciousness Of Life Without Mass Shooting.

Get Visual: On passing.

Everything Doesn’t Happen For A Reason.

NY Gov. Cuomo signs “unconstitutional, McCarthyite” pro-Israel exec. order punishing BDS boycott movement.

Chuck Miller: The Blackbird: 2006-2016.

John Oliver: Debt Buyers.

Dan Rather on a free press.

Dear Journalists: For the Love of God, Please Stop Calling Your Writing “Content”.

A Progressive Agenda to Cut Poverty and Expand Opportunity.

Meditations of an Anxious Baker.

Christine Baxter: We Are Singing For Our Lives. The sights of her experience at the United Methodist General Conference.

Love and math.

New Yorker: Frog and Toad: an amphibious celebration of same-sex love. “Arnold Lobel… was born in 1933 and raised in Schenectady, New York.”

A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, a topic I wrote about here.

Arctic greening not a good thing; low-income assistance doesn’t make people lazy. And Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) is a schmuck.

Having It All Kinda Sucks. “Only women would sign up for this much crap.”

Jaquandor is dee-you-enn with the first draft of another book.

8 Important TV Shows That Were Lost Or Destroyed.

Bruce Dern, at 80, Reflects on His Career, Working With Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock.

Deconstructing Comics Podcast: #500 – Stephen Bissette: Comics, Movies, and Creator Credits.

Trouble with Comics #40: Party All the Time.

Bats In The Bedroom Can Spread Rabies Without An Obvious Bite, something I learned firsthand.

Your Ramadan beverage.

Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style.

Now I Know: Watching What You Say and Decipher This and The Land Down Under in the Land Down Under and How to Take Turns, International Treaty Edition.

Peter Shaffer Dies at 90; Playwright Won Tonys for ‘Equus’ and ‘Amadeus’. Pronounced SHAFF-er. Amadeus: Peter Shaffer’s Enduring Portrait of Genius (and Mediocrity).

Gordie Howe, hockey legend, R.I.P. at 88. Howe played more than 1,700 games in the NHL and scored more than 800 goals. He was widely known as “Mr. Hockey.”

Irv Benson, R.I.P. at 102.

SamuraiFrog answered a bunch of questions from me, including about the Cincinnati Zoo.

Muhammad ALI

Pentagon learned from the epic mistake of making a martyr of the world’s most gifted and famous athlete.

Cassius Clay sings Stand By Me.

Remembering Cleveland’s Muhammad Ali Summit, 1967. Bill Russell, Jim Brown, Lew Alcindor and others.

World Heavyweight Champion of Peace, Justice and Humanity.

Ali Understood the Racist Roots of War and Militarism. And he called them out fearlessly.

The Political Poet.

How Muhammad Ali helped Tavis Smiley heal a father-son rift.

The champ on That’s Incredible.

Man and Superman.

Muhammad Ali’s other big fight.

The 1996 Olympics.

When Muhammad Ali fought at the Washington Avenue Armory.

‘Ali! Ali!’: The Greatest is laid to rest in his hometown.

Pieces by Dustbury and Ken Levine.

A bunch of articles from Slate, including Billy Crystal’s Homage at the Champ’s Memorial. Plus Billy Crystal’s Muhammad Ali tribute – 15 Rounds (1979).

Muhammad Ali documentary ‘When We Were Kings’ to screen at Madison Theatre in Albany 6/23.

MUSIC

Big Daddy’s new video is a mash-up of “New York, New York” with classic Doo-Wop styles of the 1950s…most notably “Blue Moon” by The Marcels.

Marcia Howard: A voice from the past brings the past to The Voice.

Carpool Karaoke with James Corden, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Audra McDonald, Jane Krakowski, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.

Lin-Manuel Miranda Freestyles about RAMEN.

Classic guitar riffs.

Bobbie Gentry and other classic music photographs from the BBC archive.

Paul McCartney talks about the early days.

As Dustbury knows, this IS bad: Court Says Remastered Old Songs Get A Brand New Copyright.

Now I Know: Faking Fakin’ It.

G is for the Greenwood Riots

“Thirty-five blocks of Greenwood were burned to the ground, wiping out businesses” that decimated the section of town.

The Greenwood riots of 1921 represent a piece of U.S. history that is not widely known. They took place in the part of Tulsa, OK known as the “Black Wall Street.” As this PBS link notes: “Most black people lived in the racially segregated ‘Greenwood’ section of the city, which contained stores, shops, hotels, banks, newspapers, schools, theaters, and restaurants. Greenwood had several wealthy black entrepreneurs…”

Indeed, following World War I, Tulsa boasted one of the most affluent African American communities in the country, which created resentment and “pure envy”, as Ebony magazine put it.

“By 1921, membership in the Ku Klux Klan was rapidly spreading throughout America and an active chapter had been formed in Tulsa. The riot was triggered over a Memorial Day weekend by a report in two white newspapers that a black youth had tried to rape — or at least assault — a young white woman elevator operator. One of the newspapers allegedly editorialized that the youth ought to be hanged,” although the Tulsa World, in an extensive history of the period, says that the publishing such a piece “does not seem likely. For one, the Tribune actually editorialized against lynching, both before and after the riot.”

In any case, a “group of armed African-American men rushed to the police station with the intention of preventing a lynching from occurring. There was no lynch mob but a confrontation developed between blacks and whites… As the news spread throughout the city, mob violence exploded. Thousands of whites rampaged through the black community, killing men and women, burning and looting stores and homes. Some blacks claimed that policemen had joined the mob; others claimed that a machine gun was fired into the black community and a plane dropped sticks of dynamite.

“When the National Guard arrived, it arrested blacks rather than white rioters. Some four thousand to five thousand men and women were held in custody for several days before being released. No whites were arrested even though many of the mob members openly boasted of what they did. Thirty-five blocks of Greenwood were burned to the ground, wiping out businesses” that decimated the section of town. “Reports of the number of blacks killed ranged from 25 to 300. Approximately 20 whites were killed.

“Despite promises to help, the city did not support those who lost their homes and jobs despite claims for over 1.5 million dollars in damage. Most support came from the black community and a few sympathetic whites. Only in recent years has white Oklahoma begun to accept any responsibility for what happened.”

In this 2014 report, Greenwood riots survivors tell their stories. More recollections are out there, many from 2011, the 90th anniversary, in the New York Times and The Root, e.g. Here’s a video from the History Channel.

Wikipedia has White American riots in the United States. In response to the primarily black violence in Baltimore following the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore police custody, Salon notes: “White pogroms against blacks are a fixture of American history.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 18

Bottom photo from here.