Saturday, February 8, 2025

Students Died to Bowl—The Orangeburg Massacre

Students at South Carolina State College in Orangeburg marched after some of them had been barred from the All Star Bowling Alley and roughed up by police the night before.  This orderly demonstration deteriorated into scuffles after being attacked by police.

1968 was one of the most eventful years in American history—the Vietnam War raged.  Riots expressing Black rage tore up inner cities. Chicago Police themselves rioted, beating and gassing demonstrators at the Democratic Party Convention.  Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated.  Richard Nixon was elected President.  Apollo astronauts first orbited the Moon.

Maybe that explains how the first shooting of students on campus by authorities on February 8, 1968 gets overlooked.  But how do you explain the fact that even then, it barely caused a ripple in the national consciousness?

Students at historically Black South Carolina State College (SCSC) at Orangeburg just wanted to bowl.  Although certainly not untouched by more than a decade of Civil Rights turmoil in the South, students there, typically the first in their families to go to college, usually concentrated on their studies.  It was certainly no hotbed of radicalism.

Like many small towns, recreational opportunities were limited.  Just outside the University sat the town’s only bowling alley, All Star Bowling Lanes, on US 301 owned by Harry K. Floyd.  It had a firm Whites only policy.  On February 6 a large group of students attempted to enter the bowling alley.  They were refused admission.  Scuffling broke out and local police were called.  In the resultant melee nine students and one officer were injured.  Two female students were restrained by one officer while being beaten by another.  The campus erupted in rage.

Governor Robert E. Mcnair mobilized the National Guard and sent a large contingent of State Police.

Rowdy demonstrations and arrests occurred the next evening.  Students announced that they would keep up street actions.  Local officials called for help.  Governor Robert E. McNair mobilized a National Guard unit and dispatched large numbers of State Police to Orangeburg.

On the night of February 8, students started a large bonfire in the street near the bowling alley.  Bottles and rocks were thrown at the massing authorities.  There were claims that at least one Molotov cocktail was thrown.  The Fire Department was called to douse the bonfire and the State Police advanced “in protection” of firefighters.  Students fell back to campus exchanging jeers and insults with police and throwing objects at them.  The crowd of 200-300 students stopped just inside the entrance of the school.

One police officer suffered minor injuries to the face when struck by a piece of banister railing.  Police later said that they came under fire from snipers.  Some witnesses recall two or three popping sounds.  Much later it was determined that an Orangeburg city policeman fired three warning shots into the air with his carbine. 

Unnerved and enraged the State Police unleashed multiple volleys at the students at a range of about 20 yards.  The Police were armed with sawed-off riot shot guns.  Ordinarily these weapons are supposed to be loaded with light bird shot for non-lethal crowd control.  The pump action shot guns instead were loaded with heavy buck shot, nine pellets to a cartridge and designed to kill.

The bodies of two victims surrounded by State Police.  Note the shoes lost by fleeing students as they scrambled up the small rise into the campus

In moments three young men lay dead.  At least 26 others were shot, most in the back while fleeing.  Many had multiple wounds from the devastating buck shot.  Forty years later, another man showed a scar and said he was shot in the stomach that night but was afraid to seek treatment.  After the shooting stopped, two students were beaten, one for questioning the Police.  Twenty-seven year old Louise Kelly Cawley was beaten and sprayed in the face with Mace while trying to bring the wounded to medical treatment.  A week later she suffered a miscarriage as a result of her injuries. 

 

Orangeburg victims--Henry Smith, Samuel Hammond, and Delano Middleton.

The dead were SCSC students Samuel Hammond, 18, Henry Smith, 19 and Wilkinson High School senior Delano Middleton, 17.

That night the Associated Press (AP) reported the shootings as a “heavy exchange of gunfire” with authorities.  It never corrected this entirely erroneous report.

The next morning Governor McNair told reporters it was “one of the saddest days in the history of South Carolina.”  He fretted that the state’s, “reputation for racial harmony had been blemished.”  He was also a fount of misinformation not only backing claims that the police were fired on but claiming that the shooting occurred off campus as students were rampaging.  He also blamed “Black Power advocates” for the unrest.  National news outlets did little to counter this biased account, which became widely accepted.

 

Local South Carolina Press coverage was sensational and parroted official claims that officers had come under fire by armed students.  Later investigation proved that claim false.  The national press  mostly accepted local claims and the story got little coverage from them. 

The Justice Department launched an investigation.  Eight of 66 State Police on the scene admitted firing their riot guns, most of them multiple times.  A ninth officer emptied the six bullets from his .38 service revolver at fleeing students.  They were indicted for “imposing summary punishment without due process of law.”  The officers were: Patrol Lieutenant Jesse Alfred Spell, 45, Sgt. Henry Morrell Addy, 37, Sgt. Sidney C. Taylor, 43, Corporal Joseph Howard Lanier, 32, Corporal Norwood F. Bellamy, 50, Patrolman First Class John William Brown, 31, Patrolman First Class Colie Merle Metts, 36, Patrolman Allen Jerome Russell, 24, and Patrolman Edward H. Moore, 30.  All were white.  An Orangeburg city police officer, later promoted to Chief, also discharged his shot gun but was never charged.  Later another State Police officer, Patrolman Robert Sanders, admitted shooting students but was never charged.

It took less than two hours for a jury to acquit all of the officers despite the fact that evidence presented at the trial was damming.  No guns were ever found among the victims nor did any eyewitnesses report seeing any or hearing any gunfire from the crowd.

Two and a half years after the shooting, one man was finally convicted—Cleveland L. Sellers, Jr.  He was a young South Carolinian who was National Program Director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).  He happened to be in Orangeburg on February 6.  He had been present at the first disturbance outside of the bowling alley and had been injured.  He was not there in his capacity with SNCC.  The organization never had a campaign at the school, and he was not present or involved with events over the next two days.  None-the-less, state authorities, hoping to shore up their weak case for “outside agitators,” charged Sellers with multiple counts, including conspiracy and incitement to riot.  This was too much for even a local trial judge, who threw out the felony counts with scathing remarks.  But he did find Sellers guilty of simple riot.  Sellers spent 7 months in state prison.  In 1998 Sellers published a memoir of his ordeal, Orangeburg Massacre: Dealing Honestly with Tragedy and Distortion.

The FBI suppressed effective distribution of the first 1970 edition of  The Orgageburg Massacre.  Subsequent editions listed Jack Bass first and Nelson second as authors more accurately reflecting true credit.  Bass also continued to campaign relentlessly for justice and recognition for the tragedy.

Jack Bass’s comprehensive 1970 account, The Orangeburg Massacre was, despite glowing early reviews, effectively squelched in distribution by pressure from Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) chief J. Edgar Hoover, who objected to accounts of FBI agents attempting to cover up for the State Police.  The book was finally re-issued and became widely available by Mercer University Press in 1984. 

Bass continued as a historian to campaign for wider awareness of the buried incident.  

In 2004 South Carolina Governor Mark Stafford finally issued a public statement that, “I think it’s appropriate to tell the African-American community in South Carolina that we don’t just regret what happened in Orangeburg 35 years ago—we apologize for it.”  

The school is now known as South Carolina State University.  Its gymnasium is now named in memory of the three men killed.  There is a monument on campus in their honor and the site of the shooting is marked. The school conducts annual memorial commemorations and promotes ongoing academic investigation of the event.

The Orangeburg Massacre memorial on the grounds of South Carolina State University today.

And, oh yeah, the All Star Bowling Lanes was renamed the All-Star Triangle Bowl. The Floyd family still owns and operates the business.   It has been integrated for many years.




 

 

Friday, February 7, 2025

A Study in Delusion and Fanaticism—The Bonfire of Vanities Burned Art for Christ

 

Dom Girolamo Savonarola of Florence.

The Bonfire of Vanities was not just a particularly snarky novel by Tom Wolfe or the one of the few movie duds starring Tom Hanks.  It was an event—or more precisely the most famous of a series of events—in Renaissance Italy propagated by elements of the Catholic Church in revulsion against perceived decadence and corruption of the flourishing new culture.

On February 7, 1497, the date of the traditional Mardi Gras festival, crowds whipped up by charismatic Dominican Friar Girolamo Savonarola seized and burned thousands of objects like cosmetics, art, and books in Florence, part of a pattern of defiance of the corruptions of the Church and the Pope himself.

Savonarola can be seen as a forerunner of the Protestant Reformation.  Denouncing clerical hubris, abuse of the poor, and the despotic rule of the Medici, he gathered a fanatical following, especially among the educated young with his promises of new civic glory based on virtue and purity.  

Pope Alexander XI was a Borgia and notorious libertine who lusted for temporal power in Italy was Savonarola's great enemy

It was a time of particular turmoil as Charles VIII of France in 1494 invaded Italy in opposition to Pope Alexander VI and his plans to extend Papal influence and control.  As the mighty French army neared the city Savonarola entered negotiations with the King while his supporters overthrew the Medici and expelled them from the city proclaiming a republic.  He welcomed the French as liberators, defying the direct order of the Pope to join his alliance.  The French, for their part, spared the city from sacking and promised to respect the new republic.

Savonarola was, naturally considered a hero by many.  But Medici and Papal loyalists remained.  To shore up support the Friar staged elaborate public processions and theatrical events both celebrating the new order and promoting purification to earn God’s approval for a New Jerusalem.  The celebrated Bon Fire was the highlight of his movement.  

Florentines Renounce Vanities, a late 91th Century British illustration. 

No one really knows how many great books, musical instruments, paintings, and statues were consigned to the flames along with ostentatious clothing, cosmetics, mirrors, and personal trifles like playing cards.  Some believe the loss to be a cultural catastrophe, while other historians downplay the amount of damage done claiming it was largely symbolic and most fine pieces were either hidden or smuggled out of Florence before the flames could consume them.

Among those caught up in the euphoria of the moment was one of Florence’s leading artists, Sandro Botticelli, who had risen to fame painting allegories from classical mythology, most notably his  stunning The Birth of Venus with its famous nude on the half-shell.  Obviously such themes and sexuality would not be in keeping with Savonarola’s austere piety.  The artist had already moved on to more acceptable themes, particularly various renditions of the Virgin Mary.  The artist may—or may not—have pitched many of his own paintings on the fire.  We do know that for some years he retired from painting all together and was as a result reduced to poverty.  He would later, however, recant his allegiance to Savonarola and regain the patronage of the restored Medici.


Florentine painter  Sandro Botticelli had risen to fame painting allegories from classic mythology.  The Birth of Venus was his most famous work.  But he fell under the sway of Dom Savonarola.  Luckily Venus and many other paintings were hidden or spirited out of the city.  But the artist may have thrown some of his more recent work on the Bonfire.

The French king’s army sliced through Italy with little resistance outside of a couple of stubborn cities which paid heavily for their defiance.  Just weeks after Savonarola’s party in Florence, Charles reached Naples where he claimed the crown of the state that controlled most of southern Italy.  Alarmed by the ease with which Charles had moved, the Pope was able to rally most of the Northern states into the League of Venice.  The idea was to cut off Charles’s return to France with his army and destroy it.  The Republic of Florence had little choice but to formally join the alliance, although under Savonarola’s influence, they never actually committed troops to the Papal force.

After a nasty battle in which he lost most of his loot, Charles got his army safely back to France.  But he had lost Naples already and once friendly northern cities like Florence were coming back into the Papal orbit.

In May of 1497 the Pope formally excommunicated the Friar and threatened to put the city under interdiction unless they surrendered him.  Under pressure from local authorities he withdrew from public preaching and composed a manuscript of justification and a theological reflection, Triumph of the Cross.  Unfortunately for him in it he not only claimed to receive visions from God but hinted that he had been given the power to perform miracles.  Big mistake.  It left him open to the charge of Heresy.

A rival friar and preacher called on Savonarola to prove his innocence by an ordeal by fire.  When another monk and friend volunteered to take the test for him, Savonarola felt he had no choice but to accept the challenge.  On April 7 1497 as he prepared to walk through the fire in the first such ordeal in Florence for 400 years, a rainstorm broke out extinguishing the flames.  As the burden of proof was on him, the crowd took it as a sign that he was guilty.  They attacked his convent.  Savonarola and two other friars were arrested.

Savonarola and two of his Friars were hung and roasted for heresy and schematism.   

On the morning of May 23, 1498, the three friars were led out into the main square where, before a tribunal of high clerics and government officials, they were condemned as heretics and schismatics and sentenced to die.  They were immediately stripped of their Dominican robes down to thin white shirts.  Each ascended to separate gallows on which they were hung with fire burning below them to consume their bodies.  Their ashes were scattered in the Arno River to prevent them from becoming relics for stubborn followers. 

However his partisans remained active as both a religious and political force until the Medici were restored in Florence and the Republic squashed in 1517.

But Savonarola’s idea lived on.  Martin Luther read Triumph of the Cross as did John Calvin.  He was very influential in the briefly flourishing Italian Protestant Reform movement which included the scholars like Faustus Socinus and Giorgio Blandrata who were instrumental in introducing anti-trinitarianism and unitarianism into central and eastern Europe.

On the Catholic side, when it was safe to do so the Dominican Order reclaimed Savonarola and recast him as a benevolent and saintly prophet mostly stripped of his political importance and rougher edges.  Later Catholic reformers would call him the last hope to “prevent the catastrophe of the Reformation.”  And in the 19th Century he would be adopted as a symbol for Italian nationalists and their drive to create a modern nation state.

Savinarola was recast politically as a hero of Italian Republicanism and religiously as the last hope "to prevent the catastrophe" of the Reformation. 

As for the Bonfire business, well, that has been more controversial.  Intellectuals, writers, and artists have looked at it with horror.  As such it has often been referenced directly or indirectly in books, from George Eliot’s Romola to Margaret Atwood’s works which allude to the Bonfire, as in her dystopian novel, The Handmaids Tale.

On the other hand, some have found inspiration in Savonarola’s urge to purge.  In some ways what we have come to think of as 19th Century American Puritanism, especially the obsessive sexual prudery and zeal at suppression of corrupting influences, might be more rightly called Savonarolaism.  Certainly the notorious Anthony Comstock and his Society for the Suppression of Vice are the old Friar’s direct heirs.

And so were and are, whether they know it or not—and most assuredly they do not—all of the modern book burners of whatever stripe.





 

Thursday, February 6, 2025

Once Upon a Real Ice Storm in Chicago—Murfin Memoir

 

This morning super slick and sometimes nearly invisible black ice coats sidewalks and roads.

Note—Chicago  and the Northern Boonies  were brushed by an ice storm for the first time this year.  Not as bad or thick as others in the past, but then a thin slick layer treacherous to pedestrians and motorists alike.  The ice brings to mind another ice storm about 45 years ago.

It was on an Easter weekend sometime in the early ‘70’s. Chicago was in the grips of a monumental ice storm.  A consultation on meteorological history and a table fixing the dates of that gypsy holiday would firmly fix the date.  1970 or ’71 would be my guess.

We slip-slided—literally since ice thickly coated the streets and sidewalks—over to my friend Penny Pixler’s place, a  second floor apartment somewhere south of Armitage Avenue between Old Town and Halstead.  The “we” were young Wobblies. The mission was to read aloud from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake  while sipping Jameson’s Irish Whiskey and ingesting some very powerful purple acid.  We had a little grass as well, just to keep the edge off.

                                                            Most of us had this paperback edition of Finnegan's Wake published in 1968.

It was probably Kathleen Taylor’s idea.  She was our leading enthusiast for Irish culture.  She knew the great old songs, played a small, dark Martin guitar, could beat a bodhrán, and blow a penny whistle in a pinch.  Or it may have been Penny.  She was quite literary.  It may even have been my doing, hatched over too many beers at O’Rourke’s Pub on North Avenue where portraits of Joyce and other Irish scribes watched silently from the walls as newspaper types, writers, and a wannabes like me regaled each other with lies.

Maybe I was inspired for the gathering by the Old Town writer's hangout O'Roukes Pub.  Large portraits of Joyce and other Irish scribes hung above the wooden booths to right.
  
I am a little unclear as to all of the participants.  Young  Dean Nolan, recently arrived from Portland was there.  I can’t imagine that Leslie Fish and Mary Frohman—eccentric even in our circles—songwriter/singer/cat lady/lesbian/anarchists, missed the occasion.  I am sure there were others.

We settled into the living room mostly sprawled on the floor.  Kathy got us going with a rousing version of the old 19th Century Irish folk song—Joyce’s inspiration.  We passed the Jameson’s and a joint.  We started to read as the acid began its work.  I can’t remember if we tried to start at the beginning or someplace else.. 

Mourners grieve around the coffin in the cabin while others drink and share tales.  From an illustration for the song Finnegan's Wake. 

After a while, I remember watching the window in Penny’s living room as if it were a movie screen.  The window stretched nearly the width of the room, which itself took up the whole front of the second story of the frame two-flat. It was no more than two or three feet high.  Lying on the floor, I could see nothing but the three bare poplars, heavy with ice, swaying in the wind against a slate sky in time to the rhythms of Joycean nonsense.

Hours later we slid away in the dark, street lights shining reflections of the perfectly smooth ice.  I kept falling.  I was young then and could still bounce up.  Perhaps I was immortal.
 



Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Belle Starr Was Outlaw Queen on a Side Saddle

Belle Starr was locally notorious in Texas, Indian Territory, and Arkansas but captured public imagination with lurid tales in the Police Gazette which were gathered and expanded into this Dime Novel that carried a heafty 25 cent cover price due to the many illustrations. Ever after the supposed Outlaw Queen became fodder for novels, plays, songs, and movies.

You have to admit Belle Starr was the perfect name for an outlaw queen.  It emblazoned perfectly the covers of dime novels, titillated the readers of the original scandal sheet The Police Gazette, and set off fantasies of a bewitching bandit beauty celebrated in generations of movies, TV shows, and songs.  The allure was so strong that in the back yard westerns we enacted every Summer day in Cheyenne my cousin Linda was always Belle to my brother’s Roy Rogers and my Hopalong Cassidy.   The stories we played out were just about as real as any associated with Starr.

Myra Maybelle Shirley doesn’t quite cut the same ice.  But that was her name at birth on a farm near Carthage, Missouri on February 5, 1848.  Her father John Shirley was a prosperous farmer.  Her mother was a member of the Virginia (later West Virginia) Hatfield clan. But it would be a mistake to read too much into that—Hatfield-McCoy feud did not break out until after the Civil War and the family was not particularly then identified with violence.

Myra got a quite proper upbringing for a young lady of her class.  She was a graduate of the Carthage Female Academy, a finishing school where she learned a little Latin, how to play the piano, and all of the social graces.

About the time Myra graduated, all hell was breaking loose along the Kansas-Missouri Border.  The well-to-do Shirleys were slave owners.  Her father and uncles may have ridden with the Border Ruffians or Bushwhackers who attacked Free Soil settlers in Bloody Kansas.  The family was close to other pro-slavery clans in the area of south eastern Missouri including the James and Younger families.  Myra was said to be particularly close to the Younger boys.

After the war broke out Confederate Missouri Guard forces under Governor Claiborne F. Jackson and General Sterling Price whipped a Union force under the command of Colonel Franz Sigel, in the First Battle of Carthage, the first important engagement in the West which gave control of most of the state south and west of St. Louis to the Rebels.  The Shirley family decided to sell the farm and move to Carthage which was becoming a major regional hub for the Confederacy.  John Shirley opened an inn and livery stable on the town square.

It was probably during this period when young Myra mastered the difficult use of the side saddle which was becoming the “proper” way for a young gentlewoman to ride.  The saddle accommodated the voluminous skirts and petticoats of the day by allowing a lady to wrap one leg around a pommel draping both to the same side of the horse.  The seat was not as secure as a conventional saddle ridden with legs astride the horse.  It took a skilled horsewoman to do much more than amble along at a walk in such a contraption.  Myra could reportedly keep in the saddle at a full gallop.  She continued to use the side saddle almost exclusively the rest of her life.

In 1863 the tide of war turned in the region at the Second Battle of Carthage, a smaller but significant skirmish in which Union forces repulsed an advancing force sending them scurrying back to Arkansas.  Yankee troops occupied the town.  Myra’s brother John A. M. “Bud” Shirley joined the partisan irregulars harassing Union troops.  He became a Captain of his own band of Bushwhackers.  He may have ridden when partisans attacked the occupied town in September 1864 and burned the Courthouse and much of the Square.  With a Yankee price on his head, Captain Shirley was ambushed and killed as he ate at a sympathizer’s house in near-by Sarcoxie soon after. 

The Shirley family became refugees.  They fled the area and made their way to Scyene, Texas near Dallas where other Missouri guerillas, including the Younger Brothers and Frank and Jesse James also settled.

As May Reed the future Belle Starr took to wearing broad hats and carrying pistols like the outlaws she associated herself with in Texas.  This photo shows that as a young woman she was much more attractive than the gaunt, haggard woman of better known later pictures.

In 1866 Myra, now generally called May, married James Reed, a young man from back home in Carthage on whom she once had a teen age crush.    No contemporary accounts remark on her beauty, although once or twice she was called handsome.  What May might have lacked in conventional attractiveness, she made up with a sense of style, even when they young family struggled on a farm near town.  She cut a swath in riding habits and plumed hats when she rode into town.

James did not take much to sod busting and his wife’s taste in finery compelled him to find extra income.  He fell in with her old chums the Younger Brothers and began to ride with their gang.  He may also occasionally have ridden with the James Gang—the two groups were friendly and often shared personnel.  All were former Confederate guerillas and at least at first considered their robberies as an extension of the war.

May took to the life style.  She soon added a pair of Colt revolvers to here riding gear and was known to display her marksmanship to admiring locals.

Scyene served as a safe haven and base for the outlaw gangs’ far flung raids, bank, and train robberies.  Reed would be gone for weeks at a time, return, and resume what looked like an ordinary life on the farm.  May gave birth to the couple’s first child, Rosie Lee, who they called Pearl in 1868.

Outlawry was dangerous work and was apt to disrupt family life sooner or later.  In 1871 Reed was charged with robbery and murder in Arkansas and wanted posters with a price on his head began to circulate in Texas—a sure invitation to some greedy or ambitious neighbor to turn him in.  The couple fled to California where a son, James Edwin—Eddie—was born.

When things cooled off, they returned to Texas.  Reed soon fell in with a new gang, the Starrs, a Cherokee clan based in Indian Territory who specialized in running whiskey to the tribes, cattle rustling, and horse thievery.  Strong arm robbery, Reed’s specialty was a side line.  

It is unclear if Mrs. Reed actively took part in the commission of her husband’s crimes during these years or was merely an accomplice.  But her continued show of being an armed and her swagger did nothing to discourage a notion that she was an active participant.  In April 1874 that supposition was enough despite a lack of any evidence placing her on the scene, to get a warrant issued along with her husband and members of the Starr gang for a Stagecoach robbery. 

The Reeds shifted their base of operations to Paris, Texas where James was shot and killed that August.
A widow with two children and no means of support, May continued her association with her old outlaw pals, many of whom evidently helped support the family.  She may have become more directly involved in some of their operations, particularly the sale of rustled cattle and horses.  She was evidently spared the fallback occupation of many a widow in her position—prostitution.

In the late 1870’s she may have entered a brief relationship—some say a marriage—with Charles Younger, uncle of Cole.  But this is unsubstantiated by any known records and may simply be rooted in gossip which took root in lore.

In 1880 31 year old May married Sam Starr and settled with him on a ranch, renamed Younger’s Bend, on the Canadian River near present-day Eufaula.  It was there that she finally became something like the bandit queen of legend.  She adopted the name of Belle, probably to obscure her identity, but perhaps as a pet name given to her by her new husband.  In Texas she was still known as Mrs. Reed or May.

Belle turned out to be a woman of great organizational skill and was soon assuming a leadership position among the Starrs.  She organized and directed cattle raids and planned robberies.  She regularized the clan’s business dealings, cultivating markets and keeping lawmen on the payroll for protection.  She was seen in her full regalia in company of the boys, her brace of pistols now upgraded to a nickel-plated pearl handle horse pistol and a lighter .38.  She kept a shotgun in a saddle boot. But whether she actually led any of the gang’s crimes is doubtful.  No reliable witness ever put her on the scene.

But in 1883 Belle and Sam were found in possession of stolen horses by a Federal Marshall operating in Indian Territory.  The pair was dragged before the notorious Hanging Judge Isaac Parker’s Federal Court at Fort Smith, Arkansas.  Both were convicted.  Belle was sent to the Detroit House of Corrections in Michigan because the Feds had no facilities for women.  There she was regarded as a model prisoner, was made a trustee, and won the admiration and affection of the supervising Matron.  The rebellious Sam served time at hard labor, much of it on a chain gang and in the hole for various infractions.

Belle was released after nine months.  Sam rejoined her in Indian Territory when his sentence was up.  Then they were back in business.

Belle and her husband Sam Starr in Fort Smith,Arkansas in 1886 months before Sam was killed in a shoot out with an Indian Police Officer.  She is shown riding side saddle and heavily armed. 

In 1886 Belle was again hauled before Judge Parker on a theft charge but escaped conviction.  While in Ft. Smith she posed on horseback fully armed for her most famous photograph.  It was a triumphant moment, but Belle’s happiness was cut short when Sam and Indian Police Officer Frank West shot each other to death in a gunfight on December 17 of that year.

Widowed once again, Belle was rumored to have had several short relationships with members of her outlaw circle—Blue Duck, Jack Spaniard, and Jim French.  In order to be able to remain on her land in the Indian Nation, Belle married the much younger Jim Starr a/k/a Jim July.

Belle with Blue Duck, a Cherokee outlaw who rode in the Starr gang.  After Sam's death he was one of a series of lovers she took and was rumored by some to have briefly been her husband.  Blue Duck is most famous as the relentless and remorseless killer in Larry McMurtry's  novels Commanche Moon and Lonesome Dove, both of which were made into successful TV mini series.

Despite these relationships, her active leadership in the Starr gang had ended with Sam Starr’s death.

On February 3, 1889 just two days before her 41 birthday Belle was riding home from a visit to neighbors in Eufaula when she was ambushed.  She was hit in the back and neck with a blast of buckshot from a shotgun.  She was knocked off of her horse.  He assailant turned her over on her back and finished her off with a second blast directly in the face, and act of such rage and savagery that suspicion was immediately drawn on those closest to her. 

Those suspects included her husband, and her son.  A tenant sharecropper named Edgar J. Watson, a Creek, was charged with her murder supposedly because Belle had threatened to turn him into the law on an outstanding murder charge in Florida.  But Belle, who had harbored many outlaws at her ranch including Jesse James himself once for several months, would be unlikely to betray anyone.  Evidence was slim to non-existence and the jury did not believe the prosecutor’s case.  Watson lived until 1910 when he was shot and killed.

Jim Starr may not have been entirely happy in his marriage to a dominating older woman, but he had little motive to murder her since he had no claim on the land on which he was living comfortably.  Most historians discount him as a suspect.

Belle with her children.  James "Eddy" Starr, upper right, was her eldest and has been suspected of her murder.  Pearl, standing in back of her seated mother became a prostitute and successful madame after her mothers death. 

Eddy, however, had recently been beaten by his mother for abusing a horse and was known to be furious with her.  The fact that the shotgun used in the murder probably belonged to Belle also linked him to the crime.  But there was never enough evidence to charge him.  Belle’s murder remains officially unsolved.  

Eddie Reed was convicted of horse theft and receiving stolen property in July 1889 and the family nemesis Judge Parker sentenced him to prison in Columbus, Ohio.  Like many former outlaws Eddie switched sides, becoming a lawman in Fort Smith.  He was involved in a famous gun battle with two outlaw brothers named Crittenden in 1895 who he killed.  He died in another shoot out in a Claremont, Oklahoma saloon on December 14, 1898.

Belle's daughter Pearl turned to prostitution after her mother's murder and went on to be a successful madame. 

Pearl Starr turned to prostitution to raise money to try and secure her brother’s release from the 1889 prison sentence.  Her efforts did earn him a pardon which opened the door to his law enforcement career.  Pearl continued to ply her trade and operated brothels in Van Buren and Fort Smith, Arkansas, up to and through World War I.  

At the time of her death Belle was locally notorious in Indian Territory, Texas, and Arkansas, but unknown in the rest of the country.  Richard K. Fox, editor and publisher of the Police Gazette, always on the look-out for exciting yarns, picked up the story of Belle’s murder from the Western press. Intrigued he did a modicum of investigation into her life and launched a series of lurid articles in his magazine.  These were consolidated and expanded into a dime novel, Bella Starr, the Bandit Queen, or the Female Jesse James published late in the year of her death.  Some Western historians continue to cite the book as a source on her life although it is riddled with errors and exaggerations.

But it did prove popular.  More dime novels followed along with the inevitable stage melodrama.  Woody Guthrie was just one of those who immortalized her in song. 

The luminous Gene Tierney actually got second billing to Randolph Scott in the highly fictionalized 1941 20th Century Fox bio-pick Belle Starr the Bandit Queen. 

Belle has been portrayed, rarely very realistically, in dozens of films.  Actresses portraying her included Betty Compton in 1928, Gene Tierney opposite Randolph Scott in 1941, Jane Russell in 1953, Elsa Martinelli in a spaghetti western with a feminist touch directed by Lina Wertmüller in 1968,  Elizabeth Montgomery in a 1980 made-for-TV movie, and Pamela Reed in the same year’s The Long Riders.

In her statue at the Woolaroc Museum in in the Osage Hills of Northeastern Oklahoma Belle is toting a rifle, not the usual shotgun she had in the boot of her side saddle. 

Belle is commemorated in the former Indian Territory where she spent much of her life with a gun-toting life size statue at Woolaroc, Oklahoma.

 





Tuesday, February 4, 2025

No Need to Stay Up All Night for the Results of the First Presidential Election

George Washington was the totally unsurprising winner of the first U.S. Presidential election.  This is the first portrait painted from life after taking office in 1798 by John Ramage in New York City, the temporary capital.  Interestingly Washington still chose to be painted in his Continental Army uniform wish his Order of Cincinatus medal.

The least exciting Presidential Election in United States history was held on February 4, 1789.  On that day the votes of the first Electoral College under the shiny new Constitution were opened, read, and counted before the House of Representatives in the new temporary capital of New York City. Earlier, the Electors of each participating state had assembled in their capitals to cast their votes.  Of the 69 Electors who voted, 68 were Federalists—not yet a party but avowed supporters of the new Constitution—and one, from Georgia, was an Anti-Federalist.

Electors were chosen in a variety of ways.  A minority were directly elected either state-wide or by Congressional or special electoral districts.  Most were elected by state legislatures, usually by a state’s upper chamber or Senate.  Because of that, property restrictions on voting, exclusion of Blacks slave or free, and of women, less than 1.3% of the adult population of the nation got to cast a popular vote for an elector, and thus indirectly for President.  The total popular vote was only 38,818.

 The first campaign buttons were literally clothing buttons like these brass ones for George Washington.

Only 10 of the 13 states participated in the election.  North Carolina and Rhode Island could not because they had not yet ratified the Constitution.  In New York Anti-Federalists led by Governor George Clinton and Federalists controlled by Alexander Hamilton deadlocked in the state legislature and failed to select their allotted eight Electors.  In addition, one Virginia district failed to report returns and thus had no Elector.  One Virginia and two Maryland Electors did not vote. A total of 12 candidates were nominated for the Presidency, led by Revolutionary War Commander-in-Chief George Washington.  

 

A map showing Washington's sweep of the Electoral College--the only President ever elected unanimously.

But at first it was not certain that Washington would accept the post.  Other candidates either hoped that Washington would stay in Virginia or hoped to be selected Vice President.  The candidates included the well-known—Minister to Great Britain John Adams, Governor John Hancock of Massachusetts, Secretary of Foreign Affairs under the Articles of Confederation John Jay, General Benjamin Lincoln, and governors of  Connecticut, South Carolina, and Georgia.  New York Governor Clinton was the best known Anti-Federalist.  And there were less well known candidates—Robert H. Harrison of Maryland, Georgia Secretary of State John Milton, and James Armstrong who was so obscure that historians are not entirely sure about who he was or if he was from Pennsylvania or from Georgia, where one Elector pledged to him was elected.

In fact all of the secondary candidates had at least one pledged Elector, with Adams leading the pack.

John Adams was elected Vice President by coming in second in the Electoral College.  Alexander Hamilton engineered several votes to be withheld from Adams resulting in a very narrow margin of victory.  That would set the two future leaders of the emerging Federalist Party at bitter odds with each other. 

When Washington finally signaled his willingness to serve, all participating Electors cast their votes for him, making him the only man ever unanimously elected president with 69 votes.  But under the new Constitution, each Elector cast two votes for President.  The top total vote-getter—if he achieved a majority in the College—would be President and the second place finisher would be Vice President.  Although locked out of the procedure by New York’s stalemate, Alexander Hamilton, acting as a Federalist whip, made sure that votes were withheld from Adams to ensure a clear victory for Washington.  Other electors cast their second vote among the other candidates.  Adams won with 36 votes, only one more than the needed 35.

Adams felt slighted by Hamilton’s work to keep his support down among Federalists.  It was the beginning of a long, bitter rivalry for leadership of the Federalists as they morphed into a real political party.



 

Monday, February 3, 2025

Hard Fought for Black History Month is Under Siege

                                    African Americans and Labor is the very relevant theme of National Black History Month 2025.

Note—Adapted from previous posts.

The 1619 Project, a long-form journalism project developed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, writers from The New York Times, and The New York Times Magazine, first came under attack four years ago.  The highly praised series and book re-examined the Black experience in the New World from the importation of African “indentured servants” to the Jamestown Colony in 1619.  It clearly showed that the generational experience of slavery continues to put African-Americans at a social and economic disadvantage and laid the blame for that on the development of an explicitly racist ideology that still lurks not far below the surface of polite white society. It was adapted as a six part documentary on Hulu.  

Naturally, the right wing propaganda machine went on a full-press attack on the series and on it’s authors.  Hannah-Jones was denied a tenured position at the University of North Carolina after the university’s board of trustees took the highly unusual step of failing to approve the Journalism Department’s recommendation under intense pressure and threats to withhold state funding for the school and a boycott by wealthy white donors.

The 1619 Project was the most talked about book of 2022 and widely celebrated in Black and progressive circles.  It also quickly aroused a tsunami of hysteria and and backlash

That was just the beginning of an escalating campaign.

Republican governors like Glenn Youngkin of Virginia and GOP controlled state legislators rushed to ban the teaching of critical race theory after a campaign to stir up a social panic was whipped by Tucker Carlson and other Fox News propagandists and the right-wing echo chamber on social media.  Local school board meetings have been stormed and disrupted; teacher, administrators, and parents have been threatened and/or assaulted; captive library boards are banning books. 

 As one eight-year old observed in the related banning of the graphic novel Maus about the Holocaust, “The people who want to ban this are the ones who want to do it again.”


This editorial cartoon makes clear what Florida Governor Ron DeSantis intends.

Republican Florida Governor and failed presidential wannabe Ron DeSantis cashed in on the hysteria by announced plans to block state colleges from having programs on diversity, equity, and inclusion, as well as critical race theory (CRT).  He also blocked a new national high school Advanced Placement course from public schools and threatened sanctions of private schools that adopted it.

Television stations are being inundated with protests and threats for airing Black History Minutes and other programing that have been routine for years. 

It all came to a head with the re-election of Donald Trump.  The new buzz word of the moment was DEI—Federal and private diversity, equity, inclusion programs which the Orange Menace blamed for failures in everything from criminal justice, the military, education, food and energy prices, trans kids in bathrooms, to FEMA disaster relief and aviation safety.  He said they promoted incompetence denying advancement to highly qualified—White male—candidates and set races, immigrants, and minorities against real Americans.  He trotted out the racist trope the Martin Luther King’s dream was a color-blind society.  He vowed to root out DEI policies from every corner of the Federal Government and coerce states, municipalities, public institutions, and private non-governmental organization to do the same.

He meant what he said and then some. 

Trumpist media celebrated.

The White House purge of (DEI) programs and workers, begun last Monday, is accelerating at lightning speed.  A policy directive notice to all Federal Departments and agencies ordered:

Each agency, department, or commission head shall take action to terminate, to the maximum extent allowed by law, all DEI, DEIA, and ‘environmental justice’ offices and positions within sixty days. 

The memo updated a directive sent earlier that told agencies to submit written plans for executing a reduction-in-force—layoffs—no later than January 31.  The new memo demanded those notices go out immediately.  It is not clear how many DEI staffers there are in the Federal government, which employs millions of workers.

It also followed a directive issued earlier this that ordered department and agency heads to close DEI offices.  Agencies were ordered to put staff on paid leave, as well as take down all DEI websites, social accounts, and “outward facing media” and to withdraw any plans in the equity and inclusion space and cancel all trainings and contracts.  The directive included an email template that called on government employees to snitch on.

The administration also tried to immediately shut down all Federal grants pending investigations into any recipients enforcing their own DEI rules or to other hot button issues like service to migrants and refugees; sanctuary city laws; abortion, contraception, and family planning; transgender health care and self-identification in law and on documents; and definitions covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).  The orders sewed wide spread panic and uncertainty.  Contractors  due payment for work already completed would be immediately affected and small providers  like day care, home health care, and homeless services could be put out of business.  State and local governments feared grants for already started or planned for things like road construction and other infrastructure projects.  Social Security, veterans benefits, and other programs seemed in danger.

After a huge public backlash the Occupant was forced to promise that those lifelines would not be frozen.  Federal courts put the whole suspension on pause pending review. 

Meanwhile some local governments, agencies, and private businesses, led by the MAGA tech bros. and companies like Meta, Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Target, and defense contractors scrapped their own DEI policies.  Others remained defiant—for now.

The breadth of these sweeping attacks transcends racial, ethnic, language, gender identity, or disability groups alone.  The masterminds of these attacks hope that under pressure identity groups will turn on each other—Blacks against immigrants, certain feminists against “fake women.”  The need for a united front of all of these oppressed if essential for the survival of all.

Black History month was scrubbed from Federal web sites including the expurgated page on WhiteHouse.gov.   

Still, it is not hard to feel that African-Americans are a particular target for erasure.  The official website on the Constitution ominously took down its page on the 14th Amendment.  A long list of recognitions of honoring minority groups was scrubbed.  The censors could not completely eradicate Martin Luther King Day or Juneteenth, both Federal holidays because the are statutory.  For now Federal employees will keep their days off, but no other notice or celebration is permitted.  Trump may have enough slavish support in Congress to get wither or both observations canceled from the calendar all together.

The roots of the annual Black History Month observance stretch back to 1926 when Carter G. Woodson and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History announced the second week of February to be Negro History Week.  Woodson, who died in 1950, spent the rest of his life promoting historical awareness in both academia and the community.  There was plenty of resistance in the first case and the revelation of an untapped hunger in the second.

 

In the wake of the Civil Rights Movement and especially the Black Power movement of the 1970’s Black history finally began to take hold as a recognized academic discipline and as part of the curriculum in public and private schools.  The first Black History Month was celebrated at Kent State University in Ohio.  By 1976 President Gerald Ford recognized Black History Month, during the celebration of the United States Bicentennial.

Since then, Black History month has spread and now usually adopts a theme each year. This year the theme is African Americans and the Arts. 

Some African-Americans think the Black History Month ghettoizes the Black experience. 

By the early 21st Century the media and many corporations seemed to co-opt the month in an attempt to pander to the Black community and inoculate themselves against charges of institutional racism.  Ubiquitous Black History Moments on television promoted hero worship of individual “pioneers” often without any context to a broader struggle or the experience of ordinary Black people.  It has also drawn criticism for “ghettoizing” Black history and confining it to a silo without connection to American history as a whole.  Actor and director Morgan Freeman declared “I don’t want a Black history month. Black history is American history."

 

Black History Month must always keep in mind the sacrifices of participation of the many in the Civil Rights movement like these women in the 1963 March for Jobs and Justice in Washington.  They made Dr. Martin Luther King's soaring rhetoric a reality. 

I’m well aware of these pitfalls as a White writer, amateur historian, and hope-to-be ally.  Yet I think there is still much to be learned if Black History can be placed in its broadest context and include the struggles and sacrifices of the many as well as iconic figures.