Today -100: January 5, 1910: Of doomed negroes, negroes in evening dress, and the age of the earth

Headline of the Day -100: “Negroes Quickly Doomed.” In Kansas City, Missouri, two black men were sentenced to death for assaulting a white woman. The trial, from jury selection to verdict, took two days. The jury was out for five minutes. The trial was held behind closed doors, to prevent a lynching.

NYT: “Society in Washington is to-day discussing somebody’s blunder at last night’s charity ball, which resulted in the bringing to the red ballroom of the Willard three negroes in evening dress.” Blunder indeed. What seems to have happened is that Paulens Sannon’s wife was listed in a newspaper as a patron of a fashionable charity, so she got the invite. She and her husband and their guest attended for an hour, were spoken to by absolutely no one, and left. Paulens Sannon was the ambassador from Haiti.

Professor William Morris Davis of Harvard, a geologist and the “father of American geography,” says that “We are now able to tell almost exactly the age of this earth.” 60 million years old.