Today -100: February 18, 1911: Of train theft, fine dining, racial covenants, and royal standup

Those Wobblies are forced off the train they hijacked. Only made it as far as Ashland, Ore.

Headline of the Day -100: “Taft to Dine Classmates.” Er, that doesn’t mean Taft will eat his classmates, does it? Does it?

Black people are annoyed at a judge on the District Supreme Court (which I guess is the court with jurisdiction over D.C.) who, when sentencing a black purse-snatcher, said “From the viewpoint of the white women of the National capital, it is not to be tolerated that a colored man should dare to put his hand on one of them, and a man of your color who lays hands on a white woman will not be tolerated if I can help it.”

91 property owners on W 136th Street in NYC, calling themselves the Harlem Real Estate Protective Association, file a covenant in the Hall of Records that none of them will rent or sell to black people (including mulattos, quadroons, or octoroons) for the next 15 years. Tenants will even be restricted from employing more than one servant who is negro, mulatto etc. Somehow this covenant is supposed to be constitutional (and legally binding) because it carefully states that they have nothing against people occupying their premises solely on account of their race, but just want to keep rents up (by keeping blacks out). They claim that colored tenants are being deliberately brought in as part of a real estate speculation/blackmail scheme.

Headline of the Day -100: “LAUGH AT KAISER’S JOKES.; Agricultural Congress Ripples with Merriment as He Talks Farming.” Jokes by Kaiser Wilhelm about farming! Well known as the height of humor -100. Tell us, tell us! Unfortunately... the NYT doesn’t relate a single one of the jokes. I has a sad.