Today -100: June 7, 1921: Of spectacles

Pueblo, Colorado conscripts all able-bodied men to dig the city out of the mud after that big ol’ flood.

Pres. Harding makes an unscheduled stop on his motoring trip at Lincoln University, a black college. He tells the graduating class that education is important for blacks, because the government isn’t going to do jack shit for them: “No government can wave a magical wand and take a race from bondage to citizenship in half a century.” Well not with that attitude, mister. “The colored race, in order to come into its own, must do the great work itself in preparing for that participation,” he says, accepting the premise that most black people are not already “prepared” for citizenship by the fact that they are, you know, citizens. He refers to Tulsa (for the first time) as “the unhappy and distressing spectacle that we saw the other day out in one of the Western States” and hopes that “God grant that, in the soberness, the fairness and the justice of this country, we shall never have another spectacle like it.” So that’s it. He can’t even name the state, much less the city, where racial atrocities occurred, and offers as the only protection against future such... spectacles... the soberness, fairness and justice that did sooooo much for the black population of Tulsa.

In Somers Point, New Jersey, Commodore William Tanguy, age 70, volunteers to be the town bathing suit censor. He says he doesn’t need glasses and will even do it free. Sounds legit.

The British colonial regime in Sierra Leone and independent Liberia ratify a convention by which Liberian wives can be purchased for a maximum price of £5.

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