The hearings in Bastrop, Louisiana investigating the murders of Watt Daniels & Thomas Richards
begin. There are many avowed kluxers spectating. The judge calls on Morehouse Parish Sheriff Carpenter (also a klansman, natch) to prevent witnesses being intimidated, and has a recess so everyone can take their guns home.
A white mob is
rampaging through the mostly black town of Rosewood, Florida, searching for Jesse Hunter, who escaped from a chain gang. He is suspected, because he is black, of assaulting a married white woman who claims she was attacked by a black man but is probably covering for her white lover. This shit has been going on for a few days (the
NYT is just catching up), as white mobs kill black people and burn houses, churches, all of Rosewood really. Black residents are hiding in the swamps. Jesse Hunter will never be caught. The exact death toll of the Rosewood massacre remains unknown.
Wish I could say whether I recommend the movie Rosewood, but it’s been too long since I’ve seen it.
The Senate
discusses a provision in the Interior Dept budget, $25,000 for the suppression of peyote use (which is legal) among Indians. Several senators have to have explained to them what peyote is.
Bellevue
tries to cure a woman of mercury poisoning by grafting a sheep’s kidney into her body. She dies. Because the poisoning was too advanced and definitely not because the operation was a stupid idea, the doctors say.
The New Jersey Education Commissioner
orders Hoboken to rehire Clara Nommensen, who they illegally fired when she got married.
Alois Rašín, Czechoslovakia’s finance minister, is
assassinated by an anarchist (?) I guess because of his plan to reduce the wages of state employees. Rašín himself had been imprisoned as part of an Austro-Hungarian crackdown on Czech nationalists in 1894 and sentenced to death for treason against the Double Monarchy in 1916.
Right-wing members of the German Reichstag
will ask the government to do something about Lothar Witzke, who’s evidently the last German prisoner of war still held by the United States. He was captured and interned after his ship was sunk during the Great War, escaped, and did sabotage work in the US and Mexico, including the Mare Island Naval Shipyard explosion in 1917 (maybe), until he was captured in Mexico. He’ll be pardoned in September, serve in the Abwehr during WW II and be elected to the Hamburg Parliament in 1949.
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