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host · 01-07-2007, 09:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by powerclown

Me too. But you might want to leave the "World Misery" section next time you visit the local Borders bookstore. Same with the "Death Channel" on cable TV. I would recommend buying a Leibovitz/Sontag/Adams/O'Keefe/Weston/Cartier-Bresson/Ritts/Sterfeld/or Mapplethorpe photobook, for starters. Next, head over to the "Humor" section and pick up something funny.

As much negativity and misery as there is (and always will be) in life, I think there is an equal or greater amount of positivity and beauty.

Why not pay some attention to the latter?

powerclown, I could not disagree with you more....consider that "beauty" never has an uphill struggle to achieve exposure,

Quote:

http://www.louvreatlanta.org/en/home/

Louvre Atlanta is an unprecedented partnership between the High Museum of Art and the Musée du Louvre in Paris that will bring hundreds of works of art from the Louvre's collections to Atlanta. Built around specific themes and periods, the High will present a series of long-term special presentations of art from the Louvre beginning October 2006 through 2009....

but here, where I live, not wanting to know, can also mean not wanting to think, not wanting to empathize....

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http://www.ajc.com/news/content/livi...lwarbride.html
Georgia was an ocean apart from the life she knew . . .
Tens of thousands of British war brides came to the United States 60 years ago. One tells how she traded London life for Southern heat, civil rights protests — and snakes

By JIM AUCHMUTEY
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 06/11/06

.....Betty knew a little about the South. She had seen "Gone With the Wind" at Leicester Square in London, but she realized there was more to the story. She also had read Lillian Smith's controversial book about lynching, "Strange Fruit."

"My father had some reservations about me coming to Georgia," she says. "He said there was going to be a lot of trouble there."

Father was right. His daughter was living in Albany when the trouble came years later during the civil rights protests of the early '60s. At one point, some people there wanted to close the library rather than desegregate it. McKemie circulated a petition to keep it open.

"A city without a library," she says, "would have been unthinkable."...

Quote:

http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache...&ct=clnk&cd=26
(page 31)

.....In 1969, the DeKalb County school district was directed to desegregate its schools, and
placed under judicial supervision by the District Court for Northern Georgia. In the 17 years that
followed, DeKalb complied with the desegregation mandate by (amongst other things):
implementing a voluntary student transfer program, reassigning teachers to achieve greater racial
balance, and establishing a neighborhood school attendance plan.
87
In 1986, believing that the
DeKalb district had achieved unitary status, petitioners returned to court, asking that the district
be released from judicial oversight. In making its determination, the District Court considered
whether the district had achieved unitary status in those areas outlined in Green. They also
considered a factor not included in the Green decision, namely the relative quality of education
offered to black and white students.
88...

Quote:

http://www.uexpress.com/asiseeit/ind..._date=20020426
04/26/2002
PHOTOGRAPHS OF LYNCHINGS BEAR SOMBER WITNESS TO BRUTAL PAST

There are Americans who still wish to deny, to equivocate, to dispute the savage history of American racism. They will not want to see "Without Sanctuary," an exhibition of gruesome photographs of lynchings in the United States. It would rob them of their defenses.

The photographs -- stark in their horror, ingenuous in their brutality -- are beyond dispute, out of equivocation's reach. They will not be denied. The dead -- the tortured, mutilated dead -- will have the final word.

After opening first in New York and Pittsburgh, the exhibit, which documents a peculiar American holocaust of mostly, but not exclusively, black victims, is belatedly opening in Atlanta. The dithering, controversy and cowardice that delayed an Atlanta exhibition serve as a stark reminder of the difficulty, even in the 21st century, of confronting the cruelty and hatred in America's past, especially here in the South. This holocaust, too, has often been denied.

The pictures are part of a collection of postcards, photographs and documents collected by James Allen, a white Atlanta antiques dealer who specializes in African-American artifacts. Allen lent the collection to Atlanta's Emory University several years ago, where the items were available to scholars but inconspicuous.

The photographs remained relatively obscure until Allen pursued the publication of a book, also called "Without Sanctuary," which attracted the attention of a New York gallery owner and later the New York Historical Society. But the hugely successful New York exhibits inspired Emory only to open discussions about showing the photographs.

Perhaps the university's initial caution was justified. Here in the Deep South, where the distant past is only yesterday, these photographs tread on tender ground, across graves dug just a while ago, when grandmothers were schoolgirls. The last lynching on record in Georgia took place in rural McDuffie County in 1965.

Nor was the reluctance to confront photographic evidence of the brutality and humiliation of lynchings limited to whites. A few African-Americans, too, were reluctant to visit a brutal past not so long buried.

So, after months of public meetings, debate with Emory faculty and discussions with the Atlanta History Center, there was little agreement among institutional leaders. Some academics argued that the photographs could only be shown in "context," with lectures and panel discussions and reminders of the social mores of a distant past. Finally, Frank Catroppa, superintendent of the Martin Luther King Jr. Historic Site, offered its exhibition space.

They are mounted in a somber display that gives the victims the dignity they deserve. And there will be lectures and discussions over the coming months. But there is no effort to justify or explain an evil that remains beyond comprehension.

Some of the pictures seem perversely poetic -- fully clothed corpses twisting gently beneath tree limbs, as if Billie Holiday had wanted a video to accompany her gripping version of "Strange Fruit," her song about lynchings. Other photographs are gruesome, sickening shots of mutilated corpses, black men caught by a frenzied white mob, then castrated, whipped and burned, all as they dangled, helplessly, from a noose.

But the photographs that are most disquieting focus not on the black victims but on the white perpetrators and hangers-on and the atmosphere of circus and celebration that was occasioned by the mob murder of a black man or woman. Men cheer and pose beside the corpses, women grin and point, and even children stand smiling, jubilant, as they witness a scene of unspeakable cruelty. Their beaming faces bear witness to their depraved souls.

There are still those who wonder what good can come of this, what purpose can be served by an excursion into a sordid and bitter past. And there will still be those who will wish to turn their heads, avert their eyes, push quickly past this window into the hideous truths that belie America's founding myths.

But a vile past -- hurriedly and poorly buried -- still emits a stench that can be cleansed only when it is opened up and fully aired. Let us begin that cleansing with these photographs.

Cynthia Tucker is editorial page editor for the Atlanta Constitution. She can be reached by e-mail: cynthia@ajc.com.

Ironically, the "Strange Fruit" exhibit contained photographs of brutal mob killings of black and white victims from all over the U.S.

Until after WWII in the USA, these were the things that some of our grandparents were doing, and they were unabashedly posing for pictures in front of their "handiwork", and exchanging souvenir postcards that pictured the "events" in their aftermath, they took their young children to watch with them, sometimes picnicking in the vicinity, To expect the grandchildren of these people, in 1994 to petition their government to send troops to intervene in Rwandan genocide, is quite a leap, indeed !

Quote:

http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/main.html
<center><img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/97.jpg" height=400 width=500> James Weldon Johnson named the summer of 1919 the "Red Summer" for the rash of deadly riots which erupted in more than twenty-five American cities between April and October of that year. Racial tensions were at an extreme in Omaha that summer; the influx of African Americans from the South and a perceived epidemic of crime created an atmosphere of mistrust and fear that led to the lynching of William Brown.

Brown had been accused of molesting a white girl. When police arrested him on September 28, a mob quickly formed which ignored orders from authorities that they disperse. When Mayor Edward P. Smith appeared to plead for calm, he was kidnapped by the mob, hung to a trolley pole, and nearly killed before police were able to cut him down.

The rampaging mob set the courthouse prison on fire and seized Brown. He was hung from a lamppost, mutilated, and his body riddled with bullets, then burned. Four other people were killed and fifty wounded before troops were able to restore order.

This photograph was acquired from a Lincoln, Nebraska, man whose grandfather purchased it for two dollars as a souvenir while visiting Omaha in 1919. 
<img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/81.jpg"><img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/82.jpg"> <img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/83.jpg"><img src="http://www.withoutsanctuary.org/photos/84.jpg"> When the corpse of Brooke Hart, a San Jose youth, was discovered in San Francisco Bay on November 26, 1933, a mob materialized to punish the alleged kidnappers and murderers, Thomas H. Thurmond and John Holmes. The lynchers rammed open the jail door, assaulted the guards, and dragged Holmes and Thurmond to St. James Park, beating them into near unconsciousness. Holmes's clothes were sheared from his body, and Thurmond's pants were drawn down to his ankles. A gathering of some six thousand spectators witnessed the hanging.

Governor James Rolph's doublespeak was typical of many lynching era politicians: "While the law should have been permitted to take its course, the people by their action have given notice to the entire world that in California kidnapping will not be tolerated."</center>