How the Media Sparked the Burning of Black Wall Street, Child Suicide Attempts Skyrocket, LA Spends More on Tent Cities Than the Cost of Apartments (The Five for 06/01/21)
Hey, welcome to The Five.
Before we begin, a confession.
I experimented with a third edition of The Five…to be delivered on the weekends.
The difference is, this one would be short form audio (maybe 5 min long). The idea would be to put out a brief piece of audio focusing on five thoughts on a single topic.
On Friday night, I recorded a little over 10 minutes on my phone while walking the dog. I built the email out, but planned to re-record a shorter version of the audio on my professional mic.
Well, I forgot to re-record, so the scratch track went out on Sunday morning (oops).
It wasn’t terrible, but not the finished product I meant to present.
Probably won’t get to do one this weekend, as I’m traveling.
The imperfect version was a reaction to the Friends reunion. I’m not going to take it down, as the first 3-4 minutes are decent. Feel free to take a listen if you like (with the context), or just wait for the next one, which will be tighter and more focused.
On to the news…
[one]
The Greenwood neighborhood of Tula, OK, June 1921
Yesterday marked the 100th Anniversary of the “Burning of Black Wall Street,” a devastating attack on the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, OK, at the time one of the wealthiest black communities in America.
NBC News reports:
On May 31, 1921, a white mob turned Greenwood upside down in one of the worst racial massacres in U.S. history. In the matter of hours, 35 square blocks of the vibrant Black community were turned into smoldering ashes. Countless Black people were killed — estimates ranged from 55 to more than 300 — and 1,000 homes and businesses were looted and set on fire.
The massacre wasn’t officially recognized by Tulsa until 1997, with an official report released in 2001.
Although most people have heard of Black Wall Street at this point, the origins of the violence are largely unknown.
Essentially, a black teenager tripped and accidentally touched the shoulder of a white teenager, which the local paper spun into a malicious lie of assault and rape.
Again, from NBC:
On May 31, 1921, Dick Rowland, a 19-year old Black shoeshiner, tripped and fell in an elevator and his hand accidentally caught the shoulder of Sarah Page, a white 17-year-old operator. Page screamed and Rowland was seen running away.
Police were summoned but Page refused to press charges. However, by that afternoon, there was already talks of lynching Rowland on the streets of white Tulsa. The tension then escalated after the white newspaper Tulsa Tribune ran a front-page story entitled “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl In Elevator,” which accused Rowland of stalking, assault and rape.
In the Tribune, there was also a now-lost editorial entitled “To Lynch Tonight,” according to Ellsworth. When the Works Progress Administration went to microfilm the old issues of the Tribune in the 1930s, the op-ed had already been torn out of the newspaper, Ellsworth said.
Many believe the newspaper coverage undoubtedly played a part in sparking the massacre.
After the riots, Tulsa’s Chief of Police sent officers to confiscate the photos taken during the riots from every photography studio in town. Those pictures were not unearthed until 2001 by local historian Michelle Place who said it took her days to sort through the material because of the horror of what she had uncovered.
Last October, a mass grave of riot victims was uncovered. The investigation to put together the full events of this 100 year old riots is ongoing.
[two]
Extremely sobering news out of Colorado, where childhood suicide attempts have reached unprecedented levels.
The Colorado Sun reports:
Colorado children are attempting suicide and arriving in emergency rooms in psychiatric crisis at levels never seen in this state, while abuse of alcohol and drugs to cope with mental health struggles is also on the rise.
The youth mental health crisis has escalated to the point this spring that hospital beds are full and more parents are sending kids out of state for treatment, according to a Children’s Hospital Colorado panel of experts who sent up a flare for help Tuesday.
The hospital system, with a main campus in Aurora as well as branches in Colorado Springs, Highlands Ranch and Broomfield, declared a “pediatric mental health state of emergency.”
In Aurora, the hospital’s 52-bed emergency department has been overrun with children in psychiatric crisis. Mental health emergency visits were up 90% last month compared with April 2019. The hospital’s transport team is seeing three or four kids each week who have just tried to kill themselves.
Unless something really unexpected is happening locally, the most logical assumption here is that the extended lockdown broke these kids.
After WWI in Ottowa, IL young women started coming down with horrific mystery illnesses and dying. At the time, the cause was unknown.
Today, we call them the Radium Girls, the last deaths from WWI who wasted away after the war due to their jobs applying the iridescent radium to military instruments to make them glow in the dark.
One day, I think we’ll have a name for those we lost in lockdown. The addicts who weren’t allowed to go to AA, but could walk into the “essential business” known as a liquor store. The depressed person who might have made it by being physically surrounded by friends and family, but made the most tragic of choices in the long winter of 2020.
COVID is a real disease. It really kills people (most of them had 4+ complicating factors but the threat is real), and the media has reminded it of this on a daily basis. Heck, even the weather app on my phone was showing me COVID cases and deaths in my area.
But as a society, we seem to be fine ignoring the deaths that aren’t from COVID, but because of the national response to the disease.
I believe future generations will judge our age for creating a world where the vulnerable, and even the very young, see suicide as the only option.
It wasn’t happening two or three or ten years ago. Children attempting to end their lives at this rate is a new phenomenon, and the evidence points to recent policy decisions as a major contributing factor.
[three]
Los Angeles has managed (errr, mismanaged) to paint the city’s homeless assistance program into a rather expensive and ineffective corner.
NPR reports:
Other cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Tampa, Fla., have opened similar programs in recent years. But the high public cost of LA's first sanctioned campground — more than $2,600 per tent, per month — has advocates worried it will come at the expense of more permanent housing.
The campsite opened in late April on a fenced-in parking lot beside the 101 freeway in East Hollywood. The lot-turned-campground can accommodate up to about 70 tents in 12-by-12-foot spots marked by white squares painted on the asphalt.
On a recent afternoon, the site was nearly full. A row of port-a-potties stood along one side of the camp. The program also provides showers, three meals a day and 24-hour security. Campers get entered into the county's database for matching unhoused people with social services and housing resources.
It's meant to corral the tents and cobbled-together structures that currently stand in parks, on sidewalks and below freeway overpasses, while providing homeless people with services and a potential steppingstone to permanent homes.
So, LA constructed a “homeless prison” (it has 24/7 guards) and spent more than just to put these people in apartments. The “stepping stone” could just be to put these folks in real housing for 6-8 months and help them get job training.
And now that the city realizes this…they’re continuing the program rather than killing it immediately and and putting the funds to better use to help the tent city residents.
Slow. Clap.
American citizens can only vote at the ballot in November every two to four years, but they can vote with their feet at any time. California lost population for the first time in a century with the latest sentence. In part, one has to assume that’s due to terrible local management of the places people live.
[four]
Traditionally, Iowa is always the first state to hold a primary during Presidential election. years, but Nevada hopes to jump the line going forward.
The AP reports:
Nevada lawmakers passed a bill on Monday that aims to make the state the first to weigh in on the 2024 presidential primary contests.
The move upends decades of political tradition and is likely to prompt pushback from other early states that want to retain their places in the calendar.
The bill that passed in the state’s Assembly on Wednesday and the Senate on Monday still must be approved by Democratic Gov. Steve Sisolak to become law. It would also need the backing of the national political parties to eventually make the change for the 2024 calendar.
The push for Nevada to jump past Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s longstanding first-in-the-nation primary follows a behind-the-scenes lobbying campaign led by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada.
Reid and other Nevada Democrats have seized on dissatisfaction in the party about the nominating process that gained steam in 2020. They’re arguing to replace party-run caucuses with state-run primary elections, which are considered easier to participate in than the in-person neighborhood caucus meetings.
[five]
As gas prices hit $6/gallon over the weekend, due in part to a cyber attack by Russian hacker group Darkside that shut down the Colonial Pipeline…inflated pork and beef prices could be next.
JBS USA, the world's largest meat supplier, says it was the target of an “organized cybersecurity attack."
In a statement, JBS, which has its U.S. headquarters in Greeley, Colorado, said the attack affected some of its servers supporting its North American and Australian IT systems.
"The company took immediate action, suspending all affected systems, notifying authorities and activating the company's global network of IT professionals and third-party experts to resolve the situation," the company said in its statement. "The company’s backup servers were not affected, and it is actively working with an Incident Response firm to restore its systems as soon as possible."
How consumers might be impacted by the attack was not immediately known Monday.
[epilogue]
One of the forgotten tragedies of WWII seven deaths from a Japanese attack on the American mainland.
To terrorize the U.S., Japan let off helium balloons carrying bombs during the war, to kill and maim American citizens at random. Only one was successful.
Twenty six year old Elyse Mitchell almost called the whole thing off, feeling ill from pregnancy. But on the morning of May 5, 1945 she felt well enough to join her husband and a group of local children on a picnic on Gearhart Mountain in Oregon.
While Archie Mitchell was parking the car, he saw the children approaching a strange looking object. He called out to Elyse to get the children back away from it just as one of them triggered the blast.
The U.S. military was aware of the balloon bombs, but had not notified the public, trying to keep a lid on the whole thing so Japan would think the balloons were not reaching the mainland.
According to the Smithsonian, there’s still a remote chance undiscovered balloon bombs still exist in the western U.S. and Canada.
In 2014, a couple of forestry workers in Canada came across one of the unexploded balloon bombs, which still posed enough of a danger that a military bomb disposal unit had to blow it up. Nearly three-quarters of a century later, these unknown remnants are a reminder that even the most overlooked scars of war are slow to fade.
In other words, the last casualty of WWII…may not have happened yet.
Until the next one.
-sth