memorial

Remembering the Children

This recitation of the names of dead Gazan children took place in early October. Where do we stand almost 2 months later?

Children of Gaza

A memorial installation at Jubilee Square to count the number of Gazan children killed in the last 2 years.

The Chattri Memorial

Finally, after backtracking from poor directions, we made it to the Chattri itself.

We also went through the Plymouth Museum. It tells the story of the English colonists in America and their depredations of the native people they found in North America. It was certainly interesting to see this story told both from a contemporary historical perspective and also from an English one, since, contrary to how we think of it in the States, for the couple of hundred years before the revolution, these were indeed Englishmen and not Americans. Outside the museum, meanwhile, plaques commemorated the great voyages of colonialism with no regard for the revised history told inside. If viewing in email, click the post title to click into the images and see them larger.

Love of Country

It’s hard not to be touched by this honoring of the fallen of the 1914-18 war, nor to forget its condemnation by such as Wilfrid Owen (full poem at the link):
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Memorial

Loves Labor Lost

In Memory

Firefighter Edward J Tuite, West 19th Street, New York

More London Street Scenes…

See the last post for the long-winded description of these scanned Kodachrome pictures my father took in the 1950s:

The Cenotaph on Whitehall, London, 1950s

I I can’t quite place the top image – I thought I saw the outline of Whitely’s in Queensway in the background but a quick look at Google maps reveals that’s wrong. And the bottom picture provides a nice street vantage of St Paul’s Cathedral.

Update, thanks to Agnes Ashe: top photo is the Cenotaph and St Paul’s from Ludgate.

Andrew Goodman

I’ve passed by this almost daily for the last year without noticing it. Goodman is a martyr of the Freedom Rides of the early ’60s.

From Wikipedia:

Andrew Goodman was born and raised on the Upper West Side of New York City, at 161 West 86 Street, the middle of three sons of Robert and Carolyn Goodman, of Jewish heritage. His family and community were steeped in intellectual and socially progressive activism and were devoted to social justice. An activist at an early age, Goodman graduated from the progressive Walden School; Walden was said to have had a strongly formative influence on his outlook. He attended the Honors Program at the University of Wisconsin–Madison for a semester but withdrew after falling ill with pneumonia.

Goodman enrolled at Queens College, New York City, where he was a friend and classmate of Paul Simon. With his brief experience as an off-Broadway actor, he originally planned to study drama, but switched to anthropology. Goodman’s growing interest in anthropology seemed to parallel his increasing political seriousness.

…

In 1964, Goodman volunteered along with fellow activist Mickey Schwerner to work on the “Freedom Summer” project of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to register blacks to vote in Mississippi. Having protested U.S. President Lyndon Johnson’s presence at the opening of that year’s World’s Fair, Goodman left New York to train and develop civil rights strategies at Western College for Women (now part of Miami University) in Oxford, Ohio. In mid-June, Goodman joined Schwerner in Meridian, Mississippi, where the latter was designated head of the field office. They worked on registering blacks in rural areas to vote.

The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission was strongly opposed to integration and civil rights. It paid spies to identify citizens suspected of activism, especially northerners who entered the state. The records opened by court order in 1998 also revealed the state’s deep complicity in the murders of three civil rights workers at Philadelphia, Mississippi, because its investigator A.L. Hopkins passed on information about the workers, including the car license number of a new civil rights worker to the commission. Records showed the commission passed the information on to the Sheriff of Neshoba County, who was implicated in the murders.^[3]

Schwerner had been working closely with an assistant James Chaney, also a civil rights activist in Meridian. On the morning of June 21, 1964, the three men set out for Philadelphia, Neshoba County, where they were to investigate the recent burning of Mount Zion Methodist Church, a black church that had agreed to be a site for a Religion School for education and voter registration.

Arrest, release and murder

Missing persons poster created by the FBI in 1964, shows the photographs of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner.

Main article: Mississippi civil rights workers’ murders

On their return to Meridian, the three men were stopped and arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price for allegedly driving 35 miles over the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit. The trio was taken to the jail in Neshoba County where Chaney was booked for speeding, while Schwerner and Goodman were booked “for investigation”. After Chaney was fined $20, the three men were released and told to leave the county. Price followed them on state hwy 19 to the county line, then turned around at approximately 10:30 p.m. On their way back to Meridian, the three young men were stopped by patrol lights and two carloads of KKK members and taken to a remote rural road. The men approached their car, then shot and killed Schwerner, then Goodman, and finally Chaney.