Lynching Of Black Man Announced In The Newspaper Before It Happens

 

June 26, 1919, the White people of Ellisville, Mississippi convicted a Black man and authorized his death on this day. His only crime was that he had a girlfriend who was also a White woman.

This was the Jim Crow South where the greatest crime was a Black man looking at a White woman so, one can imagine the rage White people felt knowing that a Black man was enjoying a relationship with a White woman.

The newspapers of the day attempted to make the lynching a perfectly justified action by writing that John Hartfield’s girlfriend Ruth Meeks was an 18-year-old innocent who had been ravished by a brute, but the facts were that two White men had seen Meeks and Hartfield together at the hotel he worked at in the town of Laurel. Meeks was in her mid-20s as well.

Initially, the men chased Hartfield and with the help of the sheriff in Laurel put Hartfield on the run. For ten days he avoided capture by the mob but when Sheriff Harbison of Ellisville requested bloodhounds and they were provided it ended the chase.

Hartfield was shot in the shoulder and then dragged back to Ellisville. The newspapers reported that a White doctor had cleaned his wound and ruled him fine to be jailed. Except there was no plan for him to be jailed as newspapers from Louisiana to Alabama had the headline, “Hartfield Toi Be Lynched At 5 O’Clock” Another said “3,000 Will Burn Negro”

That is what happened along with other heinous torture. Reports from witnesses state that Hartfield was drug behind a horse to a gum tree outside of town. There he was lifted into the air and riddled with bullets before being set on fire.

To give an idea of how vicious and brutal the period was there were postcards printed with images of Hartfield and his toes and other parts were cut off as souvenirs.

When contacted before the lynching Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo, an avowed member of the Klan, stated there was nothing his office could do. “We’re powerless,” Bilbo said ahead of the murder. “We don’t have troops and furthermore excitement is at such a high that if we tried to interfere doubtless it would end with hundreds of deaths. We cannot stop the inevitable.”

No one was ever arrested for the violent murder of Hartfield and there was of course no investigation.

 

Sources:

https://www.newspapers.com/image/737984011/?match=1

https://theclio.com/entry/22740

https://eji.org/news/lynching-survivor-mamie-lang-kirkland-returns-to-mississippi/

 

 

 

Kirk and Uhura Kiss: Rodenberry, Shatner, and Nichols Stand Up To Censors

The NBC executives demanded the scene be shot without the kiss regardless of script. Creator producer Gene Rodenberry insisted it be shot as scripted. William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols had already decided to stick to the script regardless of censors and critics. So it was shown as shot in the Star Trek Original Series episode “Plato's Stepchildren", season 3 episode 10, first broadcast on this day in 1968. The first legitimate kiss between a white man and an African American woman.

Television historians will dicker over whether this was the first interracial kiss or not as Shatner had kissed French actress France Nuyen, who is of Asian descent. While there were a handful of kisses one could point to this kiss on Star Trek was between the shows main protagonist and lead female character. It was a major shift in levels of attention. Star Trek was a popular show, even though it would be canceled due to cost vs ratings at the end of this third season. It was also a clear kiss with sexual tension between the two characters and not an off-hand gesture. The plot device allowed for it to be something for Rodenberry and the actors to step away from but also build on if the was a reason too. As the years have passed the growth of Star Trek as a culture touchstone has also allowed the kiss to take on a significance other earlier moments simply do not have.

Producers and NBC executives were extremely concerned about southern viewership and ordered that a scene without the kiss be filmed but Shatner and Nichols simply did things in each take to screw that up from Shatner crossing his eyes to really flubbing it

As Nichols recounts:

Knowing that Gene was determined to air the real kiss, Bill shook me and hissed menacingly in his best ham-fisted Kirkian staccato delivery, "I! WON'T! KISS! YOU! I! WON'T! KISS! YOU!"

It was absolutely awful, and we were hysterical and ecstatic.

In fact there is no record that NBC ever received any negative phone calls or letters. According to Rodenberry and Nichols most of the letters were from girls inquiring what it was like to kiss Kirk or Uhura.

Nichols observed that "Plato's Stepchildren", received a huge response.

“We received one of the largest batches of fan mail ever, all of it very positive, with many addressed to me from girls wondering how it felt to kiss Captain Kirk, and many to him from guys wondering the same thing about me. However, almost no one found the kiss offensive," except from a single mildly negative letter from one white Southerner who wrote: "I am totally opposed to the mixing of the races. However, any time a red-blooded American boy like Captain Kirk gets a beautiful dame in his arms that looks like Uhura, he ain't gonna fight it."

The kiss might have become just a relic to the past as television evolved except that Star Trek did go on to it's own evolution and become one of the most powerful cultural phenomena of all time.

Sources:

https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/tv-radio/108958268/star-treks-interracial-kiss-50-years-ago-heralded-change

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/star-trek-s-interracial-kiss-50-years-ago-went-boldly-n941181

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirk_and_Uhura%27s_kiss