June 21

On the 21st in 1964, members of the Ku Klux Klan murdered Andrew Goodman (left), James Chaney (center) and Michael ‘Mickey’ Schwerner (right), in Mississippi.
[When Goodman attended Queens College, in New York, one of his classmates was singer Paul Simon. Chaney, from Meridian, Mississippi had joined the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) in 1963 and was engaged in fieldwork with Goodman and Schwerner when the small group was arrested for a traffic violation on the day of the murders. They had been released and were heading for home when two cars filled with members of the KKK stopped and then shot them. The Mississippi Klan’s Imperial Wizard, Sam Bowers had ordered Schwerner's (pictured below) "elimination" in May 1964.

June 20

In Cleveland, Ohio, Charles Waddell Chesnutt was born on the 20th in 1858. His parents, Andrew Chesnutt and Ann Maria (Sampson) Chesnutt, were a couple described in contemporary records as being “free persons of color”. Charles’s grandfather was white and was as a consequence of mixed race. Photographs of him, such as the one at right, clearly confirm that he could have easily ‘passed’ for white. As an adult, he became an author, essayist and political activist. Many of his novels, essays and activism focused on social issues, the novels in particular. In 1905, Chesnutt gave a speech to the Boston Historical and Literary Association based on one of his essays titled "Race Prejudice; Its Causes and Its Cure." The work startlingly foreshadows Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech given in 1963. Clearly, Chesnutt was a driven man. Part of the force that drove him so forcefully can possibly be traced to the fact that when he was an infant, his parents tried to sell him into slavery. The deal only fell through when the prospective buyer could not come up with the full $23 that the couple was demanding for their son.

June19

On the 19th in 1865, General Gordon Granger and the 2000 troops under his command arrived at Galveston Island, Texas. Granger’s purpose in going to Texas was to seize the state and enforce the emancipation of the slaves being held in Texas. Granger must have been a very busy guy. He was about two and a half years late. Granted, for much of that time, there had been a war going on but, still, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued on September 22, 1962 and went into effect January 1, 1863. Juneteenth is a widely observed (in Texas anyway) holiday commemorating the freeing of the slaves.

June 18

It has been said, though I am uncertain by whom, that the family that prays together stays together. While that may be true, some times the family that prays together ends up doing it together professionally. Gervase and his identical twin brother Thomas were born in Maidstone, England in the twelfth century. Thomas was ordained as a priest on February 16, 1163. Subsequently he ordained his brother Gervase. The two brothers both ended up at the abbey of Christ Church, Canterbury. In the 1170s, Gervase assumed the duties of the abbey’s chronicler. Shortly after sunset on the 18th in 1178, as he sat in his office, Gervase was approached by five monks who reported to him that they had seen “two horns of light on the shaded part of the moon.” What they had witnessed was the impact of a meteorite on the moon (Today known as the Giordano Bruno crater). Some astronomers suspect that the force of this meteorite hitting the Moon is responsible for the slight oscillation of the Moon’s distance from earth.

Thomas would be a bit more familiar if I mentioned that his last name was Beckett and that he was assassinated on December 29, 1171. As St. Thomas Beckett, he really hit the big time and is today venerated as a saint and a martyr by both the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches.

June 17

Joseph Addison (pictured at right) died on the 17th in 1719. In 1711, he and Richard Steele started the newspaper The Spectator. The paper advised readers that its intention was to "to enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality... to bring philosophy out of the closets and libraries, schools and colleges, to dwell in clubs and assemblies, at tea-tables and coffeehouses." Each issue contained a measly 2,500 words but had an impressive circulation of 3000 per issue. The paper lasted for 55 issues in its original run, which would end in 1712. In 1714, Addison, working alone, revived it and it ran for another six months.
In one issue of the Spectator, Addison provided a profile of a man known as Bully Dawson, a gambler of wide notoriety in England. Dawson had been quoted elsewhere as, following the overturning of a coach he was in as having said “Twas the greatest Piece of Providence that ever befel him, for it had saved him the Trouble of bilking the Coachman”.

June 16

Following the infamous hijacking of commercial airliners on September 11, 2001, security searches on all forms of transportation have been extraordinarily heightened. For instance, a couple of years ago, a person was travelling by train from New York to Oregon. In Chicago, he had reserved a sleeping compartment for the long, uninteresting run from there to the beautiful state of Oregon. He boarded the train, placed his bags in his compartment, and was at once confronted by agents of both the DEA and Homeland Security. They asked him if he had any weapons or drugs, including prescription drugs. He was a heart patient and answered honestly that he had lots of drugs in his bag but that the only weapon he had was a scathing wit. After looking at the medication that he had, and not feeling particularly threatened by his weapon, they said ‘Thank you’ and went on their way. A great deal of the problem with the new security measures arises from the fact that they are so new and unfamiliar. The hijackings on September 11 weren’t the first planes to be taken over, far from it. Had the security measures been put in place years ago, no one would now feel terribly uncomfortable or inconvenienced by them. The first hijacking of a commercial airliner occurred on the 16th in 1947. The PBY Catalina seaplane Miss Macao was on a flight from Macao to Hong Kong when a passenger with a machine gun seized the cabin in an attempt to hijack the plane in order to steal the gold onboard. A crewmember startled the gunman who opened up with the machine gun. For some reason, the plane then crashed, killing 26 of the 27 onboard.

June 15

Following as he did Richard the Lionheart as King of England, King John had a very hard act to follow. That is a bit like any band having to follow Jimi Hendrix at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967. On the 15th in 1215, however, King John gave it a shot. That is the day he placed his seal on the Magna Carta. For the first time, an English monarch had at least some limitations placed on his power. It doesn’t matter, as far as King John’s reputation is concerned, that virtually all of the provisions in the document have been since been repealed. He Q rating at the time had to be pretty high. What also, in all likelihood, had a bit of a drag on King John’s career path was that returning from some place or other he lost all of the crown jewels that he had been foolish enough to bring with him. He lost them when the party carrying them misjudged an incoming tide as they passed through The Wash in East Anglia and the entire collection was lost. Combine that with King John contracting dysentery at the same time, from which he would quickly die, and it would be safe to say that he wasn’t having a particularly good time.