Today marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, which took place on Memorial Day, May 31, 1921.

Oklahoma was admitted to the Union in 1907. Its constitution did not call for strict racial segregation, because it was feared that Republican President Teddy Roosevelt would veto the document.

But as its first order of business, the Democratic dominated state legislature passed its Jim Crow laws. Despite the hostile political environment, an African-American community, including many veterans of World War I, thrived in the Greenwood district of Tulsa.  The community included several grocers, two newspapers, two movie theaters, nightclubs, and churches. Its citizens included doctors, dentists, lawyers, and clergy.  There’s no way of knowing for sure, but I suspect that a handful of residents owned a radio, as was normal in a thriving middle-class neighborhood.

All of this came to an end on May 30, 1921, when young Dick Rowland, black, was accused, probably falsely, of assaulting a white elevator operator. He was arrested, at at some point, a white mob showed up to lynch him. The sheriff did his best to protect the prisoner, including positioning officers in the stairway of the courthouse with orders to shoot to kill any intruders. At some point, a group of black men, some armed, showed up to help protect the courthouse. The sheriff convinced them that they were not needed, and they departed.

In the next 24 hours, Greenwood was destroyed by marauding rioters and aircraft dropping firebombs.  The exact number of deaths will never be known, but estimates range from 36 to 300.  Over 800 were injured, and most of the Greenwood district was destroyed.

Shown here 110 years ago this month in the March 1911 issue of Popular Electricity is an aerial searchlight system. According to the magazine, one of the most serious problems of naval warfare was lighting the enemy’s vessels sufficiently to make them good targets. A spotlight directly from the ship would be counter-productive, since it would provide a target for the enemy. One possibility was to mount the lights on smaller boats which were “harder to hit and not so costly if sunk,” but the problem was communicating with them, which would require either signal lights or wireless which could be detected by the enemy.

The solution was to mount the searchlight in a balloon powered by cables from the ship. The balloon would be carried by the wind and not switched on until it was sufficiently far away to avoid revealing the ship’s location. It could be controlled by magnets run from the ground.

The invention was actually the subject of a German patent by one L.J. Mayer. The magazine notes that the inventor was from “Metz, the warlike frontier town which Germany wrested from France in 1871.”

Today marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Alexander, King of Greece, on October 25, 2020. Alexander assumed the throne in 1917 upon the exile of his father, King Constantine I.

Alexander’s short reign was not a happy one. His father, a supporter of Germany, even though ostensibly neutral, was deposed by the Prime Minister, along with his first son, the crown prince. Alexander was brought in, but basically imprisoned in the royal estate.

On October 2, 2020, he was out for a walk on the grounds of the estate. Somehow, his German Shepherd, Fritz, got into a fight with a monkey belonging to the steward of the palace grapevines (to be specific, a Barbary macaque monkey). The king managed to get the animals separated, but in the process was bit. The wounds were promptly attended to, and they were not believed to be serious. The king asked that the incident be kept quiet, and he returned to the palace.

Unfortunately, an infection set in, and the king developed a fever and sepsis. He died on October 25, 1920.

This illustration appeared a hundred years ago today on June 14, 1920, in the Washington Evening Star.

The paper reported that the 143rd anniversary of Old Glory would see celebrations around the city. Children in all of the schools took part in special exercises, and veterans of the World War took part in paying tribute. The evening culminated with a mass meeting an patriotic pageant on the east steps of the Capitol.

President Wilson was unable to attend, but sent a message. The Marine Band (presumably, about 2-5 Mhz) played, along with a chorus of a thousand voices singing patriotic and folk songs.

Secretary of State Bainbridge_Colby had spoken the prior evening, stating:

The American flag speaks today, as it has always spoken, a message of cheer and help to the oppressed; a clear note of leadership to the aspiring in all lands, a note of aid and succor to liberty wherever liberty falters or is assailed. It speaks for the redemption and not the repudiation of the nation’s pledges.

It is the flag of work, of service, of courage. It is the flag of chivalrous men and noble women. It is a flag of glory. It is a flag which has moved forward on every field, never backward, and today and at this hour it cannot be an emblem of a moral retreat upon the field of highest service, the rescue of the world, to which our destiny as a nation calls us.

When Secretary Colby spoke those words, American boys, and a few girls, had only recently returned from the fields of Europe. Some of them never returned.

Did they rescue the world? They tried, and they did so very imperfectly. A quarter century later, their sons (and a few of their daughters) went back under the same flag. They didn’t do a perfect job, either. But the flag moved forward, and not backward, toward the rescue of the world.

Today, on the flag’s 243rd anniversary, it has two more stars, is still a flag of glory, and can’t be an emblem of moral retreat. Do we have a perfect Union? No. We have disease; we have racism; we have violence; and we probably have a hundred other problems that we can’t even see. But as heirs of those men and women who went before us, we too can move forward to make this a more perfect Union and a more perfect world.

On Decoration Day 1920, these World War 1 nurses marched in a Los Angeles parade.