Our visit to Marion, Indiana was sobering and tense. The last lynching in the North happened here on August 7, 1930, an event immortalized by Lawrence Beitler’s photograph, Abel Meeropol’s political poem and Billie Holiday’s rendition … Read more
Whatever the upbringing of Mark Twain (Sam Clemens) in slave-state Missouri, he was a critic of lynching by adulthood. In “Only a Nigger,”—an August 26, 1869, Buffalo Express column attributed to him—he told of the rape … Read more
It’s easy to miss the hulking brick building on Broadway when you’re in a hurry to get to Argyle, the busy hub of the Vietnamese refugee community in North Chicago. Nicknamed “New Chinatown” by Chicagoans, Argyle … Read more
From bowling and dancing trophies to a sign that says “Don’t Mistake Me For That Nice Little Old Lady,” almost 80 years of living cover every inch of the tiny living room in Audrey Ghiglione Bender’s … Read more
The search for the Ghigliones, what I like to think of as a representative immigrant family from Mark Twain’s era, began for me in St. Louis. There I discovered two branches of the local Ghigliones, the … Read more
