0609blog
Things You Should Know
Time for a quiz on historical events that were hugely important but that you probably never learned in school and if you score a perfect 100 you’re doing very well because for most of us, even a 50 percent score is pretty good. Here goes:
Q. What was the Dred Scott decision?
1. The basis of a movie starring Sylvester Stallone.
2. A variation of “Great Scott,” an expression of surprise, amazement or dismay.
3. A U.S. Supreme Court ruling that said slaves could never be citizens.
Q. What is the distinction of 5,000 to 8,000?
1. The range of cost to buy a new car in 1978.
2. The number of free and enslaved African Americans who served in the Revolutionary War.
3. The number of fact checks during the trump years.
Q. Who fought in the Boer War?
1. The Dutch and the French.
2. Dutch settlers and the British.
3. Nobody, there was never such a war.
Q. Who was Elizabeth Jennings Graham?
1. The wife of the chef who developed Graham Crackers.
2. A French physicist who is credited with discovering radium.
3. The first African American woman to ride a public vehicle restricted to whites only.
Q. What do Judaism, Islamism and liberalism have in common?
1. They are considered “dangerous isms” by a church in Richardson, Texas.
2. They are all linked historically with scenes from a desert.
3. They were all once portrayed on the vaudeville stage.
Q. What was the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory?
1. It was a company that manufactured the first woman’s blouses that resembled a shirt and was quite risque for its time.
2. It was the place of employment for the children who later ventured into Narnia.
3. A fire spread through the factory in 1911, killing 146 mostly young women and led to a national focus on the widespread problems of unsafe working conditions.
Q. What were the Zoot Suit Riots?
1. The riots was the name of a famous singing group that regularly performed at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.
2. That was the name given to the second generation of zoot suits, a sign of cool that was popular among hipsters in the 1930s.
3. A series of attacks in 1943 in California by white servicemen who claimed that Latinos wore baggy zoot suits and wasted important fabric for the war. Servicemen attacked Latinos in the streets, ripped their clothes off and left them bloodied and half-naked.
Q. What was the Port Chicago Naval Magazine.
1. The magazine was an extremely popular publication among sailors during World War II.
2. The magazine was a barnstorming group of African American baseball players who traveled around the country, playing predominantly white teams.
3. It was the site of an explosion on July 17, 1944, that killed 320 people. In the days after the disaster, 258 servicemen, mostly African Americans, refused to load ammunition at the dock because of the unsafe conditions and 50 of the men were charged with mutiny and sentenced to prison.
Q. What were the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1851 Indian Appropriations Act and the Indian Relocation Act of 1956?
1. They were a series of efforts by the federal government to provide reparations to Native Americans when they left their reservations.
2. They were three instances in which Native Americans rebelled violently against the American colonists.
3. The three federal actions were part of a series of efforts to drive out Native Americans to make room for the colonists to take their valuable lands.
Q. What was the Black Wall Street massacre?
1. It was the name given to a confrontation between Italian and Irish immigrant laborers who were working to build Wall Street in New York City.
2. The incident also known as the Tulsa Race Massacre, came on May 31 and June 1, 1921, when mobs of white residents of Tulsa, Okla., attacked African American residents and destroyed homes and businesses in the black section of Tulsa, the single worst incident of racial violence in the U.S.
3. The massacre pitted Chinese nationals and Russian immigrants who competed for control of the Wall Street area.
And the answers are: 3, 2, 2, 3, 1, 3, 3, 3, 3, 2.
*Dred Scott v. Sandford was decided in 1857 when Dred Scott, a slave, sued for emancipation on the grounds that his master moved him from a slave state, Missouri, to Illinois where slavery was illegal. The court ruled that as a slave, Scott, was not a citizen and had no standing to sue for his freedom, creating a lasting obstacle to ending slavery.
*By the end of the Revolutionary War, from 5,000 to 8,000 free and enslaved African Americans served in some capacity, with hopes that a revolution would spell the end to slavery, a hope that was not realized for nearly 100 more years.
* After the discovery of diamonds and gold in South Africa, the Boer War was fought from Oct. 11, 1899 to May 31, 1902, between the British Empire and two independent Boer states. The long bloody conflict took the lives of many Africans who had been stripped of all rights by white colonialists and marked the start of questions as to the British Empire’s power.
* Graham was living in New York City in 1855 when she boarded a horse-drawn street car that was only for whites. She was removed from the street car by police but later sued and won $255 in damages. It was a century before Rosa Parks famously resisted bus segregation in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala.
* The Greenville Avenue Church of Christ in Dallas, Texas, hosted a series of seminars in 2018 condemning “dangerous isms,” including “Judaism, Islamism and liberalism.” The pastor later apologized for the wording but said that the faiths and beliefs of the “dangerous isms” ran counter to God’s orders.
* The sweatshop factory occupied three floors of the building, where workers toiled in cramped, unsafe conditions making “shirtwaists.” The fire spread, but exit doors were locked and 146 workers, mostly young women, died in the fire or jumped out of windows to their deaths. The calamity led to a national effort to improve working conditions.
* The riots were a series of racially charged, violent confrontations between white servicemen and Mexican, Mexican-American, Filipino-American and African American youths. Police stood on the sidelines and later arrested the victims of the beatings.
* The blast was the deadliest home front incident in World War II and most of the victims were African American servicemen who worked under dangerously unsafe conditions.
* The nation consistently forced native Americans off their lands, with the most recent incident the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, which ended federal recognition and funding for reservation schools, hospitals and more, effectively forcing the indigenous people off their lands. The federal government provided the displaced with low paying, minimal jobs amid violence, maltreatment, and neglect.
* The Tulsa Race Massacre was carried out by white mobs on the ground and from private aircraft, which burned and destroyed more than 35 square blocks of what was, at the time, the wealthiest Black community in the United States, known as “Black Wall Street.” The mobs took to plundering and murder after an African American man was accused of assaulting a white woman. The massacre was not taught or mentioned in Oklahoma schools until 2002 when it officially became a part of the Oklahoma school curriculum.