Today in Labor History March 25, 1931: The authorities arrested the Scottsboro Boys in Alabama and charged them with rape. The Scottsboro Boys were nine African American youths, ages 13 to 20, falsely accused of raping two white women. A lynch mob tried to murder them before they had even been indicted. All-white juries convicted each of them. Several judges gave death sentences, a common practice in Alabama at the time for black men convicted of raping white women. The Communist Party and the NAACP fought to get the cases appealed and retried. Finally, after numerous retrials and years in harsh prisons, four of the Scottsboro Boys were acquitted and released. The other five were got sentences ranging from 75 years to death. All were released or escaped by 1946. Poet and playwright Langston Hughes wrote it in his work Scottsboro Limited. And Richard Wright's 1940 novel Native Son was influenced by the case.
@carloshr@vinylrecords
Yo opino que el aporte de #RichardWright en #PinkFloyd ha sido bastante subvalorado. Me parece que su aporte al sonido de la banda es esencial y que no podría haber Pink Floyd sin Wright. O, al menos, sería algo muy diferente.
Like James Baldwin, my Bestie is getting the eff out of America.
Him: Girl, I'm done. This country is done. And I'm tired. I don’t owe this place shit. No Black person does. These people can work it out themselves. So I got an apartment in Bangkok so I can be prepared.
Hearing that from him was the first time I took serious pause and thought about my options.
@DeliaChristina
Excerpt from the opening paragraph of #RichardWright's 1951 essay "I Choose Exile". Sadly still relevant in 2023:
"...The first 38 years of my life were spent exclusively on the soil of my native land. But, at the moment of this writing, I live in voluntary exile in France and I like it. There is nothing in the life of America that I miss or yearn for... I shall keep my American citizenship, my American passport; but I prefer to live out my days among a civilized people..."
A moment to share some genuine love for Pink Floyd's 2014 album Endless River. Essentially an instrumental exercise building on out-takes of keyboardist the late Richard Right, it includes moments of sublime, hair-standing beauty (q.v. Ebb and Flow).
I'm not comparing it with their other work, although it is reminiscent of the best instrumental bits of Wish You Were Here, due in no small part to the prominence of Wright on both.