Sunday, May 23, 2021

The Baby Thrown from the Bridge – a rumor in Black and white (Detroit, 20 June 1943)

Terry Ann Knopf, Rumors, Race and Riots (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books, 1975), 56-8.

According to the report of a special committee appointed by Michigan’s governor, the violence would not have spread beyond the [Belle Isle Bridge] were it not for a provocative rumor. This rumor was first recorded when a 17-year-old black, coming upon a crowd near the entrance of the bridge, said that a black woman and her baby had been drowned. […] The rumor had far more serious consequences when it reached the Forest Club, a night spot located in the heart of Paradise Valley, about three miles from Belle Isle. […] At about midnight, just as the band was finishing a number, a black man suddenly jumped on the stage, seized the microphone and identified himself as a police officer. The man urged the audience to get even with the whites for ostensibly killing a black woman and her baby by throwing them off the bridge. […]

Complicating the situation was a second rumor now circulating among the whites, to the effect that blacks had raped and murdered a white woman on the bridge. […] Variations of both sets of rumors also sprang up: whites threw a black baby from the bridge; blacks threw a white baby from the bridge[.]

Rachel Marie-Crane Williams, Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021), 160-1.



 

Wednesday, May 12, 2021

Marijuana = Gateway Drug (1950's comic books)

Some comic book portrayals from the early 1950s of marijuana as a gateway drug. 

“The Horror Weed…Where There’s Smoke, There’s Death!” Wanted Comics #39, July 1951.

 

“The Most Terrible Menace.” The Perfect Crime #15, August 1951.


 

Trapped! Harvey Comics/Columbia University Press, 1951. A 16-page promotional comic.


 “Dope: Teen-Age Menace!” Headline Comics, March-April 1952. One-page PSA.

“Monkey on Her Back,” Youthful Hearts #1, May 1952.


 “Holiday of Horror!” Wanted Comics #51, December 1952.


 Joe Orlando, “The Monkey,” Shock SuspenStories #12, December 1953-January 1954.