After his record-setting flight, Charles Lindbergh was an American hero of such proportion that, as happens today with popular culture icons, the media covered his life extensively. I loved this one-pager that “explained,” using his facial features, why he (here referred to as “Plucky,” one of two popular nicknames (the other was “Lucky”)) was destined to be a hero.
Face as a whole: retiring and shy
It would be interesting to know how this “retiring and shy” Minnesota kid reacted to such “analysis”!
A local (as in Detroit) duo also attempted to fly around the world. William S. Brock and Edward F. Schlee flew their 1927 Stinson-Detroiter, named Pride of Detroit, east in August, 1927 and made it to Japan where they decided trying to cross the Pacific by air was not feasible. This decision was reinforced by the news that at the same time they were flying their world-wide route, organized attempts to fly from northern California to Hawaii had resulted in the loss of 10 lives and six airplanes. Even though they didn’t complete the entire trip, after crossing the Atlantic they had flown from England to Japan in just 18 days and were treated as heroes when they got home.
The exhibit doesn’t back away from the fact that only white Americans truly had freedom of the road. Black Americans were still turned away from hotels and restaurants in many cities. One panel was devoted to an entrepreneur who did something about that by opening a motel that catered to black travelers.
An exhibit entitled “With Liberty and Justice For All” ties the Civil War to the struggle for racial equality in the 1960s. There is a lot of information about the roots of slavery in the south and Lincoln’s role as President during the war that would end it. This map is a sort of early version of the “blue” and “red” states we are familiar with during election years, but it shows very graphically which states allowed slavery (red) and which opposed it (black). Blue states were neutral. I was struck by the huge gap in the country at that time – think of all the states that had yet to be admitted to the Union as of the mid-1800s!
The chair that Lincoln was sitting in when he was shot at Ford’s (no relation to Henry) Theater in April, 1965 makes one pause and really take it in. Bloodstains still are visible at the top.
The U.S. military’s policy of racial discrimination affected the Tuskegee Airmen while they were training at Tuskegee, Alabama and throughout their military careers during World War II. The armed services were desegregated in 1948 and black service members found more doors open to them. Unfortunately, the prejudice the Airmen endured in the 1940s was still going strong throughout most of the South years later and it affected virtually every black American who lived in the region.
On December 1, 1955, a 42-year-old black woman, who was born in Tuskegee, got on a Montgomery (Ala.) city bus to go home after work. Rosa Parks sat down towards the front of the bus. Stop after stop, the bus got more crowded. The bus driver told Ms. Parks to move to the back of the bus – behind the sign he was in charge of placing in the bus aisle so blacks would know how far towards the front they could sit – so that a white passenger could sit in her seat. Ms. Parks refused and was arrested for breaking the segregationist “Jim Crow” law about black and white seating on buses. In support of Ms. Parks and as an organized protest, the black community boycotted the Montgomery Bus Company for 381 days, causing major disruption in the company’s finances. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that the law requiring buses to be segregated was unconstitutional.
Ms. Parks’ stance on the bus that day is generally thought of as the beginning of the Civil Rights movement that progressed steadily through the South for the next 10+ years. A group of black leaders in Montgomery formed the Montgomery Improvement Association (“MIA”) to spearhead desegregation efforts in that city. This sign, created by the MIA, spells out how black people should behave on the newly integrated buses after the Supreme Court ruling. Blacks were so used to the “old ways” that they needed help adjusting to their new rights!
Here’s that link to James Stewart’s wikipedia page. His career in the entertainment industry is great fun to read about, but it’s his war record that is pretty impressive for aviation buffs.
