 | PHOTOGRAPH BY EVA HAMBACH, AFP/GETTY IMAGES
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Promoted: Pope Francis is elevating Archbishop Wilton D. Gregory of Washington to cardinal next month, making him the first African American to hold the title. The new cardinal, pictured above, is a “caring pastor, a quiet leader and a courageous voice when Washington and the country need all three,” John Carr, a longtime colleague and former lobbyist for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, told the Washington Post.
R.I.P. Jerry Jeff Walker: The young folksinger from upstate New York spent a night in a drunk tank in New Orleans with a man who used the name Mr. Bojangles. Walker’s song of that encounter became a standard. Walker (who thought Nina Simone sang it best) went on to Texas to create a different kind of country music, popularizing songs like Ray Wylie Hubbard’s Up Against The Wall Redneck Mother and Gary P. Nunn’s London Homesick Blues, which became the longtime theme of the public TV music show Austin City Limits. “People said, ‘We’re different, but we’re not hillbilly country,’” Walker once recounted of what became the “Outlaw” style of country played by artists like Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. Walker died Friday after a long battle with throat cancer, Rolling Stone reported.
Unearthing history: Nearly 100 years after hundreds of Black people were killed by white mobs in the Tulsa Massacre, one of the deadliest racial attacks in U.S. history, human remains were found nearby in an Oklahoma cemetery where many of the victims are believed to be buried, DeNeen L. Brown writes for NatGeo. Archaeologists are treating the site as a crime scene long after the 1921 massacre, in which no one was charged. Oklahomans were not taught about the destruction of a prosperous African American neighborhood known as the “Black Wall Street,” and many Americans did not know about the horror until last year, when an HBO series, Watchmen, was set amid the killing.
Followup: Last week’s newsletter on the Electoral College brought plenty of pro and con readers for this indirect election of the president. Several noted that a half century ago, 80 percent of Americans were against it, and backed a GOP-supported attempt to kill it. Then-President Richard Nixon wanted it gone, too, and the U.S. House overwhelmingly backed a direct election. Even the Chamber of Commerce and the American Bar Association wanted to kill it. How did it survive? Three segregationist senators in the South filibustered to prevent it from coming to a vote in the Senate.
That time of the year: Was it because of the movie Coco? The incredible photos? For some reason, one of our strongest performing stories each October is about the origins of DÃa de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead. Unlike Halloween’s single dark night of terror and mischief, Day of the Dead festivities, begun thousands of years ago, unfold in Mexico and parts of the United States next weekend over in an explosion of color and life-affirming joy. Enjoy the article!
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