A Themeless Transition

Having moved out of our weight class last week and being wrestled to the rhetorical mat we're in a mood to flee to fluffier funfare. We're going to let the pictures speak for themselves with some assistance from LIFE's probably outsourced and offshored worker bee captioners. And what better format for a themeless transition than the lamented thumbnail?(yeth, we know that thome of you have been mithing them).

Pick USelf up, dust USelf off and start all over again

With the inauguration of President Obama last Tuesday the USA may have cast off it's leg irons and resumed it's halting attempt to walk it's constitutional talk. We've been listening to the radio this weekend and we note that most hosts have built their shows around Obamamania. We thought that we too would join the Barrage Obama and see what LIFE had to offer on the struggles of American Blacks. We were overwhelmed by the vast number of images on this subject but we tried not to shy away from the disturbing or the grotesque. There were also the inspiring and the courageous. We learned from our smoking post that Americans are never too young to be introduced to the pleasures of tobacco and apparently they are also never too young to be inoculated with the seeds of hate. There were early successes and Pyrrhic victories. We had been somewhat unaware of how overt and violent the anti-integration racists were in the 50s. It was a time of irony and contrast and contrast and irony. A strange Freudian slip by the caption writer prompted us to include this image. The work of the Freedom Riders and others led to a turning point in the sixties. As you can tell, we have struggled with the weight of this topic and failed, grossly oversimplifying it in the process but we encourage you to use these links as starting points into this archive and get a feel for the history that words have not conveyed.