The Charlotte News

Friday, August 29, 1941

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: "Symbol" tells of the breaching by the Russians, pursuant to an ukase, of a section of the Dnieper Dam in the Ukraine, a keystone of Stalin's Five-Year Plan for Russia's improvement of infrastructure, to prevent the Nazis from utilizing it for electric power. The Russians had also scorched Minsk to the bare walls to void the invaders' attempt at acquisition of supplies, drawing them deeper and deeper into the interior and consequently further away from established supply routes through Poland and Germany. Nevertheless, the Nazis were able to seize 70% of Russia's coal mines, 75% of its iron ore and 60% of its steel mills before the tide was turned back in 1943. Fully 75% of Leningrad's industry, however, by contrast, was moved to the other side of the Urals, while again the buildings formerly housing it were gutted to the walls. Leningrad, at the start of the war the fifth largest city in Europe behind London, Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, lost by varying estimates nearly two million of its population, most to starvation, during the long seige by the Nazis which was about to begin there, a siege which lasted seventeen months, into early 1943.

Governor Broughton, we also learn from this day's page, finally decided to order the S.B.I. to investigate the persons responsible for the mob action in Roxboro, after having already ordered them, immediately after the episode, to investigate the African-Americans who came in from the nearby CCC camp to break it up. Just why it was so hard to find out who the KKK men were in and around the county who organized and participated in the mob, apparently unmasked and unrobed, we couldn't tell you. There were the Sheriff and his deputies within plain view of the rock and bottle throwers; there were the CCC men with their sticks and bats confronting them. Yet, everyone left the scene without arrest, after the Sheriff had hurled teargas among them. And, apparently, without anyone being recognized. Obviously, these men must have had extraordinary throwing arms with which to impel those rocks and bottles such great distances that they could afford to stand a large measure away from the jailhouse and not be seen at all. Perhaps, they were up in the trees.

As to the CCC men involved in the counter-action, their lack of identification would be understandable, of course. For they all looked alike.

Well, maybe the S.B.I. got to the root of it at some point. We'll have to wait and see. At least the Governor finally did something, even if after three weeks, with memories sufficiently clouded in the meantime that effectiveness of identification was obviously impaired.

Incidentally, we were watching last night, after watching the rousing Democratic Convention speech by the party's nominee for President, that speech of August 28, 1963, actually only a portion of it, as the whole thing seems never available, try as we have to find it.

At some point in the 1963 speech, we don't know where or whether the footage came from prior to the start of it, we saw an obvious supporter of the spirit of the occasion, a young white man, holding a sign, perched high in one of the trees near the Reflecting Pool. We mention it because of something else we noticed for the first time back in December, 2005, and duly set forth elsewhere herein, regarding what appears to be an obviously manipulated photograph, a rather crucial photograph to history, but one whose full ingredients are not so plainly obvious to the initial observation. Indeed, it took us 42 years to notice it.

In the motion picture film of the speech, the man in the tree is quite plain and real. But in the Moorman photograph which we reference, the men in the trees are not actually present, but nevertheless are depicted, quite out of proportion to the surrounding landscape.

Other common photographs which we have examined, or even those which we have taken, sometimes show anomalies, especially within the shadows of trees and shrubbery, which, when blown up, certainly could appear to be human forms not actually present, forms grossly disproportionate to the scene, if a bit ghostly looking and barely discernible. But the figures in the Moorman photograph do not appear to be those sorts of anomalies; they are more distinctly human, even if melded within the background seamlessly. Yet, they are whole, discrete images, the men in the trees, the man with the child on the horse, the children on top of the wall.

We mention it because it would be consistent with the same sort of mindset which actuated the mob in Person in August, 1941 to undertake just such a perversion of reality as apparent in the Moorman photograph--to fix upon the innocent tree man at the speech before the Reflecting Pool in August, and then develop that same sort of imagery into a collage, to confuse and disturb the mind subliminally, within the top left portion of the Moorman Polaroid--a black and white photograph more easily susceptible to such confused imagery for its dependence entirely on variance in shades of gray contrast for its discernment as a whole image, as opposed to an image which has three primary colors on which to base its gradient contrasts across the visible spectrum.

We have suggested before how that manipulation process may have occurred within the short frame of time before the Moorman photograph was released to the press and how it could be easily accomplished with a Polaroid positive print simply re-photographed with a conventional 35mm camera, then cropped and composited with an ordinary enlarger, just as with any negative image--especially if the composited portion was already prepared before the event on film and the photographer instructed to stand at a particular spot to take the photograph, whether complying innocently or not with that directive.

We merely mention it because of our happening last night to notice the young man in the tree by the Reflecting Pool before or during the August 28, 1963 speech. Perhaps, we shall return to it later.