” Lynching at the curve, Ida B. WellsThere were few opportunities beyond sharecropping or domestic service for African Americans in the post-war South. Those blacks who did try to improve their lives through entrepreneurship ran the risk of antagonizing their white neighbors and competitors. This passage from the autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1862–1931)—an educator, journalist, and anti-lynching advocate—provides an example of how the white majority used arbitrary and brutal violence to maintain racial and social order in southern communities.Source: Ida B. Wells, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, edited by Alfred M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 47–51.Lynching at the CurveWhile I was thus carrying on the work of my newspaper, happy in the thought that our influence was helpful and that I was doing the work I loved and had proved that I could make a living out of it, there came the lynching in Memphis which changed the whole course of my life. I was on one of my trips away from home. I was busily engaged in Natchez when word came of the lynching of three men in Memphis. It came just as I had demonstrated that I could make a living by my newspaper and need never tie myself down to school teaching.Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart owned and operated a grocery store in a thickly populated suburb. Moss was a letter carrier and could only be at the store at night. Everybody in town knew and loved Tommie. An exemplary young man, he was married and the father of one little girl, Maurine, whose godmother I was. He and his wife Betty were the best friends I had in town. And he believed, with me, that we should defend the cause of right and fight wrong wherever we saw it.He delivered mail at the office of the Free Speech, and whatever Tommie knew in the way of news we got first. He owned his little home, and having saved his money he went into the grocery business with the same ambition that a young white man would have had. He was the president of the company. His partners ran the business in the daytime.They had located their grocery in the district known as the “Curve” because the streetcar line curved sharply at that point. There was already a grocery owned and operated by a white man who hitherto had had a monopoly on the trade of this thickly populated colored suburb. Thomas’s grocery changed all that, and he and his associates were made to feel that they were not welcome by the white grocer. The district being mostly colored and many of the residents belonging either to Thomas’s church or to his lodge, he was not worried by the white grocer’s hostility.One day some colored and white boys quarreled over a game of marbles and the colored boys got the better of the fight which followed. The father of the white boys whipped the victorious colored boy, whose father and friends pitched in to avenge the grown white man’s flogging of a colored boy. The colored men won the fight, whereupon the white father and grocery keeper swore out a warrant for the arrest of the colored victors. Of course the colored grocery keepers had been drawn into the dispute. But the case was dismissed with nominal fines. Then the challenge was issued that the vanquished whites were coming on Saturday night to clean out the People’s Grocery Company.Knowing this, the owners of the company consulted a lawyer and were told that as they were outside the city limits and beyond police protection, they would be justified in protecting themselves if attacked. Accordingly the grocery company armed several men and stationed them in the rear of the store on that fatal Saturday night, not to attack but to repel a threatened attack. And Saturday night was the time when men of both races congregated in their respective groceries.About ten o’clock that night, when Thomas was posting his books for the week and Calvin McDowell and his clerk were waiting on customers preparatory to closing, shots rang out in the back room of the store. The men stationed there had seen several white men stealing through the rear door and fired on them without a moment’s pause. Three of these men were wounded, and others fled and gave the alarm.ContinuedSunday morning’s paper came out with lurid headlines telling how officers of the law had been wounded while in the discharge of their duties, hunting up criminals whom they had been told were harbored in the People’s Grocery Company, this being “a low dive in which drinking and gambling were carried on: a resort of thieves and thugs.” So ran the description in the leading white journals of Memphis of this successful effort of decent black men to carry on a legitimate business. The same newspaper told of the arrest and jailing of the proprietor of the store and many of the colored people. They predicted that it would go hard with the ringleaders if these “officers” should die. The tale of how the peaceful homes of that suburb were raided on that quiet Sunday morning by police pretending to be looking for others who were implicated in what the papers had called a conspiracy, has been often told. Over a hundred colored men were dragged from their homes and put in jail on suspicion.All day long on that fateful Sunday white men were permitted in the jail to look over the imprisoned black men. Frenzied descriptions and hearsays were detailed in the papers, which fed the fires of sensationalism. Groups of white men gathered on the street corners and meeting places to discuss the awful crime of Negroes shooting white men.There had been no lynchings in Memphis since the Civil War, but the colored people felt that anything might happen during the excitement. Many of them were in business there.Several times they had elected a member of their race to represent them in the legislature in Nashville. And a Negro, Lymus Wallace, had been elected several times as a member of the city council and we had had representation on the school board several times. Mr. Fred Savage was then our representative on the board of education.The manhood which these Negroes represented went to the county jail and kept watch Sunday night. This they did also on Monday night, guarding the jail to see that nothing happened to the colored men during this time of race prejudice, while it was thought that the wounded white men would die. On Tuesday following, the newspapers which had fanned the flame of race prejudice announced that the wounded men were out of danger and would recover. The colored men who had guarded the jail for two nights felt that the crisis was past and that they need not guard the jail the third night.While they slept a body of picked men was admitted to the jail, which was a modern Bastille. This mob took out of their cells Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart, the three officials of the People’s Grocery Company. They were loaded on a switch engine of the railroad which ran back of the jail, carried a mile north of the city limits, and horribly shot to death. One of the morning papers held back its edition in order to supply its readers with the details of that lynching.From its columns was gleaned the above information, together with details which told that “It is said that Tom Moss begged for his life for the sake of his wife and child and his unborn baby”; that when asked if he had anything to say, told them to “tell my people to go West—there is no justice for them here”; that Calvin McDowell got hold of one of the guns of the lynchers and because they could not loosen his grip a shot was fired into his closed fist. When the three bodies were found, the fingers of McDowell’s right hand had been shot to pieces and his eyes were gouged out. This proved that the one who wrote that news report was either an eyewitness or got the facts from someone who was.ContinuedThe shock to the colored people who knew and loved both Moss and McDowell was beyond description. Groups of them went to the grocery and elsewhere and vented their feelings in talking among themselves, but they offered no violence. Word was brought to the city hall that Negroes were massing at the “Curve” where the grocery had been located. Immediately an order was issued by the judge of the criminal court sitting on the bench, who told the sheriff to “take a hundred men, go out to the Curve at once, and shoot down on sight any Negro who appears to be making trouble.”The loafers around the courts quickly spread the news, and gangs of them rushed into the hardware stores, armed themselves, boarded the cars and rushed out to the Curve. They obeyed the judge’s orders literally and shot into any group of Negroes they saw with as little compunction as if they had been on a hunting trip. The only reason hundreds of Negroes were not killed on that day by the mobs was because of the forebearance of the colored men. They realized their helplessness and submitted to outrages and insults for the sake of those depending upon them.This mob took possession of the People’s Grocery Company, helping themselves to food and drink, and destroyed what they could not eat or steal. The creditors had the place closed and a few days later what remained of the stock was sold at auction. Thus, with the aid of the city and county authorities and the daily papers, that white grocer had indeed put an end to his rival Negro grocer as well as to his business.As said before, I was in Natchez, Mississippi, when the worst of this horrible event was taking place. Thomas Moss had already been buried before I reached home. Although stunned by the events of that hectic week, the Free Speech felt that it must carry on. Its leader for that week said:The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order was rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left that we can do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.Questions: According to Ida B. Wells, why were Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart lynched in Memphis in 1892? What were the circumstances of their arrest and subsequent murder?Who was most responsible for the deaths of these men? Could their deaths have been avoided?How did the black community in Memphis respond to the lynching? How did the white community respond?

The lost art of the perfect sentenceRussell SmithSpecial to The Globe and MailPublished December 18, 2018 Updated December 18, 2018Every year a small press called Tightrope Books publishes an anthology called Best Canadian Essays, in which articles that were published in magazines are collected. For the past eight years this series has been overseen by the poet Chris Doda; he engages a new guest editor every time to make the selections. This year the guest editor is the philosopher Mark Kingwell, who writes in his introduction something rather scandalous: “I am not much fetched by personal-voice narratives unless there is some underlying logic to my being there in the first place. … I don’t pay a lot of attention to bio lines or bio notes. … I want to hear intelligence, wit and suppleness of expression.”One of these very essays continues this bold idea – that “what an essay is about is less important than how it is written” – even more explicitly: “The Future Is the Period at the End of a Sentence” by Peter Babiak is a rant against his students’ linguistic laziness and a furious paean to the power of the perfect sentence. Babiak dismisses “creative expression” as “easy” – it’s grammar, he says, that is “the deep structure of language … the root of all that they dream, think, say and write.”This kind of aestheticism is, as they say, “problematic” these days, as the aesthetic itself is notoriously divisive, and of course one’s bio is important to prove one’s level of privilege. The idea that elegant and playful writing is better writing privileges those with a certain kind of education, who have the luxury of detachment and defavours (or “erases” as the overwrought contemporary scholarly jargon has it) the true and powerful experiences of the marginalized. Surely a story that exposes an injustice or gives voice to the oppressed is more important than something clever and entertaining?The thing is, once one is addicted to the stylish one can take little pleasure in the lumpy, no matter how serious the subject matter. The serious is done no favours by an earnest style. Furthermore, to say that this aesthetic interest occurs only in conservative or privileged educational systems is to suggest that writers who do not come from privilege are incapable of being witty, and that is rather condescending.I don’t think this argument is so present in other countries – especially in Europe, where being clever or funny or even maintaining a certain stylish hauteur is not seen as a moral liability. This is Canada, where we still reward the virtuous over the witty. The vast majority of Canadian novels and short stories lack wit, and they rarely experiment with style that is highly economical or even faintly oblique. There are still so many awkward expository passages that are so obviously an authorial point of view (“They had first settled here in 1956, before the New Families Act of 1958 drove down commodity prices …”), so many clichés (“They had grown up in crippling poverty,” “She felt frozen with fear,” “He had a chiselled jaw”), so many redundant dialogue tags (“’Don’t go in there,’ she warned”), so many exclamation marks!In fiction, I look for great sentences above all else. And in Canadian fiction these are difficult to find. Publishers are still rewarding lifeless novel-writing if they feel a story is “important.”The award nominations this year were, on the other hand, pretty good at picking good line-by-line writing.I think of Patrick deWitt’s gleefully preposterous dialogue: “The customs agent was flummoxed. He asked Malcolm, ‘She is sick, monsieur?’ / ‘She isn’t sick.’ / ‘She does not die?’ / ‘Never.’ / ‘She must not die here,’ the customsagent warned Malcolm. / ‘She’ll die somewhere else,’ Malcolm promised. / The customs agent looked back at Frances. ‘No dying in France.’ He stamped their passports and waved them on.”I think of Kathy Page’s clever descriptions: “… a tangle of stockings of various thicknesses and similar hues, which looked like the cast-off skins of a large nest of beige and tan snakes.”Sheila Heti’s febrile and poetic philosophizing: “I resent the spectacle of all this breeding, which I see as a turning-away from the living – an insufficient love for the rest of us, we billions of orphans already living.”Lisa Moore’s vernacular-inflected stream-of-consciousness: “And your co-worker with his sunrise hair, the winding rosebush tattoo tucking under the sleeve of his employee-issue Shoe Emporium T-shirt, still high from whatever all-nighter and foxy eyes, whose grandmother was the leading expert in cold-water sea cucumbers, no joke, at the Marine Institute and who [Marty] is not even bi but straight-up gay for gosh sakes, like definitely that end of the spectrum, according to him. Sea cucumbers.”Paige Cooper’s minimalist satire, as spare as haiku: “She gave me a piece of black leather with words stamped in serif. Surgeon. Sensei. Colonist. I left her bill, which was insane, on Moe’s desk.”Writers like this can make any story interesting, even if it is implausible or frivolous.So my plea for the new year is: Can we publish more of the stylish, please, and fewer of the workhorses?1. What is the political element of this article (the parts that speak about an issue such as class or race)?2. What is the author’s thesis?3. What parts do you not understand?4. How important is presentation to you when it comes to a message?5. Look at the sentences the author gives as examples of stylish writing. What stands out to you?

Article ReviewThe purpose of an article review is to provide the academic community with a description, summary, and evaluation of the completed work. For the article review, students will assume the role of an expert who is critically evaluating contemporary research in the field of psychology. Students will incorporate material from across the course, analyzing and applying theories and principles of psychology, into a cohesive and well-written article review. This learning activity will facilitate the development of research skills, critical thinking, and writing skills that are necessary to success in the field of psychology. The article for review was chosen in Week 2 of the course and must be used in this review. Carefully read the selected article, and then write the Article Review.Begin with a well-written introduction to the article that:Analyzes the article and identifies the professional area of psychology it representsAssesses the roles of psychology professionals within this area and describes whether or not the article clearly and correctly represents these roles.Evaluate the theoretical perspective on which the study is basedDetail the hypotheses presented in the study or the relationship of interestDescribe the sample(s) presented in the study (how participants were obtained, selected, sample size, etc.)Discuss where the study was conducted: university setting (lab), organization (field), etc.Examine the ethical concerns in the study using the APA Ethical Principles and Code of Conduct as a guide.Summarize the results of the study. Be certain to specify the findings and whether or not the hypotheses were supported.Analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the study (usually found in the discussion section of the article).Evaluate possible contemporary applications of the results within the articleCreate a conclusion that includes a synopsis of professional insights about the study.In the creation of the Article Review, it is paramount to include information in the form of peer-reviewed research to support any statements made. A minimum of five peer-reviewed articles, not including the article chosen for this assignment, are required for this paper.Attention Students: The Masters of Arts in Psychology program is utilizing the Folio portfolio tool as a repository for student scholarly work in the form of signature assignments completed within the program. After receiving feedback for this Integrative Literature Review, please implement any changes recommended by the instructor, go to your Folio account and upload the revised Integrative Literature Review as a project in your portfolio. (Use the Setting Up and Using Folio (Links to an external site.) guide to create an account if you do not already have one.) The upload of signature assignments will take place after completing each course. Be certain to upload revised signature assignments throughout the program as the portfolio and its contents will be used in other courses and may be used by individual students as a professional resource tool.Writing the Final PaperThe Final Paper:Must be three to five double-spaced pages in length and formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Writing Center.Must include a title page with the following:Title of paperStudent’s nameUniversity nameCourse name and numberInstructor’s nameDate dueMust begin with an introductory paragraph that includes an analysis of the article and identification of the professional area of psychology it represents, as well as an assessment of the clear description of the roles of psychology professionals within the area presented.Must address the topic of the paper with critical thought.Must end with a conclusion that includes a synopsis of professional insights about the study.Must use at least five peer-reviewed sources, including a minimum of two from the University of Arizona Global Campus Library. The article being reviewed will not count toward this total.Must document all sources in APA style as outlined in the Writing Center.Must include a separate reference page that is formatted according to APA style as outlined in the Writing Center.