The KKK Took My Victorian Valentine’s Day Tea Away
We can’t come up with a better summation of this Talk About Town item about a Victorian Valentine’s Day tea disrupted by tear gas from the melee surrounding a KKK rally than Suds and Soliloquies: “A sedate, hoity-toity, pretentious event juxtaposed with an absurd, riotous, sociopolitical protest — that’s Ann Arbor in a nutshell.”
Actually, the tea and the rally are historically closely related. The KKK sprang up after the Civil War in reaction to emancipation and the new political power of African Americans, twenty of whom were elected to the House and two to the Senate during Reconstruction. A decade or so later, white Southerners had managed to wrest control of these offices from African Americans, and interest in the Klan dimmed somewhat. However, for many years the KKK terrorized the South during the latter part of the Victorian Era (1839-1901).
Given that, perhaps the historical tea ladies should have invited some Klansmen over to make a few historical remarks, in order to obtain a less nauseatingly sanitized and more historically accurate view of an often brutal time.
posted by Laura on February 5th, 2005 at 10:32 pmHey, thanks for the link, AAIO!
For my next trick, I asked, “Is Ann Arbor really like Berkeley?” You be the judge: I posted a comical link to pictures from a Berkeley parade. Although I bet some of those people have personal ads on their own version of Craig’s List too.
posted by Dave on February 6th, 2005 at 1:54 pm