Word: blacking
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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When he struts forth in a black shirt, his round eyes wide and straining to flame like II Duce's, Signor Francesco Marini, Director General of the Milan Schools, is a terrific sight at which small Marias and Beppos quake...
Zealous, he has ordered that in school hours they must all wear shirts as black as his. Fanatic, he commanded last week that every day they shall recite three new commandments, brief, pagan and patriotic...
...exploded flashlights, he executed three men at Charlestown, Mass., then took a train for Sing Sing. It was late when he arrived. The condemned men lay awake in their uncurtained cells in the harshly lighted, white-painted death-house. A Negro was singing a song. That afternoon the black man had tried to commit suicide with a rope made of four towels knotted together. They took the towels away from him, draped a fresh one over his shoulders. As they led him to the death chamber a voice said, "If I could get hold of that towel around your neck...
...gloomy Buterka Prison, Ignace Ghabin, sentenced to death last year (but later commuted) because he had served Tsar Nicholas as imperial hangman, died. He had hanged 645 men, many of them "innocent political prisoners" of the 1905 revolution. At executions Mr. Ghabin always wore dress clothes, white gloves, black mask. His pay: $2,500 per annum; $50 bonus per corpse...
...Abraham's Bosom concerns a Negro who tried to raise up the Carolina blacks through education. Blundering, fanatically inspired, he plods to frustration, overcome by white prejudice, black inertia, his own blunted intellect and headstrong passion. The play is constructed on the episodic model (seven scenes, no act division) covers a 25-year period, many places. The title role is played by Julius Bledsoe, giant Negro whose remarkably resonant voice won instant recognition in the Stallings-Harling opera Deep River. In diction, technique, the cast is not up to high professional standard, yet the presentation is so sincere, the playwright...