History

Newsboys and Newsgirl getting afternoon papers in New York City

On July 18, 1899, newspaper boys in Long Island City, Queens, discovered that a supplier was short-changing the bundles of newspapers that the boys had to buy upfront from distribution centers before selling them off on the streets.

In retaliation, they overturned his cart, ran him out of town, and destroyed or stole all his papers. Word quickly spread to Manhattan, where newsboys were already upset over the high prices they had to pay per bundle of papers from publishers William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.

The next day, thousands of newsies gathered in City Hall Park to form a union and elected 18-year-old Louis “Kid Blink” Baletti as their president.

Then, they called for a city-wide strike until the price of papers for newsies was lowered — and against all odds, the boys won.

Check out the full story here ⁠

Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel is frozen in time since the day Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis. It still contains the ashtray with the last cigarette MLK ever smoked.

Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel is exactly the way it was on April 4th, 1968. The bed is made. The food tray is on the coffee table. The ashtray with a partially smoked cigarette is on the desk. As you peer into the hotel room, you see Dr. King’s surroundings during the final minutes of his life — frozen in time.

Dr. King stayed at the Lorraine Motel numerous times while visiting Memphis. In April 1968, he came to the city to support striking sanitation workers. On April 4th, he stepped onto the balcony outside room 306 to talk to friends in the parking lot below. He asked the saxophonist, Ben Branch, to play ‘Take My Hand, Precious Lord’ at a rally that would be held that evening. As he turned to walk back into his room, a bullet struck him in the neck. He died instantly.

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Soviet Soldier in a parade in Moscow, 1940

He is right. We are not youth any longer. We don’t want to take the world by storm. We are fleeing. We fly from ourselves. From our life. We were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in war. 

― Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front