What came before the shooting in Grand Rapids

Plus: A new poll and podcast recs |

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By Olivia B. Waxman Staff Writer Grand Rapids, Mich., has been roiled by protests over the last week, since video emerged that shows a white police officer fatally shooting an unarmed Black man, 26-year-old Patrick Lyoya. I talked to two historians who are experts on the city’s history to put the incident in the larger context of race relations in the area. “People have the saying ‘Grand Rapids nice,’ which means that people, on the surface, appear courteous, and on the back end, are quite exclusionary,” Randal Maurice Jelks, author of African Americans in the Furniture City: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Grand Rapids, tells TIME. Click here to read the full story. Here’s more history to know:

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FROM THE TIME VAULT This week in 1932: The circus “Past the slim, tail-coated form of Ringmaster Fred Bradna lumped a big bull elephant to herald the 166th year of American circus and the 13th season of Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Combined Shows, which no longer needs to bill itself as ‘The Greatest Show on Earth.’ For John Ringling, sole survivor of Barnum & Bailey and the seven brothers Rüngeling of Baraboo, Wis., it was his 54th season of showmanship, which began with a pin-show in an Iowa barn and now undisputedly monopolizes U. S. circus entertainment. The monopoly consists of six big tent shows, four of which this year will carry Circus into all profitable corners of the land.” (April 18, 1932) Read More » This week in 1961: Yuri Gagarin "From Leningrad to Petropavlovsk, the U.S.S.R. came to a halt. Streetcars and buses stopped so that passengers could listen to loudspeakers in public squares. Factory workers shut off their machines; shopgirls quit their counters. Schoolkids turned eagerly from the day's lessons. Somewhere above them, a Soviet citizen was arcing past the stars, whirling about the earth at 18,000 miles an hour, soaring into history as the first man in space. Radio reports identified the ‘cosmonaut’ as Major Yuri Alekseevich Gagarin, 27…Brief bulletins, from time to time, traced its orbital track. Word came that at 9:22 a.m. Gagarin had reported by radio from a point over South America: ‘The flight is proceeding normally. I feel well.’” (April 21, 1961) Read More » This week in 1981: Princess Diana “Center stage right now in history's longest running show is Lady Diana, who entered as an ingénue and was already a star before she got to the footlights. She not only stood up well to the glare, she turned it to good advantage. Hounded by an anxious press, she usually managed to hold her temper and fix her smile. ‘I love working with children, and I have learned to be very patient with them,’ she told Charles with a level coolness that seemed to be much older than 19. ‘I simply treat the press as though they were children.’" (April 20, 1981) Read More »

HIGHLIGHTS FROM AROUND THE WEB Policy: In light of President Biden having recently signed into law the first bill making lynching a federal crime, NBC News’ Julianne McShane writes about how this milestone fulfills a longtime goal set by activist and journalist Ida B. Wells. Debunking myths: Seventy-five years after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier, Washington Post columnist Kevin B. Blackistone argues that a sanitized image of the baseball player persists. Book review: For the New Republic, Eric Herschthal reviews Kris Manjapra’s new book on the history of slavery, Black Ghost of Empire, which details how slaveholders—not enslaved people themselves—received monetary compensation when slaves were freed. Tech: NPR’s Neda Ulaby reports on the artificial-intelligence-based software that museums are using to preserve Holocaust survivors’ testimonies. Cycling through history: For the website on pre-1900 history Common Place, historian Anya Jabour writes about how bicycles provided Victorian-era women with more freedom.

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