Category: Default

John W. Fields, founding member of Second Baptist Church and freedman, interview by WPA Slave Narrative Project

Interview Date: September 17, 1937

Here are the first three paragraphs. The Narrative can be found at https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13579/13579-h/13579-h.htm#FieldsJohnW

“John W. Fields, 2120 North Twentieth Street, Lafayette, Indiana, now employed as a domestic by Judge Burnett is a typical example of a fine colored gentleman, who, despite his lowly birth and adverse circumstances, has labored and economized until he has acquired a respected place in his home community. He is the owner of three properties; un-mortgaged, and is a member of the colored Baptist Church of Lafayette. As will later be seen his life has been one of constant effort to better himself spiritually and physically. He is a fine example of a man who has lived a morally and physically clean life. But, as for his life, I will let Mr. Fields speak for himself:

“My name is John W. Fields and I’m eighty-nine (89) years old. I was born March 27, 1848 in Owensburg, Ky. That’s 115 miles below Louisville, Ky. There was 11 other children besides myself in my family. When I was six years old, all of us children were taken from my parents, because my master died and his estate had to be settled. We slaves were divided by this method. Three disinterested persons were chosen to come to the plantation and together they wrote the names of the different heirs on a few slips of paper. These slips were put in a hat and passed among us slaves. Each one took a slip and the name on the slip was the new owner. I happened to draw the name of a relative of my master who was a widow. I can’t describe the heartbreak and horror of that separation. I was only six years old and it was the last time I ever saw my mother for longer than one night. Twelve children taken from my mother in one day. Five sisters and two brothers went to Charleston, Virginia, one brother and one sister went to Lexington Ky., one sister went to Hartford, Ky., and one brother and myself stayed in Owensburg, Ky. My mother was later allowed to visit among us children for one week of each year, so she could only remain a short time at each place.

“My life prior to that time was filled with heart-aches and despair. We arose from four to five O’clock in the morning and parents and children were given hard work, lasting until nightfall gaves us our respite. After a meager supper, we generally talked until we grew sleepy, we had to go to bed. Some of us would read, if we were lucky enough to know how.”

Here is a picture of Mr. Fields outside his home at 2120 North Twentieth Street in the St. Lawrence Neighborhood in the North End. The house he is in front of is no more; a newer house stands there further back on the lot.

(Some of the text may be a little cringe to modern sensitivities. Still, if the house were standing, it would sell easily for $200,000 and Mr. Fields owned three properties free and clear during the Great Depression.)

Unsolicited Advice Column: Demonstrations

On Wednesday, February 5, demonstrations are being planned in all 50 state capitals. They are organized under the hashtag #50501 and so far they are promised to be peaceful. But if everybody is invited to protest, there is no guarantee that the protest will be peaceful.

Bad Actors

Boogaloo Boys

First on my list would be the “Boogaloo Boys” The SPLC describes them as far-right anti-government extremists, though the Boogaloos themselves claim no ideology. During the George Floyd protests, one of them killed a police officer without cause or provocation in California. Others were spotted damaging buildings in Minneapolis just before those riots got hot.

Anarchist Kiddies

“Anarchist Kiddies” is an unaffectionate term from the Chicago area used to describe young people who want to break windows and watch things burn. Some of them showed up in Indianapolis at an anti-Trump rally after the 2016 election, gave a series of speeches at the Capitol while waving anarchist flags (one of them resembling the “Orthodoxy or Death” banner favored by Serb warlords in Bosnia). Then the speeches ended. One young woman lay down in front of a truck bearing a Trump banner who showed up as a counter-protester. The police tried to get her out of the way, but then other protesters started chanting. A Black Lives Matter organizer saved the day by yelling “Black Lives Matter” and leading them away from the scene chanting “Black Lives Matter”. The march around downtown Indianapolis started peacefully, with even a diner in a downtown restaurant applauding. Then an idiot broke a window. While the official demonstration ended at 10 pm with a group hug, the kiddies continued wrecking things and getting arrested.

Agents Provocateur

These folks show up at demonstrations urging protesters to smash things or people. In some cases, they are sent by the parties being protested: an antiwar protest might encourage a government agency to send APs. At Kent State, APs showed up dressed as hippies to get the people of Kent, Ohio nervous so they could justify their actions against the protest that ended in four people dead and a wave of campus riots nationwide. During the 1990s, not a little of the strength behind the KKK rallies that plagued Indiana came from FBI keeping tabs on the Klan. The most recent case of which I am aware would be against the Michigan militia who planned to assassinate the Governor over COVID restrictions back in April 2020.

Backpacks should be considered red flags. They may contain rocks and other things that cause damage. If a person near you is carrying a backpack during a march, chances are that they plan to use whatever is in it and if you are too close to them, remember that police do not get enough range training to hit their targets with rubber bullets and that tear gas hurts!

Other players, for good or ill.

Affinity Groups

A well-organized group of protesters may self-organize into affinity groups of around ten people. Should somebody start damaging things, the affinity group surrounds and immobilizes them. The classic method is taking them to the cops, or if the police are not trusted, duct taping them to a convenient street lamp. (Pulling the AP’s pants down is not necessary and may expose you to charges of sexual assault or battery.) With only a few days of planning time, the February 5 protest cannot be considered well-organized.

If you do not personally know people who invite you to join their affinity group, do not join them. You have not trained with them, and violent anarchists also like to call their groups “affinity groups”.

The Cops

A positive police presence separates protesters from traffic, tries to keep the flow of travel smooth and sometimes gets gruff and shouty. In such cases, don’t take it personally: in a crowd of chanting people, the police need to speak loudly and chances are good they are tired.

The negative police presence was seen several times during the George Floyd protests/riots. For example, Kyle Rittenhouse asked the Kenosha police to arrest him after he shot at the people he said were threatening him, and killed one of them. The Kenosha police refused. He shot again, claiming self-defense and the jury believed him at least a bit. Then there were the police hanging out in Bobby Rush’s Chicago office chilling as rioters looted other stores in the plaza, or maybe the cops who, ostensibly keeping order, beat people up at Ford City Mall at least ten miles from the actual riots.

My experience is that the cops usually do not want violence, at least before the violence begins. The Indianapolis cops were peaceful until demonstrators morphed into rioters at the November 2016 rally. There are always exceptions, and if the cops want violence, they especially want people to react violently! Please do not satisfy such cops.

Be peaceful and nonviolent!

Project 2025 requires a state of emergency to hasten Trump and Musks’ plan to convert the US into an autocracy at the service of Trump and Musks’ favorites. Do not give them this excuse! The US military is incredibly powerful — at the moment some of them are pushing back but when violence begins, they may no longer push back. While violence is wrong for its own reasons, demonstrators growing violent let the power they protest choose the field of battle and the weapons with which they were trained. Most Americans don’t really like violence — your violence becomes the oligarchs’ best recruiting tool.

Final words

The organizers, at best, do not know what they are doing. There were protests on February 1, and asking protesters to come out again four days later is asking for burnout. At worst, they want things to go down violently to bring on a declaration of emergency. The successful Women’s March of 2017 was linked with local organizing for the 2018 elections, consultation with lawful authority and enough lead time for participants to plan their protest and knit those pink caps. By organizing this way, they helped turn the House in 2018.

There is lots to do and if you are free on February 5 around noon, maybe writing your congressman would be a better use of it.

January 26 forecast

To begin, here is the GFS model’s interpretation of conditions where half the atmosphere is below and the other half is above. This is known as the 500 hPa map.

We see a low centered in central California. The colors indicate the tendency of the atmosphere to rotate and compress, called vorticity. Over Illinois and Indiana, the winds are brisk and zonal (east-west). The likely direction of the low is probably toward the southwest. For us, zonal winds mean no dramatic changes in temperature.

Now this is the atmosphere at 850 hPa. Since sea-level atmospheric pressure is about 1000 hPa, this represents the atmosphere where 85% lies above and 15% lies below. More practically, temperatures at this level do not vary with the time of day, at least east of the Great Plains. The wind barbs show where the wind is coming FROM. In Indiana, a slightly cooler air mass is advecting (moving) in rather slowly because the barbs are roughly parallel to the isotherms. The temperature will change more rapidly in northwestern Wisconsin even though the wind speeds are comparable because the cold air is being more directly advected into Wisconsin.

Here we are at 7 am Eastern on Sunday the 26th. Cooler air has moved in, but not much cooler. If you follow the wind barbs backward, they lead to south-central Iowa.

A rule of thumb is that the low temperature will be roughly the 850 hPa temperature, that is, -6 C or (22 F). NWS Indianapolis predicts a low of 20 F.

The satellite photos (not pictured) show Lafayette under thin clouds at most, and this will continue. With the light winds, the NWS prediction looks more reasonable.

Here my forecast stops. NWS predicts a high of 28 F tomorrow. Clear skies overnight favor cooling at night: NWS says 16 F. As the area of cold air moves north and east, pushed by southwest winds, temperatures will rise to 38, according to NWS Indianapolis. GFS says 36 F tomorrow.

In the next few days, temperatures will not vary by much. GFS sets up an 850 hPa temperature of 5 C Friday; with a weak surface low centered in Illinois, the clouds will probably keep us in the 40s.

After that, GFS starts to spin out predicting extremely mild air around February 7 followed by a cold snap. While 68 F is not unknown in February around here, it is safer to assume that GFS is predicting more extreme weather than will take place. And if you would like the 68 F, you also get the dramatic temperature drop of 40 or 50 F February 10-11 back into the twenties by day and single digits by night.

Welcome to the Lafayette Sentinel!

This is the third iteration of the old Tipped Canoe site, renamed to the Lafayette Sentinel.

With the new Administration, people must know what their legislators and leaders are up to at every level. For that matter, most of our lives are lived close to home and most of our interactions with government are with our township, city and county.

A national government may be excellent, but that of a city may be horrible, and Uncle Sam is not completely to blame for potholes in the street or scandals in the Police Department. For example, Donald Trump and Joseph Biden are not to blame for the bizarre behavior of the Wabash Township trustee who tried governing from Florida or whatever mess has taken place in Fairfield Township.

The opposite may be true. Lafayette’s Mayor Roswarski and West Lafayette’s Mayor John Dennis helped us get through the first four Trump years, shielding their cities from some of their problems.

Some problems take place on multiple scales. Greater Lafayette’s beloved weather forecaster, Chad Evans, is facing a layoff from Channel 18 because its owner, Allen Media Broadcasting, has decided to delegate forecasts for our area to The Weather Channel, also owned by Allen Media Broadcasting; it is feared that our local forecasts will be less reliable coming out of Atlanta rather than from the office on Yeager Road. This was made possible by the Communications Act of 1996 because entities far from Lafayette can now own Lafayette media.

So here goes! The Sentinel has its own domain (lafasent.com) (sort of) and, I hope, will someday join other outlets here in Lafayette in keeping you informed.