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Livia Gershon explored the first stories about Rodney King and his brutal assault by a group of LAPD officers, and how the focus shifted from racial injustice to “political feuding among city leaders”:

When the trial began, the papers reported on the defendants’ legal strategies. While the Post referred to the “chilling tape” of the defendants “savagely beating” King, the Times downplayed King’s injuries. Both mentioned the decision to move the trial to “a conservative, overwhelmingly white area,” as the Times put it, but neither paper paid close attention to the defense tactic of breaking the video down frame by frame.

Meanwhile, outside the courtroom, a Times reporter took part in a ride-along with an LAPD officer, reporting on the difficult situations officers dealt with on the job. The Times also interviewed members of the public in local Black and white communities, reporting that everyone agreed the police should be punished for their actions.

Unlike when the assault on King first took place, there was little focus on the broader issue of societal racism and the role of the police in Black communities. [William L.] Solomon notes that neither paper analyzed the way the defense drew on racist tropes to present King as “at once all-powerful, animalistic, dazed by drugs, and insensate to pain.”

(via JSTOR Daily)

Ebony and Topaz was started in 1927, and featured essays, art, and poetry—nothing so dissimilar from Opportunity. It was likely because of the audience, argues art historian Caroline Goeser. While Opportunity explicitly tried to be a bridge toward racial equality, Ebony and Topaz was designed to “express a variety of creative responses to African American culture without the burden of appealing to a wide readership.” Johnson wanted to let the readers decide which pieces resonated and how. His hands-off approach to editing let “the writings and art of his contributors to evince a variety of themes.”

(via JSTOR Daily)

To get into the Bettmann Archive, about 90 minutes north of Pittsburgh, you need more than a library card. You need the proper credentials to get past the armed guards at the door. You need to be gloved and swaddled in several layers to deal with the cold. And you need to be OK with claustrophobic conditions, since the trip requires being shuttled hundreds of feet underground.

Seen as the father of image resource archives, Otto Bettmann immigrated to the United States from Nazi Germany in 1935 with “a few personal effects and two steamer trunks bursting with photographs, line drawings, engravings, and art reproductions.”

(via Atlas Obscura)

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Ashawnta Jackson on Richard Nixon’s fantasy baseball team.