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Different stories, same place

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By Smallbones
This is an old story on Wikipedia. The mayor doesn't like how his town is portrayed. History has some unpleasant surprises and some townsfolk think a negative image is holding back progress. Sometimes it's more complicated than that. What's a Wikipedian to do?
External videos
video icon North Platte’s Wikipedia page displays dark history, 3:21, KNOP-TV, October 4, 2021

Mayor Brandon Kelliher of North Platte, Nebraska thinks that the town of about 24,000 residents needs to improve the town's image on the internet. He even campaigned on the issue in the election. He may be right. Looking at the Wikipedia article for the town, he saw a 1929 lynching as the main event highlighted in the town's history along with the expulsion of Black residents which immediately followed. Local museum curator, Jim Griffin, confirms the accuracy of the history on Wikipedia but wants to balance information on the lynching. The news anchor concludes that city officials are "working to find a solution that adds a more positive spin to North Platte's history on the page".

Wikipedia editors should be quick to let the North Platters know that we just report the facts, as gathered from reliable sources weighing the coverage according to the weights given in those sources.

Wikipedians should write more, not less, about lynchings. Several thousand people were lynched in the U.S. There are over 800 counties where well documented lynchings occurred, most have articles which omit any information about the lynchings. Compare the extensive well-written history of Leonardtown, Maryland with this recent article in The Washington Post. Many people could benefit from access to information on lynching. Black people would like to know their history better, and to know that the world has not forgotten their struggle. White people who still wonder "What's the big deal about Black lives matter?" or "Why ruin a football game by kneeling during the National Anthem?" could also benefit. Knowing the truth can set us all free.

It turns out that North Platte already had some balancing information on Wikipedia. The article North Platte black exodus was balanced by North Platte Canteen, which is about providing a rest stop for soldiers and sailors during and shortly after World War II, 1941–1946. Neither article was well integrated into the article on the town. Both are showing their age and need to be updated.

External videos
video icon Platte Canteen, 7:00, Jay Lorenzen, August 26, 2007.
video icon Bob Greene on History Bookshelf Once Upon a Town, 3:55-49:47, C-SPAN, June 24, 2002

We may still have some balancing left to do. Twelve years after the lynching a remarkable event occurred – spread out over five years, running from early morning to late at night – which completely changed my view of the town. The women of North Platte and the surrounding small towns voluntarily served over 6 million U.S. military personnel during 10–15 minute train maintenance stops. Most of the soldiers and sailors were coming from boot camp and being deployed in combat. Perhaps they hadn't seen a friendly civilian face since entering boot camp.

The Nebraska women were not paid for their work or for the food supplies. They had to contend with wartime rationing of food and gasoline. They served up to 30 trains each day and gave away 30 birthday cakes each day. The canteen was well documented in local newspapers, wartime films and postcards, as well as a 2002 book Once upon a Town by Chicago journalist Bob Greene. The 288 pages show that Greene considered the North Platte Canteen to be America at its absolute best.

There's one postcard photo taken of the canteen that I'd like to show you but can't include here for copyright reasons: PFC Clifton Hall receives a birthday cake from Mrs. Lyda Swenson. Private Hall, a Black man, looks a bit surprised but otherwise shows little emotion. Mrs. Swenson's expression is odd, but inscrutable. The mystery is solved when you look at the expressions of the seven women who surround them. Their smiles are all beaming.

There's no way that I can reconcile these two events – the lynching and the canteen – happening in the same small town 12 years apart. Truth, or at least the history told in reliable sources, may be stranger than fiction, or the stories told in fringe sources. But if we can document those two seemingly irreconcilable events, we can include them both.


Read more about the North Platte Canteen at Matthew Spencer's article for Nebraska Life magazine, published nine years ago.


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What a story. Thanks for sharing it. --Andreas JN466 01:26, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

  • Thanks Andreas. I'm amazed at the stories, both of them, but I'm afraid I didn't do them justice. The lynching I guess is more believable. It was documented on a day-to-day basis by state and national newspapers, and by a State historical society paper. But there is a lot of politics, propaganda, and racism mixed up in the documentation. Yes, it was a lynching, or maybe some would prefer saying a police-murder similar to George Floyd's.
  • The canteen story I was pretty skeptical of at first. Somebody must be fluffing up that story, I thought. But there's a ton of documentation, and i can't poke a hole in it. I'm just incredulous that these two stories are about the same small town (12,000 population back then) 12 years apart. Smallbones(smalltalk) 02:10, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • The photograph and article you linked to may explain the disconnect. It says that 55,000 women from all over Nebraska manned the canteen; it wasn't just the women in that town, although I imagine a goodly number of them were involved. Indyguy (talk) 04:56, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • Yes, the 55,000 number of women involved comes up many times - but I don't think "from all over the state" is quite right. Rather they were likely from that part of the state - say from 100 miles around - a neighborly distance in Nebraska - just the farmers in the area. But yes, a lot of different people were involved, but I suspect much the same background, same culture. North Platte is a bit different in that it's a railroad town, with the huge railyards so might draw a slightly different population. Smallbones(smalltalk) 05:32, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Small-town USA holds many mysteries. Here in the South some of us have grown to accept the fact that these contradictions simply live on without much satisfactory explanation. I honestly don’t think the “lynching” was the worst thing about the North Platte incident (it was more of a police killing, at least according to what we are told), it was the mob threatening the entire black community and driving them away from their homes with clubs and rope. The problem with the town page wasn’t that the event was mentioned, it’s that there was little else about the history of the town, thus creating a perceived DUEness problem. I’ve seen it a few times where an article on a town or city will be dominated by one or two events. It’s fair for the town to want history to reflect everything that has happened in North Platte, as long as they don’t try and sweep the forced exile of a portion of their population under the rug. -Indy beetle (talk) 15:00, 1 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • I don't find the contradiction between the two major events, the lynching and the WW II Canteen, of North Platte history to be difficult to understand. There's something about the "madness of crowds" in which a spark unites a firestorm of bad behavior by normally respectable citizens. It happens all the time. Likewise I have no doubt that the good citizens of North Platte performed admirably during WW II, including passing out coffee and cake to "Colored" as well as white soldiers. However, I would regard as very dubious the statistics in the cited article that almost 7 million soldiers were helped by 55,000 women in the North Platte Canteen. 16 million Americans served in the Armed Services in WW II. But why in the world would 7 million soldiers pass through North Platte? It's is the middle of nowhere, militarily speaking -- and is not the only "railroad town" in the country.
    • Even the source cited in the Wikipedia article contradicts the 7 million figure. 2,000 soldiers a day, it says, got coffee and cake from the women. 2,000 a day from December 1941 to 1946 adds up to about 3 million soldiers served by the canteen. That's still an almost unbelievably large number.
    • And 55,000 women worked in the Canteen? North Platte had a WW II population of 12 to 15 thousand people. Where did 55,000 women who supposedly worked in the canteen come from? Not by train or automobile. There were wartime restrictions on civilian travel and use of cars and trains.
    • In other words, the "reliable sources" used to describe the North Platte Canteen are simply not credible. What do we on wikipedia do about "reliable sources" that are not credible? Smallchief (talk) 00:08, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • All that being said, thanks, Smallbones, for this interesting subject and discussion. Smallchief (talk) 00:08, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • And 55,000 women worked in the Canteen? North Platte had a WW II population of 12 to 15 thousand people. The article says The women of North Platte and the surrounding small towns, Smallchief. Besides, the USA officially entered WWII in December 1941 so I don't think they'd've placed any restrictions in 1940 when they had the census, and they could've set up some exemptions for North Platte (After all, who'd go far enough to attack Nebraska?). Just my 2 cents. But then again, I would have imagined that there would be just 3 or 4 other small towns (giving a total of less than 40k women if North Platte was the biggest town) and still been confused. Tube·of·Light 03:24, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • There was probably a lot of double counting for both numbers. If a soldier got breakfast and lunch at the canteen, he was probably counted as two people served. Many of the volunteers likely worked irregular times, so a woman who worked daily might have been counted once, but a woman who worked every other Sunday may have been counted as two people over the month. Argento Surfer (talk) 15:21, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Sometimes I wonder whether some supernatural entity, be it God or someone else, is creating so many interesting things in this small world or the world is big enough for all these interesting things to happen purely by chance. Tube·of·Light 03:24, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • The question to tackle is what we can do on Wikipedia about citing "reliable sources" that are obviously wrong. I wasted a few minutes of my time trying to figure out if 7 million soldiers were helped by 55,000 women in North Platte during WWII as it says in the Wikipedia article and the "reliable sources." Answer: No. The statistics are vastly inflated. This is not the only Wikipedia article in which folklore prevails over credibility. Can we do anything about it?Smallchief (talk) 12:28, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Good place for a break

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously said that "The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained." We should not be surprised at the seeming contradictions in the story of this small town -- nor be so quick to assume we are ourselves somehow immune to such contradictions. --Kent G. Budge (talk) 18:45, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]

    • (EC)@Kent G. Budge: - Thank you for this. I said above that I don't think I was able to do justice to the story, and I was thinking along these lines, but I was unable to write such a complex thought. So I just wrote basically as a news story. Solzhenitsyn with your help wrote it perfectly. Thanks again. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Smallbones (talk • contribs) 19:58, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  • Committing a lynching and race riot pogrom, followed by selfless service for the benefit of the armed forces sounds like typical mid-20th century US social attitudes to me, I'm not seeing a contradiction. The incidence of racism is not the product of an absence of altruism, but rather a systematic circumscription of who is seen as a worthy recipient of altruism (among other things). I have no doubt that several people directly participated in both of these events, and likely felt that they were standing up for their country and community in doing so on both occasions. signed, Rosguill talk 19:43, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • I too tend to think of this as being "the same people" but not exactly. I believe the lynching was almost entirely the work of men, and the canteen almost the same for women. Of course people were born or grew older or died in that time. Some folks must have moved in or out. The canteen involved many farm families as noted above, whereas the "race riot" (this term may be misleading) happened pretty much in a few hours so was more "urban", But still there must have been some overlap of the families involved. Smallbones(smalltalk) 20:08, 2 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • It's much easier to grasp once you (generic you) get past the idea that a town is simply a legal fiction. One town in my home state, Canterbury, Connecticut (which then as now has about half the population of this town in Nebraska) has a relatively similar 19th century version of this story arc (that's already well-documented in its article), about the life of Prudence Crandall (I've long wanted to see the inside of the museum, but this year it was being renovated and last year was... yeah..., in the years before that I had other issues getting out there, for a small state places can be deceptively difficult to get at). For what it's worth, they did it the right way at the time and do it the right way now, from the outside alone it was clear the renovations were necessary and they make sure to present what the town residents did in both the 1830s and 1870s. When presented that way it becomes more obvious that, although Canterbury was still the same legal fiction, the people residing in it had drastically changed. (The kicker is, if you go to Canterbury today, outside of that museum it's an utter wasteland; would it kill you people there to just pick up your damn trash?) The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:07, 3 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
TBNL, why a wasteland? Looks like a typical cute, well manicured New England village, except for the burned down house on the opposite corner. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 00:19, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
Heh. Granted I don't go out there too often, but I've been to every town in my home state (and Rhode Island, since after 169 towns 39 wasn't going to kill me!) and in Canterbury I've consistently found a whole lot of... nothing, really, except a few generic chain stores. Even the next town over, Scotland, has a far smaller population but has a building with a decent local coffee shop and liquor store. And while a lot of other towns out that way use their empty space for hiking trails, I haven't ever found anything worth going to in Canterbury. Nonetheless, if they ever get the Prudence Crandall museum up and running again I'll happily upload as many photos as I can; when I was out there earlier this year I took a few shots of the ongoing renovations too. (My own hometown is its equivalent in southwestern CT, but with a far less interesting place in history). The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 02:03, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
TBNL, well villages are villages. At least within less than 500m of the museum there is a small supermarket (more of a convenience store really), a gas station, a DunkingDonuts, and a Middle School. I imagine the village has that natural fragrance of freshly mown grass. Kudpung กุดผึ้ง (talk) 02:53, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
That may be it, when I first ventured there it was late fall (when a lot of people hadn't raked their lawns for some reason), and when I returned this summer it'd been fairly stormy so there were a lot of downed trees all over. Means I'll just have to go back sometime and catch the place at a better moment, I'd love to change my perception! The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 03:05, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]
@Kent G. Budge: Thank you for that. --Andreas JN466 14:21, 4 November 2021 (UTC)[reply]


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