"Roving bands of Negro youths"

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"Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby jingofever » Mon Dec 01, 2014 6:09 am

Michael O'Donoghue, a dead former writer for Saturday Night Live, wrote How to Write Good. In lesson eight, "Covering the News", he wrote:

Have you ever wondered how reporters are able to turn out a dozen or so news articles day after day, year after year, and still keep their copy so fresh, so vital, so alive? It's because they know The Ten Magic Phrases of Journalism, key constructions with which one can express every known human emotion! As one might suppose, The Phrases, discovered only after centuries of trial and error, are a closely guarded secret, available to no one but accredited members of the press. However, at the risk of being cashiered from the Newspaper Guild, I am now going to reveal them to you:


Number ten is: "roving bands of Negro youths"

I always thought it was funny, but certainly not something taken from real life, until I Googled the phrase.

Time Magazine, Sept. 09, 1966:

Roving bands of Negro youths roamed through the Negro section of Dayton—looting, stoning buses and breaking store windows—after a Negro man was fatally wounded by shotgun blasts fired from a passing car containing three white men.


The Lewiston Daily Sun, March 25, 1964:

Roving bands of Negro youths are reported responsible for rock throwing, beatings


Reading Eagle, July 21, 1966:

roving bands of Negro youths staged scores of hit-run fire-bomb attacks as Cleveland's racial turmoil spilled into its fourth day


New York Times, April 6, 1968:

President Johnson ordered 4,000 regular Army and National Guard troops into the nation's capital tonight to try to end riotous looting, burglarizing and burning by roving bands of Negro youths.


And so on. They seem to be from the 1960s.
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Re: "Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Thu Dec 04, 2014 6:13 pm

That first one is remarkable, given the stigma of "drive by shootings" as an inherently black-on-black phenomenon. Damn interesting roundup.

Sure enough, the phrase generates a lot of archival hits on nytimes.com .... damn.
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Re: "Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby Elvis » Thu Dec 04, 2014 11:49 pm

My favorites are the Mexican roving bands...





then you have the 'edgier', weirdly cross-cultural Chinese roving bands...

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Re: "Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby 82_28 » Sun Dec 07, 2014 4:22 am

Check out all the bullshit we were able to dredge up over the years (randomly) at classifiedhumanity:

http://classifiedhumanity.com/tagged/racism

(I think this topic should go into general discussion though)
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Re: "Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby 82_28 » Sun Dec 07, 2014 4:32 am

I forgot how many articles we tagged as racist. Here's a straight and simple one:

Image
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Re: "Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby jingofever » Sun Dec 07, 2014 5:09 am

82_28 » 07 Dec 2014 08:32 wrote:I forgot how many articles we tagged as racist. Here's a straight and simple one:

So, was that a blind man who lost his way home and tried to get into the wrong house? I do not imagine there are many blind thieves or rapists.
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Re: "Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby jingofever » Sun Dec 07, 2014 7:47 am

Wombaticus Rex » 04 Dec 2014 22:13 wrote:That first one is remarkable, given the stigma of "drive by shootings" as an inherently black-on-black phenomenon.

It probably used to be a stigma of Italian-Americans. Damned wops. Though Wikipedia tells me:

The British military (especially the Special Air Service) used this form of drive-by shooting in its campaigns in North Africa and France during the Second World War. Columns of heavily armed jeeps, bristling with machine guns, would drive past and sometimes through enemy positions, usually airfields and supply depots, shooting at military targets.

Damned limeys. But then I remember that Americans used to shoot buffalo from moving trains. Damned yanks.
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Re: "Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby Lord Balto » Fri Jun 05, 2015 1:07 pm

jingofever » Sun Dec 07, 2014 7:47 am wrote:
Wombaticus Rex » 04 Dec 2014 22:13 wrote:That first one is remarkable, given the stigma of "drive by shootings" as an inherently black-on-black phenomenon.

It probably used to be a stigma of Italian-Americans. Damned wops. Though Wikipedia tells me:

The British military (especially the Special Air Service) used this form of drive-by shooting in its campaigns in North Africa and France during the Second World War. Columns of heavily armed jeeps, bristling with machine guns, would drive past and sometimes through enemy positions, usually airfields and supply depots, shooting at military targets.

Damned limeys. But then I remember that Americans used to shoot buffalo from moving trains. Damned yanks.


Didn't the East Indians shoot tigers from special trains during the Raj?
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Re: "Roving bands of Negro youths"

Postby chump » Tue Jun 16, 2015 2:45 pm

My long lost cuz took my wife and I to the "Taste of Ft Collins" street fair Sunday, where we sat for a moment next to some hippie types on a grassy knoll overlooking the stage - who offered us a loaf of the bread someone was passing bread around before the MTV band Smashmouth began to play..


Smash Mouth singer goes on tirade, attempts to fight fans after being pelted with slices of bread

"Why Can't We Be Friends" singer has on-stage meltdown at Taste of Fort Collins

Long ago, before the days of Shrek and that “All Star” song, Smash Mouth was actually a pretty legitimate, foul-mouthed rock band, as evidenced by their criminally underrated 1997 debut, Fush Yu Mang. For their next album, however, Smash Mouth went a much different direction. Their once abrasive sound devolved into mostly vanilla, emotionless, nonthreatening songs that, while suited for Radio Disney, mostly sucked.

But this weekend, fans who attended the Taste of Fort Collins street festival in Fort Collins, Colorado may have stumbled onto Smash Mouth’s kryptonite: bread. Apparently, at Taste of Fort Collins loaves of bread are given out to attendees as party favors, because why not. And what better way to use your newly acquired loaf than by throwing it at the world’s shittiest rock band.

After getting hit by a few slices, frontman Steve Harwell briefly reverted back to his 1990s persona, launching into a profanity-filled tirade. At one point, he threatened to go into the audience and had to be restrained by security members. Ultimately, the set was canceled.

Tl;dr: Throw bread at Smash Mouth, unleash raw emotion.


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