Frank Beacham's Journal

Bedloe’s Island was eventually renamed Liberty Island — now home of the Statute of Liberty — 137 years ago

For the first 200 years or so of European settlement, Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor was a smallpox quarantine station, a vacation haven and a fort.

On June 17, 1885 — 137 years ago today — the island found a new purpose.

The Isère, a French steamship, sailed into the harbor bearing the copper segments that would come together to form the Statue of Liberty. An account in The New York Times a few days later described the extreme pomp that greeted the vessel and its cargo as the harbor jammed with boats filled with crowds jostling for a glimpse.

“Every lady was waving a parasol or a handkerchief,” the newspaper reported, “gentlemen were flourishing hats and canes, and the whole was a sight that New-York Bay has never witnessed before and will probably never witness again.”

Bedloe’s Island was eventually renamed Liberty Island, but the star-shaped fort stayed. Its walls became the statue’s base.

Thanks New York Times!

In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi — 59 years ago today — African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith

In the driveway outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi, African American civil rights leader Medgar Evers was shot to death by white supremacist Byron De La Beckwith.

It was June 12, 1963 — 59 years ago today.

During World War II, Evers volunteered for the U.S. Army and participated in the Normandy invasion. In 1952, he joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

As a field worker for the NAACP, Evers traveled through his home state encouraging poor African Americans to register to vote and recruiting them into the civil rights movement. He was instrumental in getting witnesses and evidence for the Emmitt Till murder case, which brought national attention to the plight of African Americans in the South.

After a funeral in Jackson, Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. President John F. Kennedy and many other leaders publicly condemned the killing.

In 1964, the first trial of chief suspect Byron De La Beckwith ended with a deadlock by an all-white jury, sparking numerous protests. When a second all-white jury also failed to reach a decision, De La Beckwith was set free. Three decades later, the state of Mississippi reopened the case under pressure from civil rights leaders and Evers' family.

In February, 1994, a racially mixed jury in Jackson found Beckwith guilty of murder. The unrepentant white supremacist, aged 73, was sentenced to life imprisonment. On January 21, 2001, De La Beckwith died after he was transferred from prison to the University of Mississippi Medical Center in Jackson, Mississippi. He was 80 years old and had suffered from heart disease, high blood pressure and other ailments.

De La Beckwith was the subject of the 1963 Bob Dylan song, "Only a Pawn in Their Game," which deplores Evers' murder and the racial environment of the South.

The 1996 film, Ghosts of Mississippi, tells the story of the murder and 1994 trial. James Woods portrayed De La Beckwith in an Academy Award-nominated performance.

Thanks History.com

March after Evers' Assassination

"Only a Pawn in Their Game" is a song written by Bob Dylan about the assassination of civil rights activist Medgar Evers.

It was released on Dylan's The Times They Are a-Changin' album in 1964.

The song suggests that Evers' killer does not bear sole blame for his crime, as he was only a pawn of rich white elites who incensed poor whites against blacks so as to distract them from their position on "the caboose of the train."

Dylan first performed "Only a Pawn in Their Game" at a voter registration rally in Greenwood, Mississippi. Civil rights activist Bernice Johnson would later tell critic Robert Shelton that “Pawn” was the very first song that showed the poor white was as victimized by discrimination as the poor black.

Dylan sang the song at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Later during that event Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a Dream" speech.

Here, Dylan performs “Only a Pawn in Their Game”

Harry Smith, visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian, mystic and largely self-taught student of anthropology, was born 99 years ago

Harry Smith, visual artist, experimental filmmaker, record collector, bohemian, mystic and largely self-taught student of anthropology, was born 99 years ago.

Smith was an important figure in the Beat Generation scene in New York City. Besides his films, Smith is widely known for his influential Anthology of American Folk Music, drawn from his extensive collection of out-of-print commercial 78 rpm recordings.

Throughout his life Smith was an inveterate collector. In addition to records, he collected artifacts that included string figures, paper airplanes, Seminole textiles and Ukrainian Easter eggs.

Born in Portland, Oregon, Smith spent his earliest years in Washington state in the area between Seattle and Bellingham. As a child, he lived for a time with his family in Anacortes, Washington, a town on Fidalgo Island, where the Swinomish Indian reservation is located. He attended high school in nearby Bellingham.

Smith's parents, who didn't get along, lived in separate houses — meeting only at dinner time. Although poor, they gave their son an artistic education, including 10 years of drawing and painting lessons. For a time, it is said, they even ran an art school in their house.

Smith was a voracious reader and he recalled his father bringing him a copy of Carl Sandburg's folksong anthology, American Songbag. "We were considered some kind of 'low' family," Smith once said, "despite my mother's feeling that she was [an incarnation of] the Czarina of Russia."

Physically, Smith was undersized and had a curvature of the spine, which kept him from being drafted (a circumstance that later would disqualify him from benefitting from the G.I. Bill). During World War II, he took a job as a mechanic working nights on the construction of the tight, hard-to-reach interior of Boeing bomber planes, for which his short stature suited him.

Smith used the money he made from his job to buy blues records. It also enabled him to formally study anthropology at the University of Washington in Seattle for five semesters between 1942 and the fall of 1944.

He concentrated on American Indians, making numerous field trips to document the music and customs of the Lummi, whom he had gotten know through his mother's work with them. When the war ended, Smith, then 22, moved to the Bay Area of San Francisco, then home to a lively bohemian folk music and jazz scene.

As a collector of blues records, he had already been corresponding with the noted blues record aficionado, James McKune. He now also began seriously collecting old hillbilly music records from junk dealers and stores which were going out of business and even appeared as a guest on a folk music radio show hosted by Jack Spicer, the poet.

Smith was especially drawn to bebop, a new jazz form which had originated during impromptu jam sessions before and after paid performances. He went to after hours clubs where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker could be heard in San Francisco.

At this time, he painted several ambitious jazz-inspired abstract paintings (since destroyed) and began making animated avant garde films featuring patterns that he painted directly on the film stock and which were intended to be shown to the accompaniment of bebop music.

In 1950, Smith received a Guggenheim grant to complete an abstract film, which enabled him first to visit and later move to New York City. He arranged for his collections, including his records, to be shipped to the East Coast. He said that "one reason he moved to New York was to study the Cabala. And, 'I wanted to hear Thelonious Monk play'."

When his grant money ran out, he brought what he termed "the cream of the crop" of his record collection to Moe Asch, president of Folkways Records, with the idea of selling it.

Instead, Asch proposed that the 27-year-old Smith use the material to edit a multi-volume anthology of American folk music in long playing format — then a newly developed, cutting edge medium — and he provided space and equipment in his office for Smith to work in.

The recording engineer on the project was Péter Bartók, son of the renowned composer and folklorist. The resultant Folkways anthology, issued in 1952 under the title, American Folk Music, was a compilation of recordings of folk music issued on hillbilly and race records that had previously been released commercially on 78 rpm.

These early recordings featured the "golden age" of the commercial country music industry between 1927 and 1932. When the Depression halted folk music sales, many of the artists went into obscurity. Originally issued as budget discs marketed to rural audiences, the records had long been known, collected and occasionally reissued by folklorists and aficionados.

But this was the first time such a large compilation was made available to affluent, non-specialist urban dwellers. LP discs could hold much more material than the old three-minute 78s and had greater fidelity and far less surface noise. The Anthology was packaged as a set of three, boxed albums. Each box front had a different color: red, blue, or green — in Smith's schema, representing the alchemical elements.

Priced at $25.00 ($216.00 in 2012) per two-disc set, they were a luxury item.

A fourth album, comprising topical songs from the Depression era, was originally planned by Asch and his long-time assistant, Marian Distler. It was never completed by Smith. It was issued in 2000, nine years after Smith’s death in CD format by Revenant Records with a 95-page booklet of tribute essays to Smith.

The music on Smith's anthology was performed by such artists as Clarence Ashley, Dock Boggs, The Carter Family, Sleepy John Estes, Mississippi John Hurt, Dick Justice, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Buell Kazee and Bascom Lamar Lunsford.

It had a huge impact on the folk and blues revivals of the 1950s and 60s. The songs were covered by my artists including The New Lost City Ramblers, Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.

Rock critic Greil Marcus, in his liner-note essay for the 1997 Smithsonian reissue, quoted musician Dave van Ronk's avowal that "We all knew every word of every song on it, including the ones we hated."

In addition to compiling the Folkways anthology, Smith was also instrumental in getting Folkways to produce (on its Broadside label) the The Fugs First Album (1965), now considered the first "folk rock" album.

A regular visitor to the Peace Eye bookstore, in Manhattan's East Village on 10th St. between Avenues B and Ave C, founded in 1965 by poet Ed Sanders, Smith had advised Sanders which books about Native American studies the store ought to stock. When Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg formed the Fugs, they rehearsed at Peace Eye. "Thanks to Harry," writes Sanders, "the band was able to record an album within weeks of forming."

Peter Stampfel recalls that, as the album's editor and producer, "Harry's contribution to the proceedings were his presence, inspiration and best of all, smashing a wine bottle against the wall while we were recording 'Nothing.'"

Harry Smith lived at the Hotel Chelsea on West 23rd Street in New York City from 1968 to 1975, after which he was "sometimes 'stranded' at hotels where he would owe so much money he couldn't leave, and he was too famous just to be thrown out."

This was the case at the Breslin Hotel at 28th and Broadway, where Smith lived until 1985, when his friend, poet Allen Ginsberg, took him into his home on East 12th Street.

While living with Ginsberg, Smith designed the cover for two of Ginsberg's books, White Shroud and Collected Poems, as well as continuing to work on his own films and to record ambient sounds. By this time, Smith was suffering from severe health and dental problems, as well as alcohol addiction. He proved a difficult guest.

Ginsberg's psychiatrist finally told him that Smith would have to leave because he was bad for Ginsberg's blood pressure (Ginsberg was already suffering from the cardiovascular disease that was to kill him).

In 1988, Ginsberg arranged for Smith to teach shamanism at the Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, Colorado. When Ginsberg, who was paying all of Smith's expenses, realized Smith was using the money he was sending him for rent to buy alcohol, he hired Rani Singh, then a student at Naropa, to look after him.

But this was not before Smith had amassed substantial debts that Ginsberg would be responsible for. Singh, now an author and art curator, has since devoted much of her life to furthering Smith's legacy.

In 1991, Smith suffered a bleeding ulcer followed by cardiac arrest in Room 328 at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City. His friend, poet Paola Igliori, described him as dying in her arms "singing as he drifted away." Smith was pronounced dead one hour later at St. Vincent's Hospital.

Smith's ashes were long in the care of his late friend, longtime participant in New York's Beat scene, Rosemarie "Rosebud" Feliu-Pettet, who was Smith's "spiritual wife."

Above photo by Gavin Friday

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Some Crazy Magic: Meeting Harry Smith

A animated interpretation of John Cohen’s first meeting with Harry Smith

In 1831 — 191 years ago — a play called The Lion of the West opened in New York City. It would be the first of many plays, books and movies celebrating the life of Davy Crockett

Fess Parker as Davy Crockett in the center. Buddy Ebsen (left) and Mike Mazurki (right), 1954

In 1831 — 191 years ago — a play called The Lion of the West opened in New York City. It would be the first of many plays, books and movies celebrating the life of Davy Crockett.

Born in 1786 in Tennessee, Crockett grew up in a poor family that hired him out as a cattle drover at age 12. He eventually settled in middle Tennessee, where he became famous for his skill as a professional hunter. The forests of Tennessee were still dense with game at that time, and Crockett once killed 105 bears in a single season.

After a stint fighting Indians with Andrew Jackson, Crockett began a career in politics, eventually becoming a Tennessee state representative in 1821. As a state legislator, Crockett was a strong advocate for the rights of squatters who were claiming land on the frontier without legal permission.

At the same time, the political fortunes of his old commander, Andrew Jackson, were on the rise. When Jackson became president in 1828, he pointed to Crockett as a symbol of the frontier egalitarianism he believed should be adopted throughout the nation.

Politics alone, however, would not have ensured Crockett’s enduring status as an American hero. For that, only the 19th century version of Hollywood would be adequate. That came in 1831 when the play, The Lion of the West, opened at New York City’s Park Theater. Starring the popular actor James Hackett as a legendary frontiersman named Colonel Nimrod Wildfire, the play was a thinly disguised and highly exaggerated account of Crockett’s life.

Two years later, the play was followed by an equally larger-than-life biography, Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee.

After Crockett died at the Alamo in 1836, his posthumous transformation from mortal man to mythic martyr was almost inevitable. A bogus 1836 autobiography portrayed him as an American Hercules and established many of the tall tales that would remain forever associated with his name.

In the 20th century, Crockett’s fame waned for a time, but Walt Disney revived the legend. In 1954, Disney began producing a series of movies and television programs featuring the actor Fess Parker as Crockett. The series was a ratings blockbuster, and it led to the largest media-generated commercial craze up until that time.

Children across America clamored for coonskin caps, powder horns, books and records so that they could be just like their idol, Davy Crockett.

Here, the Kentucky Headhunters perform “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”

The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world

The main reading room of the Library of Congress.

Photo by Richard Perry

It contains 167 million items and 838 miles of bookshelves, and it adds 12,000 articles of history daily.

The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world. It was established on this day in 1800 with the same sweep of President John Adams’s pen that moved the federal government from Philadelphia to Washington.

As its name suggests, the library was originally for members of Congress, but its role as the leading research arm of the government has expanded. Anyone 16 and older may get a library card and use the collections on site.

While its main building is in Washington, the library has offices around the world and has materials in 470 languages. It is home to a Gutenberg Bible and a 1507 world map that is the first known document on which “America” appears (over what is now Brazil).

The Librarian of Congress is a title that has been held by 14 people since 1800. Carla Hayden, the current librarian, is the first woman and first African-American to hold the post. “If you can absorb information yourself and make your own decisions, that’s a freedom,” Dr. Hayden told The New York Times.

Thanks New York Times!

This week in 1908 — 114 years ago — seven people packed into a Packard in Los Angeles and headed for New York City

This week in 1908 — 114 years ago — seven people packed into a Packard in Los Angeles and headed for New York City.

The going was not easy. The trip required “building bridges over streams, constructing roads over wash-outs,” The New York Times reported. Not to mention the “usual bad mud in Iowa.”

But eventually, J.M. Murdock and his passengers crossed the Hudson on the ferry from Hoboken and drove up Broadway. Their journey took 32 days.

The trip set a record for the fastest transcontinental auto trip by “a private owner traveling simply for his own pleasure.”

When the 1964 World’s Fair opened 58 years ago today, the architectural star of the show was Philip Johnson’s soaring, futuristic New York State Pavilion

Observatory Towers of the New York State Pavilion, 1964 World's Fair

Photo by Erik S. Lieber

When the 1964 World’s Fair opened 58 years ago today, the architectural star of the show was Philip Johnson’s soaring, futuristic New York State Pavilion.

“A sophisticated frivolity,” The Times’s architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable raved, “seriously and beautifully constructed. This is ‘carnival’ with class.”

Standing inside the pavilion’s Tent of Tomorrow, a multicolored canopy supported by 100-foot concrete towers, was like looking up at a spacecraft taking off. For years, the pavilion has been shuttered and in disrepair, slowly crumbling. The pavilion was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2009.

In the fall of 2013, New York City's Department of Parks and Recreation announced plans to restore the pavilion with new landscaped paths and event spaces at an estimated cost of $73 million, as opposed to the $14 million cost to demolish the structure.

Renewed interest was shown in the pavilion's restoration in early 2014, the 50th anniversary of its opening.

In July, 2014, the pavilion received about $5.8 million for restoration. The New York Mets also donated some money for the preservation effort. However, the pavilion was damaged the same month by arsonists.

In May, 2015, the New York Structural Steel Painting Contractors Association, in conjunction with the New York City Parks department and members of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades (District Council 9, Local 806), announced a project to repaint the rusty steel framework of the Tent of Tomorrow.

After testing paint chips, the color "American Cheese Yellow" was selected as the best match for the original color. The majority of the labor was done by union trainees, and materials were supplied by the contractors, constituting a $3 million donation. All work was completed by August 15th, 2015.

The Pavilion is the subject of a documentary film titled, Modern Ruin: A World's Fair Pavilion, produced by filmmaker and teacher Matthew Silva. The documentary premiered on May 22, 2015 in the Queens Theatre which was formerly the theaterama, the third component of the New York State Pavilion.

In March, 2016, People For the Pavilion and the National Trust for Historic preservation launched an international ideas competition to allow the public to reimagine possibilities for what is possible for the pavilion.

Two proposed designs for the New York State Pavilion's restoration won New York City's 2018 Annual Awards for Excellence in Design. As of June 2018, the New York City government planned to award contracts for the pavilion's restoration, set to be worth $14.25 million. The restoration was planned to take one and a half years but was delayed due to construction and pandemic issues. It is uncertain when it will be finished.

Fifty-eight years ago today, folk singer Oscar Brand provided the music for this "film poem," a day in the life of the 1964 World's Fair in Queens, New York.

All major areas of the fair are represented — international, industrial, federal and states, transportation and amusements. The narration form gives the film its title — Oscar Brand sings the "Ballad." The song was specially written for the film.

Some of the construction leading up to opening day is contrasted to the finished appearance of the grounds later in the film. Many pavilions and the Unisphere are shown, but the Bell Pavilion is the main focus.

The "Floating Wing" pavilion of the Bell System is given a quick tour, as people ride the 17-minute moving, Disney-style slow ride through telecommunications history (with music by Morton Gould), and visit such exhibits as The Vocoder, Patterns of your Voice, Electronic Switching and the Picturephone.

The film closes with the fireworks and water show that was produced nightly in front of the Bell Pavilion at the Pool of Industry.

While the Unisphere still exists on the Queens fairgrounds (now the Flushing Meadows park), most buildings were torn down or removed following the Fair. The giant tire ferris wheel for Royal Tire is a landmark along I-94 west of Detroit, Michigan. The Skyway tower structures and gondolas were moved to Six Flags Great Adventure (at that time called Great Adventure) in New Jersey. "It's a Small World" was transferred to Disneyland.

Nothing remains of the Bell Pavilion. But many of the ideas in this pavilion about communications and the future were later transferred to the "Spaceship Earth" building at Epcot Center, which opened in 1982 sponsored by Bell, then sponsored by AT&T from 1984 to 2004.

The Mariel Boat Lift — A Personal Remembrance

The Mariel Boat Lift — A Personal Remembrance

On April 20, 1980 — 42 years ago today — Fidel Castro announced that all Cubans wishing to emigrate to the United States were free to board boats at the port of Mariel west of Havana, launching the Mariel Boat Lift. The first of 125,000 Cuban refugees from Mariel reached Florida the next day.

The boat lift was precipitated by housing and job shortages caused by the ailing Cuban economy, leading to simmering internal tensions on the island. Castro proclaimed that the port of Mariel would be opened to anyone wishing to leave, as long as they had someone to pick them up. Cuban exiles in the United States rushed to hire boats in Miami and Key West and rescue their relatives.

In all, 125,000 Cubans fled to U.S. shores in about 1,700 boats, creating large waves of people that overwhelmed the U.S. Coast guard. Cuban guards had packed boat after boat, without considering safety, making some of the overcrowded boats barely seaworthy. Twenty-seven migrants died, including 14 on an overloaded boat that capsized on May 17.

During the extent of the boat lift, I was sent to Key West for NBC News and covered the arriving Cubans each day. Every helicopter in the South Florida area was rented for aerial shots of the boats. But during the boat lift, we found that many of the helicopters were without the required floatation material that allows them to land in water during an emergency.

Sure enough, I was on one of them when the engine began overheating and smoking while we were out to sea. Without flotation, a small chopper — like the one I was in — that goes down in the ocean means almost certain death to the passengers.

Our pilot raced to the shoreline as the smoke from the engine grew stronger. I was recording sound on this flight, but was gripped with fear. I will never forget looking over to see the camera operator still rolling on the boats below — as if nothing else was happening as the chopper raced to shore.

By some miracle, we made it to land in the knick of time. From that day on, we demanded to see the floatation on helicopters before flying over water again.

The boat lift finally ended by mutual agreement between the U.S. and Cuban governments in October, 1980.

American actress Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco in a spectacular ceremony on this day in 1956 — 66 years ago

American actress Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier of Monaco in a spectacular ceremony on this day in 1956 — 66 years ago.

Kelly, the daughter of a former model and a wealthy industrialist, began acting as a child. After high school, she attended the American Academy for Dramatic Arts in New York. While she auditioned for Broadway plays, she supported herself by modeling and appearing in TV commercials. In 1949, Kelly debuted on Broadway in The Father by August Strindberg.

Two years later, she landed her first Hollywood bit part, in the film, Fourteen Hours. Her big break came in 1952, when she starred as Gary Cooper’s wife in High Noon. Her performance in The Country Girl, as the long-suffering wife of an alcoholic songwriter played by Bing Crosby, won her an Oscar in 1954.

The same year, she played opposite Jimmy Stewart in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window. While filming another Hitchcock movie, To Catch a Thief (1955), in the French Riviera, Kelly met Prince Rainier of Monaco. It wasn’t love at first sight for Kelly, but the prince initiated a long correspondence, which led to their marriage in 1956.

Afterward, she became Princess Grace of Monaco and retired from acting. She had three children and occasionally narrated documentaries.

Kelly died at the age of 52 when her car plunged off a mountain road by the Cote D’Azur in September, 1982.

Leo Frank, the Jewish-American factory superintendent who was lynched in the South, was born 138 years ago today

Leo Frank, the Jewish-American factory superintendent who was lynched in the South, was born 138 years ago today.

Frank was convicted of killing a factory worker and was hung in 1915 by a lynch mob planned and led by prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia. The case drew attention to antisemitism in the United States and was the subject of the Broadway musical, Parade, in 1998.

The Washington Post noted that the list of people who killed Frank includes several prominent citizens — a former governor, the son of a senator, a Methodist minister, a state legislator and a former state Superior Court judge — their names matching those on Marietta's street signs, office buildings, shopping centers and law offices today.

One of those involved in the hanging was Joseph Mackey Brown, a former governor of Georgia and my own great grandfather.

Leo Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986.

An engineer and superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank was convicted on August 25, 1913 for the murder of one of his factory workers, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. She had been strangled on April 26 and was found dead in the factory cellar the next day.

Frank was the last person known to have seen her alive, and there were allegations that he had flirted with her before. His trial became the focus of powerful class, regional and political interests.

Raised in New York, he was cast as a representative of Yankee capitalism, a rich northern Jew lording it over vulnerable working women, as the historian Albert Lindemann put it.

Former U.S. Representative Thomas E. Watson used the sensational coverage of the case in his own publications to push for a revival of the Ku Klux Klan, calling Frank a member of the Jewish aristocracy who had pursued "our little girl" to a hideous death.

Frank and his lawyers resorted to stereotypes too, accusing another suspect — Jim Conley, a black factory worker who testified against Frank — of being especially disposed to lying and murdering because of his race. There was jubilation in the streets when Frank was convicted and sentenced to death.

By June, 1915, his appeals had failed, but Governor John M. Slaton believed there had been a miscarriage of justice, so he commuted the sentence to life imprisonment — to great local outrage.

A crowd of 1,200 marched on Slaton's home in protest, and two months later Frank was kidnapped from prison by a lynch mob of 25 armed men who called themselves "Knights of Mary Phagan.”

Frank was driven 150 miles to Frey's Gin, near Phagan's home in Marietta, and murdered. A crowd gathered after the lynching. One man repeatedly stomped on Frank's face, while others took photographs, pieces of his nightshirt and bits of the rope to sell as souvenirs.

On March 11, 1986, the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles granted Frank a pardon, citing the state's failure to protect him or prosecute his killers, though they stopped short of exonerating him.

The names of Frank's murderers were well-known locally but were not made public until January 7, 2000, when Stephen Goldfarb, an Atlanta librarian and former history professor, published the Phagan-Kean list on his website.