Tag Archives: Ju’Coby Pittman

Lost Smiles on Moving Day, 1973

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The moment would have vanished entirely, but for these few photos Lon King took in 1973. The Housing Department was demolishing the house and the duplex where the five kids lived next door. Fifty years later, the land is still empty. He’d moved downtown for work, grown his hair, rode his bikes through the empty streets. He still wonders what happened to those kids.

The Clara White Mission Remains the Humanitarian Heart of Jax

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If the goodness, kindness, and mercy enacted in a particular building, on a certain quadrant of earth, can accrue across the years, then the Clara White Mission should be a pilgrimage site and 613 Ashley Street in LaVilla is sacred ground.

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At the turn of 1974, Eartha was the tiny, bird-like, Old-Testament-but-New-Testament saint at the center of town. She died in January. I was born in June. I so wish I could have met her.

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When I saw Eartha White look out at me from the open doors of Roosevelt Watson III’s major artwork, I saw her as I’d never seen her but also as she’d visited me, angelically and ghostly, when I’d most needed to find her before.

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