On June 13, 1777, a 19-year-old French teenager landed on a beach in South Carolina, uninvited, to fight in someone else's war. He would become one of the most important men in American history.
The Marquis de Lafayette was one of the richest young aristocrats in France. He had a beautiful wife, a fortune, and zero reason to risk any of it. But he believed in the American cause so fiercely that when the French king forbade him from going, Lafayette bought his own ship and sailed anyway. He literally went AWOL from a life of luxury to bleed for a country that didn't exist yet.
Congress was annoyed at first. Another foreign officer looking for a paycheck? Then Lafayette offered to serve for free and pay his own way. That got their attention.
He met Washington and the two formed one of the great father-son bonds in American history. Washington had no biological children. Lafayette named his only son George Washington Lafayette.
He took a bullet in the leg at Brandywine and kept rallying the retreat. He was instrumental at Yorktown, the battle that won the war. He went home a hero on two continents.
A foreign teenager believed in America before America did. 249 years ago today.
“We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future." - President John F. Kennedy.
https://t.co/jPH64auS9Q
On June 12, 1963, a WWII veteran was shot in the back in his own driveway while his wife and children hid inside. It took 31 years to convict his killer.
Medgar Evers stormed Normandy at 19. He came home to Mississippi and was turned away from voting at gunpoint. So he dedicated his life to the NAACP: investigating the Emmett Till murder, organizing boycotts, registering Black voters. He knew it would kill him. "If I die, it will be in a good cause," he said.
Hours before his death, President Kennedy gave his historic civil rights address on national TV. Evers came home after midnight carrying NAACP T-shirts that read "Jim Crow Must Go." Byron De La Beckwith was waiting across the street with a rifle.
The details still stop your heart. Evers was initially refused admission at the local hospital because he was Black. He died there 50 minutes later, the first Black man ever admitted, too late.
Beckwith was tried twice in 1964. Two all-white juries deadlocked. He spent decades free, bragging about it at Klan rallies. That bragging became evidence. In 1994, new testimony and a new jury finally convicted him. He died in prison.
Medgar Evers is buried at Arlington with full military honors. He was 37 years old.
He died 63 years ago today. Remember him.
On June 6, 1966, Roy Orbison was following his wife Claudette on his car as she rode her motorcycle.
A truck pulled out. She swerved. Crashed.
Roy held her body in the road, screaming.
Claudette was 25 years old.
When the police arrived, they found her purse. Inside was a pregnancy test. Positive.
She had planned to tell him that night. He never knew until it was too late.
Roy stopped performing for a year. The stage, the lights, the audience — nothing mattered.
Then, in 1968, disaster struck again. His house caught fire. Two of his three sons died in the blaze.
Most people would have vanished from the world entirely.
Roy did not.
He wrote. He cried. He poured grief into melodies because there was nowhere else to put it. Songs built from a loss that had no bottom. Lyrics that carried what his heart could not release.
For decades, he carried the weight silently.
In 1988, Roy Orbison died of a heart attack at 52.
When they went through his wallet, they found it. Claudette’s pregnancy test. Still there. Twenty-two years later.
He had carried it every single day.
His final album, recorded just weeks before he died, was titled — *She's a Mystery to Me*.
Some grief doesn’t fade.
It doesn’t end.
It becomes the quietest, most permanent part of who you are.
Every note he sang, every melody he wrote afterward, held a piece of that silence.
Roy Orbison carried his love and his loss together, letting the sorrow shape the music itself.
And in doing so, he transformed tragedy into art that could be heard, felt, and remembered.
Some memories never leave.
Some grief never lets go.
Some love lasts beyond life, quietly shaping everything left behind.
One retweet of this puts "I love the inflation" in front of someone who voted for him to lower prices.
That's how he loses. One share at a time.
🔁 #TrumpLovesTheInflation
She was born on a cotton plantation in South Carolina in 1927. She had no birth certificate. She did not know her father's name. By age 3, her own mother had abandoned her. And by 1963, she was the most exciting woman in the world — crouched on a concrete floor in Australia, trying to teach her 23-month-old daughter that life holds nothing to fear.
That little girl in the red tights is Kitt McDonald. Her mother is Eartha Kitt.
And this photo, shot on Kodachrome film, captures something most people never knew existed — a woman of extraordinary tenderness, behind one of the most ferocious lives ever lived.
Let's start at the beginning.
Eartha Mae Keith was born on January 17, 1927, in a tiny town called North, in Orangeburg County, South Carolina. Her mother was of Black and Cherokee heritage. Her father was believed to be a white plantation owner — a name South Carolina authorities reportedly protected well into the 21st century.
She never knew who he was.
At around 3 years old, her mother abandoned her. She was sent to live with a neighbor. That neighbor treated her like a servant, punished her for eating too much, and allowed abuse in that household that no child should ever endure. Then, at around age 7, she was sent to live with an aunt in Harlem, New York. That home was no safer.
She described herself simply: "Just a poor cotton picker from the South."
Here's what makes her story extraordinary.
From those beginnings — no family, no name, no protection — she built herself into something the world had never seen. She taught herself to dance. She caught the eye of legendary choreographer Katherine Dunham in 1945 at age 18. She toured Europe with Dunham's dance company. She learned to speak 4 languages fluently: English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.
Orson Welles cast her in a Paris stage production in 1950 and called her "the most exciting woman in the world."
By 1953, at age 26, she had 2 recordings that became timeless classics: "C'est si bon" and the Christmas novelty hit "Santa Baby." Both are still played everywhere, more than 70 years later.
On June 9, 1960, she married real estate investor John William McDonald. On November 26, 1961, their daughter Kitt McDonald was born in Los Angeles. Eartha refused to leave her daughter behind during tours. She brought Kitt everywhere — across continents, across time zones, into every dressing room and every foreign city.
That is how a 36-year-old global star ends up crouched on a floor in Australia in 1963, showing a baby kangaroo to a 23-month-old girl with windswept blonde hair.
But here's what was quietly building behind that smile.
January 18, 1968. Eartha Kitt is invited to a White House luncheon by First Lady Lady Bird Johnson. The subject is juvenile delinquency. Eartha has been working with a youth nonprofit called "Rebels with a Cause" in Washington D.C. She is there as an activist and a voice.
When it comes time to speak, she stands up and looks directly at Lady Bird Johnson.
"You send the best of this country off to be shot and maimed," she says. "They rebel in the streets. They will take pot and they will get high. They don't want to go to school because they're going to be snatched off from their mothers to be shot in Vietnam."
The room goes silent. Completely silent.
President Johnson is furious. The CIA opens a file on Eartha Kitt. The dossier fills with fabricated accusations. At the bottom of the file, according to Eartha herself, it reads: "Specifically requested by Lady Bird and President Johnson."
She later told Whoopi Goldberg that the Johnsons contacted television networks and media across the nation and said they did not want to see her face on their screens.
She was 41 years old. Her career in America was destroyed overnight.
No car was sent to take her home from the White House that day. She had arrived by limousine. She left by taxi.
For nearly a decade, she worked almost exclusively in Europe. Club owners in America told her: "You're a problem." She kept performing. She kept touring. She brought her daughter Kitt along.
In 1975, 7 years after the luncheon, the New York Times revealed that the CIA had secretly compiled a surveillance report on Eartha Kitt following that lunch. The truth finally reached the public. Outrage followed.
She was welcomed back.
She went on to win a Tony Award for her Broadway role in Timbuktu! in 1978. She voiced Yzma in Disney's The Emperor's New Groove in 2000. She won 2 Daytime Emmy Awards. She worked until the very end of her life, performing and recording into her 80s while battling colon cancer.
She died on Christmas Day, December 25, 2008, at age 81, at her home in Connecticut. Her daughter Kitt was by her side.
That little girl in Australia grew up to write a memoir titled Eartha & Kitt: A Daughter's Love Story in Black and White. In it, she described 3 decades of traveling the world alongside her mother. Every dressing room. Every foreign city. Every stage.
Eartha Kitt once said: "I don't think there is anything I have done that I wish I hadn't done. Because I learn from everything I do. I'm in school every day. My diploma will be my tombstone."
A girl abandoned at age 3 with nothing. A woman who stood in the White House and told the most powerful people in the world the truth. A mother who crouched on a concrete floor in Australia in 1963, showing her daughter a kangaroo, teaching her there is nothing to fear.
Share this with someone who needs to know — the most powerful thing a person can do is refuse to be silent, no matter the cost.
Every fact is “fake news”
Every protest is “paid agitators”
Everything they don’t like is a “hoax”
Every election they lose is “rigged”
Imagine being so fucking weak and pathetic that you have to invent an alternate reality because you’re incapable of dealing with the truth.
The inflation rate in Biden's last month in office was 2.9%. Trump (supported by a Republican Congress) has driven it up to 4.2%.
Thank you, voters, for your attention to this matter.
https://t.co/2BWtpX5aEf
@CatherineM0yim@LawCat281545@magi_jay Janet Mills current Gov of ME, would beat Collins. She dropped out of the race cuz DC Dems were reluctant to help her campaign with some $$$
Relatives of U.S. airmen whose planes were downed over central Germany in World War II witnessed the recent unveiling of a rare memorial honoring both the Americans and some of those they fought against. (from @pwwellman) https://t.co/bMcPTR2NPH
Happy Birthday Dr Fauci!!
Thank you!
Physician w National Institutes of Health, he served American public health for 51 years,advisor to every president since Reagan. As director of NIAID he made invaluable contributions to HIV/AIDS research and other immunodeficiency diseases
We were absolutely floored by the millions of you that watched us make silly water sillouettes on our driveway last summer. We are starting out the summer the only way we know how, and this time it’s all about movies! What else do you want to see? We have a whole summer ahead, a driveway and a hose. The possibilities are endless!!!
🔥🔥🔥 TRUMP & EPSTEIN ARE SEX TRAFFICKERS & I’m gonna post this every day so nobody forgets exactly who Pedophile Trump is and why the Epstein files have suddenly disappeared.