I have a feeling we’re going to see a wave of unseen 9/11 footage over the next five years.
CCTV that has sat in archives for decades. Private tapes people are finally digitizing. FOIA requests that keep chipping away at government collections. And growing public pressure to release material that has never been seen.
The recent fight over unreleased World Trade Center PATH CCTV is a good example.
Twenty-five years later, it increasingly feels like we still haven’t seen everything.
Why is this white man relevant to Black history? He was one of the Freedom Riders. In 1960, he was on a bus full of Freedom Riders who arrived in Montgomery Alabama where an angry whitē mob was waiting for them. He volunteered to get off the bus first and take the brunt of the mob's viõlence, which left him beàten and blòody. His name was James Zwerg.
Cantor Fitzgerald, an American financial services firm whose offices occupied floors 101-105 of 1 World Trade Center (which were totally destroyed), announces that 658 of the company’s 960 employees (68.5% of the total workforce) are missing, which is a considerably-larger rate of casualty than any other company that occupied the World Trade Center.
CEO Howard Lutnick visibly cries as he talks with reporters about the dead and missing.
Lutnick was late to work on the morning of rhe 11th, but he stood outside the North Tower looking for people from his company - but slowly, it dawned on him that nobody was coming. Nobody at all came from above the impact site.
Looting, Arrest & Murder
There were darker stories unfolding around 9/11 that rarely get talked about.
Looting: In November, the New York Post ran the headline “RANSACKING RATS IGNORED DEATH ALL AROUND THEM,” reporting that more than a dozen people had been accused of looting around Ground Zero. Stores in and around the World Trade Center were hit, with watches, electronics, clothing and other merchandise taken from the wreckage.
Arrest: Photographer Bolivar Arellano captured this striking image of a handcuffed man in Lower Manhattan. In the Naudet footage, you can actually see Bolivar notice the man before moving in and taking the photograph. My understanding is that the man was detained amid the fear and suspicion of that morning but was never charged, and his identity never became public.
Murder: Around 11:40 p.m., just 20 minutes before September 11 ended, Polish immigrant Henryk Siwiak was shot and killed in Brooklyn while trying to get to his first night at a new job. He had gotten bad directions and ended up in the wrong neighborhood. His murder remains unsolved.
One day, three very different stories from the chaos surrounding it.
thank you @JavonDiggs11322 for your insights on this story.