Part 10 in a series... June  1989

BEIJING--Chinese children flash "victory" signs for their camera holding parents. 

One this day 20 years ago  there were no police on the streets, the students controlled the square and rumors filled the air. June 2 was the last day of any hope or optimism before things became very dark. 

 I was looking for images from June 1 and 2 in the back of a file cabinet and  while squinting at the negatives I realized  a large number of people were bringing their kids to Tiananmen Square to pose in front of the Goddesss of Democracy on those days. 

 I dug a couple of  negatives out of an old envelope and scanned them and saw them for the first time.   I wonder  what happened to the pictures  that thier parents took?. These same  kids, now in their 20's, probably have little memory of the event and  the historical record has been erased.  

These images were never transmitted or "moved" on the newswire. I'm including them here because we're so used to seeing the usual sets of images from that time that many of the small details..like the presence of children,  can easily be forgotten.

This is part of an effort to post images from exactly 20 years ago in Beijing. The original post:

http://open.salon.com/blog/ed_nachtrieb/2009/05/11/history_is_real