== discussion moved from article == 

 *As Great Fire raged in city, racism may have smolderedThe link to this story on Jacksonville.com (the official web site of The Florida Times-Union) is broken, forwarding the reader to a "404" error message. A search of its web site from this page does not find the story, but a reader may be more successful with a search originating on the newspaper's main page. The article quotes a passage from Along This Way, the autobiography of author, diplomat and civil rights leader James Weldon Johnson. Johnson grew up in Jacksonville, and alleges that the fire might have been controlled in the beginning, but that a conscious decision, based on racism, was made to ignore the fire's path in the city's black neighborhoods. The article was created as part of a tab titled "Postcards from the Past," a special section created for Black History Month more than a decade ago. It was included in the Times-Union's regular issue, and was also distributed to area schools for use in the classroom by sixth-graders (the language is purposely written at a sixth-grade reading level). As a former Times-Union writer, I am the author of the original article, but the piece was created as a work for hire, and the Times-Union holds the copyright [verifiable by The Times-Union]. Please note that the story has been plagiarized several times with minimal changes and appears elsewhere on the Web under different bylines [verifiable by Web search].  Sharon Weightman Hoffmann