In sentence 1, I would prefer using past continuous (he was holding the hand ...), because using past simple will make it sounds like he held some white girl's hand habitually. (Note: If you change because to after, I think held will be more appropriate. It should also be even more appropriate than past perfect, in my opinion.)
To explain why using past continuous (or past progressive) is preferred, here is the closest entry I can find in Practical English Usage by Michael Swan.
422 past (2): past progressive (I was working etc)
3 past progressive and simple past: 'background' events
We often use the past progressive together with a simple past tense. The past progressive refers to a longer 'background' action or situation; the simple past refers to a shorter action or event that happened in the middle of the longer action, or that interrupted it.
As I was walking down the road, I saw Bill.
The phone rang while I was having dinner.
Mozart died while he was composing the Requiem.
In sentence 2, if you have this sentence alone:
Fans (queued/were queuing) overnight at a Hollywood music shop for the chance to get Lady Gaga's autograph.
I would say that either queued or were queuing can be used, depending on the way you want to narrate the scene. If you were a journalist writing it as a news, I think using queued would be more appropriate. However, if you were an anchor reporting the news, using were queuing would be more appropriate. This is because, according to my observation, TV news anchors usually use progressive tenses to arouse our attention, to make us feel as if we were in the scene of the news they are reporting.
However, when you gave the full passage,
Fans (queued/were queuing) overnight at a Hollywood music shop for the chance to get Lady Gaga's autograph. While they were waiting, Gaga saw their tweets. She immediately ordered 80 takeaway pizzas and sent them to her fans in case they were hungry.
I changed my preference to queued immediately. The reason is because it will provide the background (or the first reference time [ref.], if you prefer) for the whole story. Besides, there is already one use of the past progressive (... they were waiting, ...) as the main event of the whole story, which is sufficient for a news report.
Both versions are 100% grammatically and idiomatically correct. They have nearly identical meanings, but offer slightly different opportunities for usage.
Miguel came to the presentation but he seemed very distracted and he did not listen to anything that the speaker said.
In this sentence, the presentation is over and we know that Miguel never paid attention.
Miguel came to the presentation but he seemed very distracted and he was not listening to anything that the speaker said.
There are two possibilities for this sentence.
- Alone it means exactly the same as the "did not listen" version.
- With some additional description of his behavior, it describes Miguel's ongoing actions during the meeting, but offers the possibility that they were interrupted at some point.
Miguel came to the presentation but he seemed very distracted and he was not listening to anything that the speaker said. However, the speaker was so skillful a lecturer that soon he was as captivated as the rest of the audience.
We would use this second version to tell the story of Miguel at the presentation if that story was more involved than "He didn't listen."
Best Answer
The basic idea of the past continuous is to describe an action that is ongoing and incomplete, usually an ongoing action that is interrupted by another action (which would be in simple past):
For example, this would be entirely correct:
This is a little unclear, because you presumably kept sitting after the point in time described, so the sitting could be thought of as incomplete. But the continuous activity provides an ongoing context for the simple activity; it encompasses or encloses the simple activity. For example, we could also say this:
Now, we could simplify this a bit by changing the simple behaviors so that they don't imply ongoing activity:
There are a few usages that might seem a bit different, but are really the same:
In the first case, the planning is ongoing, and interrupted by the decision to stay home. In the second case, the wondering is still ongoing at the point of asking, so it is more grammatically correct to use the present perfect continuous ("I have been wondering if you might be able to lend me a dollar"), but idiomatically we use the past continuous in this situation.