Black History

black history

past and present

HISTORY IS A PEOPLE'S MEMORY, AND WITHOUT A MEMORY, MAN IS DEMOTED TO THE

LOWER ANIMALS.

MALCOLM X

FEBRUARY 2023

THE RT. HON. MARCUS GARVEY: "A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots."

A sculpture depicting the slave trade at the entrance of the National Memorial for Peace And Justice. Photograph: Bob Miller/Getty Images

The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities

- he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.

Malcolm X

articles of interest

HOWARD THURMAN'S "FASCIST MASQUERADE": THE BLACK THINKER WHO SAW THIS COMING, 75 YEARS AGO(ARTICLE BELOW)

THE HIDDEN STORY OF WHEN TWO BLACK COLLEGE STUDENTS WERE TARRED AND FEATHERED
(ARTICLE BELOW)

SLAVE-BUILT INFRASTRUCTURE STILL CREATES WEALTH IN US, SUGGESTING REPARATIONS SHOULD COVER PAST HARMS AND CURRENT VALUE OF SLAVERY(ARTICLE BELOW)

He fought for Black voting rights after the Civil War. He was almost killed for it.
(ARTICLE BELOW)

Feminism, flour bombs and the first black Miss World
(ARTICLE BELOW)

Curator Uncovers Black Baseball Team That Dominated Before Integration of Sport
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NEXT FORD-CLASS CARRIER TO BE NAMED AFTER PEARL HARBOR HERO DORIS MILLER
(ARTICLE BELOW)

GI BILL OPENED DOORS TO COLLEGE FOR MANY VETS, BUT POLITICIANS CREATED A SEPARATE ONE FOR BLACKS(ARTICLE BELOW)

A rural town confronts its buried history of mass killings of black Americans
(ARTICLE BELOW)

Red Summer, 100 Years Later: When the White Mob Was Unleashed on Black America
(ARTICLE BELOW)

6 Important Things You May Not Know About Juneteenth — But Should
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Marsha P. Johnson: Transgender hero of Stonewall riots finally gets her due
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GROUNDBREAKING WORLD WAR II UNIT OF BLACK WOMEN HONORED DECADES AFTER THEIR SERVICE(ARTICLE BELOW)

SLAVERY: LAST KNOWN US SLAVE SHIP FOUND IN ALABAMA
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The Brown V. Board Of Education Case Didn't Start How You Think It Did
(ARTICLE BELOW)

Mary Elizabeth Bowser: Spy of the Confederate White House
(ARTICLE BELOW)

Researchers, Descendents Seek Recognition for Africans Who Were Central to the Success of England’s First Settlement In U.S. (ARTICLE BELOW)

HERE ARE 9 MLK QUOTES YOU WON’T HEAR MAINSTREAM MEDIA CITE TODAY
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FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM REVIEW: A MONUMENTAL BIOGRAPHY
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Coard: Tuskegee syphilis study’s Black ‘guinea pigs’
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WHEN WHITE MALE RAPE WAS LEGAL
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U.S., historian battle over unsealing records on 1946 lynching
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Quakers to honor slaves buried on their land in Bucks County
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'Our history is getting erased': the biggest threat to Sandy Island's Gullah is not hurricanes
(ARTICLE BELOW)

Meet Haiti’s Founding Father — His Black Revolution Was Too Radical for Thomas Jefferson(ARTICLE BELOW)

A MASS GRAVE OF PRISON LABORERS IN TEXAS SHOULD BE RESPECTED, NOT PAVED OVER
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Legacy of Slavery, Segregation Impacts Debate on Talbot Boys Statue In Maryland
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Tennessee reopens civil rights cold case from 1940
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Coard: Last slave ship docked 158 years ago
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Burial Site of Nearly 5,000 Newly Freed Blacks Covered by Playground to Get Memorial
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When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday
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White Politicians Have Been Coercing African-Americans to Vote Since Before the Civil Rights Era(ARTICLE BELOW)

York plans statue of African-American
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The Army’s First Black Nurses Were Relegated to Caring for Nazi Prisoners of War
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The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced
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How African-Americans disappeared from the Kentucky Derby
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Ida B Wells: the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement
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THE NATIONAL MEMORIAL FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE
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This massacre of black soldiers during the Civil War is reason enough to bring down the Confederate statues(ARTICLE BELOW)

Women’s Empowerment Was a Big Deal In African Societies, Before Christianity and Islam(ARTICLE BELOW)

Coard: Ota Benga, an African, caged in American Zoos(ARTICLE BELOW)

Enslaved Black People: The Part of the Trail of Tears Narrative No One Told You About
(ARTICLE BELOW)

THE BLACK WOMAN WHO RESISTED SEGREGATION IN CANADA WILL NOW APPEAR ON ITS CURRENCY
(ARTICLE BELOW)

J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.: ‘Superb Mathematician’ Broke Barriers at Dawn of Atomic Age
(ARTICLE BELOW)

Their forefathers were enslaved. Now, 400 years later, their children will be landowners
(ARTICLE BELOW)

COARD: GEORGE WASHINGTON'S TEETH NOT FROM WOOD BUT SLAVES(ARTICLE BELOW)

Tony McGee got kicked out of Wyoming with the Black 14 but still made it to the Super Bowl
(ARTICLE BELOW)

The Secret History of the White House’s Kitchen Slaves(ARTICLE BELOW)

'Still fighting': Africatown, site of last US slave shipment, sues over pollution(ARTICLE BELOW)

The DNA of Iceland's First Known Black Man, Recreated from His Living Descendants
(ARTICLE BELOW)

The Myth of Black Confederates
And the rise of fake racial tolerance(ARTICLE BELOW)

A CENTURY LATER, A LITTLE-KNOWN MASS HANGING OF BLACK SOLDIERS STILL HAUNTS US(ARTICLE BELOW)

VROOM VROOM: THE SHORT, BUT POIGNANT HISTORY OF BLACK AMERICANS IN THE WORLD OF NASCAR(ARTICLE BELOW)

ROY MOORE: ACCEPTANCE OF PEDOPHILLIA IN THE SOUTH IS A LEGACY OF SLAVERY(excerpt below)

HOW AFRICAN AMERICAN WWII VETERANS WERE SCORNED BY THE G.I. BILL(ARTICLE BELOW)

THE TIRELESS ABOLITIONIST NOBODY EVER HEARD OF(ARTICLE BELOW)

*IGNORANCE EXTOLLED: FORCED ANTHEM ADHERENCE ANTITHETICAL TO JUSTICE(ARTICLE BELOW)

the father of black history

Carter G. Woodson was the second African American to receive a doctorate from Harvard, after W.E.B. Du Bois. Known as the "Father of Black History," Woodson dedicated his career to the field of African American history and lobbied extensively to establish Black History Month as a nationwide institution.

Early Life
Carter Godwin Woodson was born on December 19, 1875, in New Canton, Virginia, to Anna Eliza Riddle Woodson and James Woodson. The fourth of seven children, young Woodson worked as a sharecropper and a miner to help his family. He began high school in his late teens and proved to be an excellent student, completing a four-year course of study in less than two years.

Associations and Publications
In 1915, Woodson helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (later named the Association for the Study of African American Life and History), which had the goal of placing African American historical contributions front and center.

america!!!

How Stephen Smith, once the richest Black man in U.S., used his wealth to free thousands of African Americans

Stephen Nartey - Face2FaceAfrica
2/6/2023

One of his notable legacies is getting 15,000 people of African descent to move to Canada after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850. His commitment to fighting slavery stemmed from the fact that he was born into slavery.
Abolitionist Stephen Smith became aware of his status when he was separated from his mother at the age of five and given out to Pennsylvanian businessman Thomas Boude as an indentured servant. Boude, who was a former revolutionary war officer from Lancaster County, placed Smith in charge of his lumber business, according to Stephen Smith House.

His mother, Nancy Smith, was a slave so she had no choice concerning his fate. But when Smith was 21, he raised $50 to purchase his freedom on January 3, 1816. Smith was born in 1725 in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. He married Harriet Lee on November 17, 1816, while she was still working as a servant in the Jonathan Mifflin home.
He ventured into the lumber business shortly after he gained his freedom. He operated his business in Columbia, Pennsylvania. He expanded his business when he became successful. He partnered with William Whipper in 1830 as part of his vision to establish a global conglomerate with the lumber business as the central focus.

Smith and Whipper ran a lucrative business and soon diversified into coal, real estate, railroad cars as well as other investments in the stock market. Smith became known as the richest Black man in America. As part of giving back to society, Smith and Whipper decided to use their wealth to fight slavery. His efforts earned him the Chairman of the African American Abolitionist Organization in 1830.

In 1831, he was ordained in the Mt. Zion A.M.E. Church on South Fifth Street, Columbia. The white community began sabotaging his business when they realized the success of his business. In 1835 a mob of whites destroyed his office including his documents and records.

Instead of being deterred and cowed into submission, Smith prioritized his agenda of combating slavery. He purchased a safe house where he held meetings with the black community. He helped many enslaved Africans to escape from Maryland to Canada.

He kicked against a policy instituted by the American Colonisation Society and demonstrated his stiff resistance by leading free blacks in Columbia in a public meeting in 1831. He partnered with other abolitionists such as David Ruffles, John Peck, Abraham Shadd and John B. Cash.

Though he was the largest shareholder of the Columbia Bank, the color of his skin made it impossible for them to name him as the President of the bank. The power he had was to name a white man in his stead. His dream was that the African-American community would be empowered and free someday.

Smith died in 1873.

Howard Thurman's "Fascist Masquerade": The Black thinker who saw this coming, 75 years ago

At the end of World War II, pioneering religious thinker Howard Thurman saw fascism coming to Christian America

By PETER EISENSTADT - salon
FEBRUARY 13, 2021 5:00PM (UTC)

...The problem with calling anyone or any movement fascist is that "fascism" is likely the slipperiest term in our political vocabulary. And there is the further problem that there has never been a large avowedly fascist movement in the United States. But if we look at the perpetrators of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol — with their Confederate flags, their claims to be religious warriors for Jesus, their beliefs that those opposing them were traitors — we see elements that have been common in descriptions of American fascism for a century. In the words of one commentator on the subject:

These organizations exploit the active and latent prejudices that the average American has against the non-white races on the one hand and against the Jewish people on the other. They make it possible for a creative rationalization to provide a cloak for group hatreds which can be objectified as true Christianity or true Americanism. In other words, they provide for a legitimizing of sadistic and demonical impulses of which, under normal circumstances they might be ashamed. To appeal to anti-Negro sentiment in many sections, communities and among many groups is a "natural" for the would-be demagogue. It is sure fire.

The word "Negro" is a likely giveaway, but this is not a reflection on recent events. It was written by the African American religious thinker, Howard Thurman (1899–1981), a pioneering advocate of radical nonviolence, an inspiration to the Black Freedom Struggle, a mentor to such civil rights pioneers as James Farmer, Pauli Murray and Martin Luther King Jr., and published in a 1946 essay titled "The Fascist Masquerade." The essay is one of Thurman's most urgent yet enduring political works. Its inspiration was Thurman's sense that the United States, shortly after the end of World War II, was at a crossroads. Either the post-war period would see the furthering of the tentative wartime gains by Black Americans for full citizenship, or it would see those aspirations crushed, as had happened so many times before, by a ferocious pushback by the maintainers and abetters of what Thurman called "the will to segregation."

Thurman, to be sure, was an optimist. In 1944 he left a comfortable position as dean of chapel at Howard University to co-found a small, fledgling congregation in San Francisco, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, one of the first churches in the U.S. intentionally organized on an interracial and interdenominational basis. At the same time, he was a realist. He wrote in 1943 that the war against Japan "has given excellent justification for the expression of the prejudices against non-white peoples just under the surface of the American consciousness." In his wartime travels he found "the picture is the same everywhere — sporadic outbursts of violence, meanness, murder, and bloodshed." Black Americans were angry, and many whites were furious that they were no longer hiding their anger. The United States had to choose between democracy and fascism, and for Thurman the outcome was uncertain. But he was sure that American fascism would hide behind a homegrown vocabulary drawn from a toxic and intolerant Christianity and ultra-Americanism, disguising their real beliefs and intents. This was the fascist masquerade.

For Thurman, the key to the ideology of fascism was the belief in inequality, the belief that the world was invidiously divided between the haves and have-nots, those favored, whom the state would help, and those out of favor, to whom the state disclaimed and denied any responsibility. Fascism was a worldview that built upon all existing inequalities; whether of race, class, nationality or what have you, and consciously tried to exacerbate those differences. And that was how business elites and the common racial prejudices of most white Americans could find common ground in fascism.

By 1946 Thurman was very concerned by the growing strength of anti-union sentiment in post-war America. Among the fascist organizations he considered in detail in his essay was the now quite obscure Christian American Association. Based in Houston, it was a racist, anti-labor and anti-Semitic organization whose one lasting contribution to American history was to popularize the term "right to work" while working to help enact the nation's first such laws, banning the "closed" or union shop, in Arkansas and Florida, in 1944. (One reason for such laws, the organization stated, was so "white men and women" would not be forced to work with "black African apes.") Thurman thought the Christian American Association had the perfect name for an American fascist organization.

Another, much better-known group Thurman wrote about was the Ku Klux Klan, which some observers had labeled fascist even before Benito Mussolini seized power in Italy in 1922. The Klan, in its various incarnations, had an exceptional longevity whereas, as Thurman wrote, most "hate organizations spring up, flourish for a season, disappear, and reappear in another form." The organizational form of such groups was less important than their continuing appeal, he added, noting that "an important part of the menace of fascism is its property as a catalyst," how its appeal "crystallizes moods, attitudes, and fears already in solution."

Thurman's enduring insight was that was a mistake to see hate organizations like the Klan as somehow outside the political mainstream. They were merely the far edge of a society that tolerated inequalities of all kinds as part of its civic and political life. To counter hate organizations it was "no answer to say" that hate organizations represent "a false interpretation of Christianity" or America. They represented the church and the state only too well. Traditional Protestant Christianity, he thought, with its ironclad division between the saved and the damned, provided the template for all the invidious distinctions that underlined American racism and fascism. As for American democracy, in the gap between the soaring promises of the Declaration of Independence and the uglier realities was a space in which economic and social inequalities could fester and become accepted as natural or even essential parts of American society and religion. This allowed, Thurman wrote, "the various hate-inspired groups to establish squatter's rights" in our basic institutions.

What would Thurman have to say about Donald Trump and the Capitol insurrection? Such retrospective ventriloquizing is always dangerous, but it is fair to say that he would have been appalled, and would have been dismayed that for all the changes in the United States since 1946, the descendants of the Christian American Association are still engaged in a version of the same old Christian American fascist masquerade.

For Thurman, the most pressing danger of the fascist masquerade was its protean quality, its myriad guises and disguises. It was all too easy to become inured to its prevalence. It is not enough to oppose the KKK or their latter-day descendants such as the Proud Boys. We must look to the ways inequalities between persons are tolerated in our society as a whole. We must look to ourselves, and examine the ways we tolerate inequalities of all kinds in our own lives and politics. Thurman argued that we must "rely upon the guarantee of God in whom all life and all of the great potentials of mind and spirit are grounded. Such a position establishes the infinite worth of all individuals and denies that for which fascism stands."

We may see this struggle in more secular terms than Thurman, and we may believe that implementing a society based on the "infinite worth of all individuals," where no one is a means to another person's ends, is a utopian dream. At the same time, we need to confront the reality that almost 75 years after Thurman wrote his essay, the fascist masquerade, with its facades, its lies, its true believers and silent supporters, and its chilling willingness to resort to violence, is still very much with us, and seems to be growing stronger, not weaker. And as Thurman wrote in 1946, in 2021 we still stand at a crossroads, and still face the same stark choice: Democracy or fascism.

The hidden story of when two Black college students were tarred and feathered

the conversation
February 8, 2021 8.37am EST

The Courtney brothers, pictured tarred and feathered inside the livestock-viewing pavilion on the University of Maine’s campus. Seth Pinkham papers, Fogler Library, University of Maine

One cold April night in 1919, at around 2 a.m., a mob of 60 rowdy white students at the University of Maine surrounded the dorm room of Samuel and Roger Courtney in Hannibal Hamlin Hall. The mob planned to attack the two Black brothers from Boston in retaliation for what a newspaper article described at the time as their “domineering manner and ill temper.” The brothers were just two among what yearbooks show could not have been more than a dozen Black University of Maine students at the time.

While no first-person accounts or university records of the incident are known to remain, newspaper clippings and photographs from a former student’s scrapbook help fill in the details.

Although outnumbered, the Courtney brothers escaped. They knocked three freshmen attackers out cold in the process. Soon a mob of hundreds of students and community members formed to finish what the freshmen had started. The mob captured the brothers and led them about four miles back to campus with horse halters around their necks.

Before a growing crowd at the livestock-viewing pavilion, members of the mob held down Samuel and Roger as their heads were shaved and their bodies stripped naked in the near-freezing weather. They were forced to slop each other with hot molasses. The mob then covered them with feathers from their dorm room pillows. The victims and bystanders cried out for the mob to stop but to no avail. Local police, alerted hours earlier, arrived only after the incident ended. No arrests were made.

Incidents of tarring and feathering as a form of public torture can be found throughout American history, from colonial times onward. In nearby Ellsworth, Maine, a Know Nothing mob, seen by some as a forerunner to the KKK, tarred and feathered Jesuit priest Father John Bapst in 1851. Especially leading into World War I, this method of vigilantism continued to be used by the KKK and other groups against Black Americans, immigrants and labor organizers, especially in the South and West. As with the Courtney brothers incident, substitutions like molasses or milkweed were made based on what was readily available. Although rarely fatal, victims of tarring and feathering attacks were not only humiliated by being held down, shaved, stripped naked and covered in a boiled sticky substance and feathers, but their skin often became burned and blistered or peeled off when solvents were used to remove the remnants.

Discovering the attack
When I first discovered the Courtney brothers incident in the summer of 2020 – as Black Lives Matter protests took place worldwide following the May death of George Floyd – it felt monumental to me. Not only am I a historian at the university where this shameful event occurred, but I’ve also devoted the past five years to tracking down information about the Red Summer of 1919, the name given to the nationwide wave of violence against Black Americans that year.
University alumni records and yearbooks indicate the Courtney brothers never finished their studies. One article mentions possible legal action against the university, although I couldn’t find evidence of it.

Local media like The Bangor Daily News and the campus newspaper reported nothing on the event. A search of databases populated with millions of pages of historic newspapers yielded just six news accounts of the Courtney brothers incident. Most were published in the greater Boston area where the family was prominent, or in the Black press. While most of white America was unaware of the attack, many Black Americans likely read about it in The Chicago Defender, the most prominent and widely distributed Black paper in the nation at the time.

Anyone with firsthand memory of the incident is long gone. Samuel passed away in 1929 with no descendants. Roger, who worked in real estate investment, died a year later, leaving a pregnant wife and toddler behind. Obituaries for both men are brief and provide no details about their deaths. My efforts to speak with Courtney family members are ongoing.

No condemnationThe tarring and feathering is also missing from official University of Maine histories. A brief statement from the university’s then-president, Robert J. Aley, claimed the event was nothing more than childish hazing that was “likely to happen any time, at any college, the gravity depending much upon the susceptibilities of the victim and the notoriety given it.” Rather than condemn the mob’s violence, his statement highlighted the fact that one of the brothers had previously violated unspecified campus rules, as if that justified the treatment the men received.

A cross-country searchWhen I began my research on the Red Summer in 2015, almost no documents about the events were digitized, and resources were spread out across the country at dozens of different institutions.
I spent much of 2015 on a 7,500-mile cross-country journey, scouring material at over 20 archives, libraries and historical societies nationwide. On that trip, I collected digital copies of over 700 documents about this harrowing spike in anti-Black violence, including photographs of bodies on fire, reports of Black churches burned, court documents and coroners’ reports, telegrams documenting local government reactions and incendiary editorials that fueled the fire.

I built a database of riot dates and locations, number of people killed, sizes of mobs, number of arrests, supposed instigating factors and related archival material to piece together how these events were all connected. This data allowed me to create maps, timelines and other methods of examining that moment in history. While each event was different, many trends emerged, such as the role of labor and housing tension spurred by the first wave of the Great Migration or the prevalence of attacks against Black soldiers that year.

The end result, Visualizing the Red Summer, is now used in classrooms around the country. It has been featured or cited by Teaching Human Rights, the National Archives, History.com and the American Historical Association, among others.

Yet most Americans have still never heard about the Black sharecroppers killed in the Elaine Massacre in Arkansas that year for organizing their labor or the fatal stoning of Black Chicago teenager Eugene Williams for floating into “white waters” in Lake Michigan. They weren’t taught about the Black World War I soldiers attacked in Charleston, South Carolina, and Bisbee, Arizona, during the Red Summer.

There is still work to do, but the recent anniversaries of events like the Tulsa Massacre or the Red Summer, which coincided with modern-day Black Lives Matter protests and the killings of Americans like Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, have sparked a renewed interest in the past.

This new discovery brings my research back home to campus. It has afforded me an opportunity to engage students with the events of the Red Summer in new ways.

As the humanities specialist at the McGillicuddy Humanities Center, I worked with students in a public history class in the fall of 2020 to design a digital exhibit and walking tour of hidden histories at the University of Maine. This tour includes the attack on the Courtney brothers. Intentionally forgotten stories, or those buried out of shame or trauma, exist everywhere. By uncovering these local stories, it will become more clear how acts of violence against people of color are not limited to a particular time or place, but are rather part of collective American history.

Slave-built infrastructure still creates wealth in US, suggesting reparations should cover past harms and current value of slavery

THE CONVERSATION
February 5, 2021 1.27pm EST

Picking cotton outside Savannah, Ga., in 1867. Library of Congress

American cities from Atlanta to New York City still use buildings, roads, ports and rail lines built by enslaved people.

The fact that centuries-old relics of slavery still support the economy of the United States suggests that reparations for slavery would need to go beyond government payments to the ancestors of enslaved people to account for profit-generating, slave-built infrastructure.

Debates about compensating Black Americans for slavery began soon after the Civil War, in the 1860s, with promises of “40 acres and a mule.” A national conversation about reparations has reignited in recent decades. The definition of reparations varies, but most advocates envision it as a two-part reckoning that acknowledges the role slavery played in building the country and directs resources to the communities impacted by slavery.

Through our geographic and urban planning scholarship, we document the contemporary infrastructure created by enslaved Black workers. Our study of what we call the “landscape of race” shows how the globally dominant economy of the United States traces directly back to slavery.

Looking again at railroads
While difficult to calculate, scholars estimate that much of the physical infrastructure built before 1860 in the American South was built with enslaved labor.

Railways were particularly critical infrastructure. According to “The American South,” an in-depth history of the region, railroads “offered solutions to the geographic barriers that segmented the South,” including swamps, mountains and rivers. For inland planters needing to get goods to port, trains were “the elemental precondition to better times.”

Our archival research on Montgomery, Alabama, shows that enslaved workers built and maintained the Montgomery Eufaula Railroad. This 81-mile-long railroad, begun in 1859, connected Montgomery to the Central Georgia Line, which served both Alabama’s fertile cotton-growing region – cotton picked by enslaved hands – and the textile mills of Georgia.

The Eufala Railroad also gave Alabama commercial access to the Port of Savannah. Savannah was a key cotton and rice trading port, and slavery was integral to the growth of the city.

Today, Savannah’s deep-water port remains one of the busiest container ports in the U.S. Among its top exports: cotton.

The Eufala Railroad closed in the 1970s. But the company that funded its construction – Lehman Durr & Co., a prominent Southern cotton brokerage – existed well into the 20th century.

Examining court affidavits and city records located in the Montgomery city archive, we learned the Montgomery Eufaula Railroad Company received US$1.8 million in loans from Lehman Durr & Co. The main backers of Lehman Durr & Co. went on to found Lehman Brothers bank, one of Wall Street’s largest investment banks until it collapsed in 2008, in the U.S. financial crisis.

Slave-built railroads also gave rise to Georgia’s largest city, Atlanta. In the 1830s, Atlanta was the terminus of a rail line that extended into the Midwest.

Some of these same rail lines still drive Georgia’s economy. According to a 2013 state report, railways that went through Georgia in 2012 carried over US$198 billion in agricultural products and raw materials needed for U.S. industry and manufacturing.

Rethinking reparations
Savannah, Atlanta and Montgomery all show how, far from being an artifact of history, as some critics of reparations suggest, slavery has a tangible presence in the American economy.

And not just in the South. Wall Street, in New York City, is associated with the trading of stocks. But in the 18th century, enslaved people were bought and sold there. Even after New York closed its slave markets, local businesses sold and shipped cotton grown in the slaveholding South.

Geographic research like ours could inform thinking on monetary reparations by helping to calculate the ongoing financial value of slavery.

Like scholarship drawing the connection between slavery and modern mass incarceration, however, our work also suggests that direct payments to indviduals cannot truly account for the modern legacy of slavery. It points toward a broader concept of reparations that reflects how slavery is built into the American landscape, still generating wealth.

Such reparations might include government investments in aspects of American life where Black people face disparities.

Last year the city council in Asheville, North Carolina, voted for “reparations in the form of community investment.” Priorities could include efforts to increase access to affordable housing and boost minority business ownership. Asheville will also explore strategies to close the racial gap in health care.

It is very difficult, perhaps impossible, to calculate the total contemporary economic impact of slavery. But we see recognizing that enslaved men, women and children built many of the cities, rail lines and ports that fuel the American economy as a necessary part of any such accounting.

He fought for Black voting rights after the Civil War. He was almost killed for it.

Jess McHugh - washington post
10/25/2020

From the floor of the Georgia Senate, Tunis G. Campbell could see the glint of firearms. As he spoke, his fellow senators moved their hands to the butts of their guns, gesturing ever more threateningly the longer Campbell held the floor. Undeterred, he went on. The state senator continued to speak for seven consecutive days, arguing for a simple right: to stand exactly where he was.

Campbell was Black. It was 1868, and after only a few months in office, his opponents had voted that his skin color alone disqualified him from holding political office. After the eighth day, Campbell headed to Washington to petition the federal government to reinstate him and several other Black political officeholders who had been denied their elected seats. He would stay in Washington for several months to lobby for bills promoting Reconstruction in Georgia. “We went on — although threatened by many rebel sympathizers that if I went to Washington again I should not live in Georgia,” he would later write in his autobiography.

He did return to live in Georgia, this time as a sworn state senator. His fight for the equal rights of Black citizens has been mostly forgotten, but Campbell was one of the earliest people in Reconstruction-era Georgia fighting voter suppression. Using a militia of several hundred people to protect himself and other Black residents from White violence, Campbell served as a labor organizer, justice of the peace, voter registrar and state senator.

Some 150 years later, amid racial justice protests and voter suppression efforts, Campbell remains emblematic of the struggle to ensure Black Americans not only the right to vote, but also to exercise the full scope of citizenship: as activists, as small-business owners and as politicians.

Campbell spent his life championing the rights of Black people, meeting with fierce resistance at every step. During the course of his political career, he would be threatened, suffer an attempted assassination, see his house burned down and even be imprisoned and put on a chain gang. Despite grave danger to his health and family, Campbell dedicated his life to ensuring that freedmen would be free in every sense of the word: safe from physical violence and exploitative labor practices, while being able to practice their constitutional rights. It was his work ensuring the enfranchisement of all voters that left its mark on McIntosh County, Ga., well into the 20th century.

Mississippi’s first black senator was greeted with applause. But it wouldn’t last.
Born in 1812, Campbell was the son of a free blacksmith in New Jersey. He worked as a head waiter in a New York City hotel before gaining recognition as an abolitionist and a preacher. He came to the South by order of a general under President Abraham Lincoln, who appointed Campbell as the guardian of several islands off the coast of Georgia.

By the mid-1860s, he was selected to be a registrar. He and a biracial group of registrars traveled to several counties registering voters, as part of a larger effort across the state. The several dozen statewide Black registrars were often greeted with brutal violence: Campbell and another Black registrar were poisoned. The other registrar died, according to Campbell.

Yet the drive to register voters in Reconstruction Georgia — both Black and White — was exceptionally successful. By the fall of 1867, approximately 80 percent of men, or nearly 200,000 potential voters, had been registered, according to historian Edmund L. Drago. That included not only recently emancipated Black residents, but also some 95,000 low-income White men. The Black registrars also served a symbolic function: providing “the first contact many Southerners, White and Black, ever had with a black office-holder,” Drago wrote.

Lynching and other vicious crimes were a near-daily occurrence across the South during Reconstruction. In 1868 in Georgia alone, there would be 355 “outrages,” or violent attacks against free men, women and children, according to sociologist Richard Hogan.

Campbell forged ahead. He was on the ground at polling places, urging Black voters to stand up for their newly won rights, under any circumstances.

“You see all of the things we see now. We see voter suppression. We see Whites blocking voting venues and courthouses,” said Russell Duncan, a historian and author of a biography on Campbell.

By then, President Andrew Johnson had restored voting rights to former Confederates, but many abstained from the vote for the mere fact that there were Black candidates on the ballot. Black voters did not abstain, however, and many of them cast their first vote ever for Campbell. He cruised to victory.

When Campbell traveled to Washington after White opponents tried to deny him his seat, he spoke to Charles Sumner about the need for a 15th Amendment. Duncan suggests that Campbell’s specific wording for the amendment may have ended up in the Constitution itself. As a state senator, Campbell continued to lobby for fair voting practices, integrated juries, equal opportunities for education, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt.

He was the first Black man elected to Congress. But White lawmakers refused to seat him.
Campbell’s remarkable political career came to an abrupt halt in what one historian called a “judicial lynching.” As a justice of the peace, Campbell arbitrated both Black and White residents. He was known for levying fines on White landowners who mistreated their Black laborers. Some of the people had enslaved hundreds just a few years earlier — and appearing before a Black justice of the peace enraged them.

Campbell would be indicted on multiple charges in the mid-1870s, largely trumped up by those who saw the opportunity to finally oust him from the Georgia political arena. He petitioned many of his allies and sought a pardon from the governor and even from President Ulysses S. Grant. But those efforts failed. Campbell, then in his sixties, served his time — hard labor on a chain gang — and he left Georgia for good shortly afterward.

Just as early Reconstruction had ushered in a brief golden age of Black officeholders, they were violently ushered out. Historians estimate that some 2,000 Black people served in political roles during Reconstruction — as sheriffs, city councilors and members of Congress — a number not to be achieved again until the 1960s.

“There is almost always backlash, throughout U.S. history, to Black people gaining rights or making advancements,” said Ashleigh Lawrence-Sanders, an assistant professor of African American history who researches the Civil War and Reconstruction era. “And it’s not always just the backlash of the virulent racists; it’s also where they’re thrown to the wolves by people who are supposed to be their allies.”

Campbell may never have returned to Georgia, but his work left an indelible mark on McIntosh County. The region would remain — for the next four decades — a stronghold of Black political power.

Feminism, flour bombs and the first black Miss World

Millions watched as protesters took over the 1970 Miss World contest. Now, as a film recounts the story, Jennifer Hosten tells of winning the crown and her own battle with racism

Rob Walker
the guardian
Sun 9 Feb 2020 02.55 EST

Jennifer Hosten, representing Grenada, is crowned Miss World by Bob Hope. Photograph: Peter King/Getty Images

It was the era of apartheid in South Africa, the civil rights movement in America and women’s liberation in Britain. And they all came together at one of the most-watched live television events of the time, when feminist protesters stormed the stage at Miss World 1970, and a black woman walked away from the beauty contest with the crown for the first time.

Fifty years on, that night is being retold in a film, Misbehaviour, inspired by the memoir of Jennifer Hosten, who won the contest and made history. In the decades that have followed, the one-time beauty queen has come to the conclusion that she and the women disrupting the competition had more in common than they might have thought.

“I didn’t realise it fully at the time but we were all using that contest as a way to get a message across,” she told the Observer last week. “For me it was about race and inclusion – for them, it was about female exploitation.”

Hosten, who came from the tiny Caribbean island of Grenada to scoop the crown at the age of 23, was peeking through the stage curtain at the Royal Albert Hall, a few feet from compere Bob Hope as he delivered his now infamous opening remarks.

“I don’t want you to think I’m a dirty old man because I never give women a second thought,” he said. “My first thought covers everything.”

“He was struggling,” remembered Hosten, now 72. She recalled hearing a firecracker go off and seeing people running scared. But the huge bang was from a group of well-dressed women who had started pelting the US comedian with flour bombs, then rose up in outrage. “We’re not beautiful, we’re not ugly. We’re ANGRY!” they screamed.

“It was an incredible commotion,” Hosten said.

The supposed firecracker was actually a football rattle, sounded by a women’s liberation activist and designed as a cue for the other feminists strategically planted among the audience to leap into action. The plan had been to kick things off when the contestants were on stage being paraded around in their swimwear, but Hosten says the women were so outraged by Hope’s jokes that the rattle went off early. “It was a big deal then, it’s still a big deal now!” she added.

Watched on TV by over 22 million people in Britain, and 100 million worldwide, the incident was seen as a galvanising moment for the women’s liberation movement and is to be retold in the film starring Keira Knightley, Gugu Mbatha-Raw and Jessie Buckley later this year. Hosten’s memoir, Miss World 1970, will be published next month.

But for Hosten it was also a big win for racial equality. Not only was she crowned Miss World but her friend, Pearl Jansen from South Africa, was the runner-up. Organisers had been shamed into sending her, a black contestant, at the last minute but Jansen had to be known as Miss Africa South because there was already a white Miss South Africa.

Hosten recalls Jansen telling her there was a reason for black women being represented at the contest that was “much more important than just representing our country”.

Her success, however, outraged sections of the tabloid media. The Sun newspaper presented Hosten’s victory as a conspiracy by black members of the judging panel. “How else could a black girl with 25:1 odds have walked away with the title? That’s what they were saying,” she said.

And it wasn’t only the press. Eric Morley – the then head of the Miss World beauty business – had handpicked 15 of the 58 contestants for a dress rehearsal the night before the event, parading them before the cameras. “They were his favourites,” Hosten said. “But only one of them – Miss Guyana – was a woman of colour. The rest of us were told to go and sit down with the audience.”

Hosten was shocked. Growing up in Grenada she had not thought much about skin colour. That changed when she arrived in Britain for the show.

“It was such an eye-opener, seeing the way the media only saw beauty by European standards. It was supposed to be Miss World – people of different races and different cultures. Most of us were written off before we even started.”

It made her participation much more meaningful, she said. “It made me want to win.”

When she did just that she was celebrated right across the Caribbean. In 1970 Grenada still didn’t have independence from Britain, so it was an opportunity to put her small country on the map. “I showed off my country and showed that women can do anything,” she said.

In the 50 years since then, the world has moved on. Last year, for the first time in history, Miss World, Miss Universe, Miss USA, Miss Teen USA and Miss America were all won by women of colour. “The question is, though, why are we talking about that?” said Hosten. “The fact that we’re talking about it as a big deal means to say that it is still a big deal.”

Curator Uncovers Black Baseball Team That Dominated Before Integration of Sport

By Tanasia Kenney - atlanta black star
February 2, 2020

The Louisville Unions were a pre-Negro Leagues baseball team that dominated the Southern baseball circuit in 1908. (Photo: WHAS 11/video screenshot)

Louisville’s Slugger Museum & Factory is a one-stop shop for all things baseball, so curators were thrilled when they became the new owners of what they thought were snapshots of one Negro Leagues baseball team, the Louisville White Sox.

Little did they know they had stumbled across a rare find.

The pictures, obtained in 2018, date back decades before the Negro Leagues ever existed and long before the integration of baseball, local station WKLY reported. What the faded photos actually showed were uniformed players of a team known as the Louisville Unions.

They stood, posed for action shots: one player pretends to slide into home base while the catcher reaches for the ball.

“There’s still more I’d like to learn about these photos and this team, but it’s so gratifying to know that the Louisville Unions have been rediscovered as a part of baseball’s story, where they belong,” said the museum’s curatorial specialist Bailey Mazik, who unearthed the team’s lost history.

“During a curatorial investigation it’s incredibly rewarding for me to find meaningful connections that broaden the understanding of baseball in our country and in our culture through time,” she added.

Through her research, Mazik learned the Unions were the team to beat and dominated the Southern baseball circuit in 1908. They often outplayed their competitors, winning 24 out of 27 games that same season. A 1908 clipping from the Louisville Courier-Journal lauds them as “the best colored team in the South.”

The Unions even had their own special playing field, ‘ol League Park, where they faced off against semi-professional and amateur teams from in town, including the Reccius Club and City League Stars. Newspaper articles show they also played teams from New York, Indiana and Tennessee.

In examining the photos, Mazik said she knew they held a different story when she noticed the “LU” on the players’ uniforms. She also pointed out several other clues that made it abundantly clear these weren’t Louisville White Sox players.

Her biggest clue? A bourbon distillery pictured beyond the outfield in one of the photos. The Sunny Brook Distillery Co. stood from 1897 until 1909 at 28th and Broadway — what was the team’s playing field, Old League Park or Eclipse Park II, which didn’t quite match with the White Sox time frame.

A faint inscription on the back of one of the photos also helped Mazik nail down a timeline. The image was dated February 22, 1909, well before the White Sox team was established in 1931.

“Original research can be quite tedious because information is often lost or not well preserved through the years,” Mazik wrote, “[because] sometimes the connections I work so hard to find can’t be backed up by evidence. But other times, all the attention to detail, examining every possible aspect, searching from every angle for information pays off in a big way.”

The museum curator said she’s “thrilled” to have recovered the history of a baseball team that was once forgotten and looks forward to learning even more.

“I feel lucky to have these photographs in our archives and I’m excited by the possibility of learning more about them!” she added.

The Louisville Unions Rediscovered exhibit will remain on display through September 7, 2020, according to the museum’s website.

Next Ford-class Carrier to be Named After Pearl Harbor Hero Doris Miller

By: Sam LaGrone - usni news

January 18, 2020 10:49 AM

Doris Miller in 1942. US Navy Photo

Cartoon of Doris Miller during the attack on Pearl Harbor. Navy History and Heritage Command Image

The fourth Ford-class carrier will be named in honor of World War II icon Doris Miller, the first black recipient of the Navy Cross, Navy officials confirmed to USNI News on Saturday.

The naming of CVN-81 is expected to be announced during a Monday ceremony in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii by Acting Navy Secretary Thomas Modly, USNI News has learned.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser first reported the news of the ceremony and the carrier name on Saturday.

Modly wanted to name the carrier after a Navy hero and landed on Miller after extensive conversations with current and former Navy leaders, two sources familiar with the process told USNI News. The name was floated to both the White House and Congress with no pushback, the sources confirmed.

Miller was widely recognized as one of the first U.S. heroes of World War II and his legacy has been a touchstone for African American sailors in the service.

“Without him really knowing, he actually was a part of the civil rights movement because he changed the thinking in the Navy,” Doreen Ravenscroft, with the Doris Miller Memorial in Waco, Texas, told the Star-Advertiser.

During the Imperial Japanese Navy attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, then Mess Attendant 3rd Class Miller took charge of an anti-aircraft battery on USS West Virginia (BB-48) firing on enemy aircraft until running out of ammunition.

“It wasn’t hard. I just pulled the trigger and she worked fine,” Miller recalled after the battle. “I guess I fired her for about fifteen minutes. I think I got one of those Jap planes. They were diving pretty close to us.”

Then he assisted the battleship’s commander and several others off the ship before it sank. For his actions, he received the Navy Cross in 1942 presented by Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz on the deck of WWII carrier USS Enterprise (CV-6).

“For distinguished devotion to duty, extraordinary courage and disregard for his own personal safety during the attack on the Fleet in Pearl Harbor, Territory of Hawaii, by Japanese forces on December 7, 1941,” read his citation for the Navy Cross. “While at the side of his Captain on the bridge, Miller, despite enemy strafing and bombing and in the face of a serious fire, assisted in moving his Captain, who had been mortally wounded, to a place of greater safety, and later manned and operated a machine gun directed at enemy Japanese attacking aircraft until ordered to leave the bridge.”

Miller continued to serve in the Navy until 1943 when he was killed by a Japanese torpedo attack on escort carrier USS Liscome Bay (CVE-56).

Naming an aircraft carrier for an enlisted sailor is a break from the naming trends in the past several decades.

“Aircraft carriers are generally named for past U.S. Presidents. Of the past 14, 10 were named for past U.S. Presidents, and two for Members of Congress,” according to the Congressional Research Service.

The exceptions have been USS Nimitz (CVN-68) named for Fleet Adm. Chester Nimitz and the future Ford-class carrier Enterprise (CVN-80) which will be the ninth U.S. warship to bear the name since the American Revolutionary War.

Previous to the planned carrier, the Knox-class frigate USS Miller (FF-1091) was named in honor of Miller.

GI Bill opened doors to college for many vets, but politicians created a separate one for blacks

THE CONVERSATION
November 9, 2019 9.45am EST

When President Franklin Roosevelt signed the GI Bill into law on June 22, 1944, it laid the foundation for benefits that would help generations of veterans achieve social mobility.

Formally known as the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, the bill made unprecedented commitments to the nation’s veterans. For instance, it provided federal assistance to veterans in the form of housing and unemployment benefits. But of all the benefits offered through the GI Bill, funding for higher education and job training emerged as the most popular.

More than 2 million veterans flocked to college campuses throughout the country. But even as former service members entered college, not all of them accessed the bill’s benefits in the same way. That’s because white southern politicians designed the distribution of benefits under the GI Bill to uphold their segregationist beliefs.
So, while white veterans got into college with relative ease, black service members faced limited options and outright denial in their pursuit for educational advancement. This resulted in uneven outcomes of the GI Bill’s impact.

As a scholar of race and culture in the U.S. South, I believe this history raises important questions about whether subsequent iterations of the GI Bill are benefiting all vets equally.

Tuition waived for service
When he signed the bill into law, President Roosevelt assured that it would give “servicemen and women the opportunity of resuming their education or technical training … not only without tuition charge … but with the right to receive a monthly living allowance while pursuing their studies.” So long as they had served 90 consecutive days in the U.S. Armed Forces and had not received a dishonorable discharge, veterans could have their tuition waived for the institution of their choice and cover their living expenses as they pursued a college degree.

This unparalleled investment in veteran education led to a boom in college enrollment. Around 8 million of the nation’s 16 million veterans took advantage of federal funding for higher education or vocational training, 2 million of whom pursued a college degree within the first five years of the bill’s existence. Those ex-service members made up nearly half of the nation’s college students by 1947.

Colleges scrambled to accommodate all the new veterans. These veterans were often white men who were slightly older than the typical college age. They sometimes arrived with wives and families in tow and brought a martial discipline to their studies that, as scholars have noted, created a cultural clash with traditional civilian students who sometimes were more interested in the life of the party than the life of the mind.

Limited opportunities for black servicemen
Black service members had a different kind of experience. The GI Bill’s race-neutral language had filled the 1 million African American veterans with hope that they, too, could take advantage of federal assistance. Integrated universities and historically black colleges and universities – commonly known as HBCUs – welcomed black veterans and their federal dollars, which led to the growth of a new black middle class in the immediate postwar years.

Yet, the underfunding of HBCUs limited opportunities for these large numbers of black veterans. Schools like the Tuskegee Institute and Alcorn State lacked government investment in their infrastructure and simply could not accommodate an influx of so many students, whereas well-funded white institutions were more equipped to take in students. Research has also revealed that a lack of formal secondary education for black soldiers prior to their service inhibited their paths to colleges and universities.

As historians Kathleen J. Frydl, Ira Katznelson and others have argued, U.S. Representative John Rankin of Mississippi exacerbated these racial disparities.

Racism baked in
Rankin, a staunch segregationist, chaired the committee that drafted the bill. From this position, he ensured that local Veterans Administrations controlled the distribution of funds. This meant that when black southerners applied for their assistance, they faced the prejudices of white officials from their communities who often forced them into vocational schools instead of colleges or denied their benefits altogether.

Mississippi’s connection to the GI Bill goes beyond Rankin’s racist maneuvering. From 1966 to 1997, G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery represented the state in Congress and dedicated himself to veterans’ issues. In 1984, he pushed through his signature piece of federal legislation, the Montgomery GI Bill, which recommitted the nation to providing for veterans’ education and extended those funds to reserve units and the National Guard. Congress had discontinued the GI Bill after Vietnam. As historian Jennifer Mittelstadt shows, Montgomery’s bill subsidized education as a way to boost enlistment in the all-volunteer force that lagged in recruitment during the final years of the Cold War.

Social programs like these have helped maintain enlistment quotas during recent conflicts in the Middle East, but today’s service members have found mixed success in converting the education subsidies from the Post-9/11 GI Bill into gains in civilian life.

This new GI Bill, passed in 2008, has paid around US$100 billion to more than 2 million recipients. Although the Student Veterans for America touts the nearly half a million degrees awarded to veterans since 2009, politicians and watchdogs have fought for reforms to the bill to stop predatory, for-profit colleges from targeting veterans. Recent reports show that 20% of GI Bill disbursements go to for-profit schools. These institutions hold reputations for notoriously high dropout rates and disproportionately targeting students of color, a significant point given the growing racial and ethnic diversity of the military.

In August 2017, President Trump signed the Forever GI Bill, which committed $3 billion for 10 more years of education funding. As active duty service members and veterans begin to take advantage of these provisions, history provides good reason to be vigilant for the way racism still impacts who receives the most from those benefits.

A rural town confronts its buried history of mass killings of black Americans

100 years after hundreds of African Americans were reportedly killed in Elaine, Arkansas, a memorial is set to bring details of the tragedy to light

Teresa Krug
The Guardian
Sun 18 Aug 2019 02.00 EDT

Charlie McClain was surprised to learn that he was related to one of the Elaine Twelve.

It came out when McClain, 58, asked his mother earlier this year about the largely forgotten mass killings in his Arkansas Delta home town a century ago, when white mobs murdered scores of African Americans, but only a dozen black men were ever prosecuted for any crime during the disturbances.

“When I got off the phone, I went back and looked at my notes, and I recognized the name: Paul Hall,” McClain said.

The Elaine Twelve were a group of black defendants sentenced to death for what transpired in the autumn of 1919, after an all-white jury found them guilty within eight minutes. Black witnesses later testified that they had been tortured into giving false testimonies and the 12 were eventually released – though no white people were ever charged for any crime.

“It was a kangaroo trial,” said Audrey Evans, a retired federal judge, who is part of the planning committee for the Elaine Massacre Memorial in nearby Helena. They are now preparing to commemorate the town’s bloody and largely forgotten past.

What happened a century ago is still a point of contention, but the general consensus today is this: a white mob, upset over African Americans organizing to demand fair wages, descended upon a church in the township of Hoop Spur, just up the road from Elaine, on 31 September 1919.

A shot was fired – by which “side” is still up for debate – and a white man was killed. News of a “black insurrection” spread to neighboring communities and hundreds more white men poured in, including federal troops, the Arkansas governor, Charles Brough, and newly deputized soldiers from the American Legion.

The violence spread beyond the church to more communities, and African Americans were killed in their homes and streets. There’s a commonly told story of a family who were off celebrating their son’s return from the first world war, who were pulled off of a train on their way home and killed.

In the end, hundreds of African Americans were reportedly killed. The most frequently touted number is 237, but some observers say the number could be more than 800, which would make it the deadliest massacre of African Americans in US history.

“It’s hard without a number. A lot of people sort of gauge these, rank these by the number of dead,” said Brian Mitchell, an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas in Little Rock, explaining that they came toward the end of the Red Summer – a year where an unprecedented number of African Americans were attacked across the US, including dozens killed in cities like Chicago and Washington DC.

“One of the things that’s fascinating about Elaine is so much of what we consider the Red Summer was urban, you know, big cities with immigrant communities and poor whites butting up against blacks for resources as blacks begin to migrate to the industrial north. Elaine is rural, and the dynamics are also labor, but it’s more controlling. Making sure things don’t change. That blacks remain in their position. That they’re not getting higher pay.”

Despite the horrific story, the news of the mass killings has been largely absent from popular consciousness in Elaine – and indeed the Red Summer as a whole is little known across the US.

Not only did McClain never hear about his ancestor’s role as one of the Elaine Twelve until recently, he also never learned about the massacre at all until he was in his 30s and had left Arkansas.

“Imagine growing up in a place where something this tragic happens and you find out decades later,” he said.

McClain isn’t the only one who grew up unaware of the tragedy that took place in a place he loved, that has shrunk to a community of about 500 to 600 people.

Faye Duncan-Daniel, who grew up just down the road in Ratio, learned about the massacre when she got to college in Boston. There, she stumbled across it while researching another topic.

“If it was mentioned, it was not given the kind of weightiness that would spark your memory,” Duncan-Daniel said, who is part of a small group of people gathering donations and resources for the future Elaine Legacy Center.

With the centenary quickly approaching, more attention is being devoted to educating and investigating everything that happened so long ago.

Next month, the Elaine Massacre Memorial will be unveiled and will sit directly across from the courthouse where the trials for the Elaine Twelve were held. The committee includes descendants of both the victims and perpetrators.

“The Elaine Massacre marked one of the darkest moments in our state’s history,” the office of Arkansas’s governor, said in an email. “The 100th anniversary is re-energizing a statewide conversation about a tragic event in our history. The lessons that we can learn from 100 years ago are relevant today as we navigate race relations in the 21st century. I’m grateful that we as a state are taking the opportunity to remember the history and learn from it.”

The issue of reparations has also arisen, as victims’ descendants and activists start digging more actively into the past and demand justice, especially for the thorny issue of land allegedly grabbed from blacks by whites in the aftermath of the killings.

Stories of stolen land have been passed down in families to the point where there are now calls to investigate the claims. Wendell Griffen, a circuit judge and pastor who chaired a truth-telling commission earlier this year, said a “false narrative” has been presented about what happened in Elaine.

“That narrative has disregarded and worked to conceal and/or attempt to discredit reports that ownership of thousands of acres of land owned by black people in Elaine and South Phillips county mysteriously changed from black people to white people in the aftermath of the massacre,” Griffen wrote.

But so far no documents have emerged to corroborate any oral claims of land theft, according to Brian Mitchell. Together with his graduate students, Mitchell has tracked down more than 10,000 documents, often going through attics and old office buildings.

“In fact, we looked at the 1910 census to see if there was substantial land ownership there, and we didn’t see much black land ownership and we haven’t seen any documents that pull that narrative together,” Mitchell said.

He also expects it to be difficult for descendants to claim reparations based on the fact that there is still no complete record of who was killed. While some estimates are high, some, including one former mayor of Elaine, maintain the number of those killed is much smaller, or never happened at all.

“I did a presentation at the Arkansas Historical Association, and there was one guy who kept yelling, ‘Show me a body!’” Mitchell said.

Mitchell said finding bodies of those killed in 1919, especially in alleged mass graves around Elaine, would help answer a lot of questions. Mitchell and others are currently pushing for state officials to be more involved in conducting investigations into what happened and unearthing and marking gravesites.

“Even if the numbers are at 100 or slightly above that, there would have had to have been burials of these individuals,” Mitchell said. “As it stands, even for the people we know who died there, no one knows the exact location.”

Some Elaine and Helena residents interviewed for this article talked about visible mounds of earth that have changed in size, due to flooding and the Mississippi River shifting course over the last 100 years. Mitchell says there’s no certainty that’s where the bodies are buried.

“If I did [know where they were], I would be out with a shovel. I’d be on the phone with archeologists right now, going out to excavate,” Mitchell said.

As for McClain, he is more interested in getting answers than reparations.

“I’m not out to get even with anyone, but just for my peace of mind, I’d really like to know what happened,” McClain said.

Red Summer, 100 Years Later: When the White Mob Was Unleashed on Black America

By David Love - Atlanta Black Star
July 28, 2019

In 1919, white mobs throughout the nation descended upon Black communities, lynched Black people and destroyed homes and businesses in what was known as Red Summer (Photo: Will Brown, victim of Omaha, Nebraska, lynching, Wikipedia).

This year marks the centennial of what has become known as the Red Summer, when in 1919, America was stained red with the blood of Black victims who were lynched, burned, shot and beaten to death by white mobs across the country. In what is regarded as one of the worst periods of white-on-Black mob violence in U.S. history, over 10 months in at least 25 riots, more than 250 Black people were killed with impunity, and thousands saw their homes and businesses destroyed in the conflagration, all without justice being served.

A number of factors and circumstances were catalysts for Red Summer. During World War I, with men serving in the military and restrictive immigration policies, the East and Midwest experienced labor shortages. This was also the time of the Great Migration when hundreds of thousands of African-Americans left the South to escape Jim Crow terror, oppression and exploitation. Working-class whites resented Black workers as potential economic competitors. According to Dr. George Edmund Haynes, who wrote a report on Red Summer, “the persistence of unpunished lynching” fueled a white male mob mentality, and fostered a sense of self-defense among 100,000 Black veterans who had served in the war and migrated out of the South. “In such a state of public mind,” Haynes wrote, “a trivial incident can precipitate a riot.”

The violence of Red Summer took place in the North and South alike, with Charleston, South Carolina, as the first location to experience bloodshed. White sailors set off riots after attacking a Black man who refused to step off the sidewalk for them, while another white gang killed a Black man in a pool hall. Hundreds of white sailors descended upon the Black community, some of whom armed themselves and fought back.

Other cities were hit as well. In Pittsburgh, the Klan posted notices in Black communities: “The war is over, negroes. Stay in your place. If you don’t, we’ll put you there.” On September 28, 1919, a white lynch mob in Omaha, Nebraska, gathered after a white woman, Agnes Loebeck, accused Will Brown, a Black man, of rape. The whites burned down the Douglas County Courthouse and lynched Brown, where he was being held.

The three deadliest race riots of Red Summer took place in Chicago, Elaine, Arkansas, and Washington, D.C.

In Chicago, a housing shortage had worsened the city’s racial tensions, as the Black population had increased from 44,000 in 1910 to 235,000 in 1930. On July 27, 1919, violence erupted when a Black teen named Eugene Williams swam along a whites-only beach on Lake Michigan. He was stoned by white men and drowned. Police refused to arrest the white men responsible and arrested a Black man instead, leading to escalated violence. Ultimately, 23 Blacks and 15 whites died, 537 people were injured, and 1,000 Black families were rendered homeless.

When Black sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas, met to organize and form a labor union, at least 200 people were lynched. Journalist Ida B. Wells wrote in her report that a mob dragged and nearly murdered a woman named Lula Black for wanting to join the union, and lynched another. “They knocked her down, beat her over the head with their pistols, kicked her all over the body, almost killed her, then took her to jail,” Wells wrote. “The same mob went to Frank Hall’s house and killed Frances Hall, a crazy old woman housekeeper, tied her clothes over her head, threw her body in the public road where it lay thus exposed till the soldiers came Thursday evening and took it up.” Black bodies were dumped in the Mississippi River or left to rot. White elites claimed the Black people had conspired to take the white planters’ land and rape their women.

In July 1919 in Washington, D.C., mobs of white military men targeted the Black community and Black soldiers returning from the war. The “mob in uniform” said they were retaliating against the alleged rape of a white woman — the wife of a Navy employee — by a Black man. As Black people were brutally beaten, the police refused to intervene. One Black Washington resident, Carrie Johnson, 17, shot at white intruders, and killed a white police officer who broke into her bedroom. Her manslaughter conviction was overturned when she claimed self-defense, and she was regarded a hero, one of many examples of Black people who defended themselves and fought back against white terror. The NAACP counted 2,000 Black people, many of them with guns, patrolling the nation’s capital ready to “die for their race, and defy the white mob.”

The terror, death and destruction visited upon Black people at the time was by no means limited to Red Summer. For example, in 1921, the thriving Black community of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma — known as “Black Wall Street” — was destroyed by white mob violence. As a result of an aerial bombing and arson from white rioters and looters, 35 city blocks were burned to the ground, over 800 people were injured and an estimated 300 people died. Similarly, in 1920, several hundred whites burned down the Black village of Rosewood, Florida, hunted for Black people in the countryside and lynched them following unsubstantiated accusations a Black man had raped and beaten a white woman.

Typically called race riots or examples of racial unrest, Red Summer was the handiwork of anti-Black, white lynch mob violence. Following Red Summer, the civil rights and anti-lynching movements were given new life, and NAACP membership increased from 9,000 to 100,000 members.

In today’s era of white racial backlash and white supremacist violence, much had been forgotten about the massacres of Red Summer, though that is changing. For example, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice and Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama documents the history of lynching in America and features exhibits on Red Summer. America’s Black Holocaust Museum features digital exhibits on the victims of lynching and Red Summer, while Visualizing the Red Summer is a comprehensive digital archive, timeline and map of the lynchings and riots of 1919. The Elaine Massacre Memorial is being constructed and is set to open in September in Arkansas, and federal anti-lynching legislation passed in the Senate just last year, a century after such legislation was first introduced.

Remembering Red Summer is the key to preventing lynchings and other future racial atrocities.

6 Important Things You May Not Know About Juneteenth — But Should

By David Love - Atlanta Black Star
June 19, 2019

June 19 marks Juneteenth, which Black people in the United States celebrate to mark their emancipation from slavery (Photo: “A group of slaves including men, women and children gathered outside a building at the Foller Plantation in Cumberland Landing, Pamunkey Run, Virginia, May, 1862.” Photo by James Gibson. Library of Congress).

Juneteenth, which takes place on June 19, commemorates the emancipation of Black people and the end of slavery in the United States in 1865. Throughout the country, the descendants of formerly enslaved people celebrate Juneteenth in a variety of ways, such as parades, street fairs, cultural events, church services, festivals, historic reenactments, and cookouts. However there are six important tidbits of information about the holiday that you may not have known, but should.

Black People Were Not Free Until Two Months (or Years) After the Fact

Although Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was effective on January 1, 1863, it did not “free” the enslaved Black people who remained under the control of the Confederate states. Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to the Union Army in April 1865 and the Civil War was over. However, Black people in Texas were not informed of their liberation until June 19 when Union Major-General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston, Texas and read General Orders No. 3, which stated: “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them becomes that between employer and hired labor. The freedmen are advised to remain quietly at their present homes and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.” There were 4 million enslaved people in America, and 250,000 in Texas, over 30 percent of the state population.

Juneteenth Is a Real Holiday, and Isn’t Only About Texas

Known also as Freedom Day and Emancipation Day, Juneteenth is a combination of “June” and “Nineteenth.” As Black Texans migrated, the day of commemoration had spread from Texas to the states of Alabama, Arkansas, California, Florida, Louisiana and Oklahoma. Texas was the first state to declare Juneteenth a state holiday in 1979. Today, 45 states observe Juneteenth or recognize it as a state holiday. Two of the largest Juneteenth celebrations are held in Milwaukee and Minneapolis, while cities such as Philadelphia, one of the important locations of the Underground Railroad, also hold festivities to mark the end of slavery.

Black People In Mexico Celebrate Juneteenth

In the mid-19th century, thousands of enslaved Black people fled their oppressors in the U.S. and escaped to freedom in the desert of Northern Mexico, similar to the Underground Railroad that led refugees to the Northern states and Canada. They are known as the Mascogos. Every year they celebrate Juneteenth and wear their traditional dress on that day. Vicente Guerrero, the second president of Mexico and a man of African descent whose ancestors had been enslaved, had abolished slavery in 1829. This move led to the secession of Texas from Mexico, which was led by slave masters.

Juneteenth Lost Popularity Before Witnessing A Resurgence

Juneteenth celebrations subsided during the era of Jim Crow segregation and the Great Depression, but witnessed a reawakening during the civil rights and Black Power movements. Juneteenth is a national rather than solely a Texas holiday due in part to an historic Juneteenth celebration that took place two months after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The decision by Coretta Scott King and longtime movement figure Ralph Abernathy to end the Poor People’s March early and hold a Juneteenth celebration on the Washington Mall helped to link the day with the larger civil rights struggle.

There is a Juneteenth Flag

Art designer L.J. Graf designed a Juneteenth flag with a red, white and blue color scheme to represent that the formerly enslaved and their descendants are Americans. A white star represents Texas, and a bursting star on the horizon represents freedom.

There Is An Effort To Make Juneteenth A Federal Holiday

Although Juneteenth is not a federal holiday, there are some people who are trying to change that. Organizations such as the National Juneteenth Observance Foundation and 92-year old Opal Lee of Fort Worth, Texas, who staged a symbolic walk from Fort Worth to Washington to bring attention to the significance of the holiday. As a senator, Barack Obama cosponsored legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday, which did not pass.

a whitewashed history!!!

Marsha P. Johnson: Transgender hero of Stonewall riots finally gets her due

Dalvin Brown, USA TODAY

Marsha P. Johnson said she never threw the first brick that started the riots at a gay bar in New York called the Stonewall Inn, which police raided in June 1969. But she was part of the “vanguard” that resisted police during the demonstrations. (Photo: Netflix)

Marsha P. Johnson was not well known during her life. But in death, her legacy is stamped indelibly onto the rainbow pride flag.

The transgender activist was among a group of blacks who in the 1960s stood on the front lines of the LGBT liberation movement and is now receiving overdue credit for her trailblazing role.

Johnson, who founded one of the first organizations to protect transgender youth, was an outspoken figure in New York’s Greenwich Village.

“For so long, the role that people like Marsha played was dismissed,” says Marisa Richmond, a trans scholar who teaches history at Middle Tennessee State University. “The world is more open, welcoming and inclusive than it was 50 years ago. Her efforts helped make that happen.”

Johnson was part of the “vanguard” that resisted police during the Stonewall riots — demonstrations that followed a raid on the Stonewall Inn, a gay bar in the Village, on June 28, 1969, according to the 2010 book "Stonewall", written by LGBT historian David Carter.

At the time, New York refused to grant licenses to bars that served gays, which allowed police to enter Stonewall with a warrant. They arrested 13 people.

“The majority of people at Stonewall were either drag queens or gay men of color,” Titus Montalvo, a hairdresser and makeup artist who was 16 at the time, told USA TODAY.

The incident became a rallying cry for the nascent gay rights movement.

Many in the LGBT community credit Johnson for throwing the first brick or shot glass that sparked the riots. Johnson said she didn’t arrive at the bar until rioting was underway. Nevertheless, her role is hailed.

“There are lots of different accounts of what she did during the riots,” says Michael Boucai, associate professor of law at the University at Buffalo School of Law who studies LGBTQ rights and history. “The consensus is that she did climb a lamppost and throw a very heavy object that was in a bag and shattered a police (car) window.”

The following year, Johnson and a close friend, Sylvia Rivera, founded the trans-youth organization STAR — Street Transvestite (now Transgender) Action Revolutionaries — that housed and fed homeless youths.

Donald Bell of Chicago, a former dean of students at several colleges, says Stonewall called attention to a group of people who lacked basic civil rights. “That’s why Marsha’s visibility and advocacy remain important,” he says. “She and a number of others who lived at the intersection between racism and homophobia were political agitators that helped advance the mindset of society.”

Marsha P. Johnson was born Malcolm Michaels in Elizabeth, N.J., in 1945. She said the “P” in her name stood for “Pay-it-no-mind.”

Often draped in shimmering robes, red plastic high heels and floral headdresses, she was a muse of pop artist Andy Warhol and has been the subject of several films, including a 2017 Netflix documentary, "The Death and Life of Marsha P. Johnson."

“When he got off the bus, everyone would notice,” says Al Michaels, Johnson’s nephew, who grew up calling Johnson “Uncle Mikey.”

“We’d be playing football in the streets as kids,” Michaels recalls. “Soon as he turned the corner, he’d have on fruit, a big hat with flowers.”

After Stonewall, Johnson joined the gay liberation front. In the 1980s, she became an outspoken activist with the AIDS charity ACT UP.

She died in 1992 at age 46. Her body was found in the Hudson River six days after she was reported missing. Police ruled Johnson’s death a suicide, which members of the local gay community disputed. In 2012, authorities reopened the investigation into her death, which remains unsolved, according to her nephew.

Johnson’s death attracted scant media attention at the time, but her life and contributions have been celebrated in recent years. In 2018, The New York Times published a full obituary on her significance in the LGBT liberation movement.

“The 50th anniversary of Stonewall is coming up this June. I’m hoping that this time, trans people and people of color are front and center in the local pride celebrations,” Richmond says. “After all, we were there from the very beginning.”

RELATED: https://timeline.com/marsha-johnson-stonewall-riots-12b5a0a7cb17

Groundbreaking World War II unit of black women honored decades after their service

Meg Jones - msn.com

MILWAUKEE - When Anna Mae Robertson and her fellow soldiers arrived in England early in 1945, millions of pieces of mail and parcels destined for homesick American troopsgathered dust in postal bags piled high in warehouses.

Knowing the importance to morale of letters and packages from home, commanders gave the difficult task of sorting through a months-long backlog of mail to the Women's Army Corps 6888 Central Postal Directory Battalion. The women devised a system, rolled up their sleeves and got to work.

"We worked in shifts around the clock. You had to find the right name and address," Robertson, 95, recalled in a recent interview at her Milwaukee home. "You just managed."

The hard work and critical role played by the battalion of African-American women during World War II is spotlighted in a new documentary by a filmmaker from Wisconsin. Jim Theres filmed interviews with the last seven survivors of the unit for his documentary, "The Six Triple Eight," which will be shown at the War Memorial Center in Milwaukee on June 6.

Robertson was interviewed for the documentary and will appear at the screening.

Arriving in Birmingham, England, in February 1945 after their convoy across the Atlantic was rerouted because of German U-boats, postal battalion soldiers quickly organized a system to find troops who had been on the march since the D-Day invasion. Some letters were simply addressed "Junior, U.S. Army," rats and mice had gnawed into parcels packed with baked goods, and tracking down the 7 million American GIs in Europe was incredibly difficult.

But the 855 women in the Six Triple Eight figured it out, processing 65,000 pieces of mail during each eight-hour shift. They worked in unheated buildings with windows darkened because of nightly attacks by German pilots and V-2 rockets. Some of the women were assigned the sad task of returning mail sent to troops killed before their letters from home reached them.

The six-month backlog was cleared in half the time. Since the Army was still segregated, they lived and ate in barracks apart from other American soldiers with battalion members assigned to handle their own motor pool and chow hall.

"These are the stories that got stuck in the nooks and crannies of history. When people hear about this, their reaction is almost universally the same: 'Wow, I didn't know about that,'" said Theres, a Racine native.

Theres was screening a documentary last year on American female telephone operators in Europe during World War I when someone in the Milwaukee audience asked if he knew about the all-African American female postal battalion. He Googled the unit, was amazed to learn its story and decided to make a documentary.

All seven surviving veterans Theres could track down agreed to take part in the movie. He recorded five of the interviews, including Robertson's, in November during ceremonies in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, dedicating a monument to the 6888 Postal Battalion.

Theres wondered if the women would talk about the racism and sexism they experienced at home and in the military.

"But they talked about the good things that happened in Birminhgam (England), their sense of mission, how proud they were to find homes for millions of pieces of mail," Theres said. "That was their focus. That made the conversations just so engaging. It was really wonderful."

At the start of the war, only 10% of the Women's Army Corps at any one time could be African American. Black female soldiers began calling themselves the "ten percenters."

The military also restricted the number of black female officers with each branch to one full colonel or Navy captain. More than 6,500 African American women served in the Women's Army Corps throughout World War II. In 1948, America's military was integrated.

Marcia Anderson, the first African American woman to become a major general in the Army, knew about the 6888th as she made a career in the military.

The Six Triple Eight is "something that's passed down among black female officers," said Anderson, a Beloit native who is now clerk of court for the U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Wisconsin's Western District. "I definitely stand on their shoulders."

Anderson, who was interviewed for the documentary, knows the importance of communication to military members trying to connect with family and friends while serving so far from home, whether it was letters and parcels during World War II or email, text messages and care packages for today's troops.

"Back in the day when there wasn't email, mail call was a significant event. To learn that all that mail was sitting around in warehouses in England is incomprehensible," said Anderson.

In June 1945, the unit was sent to France where it worked on another backlog of mail alongside French civilians and German POWs. The next month three soldiers in the battalion were killed in a Jeep crash and were buried in the cemetery made famous in the film "Saving Private Ryan."

Since the War Department didn't pay for their funerals, fellow 6888th soldiers pooled their money to buy caskets and three women in the unit with mortuary experience took care of the bodies.

Early in 1946, the unit returned to the U.S. from France and was quietly disbanded. There were no parades, no recognition, no medals.

A native of Mississippi, Robertson, whose maiden name is Wilson, was living in Arkansas when her mother died. She was 19 and had no way to support herself, so she decided to join the Army in March 1943.

Robertson came to Milwaukee after the war for the wedding of a fellow soldier and decided to stay here. She got a job as a nurse's aide at the VA hospital, married in 1948 and raised eight children, including a daughter who worked for the U.S. Post Office.

She didn't talk much about her service in World War II and quietly raised her family, instilling in them a sense of duty and the importance of education, said her daughter Sheree Robertson.

Vets' donation saves 4-year-old: Army veteran meets the little girl he saved with his bone marrow donation

"As she journeyed through life she continued to be a courageous woman. She worked hard and raised her eight children to make good choices and let their light shine," Sheree Robertson said.

Not until 2014, with the intervention of Congresswoman Gwen Moore (D-Wis.), did Robertson finally receive the Women's Army Corps Medal, American Campaign Medal, European-African-Middle Eastern Campaign Medal, World War II Victory Medal and the Honorable Service Lapel Button WW2.

The medals are in a shadow box that Robertson proudly hangs on a wall in her home.

slavery: Last known US slave ship found in Alabama

The Clotilda was found by SEARCH Inc in collaboration with the Alabama Historical Commission

Reuters
the guardian
Thu 23 May 2019 08.06 EDT

The last ship known to smuggle slaves from Africa to the US has been discovered in Alabama’s Mobile River, nearly 160 years after it was deliberately sunk, a historical commission has said.

The Alabama Historical Commission, in a post on its Facebook page, called the effort to locate the ship, the Clotilda, a “year-long scientific investigation.”

The Clotilda was discovered by a company called SEARCH Inc in collaboration with the commission and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Historians have documented the Clotilda as the last ship known to bring African captives to the US. It operated in secret, decades after Congress banned the importation of slaves into the country in 1807.

The Clotilda carried 110 men, women and children from Africa to Alabama in 1860, according to the 2007 book Dreams of Africa in Alabama by Sylviane Anna Diouf, who relied on testimony from the slave traders and their captives.

The ship is believed to have been intentionally sunk in 1860 to hide evidence of its use in the slave trade.

Three years later, in the middle of the civil war, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation declaring the end of slavery in the US.

“The discovery of the Clotilda sheds new light on a lost chapter of American history,” said Fredrik Hiebert, archaeologist-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, which supported the search.

Hiebert spoke to National Geographic magazine, which first reported the discovery.

Researchers used insurance records to determine the Clotilda’s dimensions and its other unique characteristics, such as planks of southern yellow pine over white oak frames, according to National Geographic.

The team behind the search for the Clotilda discovered a ship with its identifying features underwater in a section of the Mobile River, according to National Geographic.

A representative from the Alabama Historical Commission could not be reached for comment late on Wednesday.

Among the captives on the Clotilda were Cudjo Lewis, who lived until 1935 and was long described as the last survivor of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the US.

Earlier this year, researcher Hannah Durkin of Newcastle University, published a paper naming the last known survivor as Redoshi, who also went by the name Sally Smith.

She died in 1937, two years after Lewis, and also was a captive of the Clotilda, according to Durkin’s findings.

The Brown V. Board Of Education Case Didn't Start How You Think It Did

As often happens, history is a lot more complicated than the way historians have portrayed it. Oliver Brown was reluctant to take on Kansas' Board of Ed, and the Black population of Topeka resisted integration themselves.

By The Conversation - Charise Cheney, University of Oregon
5/20/19 5:01am

hurgood Marshall outside the Supreme Court in Washington in 1958. Marshall, the head of the NAACP’s legal arm who argued part of the case, went on to become the Supreme Court’s first African-American justice. AP

As the nation celebrates the 65th anniversary of the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case, the case is often recalled as one that “forever changed the course of American history.”

But the story behind the historic Supreme Court case, as I plan to show in my forthcoming book, “Blacks Against Brown: The Black Anti-Integration Movement in Topeka, Kansas, 1941-1954,” is much more complex than the highly inaccurate but often-repeated tale about how the lawsuit began. The story that often gets told is that – as recounted in this news story – the case began with Oliver Brown, who tried to enroll his daughter, Linda, at the Sumner School, an all-white elementary school in Topeka near the Browns’ home. Or that Oliver Brown was a “determined father who took Linda Brown by the hand and made history.”

As my research shows, that tale is at odds with two great historical ironies of Brown v. Board. The first irony is that Oliver Brown was actually a reluctant participant in the Supreme Court case that would come to be named after him. In fact, Oliver Brown, a reserved man, had to be convinced to sign on to the lawsuit because he was a new pastor at church that did not want to get involved in Topeka NAACP’s desegregation lawsuit, according to various Topekans whose recollections are recorded in the Brown Oral History Collection at the Kansas State Historical Society.

The second irony is that, of the five local desegregation cases brought before the Supreme Court by the NAACP Legal Defense Fund in 1953, Brown’s case – formally known as Oliver Brown et al., v. Board of Education of Topeka, et al. – ended up bringing widespread attention to a city where many blacks actually resisted school integration. That not-so-small detail has been overshadowed by the way the case is presented in history.

Black resistance to integration
While school desegregation may have symbolized racial progress for many blacks throughout the country, that simply was not the case in Topeka. In fact, most of the resistance to the NAACP’s school desegregation efforts in Topeka came from Topeka’s black citizens, not whites.

“I didn’t get anything from white folks,” Leola Brown Montgomery, wife of Oliver and mother of Linda, recalled. “I tell you here in Topeka, unlike the other places where they brought these cases we didn’t have any threats” from whites.

Prior to the Brown case, black Topekans had been embroiled in a decade-long conflict over segregated schools that began with a lawsuit involving Topeka’s junior high schools. When the Topeka School Board commissioned a poll to determine black support for integrated junior high schools in 1941, 65 percent of black parents with junior high school students indicated that they preferred all-black schools, according to school board minutes.

Separate but equal
Another wrinkle to the story is that the city’s four all-black elementary schools – Buchanan, McKinley, Monroe and Washington – had resources, facilities and curricula that were comparable to that of Topeka’s white schools. The Topeka school board actually adhered to the “separate-but-equal” standard established by the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case.

Even Linda Brown recalled the all-black Monroe Elementary School that she attended as a “very nice facility, being very well-kept.”

“I remember the materials that we used being of good quality,” Linda Brown stated in a 1985 interview.

That made the Topeka lawsuit unique among the cases the NAACP Legal Defense Fund combined and argued before the Supreme Court in 1953. Black schoolchildren in Topeka did not experience overcrowded classrooms like those in Washington, D.C., nor were they subjected to dilapidated school buildings like those in Delaware or Virginia.

While black parents in Delaware and South Carolina petitioned their local school boards for bus service, the Topeka School Board voluntarily provided buses for black children. Topeka’s school buses became central to the local NAACP’s equal access complaint due to weather and travel conditions.

Quality education was “not the issue at that time,” Linda Brown recalled, “but it was the distance that I had to go to acquire that education.”

Another unique characteristic of Topeka public schools was that black students went to both all-black elementary and predominantly white junior high and high schools. This fact presented another challenge for the Topeka NAACP’s desegregation crusade. The transition from segregated elementary schools to integrated junior and senior high schools was a harsh and alienating one. Many black Topekans recalled the overt and covert racism of white teachers and administrators. “It wasn’t the grade schools that sunk me,” Richard Ridley, a black resident and Topeka High School alumnus who graduated in 1947, told interviewers for the Brown Oral History Collection at the Kansas State Historical Society. “It was the high school.”

Black teachers cherished
A primary reason that black Topekans fought the local NAACP’s desegregation efforts is because they appreciated black educators’ dedication to their students. Black residents who opposed school integration often spoke of the familial environment in all-black schools.

Linda Brown herself praised the teachers at her alma mater, Monroe Elementary, for having high expectations and setting “very good examples for their students.

Black teachers proved to be a formidable force against the local NAACP. "We have a situation here in Topeka in which the Negro Teachers are violently opposed to our efforts to integrate the public schools,” NAACP branch Secretary Lucinda Todd wrote in a letter to the national NAACP in 1953.

Black supporters of all-black schools used a number of overt and covert tactics to undermine NAACP members’ efforts. Those tactics included lobbying, networking, social ostracism, verbal threats, vandalism, sending harassing mail, making intimidating phone calls, the Brown Oral History Collection reveals.

But the national office of the NAACP never appreciated the unique challenges that its local chapter faced. The Topeka NAACP struggled to recruit plaintiffs, despite their door-to-door canvassing.

Fundraising was also a major problem. The group could not afford the legal services of their attorneys and raised only $100 of the $5,000 needed to bring the case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Unheralded legacy
History ultimately would not be on the side of the majority of Topeka’s black community. A small cohort of local NAACP members kept pushing for desegregation, even as they stood at odds with most black Topekans.

Linda Brown and her father may be remembered as the faces of Brown v. Board of Education. But without the resilience and resourcefulness of three local NAACP members – namely, Daniel Sawyer, McKinley Burnett and Lucinda Todd – there would have been no Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.

The real story of Brown v. Board may not capture the public imagination like that of a 9-year-old girl who “brought a case that ended segregation in public schools in America.” Nevertheless, it is the truth behind the myth. And it deserves to be told.

Mary Elizabeth Bowser: Spy of the Confederate White House

Rebecca Beatrice Brooks - civil war saga

Mary Elizabeth Bowser was a slave who later became a spy for the Union army during the Civil War.

Born as Mary Elizabeth Richards, sometime around the year 1839, she was a slave of John Van Lew of Virginia.

After John Van Lew died in 1843, or 1851 (sources differ on the exact date), Elizabeth Van Lew and her daughter, also named Elizabeth, freed all of the family’s slaves, despite the fact that John Van Lew’s will didn’t allow it, according to a New York Times article:

“Mary’s freedom was likely de facto, not de jure, at least until after the war: both Virginia state law and stipulations in her husband’s will impeded Mrs. Van Lew from legally manumitting any of her family slaves.”

Bowser remained with the Van Lew family and worked as their servant. In the late 1850s, the elder Elizabeth Van Lew sent Bowser to be educated at a Quaker school for African Americans in Philadelphia.

Bowser later spent her teenage years as a missionary in Africa, before returning to Virginia in 1860 where she married Wilson Bowser the following year.

When the younger Elizabeth Van Lew began working as a Union spy during the Civil War, Mary Elizabeth Bowser assisted her in her intelligence gathering, as Van Lew described in her diary:

“When I open my eyes in the morning, I say to the servant, ‘What news, Mary?’ and my caterer never fails! Most generally our reliable news is gathered from negroes, and they certainly show wisdom, discretion and prudence which is wonderful.”

Since Van Lew was a prominent member of Richmond society, she was able to obtain a servant position for Bowser at parties held by Varina Davis, the wife of Confederate President Jefferson Davis.

This then led to a full-time position as a servant at the Confederate White House in Richmond.

During Bowser’s time there, she used her education and photographic memory to gather intelligence by reading military documents left out on desks or tables and eavesdropping on conversations.

Bowser then delivered the information to a baker named Thomas McNiven who made daily deliveries to the house. McNiven later described his activities in conversations with his daughter Jeannette:

“Miss Van Lew was my best source. She had contacts everywhere. Her colored girl Mary [Elizabeth Bowser] was the best as she was working right in Davis’ home and had a photographic mind. Everything she saw on the Rebel President’s desk she could repeat word for word. Unlike most colored, she could read and write. She made the point of always coming out to my wagon when I made deliveries at the Davis’ home to drop information…”

In 1865, Jefferson Davis figured out there was a spy in his house and eventually suspected Bowser, although it is not known how or why. According to the book “African American Lives,” Mary’s last act as a spy was an unsuccessful attempt to burn down the Confederate White House.

There is very little information of what became of Bowser after the war ended. Like most spies, any information or documents about Bowser’s spy activities were destroyed by federal officials after the war in order to protect her identity.

Bowser allegedly kept a diary, which was discovered by one of her descendants in 1952, but according to an article by NPR, it was inadvertently discarded:

“And she [Mary Elizabeth Bowser] left a diary, a diary that McEva Bowser may have found in 1952 when her husband’s mother died. McEva Bowser: ‘I was cleaning her room and… I ran across a diary but I never had a diary and I didn’t even realize what it was… And I did keep coming across (references to) Mr. Davis. And the only Davis I could think of was the contractor who had been doing some work at the house. And the first time I came across it I threw it aside and said I would read it again. Then I started to talk to my husband about it but I felt it would depress him. So the next time I came across it I just pitched it in the trash can.'”

A recent article in the New York Times suggests that after the war ended, Bowser gave public lectures about her time as a spy, using a false name to protect her identity:

“On Sept. 10, 1865, The New York Times published a notice for a ‘Lecture by a Colored Lady’: ‘Miss RICHMONIA RICHARDS, recently from Richmond, where she has been engaged in organizing schools for the freedmen, and has also been connected with the secret service of our government, will give a description of her adventures, on Monday evening, at the Abyssinian Baptist Church.’ There can be little doubt that this was Bowser. And yet, as the use of a pseudonym suggests, she was consciously constructing a public persona. Reporting on the talk, the New York-based newspaper the Anglo African described Richards as ‘very sarcastic and … quite humorous.’”

The same article states that Bowser also met Harriet Beecher Stowe in Georgia in 1867, when Bowser was running a school for African Americans, and told her all about her time as a Union spy during the war.

What became of Bowser after the 1860s remains unknown. According to an article in Richmond’s Style Weekly in 2002, a historian doing research on Mary Elizabeth Bowser claimed to have found her grave in a cemetery in Richmond but refused to announce where until she received permission from Bowser’s living descendant.

In 1995, the U.S. Military inducted Bowser into the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps. Hall of Fame with a statement that read:

“Mrs. Bowser certainly succeeded in a highly dangerous missions to the great benefit of the Union effort. She was one of the highest-placed and most productive espionage agents of the Civil War.”

RELATED: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/03/24/freed-slave-became-spy-then-she-took-down-confederate-white-house/?utm_term=.969e0503fb9b&tid=sm_tw

A statue of Gaspar Yanga, leader of uprising of enslaved Africans in Veracruz, Mexico (photo: Wikimedia Commons).

Vicente Guerrero, Afro-Mexican and second president of Mexico (Photo: Wikimedia Commons).

Researchers, Descendents Seek Recognition for Africans Who Were Central to the Success of England’s First Settlement In U.S.

By Associated Press - atlanta black star
February 8, 2019

WASHINGTON (AP) — The first Africans to arrive in English-controlled North America were so little noted by history that many are known today by only their first names: Antony and Isabella, Angelo, Frances and Peter.

Almost 400 years ago, they were kidnapped and forcibly sailed across the ocean aboard three slave ships — the San Juan Bautista, the White Lion and the Treasurer — and then sold into bondage in Virginia.

Now their descendants, along with historians and genealogists, are seeking recognition for a group of 20-some Africans they describe as critical to the survival of Jamestown, England’s first successful settlement in North America.

“We need to reclaim our history. We need to tell our story,” said Calvin Pearson, head of Project 1619, which is named after the year those first Africans landed near what became Hampton, Virginia.

A few historical markers and records mention these early enslaved Africans, but there’s been scant research on their lives. President Barack Obama made the area where they arrived a national monument in 2011 to ensure that its history was not lost, and Pearson and others are working to learn more.

Before the slaves arrived, Jamestown was starving. “Basically all of those people were right off of the streets in England,” said Kathryn Knight, who in May will release a book titled “Unveiled – The Twenty & Odd: Documenting the First Africans in England’s America 1619-1625 and Beyond.”

Those colonists “didn’t know how to grow anything. They didn’t know how to manage livestock. They didn’t know anything about survival in Virginia,” Knight said. The Africans “saved them by being able to produce crops, by being able to manage the livestock. They kept them alive.”

The Africans’ arrival marked the beginning of the region’s fractured relationship with blacks. More than two centuries later, Virginia became home to the Confederate capital, and in the last week its governor has been pressured to resign for a racist photo that appeared on his page in a 1984 yearbook.

The new arrivals were Catholic and many spoke multiple languages, according to Ric Murphy, an author and descendant of John Gowan, one of the Angolan captives.

They came from a royal city and “were quite informed and educated, and several of them, based upon what they did in the latter part of their years, clearly were leaders in the community in one form or the other,” Murphy said. “Many of them became landowners, which is quite different from the false narrative of what an enslaved person was.”

In Jamestown, historian Mark Summers leads tourists down paths that Angelo — also known as Angela — walked after being sold to a Captain William Pierce.

Like many of that first group, her life is largely a mystery. In fact, her entire known biography “could probably fit on a 3×5 index card,” Summers said. But being able to show people where she lived and walked is a spiritual experience for some, he said.

For African-Americans, “this is the same thing as going to Plymouth Rock,” said Summers, who works at the Historic Jamestowne park. “Here’s a place where you can stand and say, ‘We set foot here, and we can still walk this ground.'”

The first Africans were among more than 300 taken out of the Ndongo region of Angola, a Portuguese colony of mostly Catholic Africans, on the San Juan Bautista bound for Mexico. That ship was attacked and plundered by the White Lion and the Treasurer, which together seized about 60 slaves. After stopping in the Caribbean and trading some of the slaves for provisions, the White Lion sailed for Virginia with its human cargo.

Englishman John Rolfe, who would later marry Pocahontas, documented the White Lion’s arrival at what was then called Point Comfort.

“He brought not anything but 20, and odd Negars, which the Governor and Cape Merchant bought for victualle,” Rolfe wrote in a letter in January 1620, meaning that the colony purchased the slaves with provisions.

A 1620 census showed 17 African women and 15 African men in Jamestown.

Although sold into servitude, many of those original Angolans fared better than the millions of African slaves who came to North America later, said John Thorton, a Boston University professor of African American studies and history.

“They had a better chance at a better future than almost anybody who followed them because they were the first,” Thorton said. “A lot of them ended up owning property, and they ended up owning slaves of their own.”

By intermingling with the English colonists, some had children who ended up passing for white and merging into early colonial society, Thorton said.

Some, like the Catholic John Pedro, met with tragedy, Pearson said.

Pedro “ended up owning quite a bit of land in Virginia. When the English Civil War broke out, it was Protestants versus Catholics,” Pearson said. Pedro moved to Maryland to live with other Catholics, but he was captured in a battle and executed.

Antony and Isabella became servants for a Captain William Tucker, gained their freedom around 1635 and started a homestead in Kent County, Virginia, Pearson said. Around 1623, they had a son named William Tucker who “became the first documented African child born in English-occupied North America.”

Descendants of Antony and Isabella are buried at a Hampton cemetery that has been in use since the 1600s, Pearson said.

Knight has a different interpretation of those early records, concluding that Frances gave birth to Peter first, making him the first African child born in Virginia.

Described in later records as a “Negro carpenter,” Peter married and received his freedom with the promise of paying 10,000 pounds of tobacco to his master around 1676. He made the last payment in 1682, Knight said.

Murphy, who wrote “Freedom Road: An American Family Saga from Jamestown to World War,” said it’s important for black people to know about these first Africans because it “helps us have more ownership of American history.”

Pearson, whose organization plans to honor the anniversary of the Africans’ arrival on Aug. 24, agrees.

“From here, we see the beginnings of the Africa imprint on what would become the United States of America. It’s worth remembering.”

Here are 9 MLK quotes you won’t hear mainstream media cite today

Kali Holloway, AlterNet KALI HOLLOWAY, ALTERNET - COMMENTARY - raw story
21 JAN 2019 AT 05:12 ET

The Martin Luther King Jr. who is cynically trotted out every time racial unrest erupts in our cities is the MLK who can be conveniently used to prop up the status quo. He is MLK reduced to “I Have A Dream,” used in conservative political ads to scare-monger about invading, job-stealing Mexican immigrants. He is the almost wholly fabricated MLK whom the modern GOP claims would today be one of their own, presumably standing alongside them as they vote against the poor, people of color and women of every race at every opportunity. He is MLK reimagined as the passive figure the fascist, racist right in this country wants us to be as they lean into the boot on our necks.

In reality, those examples rely on half-truths and half-reveals of who MLK truly was. In real, big-picture life, MLK was far more radical than the cherry-picked lines from his speeches and books would suggest, a man who moved further left over the course of his long and weary fight for African-American civil rights. By 1966, MLK had become an outspoken opponent of “liberal” white complicity in white supremacy, of American imperialism and warmongering, of the capitalist system itself. Modern right-wingers’ use of quotes from MLK (here are a few examples) twist and misuse his words in ways that belie much of what he ultimately came to stand for.

The next time you see MLK corrupted and misused as a tool of capitalism, racism, unchecked white supremacy and war, recall that MLK said “a riot is the language of the unheard.” Here are several more examples of MLK’s most radical statements.

1. “Why is equality so assiduously avoided? Why does white America delude itself, and how does it rationalize the evil it retains?
The majority of white Americans consider themselves sincerely committed to justice for the Negro. They believe that American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying racial harmony. But unfortunately this is a fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity.”
— Where Do We Go From Here, 1967

2. “I contend that the cry of “Black Power” is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years.”
— Interview with Mike Wallace, 1966

3. “But it is not enough for me to stand before you tonight and condemn riots. It would be morally irresponsible for me to do that without, at the same time, condemning the contingent, intolerable conditions that exist in our society. These conditions are the things that cause individuals to feel that they have no other alternative than to engage in violent rebellions to get attention. And I must say tonight that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it America has failed to hear?…It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity.”
— “The Other America,” 1968

4. “When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”
— “Revolution of Values,” 1967

5. “Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad.”
— “The Three Evils of Society,” 1967

6. “A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.”
—“Beyond Vietnam,” 1967

“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn. The reality of substantial investment to assist Negroes into the twentieth century, adjusting to Negro neighbors and genuine school integration, is still a nightmare for all too many white Americans…These are the deepest causes for contemporary abrasions between the races. Loose and easy language about equality, resonant resolutions about brotherhood fall pleasantly on the ear, but for the Negro there is a credibility gap he cannot overlook. He remembers that with each modest advance the white population promptly raises the argument that the Negro has come far enough. Each step forward accents an ever-present tendency to backlash.”
— Where Do We Go From Here, 1967

7. “The problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power.”
— “The Three Evils of Society,” 1967

8. “The evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and evils of racism.”
— Southern Christian Leadership Conference speech, 1967

9. “First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a “more convenient season.” Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.”
— Letter From a Birmingham Jail, 1963

Civil War site for Black recruits becomes national monument

Adam Beam - philly tribune
10/29/18

NICHOLASVILLE, Ky. — When Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation to free slaves during the Civil War, it did not apply to Kentucky, one of the few slave states that did not join the Confederacy.

But Elijah P. Marrs did not want to wait. He escaped slavery in September 1864 to join the Union Army in Louisville and told some of his fellow slaves, “We might as well go.”

“If we staid at home we would be murdered,” he wrote in his autobiography. “If we joined the army and were slain in battle, we would at least die fighting for principle and freedom.”

Marrs was one of about 10,000 African Americans who eventually came to Camp Nelson in central Kentucky, a Union Army depot during the Civil War that became a recruiting center for Black soldiers and a refugee camp for their families.

On Saturday, the camp became the country’s latest national monument, the first area to gain the designation under Republican President Donald Trump.

“The Park Service tells the story. The story here is a story about fighting for freedom in a slave, Union state,” U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said. “We don’t hide from history. We learn from history. This history is an important part of the American history and story.”

Camp Nelson was once 4,000 acres, used to train and supply the Army of the Ohio. Today, 525 acres have been preserved to include a museum and reconstructed buildings. Saturday’s ceremony took place in a replica barracks, where two soldiers squeezed into bunks atop of straw mattresses. One of those soldiers was Jesse Comasuell Toll, according to his great grandson, Robert P. Gates Sr.

Gates attended Saturday’s ceremony and opened it with prayer. He said his great-grandfather, who was born a free man but lived under the threat of slavery, lived at the camp and attended a church. Gates now pastors that church, the Historic First Baptist Church of Camp Nelson.

“They came here because it was closer to freedom than it was to go to Canada,” he said.

Kentucky has a complicated Civil War history. It never officially joined the Confederacy, but it allowed slavery and was filled with Confederate sympathizers who attempted to set up a shadow government in the western party of the state. Confederate soldiers briefly occupied the state capital of Frankfort before Union forces took it back.

“At a time in our country when there are divisions, this is the real story of America,” Republican U.S. Rep. Andy Barr said.

Local officials have been trying to get Camp Nelson federal recognition for years. It’s a long process, requiring the land to be transferred to the federal government and various other legal requirements. The timing of Saturday’s ceremony was fortunate for Barr, who in just 10 days will be on the ballot for re-election in a competitive district. He faces a serious challenge from Democrat Amy McGrath, a retired Marine fighter pilot who has raised more money than he has.

Zinke, a former Congressman from Montana before Trump appointed him to lead the U.S. Department of Interior, told reporters the designation was not purposefully timed to give Barr a boost heading into the election. He noted he has worked with Barr on this issue back when he was in Congress.

“This is the right place, and it is above politics,” Zinke said. “This is red, white and blue.”

Zinke said Camp Nelson’s status as a national monument will add it to the National Park Service, elevating its profile. The camp will have its own unique stamp for visitors to collect in their quest to visit all of the national monuments and parks. And it will get a professional superintendent and staff to manage the property.

That was good news for Peggy McClintock, a tour administrator at the camp who gave Zinke and other dignitaries a tour of the facility before the ceremony. She wore purple sneakers to mark the occasion.

“I had to wear flat shoes today so I can tap dance,” she said. — (AP)

Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom review: a monumental biography

John S Gardner
the guardian
Sat 27 Oct 2018 06.00 EDT

Frederick Douglass, c1855. Photograph: Library of Congress/Getty Images

David Blight has written a must-read life of the escaped slave who held America ‘to the lightning scorn of moral indignation’

If Frederick Douglass had been born white in 19th-century America, he would be remembered as a self-made man in the style of Thomas Edison. In 20th-century America, postwar, he could have been a counselor to presidents, like James A Baker, or perhaps a media personality, even Walter Cronkite.

But he was born a slave, in Maryland in 1818, and he escaped to freedom and a life of voice and pen, thundering against slavery and for justice and the rights of African Americans and women – while becoming all those other things as well.

His second wife, Helen, wrote of “the shining angel of truth by whose side I believe he was born, and by his side he unflinchingly walked through his life”. Indeed, Douglass seemed protected. He was taught to read (then a crime) by a white woman, Sophia Auld, in the family that enslaved him. He worked in Baltimore, was converted as a teenager to a strong personal faith, and taught himself oratory from sermons and books. In 1838 he escaped north, making a new life and taking a new surname, adapted from Sir Walter Scott.

As David Blight writes, “Douglass’ great gift … is that he found ways to convert the scars Covey [a slave master] left on his body into words that might change the world. His travail under Covey’s yoke became Douglass’ crucifixion and resurrection.”

Once he began telling his story in public, Douglass brought the brutal inhumanity of slavery to northern audiences and launched his true life’s work. Three autobiographies and countless pamphlets and editorials show a language both lyrical and beautiful. “We have opened our papers,” he wrote, “new and damp from the press.”

Early efforts included a visit to Britain in which Douglass experienced the exhilaration of avoiding race prejudice for the first time. He founded the North Star newspaper, attacking slavery in the south and racism in the north, supported women’s suffrage at Seneca Falls in 1848. The anti-slavery movement was racked by conflict but he gave as good as he got.

During the civil war, Blight writes, Douglass “equate[d] treason with slaveholding” and advocated using the war to end slavery, its cause, deploying black troops to do so. He met Lincoln several times, notably at the White House in 1864, where he was “treated … as a man”.

After the war, Douglas fought for votes for African Americans. “If the old abolitionist needed a new occupation,” Blight writes, “he surely had one now – the frightening black man with brains who had penetrated the racist psyches of powerful people with words and his physical presence.”

Moving to Washington, he became active in Republican politics. He perceptively described the end of Reconstruction as “peace among the whites” and promoted “elbow room and enlarged opportunities” for black citizens along with strong federal enforcement of their rights. Selected as US marshal for the District of Columbia by President Rutherford Hayes, he even met an ageing Thomas Auld, Sophia’s brother-in-law, as a way “to declare his equality, and in a way to practice a self-renewing forgiveness”. Both shed tears. Douglass, one hopes, achieved a measure of internal peace.

Blight’s book is – thankfully – not a psychobiography. But it offers penetrating insights into the effect slavery had on Douglass’s personality.

“Douglass engaged in a lifelong autobiographical quest for a coherent story of ascendance and familial identity,” Blight writes, and “for the healing of his own wounds”. Douglass himself thundered that slavery “converted the mother that bore me into a myth, it shrouded my father in mystery, and left me without an intelligible beginning in the world”. He yearned for “a bright gleam of a mother’s love”.

This is a monumental book, a definitive biography, rich with the biblical cadences that filled Douglass’ life and imagination. Slavery, redemption, vengeance, justice: these were Douglass’ themes, and like Jeremiah he would be a prophet to an often recalcitrant people. The lecture halls expected no less yet Douglass gave them more, probing new depths of social and political analysis, constantly imploring greater exertion for the causes of emancipation and full equality, unafraid to make his hearers deeply uncomfortable.

“I will hold up America to the lightning scorn of moral indignation,” he wrote in 1847. That is what prophets do – real prophets rather than those who speak peace where there is none.

And of that popular conceit of today, Douglass as Republican? The truth is, Douglass was a partisan because only (and only some) Republicans showed any interest in protecting African-American rights and votes. His radicalism was above party.

In response to criticism of Douglass’ acceptance of political office, Blight notes that “some freedom fighters wear starched shirts, cultivate their appearance, and battle evil with words”. One might think the modern Republican party could encourage “Douglass Clubs” among recent immigrants – and then expect them to hold their party’s feet to the fire. It might work.

After all, recent presidential tweets could never have been more effectively skewered than by the editor of Frederick Douglass’ Paper. Blight records his response to the blusterings of Abraham Lincoln’s impeached successor: “‘What shall be said of Andrew Johnson?’ … better ‘leave Mr Johnson speak for himself as being the most damaging thing he can do’.”

This was a turbulent rather than tranquil life. What WEB DuBois called the “problem of the color line” has never disappeared. And so the fundamental tension in Douglass’ thought and words endures. As he wrote, “if American conscience were only half-alive”, injustice would cease and “[b]ased upon the eternal principles of truth, justice, and humanity … your Republic will stand and flourish forever.”

At his bicentennial, Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave who became a colossus, still stands witness in the conscience of the American people.

Coard: Tuskegee syphilis study’s Black ‘guinea pigs’

Michael Coard - philly tribune
10/19/18

Exactly 86 years ago in mid-October 1932, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” was implemented by the U.S. Public Health Service (PHS) at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

This inhuman study, which was designed to last for six months, initially included 600 Black men in rural Macon County, 399 with syphilis and 201 without. By the time this wicked experiment ended- 40 years later in 1972- as many as 128 of the 399 had died of syphilitic complications.

But it’s worse than that. Forty wives were infected. And 19 infants were born with congenital syphilis.

And, believe it or not, it’s actually even worse than that. Because penicillin had become available in the military during World War II (1939-1945), induction centers ordered treatment for 250 of those diseased Tuskegee victims who had been drafted. And because it became widely available to civilians in 1947- which was 15 years after the wicked experiment began- everyone in the country with syphilis could be cured immediately. But PHS used its political influence to maliciously block access to treatment for any of the 250 drafted Tuskegee men (as well as obviously any of the other Tuskegee victims).

And as late as 1969, PHS got the prestigious American Medical Association to support this depraved experiment.

By the way, just in case you don’t already know, here’s what that vicious disease did and does- if left untreated- to human beings, regardless of race: It caused and causes blindness. And deafness. And heart disease. And bone deformity. And dental disfigurement. And central nervous system deterioration. And excruciating death that resulted in up to 58 percent of untreated syphilis cases throughout America.

The purpose of the study was to monitor the natural progress of untreated syphilis. In other words, it was to watch Black “lab rats”- I mean Black men, women, and children- suffer and die.

The American Journal of Public Health in 2008 described it as “arguably the most infamous biomedical research study in U.S. history.” And in his book, Bad Blood: The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, award-winning author James H. Jones, Ph.D., wrote, “[It’s] the longest non-therapeutic experiment on human beings in medical history.”

The PHS reeled the unknowing Tuskegee victims in by flooding the county with fliers offering “Special Free Treatment” to cure “bad blood,” which was a colloquialism the poverty-stricken and barely literate residents used to describe all types of general ailments they didn’t understand. They were tricked into signing complex medical forms without any informed consent whatsoever. And they received no real benefits whatsoever- with the exception of “free burial insurance.” But they had to unknowingly sign forms agreeing to a specific type of autopsy before that coverage kicked in.

The study’s physicians and laboratory clinicians reasoned that they were not really harming these Black subjects because they were unlikely to get medical treatment anyway due to their destitution and also because they were purportedly too ignorant to reduce their behavior anyway due to their inherent and supposed excessive sex drive. Can you believe the racist PHS would take that position? Yes. I can.

The major bad guys in this sick and twisted medical conspiracy were Taliafero Clark and Thomas Parran Jr.

Clark, a member of the PHS’s Venereal Disease Division (VDD) who founded the study committee in 1932 at the national headquarters in Washington, D.C., said he conceived of a program that would observe but not treat cases of syphilis “in a group of Black men for six-to-nine months.”

As slimy as Clark was, Parran was slimier. While the former was the envisioner, the latter was the implementer. As the New York Health Commissioner and ex-head of the VDD, he personally selected Black, southern, impoverished, unschooled Macon County residents, proclaiming, “If one wished to study the natural history of syphilis in the Negro race ‘uninfluenced’ by treatment, this county would be an ideal location for such a study.”

As barbarically racist as this entire four-decade episode was, it wasn’t just hateful white devils who made it happen. It was also traitorous Black demons who participated. Dr. Eugene Dibble Jr., chief of the John Andrew Hospital at Tuskegee Institute, Dr. Robert Moton, president of Tuskegee Institute, and Eunice Rivers, the supervising nurse who trained at Tuskegee Institute and worked at its John Andrew Hospital, were the wealthy educated Black faces on white “supremacy” who were paid and rewarded to fool the poor uneducated Black victims into trusting the process.

If it hadn’t been for Peter Buxtun, a white 27-year-old epidemiologist and social worker hired by PHS in 1965 to interview patients with sexually transmitted diseases, no one would have ever known about this horror. A year after he was employed there, he filed an internal complaint on ethical grounds. When that complaint was denied, he refiled in 1968.

And when that one was rejected, he leaked the story to Jenn Heller, a white 23-year-old reporter at The Washington Star. Her article, a front page story published in 1972, was so explosive that the New York Times republished it the next day.

As a result of the widespread public outcry and outrage, the “Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male,” which started in mid-October 1932, ended in November 1972.

The last male victim died in 2004. The last widow victim died in 2009. Twelve adult offspring are still alive and receiving constant medical treatment.

A class action lawsuit, filed in 1973 by the ever-vigilant NAACP, resulted in a $10 million settlement, which is worth about $50 million in 2018 dollars. But that’s not enough. Not nearly enough. How much are blindness, deafness, heart disease, bone deformity, dental disfigurement, central nervous system deterioration, excruciating death, and hellish racism worth? I’m not sure. But I am sure that whatever it is, it must be part of a full health, education, housing, business start-ups, and land reparations package for all Black folks in America.

Before October ends, you should stop, pause, and think about those 600 total- including those 399 men and those 201 men, as well as those 40 widows, those 19 infants, and especially those 128 men who were the first to die.

Never forget. Always avenge.

When White Male Rape was Legal

October 6, 2018
Rachel Feinstein - racism review

Slavery in America–horrific work conditions, physical abuse, and lack of power come to mind; rarely do we consider the rape of black women by white men. White fathers and their sons regularly engaged in sexual violence against enslaved black women, often purchasing them for this purpose. This sexual exploitation was frequently allowed by white parents, if not encouraged. Because this behavior was normalized, and permitted by the U.S. legal system, it is no wonder the rape of enslaved black women was commonplace during slavery. Historians have described the rape of enslaved women by white men as a “routine feature” of most Southern slaveholdings. In When Rape was Legal: The Untold History of Sexual Violence during Slavery, I analyze this routine rape, focusing on the role of white men and women in sustaining oppression.

White masculinity has evolved over time and is shaped by a variety of factors including class, region, and the institution of slavery. In particular, those traits admired in white men were generally those which whites claimed contrasted with enslaved men and women. For example, dominance, independence, honor and sexual prowess served as standards for white masculinity. Identifying as the “master of others,” including being served by enslaved people and ordering them around, was particularly important for the status of wealthy white men in the South. In this sense, sexual violence against enslaved black women offered a legally accessible and socially acceptable way for white men to achieve many of the traits upheld by white society at the time.

White men experienced many social and legal incentives to engage in the rape of enslaved black women. As opposed to viewing this sexual violence as merely the result of sexual desire, demonstrations of power, or racial domination, it is best to understand this rape as an outcome of all of these components working together as part of the identity of white masculinity during this time period.

Many white boys and men were encouraged to engage in sexual violence against enslaved black women through social norms and parental guidance. For instance, a formerly enslaved man, “Bird” Walton described the experience of a woman Ethel Jane, with whom he was enslaved. Walton explained that the master of the household brought his son, Levey, to one of the cabins where,
They both took her [Ethel Jane]-the father showing the son what it was all about—and she couldn’t do nothing ‘bout it.

White women also had a role to play in encouraging their sons to sexually violate enslaved women. In some cases, they would purchase enslaved women for their sons, such as the example Tirrell notes in 1844 of a white mother in Virginia who purchased three attractive mulatto females, and placed them in a cottage near the family mansion, for the exclusive use of an only son—assigning as a reason why she did it, that it would “make Charley steady!”

The term “mulatto” in this passage, which was commonly used in the 1800’s to associate mixed-race individuals with mules, reflects the way enslaved women were dehumanized in the minds of whites and were thus able to be exploited for the benefit of whites without social or legal repercussions. Moreover, this quote reflects the role that some mothers played in creating a context which encouraged white boys and men to engage in sexual violence of enslaved women.

This is not the only role white women played in the sexual violence against enslaved black women. As mothers, but also as wives, white women played an intricate and noteworthy role in sustaining the oppression of black women under slavery. As a group with an intermediate degree of power and status, white women did not have the financial independence or legal power to fully resist their husbands’ behavior without consequences to themselves. However, their position within an intersectional hierarchy often afforded them some power to punish and blame enslaved women who were subjected to rape and sexual violence, or to ignore the violence altogether, as I describe in a previous post and in more detail in the book. White women’s intermediate status and power highlights the way intersectional oppression functions and is sustained, incentivizing various groups to uphold oppression of those beneath them within the hierarchy even if this also requires sustaining their own repressed status.

Today, a legacy of white male entitlement to the bodies of women and the derogatory white racial framing of black women continues. For instance, Brittany Slatton’s research demonstrates the way many white men today still view black women in terms of their sexual value, as exotic and degraded simultaneously, and as an opportunity for white men to explore their sexuality. Peggy Reeves Sanday has also documented the use of gang rapes by men as a male bonding activity on college campuses, practicing the sexual exploitation and violation of women as a means to foster masculinity. These practices are deeply embedded in the foundation of U.S. society, occurring throughout slavery as a regular, socially and legally accepted behavior for white men for hundreds of years.

Sadly, the lack of legal protection for those who experience sexual violence today continues in a modified form as well, with many white men convicted of sexual violence receiving lenient sentences and many black women being blamed, or even criminalized, for their victimization.

In addition to shedding light on the routine sexual violence against enslaved black women that is foundational to U.S. society, and the legacy this has left behind in terms of white male entitlement and the derogatory white racial framing of black women today, When Rape was Legal offers theoretical insight into the mechanisms that help sustain intersectional oppression broadly.

U.S., historian battle over unsealing records on 1946 lynching

Kate Brumback - PHILLY TRIBUNE
Oct 6, 2018

ATLANTA — Seven decades ago, a federal grand jury in Georgia heard 16 days of testimony but declared itself unable to identify or indict anyone involved in the brazen lynching of two young Black couples on a country road.

Now a historian is fighting to find out what happened in that grand jury room.

A car carrying the four sharecroppers was stopped by a white mob at Moore’s Ford Bridge, overlooking the Apalachee River, in July 1946. They were pulled from the car and shot multiple times along the banks of the river, a little more than 50 miles east of Atlanta.

The lynching captured national attention, and President Harry Truman sent the FBI to rural Walton County. Agents investigated for months and identified dozens of possible suspects. But a grand jury convened in December 1946 failed to indict anyone in the deaths of Roger and Dorothy Malcom and George and Mae Murray Dorsey.

Anthony Pitch, author of a 2016 book on the lynching, wants the transcripts from the grand jury proceedings unsealed. But the federal government argues that grand jury proceedings are secret and the records should remain locked away.

A federal judge last year granted Pitch’s request to unseal the records, but lawyers with the U.S. Department of Justice appealed. A three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments in the appeal Wednesday.

Pitch hasn’t been able to review the records but says he knows they are “voluminous.” Feeling optimistic after the hearing before the 11th Circuit, he said he hopes he’ll get to see them soon.

“I don’t know what I’m going to find there,” he said. “I hope it’s going to be explosive.”

Roger Malcom, 24, had been jailed after stabbing and gravely injuring a white man, Barnett Hester, during an argument. Witnesses told authorities Malcom suspected Hester was sleeping with his wife.

A white farmer, Loy Harrison, paid $600 to bail Malcom out on July 25, 1946. He was driving the Malcoms and Dorseys home, he told investigators, when he was ambushed by a mob.

Harrison was unharmed and told authorities he didn’t recognize anyone in the mob, which the FBI numbered at 20 to 25 people. An FBI report noted Harrison was a former Ku Klux Klansman and well-known bootlegger.

The months-long FBI investigation identified many possible suspects, some merely because they were Hester’s relatives, friends or neighbors, or because they had no alibis. But no one was charged.

When people came forward promising new information in the 1990s, law enforcement revisited the case, but investigators still said they couldn’t prosecute. Then-Gov. Roy Barnes in June 2000 ordered the Georgia Bureau of Investigation to reopen the case. That investigation closed in January, shortly after the FBI concluded its latest review.

Journalists, students, cold case groups and historians have visited the bridge and surrounding towns hoping to find clues or to coax people into talking.

Pitch was working on a book, “The Last Lynching: How a Gruesome Mass Murder Rocked a Small Georgia Town,” when he petitioned a federal judge to unseal the grand jury transcripts in January 2014.

Government lawyers argued that they weren’t aware of any such records, that they’d likely been lost or destroyed. But even if the records did exist, they argued, they shouldn’t be released because grand jury proceedings are secret.

U.S. District Judge Marc Treadwell in August 2014 denied Pitch’s request, saying there was no evidence the records existed.

Pitch again asked Treadwell in January 2017 to unseal the transcripts, saying his investigation had determined that the National Archives in Washington has the transcripts.

In August 2017, Treadwell ordered the records released, and the government appealed.

The appeals court judges grilled lawyers for both sides Wednesday. They asked where lines should be drawn for the release of grand jury records and what potential harm could come from releasing the records. They also wanted to know if binding court precedent that says federal judges have the authority to order grand jury records released should apply.

Department of Justice attorney Brad Hinshelwood argued that rules governing grand jury secrecy allow for exceptions but that Pitch’s request doesn’t meet any of them. Those rules can be changed, he said, but that should be done by policymaking bodies rather than the courts.

Hinshelwood also argued that people who appear before a grand jury might behave differently if they thought the records might one day be released.

Joe Bell, Pitch’s lawyer, argued that the historical significance of the case and the possibility that real answers might come out were of such great public interest. He also noted that all of the witnesses in this case are now dead.

Previous rulings in the 11th Circuit and in other circuits have allowed the release of grand jury records for reasons not enumerated in the exceptions provided for by the rules, he argued. — (AP)

the land stolen from the native americans!!!

Quakers to honor slaves buried on their land in Bucks County

Jay Scott Smith Tribune Correspondent - philly tribune
Oct 3, 2018

As Quakers at the Middletown Friends Meeting at Langhorne mark their 335th anniversary, they are looking to acknowledge and right a wrong that has extended over centuries.

Buried beneath the grounds of the meetinghouse in Bucks County are the souls of an untold number of slaves, some of whom have been buried on the grounds since 1693. Hundreds of them are buried in unmarked, segregated graves on the meetinghouse property.

On Saturday, the Quakers will hold a long overdue memorial service to properly honor their lives.

“There are slave remains on this property and we are acknowledging that,” said Holly Olson, the organizer of the event. “That ground that was never blessed and their graves that were never blessed are going to be blessed.”

The service will take place at 1 p.m. at 453 W. Maple Ave. in Langhorne and will honor the lives of enslaved Africans and African Americans buried in two locations on the property. There also will be a reading of manumissions, the legal documents that officially released slaves owned by Langhorne Quakers from enslavement.

Attendees later will gather at the two burial sites where memorial plaques will be dedicated. Olson said that she was first drawn to investigate how many dead slaves were buried in Langhorne after she heard a similar story in Upper Dublin.

“There was a member of Upper Dublin Friend’s Meeting who had a ministry to acknowledge enslaved people buried at that location,” Olson said. “That kind of got me wondering do we have enslaved people buried at [the meetinghouse].”

Olson went to Swarthmore College to research Quaker records and made a discovery that left her stunned.

“Quakers are notorious for having detailed records,” she said. “When I came across the manumissions, that was just mind-blowing. You realized that ‘Oh, sh—, these people were owned.’ I’m all about going back a step or two to fully understand what I’m looking at.”

Quakers, like many others in the 17th century, owned slaves. Even though the denomination officially banned slavery in 1776, it took years for many to free their slaves and for many decades after Blacks were still barred from being Quakers in many communities.

Jesse Crooks, a historian who has focused Quaker history and — for the last seven years — its connection to African-American history, says that Langhorne’s early Black population was borne from the city’s namesake.

“The history of the African-American community in Langhorne is really something special,” Crooks said. “There was a community south of what is now Langhorne Manor.

“When Jeremiah Langhorne died in 1742, he freed almost all of his slaves,” he added. “He owned thousands of acres of land and he didn’t have any direct heirs. He gave them life rights to part of his land. The people couldn’t pass it on to their kids — the land went back to his estate after their death.”

Crooks, who will speak during the memorial service, said that of all of the deceased Africans and African Americans, only one has been positively identified. In the Quaker tradition, most people’s graves are not much more than a simple headstone and a name.

In the slave days, Black people were treated like cattle and often died nameless. One man did not.

His name was Cato Adams, and it was by chance that he was identified.

“It’s so rare that you can know something about the life of a specific individual of African descent in that time period,” Crooks said. “The only way you could infer that [Adams] is buried there is that he died when it was in use and he left money for its upkeep. It’s not a Quaker record that says he’s buried there.”

Olson said that Quakers spent the last decade working on social justice in their community. The Quakers are predominantly white and along with their checkered history with slavery, they still carry the stain of their forced assimilation of Native Americans in schools as recently as the 1960s.

It’s a history that both Olson and Crooks acknowledge and say will continue to be addressed. As for this weekend, they know that it is not an end, but a beginning.

They have gotten input and help from area Black churches, along with the African American Museum of Bucks County. Along with Crooks’ talk, the service will feature spiritual music by the Lincoln University Gospel Choir.

“We’re trying to do this not in the Quaker way,” Olson said. “We’re so grateful to have members of the African American Museum on the planning committee because a bunch of white folks sitting around a table planning something for Black folks just doesn’t work.”

“We did not want a whitewashing of history,” she added. “It needs to be outed. People need to understand.”

'Our history is getting erased': the biggest threat to Sandy Island's Gullah is not hurricanes

Khushbu Shah in Sandy Island, South Carolina
the guarfian
Sun 23 Sep 2018 01.00 EDT

Laura Herriott can trace her family’s heritage on the island back to the 1800s. ‘It’s our own world,’ she says. Photograph: Khushbu Shah for the Guardian

Laura Herriott stepped off the Sandy Island landing dock into a fog-cloaked early morning covering the American mainland. Although only a passing car broke the silence it was louder than her island home, which lies a five-minute boat ride across the swollen Waccamaw river.

Secluded and nestled between two South Carolina rivers, Sandy Island houses a dozen homes for descendants of rice-cultivating West African slaves who created their own culture on the eastern seaboard, known as the Gullah.

Herriott, 65, lives in the Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor, a stretch of 400 miles south from Jacksonville, North Carolina, to Jacksonville, Florida, that includes 200,000 Gullah Geechee, some of whom still speak Gullah, with its creole mix of words from English and west African languages.

Much of the corridor was in the path of Hurricane Florence. Even more dangerous, the extensive post-storm flooding threatens to be worse than Matthew’s impact in 2016. Sandy Island, though, is an anomaly in the region as sand dunes elevate its 9,000 acres above the surrounding landscape.

“We’re untouchable,” Herriott said. God is looking out for the Gullah people on Sandy Island because he put us so high, she explained. “Once you get off the water, you’re great.”

A tin roof that blew off during Hugo was the worst damage she has had to her home – once her parents’ home – from hurricanes.
The mayor of Georgetown – of which Sandy Island is a part – Brendon Barber, is its first Gullah mayor, and he took potential flooding the week after Florence seriously, urging citizens to be prepared.

However, on the mainland in Georgetown, past the landing dock, past the golf courses and resorts named after plantations, past the huge commercial development in previously black neighborhoods – Gullah descendants Jannette Graham, 72, and Phyllis Gibson, 72, agree with Herriott. They do worry about flooding in coming days.

But hurricanes are not the worst of what is happening to those Gullah still holding on to their culture and heritage in the face of large-scale development on their ancestral lands. An influx of hundreds of thousands of sun-seekers, holidaymakers and retirees has transformed the Gullah coast from an isolated wilderness to what seems at times like one long strip mall.

“Levy Alley was where I was born,” Graham started and Gibson interjected, “it’s no longer there” only stopping when Graham cut her off to say, “[It] was a row of all black wooden houses.” They drove up to Graham’s former home, now an empty grass lot. A chunk of history has disappeared, just like the street of shops only for African Americans down the road – replaced with a law firm, salons and a strip mall.

Graham’s father was born on Arcadia Plantation, just as Gibson’s mother was born on Brookgreen Plantation in the early 20th century. The two exchanged stories from their childhood, pointing out the ghosts of buildings past and people gone, while trading neighborhood gossip.

“James Holmes? He had a shoeshine parlour on one side. And what was the name of the man with the barber shop?

“Mr Green? Green’s Barber Shop.”

“And that’s the fish place where the radio station is now.”

“This used to be the black street and every Saturday people came from all over. That changed in the 60s when the area started to integrate and they started to build more stores out in the rural area.”

For two hours, the childhood friends reminisce. “Now, it’s all gone. Now they say ‘Saturday’. It used to be ‘Sat’ta’dee’,” Graham smiled.

Back on Sandy Island, the yellow painted Pyatt convenience store and wispy willow trees near the dock welcome the Gullah residents home to the sandy roads. Besides that, the only two other services for the public are a fire station and the AME Bethel Baptist church built in 1880. Trash collection and mail delivery are on the mainland; a boat trip is needed for both.

“Some things are never going to change – like the history of here – but people do bring changes on. I’d like the church to stay the same,” Herriott said.

Herriott noticed a small leak in the roof from the rain that followed Florence’s arrival to the Carolina coast, shaking her head. As the church custodian, she will have to clean it up.

On the next road, the two-room schoolhouse closed in the 1960s. Now the school bus ferry shuttles the nine children on the island to Georgetown for school. Rattling off half a dozen former neighborhoods where a few hundred people used to live on the island just a couple of decades prior, Herriott drove her SUV past one abandoned home after another, without spotting another soul.

When hurricane winds pass through the island, the only bad things are lots of trees falling down, Herriott observed. “Nobody came from the state or county to help clean up,” she added. “You have to do it yourself, of course.”

The real threat, though, to her culture, her community, she emphasized, “is that nobody is left here, nobody standing here”.

After high school, Graham and Gibson left for much of their adult lives. “The economic situation was nothing we could live with while we were growing up,” Graham said. There were no opportunities for African Americans at the time, she elaborated. That’s why the two women took blue-collar jobs in New York for years. “The only option was to leave.” Now, they’re both back, trying to instill the importance of their culture to their children and grandchildren, who have moved away.

“Our history is getting erased,” Graham said. Her children laugh when she speaks Gullah.

For this reason, the three women take pride in Barber, their first African American and first Gullah mayor of the town of 9,000, as he preserves part of their heritage. Over grits and blackened shrimp at the Big Tuna, Barber told a story in the Gullah dialect – one with a moral – about a bear and a preacher.

He switched topics suddenly, becoming serious about Florence evacuation plans and flooding preparation for the town, his childhood community.

“We organize first responders, administrators, people from the state also,” he explained. “We have to do what’s best for the people in the city.”

And as the women toured the city, going back over their childhoods and the history of the Gullah people in South Carolina, Barber held a press briefing preparing citizens for floodwaters potentially cresting the coming weekend.

Herriott looked over the Waccamaw river from the four-seater boat as she returned to Sandy Island, unfazed by the prospect of rising water levels and choppy conditions. “If I’m coming home [from the mainland], I’m coming home,” she said defiantly.

Because, as Graham and Gibson acknowledged, the biggest threat to the Gullah people along the coast may not be rains, wind and floods. It’s watching their history disappear in front of their eyes.

Meet Haiti’s Founding Father — His Black Revolution Was Too Radical for Thomas Jefferson

Modern scholarship is reexamining Haiti’s founding father.

The Conversation - alternet
August 30, 2018, 6:08 AM GMT

Crowds cheered as local lawmakers on August 18 unveiled a street sign showing that Rogers Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn would now be called Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard, after a Haitian slave turned revolutionary general.

When Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after a 13-year slave uprising and civil war, he became the Americas’ first black head of state.

Supporting the French colonial perspective, leaders across the Americas and Europe immediately demonized Dessalines. Even in the United States, itself newly independent from Britain, newspapers recounted horrific stories of the final years of the Haitian Revolution, a war for independence that took the lives of some 50,000 French soldiers and over 100,000 black and mixed-race Haitians.

For more than two centuries, Dessalines was memorialized as a ruthless brute.

Now, say residents of Brooklyn’s “Little Haiti” – the blocks around Rogers Avenue, home to some 50,000 Haitian-Americans – it’s time to correct the record. They hope the newly renamed Dessalines Boulevard will burnish the reputation of this Haitian hero.

Opposition to Dessalines

Other New Yorkers aren’t so sure.

The New York City Council’s vetting committee labeled Dessalines a “possibly offensive historical figure,” tacitly referencing the massacre of French citizensthat followed Haiti’s revolution.

Just after declaring independence, in early 1804, Dessalines discovered that local French colonists were plotting to overthrow his new government. He ordered all remaining French citizens in Haiti, except for a few French allies, to be killed.

My research indicates that between 1,000 and 2,000 white landowners and their families, merchants and poor French were executed, always in a very public fashion. Some estimates are as high as 5,000.

Dessalines, who protected all British, American and other non-French white people living in Haiti, justified the killings as a response to acts of war by France. Despite Haiti’s declared independence, French imperial forces continued to threaten invasion from their military outpost in Santo Domingo, modern-day Dominican Republic.

To his critics, however, Dessalines’ massacre amounted to “white genocide.”

The limits to Jefferson’s vision of equality

In researching Dessalines for the biography I am writing, I found that he was in many ways cut from the same cloth as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other American revolutionaries.

Dessalines was an Enlightenment thinker who espoused life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And he was willing to use strategic, bloody violence to free his people from colonial rule.

But in his commitment to black equality he was far more radical than America’s founding fathers, who freed the U.S. from England but let black Americans stay in chains for another nine decades.

In June 1803, when Dessalines began planning for independence, he wrote to President Thomas Jefferson.

Like Americans, he reported, Haitians were “tired of paying with our blood the price of our blind allegiance to a mother country that cuts her children’s throats,” he said. They would fight for their freedom.

Jefferson never responded.

Dessalines’ vision of an autonomous black state – a nation founded by enslaved people who killed their colonial masters – alarmed the patrician Virginia plantation owner, Jefferson’s letters show. The U.S. was also being pressured by southern slave states and French and British diplomats to shun Haiti.

Rather than reckoning with the ills of racial oppression and colonialism, most prominent thinkers across the Americas and Europe interpreted Dessalines’ war as an example of African barbarity.

Haiti was run by a “hord of ferocious banditt” and led by “Barbarous Chieftains,” commented one British observer in 1804.

Pushing the Enlightenment further

This racist view of Dessalines persisted for two centuries.

Today, modern scholarship is redeeming Haiti’s founding father.

Dessalines challenged the universalist rhetoric of the 1789 French Revolution, when idealists toppled their monarchy demanding “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité” – freedom, equality and fraternity.

Yet the French continued to use enslaved labor to produce sugar, coffee and other crops in the Caribbean. Dessalines said France had shrouded their colonies in a “veil of prejudice.” He insisted that true egalité required black liberty, too.

This radical vision of black empowerment is evident in Haiti’s 1804 Declaration of Independence, signed by Dessalines. In 2010 I located the only known extant copy of this stunning founding document, at the National Archives of the United Kingdom.

The 1805 Constitution that followed reaffirmed the abolition of slavery in Haiti, making it the first free black state in the Western Hemisphere.

It also eliminated official racial distinctions. According to Haiti’s Constitution, all Haitians, regardless of skin color, would be considered black in the eyes of the law. In Dessalines’ philosophy, race was an ideological concept. By securing Haitian citizenship, a person became black.

Under Dessalines’ rule, blackness was to be the source of freedom and equality – not bondage.

Haiti’s rejection on the world stage

Dessalines’ revolutionary fervor earned him international diplomatic isolation.

France refused to accept Haitian independence until 1825, when Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed to pay 150 million francs – equivalent to US$21 billion today – for the loss of human and territorial “property.” To ensure compliance, French warships with loaded canons threatened the country from the harbor of Port-au-Prince.

Things also went badly for the newly independent Haiti in its own neighborhood.

Jefferson imposed an embargo on Haiti, cutting off trade with the country from 1806 to 1808, and the U.S. refused to recognize Haitian independence until 1862.

Dessalines was assassinated in 1806 by opponents within his own government.

A modern black hero

The international smear campaign almost succeeded in erasing Dessalines’ revolutionary legacy.

As one opponent to the Little Haiti street renaming claimed, Dessalines is “obscure to most Americans.”

Even within Haiti, Dessalines is overshadowed by the black Haitian military leader Toussaint Louverture, allegedly a more restrained and diplomatic revolutionary.

But as scholars have revised the long-dominant racist narrative about Dessalines, public interest in the abolitionist has grown.

As the Haitian-American New York Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte said in Brooklyn, the newly named Dessalines Boulevard is “undoing in a concrete and tangible way centuries of the trivialization of our history.”

A Mass Grave of Prison Laborers in Texas Should Be Respected, Not Paved Over

BY Andrea Roberts The Conversation - truthout

After the Civil War, Texas's sugar cane plantations were still farmed by unpaid black laborers -- prisoners forced to work for free in a system called "convict leasing."

When archaeologists discovered the intact skeletons of 15,000 free and enslaved Africans at a construction site in lower Manhattan in 1991, the federal government – which planned to build an office building on the site – conferred with African-American communities, scholars and activists. Together, they signed an agreement to halt construction, rebury the bodies and establish a national monument on the site.

Officials in Sugar Land, Texas, chose a different path in April 2018 when they found 95 graves beneath the construction site of a new school.

A judge issued approval to exhume the bodies and, on June 10, archaeologists hired by the school district opened up the wooden coffins.

They contained the remains of black prison laborers forced to work on Texas’ sugar cane plantations from 1878 to 1911. This form of indentured servitude, called “convict-leasing,” was common across the American South after the Civil War.

School construction has continued during the excavation. The city of Sugar Land, which owns most of the land occupied by the burial ground, quickly decided that the exhumed bodies would be reburied elsewhere.

Protecting Texas’ Black History

The contrast between these two cases is illustrative.

As an urban planning professor whose scholarship focuses oncommunity development and historic preservation, I can attest that it is not that unusual to find unmarked black cemeteries in the South. After all, enslaved Africans comprised 35 percent of the region’s population in 1860, according to census data.

Yet, too often, public discussion about how to handle these sensitive sites occurs only after graves have been disturbed.
My research on Texas’ black settlements and cemeteries suggests that such discoveries will only increase as its fast-growing cities expand into what was once rural land.

Texas was the last American state to officially end slavery, two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Soon, Texas was home to hundreds of freedom colonies, towns founded by landowning African-American families descended from enslaved people.

My Texas Freedom Colonies Project Atlas and Survey has found archival and ethnographic evidence that African-Americans established more than 557 freedom colonies throughout eastern and central Texas between 1865 and 1920. Fort Bend County, where the Sugar Land burial ground was discovered, is itself home to five freedom colonies.

Today, memories and stories, a few homesteads and a cemetery are all that remain of the once-prosperous Texas communities that insulated African-Americans from the racial terror that followed Emancipation and Reconstruction.

These are critical parts of US history. But many freedom colonies’ cemeteries have already been paved over, bulldozed or hemmed in by development.

What the Law Requires

In theory, Texas law should protect these heritage sites.

By law, once a cemetery or grave site is found, the property owner must be notified and the finding recorded with the county clerk.

If the cemetery is more than 50 years old and abandoned, the Texas Historical Commission takes jurisdiction over the site. It must consult with the dead’s next of kin, and can require exhumation to be conducted noninvasively, using ground-penetrating radar.

The state does not, however, outline how or where unearthed remains should be reburied, nor require that community members be involved in that decision.

Federal law, which comes into play when a burial site may be eligible for inclusion on the National Register of Historic Places, is more robust.

In such cases, construction must be halted while officials determine if the newly discovered burial grounds qualify based on the historic significance of the dead, the events surrounding their death, the burial materials or their prehistoric value.

I believe work on the entire school project should have been paused the moment the bodies were discovered. The Sugar Land mass grave hasclear historic relevance, both as an endangered place and a remnant of the horrific but little-known chapter of black history that followed emancipation and Reconstruction.

Sugar Land official complied with Texas law, but they did not recognizethe site’s national significance as a graveyard of the former Imperial State Prison Farm.

So the National Historic Preservation Act – which requires local officials to consult with the state and other “interested parties,” including the descendants of prison laborers throughout Texas – was not triggered.

Black History and Suburban Growth

Texas is among the fastest-growing states in the country. With little to no regulatory constraints, suburban developments – many named after plantation owners – have proliferated in major metro areas.

My ancestors were enslaved and forcibly brought to this area of Texas in the 1830s. Since I was a child, relatives have shared stories of the black bodies buried beneath suburbs in Sugar Land and Missouri City.

Indeed, Sugar Land officials knew that they might discover an old cemetery on the site of the proposed school.

For decades, a local advocate, Reginald Moore, had told local officials that prison laborers were likely buried in the area. As a result, an archaeologist was already on hand when the graveyard was discovered.

Exhumation occurred within days, without family members’ permission. News helicopters provided the public with aerial views of the bodies in wooden boxes.

Archaeologists determined that the dead had been black men, some as young as 14 years old. Their misshapen bones were a sign of repeated hard labor.

By July, images of handcuffs, chains and other artifacts buried with the bodies were being broadcast internationally.

The Southern convict-leasing system, which some historians consider have called “slavery by another name,” was laid bare for the world – and relatives of the dead – to see.

Memorializing a Difficult History

The sudden media visibility changed the dynamics on the grave site.

In the months since the discovery, Sugar Land has begun consulting with outside groups, including Moore and his Convict Leasing and Labor Project, on the process of reinterment and memorializing the bodies.

Moore wants the remains reburied at the nearby Old Imperial Prison Farm Cemetery, which his group runs. He and others also say a museumshould be dedicated to convict leasing.

The Black United Front, a civil rights group, hopes that the remains will be DNA tested so that reparations may be paid to the descendants.

Preserving While Growing

When Native American remains are discovered, federal law mandates a very specific and careful set of next steps.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act recognizes the rights of “Indian tribes, and Native Hawaiian organizations to Native American cultural items, including human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony.”

No specific laws recognize the cultural and historic significance of African diaspora sites. That makes it much harder to protect black history.

Too often, African-American heritage sites like Sugar Land are simply paved over.

Of the 114 previously unmapped Texas freedom colonies my team has so far identified, for example, 21 are in high-risk locations near Texas’ fast-growing Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston, San Antonio or Austin metro areas.

State officials now have the opportunity to reach out to freedom colony descendants, historians and experts about appropriate protection of the sites before the inevitable development begins in the area.

Of course, Texas is not the only state facing this problem. And the law doesn’t have all the answers.

The United States was built with black labor. As its population inexorably expands, city planners must look beyond the law – to technology, cultural practice, community and history – to reconcile preservation with growth.

Legacy of Slavery, Segregation Impacts Debate on Talbot Boys Statue In Maryland

By Associated Press - atlanta black star
August 19, 2018

EASTON, Md. (AP) — When residents here describe their town, they describe a paradise. There’s no crime and everyone_black and white_gets along in neighborhoods just a few miles from the banks of the Eastern Shore’s Tred Avon River in Talbot County.

Those waters, however, once led to one of the most prominent slave ports in the country. Talbot County profited off of the human cargo the ships carried, condemning slaves to labor that sustained thriving agriculture and seafood industries.

With the Civil War came the opportunity for slaves to gain freedom through military service. Eighteen who fought for the Union then returned to Easton to found Unionville, a haven that got them through the violence of the later segregationist Jim Crow era.

Throughout the 20th century, black and white communities in Easton developed into the largely middle-class households they are today, but as parallel, segregated worlds. Lines started to blur once segregation ended. But as much as Easton and its neighbor Unionville may want to move past the deeply unequal relationships that etched their past, they can never quite escape them.

“You have people here who may be descendants of folk who held others in bondage and the descendants of the people who were held in bondage,” said Rev. Nancy Dennis of St. Stephen’s AME Church in Unionville. “They work together, they engage in business transactions together, they socialize together, they help each other when there’s crisis.”

This proximity is one reason why a recent but unresolved debate about taking down Easton’s Confederate statue has been so delicate.

Soldiers who sacrificed their lives to ensure that African American slaves would never be free are glorified in a bronze statue on the courthouse lawn. Five miles away in Unionville, the graves of 18 of their military opponents, born into slavery, are buried behind a church where their descendants worship every Sunday.

Around the bend from the church graveyard is Wye House Plantation, which was the largest plantation on the Eastern Shore and where Frederick Douglass was enslaved. The original structure looms and a descendant of Douglass’ owner still lives there. Though a statue of Douglass was erected in front of the courthouse to honor the abolitionist, the county council approved it after months of debate and stipulated it could not exceed the height of the Confederate statue it parallels.

Communities with Confederate statues across the country are reckoning with relics commemorating the Civil War. In Charlottesville last year, such a statue became the gathering point for a white nationalist and Nazi rally that erupted into violence and left one anti-protester dead. Baltimore authorities removed four Confederate monuments overnight in their city just a few days later.

People in Easton are grappling with how their histories are honored as a handful of activist residents are forcing the town to confront its past.

Talbot Boys

Although the controversy over Easton’s Talbot Boys statue has simmered for only a couple of years, its story begins 104 years ago.

Joseph B. Seth, a lawyer from Easton, wrote a letter to Col. David G. McIntosh of Towson in 1914, asking McIntosh to help him secure a monument with the names of the 84 Confederate soldiers from Talbot County.

“We had more men from this County to gain positions of high distinction than there were from any other County in the Country, either North or South,” he wrote.

When Easton erected the monument in July of 1914, Seth realized his mission was incomplete. He expressed to McIntosh his interest in placing a unique statue on top of the monument, unlike the common statues of soldiers throughout the country.

“It is my desire to get away from the conventional soldier figure which is found on all of the monuments North and South, and to get an allegorical figure representing youth and courage,” he wrote.

The county dedicated the Talbot Boys statue on June 5, 1916, an image of a boy soldier standing at attention holding a Confederate flag that drapes over his left shoulder. Although some Easton residents say they either ignore the statue or knew nothing about it as children, their tune changed three years ago when concerned residents notified the local NAACP chapter of their opposition to Talbot Boys after feeling alarmed by the shooting of nine black members of Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina by white supremacist Dylann Roof.

The NAACP then requested the statue’s removal and a countywide debate over which side of the town’s history to honor ensued.

A Painful History

Before the Civil War, Talbot County had the tenth largest slave population in the state. People from Africa and the Caribbean were brought into the deepwater port at Oxford, operated by founding father Robert Morris, according to local historian Bernard Demczuk. They were then distributed on both sides of the Tred Avon River using a ferry now considered the longest running private ferry in the country.

There were 3,725 slaves and 2,964 free blacks living in the county by 1860. Slaves were sold at an open market where the county courthouse now stands.

When war broke out, brothers in the county found themselves fighting against each other, though three times as many fought for the Union as the Confederate cause.

The Talbot Boys statue was erected 51 years after the war ended during the height of segregationist Jim Crow period.

“You had this climate in 1913, 14, 15 of the highest office in the land saying it’s good to attack black people, it’s the American way,” said Demczuk. “That’s why the statue was put up.”

During that same era, there were several lynchings on the Eastern Shore, Demczuk said. Black residents, such as those in Unionville five miles away, knew not to wander far from home.

“That community was self-sustaining and it was insular and it had to be,” Demczuk, who wrote a dissertation on Unionville, said. “They had to grow their own food, they had to have their own school system, they had to have their own midwives, they had to have their own health care and child care because they couldn’t go to the white schools. They were confined. Racism and Jim Crow and the (Ku Klux) Klan confined them into this community.”
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Controversy

Easton’s Talbot Boys statue stands on the Talbot County Courthouse lawn. Some residents believe its position sends a message of hate to those seeking justice and inaccurately portrays the Confederacy as the winner of the Civil War.

Richard Potter, an Easton native and president of the NAACP, led the organization’s efforts in 2015 to remove the Talbot Boys statue from the lawn. The members submitted recommendations to the county council, which included relocating the statue to a museum and replacing it with a statue that honors both sides of the Civil War.

The courthouse is a place where Americans go to seek a fair and just trial, according to the Sixth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution_yet, on one side of its lawn stands “a statue that honors individuals who were pro-slavery and wanted to keep us_a particular group of people_oppressed,” Potter said.

When the county council voted against the recommendations, they did so in an illegally closed meeting, a move that prompted the NAACP to partner with the ACLU of Maryland to fight the council’s violation of the Open Meetings Act. The council voted again in public, and the decision was the same_no.

For the more conciliatory voices, including Bartlett, a workaround solution came in 2011 when the county council allowed the Frederick Douglass Honor Society to erect a statue of Douglass. The statues stand 51 feet apart, on either side of the walkway leading up to the courthouse doors, both depicting life in 1800s Easton, when Confederates and those who supported the Union lived as neighbors.

Bartlett voted against the NAACP’s recommendations because he believed the Talbot Boys and Douglass statues complement one another by accurately depicting the county’s history with the Confederacy and Douglass’ triumph over slavery.

“The NAACP didn’t see it that way and that took me by surprise,” he said. “I thought that having both the statues was actually a good thing because it showed the progression of history, and having torn down the Talbot Boys statue, no one would ever know that there were Southern Sympathizers in Easton.”

Although the Douglass statue is viewed as a peaceful solution, it doesn’t tell the story of the other side of the Civil War_the Union side, according to Potter.

“(The NAACP) won’t be finished until that statue is removed and we have a monument up there that depicts the entire truth about the Civil War, as it relates to Talbot County,” he said.

Tennessee reopens civil rights cold case from 1940

Emanuella Grinberg Jamiel Lynch - philly tribune
8/10/18

Elbert Williams may not be as well-known as Medgar Evers, James Chaney or other American civil rights activists who were killed in their quest for justice and equality.

No autopsy was performed on Williams. No one was charged with a crime. It’s not even clear where his body was buried.

But that may change soon.

The investigation into Williams’ death almost 80 years ago has been reopened, a Tennessee prosecutor said Thursday. Williams is thought to be the first NAACP member to be killed for his civil rights work.

“We cannot do all in 2018 that should have been done in 1940, but justice and historic truth demand that questions about the cause of Elbert Williams’ death, and the identity of his killer(s), that should have been answered long ago, be answered now if possible,” Garry G. Brown, District Attorney of Tennessee’s 28th Judicial District, said in a statement.

Who was Elbert Williams?

Williams was born in Haywood County, Tennessee in 1908 to sharecropper parents, according to retired lawyer Jim Emison, who is writing a book about Williams’ life and death.

Williams received his education in the African-American church that served as the school for black children in the county. There he met his wife, Annie. The couple married in 1929 and both got jobs at Sunshine Laundry. She worked as a presser and he as a fireman who kept the boiler going.

A founding member of the Brownsville, Tennessee NAACP chapter in 1939, Williams was involved in efforts to register black voters.

On June 20, 1940, police kidnapped him from his home and interrogated him in the city jail about whether he was planning an NAACP meeting.

Three days later, Williams’ body was found, beaten and bruised, in the Hatchie River, six miles south of the city. His widow said he appeared to have two bullet wounds in his chest, according to Emison.

A hastily assembled coroner’s inquest at the riverbank determined the cause of death “foul means by parties unknown.” An immediate burial was ordered before an autopsy or external medical examination was performed. Williams’ body is believed to be buried in an unmarked grave in Taylor Cemetery in Haywood County.

In August 1940, a special county grand jury ruled the death a homicide, Brown said. The U.S. Justice Department later said the murder was “undoubtedly” a violation of federal civil rights laws, but no charges were brought. Tennessee has no statute of limitations on first-degree murder.

“There is no expiration date on the truth or justice. Elbert Williams, like so many other relatively unknown heroes of the civil rights movement gave their lives to exercise the most basic foundation of our democracy — the vote,” NAACP Communications Director Malik Russell said.

‘I hope it’s done right’

A historical marker honoring Williams was unveiled near the town square in Brownsville on June 20, 2015. Otherwise, no progress has been made in the case.

It is being reopened under the state’s new Civil Rights Crimes Cold Case Law, which mandated a survey of cold crimes and referral for prosecution of those deemed “viable.” Experts with the forensic anthropology department at the University of Tennessee have volunteered to locate the grave and exhume the remains for examination, Brown said.

Emison said he has been hoping that the case would one day be reopened. Even if no one faces charges, finding his body and giving him a proper burial would be a measure of justice, he said.

“I hope it’s done right,” he said. “I hope it becomes a model. A model for the South and a model for the nation.”

The retired lawyer stumbled upon Williams’ story while he was researching a court case online and found an article about Depression-era lynchings in middle Tennessee. He had never heard Williams’ name before, and that surprised him as someone who had lived in the area his whole life. He asked other lawyers and judges if they knew about the case and found out that he wasn’t alone, he said.

He started research thinking he would write an article. Six years later, he’s working toward a book.

“We will never heal the wounds inflicted until we acknowledge them. Discover their depth. Apologize and try to make them right,” he said. “That is what I hope happens.” — (CNN)

Coard: Last slave ship docked 158 years ago

Michael Coard - philly tribune
7/6/18

On July 7, 1860, which was more than a half century after the importation of enslaved Africans into America was banned, slave ship Clotilde illegally docked in Mobile, Ala., with as many as 110 Black men, women and children from Dahomey (which is present-day Benin near the west coast of the Motherland).

It was the last recorded slave ship that landed in the U.S.

The Clotilde, an 86-foot-long, 23-foot-wide, two-masted schooner, was built to transport lumber.

Apart from the wreckage shown in the photograph above, there are no other images available because the ship’s owner burned it down in order to destroy all evidence of his crime. That crime was a violation of a federal law known as “The Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves,” which was passed in 1807 and implemented in 1808. It didn’t go into effect any sooner because the U.S. Constitution wouldn’t allow it.

Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution, which went into effect in 1789, mandated that the “importation... [of enslaved Africans] shall ‘not’ be prohibited by Congress prior to 1808....”

First of all, it didn’t ban slavery; it banned only the importation of enslaved Africans. Second, it didn’t ban their importation immediately in 1789; it banned it 20 years later in 1808 (with 1789 being counted as the first year).

Why did it take 20 years? The answer’s very simple. It was racism and capitalism. The drafters of the Constitution knew slavery importation was wrong, but they also knew they and others could make a lotta money by continuing it as long as feasibly possible. So they first decided on the 20 year delay and then they in particular- along with racist America in general- decided to breed humans for enslavement instead of importing them for it. Is that psychotically evil or what? This is exactly why I call all of ‘em devils. And don’t accuse me of being racist because I call those white folks devils. After all, a devil is what a devil does. If you do devilment, you’re a devil. Case closed.

The background of Clotilde’s transformation from lumber ship to slave ship goes like this. During the early months of 1860, Timothy Meaher, a wealthy shipbuilder, slave trader, and landowner made a bet with other wealthy slave traders and landowners that he could evade federal authorities and sneak enslaved Africans into the country. They actually bet each other. If that’s not devilment, nothing is. He then hatched a scheme to pretend to bring wood from Africa to America. When he arrived there, he engaged in a conspiracy to kidnap 125 Africans but had time to get (depending on various historical records) only 103-110 because he thought his plan had been exposed when he saw U.S. ships near the area.

Upon arrival back to Mobile with his human cargo that had endured the unimaginably tortuous two-month voyage on the reconverted lumber ship, Meaher was convinced that the feds were onto him. Therefore, he had the Clotilde (also spelled Clotilda) towed upriver during the cover of darkness at night past the port where he ordered the captives ashore. He then had the Clotilde set afire.

He was later arrested and charged with blatantly violating federal law. However, the court ruled that since the ship was destroyed leaving insufficient physical evidence and since the Africans weren’t permitted to testify because they were legally considered “property,” not humans, Meaher couldn’t be criminally liable. Therefore, he was found not guilty of all charges.

The man in the photograph above is Cudjo Lewis, the last survivor on Clotilde. By the way, let’s not call this man, who had been a village chief, by his “slave name.” Instead, let’s show him the respect and dignity he deserves by calling him by his indigenous African name, which he said is Kazoola.

Shortly after Kazoola and other survivors were located by federal authorities, they were freed. That same year, 1860, they immediately labored at local businesses, pooled their meager resources, purchased a small plot of land, and established a community they called “Africatown,” 3 miles north of Mobile. Several of Kazoola’s descendants still live there.

Speaking of descendants, as a hip-hop aficionado, I’m proud to say that there’s a big hip-hop connection to this “Africatown” story. Two of the Clotilde survivors were Charles and Maggie Lewis, who are the great-grandparents of Ahmir Khalib Thompson, aka Questlove of The Roots!

Many of the Coltilde captives were Yoruba and Fon. The “Africatown” residents retained their cultural traditions and language well into the 1950s. Its population peaked at 12,000 and is currently at 2,000.

Zora Neale Hurston, a literary giant of the Harlem Renaissance, interviewed Kazoola in 1927 for an article in the Journal of Negro History. But it was never published. Despite that, the manuscript of her research was posthumously published this year as “Barracoon: The Story of the Last ‘Black Cargo.’” I encourage everyone to read it.

Kazoola, who was “Africatown’s” official spokesperson in dealing with the outside world, became an ancestor in 1935 at age 94.

In closing, I have a final comment to make about Chief Kazoola and all the other Clotilde captives: Never forget. Always avenge.

Burial Site of Nearly 5,000 Newly Freed Blacks Covered by Playground to Get Memorial

By Associated Press - atlanta black star
July 6, 2018

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — For generations, children would play kickball, hide-and-seek and jump rope on a stretch of concrete at Weccacoe Playground, unaware the remains of 5,000 black Philadelphians were buried 18 inches beneath their feet. Now, a portion of that playground will become a memorial to the dead.

Last month, the city announced plans to develop a section of the playground into the Bethel Burying Ground Historic Site.

“This is an opportunity to fix something that fell off of our radar, and it’s a teachable moment for these young children,” said Leslie Patterson-Tyler, whose husband, the Rev. Mark Tyler, is pastor of Mother Bethel AME. Her two daughters learned to swing at the playground when they lived in the neighborhood, she said. “It’s already a gathering place, so let’s continue to gather in this place and talk about what was.”

In the 1800s, no African-Americans could be buried in cemeteries within Philadelphia’s city limits. The dead could be buried at potter’s fields like Washington Square, but the city forbade any tombstones to mark those interred there.

So when Richard Allen, a freed slave who founded the African Methodist Episcopal Church, sought to buy land for a burial ground for his church members in 1810, he had to search outside the city’s boundaries. The Mother Bethel Burying Ground was established that year on parcel of land a half-mile south of the church, in what was then called Southwark, a former 17th century Swedish settlement in an area the Lenape tribe referred to as “Weccacoe.”

After burials ceased in 1864, the graveyard fell into disrepair. The church sold the site to the city in 1889, and it was developed into a park.

As congregants with connections to the burial ground passed away, so did the memories of its existence. The park transformed into a playground called Weccacoe, and the neighborhood transformed into the Queen Village section of the city.

In 2008, historian Terry Buckalew doing research for a documentary on 19th-century black activist Octavius Catto when he stumbled onto references to Bethel Burying Ground. He knew of the church, but couldn’t place the burial ground.

“It basically had been lost to history,” he said.

He began collecting data on those buried there and writing biographies in an online project.

“I wanted people to be able to relate to who’s there. Many are former slaves, first-generation free blacks. I wanted to be able to say, ‘Here is a woman who was a single mom and ran her own business,'” he said.

Around 2011 he said he learned about a plan to renovate the playground. Buckalew reached out to the city, to the Queen Village Neighborhood Association and to Mother Bethel Church about his findings.

Archaeologists in 2013 determined at least 5,000 people were interred there, just 18 inches below the surface, Buckalew said. It’s likely many more are there, as the remains appeared to be stacked in three layers.

A committee and coalition were formed and after years of meetings, plans were hashed out to create a memorial at the site. A well-used community center will be dismantled to make way for the memorial.

“Like any neighborhood, we lament the loss of an accessible meeting space, but in this case it’s the loss of a space for all the right reasons,” said Eleanor Ingersoll, president of the Queen Village Neighborhood Association.

She said she’s been impressed with how inclusive the process has been, and is focused on keeping the public as involved as possible.

Kelly Lee, the city’s chief cultural officer, said they are more focused on getting the memorial right than moving quickly. The city will conduct community outreach to get input on what it should look like.

“At the end will be a memorial the whole city can be proud of,” she said.

Stephanie Gilbert’s family has been in Philadelphia since the 1600s. Her 4th great-grandfather was Clayton Durham, who worked with Allen in founding the AME church, and through genealogy research learned that his son James Durham was buried at Bethel, as well as other relatives.

She hopes the memorial will give visitors a better sense of Philadelphia’s free black community.

“They were part of very different kind of liberation movement,” she said. “They were fighting for careers and access to things they could afford but were kept out of.”

For Rev. Tyler, the memorial should be something that invites children in, that prompts thought-provoking questions so they ask their parents, “Why is this here?”

“I think that would be a wonderful way to honor the ancestors who are buried there,” he said. “To help these children write a new and better American story.”

When the Fourth of July Was a Black Holiday

After the Civil War, African Americans in the South transformed Independence Day into a celebration of their newly won freedom.

Ethan J. Kytle, Blain Roberts - the atlantic
7/3/18

“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Famed black abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass posed this question before a large, mostly white crowd in Rochester, New York on July 5, 1852. It is “a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim,” Douglass explained, adding that he felt much the same: “I am not included within the pale of this glorious anniversary! ... This Fourth [of] July is yours not mine.”

A little over a decade later, however, African Americans like Douglass began making the glorious anniversary their own. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, the nation’s four million newly emancipated citizens transformed Independence Day into a celebration of black freedom. The Fourth became an almost exclusively African American holiday in the states of the former Confederacy—until white Southerners, after violently reasserting their dominance of the region, snuffed these black commemorations out.

Before the Civil War, white Americans from every corner of the country had annually marked the Fourth with feasts, parades, and copious quantities of alcohol. A European visitor observed that it was “almost the only holy-day kept in America.” Black Americans demonstrated considerably less enthusiasm. And those who did observe the holiday preferred—like Douglass—to do so on July 5 to better accentuate the difference between the high promises of the Fourth and the low realities of life for African Americans, while also avoiding confrontations with drunken white revelers.

Yet the tables had turned by July 4, 1865, at least in the South. Having lost a bloody four-year war to break free from the United States and defend the institution of slavery, Confederate sympathizers had little desire to celebrate the Fourth now that they were back in the Union and slavery was no more. “The white people,” wrote a young woman in Columbia, South Carolina, “shut themselves within doors.”

African Americans, meanwhile, embraced the Fourth like never before. From Washington, D.C., to Mobile, Alabama, they gathered together to watch fireworks and listen to orators recite the Emancipation Proclamation, the Declaration of Independence, and the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery when it was ratified in late 1865.

As we document in our new book, Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy, the most extraordinary festivities were held in Charleston, South Carolina, the majority-black city where Southern secession and the Civil War had begun. At the 1865 commemoration in Charleston, one speaker noted the altered meaning of the holiday for black Americans, who could at last “bask in the sunshine of liberty.”

The martial displays at this and subsequent celebrations underscored his point. Each year, thousands of black South Carolinians lined up early to watch African American militia companies march through city streets. Led by mounted officers, some of whom were ex-slaves, these black companies were often named for abolitionists and other black heroes. The 1876 Fourth of July parade included the Lincoln Rifle Guard, the Attucks Light Infantry, the Douglass Light Infantry, and the Garrison Light Infantry.

The Charleston parades typically ended at White Point Garden, a beautiful park at the base of the city peninsula, where enormous crowds bought peanuts, cakes, fried fish, and sassafras beer from vendors camped out in shady spots. “The whole colored population seemed to have turned out into the open air,” reported the Charleston Daily News on July 5, 1872, “and the gardens were so densely thronged that it was only with the utmost difficulty that locomotion was possible amid the booths, stalls and sightseers.”

Throughout the South, freedwomen were conspicuous participants in Fourth of July celebrations, pushing back against the gender and, in many cases, class barriers that relegated them to the sidelines of Reconstruction politics. The domestic workers and washerwomen of the Daughters of Zion and the Sisters of Zion, two benevolent societies in Memphis, Tennessee, marched in parades each year. The 1875 parade featured a carriage carrying “a queen for the day”—a striking claim to the respectability whites routinely denied black women.

At Charleston’s White Point Garden, freedwomen joined freedmen in annual performances of songs and dances, including one called the “Too-la-loo” that had subversive meaning. About two dozen participants—evenly split between men and women—formed a ring, into which one of the female dancers would move while the others sang and clapped. “Go hunt your lover, Too-la-loo!/Go find your lover, Too-la-loo!” they urged the lady in the center, who eventually chose a suitor to join her. The Too-la-loo allowed ex-slaves to poke fun at the elite courtship rituals of their former masters while also engaging in a raucous celebration of their own emancipation. In 1876, 50 groups danced the Too-la-loo from early morning until after midnight. The dance was so popular among the freed population in Charleston, in fact, that Too-la-loo eventually became shorthand for the Fourth of July there.

In Charleston and elsewhere, whites deeply resented their former slaves turning the Fourth into a commemoration of black liberty. What “a dreadful day” it was, complained one Charleston planter in a letter to his daughter. A local merchant lamented in his journal that the nation’s holiday had become “a nigger day”: “Nigger procession[,] nigger dinner and balls and promenades,” and “scarcely a white person seen in the streets.” Even some Northern whites could not abide what they saw. At the 1865 festivities in Mobile, federal troops from Illinois and Indiana were overheard wishing newly freed slaves dead.

They got their wish, in part, in the decade to come, as Fourth of July celebrations became more politically charged affairs. Republican candidates and officeholders played a prominent role in the festivities in the 1870s, much to the consternation of white Democrats, who used some commemorations as an opportunity to reclaim their power through force of arms. On July 4, 1875, a white mob broke up a Republican rally in Vicksburg, Mississippi, killing a black deputy sheriff. The next year, in the village of Hamburg, South Carolina, anger over a black militia parade on the Fourth boiled over into a full-blown riot that left at least seven African Americans dead at the hands of white vigilantes. The Hamburg massacre helped conservatives wrest control of local and state governments from the biracial Republican Party that fall, making South Carolina one of the final three Southern states to be returned to the Democratic fold.

In the years that followed, as white Southerners began implementing segregationist laws and customs, they quashed official black celebrations of the Fourth. Beginning in 1881, Charleston city leaders pushed Too-la-loo to parks further and further away from downtown until finally, in 1886, they succeeded in removing it from the peninsula altogether. African American families and friends continued to meet in more informal gatherings in the city, but by the early 1900s both Charleston and Atlanta had forbidden vendors from setting up food stalls along the streets where black residents had long congregated on the Fourth. The African American, noted a Memphis newspaper, now marked the holiday by “going way off by himself,” celebrating behind closed doors in black churches and cultural institutions or with family.

As they removed black commemorations from public spaces, white Southerners deployed racist tropes to question black affection for the holiday. The Atlanta Constitution declared on July 4, 1901 that African Americans seemed “a little hazey” as to why they actually celebrated the Fourth: “One shiny black-faced old darky said he reckoned they celebrated ‘jest ‘cause hit was watermelon season!’ and to the average brother in black that is reason quite sufficient.”

Beneath the ridicule was something more serious: a concerted effort to delegitimize black claims to the holiday. African Americans did not observe the Fourth, white critics sneered, out of a sincere sense of patriotism or an accurate understanding of what the day meant. After all, they insisted, the Fourth of July did not apply to black Americans. It neither represented their freedom nor testified to their status as people worthy of equal citizenship.

In 1902, white Atlantans completed their commemorative coup with an elaborate Fourth of July program. A children’s chorus sang three “patriotic” songs: “Dixie,” “The Star-Spangled Banner,” and “America.” A parade of local dignitaries, among them both Confederate and Union veterans, wound through the city. The nation’s birthday was back where it belonged—in the hands of “true” Americans.

That this patriotic display honored men who had fought to destroy the United States did not bother local whites. On the contrary, erasing the contradiction was necessary. By the turn of the century, white Americans everywhere gave in to the lure of sectional reconciliation. Union and Confederate veterans, for instance, buried the hatchet in reunions that emphasized the bravery of all combatants and avoided any reference to slavery or the legacy of emancipation. Reframing who could rightfully celebrate Independence Day proved a critical part of this reconciliation process, helping paper over regional differences in the service of a unifying, national white supremacy.

In the Jim Crow South—where segregation, disfranchisement, and racial lynching were the order of the day—the message was clear: African Americans were as unfit for the fruits of freedom as they were for the Fourth of July. Once again, as Frederick Douglass had said a half-century earlier, black Americans were not included within the pale of their nation’s birthday.

White Politicians Have Been Coercing African-Americans to Vote Since Before the Civil Rights Era

It is impossible to describe the US as having been a full democracy for any more than five decades.

The Conversation - alternet
June 5, 2018, 7:47 AM GMT

During a recent campaign rally in Tennessee, Donald Trump claimedthat most African-Americans have been voting for the Democratic Party for over a century. He told supporters, “African-Americans vote for Democrats, for the most part. Vast majority. They’ve been doing it for over a hundred years.”

A number of commentators have pointed out that Trump’s comment is historically inaccurate because most African-Americans in the south could not vote until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Additionally, many African-Americans who could vote before the 1960s – located mostly in the north – were supporters of the Republican Party, the party of Lincoln and emancipation. This was especially true before Franklin Roosevelt introduced the New Deal during the Great Depression, but well into the 1960s moderate-to-liberal Republican candidates still won sizeable shares of the black vote.

Yet while Trump’s statement was clearly ignorant, he did accidentally stumble into an overlooked part of American history. In Tennessee, where he made his comments, African-Americans have indeed been voting – and voting Democratic – for more than a century. But this isn’t a grand tradition of multiracial democracy; it’s part of a history of machine politics.

White political bosses exploited black Tennesseans in the early 20th century to secure their own power. In fact, paradoxically, bosses used the institutions of the segregationist Jim Crow regime designed to deny African-Americans’ access to the ballot as a means of coercing them to vote for Democratic candidates.

This played out on a grand scale in Tennessee’s largest city, Memphis, which to this day has the state’s greatest share of black residents. In the first half of the 20th century, Memphis politics were dominated by local Democratic Party leader E H “Boss” Crump, who was described by Time magazine as “the most absolute political boss in the US”. Crump personally selected nearly every Memphis mayor and municipal leader, as well as many statewide politicians, from roughly 1909 until 1948.

In order to do this, Crump allowed African-Americans to vote.

The machine at work

Crump paid black residents’ poll taxes and coerced them into supporting his candidates as a bloc in exchange for protection from physical violence. The Colored Democrats Club of Memphis was described as “the African-American wing of the Crump organisation”.

This protection was of vital importance for black Memphians who had been terrorised by the city’s white population for decades. While guaranteeing security from physical violence is a basic function of the modern state, many parts of the US existed in a condition of little less than racialised anarchy until well after World War II. Public officials refused to protect citizens from physical harm on the basis of race.

And so it went in Memphis. In reaction to the presence of black federal soldiers in the city in 1866, a white riot erupted: the mob murdered 46 black residents, raped five black women, and burned all 12 of Memphis’s black schools, four black churches, and 91 homes.

Crump suppressed the Klan and prevented lynchings so long as African-Americans voted for his Democratic candidates, but he remained personally committed to white supremacy, abandoning Harry Truman in the 1948 election in protest at Truman’s support for civil rights.

He was also prepared to permit violence against black citizens who did not follow his political imperatives. When Reverend George Long invited union leader A. Phillip Randolph to speak to his black congregation about trade unionism in 1944, ignoring Crump’s instructions, he was badly beaten by white thugs. Crump turned a blind eye.

No illusions

Because of its relatively high proportion of black voter registration, Tennessee was one of only three states in the former Confederacy not to receive any coverage under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which placed areas with historically low African-American electoral participation under heightened federal surveillance of changes to electoral law. In 1960, the average proportion of African-Americans registered to vote in the south was 30%, but in Tennessee it was as high as 60%. African-Americans in Memphis probably voted at higher rates than anywhere else in the pre-Voting Rights Act south.

This should not be mistaken for evidence that a multiracial democracy predated the Civil Rights era. Like many African-Americans in the north, black southern voters were dependent on the forbearance of violent and corrupt white-dominated political machines. These organisations made only minor concessions but otherwise fundamentally preserved the segregation and discrimination that African-Americans were forced to endure.

The ConversationUntil the mid-20th century, many essential features of a democracy – free and fair elections, multiparty competition, universal franchise, free assembly and speech – were withheld from millions of US citizens. For that reason, it is impossible to describe the US as having been a full democracy for any more than five decades. This fact should be basic to every American’s understanding of their country’s development – but many (white) Americans prefer to imagine their country as one of the world’s oldest democracies. In fact, it only joined the club relatively recently.

York plans statue of African-American

Jossie Carbonare - philly tribune
Jun 3, 2018

YORK — The city of York is working to create a life-sized statue of William C. Goodridge, a prominent African-American businessman who helped hide slaves in his home as they traveled along the underground railroad.

“Interestingly, he would sacrifice all of that to help strangers, [which] is what really makes him inspiring,” said Carol Kauffman, manager of the William C. Goodridge Freedom Center and Museum.

York Mayor Michael Helfrich, who is behind the initiative, says Goodridge’s story should be shared.

“The heroes of history are not all very pale. We have lots of heroes in history and we need to make sure that we recognize that and celebrate that,” Helfrich said.

“At that time, while there was strong support for African Americans in this community, there was also a group that was frankly, pro-slavery and didn’t want them in our community, so for him to be successful against those odds is really a remarkable story and a remarkable journey,” said Helfrich.

Kauffman said the statue will placed in front of his former home, now a museum on Philadelphia Street, which organizers hope will bring people to the area.

“The idea is first of all to attract people’s attention as they are coming into the city of York from the East,” Kauffman said.

The building of the statue is estimated to cost anywhere from $45,000 to $50,000, but the statue won’t be created until the funds are raised.

“I think it’really important that we all see heroes in all races and all ethnicities,” Helfrich said. “The more we know about different types of people that have been successful, I think the more hope there is for all of us to be successful.”

The Army’s First Black Nurses Were Relegated to Caring for Nazi Prisoners of War

Prohibited from treating white GIs, the women felt betrayed by the country they sought to serve

By Alexis Clark, Zócalo Public Square
smithsonian.com
May 15, 2018 1:39PM

Elinor Powell (right) with a fellow nurse at POW Camp Florence in Arizona, circa 1944-1945 (Photo courtesy of Chris Albert) Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/armys-first-black-nurses-had-tend-to-german-prisoners-war-180969069/#7VipbOFHATOk7Z6B.99 Give the gift of Smithsonian magazine for only $12! http://bit.ly/1cGUiGv Follow us: @SmithsonianMag on Twitter

On the summer afternoon in 1944 that 23-year-old Elinor Powell walked into the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Phoenix, it never occurred to her that she would be refused service. She was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, serving her country during wartime, and she had grown up in a predominantly white, upwardly mobile Boston suburb that didn’t subject her family to discrimination.

But the waiter who turned Elinor away wasn’t moved by her patriotism. All he saw was her brown skin. It probably never occurred to him that the woman in uniform was from a family that served its country, as Elinor’s father had in the First World War, as well as another relative who had been part of the Union Army during the Civil War. The only thing that counted at that moment—and in that place, where Jim Crow laws remained in force—was the waiter’s perception of a black army nurse as not standing on equal footing with his white customers.

Infuriated and humiliated, Elinor left Woolworth’s and returned to POW Camp Florence, in the Arizona desert. She was stationed there to look after German prisoners of war, who had been captured in Europe and Northern Africa and then sent across the Atlantic Ocean, for detainment in the United States during World War II.

Elinor, like many other black nurses in the Army Nurse Corps, was tasked with caring for German POWs—men who represented Hitler’s racist regime of white supremacy. Though their presence is rarely discussed in American history, from 1942 to 1946, there were 371,683 German POWs scattered across the country in more than 600 camps. Some POWs remained until 1948.

On the summer afternoon in 1944 that 23-year-old Elinor Powell walked into the Woolworth’s lunch counter in downtown Phoenix, it never occurred to her that she would be refused service. She was, after all, an officer in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, serving her country during wartime, and she had grown up in a predominantly white, upwardly mobile Boston suburb that didn’t subject her family to discrimination.

But the waiter who turned Elinor away wasn’t moved by her patriotism. All he saw was her brown skin. It probably never occurred to him that the woman in uniform was from a family that served its country, as Elinor’s father had in the First World War, as well as another relative who had been part of the Union Army during the Civil War. The only thing that counted at that moment—and in that place, where Jim Crow laws remained in force—was the waiter’s perception of a black army nurse as not standing on equal footing with his white customers.

Infuriated and humiliated, Elinor left Woolworth’s and returned to POW Camp Florence, in the Arizona desert. She was stationed there to look after German prisoners of war, who had been captured in Europe and Northern Africa and then sent across the Atlantic Ocean, for detainment in the United States during World War II.

Elinor, like many other black nurses in the Army Nurse Corps, was tasked with caring for German POWs—men who represented Hitler’s racist regime of white supremacy. Though their presence is rarely discussed in American history, from 1942 to 1946, there were 371,683 German POWs scattered across the country in more than 600 camps. Some POWs remained until 1948.

And these POWs were kept busy. Prisoners of war, under rules set by the Geneva Convention, could be made to work for the detaining power. And, with millions of American men away serving in the military, there was a significant labor shortage in the United States. Farms, plants, canneries, and other industries needed workers.

For black nurses, the assignment to take care of German POWs—to tend to Nazis—was deeply unwelcome. To the African-American women who had endured the arduous process of being admitted into the U.S. Army Nurse Corps, this assignment felt like a betrayal. They volunteered to serve to help wounded American soldiers, not the enemy.

Long before World War II, black nurses had been struggling to serve their country. After the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, black nurses tried to enroll in the Red Cross, which was then the procurement agency for the Army Nurse Corps. The Red Cross rejected them, because they didn’t have the required membership in the American Nurses Association (ANA), which didn’t allow blacks to join at the time. A few black nurses eventually served in the First World War, but not because they were finally admitted into the Army Nurse Corps. The 1918 flu epidemic wiped out so many thousands of people that a handful of black nurses were called to assist.

More than two decades later, after Hitler invaded Poland, the United States began an aggressive war preparedness program, and the Army Nurse Corps expanded its recruiting process. Wanting to serve their country and receive a steady military income, thousands of black nurses filled out applications to enlist. They received the following letter:

“Your application to the Army Nurse Corps cannot be given favorable consideration as there are no provisions in Army regulations for the appointment of colored nurses in the Corps.”

The rejection letter was a crushing blow, but also an honest appraisal of how the country regarded black nurses: They weren’t valued as American citizens or seen as fit to wear a military uniform.

The National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses (NACGN)—an organization founded in 1908 for black registered nurses as an alternative to the ANA, which still hadn’t extended its membership to black nurses—challenged the letter. And with political pressure from civil rights groups and the black press, 56 black nurses were finally admitted into the U.S. Army Nurse Corps in 1941. Some went to Fort Livingston in Louisiana and others to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, both segregated bases.

When Elinor Powell entered the army in 1944, she completed her basic training an hour outside of Tucson, Arizona, at Fort Huachuca, which had become the largest military installation for black soldiers and nurses. The army had a strict quota for black nurses, and only 300 of them served in the entire Army Nurse Corps, which had 40,000 white nurses. It was evident the military didn’t really want black women to serve at all, and they made this clear.

Elinor’s cohort of newly trained Army nurses soon received shocking news: There had been too much fraternization between white nurses and German POWs at Camp Florence. So the Army was bringing in black nurses as replacements.

POW camps would become an ongoing assignment for the majority of African-American nurses. The remainder were stationed at segregated bases with black soldiers, who mostly performed maintenance and menial jobs during the war, and understood what it meant to wear a U.S. military uniform and still be treated like a second-class citizen.

Life for a black army nurse at a POW camp could be lonely and isolated. The camps in the South and Southwest, in particular, strictly enforced Jim Crow. The list of complaints from black nurses included being routinely left out of officer meetings and social functions, and being forced to eat in segregated dining halls. The trips to nearby towns were also degrading because of establishments that either relegated blacks to subpar seating and service or barred them from entering altogether.

At the hospitals in the POW camps, black nurses weren’t that fulfilled either. A great many of the prisoners were in good health, which had been a requirement to make the trans-Atlantic journey in the first place, so the black nurses weren’t utilized to full capacity. There were typical bedside nursing duties and occasional appendectomies performed, but rarely were there critical cases.

In some ways, from a social standpoint, the German POWs fared better than the black nurses. Local white residents, U.S. Army guards and officers were friendly toward them—a level of respect that black laborers, soldiers, and nurses did not experience with any regularity.

When German prisoners first arrived in the United States, many were shocked by the racial hierarchy entrenched in American culture. They saw the segregated bathrooms and restricted dining halls at train stations, and during their days-long journeys to their respective POW camps had black train attendants bringing them food and drinks and calling them “sir.” It was clear that in the United States, there was an inherent expectation of subservience to whites, even to those from Hitler’s army.

Once at camp, life for German POWs, for the most part, was comfortable. From the clean accommodations and regular meals, to the congeniality of Americans, some POWs were relieved to have been captured. And the interactions with black nurses were largely civilized.

But there were occasions when black nurses found themselves humiliated by German POWs and not backed up by the U.S. Army. At Camp Papago Park, outside of Phoenix, a German POW said he hated “niggers” in front of a black nurse. She reported the incident to the commanding officer, expecting a swift reprimand. The nurse later discovered the commanding officer didn’t think any punishment was necessary. She complained about the incident in a letter to the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses:

“That is the worst insult an army officer should ever have to take. I think it is insult enough to be here taking care of them when we volunteered to come into the army to nurse military personnel…All of this is making us very bitter.”

Meanwhile, even though black nurses were underutilized, there was an urgent need for more nurses to care for the returning American soldiers, wounded in battle. Nevertheless, white nurses were tasked to tend to Americans almost exclusively. Yes, thousands of white nurses also had POW camp assignments—there were very few black women in Army Nurse Corps. But if a black unit could replace a white one at a camp, the swap was made.

As the war entered its final year, the numbers of wounded men rose exponentially. President Roosevelt made the alarming announcement of legislation to establish a nursing draft in his State of the Union Address on January 6, 1945. Radio announcements said the draft would be instituted unless 18,000 additional nurses volunteered.

At the time of the president’s address, there were 9,000 applications from black nurses hoping to enlist in the Army Nurse Corps. But those nurses didn’t count toward the goal, or dissuade FDR’s announcement—to the dismay of NACGN, the black press and civil rights organizations.

Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the esteemed minister from Harlem, famously denounced the decision: “It is absolutely unbelievable that in times like these, when the world is going forward, that there are leaders in our American life who are going backward. It is further unbelievable that these leaders have become so blindly and unreasonably un-American that they have forced our wounded men to face the tragedy of death rather than allow trained nurses to aid because these nurses’ skins happen to be of a different color.”

The draft legislation stalled in the Senate and the conscription of nurses never occurred. But with morale among black army nurses reaching record lows, the NACGN approached First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt for help, given her commitment to equal rights. And the meeting was a success.

In the final year of the war, black nurses were no longer assigned exclusively to POW camps. After a few months they were transferred to army hospitals for wounded American soldiers.

Elinor remained at POW Camp Florence for the duration of the war, and fell in love with a German prisoner, Frederick Albert. While fellow Americans humiliated her with segregation, a German, of all people, uplifted her. The two shunned the racist policies of Jim Crow and Nazism, seeking solace in a forbidden romance. They would spend their lives together in constant search of a community that accepted them, more than 20 years before laws banning interracial marriage were struck down in the 1967 Loving v. Virginia decision.

By war’s end, only about 500 black nurses had served in the U.S. Army Nurse Corps during WWII, even though thousands had applied. Despite the discrimination they faced, black army nurses demonstrated a persistent will to be a part of the U.S. Army Nurse Corp and serve their country. Their efforts paid off when President Truman issued an executive order to desegregate the entire military in 1948.

And by 1951, the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses dissolved into the American Nurses Association, which had extended its membership to all nurses regardless of race.

The Last Slave Ship Survivor Gave an Interview in the 1930s. It Just Surfaced

BY BECKY LITTLE - history.com
MAY 3, 2018

A marker to commemorate Cudjo Lewis, considered to be the last surviving victim of the Atlantic slave trade between Africa and the United States, in Mobile, Alabama. (Credit: Womump/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0)

Roughly 60 years after the abolition of slavery, anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston made an incredible connection: She located the last surviving captive of the last slave ship to bring Africans to the United States.

Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with the survivor but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they are only now being released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that comes out on May 8, 2018.

Hurston’s book tells the story of Cudjo Lewis, who was born in what is now the West African country of Benin. Originally named Kossula, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe captured him and took him to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States.

The Clotilda brought its captives to Alabama in 1860, just a year before the outbreak of the Civil War. Even though slavery was legal at that time in the U.S., the international slave trade was not, and hadn’t been for over 50 years. Along with many European nations, the U.S. had outlawed the practice in 1807, but Lewis’ journey is an example of how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo.

To avoid detection, Lewis’ captors snuck him and the other survivors into Alabama at night and made them hide in a swamp for several days. To hide the evidence of their crime, the 86-foot sailboat was then set ablaze on the banks of the Mobile-Tensaw Delta (its remains may have been uncovered in January 2018).

Most poignantly, Lewis’ narrative provides a first-hand account of the disorienting trauma of slavery. After being abducted from his home, Lewis was forced onto a ship with strangers. The abductees spent several months together during the treacherous passage to the United States, but were then separated in Alabama to go to different plantations.

“We very sorry to be parted from one ’nother,” Lewis told Hurston. “We seventy days cross de water from de Affica soil, and now dey part us from one ’nother. Derefore we cry. Our grief so heavy look lak we cain stand it. I think maybe I die in my sleep when I dream about my mama.”

Lewis also describes what it was like to arrive on a plantation where no one spoke his language, and could explain to him where he was or what was going on. “We doan know why we be bring ’way from our country to work lak dis,” he told Hurston. “Everybody lookee at us strange. We want to talk wid de udder colored folkses but dey doan know whut we say.”

As for the Civil War, Lewis said he wasn’t aware of it when it first started. But part-way through, he began to hear that the North had started a war to free enslaved people like him. A few days after Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered in April 1865, Lewis says that a group of Union soldiers stopped by a boat on which he and other enslaved people were working and told them they were free.

Lewis expected to receive compensation for being kidnapped and forced into slavery, and was angry to discover that emancipation didn’t come with the promise of “forty acres and a mule,” or any other kind of reparations. Frustrated by the refusal of the government to provide him with land to live on after stealing him away from his homeland, he and a group of 31 other freepeople saved up money to buy land near the state capital of Mobile, which they called Africatown.

Hurston’s use of vernacular dialogue in both her novels and her anthropological interviews was often controversial, as some black American thinkers at the time argued that this played to black caricatures in the minds of white people. Hurston disagreed, and refused to change Lewis’ dialect—which was one of the reasons a publisher turned her manuscript down back in the 1930s.

Many decades later, her principled stance means that modern readers will get to hear Lewis’ story the way that he told it.

How African-Americans disappeared from the Kentucky Derby

May 4, 2017 9.36pm EDT •Updated May 3, 2018 12.34pm EDT
the conversation

Oliver Lewis. Hub Pages

Isaac Murphy. Wikimedia Commons

When the horses enter the gate for the 144th Kentucky Derby, their jockeys will hail from Louisiana, Mexico, Puerto Rico and France. None will be African-American. That’s been the norm for quite a while. When Marlon St. Julien rode the Derby in 2000, he became the first black man to get a mount since 1921.

It wasn’t always this way. The Kentucky Derby, in fact, is closely intertwined with black Americans’ struggles for equality, a history I explore in my book on race and thoroughbred racing. In the 19th century – when horse racing was America’s most popular sport – former slaves populated the ranks of jockeys and trainers, and black men won more than half of the first 25 runnings of the Kentucky Derby. But in the 1890s – as Jim Crow laws destroyed gains black people had made since emancipation – they ended up losing their jobs.

From slavery to the Kentucky Derby

On May 17, 1875, a new track at Churchill Downs ran, for the first time, what it hoped would become its signature event: the Kentucky Derby.

Prominent thoroughbred owner H. Price McGrath entered two horses: Aristides and Chesapeake. Aristides’ rider that afternoon was Oliver Lewis, who, like most of his Kentucky Derby foes, was African-American. The horse’s trainer was an elderly former slave named Ansel Williamson.

Lewis was supposed to take Aristides to the lead, tire the field, and then let Chesapeake go on to win. But Aristides simply refused to let his stablemate pass him. He ended up scoring a thrilling victory, starting the Kentucky Derby on its path to international fame.

Meanwhile, men like Lewis and Williamson had shown that free blacks could be accomplished, celebrated members of society.

‘I ride to win’

To many black Americans, Isaac Murphy symbolized this ideal. Between 1884 and 1891, Murphy won three Kentucky Derbys, a mark unequaled until 1945.

Born a slave in Kentucky, Murphy, along with black peers like Pike Barnes, Soup Perkins and Willie Simms, rode regularly in integrated competition and earned big paychecks. Black jockeys were even the subjects of celebrity gossip; when Murphy bought a new house, it made the front page of The New York Times. One white memoirist, looking back on his childhood, remembered that “every little boy who took any interest in racing…had an admiration for Isaac Murphy.” After the Civil War, the Constitution guaranteed black male suffrage and equal protection under the law, but Isaac Murphy embodied citizenship in a different way. He was both a black man and a popular hero.

When Murphy rode one of his most famous races, piloting Salvator to victory over Tenny at Sheepshead Bay in 1890, the crusading black journalist T. Thomas Fortune interviewed him after the race. Murphy was friendly, but blunt: “I ride to win.”

Fortune, who was waging a legal battle to desegregate New York hotels, loved that response. It was that kind of determination that would change the world, he told his readers: men like Isaac Murphy, leading by example in the fight to end racism after slavery.

Destined to disappear?

Only a few weeks after the interview with Fortune, Murphy’s career suffered a tremendous blow when he was accused of drinking on the job. He would go on to win another Kentucky Derby the next spring, riding Kingman, a thoroughbred owned by former slave Dudley Allen, the first and only black man to own a Kentucky Derby winner. But Murphy died of heart failure in 1896 at the age of 35 – two months before the Supreme Court made segregation the law of the land in Plessy v. Ferguson.

Black men continued to ride successfully through the 1890s, but their role in the sport was tenuous at best. A Chicago sportswriter grumbled that when he went to the track and saw black fans cheering black riders, he was uncomfortably reminded that black men could vote. The 15th Amendment and Isaac Murphy had opened the door for black Americans, but many whites were eager to slam it shut.

After years of success, black men began getting fewer jobs on the racetrack, losing promotions and opportunities to ride top horses. White jockeys started to openly demand segregated competition. One told the New York Sun in 1908 that one of his black opponents was probably the best jockey he had ever seen, but that he and his colleagues “did not like to have the negro riding in the same races with them.” In a 1905 Washington Post article titled “Negro Rider on Wane,” the writer insisted that black men were inferior and thus destined to disappear from the track, as Native Americans had inevitably disappeared from their homelands.

Black jockey Jimmy Winkfield shot to stardom with consecutive Kentucky Derby victories in 1901 and 1902, but he quickly found it difficult to get more mounts, a pattern that became all too common. He left the United States for a career in Europe, but his contemporaries often weren’t so fortunate.

Their obituaries give us glimpses of the depression and desperation that came with taking pride in a vocation, only to have it wrenched away. Soup Perkins, who won the Kentucky Derby at 15, drank himself to death at 31. The jockey Tom Britton couldn’t find a job and committed suicide by swallowing acid. Albert Isom bought a pistol at a pawnshop and shot himself in the head in front of the clerk.

The history of the Kentucky Derby, then, is also the history of men who were at the forefront of black life in the decades after emancipation – only to pay a terrible price for it.

Ida B Wells: the unsung heroine of the civil rights movement

The pioneering African American reporter counted, investigated and reported lynchings in America as no one had done before

‘Lynching is color-line murder’: Ida B Wells-Barnett’s blistering 1909 speech

David Smith in Washington
the guardian
Fri 27 Apr 2018 02.00 EDT

Portrait of Ida B Wells, 1920. ‘I consider her my spiritual grandmother,’ said journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who covers civil rights. Photograph: Chicago History Museum/Getty Images

Today, a simple marker on a street corner in Memphis, Tennessee commemorates the People’s Grocery lynching. In 1892 three black men, co-owners of a store giving white businesses a run for their money, were attacked, fought back and were arrested. They never stood trial. A white mob broke into the jail, dragged them away and lynched them.

The murders were grieved by their friend Ida B Wells, an African American teacher, journalist, civil rights pioneer and suffragist about whom it was once said: “She has plenty of nerve; she is as smart as a steel trap, and she has no sympathy with humbug.”

Wells was galvanised to count, investigate and report lynchings in America as no one had done before, hurling her 5ft frame into hostile territory with all the fearlessness of a war reporter.

For a century she has languished as an unsung heroine, overshadowed by more familiar giants of the civil rights movement. In recent years, however, her crusading activism and muckraking techniques are being rediscovered. A society for investigative reporting bears her name; the New York Times – which once branded her “a slanderous and nasty-minded mulattress” – just published a belated obituary, and there are moves to name a street after her in New York and build a monument in Chicago.

“I consider her my spiritual grandmother,” says Nikole Hannah-Jones, an investigative journalist covering civil rights. “She was was a trailblazer in every way ... as a feminist, as a suffragist, as an investigative reporter, as a civil rights leader. She was just an all-around badass.”

Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the civil war. She was orphaned at 16 after her parents – as well as a younger brother – died from a yellow fever epidemic. She found work as a teacher to support her five remaining siblings, then moved to Memphis, where she became a leading journalist and civil rights activist.

At 21, Wells clashed with a white train conductor who ordered her to move from the ladies’ car to the a section designated for black passengers, despite her having bought a first class ticket. When she refused and the conductor tried to forcibly move her, Wells “fastened her teeth on the back of his hand”, as she wrote later.

Wells sued after being ejected from the train and won the case (a newspaper headline declared “Darky damsel gets damages”), though the decision was later reversed in court.

By the time Wells turned 25, she was the co-owner and editor of the Free Speech and Headlight, a local black newspaper, a platform she used to skewer racial inequality. Then came the People’s Grocery Lynching. She denounced it in print, armed herself with a pistol and spent months traveling alone in the south, researching more than 700 lynchings from the previous decade.

Some 4,075 African Americans were lynched in 12 southern states between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative’s 2015 report, Lynching in America. Some were witnessed by big crowds who brought children and picnic baskets, as if at a public entertainment.

Wells’s great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster, an author and public speaker, says: “They would torture people before they were killed and dismember them afterwards and pass around the body parts. It was shocking to me that people would take bones as souvenirs. The more I learned about the level of violence, the more I appreciated what it took for her to do what she did. I am just amazed.”

Wells visited places where people had been hanged, shot, beaten, burned alive, drowned or mutilated. She examined photos of victims hanging from trees as mobs looked on, pored over local newspaper accounts, took sworn statements from eyewitnesses and, on occasion, even hired private investigators.

It was astoundingly courageous work in an era of Jim Crow segregation and in which women did not have the vote. Hannah-Jones, who writes for the New York Times Magazine, says: “There was no protection from the law for a black woman who was going into territories where black people had been stolen from the jail and lynched with the help of law enforcement.

“These places would have been hostile to a black person questioning these communities at all, but think about the types of emotion in a community that has just lynched someone and strung their body up for public display and then to have a black woman come in there asking questions. One has to ask: ‘Would I have the courage to do that?’ There was no help that was going to come for you. There was no protection from the law. Black folks didn’t even have a lot of legal rights and they certainly didn’t have much protection from law enforcement.”

Wells, however, was a force of nature who once said, “One had better die fighting injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap.” On another occasion, she wrote: “I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. If I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.”

She destroyed the mainstream media’s narratives that suggested lynching victims were criminals – often rapists of white women – who got their just desserts. Her reporting showed that rape had not been alleged in two thirds of the lynchings or was only alleged after a covert, consensual, interracial relationship had been exposed.

Duster says: “She was putting names to stories and names to statistics. She was putting context into what was happening. Without what she did, it was pretty much ‘OK, this person committed a crime, they got what they deserved.’ She said, ‘No, they did not commit a crime.’ The narrative of the mainstream media at this time was very different from the reality she found on the ground.”

Hannah-Jones adds: “Much like the killing of black people by police today, the ‘official’ story of lynchings was just largely accepted, which was that black men were rapists and that unknown vigilantes were just meting out justice to black brutes. You can look at the way that newspapers covered these things and that was just accepted and Ida B Wells exposed the reality behind lynchings, which is that they were often used as economic retaliation.

“They were used to sow fear in black communities so that black people would stay in their place and she exposed the truth about that. She also exposed that while law enforcement would often say they these lynchings occur ‘at the hands of parties unknown’, everyone in town knew who committed them and often law enforcement took part.”

While Wells was out of town, a mob destroyed her printing press in Memphis and threatened to kill her if she returned. She stayed away from the south for more than three decades but toured the US and UK, raising awareness through public speaking. In 1895 she published a pamphlet, the Red Record, the first statistical record of the history of American lynchings, a forerunner of data journalism projects such as The Counted, the Guardian’s project to document people killed by police.

Hannah-Jones says: “She was one of the first people to actually tally the number of lynchings that were happening. We like to say she was one of our early data reporters. She began to collect data on this to show how actually vast the scope of the problem was.”

Wells married Chicago lawyer and newspaper editor Ferdinand Barnett and, uncommonly for the time, hyphenated her name rather than take his. The couple had four children. Wells jugged motherhood, journalism and civil rights. In 1909, she was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), although was later ousted because she was perceived as too “radical”. She also worked with Susan B Anthony as a leader in the movement for women’s suffrage.

When Wells died in 1931 at the age of 68 from a brief illness due to kidney failure, her influence was waning, her autobiography was unfinished and her ambition of a federal anti-lynching law was unrealised. Duster muses: “She went out with a whimper. She was almost obsolete. She writes in her autobiography that there was a generation who didn’t know who she was and didn’t know about lynching. She wrote the book to stop it being forgotten.”

Wells and Barnett are interred together in the Oak Woods cemetery in Chicago. She remains a little known figure in America and abroad. Hannah-Jones, who adopted the Twitter handle Ida Bae Wells, reflects: “A lot of people have no idea who Ida B Wells is. To this day people think my name is Ida; they don’t even get the reference of my Twitter handle.

“I think her being a woman, and a black woman, were things that pretty much guaranteed her obscurity. She was also written out of the suffrage movement even though she played a huge role in it and was trying to push the white suffragists on racial equality. Both her gender and her race are the reasons why she was largely written out of history.”

But now she is inspiring a new generation of women in journalism. Hannah-Jones is co-founder of the Ida B Wells Society for Investigative Reporting, which aims to increase the ranks, retention and profile of reporters and editors of colour in the field.

What if Wells herself were alive today? “I think she would be very unsurprised by the America of 2018,” she says. “In many ways it would look very familiar to her. As long as she was able, she would be one of the sharpest critics of this country right now.”

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice

https://eji.org/national-lynching-memorial

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice, opening to the public on April 26, 2018, will become the nation’s first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence.

Work on the memorial began in 2010 when EJI staff began investigating thousands of racial terror lynchings in the American South, many of which had never been documented. EJI was interested not only in lynching incidents, but in understanding the terror and trauma this sanctioned violence against the black community created. Six million black people fled the South as refugees and exiles as a result of these "racial terror lynchings."

This research ultimately produced Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror in 2015 which documented thousands of racial terror lynchings in twelve states. Since the report’s release, EJI has supplemented its original research by documenting racial terror lynchings in states outside the Deep South. EJI staff have also embarked on a project to memorialize this history by visiting hundreds of lynching sites, collecting soil, and erecting public markers, in an effort to reshape the cultural landscape with monuments and memorials that more truthfully and accurately reflect our history.

The Memorial for Peace and Justice was conceived with the hope of creating a sober, meaningful site where people can gather and reflect on America’s history of racial inequality. EJI partnered with artists like Kwame Akoto-Bamfo whose sculpture on slavery confronts visitors when they first enter the memorial. EJI then leads visitors on a journey from slavery, through lynching and racial terror, with text, narrative, and monuments to the lynching victims in America. In the center of the site, visitors will encounter a memorial square, created with assistance from the Mass Design Group. The memorial experience continues through the civil rights era made visible with a sculpture by Dana King dedicated to the women who sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Finally, the memorial journey ends with contemporary issues of police violence and racially biased criminal justice expressed in a final work created by Hank Willis Thomas. The memorial displays writing from Toni Morrison, words from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and a reflection space in honor of Ida B. Wells.

Set on a six-acre site, the memorial uses sculpture, art, and design to contextualize racial terror. The site includes a memorial square with 800 six-foot monuments to symbolize thousands of racial terror lynching victims in the United States and the counties and states where this terrorism took place.

The memorial structure on the center of the site is constructed of over 800 corten steel monuments, one for each county in the United States where a racial terror lynching took place. The names of the lynching victims are engraved on the columns. The memorial is more than a static monument. In the six-acre park surrounding the memorial is a field of identical monuments, waiting to be claimed and installed in the counties they represent. Over time, the national memorial will serve as a report on which parts of the country have confronted the truth of this terror and which have not.

Lynching in America

In the report, Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror, EJI documented more than 4400 lynchings of black people in the United States between 1877 and 1950. EJI identified 800 more lynchings than had previously been recognized.
Racial terror lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. Unlike the hangings of white people and outlaws in communities where there were no functioning criminal justice system, racial terror lynchings in the American South were acts of violence at the core of a systematic campaign of terror perpetuated in furtherance of an unjust social order. These lynchings were terrorism.

The lynching era left thousands dead; it significantly marginalized black people in the country's political, economic, and social systems; and it fueled a massive migration of black refugees out of the South, permanently reshaping the demographics of America. In addition, lynching -- and other forms of racial terrorism -- inflicted deep traumatic and psychological wounds on survivors, witnesses, family members, and the entire African American community.

Why Build a Memorial to Victims of Racial Terror?

EJI believes that publicly confronting the truth about our history is the first step towards recovery and reconciliation.
A history of racial injustice must be acknowledged, and mass atrocities and abuse must be recognized and remembered, before a society can recover from mass violence. Public commemoration plays a significant role in prompting community-wide reconciliation.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice provides a sacred space for truth-telling and reflection about racial terrorism and its legacy.

The museum and memorial are part of EJI’s work to advance truth and reconciliation around race in America and to more honestly confront the legacy of slavery, lynching, and segregation. “Our nation’s history of racial injustice casts a shadow across the American landscape,” EJI Director Bryan Stevenson explains. “This shadow cannot be lifted until we shine the light of truth on the destructive violence that shaped our nation, traumatized people of color, and compromised our commitment to the rule of law and to equal justice.”

Modeled on important projects used to overcome difficult histories of genocide, apartheid, and horrific human rights abuses in other countries, EJI’s sites are designed to promote a more hopeful commitment to racial equality and just treatment of all people.

The April 26 opening will be accompanied by several days of educational panels and presentations from leading national figures, performances and concerts from acclaimed recording artists, and a large opening ceremony. From April 26-29, EJI is expecting thousands of visitors to travel to Montgomery to celebrate the launch of these important new American institutions.

Tickets for admission to the museum and the memorial are now available at museumandmemorial.eji.org.

Part of a statue depicting chained people is on display at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, a new memorial to honor thousands of people killed in racist lynchings, Sunday, April 22, 2018, in Montgomery, Ala. The national memorial aims to teach about America’s past in hope of promoting understanding and healing. It’s scheduled to open on Thursday. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

This massacre of black soldiers during the Civil War is reason enough to bring down the Confederate statues

History News Network - raw story
09 APR 2018 AT 10:35 ET

April 12 is the 154th anniversary of the Civil War battle and massacre at Fort Pillow, located on the Mississippi River near Henning, Tennessee. It was a strategic location, held by United States (Union) forces just north of Memphis and controlling river access to and from St. Louis and the Ohio River Valley.

On April 16, 1864, the New York Times reported that rebel forces under the command of General Nathan Bedford Forrest, after twice using a “flag of truce” to maneuver prior to attack, overwhelmed defenders. After taking the fort, “the Confederates commenced an indiscriminate butchery of the whites and blacks, including those of both colors who had been previously wounded.” Black women and children in the fort were also slaughtered. “Out of the garrison of six hundred, only two hundred remained alive.” In the same issue, the Times published an account of events from a “correspondent of the Union, who was on board the steamer Platte Valley at Fort Pillow.” This correspondent “gives even a more appalling description of the fiendishness of the rebels.”

“On the morning after the battle the rebels went over the field, and shot the negroes who had not died from their wounds . . . . Many of those who had escaped from the works and hospital, who desired to be treated as prisoners of war, as the rebels said, were ordered to fall into line, and when they had formed, were inhumanly shot down. Of 350 colored troops not more than 56 escaped the massacre, and not one officer that commanded them survives.”

The Black soldiers who were butchered in cold blood by the Confederate troops were regularly enlisted in the Union army, were in full uniform, and were defending the United States flag.

General James Ronald Chalmers explained to the Times correspondent that the Confederate troops were following orders. It was official policy to kill wounded Black Union soldiers and anyone who surrendered, as well as White officers who served with Black troops.

In battle dispatches, General Forrest wrote, “The river was dyed with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.”

In response to the massacre, Congress passed a joint resolution demanding an official inquiry, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton initiated a military investigation, and Abraham Lincoln ordered General Benjamin Butler, who was negotiating prisoner exchanges with the Confederacy, to demand that captured Black soldiers be treated the same as White soldiers, a demand that Confederate negotiators rejected.

An enraged Lincoln issued a resolution that for every “soldier of the United States killed in violation of the laws of war, a rebel soldier shall be executed,” but it was never been implemented.

Black lives mattered, at least publicly, for about a month, and then the incident was forgotten. There was never a federal response even though the massacres did not stop. In July 1864, Confederate forces under the command of General Robert E. Lee at the Battle of the Crater in Virginia massacred Black United States soldiers who were trying to surrender.

In 2016, the Southern Poverty Law Center, in an admittedly incomplete list, identified over fifteen hundred Confederate “place names and other symbols in public spaces” in the United States. Lee’s legacy, status and statues have continually been debated. We are now witnessing an attempt to correct history that includes removing some of the monuments that honor Confederate leaders and the Confederacy in general, including Robert E. Lee.

After the Civil War, Nathan Bedford Forrest helped found, and then served, as the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in its campaign to terrorize newly emancipated Southern Blacks into submission. Astoundingly, there are still Forrest monuments and memorials across the South, including a bust in the state capital of Tennessee and a Forrest County in Mississippi. A monument in the Oak Cemetery in Selma, Alabama, describes Forrest as “Defender of Selma, Wizard of the Saddle, Untutored Genius, The first with the most.”

The effort to portray the Civil War as somehow a glorious “Lost Cause” dates back to the 1890s campaign for Jim Crow laws, the legalization of racial segregation, and the lynching of Black men in the South to terrorize people into acceptance of second-class citizenship. It was promoted by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), their children’s auxiliaries, Children of the Confederacy, and the United Confederate Veterans (UCV).

A major part of their campaign to rewrite history was pressuring textbook companies and libraries to purge books that “calls a Confederate soldier a traitor, a rebel and the war a rebellion; that says the South fought to hold her slaves; that speaks of the slaveholder as cruel or unjust to his slaves; that glories Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis.”

The American Civil War was not a glorious lost cause. It was a war by the South to preserve slavery. The Civil War was not an unfortunate battle between brothers – Southern Whites never considered Blacks or their White supporters to be their brothers.

“Remember Fort Pillow!” became a battle cry for Black troops in the United States Army for the rest of the Civil War. As the United States confronts the legacy of discrimination and continuing police violence against Black Americans, and debates removing statues and renaming places honoring racists and traitors, this country needs to once again “Remember Fort Pillow!”

Women’s Empowerment Was a Big Deal In African Societies, Before Christianity and Islam

By Nareissa Smith - atlanta black star
March 23, 2018

Oftentimes when people learn of the status of women in ancient Egyptian society they are perplexed by the amount of human rights women enjoyed in a civilization that existed so far back in history.

On a reported visit to Egypt, fifth century BCE Greek historian Herodotus, surprised by the women’s position in the society, recorded. “Women attend market and are employed in trade, while men stay at home and do the weaving.” The Egyptians, he concluded, “in their manners and customs seem to have reversed the ordinary practices of mankind.”

In a recent CNN article, Egyptologist Valentina Santini said, “The women of ancient Egypt — the mighty and the modest — were considered equal to men” Santini added, “They could divorce. They could own property. They had many rights that women in subsequent civilizations didn’t have.”

The subsequent civilizations Santini is likely referring to are ancient Western civilizations such as Greece and Rome, where women were relegated to second-class status. Greek and Roman women were prohibited from owning or inheriting property. European women in the Middle Ages lived under similar restrictions. Although Santini did not address other ancient African civilizations, there’s a plethora of scholarly work that has tied ancient Egypt culturally to sub-Saharan Africa. Numerous historians have highlighted some of the ancient Egyptian customs that are seen in other pre-colonial/pre-Islamic cultures throughout the African continent. The empowerment of women in domestic and in public domains is one such tradition.

In his book “The Cultural Unity of Black Africa” Senegalese scholar Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop argued that there exists a cultural continuity throughout sub-Saharan African cultures. He specifically points out the status of women, stating, “The African woman, even after marriage, retains all her individuality and her legal rights; she continues to bear the name of her family, in contrast to the Indo-European woman who loses hers to take on that of her husband.”

Aside from being empowered in marriage, precolonial African society had several avenues for women to exercise power. Throughout African history we have numerous examples of woman as queens who ruled, warriors who shed blood, and traders and merchants who built immense fortunes.

Vanderbilt professor Dr. Sandra Barnes, posits that “women in Africa were “one of history’s most politically viable female populations.” Queens such as Egypt’s Hatshepsut and Ethiopia’s Makeda(thought to be the biblical queen of Sheba) were known for using their leadership and wisdom to protect, expand, and enhance their nations.

Queen mothers were once very important political figures who commanded respect prior to the colonial era. In some instances, they were even considered to be autonomous rulers. In the Akan tradition, according to an article out of the journal Institute of African Studies: Research Review, queen mothers ruled alongside the chief or the king. They held veto power of the king or chief, appointed their own ministers, and presided over courts that dealt with cases brought by women. The authors of the book “The Swazi, a South African Kingdom,” describes the queen mother’s position in the kingdom of Swaziland as “essentially a diarchy.” In the book “Women in African Colonial Histories,” Holly Hanson writes, In precolonial Buganda, “the queen mother participated in a system of gendered political power in which the mother of the king had autonomous authority, which she used to check his excesses and protect the nation.”

Some African women were soldiers or held leadership roles in the military. Warrior queens such as Queen Yaa Asantewa of the Ashanti people, Queen Nzinga of the Matamba, and Queen Amina of the Hausa demonstrated military skills that rivaled their male contemporaries. These women led military campaigns that embarrassed empires. Interestingly, the fictional Dora Milaje warriors who protect King T’Challa — The Black Panther — in comic books and on screen are based on the so-called

“Dahomey Amazons,” properly known as the Ahosi (king’s wives) or Mino (our mothers) in the Fon language. The Fon were the people of the Kingdom of Dahomy (1600 until 1894), which was located in what is now the present-day Republic of Benin.

Certainly, not all African women were queens, chiefs, or warriors. Dr. Tarikhu Farrar, anthropology professor at Holy Names University in Oakland, California, says in his article The Queenmother, Matriarchy, and the Question of Female Political Authority in Precolonial West African Monarchy that “using the status of royal and aristocratic women as an indicator of the status of women in general could result in a relatively inaccurate portrayal of the overall status of women and of prevailing gender relations.” However, there is evidence that even common women had rights above any known in the Western world at the time.

In the book “African Women: A Modern History,” French author Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch explains that in West Africa, women were artisans who travelled far and wide to sell their goods. She notes that though East African women were not thought to be as active in trade, they were also involved in the trade of livestock and foodstuffs. In some parts of the region, the food could not be touched nor the livestock sold without a woman’s permission.

All this does not mean that Africa was an utopia of gender equality. Dr. Farrar noted that men and women did have different spheres of influence in African societies and that most leadership positions were held by older men, But it does suggest that African women were valued in ways not seen in most places outside of Africa.

Many modern-day African women are not enjoying the same level of freedom as their ancestors. This begs the question if ancient African societies valued women so much, what happened? Why did some communities in the diaspora reverse course and decided to subjugate women in a way that seems foreign to African traditions?

Many aspects of colonialism resulted in reduced public roles for African women. Dr. Ambe Njoh, professor of Environmental Science and Policy at the University of South Florida, wrote in his book “Tradition, Culture, and Development in Africa,” “Most of the socio-economic and political problems which African women face have their roots in European colonial development policies, which were designed to discriminate against women.” He notes that beginning in the colonial era, women were barred from trading, attending school, holding jobs, or participating in the economy in any way.

“Colonial rulers erased the balance that women provided in the political structures of African Societies by systematically preventing them from any participation in the new political order,” wrote Dr. Toyin Falola in the book “Women’s Roles in Sub-Sharan Africa.” European colonizers would avoid discussions of political matters with African women, even the queen mothers, who they often referred to in historical documents as “sisters” of the men in power. Post-colonial governments continued with policies that suppressed women’s traditional authority.

Furthermore, as Europeans took control of African land and agriculture, the perceived value of women’s contribution society was greatly reduced. In an article titled Women and Development in Africa: From Marginalization to Gender Inequality, the authors argue that the “establishment of commercialized agriculture also contributed to the loss of women’s economic power. In Africa, commercialization begun under colonialism, often led to the granting of government titles to the land. Consequently the effect was to transfer farmland that had been controlled by women to [white] male ownership.”

Adoption of foreign cultural and religious values may have also helped changed the way African women were valued. In a paper about the impact of religion on women in African society, Wenpanga Eric Segueda, a writer from Burkina Faso, wrote that in contrast to traditional African religions, Christianity and Islam demanded a lower status for women. He notes that “Islamic and Christian teachings led Africans to deny their own perceptions of things, viewing them as primitive, backwards, and worthless,” a perception that was encouraged by those touting the new religions.

“Arabs, hence Islam, found a lot wrong with indigenous African norms, traditional practices and beliefs,” write the authors of a 2001 paper “The Impact of Religion on Women Empowerment as a Millennium Development Goal in Africa,” published by Springer Science+Media B.V. The researchers specified that “this was especially true with respect to gender relations in both the domestic and public spheres. Consequently, disciples of Islam wasted no time in altering these relations in the areas of the continent they successfully penetrated.”

Christianity had a similar impact on the status of women in African cultures. University of South Africa theology professor Matsobane J Manala says in his paper “The Impact of Christianity on sub-Saharan Africa,” that the religion “led to the demise of African customs, which it viewed as pagan and evil; the religion also led to the implementation of apartheid (to which it gave its theological support), and undermined the leadership role of women.”

As stated before, Africa was not free from gender tensions, and gender equity had not been totally achieved. But as the world moves towards the direction of gender equity, it’s important to know that the Western world was never a better example — despite how much it avows women’s equality and attempt to impose its conceptualization of it onto others. Though there may be specific Western concepts Africans can use to improve the status of women in relationship to men, traditional African cultures provide some great solutions for the world as well.

Coard: Ota Benga, an African, caged in American Zoos

Michael Coard - philly tribune
3/17/18

On Tuesday, it will be exactly 102 years ago from March 20, 1916 when Ota Benga died. But it didn’t happen in his homeland. Instead, it happened in Virginia after he had been kidnapped from Africa and put on display in a monkey cage at a zoo in the U.S.

Before explaining the details of Mr. Benga having been caged, humiliated, and dehumanized in a zoo, I must point out that this kind of racist depravity wasn’t new. It was a long-term and widespread “white thing.”

As documented by BBC News, “Over four centuries from the first voyages of (so-called) discovery, European societies developed an appetite for exhibiting exotic human ‘specimens’ shipped back to Paris, London, or Berlin (as well as Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Hamburg, Marseilles, Milan, Warsaw, and even The Vatican) for the interest and delectation of the crowd....” And the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, which seven years ago quasi-apologized for Europeans by hosting a presentation called “Inventing The Savage,” disclosed that nearly 1.5 billion persons had visited “human zoos.” This savage lust to dehumanize and to profit wasn’t limited to Europe. “Human zoos” also existed in America, namely Buffalo, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York City, and St. Louis.

In 1906 during the slaughter of Mr. Benga’s Congolese village while he was away hunting, Belgian soldiers murdered his wife and children. Shortly afterward, the 23-year-old Mr. Benga was kidnapped and sold for “a pound of salt and a bolt of cloth” to South Carolina Christian missionary and anthropologist Samuel Phillips Verner who transported Mr. Benga to New York City’s American Museum of Natural History to be put on display.

Justifiably outraged by such inhuman disrespect, Mr. Benga became “difficult to control.” During one incident, “it took three men to get him back into the (museum’s) Monkey House” from which he had escaped. And when they were trying to return him to the cage inside that Monkey House, he decided to “kick and fight his way free... (and even) threatened them with a knife.” Another time, he “threw a chair” at a museum official, “nearly hitting her in the head.” Described as “unmanageable” and “utterly impossible to control,” he was transferred to the Bronx Zoo on Sept. 8, 1906 and imprisoned in another “Monkey House,” this time with a monkey, an orangutan, a parrot, and a guinea pig. He was forced to walk barefoot with bones strewn about in the cage.

Not only was the zoo unimaginably racist for caging a human being, so was the American public. On just one day, “more than 40,000 whites” in groups of approximately “500 at a time” were “howling, jeering, and yelling” at Mr. Benga. “Some of them poked him in the ribs, (while) others tripped him up, (and) all laughed at him.” They also “poked him with lighted cigars.” Even the racist American media joined in. The Evening Post wrote, “(He) plays (with the beasts) as though one of them, rolling around the floor of the cages in wild wrestling matches and chattering to them in his own guttural tongue, which they seem to understand.” And the New York Times reported he “is probably enjoying himself as well as he could anywhere in his country, and it is absurd to make a moan over the ‘imagined humiliation and degradation’ he is (supposedly) suffering.”

When the New York Times wrote about someone making a “moan” regarding Mr. Benga’s horrifically inhumane plight, it was referring to the Rev. James H. Gordon, head of the Colored Ministers Conference and Superintendent of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Long Island. Rev. Gordon, along with the Rev. Matthew Gilbert of Mt. Olivet Baptist Church who served as spokesperson for the Ministers Union of Charlotte, N.C., raised holy hell demanding the release of Mr. Benga. The union described such malicious mistreatment by writing “We regard the (white) actors… in this most reprehensible conduct as offering an unpardonable insult to humanity….”

Also, Wilford H. Smith, Esquire, the first Black attorney to win a case in the U.S. Supreme Court, joined in to express his righteous indignation. But the zoo’s founding director, William Temple Hornady, refused to relent, stating, “The display is in keeping with the practice of ‘human exhibitions’ of Africans in Europe (and America).” Rev. Gordon then appealed to Mayor George McClellan. Unfortunately, the mayor refused to even meet.

However, due to mounting pressure from the Black clergy, the Black lawyer, and others, including some civilized whites, the zoo ultimately caved in and released Mr. Benga on Sept. 28, 1906, twenty days after he was first caged at the zoo. Thanks to Rev. Gordon, Mr. Benga was taken to the colored asylum, which served as a residential facility, hospital, and school.

After about three and a half respectful, rewarding, and productive years there with the good reverend, Mr. Benga was offered and accepted in Jan. 1910 a decent job in Lynchburg, Va. While in Lynchburg, he became a close friend of poet Anne Spencer who took him to meet W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington on separate occasions.

As an aside, and I mean no disrespect to anyone, but here’s an indisputable anthropological fact: If you look closely at a monkey (or any other simian), you will notice that it has straight hair — not thick hair. And if you shave it, you will notice that its skin is white — not black — and its lips are thin — not full. Class dismissed. Now back to Mr. Benga.

Six years after arriving in Lynchburg, meeting good people, and living a dignified life, Mr. Benga was homesick. In fact, he had always been homesick, ever since he was kidnapped. And each day away from Africa, he grew more and more depressed. And each day that he thought about the unbearable humiliation of having been caged like an animal, he grew more and more depressed.

And on the early afternoon of March 20, 1916, the 32-year-old Mr. Benga built a ceremonial fire and sang “I believe I’ll go home. Lordy, won’t you help me?” (which he had learned from one of the ministers). After that, he used a borrowed gun to shoot himself in the heart. Then he went home.

Enslaved Black People: The Part of the Trail of Tears Narrative No One Told You About

By D. Amari Jackson - atlanta black star
March 17, 2018

Contrary to the popular historical narrative, the Union’s effort to rein in the Confederacy and end the secessionist military rebellion now known as the Civil War was incomplete upon the iconic April 9, 1865, surrender of Robert E. Lee at a Virginia courthouse in Appomattox. While ending the conflict in Virginia, the legendary courthouse meeting between Lee and Union General Ulysses S. Grant prompted a series of subsequent surrenders in numerous Southern states and Western territories over the following months. On June 23, a full two-and-a-half months after Appomattox, the war finally came to its conclusion at the Doaksville settlement in present-day Oklahoma with the surrender of Stand Watie, the last Confederate general to lay down his arms.

Watie, a staunch Confederate whose loyalty and battlefield exploits had earned him the rank of brigadier general, was, perhaps, far too complex for our sanitized and more linear national historical narrative. He was a Native American, a Georgia-born Cherokee who commanded Southern troops in the Indian Territory consisting of battalions of Creek, Seminole, Cherokee and Osage natives. He was one of many natives who’d left their Southern lands behind three decades prior and entered the Oklahoma Territory by way of the infamous “Trail of Tears,” a series of forced relocations enacted by government authorities following the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

And, like a number of his native brethren, Watie was a wealthy planter and landowner who was accompanied on the western trail to the Oklahoma Territory by the sizable number of enslaved Africans he owned.

“What people need to realize is that slavery was not just Black and white,” said Dr. Arica L. Coleman, a nationally recognized historian of Black and Native American descent. Coleman, who has held numerous faculty appointments, is the author of “That the Blood Stay Pure: African Americans, Native Americans and the Predicament of Race and Identity in Virginia.”

“Every time you see the pictorial representations, the iconography of the Trails of Tears, you only see Indians,” stressed Coleman, noting “the truth of the matter is they certainly didn’t leave their slaves behind.”

“We couldn’t ignore the fact that the Five ‘Civilized’ Tribes were actually slave states legally, where they did practice slavery,” said Paul Chaat Smith, associate curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Smith, a Comanche, noted the need to put the term “civilized” in quotations given its skewed 19th century Eurocentric application to the Southern-based Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole nations. The author of several books on Native American culture recently facilitated the museum’s “Ámericans” exhibit, which included information on the Trail of Tears, and a “Finding Common Ground” symposium exploring African-American and Native American relations.

While slavery was not practiced in native communities “in the same way that Mississippi or Alabama did in terms of numbers or being essential to the economy,” Smith stressed “they clearly took a position to support slavery, to enforce it in their laws and to actually fight for the Confederacy. So it would have been pretty hypocritical to talk about the role of Indian removal being part of these larger historical processes while ignoring the undisputed historical fact that Indian nations practiced and protected the institution of slavery.”

Although Native Americans, long before Waite and like many cultures, had practiced the enslavement of prisoners of war within and between their own cultures, they didn’t engage in racialized chattel slavery until the late 18th century amidst the increasing encroachment of white settlers. While this violent encroachment and its associated “civilization” efforts by whites impacted and influenced all of the five major groups, it was the Cherokee Nation that most actively engaged in and profited from Southern enslavement. Coleman has pointed out that by 1809 600 enslaved Africans were held in the Cherokee nation alone, a number that increased to 1600 by 1835.

It was during the 1830s, in the aftermath of the Indian Removal Act, that the decade-long process known as the Trail of Tears occurred. Fueling the desire to claim the lands of those believed to be “godless savages” was the white settlers’ government-backed wish to expand the cotton industry, and the recent discovery of gold in parts of the South, particularly North Carolina. As a consequence, thousands of Native Americans were evicted from their common lands and forced to walk thousands of miles to designated Indian Territory in current-day Oklahoma, many dying from starvation and disease along the way.

Watie, one of a smaller faction of Cherokees who supported removal to the Western territory as the only way to preserve the Cherokee autonomy, was among those who signed the 1835 Treaty of New Echota that ceded native lands in Georgia in exchange for the Western territory. While he and the Africans he enslaved would make the move west in 1837, of the estimated 15,000 Cherokee in Georgia forced on to the trail in 1838, as many as 4,000 died.

Once in Indian territory, Watie and other native slave-owners resumed and even increased their heinous and profitable practice. “Slavery in Indian territory became a mirror-image of slavery in the white South,” said Coleman. She further explained there were already established slave codes within native territories dating back to the 1827 Cherokee Constitution, which stated, “The descendants of Cherokee men by all free women, except the African race, whose parents may have been living together as man and wife, according to the customs and laws of this Nation, shall be entitled to all the rights and privileges of this Nation, as well as the posterity of Cherokee women by all free men. No person who is of negro or mulatto parentage, either by the father or mother side, shall be eligible to hold any office of profit, honor or trust under this Government.”

“There were even Black Codes to keep in line the free Black populace, given there was a free Black population living among the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks and other groups,” added Coleman.

“I learned a narrative that said there were some really basic differences between the treatment of people enslaved by Native Americans and those enslaved by white people,” said Smith, of a popular yet questionable historical theme that emerged in the 1970s. “But more recent scholarship has really demolished that argument.”

While noting there were certainly variances in the way it was practiced by certain states and territories, Smith stressed that “one thing we now know about slavery that is well documented is that it really was about metrics, about money, about careful record-keeping given that slaves were very expensive” and a major investment. “So it’s not a valid argument to say that somehow enslavement under Native Americans was, to any significant degree, a kinder and gentler form of slavery.”

By 1860, there were 4,000 enslaved Africans living in the Cherokee Nation alone. Upon the Civil War, in 1861, Watie didn’t hesitate to join the Confederacy, given his common interest with the wealthy slaveholders of the South and his view of the federal government as the Cherokees’ primary displacer and enemy. He was pivotal in establishing the first Cherokee regiment of the Confederate Army known as the “Cherokee Mounted Rifles” and in securing early Confederate control of Indian Territory. Unwilling to acknowledge Confederate defeat upon Lee’s Appomattox surrender, Watie would ultimately close the epic military chapter of America’s most historic internal conflict by finally laying down his arms to Union Lieutenant Colonel Asa C. Matthews at Doaksville on June 23.

It is a little-known conclusion to a pivotal American event.

“This is why history is so important,” insisted Coleman, promoting the value of a more nuanced and accurate account, regardless of where the truth may take you. “When you say slavery was only Black and white,” continued Coleman, “it erases the other part of that story.”

The black woman who resisted segregation in Canada will now appear on its currency

Sarah K. Burris - raw story
13 MAR 2018 AT 16:10 ET

Viola Desmond, accidental civil rights activist now on Canadian $10 bill (Photo: Canadian treasury)

Before there was Rosa Parks, there was Viola Desmond, who tried to sit in a “whites-only” section of a movie theater in New Glasgo, Nova Scotia in 1946.

A local business woman with her own line of cosmetics, Desmond was prosecuted for trying to defraud the government of 1 cent. Tickets to movies charged people of color more to sit in the balcony. She offered to pay the tax, but she was convicted and fined 26 Canadian dollars, which included court costs, the New York Times recalled.

Now Desmond’s face will be the first black person and only second woman to appear on Canadian currency. She’ll be on the $10 bill, which will be released this year.

“Outside of the Underground Railroad story, which has a fair amount of mythologizing around it, Canadians do not know about black Canadian history,” said history professor Barrington Walker, of Queen’s University. “Black history was imagined as not central to the founding of the country.”

“Her legal challenge galvanized the black community in Halifax’s north end and paved the way for a broader understanding of human rights across our country,” said financial minister Bill Moreau. He’s responsible for making the final decision on the currency.

Few knew Desmond’s story even in Canada but her sister, Wanda Robson, began talking about it publicly after taking a course on race relations in 2003 at University College of Cape Breton.

Desmond explained that she was unaware of the segregation policy at the time that required black customers sit in the balcony. She asked for a ground-floor seat, which the cashier sold her. She wasn’t informed by the staff at the time of purchase that she had to sit elsewhere, nor was she charged the 1 cent tax at the time of purchase. She was challenged by an usher upon entering the theater but she refused to move. The manager called police and she was arrested. She was 32 years-old.

While she attempted to sue the theater and have her conviction overturned, her efforts were unsuccessful. The state banned segregation in 1954. She was issued a pardon after her death in 2010.

American activists have attempted to put a woman of color on currency with suggestions ranging from Parks to Harriet Tubman.

J. Ernest Wilkins Jr.: ‘Superb Mathematician’ Broke Barriers at Dawn of Atomic Age

By D. Amari Jackson - atlanta black star
March 12, 2018

In 1937, in an unprecedented move, the University of Chicago admitted a 13-year-old prodigy to its mathematics program. The early enrollment was appropriate given the student’s parents were successful alums of the school from a prominent family that embodied educational achievement and given the early teen, by all accounts, was one of the brightest young minds in the country.

J. Ernest Wilkins Jr. was not only young and gifted, he was Black. By age 16 the university awarded Wilkins a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. By 17 he received his master’s, and by age of 19, Wilkins completed his doctorate, a stunning achievement.

The American government was equally impressed, especially since the country was in the midst of World War II and wanted the brightest scientific minds to help develop its atomic energy and weapons capacities. A year after receiving his Ph.D., while teaching at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, Wilkins was recruited by the government to return to the University of Chicago, now the home of the world’s first nuclear reactor. In this capacity, Wilkins researched neutron energy while working in the preliminary stages of the Manhattan Project, the program producing the first nuclear weapons, with world-renowned scientists Eugene Wigner and Enrico Fermi. Within his first year, the 21-year-old discovered three scientific effects impacting the motion of subatomic particles now named for him, the Wilkins effect, the Wilkins epectra and the Wigner-Wilkins spectra.

“He was a very famous mathematician, not only to the Black community, but in general,” said Ronald Mickens, a physics professor and former colleague at Clark Atlanta University, where Wilkins taught mathematics from 1990 to 2003. “I had read a lot about him and, then, in my 20s, I met him,” Mickens said, characterizing him as “a superb mathematician.”

“In spite of the fact he could have passed for white if he wanted to, he always maintained the fact that he was Black,” noted Mickens.

Given the war effort required more space for a larger nuclear reactor and adjacent facilities, the Manhattan Project eventually transferred its research teams to a Southern site in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. While scientists of all races and backgrounds, domestic and foreign, had worked together in New York, Chicago and other Northern sites, the move south impacted this dynamic as the African-Americans, in accordance with the wishes of Southern congressmen, were designated segregated housing at the site, consisting of 16-by-16 foot plywood structures without plumbing. In addition, African-American women, wives and family members were not allowed to live in these so-named “hutments” with the male employees, being relegated to separate fenced-in structures and subject to a curfew.

“He was not stopped from going to Oak Ridge,” said Mickens, referencing a common misconception that Wilkins was disallowed from transferring to the Tennessee site to continue his atomic research. Wilkins, clarified Mickens, “was the one who decided that he was not going to live in that segregated community, so they found him something else to do.”

When it came to racism, one needs to understand, continued Mickens, that “people of that generation said, ‘I am going to succeed independently of these other conditions,’ and racism was just part of those conditions.”

“There’s a deep stoicism that runs through particularly the male side of my family,” explained Carolyn Marie Wilkins, Wilkins’ niece and a professor at the Berklee College of Music in Boston. A jazz singer and author, Carolyn penned “Damn Near White: An African American Family’s Rise from Slavery to Bittersweet Success,” a 2010 book on her accomplished family. “They are very upright, they’re very stoic, they do not complain, they don’t make excuses, they don’t whine, they keep their feelings to themselves.”

While thousands of scientists and researchers contributed to the Manhattan Project under J. Robert Oppenheimer, the “father of the atomic bomb” who coordinated the national effort, Mickens pointed out “there were a number of Blacks who were involved at a high level, all of them brilliant.” Among them was Carolyn Beatrice Parker, who worked as a physicist to produce polonium as part of the construction of the first atomic bombs. A mathematician from Fisk University with a master’s from the University of Michigan, Parker went on after the war to earn a second master’s degree in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before succumbing at age 47 to a form of leukemia associated with her polonium work.

There were also the Knox brothers who contributed to the Manhattan Project while working as chemists at Columbia University; Fisk University’s Samuel P. Massie Jr., who worked as a project chemist at Iowa State University’s Ames Laboratory; Howard University’s Harold Delaney, a project chemist at the University of Chicago’s Metallurgical Laboratory (Met Lab); Lincoln University’s George Sherman Carter, a project physicist at Columbia; Jasper Jeffries, a project physicist at Met Lab; and Edwin Russell, Harold Evans, George Warren Reed, Lloyd Quarterman, Moddie Taylor, Benjamin Franklin Scott and Blanche J. Lawrence, who all worked as project chemists at Met Lab.

Although contributing important research to the atomic effort, Wilkins, along with Jeffries, was among 70 project scientists who signed a July 1945 petition pushing President Harry Truman to refrain from using the atomic bomb on Japan. The Szilard petition, named after project physicist Leo Szilard, stated that “such an attack on Japan could not be justified in the present circumstances. We believe that the United States ought not to resort to the use of atomic bombs in the present phase of the war, at least not unless the terms which will be imposed upon Japan after the war are publicly announced and subsequently Japan is given an opportunity to surrender.”

After the war Wilkins, like many African-American scientists, wished to join the faculty at a major university, but few, if any, would accommodate him, especially considering it was the mid-1940s and the armed forces had yet to be desegregated. Instead, he began a career in the private sector while earning a bachelor’s and master’s in mechanical engineering at New York University. Wilkins eventually landed a position with the Nuclear Development Corporation of America, where he helped design a power-generating nuclear reactor and, for years, researched and introduced other peaceful applications for nuclear energy.

In 1970s, while teaching at Howard University and creating its mathematics Ph.D. program, Wilkins served as president of the American Nuclear Society from 1974 to 1975. A year later, Wilkins became the second African-American elected to the prestigious National Academy of Engineering for his design and development of nuclear reactors in the peaceful application of atomic energy. Mickens noted that “most of his work, for a long time, was nonmilitary.”

Mickens, who had stayed in touch over the years through academic circles and professional events, would eventually recruit Wilkins to teach math and physics at Clark Atlanta in 1990, where the two conducted joint research and became good friends. In 2003, Wilkins ended his lengthy career at Clark, having published well over 100 scientific papers and earned numerous fellowships and honors in mathematics, physics and engineering. He died eight years later at age 87, leaving behind an extraordinary legacy of success and achievement in science, mathematics and research, one that racism could not cripple.

“You either survive or you don’t survive, but you don’t get anything done by worrying about it,” Mickens said of the can-do attitude that Wilkins embodied despite both the legal and daily discrimination he faced. “You worry about it only in the sense that you want to change it, but you don’t let it stop you.”

Coard: George Washington's teeth not from wood but slaves

Michael Coard - philly tribune
Feb 25, 2018

Ever since I began writing this Freedom’s Journal column at the Tribune back in 2015, I always wrote about upcoming events. For example, I’d write that an anniversary date is approaching and then I’d discuss it in detail. But I never wrote about something after it had already passed — well, not until now. And now I’m writing about President’s Day, which was a few days ago on February 19.

I’m actually writing about President George Washington — more specifically, his teeth. I mean my ancestors’ teeth.

And I’m writing about their teeth in The Tribune because racist white folks went crazy trying to defend Washington when I posted some of this historically truthful information on my Facebook page on February 19.

In fact, they unwittingly played a key role in making my post go viral. I love when I make racists angry. And now I’m gonna make ‘em even angrier because this newspaper reaches much more people than my Facebook page does. So here we go.

President’s (not Presidents’) Day is officially called George Washington’s Birthday according to federal legislation. It was created in 1885 to honor the man who enslaved 316 Black human beings at his Mt. Vernon, VA plantation and who transported nine of them beginning in 1790 to America’s first “White House,” which was located right here in Philly at Sixth and Market.

By the way, there is not and never has been a “Presidents’” Day to honor both Washington and Lincoln or Washington and any other president. In 2001, there was a congressional attempt in the form of House Resolution 420 to combine Washington’s February 22 birthday and Lincoln’s February 12 birthday. But it died after failing to get past a subcommittee vote.

Let’s get back to the enslaved Black folks. It wasn’t just their entire bodies that Washington robbed them of; he also robbed many of them of their teeth. Yes- their teeth! In 1784, Washington had the teeth of enslaved Black adults “transplanted into” his mouth. And five years later, a dentist in Philadelphia made Washington’s first set of total dentures (shown above) from teeth that were “yanked from the heads of his slaves.”

If you don’t believe me, read George Washington’s Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century, which is a meticulously researched book written by Dr. Robert Darnton, an award-winning author and professor. And if you don’t believe him, read George Washington: An Imperfect God, His Slaves, and the Creation of America, which is a thoroughly documented book written by award-winning author and historian Henry Wiencek.

But if you still don’t believe it and still think Washington wouldn’t have done such a despicable thing and that such barbarism was beneath him, please continue reading.

From age 11, in 1743, until his death at 67 in 1799, Washington (and his wife Martha Washington) enslaved Africans and their descendants.

And he had a habit of being an unsanitary miser who, at Mt. Vernon, issued to his enslaved Blacks for use as their garments “dirty,” “fouled,” and “manure”-soaked wool from the stomach of sheep.

Similarly, many of those Black laborers had to resort to rummaging for “coarse burlap bags” to use as clothing because Washington refused to adequately clothe them. As Wiencek stated during a 2003 radio interview, Washington’s “slaves were miserably clothed … (In fact, they) were so badly clothed that they were stealing the wheat sacks made of the cheapest, roughest burlap to repair their own clothes … Otherwise, (they) would go around in rags.”

In providing so-called shelter, Washington’s treatment of his fellow men and women was just as bad. Consistent with Wiencek’s statement that Washington’s enslaved Black workforce was “miserably housed … (in) a very harsh place” is the observation of Julian Niemcewicz, a Polish poet who resided at Mt. Vernon for two weeks in 1798 and who described the living conditions of many of the enslaved population:

“We entered some negroes’ huts, for their habitations cannot be called houses. They are far more miserable than the poorest of the cottages of our peasants. The husband and his wife sleep on a miserable bed, the children on the floor. A very poor chimney, a little kitchen furniture amid this misery—a teakettle and cups. A boy about fifteen was lying on the floor with an attack of dreadful convulsions....”

If you want even more irrefutable evidence of Washington’s outrageously inhumane treatment of enslaved Black men, women, and children, Google my 2005 article published in the scholarly Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography. It is entitled “The ‘Black Eye’ on George Washington’s ‘White House.’”

And please remember next year on President’s Day to display your proud American patriotism by showing your pearly whites and smiling. Or don’t.

Coard: President Thomas Jefferson: A Pedophile Rapist

Michael Coard - philly tribune
Mar 3, 2018

In my Freedom’s Journal column last week here in The Philadelphia Tribune, I exposed the lie about President George Washington’s supposed wooden teeth and disclosed the truth about them having been “yanked from the heads of his slaves.”

White racists who read it went ballistic. They denied. They yelled. They screamed. They hollered. They insulted. They trolled. But mostly, they unwittingly made my column go viral all over social media. And for that I say, “Thank you, racist white folks. Thank you very much!” I also say if you were mad about that Washington column, you’re gonna be livid about this Thomas Jefferson column.

Jefferson, the third president of the United States and the man given credit for drafting the Declaration of Independence — which hypocritically proclaimed “All men [and women] are created equal” — was not only a slaveholder. He was also a pedophile rapist. You want proof? OK.

As U.S. Envoy and Minister to France, Jefferson began living there periodically from 1784-1789. He took with him his oldest daughter Martha and a few of those whom he enslaved, including James Hemings. In 1787, he requested that his daughter Polly join him. This meant Polly’s enslaved chambermaid, 14-year-old seamstress Sarah “Sally” Hemings (James’ younger sister), was to accompany her.

Both Sally and James were among the six mulatto offspring of Jefferson’s father-in-law, John Wayles and his enslaved “domestic servant” Betty Hemings. Sally and James were half-siblings of Thomas’ late wife, Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson (meaning Thomas and Sally were technically related).

Thomas Jefferson, after repeatedly raping Sally while in Paris, impregnated her. Her first child died after she returned to America. But she has six more of Thomas’ children at Monticello.

But you don’t have to believe me. You can read the January 2000 official report by the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation’s Research Committee, which concluded, based on DNA studies, primary and secondary documents, oral histories of Jefferson and Hemings descendants, and nationally renowned scholars, that there is a “high probability that Thomas Jefferson fathered Eston Hemings and that he most likely was the father of all six of Sally Hemings’ children appearing in Jefferson’s records.” By “high probability” and “most likely,” you know that report actually and euphemistically meant “absolute certainty.”

As a result of Jefferson’s perverted and criminal lust for a Black child, many people during that time were confused about why he promoted the “Back To Africa” movement. But those who knew the real deal knew he never really supported the notion of Blacks being returned to their Motherland to be free, to be independent, and to prosper. Nope. That wasn’t true. The truth, as noted by Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation Professor Emeritus Peter S. Onuf, is that it was in reality a scheme by Jefferson to try to conceal Hemings’ children who were his “shadow family.”

Jefferson’s inhumanity as a pedophile rapist wasn’t an aberration in terms of his character. After all, he was a lifetime slaveholder.

He was the son of Peter Jefferson, a Virginia landowning slaveholder who died in 1757, leaving the eleven-year-old Thomas with a massive estate. In 1767, he formally inherited 52 Black human beings. When he authored the Declaration of Independence in 1776, he held 175 Black men, women, and children in bondage. By 1822, he had increased that number to 267.

In addition to being a slave-owning racist, he was a legislative racist. As pointed out by Joyce Oldham Appleby, Professor Emerita of History at UCLA and former President of the Organization of American Historians and the American Historical Association, as well as by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., former Professor of History at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at CUNY Graduate Center, Jefferson opposed the practice of slaveholders freeing their enslaved because he claimed it would encourage rebellion. And, as noted by John E. Ferling, Professor Emeritus of History at University of West Georgia, after Jefferson was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses in 1769, he attempted to introduce laws that essentially would have banned free Blacks from entering or exiting that state and would have banished children whose fathers were of African origin. He also tried to expel white women who had children by Black men. After his election as Governor in 1779, he signed a bill to encourage enlistment in the Revolutionary War by compensating white men with payment of “a healthy sound Negro.”

But he wasn’t merely a domestic racist. He was an international racist, too. As Secretary of State in 1795, he gave $40,000 and one thousand firearms to colonial French slaveholders in Haiti in an attempt to defeat Toussaint L’Ouverture’s slave rebellion. As President, he supported French plans to resume power, lent France $300,000 “for relief of whites on the island,” and in 1804 refused to recognize Haiti as a sovereign republic after its military victory. Two years later, he imposed a trade embargo.

Along with being a perverted, slave-owning, legislative, domestic, and international racist, Jefferson was a blatantly ignorant racist. In his 1785 book entitled “Notes on the State of Virginia,” he wrote about “the preference of the ‘oran-outan’ (i.e., an ape-like creature) for the Black women over those of… (its) own species.” He also wrote that Blacks have “a very strong and disagreeable odor” and that they “are inferior to the whites....”

Oh, by the way, he was a lying racist, too. His friend from the American Revolution, Polish nobleman Tadeusz Kosciuszko, came to America in 1798 to receive back pay for his military service. He then wrote a will directing Jefferson to use all of Kosciuszko’s money and land in the U.S. to “free and educate slaves.” Jefferson agreed to do so. After Kosciuszko died in 1817, Jefferson refused to free or educate any of them.

The next time your children’s or grandchildren’s or nieces’ or nephews’ teachers lie to them about the great Thomas Jefferson, ask those teachers this: “How could a slave-owning racist pedophile (incestuous) rapist be a great man?”

Their forefathers were enslaved. Now, 400 years later, their children will be landowners

Rare victory for Brazilian poor, as record Amazon land tract is handed over to descendants of escaped enslaved people

Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
the guardian
Mon 5 Mar 2018 04.00 EST

It was a modest ceremony for such a significant victory: it is not every day that the descendants of enslaved people are given the title to their land. But there was no doubt of its importance at a time when the protection of Brazil’s traditional rural communities is threatened by a conservative government in league with powerful agribusiness interests.

This weekend, Simão Jatene, the governor of Pará state, signed a document giving land titles for more than 220,000 hectares of Amazon forest to an isolated community populated by descendants of enslaved people who escaped centuries ago.

The 500 inhabitants of Cachoeira Porteira have spent 23 years trying to get legal rights to their territory. “It has a very important meaning for us,” said Valterlane Souza, 34, who was born and raised in the community. “Everyone was too emotional to talk.”

Some 950km from the state capital, Belém, Cachoeira Porteira is a “quilombo” – a rural settlement founded by descendants of enslaved people, of which there are some 6,000 in Brazil, said Denildo “Biko” Rodrigues, national coordinator of quilombo association Conaq.

“Where there was slavery there was resistance. Some quilombos were formed by those who escaped the slave house and others by those who fought and took the plantation,” he said.

Brazil has struggled to come to terms with its brutal legacy of slavery. Some 4.5 million people were forcibly brought here between 1600 and 1850, when Brazil ended the traffic, though domestic slavery was only abolished in 1888. Even today, 76% of the poorest Brazilians are black, compared with 55% of the general population.

Under Brazil’s 1988 constitution, quilombola and indigenous people were given rights over their ancestral territories. Leftwing president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silvaissued a decree regulating the procedures in 2003, but so far just 170 quilombola territories have been given their full land rights, according to Conaq – 62 of those in Pará state.

President Michel Temer’s administration is closely allied to powerful agribusiness lobbies and has eroded protection for Amazon forest reserves.

Last year, his government suspended new demarcations of quilombo territories pending a supreme court ruling on a legal action that argued that Lula’s original decree was unconstitutional. But in a landmark judgment on 8 February, the supreme court voted to uphold Lula’s decree.

“It was a significant victory,” said Rodrigues. But he cautioned that the government body charged with the regulatory process has had its budgets slashed as part of austerity measures and is barely able to operate.

Anthropologist Emmanel Farias Júnior participated in a project to map the limits of Cachoeira Porteira’s land and said the community lives in close harmony with the forest, living by harvesting Brazil nuts, subsistence farming and fishing. Five guest houses offer eco-tourism visits.

“They have this very strong relationship with the place,” Farias Júnior said.

At Saturday’s ceremony, a song written for the occasion was sung and women performed an Afro-Brazilian dance called the Maculelê, spinning fluidly and clashing pieces of wood.

“The titling ceremony was wonderful, simple as it was,” said another resident, Claucivaldo Souza, 44. “It was something that many people no longer believed in, but it happened.”

Ivanildo de Souza, 46, president of the Cachoeira Porteira association, cried as he described years of struggle to secure the title, during which the community resisted illegal loggers who attempted to buy their way into the area and plans for a hydroelectric dam project and highway were drawn up, then abandoned.

He told how two centuries ago escapees from plantations would climb up the treacherous Cachoeira Porteira waterfall – “Waterfall Gate” – beyond which overseers sent to capture them could not pass.

De Souza said the community was committed to protecting the forest that sustains them. “This is our objective,” he said. “We want to guarantee the nature. We struggled for this.”

Tony McGee got kicked out of Wyoming with the Black 14 but still made it to the Super Bowl

Just contemplating a protest in 1969 ended the football careers of many of his teammates

BY MICHAEL A. FLETCHER - the undefeated.com
February 25, 2018

Tony McGee, photographed at his home near Atlanta, Ga. He is wearing a black armband which pays tribute to the 14 football players kicked off the University of Wyoming football team in 1969 for protesting racism. Matt Odom for The Undefeated

Tony McGee had no idea what would come next after he and 13 other black players were kicked off the undefeated and nationally ranked Wyoming Cowboys football team in the midst of the 1969 season. The defensive end had been playing like an All-American and maybe even a future pro, racking up 11 sacks in just four games. But now his football career, his college education and his entire future were in doubt.

One thing McGee knew for sure was that he would never play for Wyoming again. As far as he was concerned, the ouster of the group that came to be known as the Black 14 had revealed head coach Lloyd Eaton as not just a hard-edged taskmaster but also a hardheaded racist.

Wyoming’s black players had proposed wearing black armbands in their home game against Brigham Young University. A few wanted to protest the Mormon Church’s dictum forbidding black members from becoming priests. But for most of them, including McGee, the beef was more personal: BYU’s all-white squad had hurled racial slurs and cheap shots at black players during their game a year earlier.

But when the black Wyoming players raised the idea of a protest with their coach, Eaton did not want to hear it. Instead, he berated and insulted them, saying they were troublemakers, half of whom did not know their fathers. Then, he kicked them off the team. McGee recalls Eaton saying the players could go back home to live off “colored relief.” Or, if they were lucky, maybe they could go play for Morgan, Grambling or some other historically black college or university.(video)

As it turned out, McGee was among the fortunate. He went on to play his senior year at Bishop College, a now-defunct historically black college near Dallas, where he continued to dominate. After he graduated, he was drafted by the Chicago Bears, launching a 14-year NFL career that included tours with the New England Patriots and the Washington Redskins, as well as two Super Bowl appearances. After his playing career, McGee became an entrepreneur and a broadcaster with a Washington, D.C.-area show, now called Pro Football Plus, that has aired for 33 years.

The University of Wyoming football program did not fare as well. After dismissing its black players, the team won its next two games but lost the final four contests of the 1969 season, causing the Cowboys to plummet from the national rankings. The next season, Wyoming went 1-9, its worst record since 1939. The mass dismissal prompted black athletes in all sports to shun the university, and it was nearly a decade before a significant number of them would again suit up for Wyoming.

Eaton was fired as head coach after the disastrous 1970 season. He was hired as director of player personnel for the Green Bay Packers and was demoted to scout after four years. He worked for an NFL-run scouting service before retiring in the mid-1980s.

Even when his career was crumbling, Eaton stood by his decision to summarily dismiss his black players. His stance was publicly supported by the coaching staff, most of the team’s white players, most students at Wyoming and nearly the team’s entire fan base, which spanned the whole state.

In a 1982 interview with The Denver Post, Eaton said he had no regrets. “Hell, no,” he said, adding, “They were biting the hand that feeds them.”

McGee, who was born and raised in Battle Creek, Michigan, said his future looked bleak in the weeks immediately after he was kicked off the Wyoming team. Although he was a top talent, at first no other schools showed interest in him. “What had happened was in the back of people’s minds,” he said, “they thought I was a troublemaker.”

McGee ended up at Bishop mainly by luck. Jay Berry, a black teammate who was also headed to Bishop (but never played there because of medical reasons), talked McGee up to the coaches, who offered him a scholarship over the phone. At Bishop, McGee picked up where he had left off at Wyoming: shedding blockers, making tackles and terrorizing quarterbacks. By the end of the 1970 season, he was selected to play in several all-star games and was recognized as one of the nation’s best black-college players.

Football people told him he could have been a first-round draft choice — if it weren’t for what happened at Wyoming. “It is hard to know how much money that cost me,” McGee said.

He ended up being chosen in the third round by the Bears. He went on to a long and productive pro career, highlighted by back-to-back Super Bowl appearances in 1983 and 1984 when he played for Washington.

Even as McGee was having his way on the field, he was planning for his life off of it. He remembers telling a teammate, “When I stop working here, I am not working for anyone else.”

It was an idea he got from his late father, who was a serial entrepreneur and activist. His father worked at the Kellogg Co., where his activism helped move black workers from “the brooms to the machines,” McGee said. Later, his father opened a record store, barbershop and pawnshop. He later opened a beauty shop, which he was expanding into a beauty school when he died while McGee was still in high school.

McGee launched a physical therapy business in Washington’s Virginia suburbs during his final year in pro football. He operated the business for years and combined it with a health club before selling it to a health care firm after 13 years.

Through his many years in football and in business, McGee, 69, said his experience at Wyoming seemed to fade from the public mind. But that changed over the past several years, as a wave of athletic activism pushed the story of Wyoming’s Black 14 back into the limelight.

First, players at the University of Missouri backed campus protests in 2015 by refusing to play unless the university president resigned. Then, the NFL protests ignited by former 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick made storytellers curious about McGee and his Wyoming teammates.

“Interest has picked up tremendously in the last few years,” McGee said, adding that he has been contacted by documentarians, playwrights, moviemakers and foreign reporters all intrigued by the Wyoming story.

McGee said he supports the idea of athletes as activists, and he understands why Kaepernick and his supporters chose to take a knee during the national anthem to protest inequality. But he said Kaepernick should repeatedly make clear in his own voice the motives for his protest so they could not be distorted.

“When I look at him, I understand what he is doing. But he needed to — in the beginning, in the middle and even now — make sure individuals understand what he was protesting for and who and what he was protesting against,” McGee said. “Once you started to get the ear of the people and once people wanted to get involved, then you explain that again. Then you get up off your knee and move forward for progress.”

McGee knows from personal experience that protest comes at a price. For most of the Black 14, being thrown out of Wyoming meant the end of their football careers. McGee estimates that seven or eight of his black teammates had the talent to play in the NFL, but only one other, running back Joe Williams, went on to join him in the pros. Several did earn college degrees and went on to careers in education, in the auto industry and in television, among other professions.

Looking back, McGee is proud that the planned protest forced change. Just a year after the black players were kicked out of Wyoming, BYU recruited its first black player. In 1978, the church announced that a divine revelation had opened the Mormon priesthood to African-Americans.

But there has been no formal reconciliation between the players and the university, although there have been conversations on campus about repairing the breach. In 2002, a student group at Wyoming dedicated a bronze sculpture in the basement of the student union. It shows a black armband on a player’s arm. But none of the Black 14 is in the university’s Intercollegiate Athletics Hall of Fame. Eaton, who died in 2007 at age 88, also is not a member of the hall.

Kevin McKinney, Wyoming’s senior associate athletic director for external operations, was an intern on the athletic department staff in 1969. He recalls that virtually the entire state, himself included, was against the black players then. But in the years since, he said, eyes have been opened.

“People have certainly eased their feelings about it,” he said. “As far as we’re concerned around here at the university and in the state generally, people can now see how courageous they were and how unfairly they were treated.”

Several years ago, he said, two of the black players were back in Laramie for a sports banquet. When they were introduced, the entire room rose in applause. Now, he said, the university is working on inviting all of the surviving Black 14 players back to campus. One preliminary idea is to have a memorial dedicated to them on the facade of the football stadium.

“It has been a long, long time,” McKinney said. “If we presented them on the field at halftime, I think they would get a wonderful reception. I really think the state of Wyoming is much more open-minded and much more respectful than it used to be.”

For his part, McGee sounds open to some kind of reconciliation, although he can never forget what happened to him and the rest of the Black 14. “We were thinking about protesting racism in another institution,” McGee said. “But what we did not know, until everything went down, is that we were living with it every day.”

The Secret History of the White House’s Kitchen Slaves

Food for thought on Presidents’ Day weekend.

TOM PHILPOTT - mother jones
FEB. 17, 2018 6:00 AM

"Portrait of George Washington's Cook," by Gilbert Charles, circa 1796'-'97. The painting is thought to depict Hercules.Painting by Gilbert Charles Stuart/Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Colección Permanente/Wikimedia Commons

When you look at the White House, you probably don’t think of it as a Southern plantation mansion—the way you might, say, a columned antebellum pile in Georgia. But Washington, D.C. was carved out of territory from Virginia and Maryland, both slave states. Slavery was legal in the nation’s capital until months before the Emancipation Proclamation—and enslaved people not only built the original White House and the post-1814 edition, but they also toiled in the kitchen for the first several decades of the republic.

In his 2017 book The President’s Kitchen Cabinet: The Story of the African Americans Who Have Fed Our First Families, From the Washingtons to the Obamas, Adrian Miller, an historian and former adviser to President Bill Clinton, unearths this largely hidden history with great care and as much detail as could be mustered, given the often patchy nature of documentary evidence on the topic. And on the latest episode of Bite, he regaled me with eye-opening tales of previously invisible black cooks working at the center of American power.

“Black hands—enslaved and free—wove the fabric of social life in the nation’s capital, and black people, widely considered by whites as inherently bred for servitude, were integral to cementing a white family’s social status as an elite household,” Miller writes. “Our presidential families were no exception, which means that slave labor powered the White House kitchen and nourished our presidents.”

The tradition dates back before the White House even existed—to when the first president, George Washington, maintained his executive manse in Philadelphia. There, Miller writes, our founding father installed an enslaved man named named Hercules to man the kitchen fires, transferring him from a similar post at Mount Vernon. Pennsylvania’s ban on slavery forced President Washington into some chicanery to keep Hercules as his property.

The state’s law “freed any enslaved person who stayed on Pennsylvania soil for longer than six continuous months,” Miller writes, “To skirt the law, Washington decided to send all of his slaves back to Mount Vernon every time the six-month deadline was about to toll. They would stay at the plantation for a few weeks and then return to Philadelphia to restart the ‘freedom clock.'” Toward the end of his term, Washington moved Hercules back to Mount Vernon—”where he suddenly found himself…in the coarse linens and woolens of a field slave”—fearing he would seek his freedom in Philadelphia when his stint in the presidential kitchen ended.

Hercules ultimately triumphed over Washington’s machinations: he escaped on February 22, 1797, Washington’s birthday. “Hercules must have shrewdly calculated that all of the activity surrounding the birthday festivities at Mount Vernon would distract others from noticing his absence,” Miller writes. Hercules’ life in captivity, as well as his great escape, is worth thinking about this Presidents’ Day. As is the the long and, until now, little-known history of African-Americans in the presidential kitchen. In our interview, Miller tells me an equally unsavory story about Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved cooks.

'Still fighting': Africatown, site of last US slave shipment, sues over pollution

Lauren Zanolli in Africatown, Alabama
the guardian
Fri 26 Jan 2018 06.00 EST

In 1860 the last, illegal, shipment of slaves to the US landed in this part of Alabama. Now hundreds of the largely African American residents are suing an industrial plant claiming it released toxic chemicals linked to cancer

From the front seat of his truck, Joe Womack points out the site where the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to enter the US, landed in 1860, 52 years after it outlawed the international slave trade.

Womack, a retired army major who grew up in the area and is now the leader of a local environmental justice group, has parked on a patch of dirt under a stories-high interstate bridge, wedged between a paper mill, oil storage tanks and an industrial railroad.

Between the tangle of heavy industry, it’s about as close as you can still get to the area where the Clotilda and the 110 kidnapped west Africans aboard are said to have first touched ground – and where the remains of what might in fact be the ship were recently discovered, thanks to unusual weather conditions.

Several years after emancipation many of the Clotilda survivors would return here to start an independent settlement governed by native traditions.

The Clotilda was sponsored by Timothy Meaher, a wealthy Alabama businessman, on a bet that he could evade authorities and successfully land an illegal slave ship (he was caught but never convicted). The landing site, now covered by oil storage tanks, is on land still owned by the Meaher family, along with several other lucrative industrial plots in the area.

Today, this mostly black, low-income community has more than just a unique history as an against-the-odds bolthole of black independence in the Reconstruction south. Residents say they also have a serious industrial pollution and public health problem, and a group of about 1,200 have launched a lawsuit against the owners of a now-shuttered paper plant that was built in 1928 on land that was then owned by A Meaher Jr.

“People born after 1945 seem to be dying before the age of 65,” said Womack, who grew up during the mid-century heydey of the International Paper plant that drew thousands of workers here but also, according to residents, spewed ash across the town.

The lawsuit claims International Paper was responsible for the release of hazardous chemicals into the air and local environment, and notes that these have been linked to bad health outcomes including cancer. It further claims International Paper failed to properly clean up the site when it closed 20 years ago.

The firm denies all the allegations.

After being smuggled into Mobile, survivors of the Clotilda were sold into slavery or kept on Meaher’s properties until the civil war ended two years later. After emancipation, many returned to this bank of the Mobile river and, unable to return to Africa, founded their own town in 1866 as Sylviane Anna Diouf documents in her book, Dreams of Africa in Alabama.

Africatown residents were able to remain independent, self-governed under African traditions and languages, and eventually saved enough money to buy land from their former owners. It is one of the first towns founded and controlled by African Americans in the United States.

Many of Africatown’s descendants still live here today.

And residents fear their unique past is in danger of being erased by industrialization, environmental pollution and, they say, high cancer rates. It is one of many poor communities of color around the country disproportionately affected by industrial pollution.

“We’re still fighting” says Womack when asked about Africatown’s past and the current legal fight. “This whole thing is called planned obsolescence and that is what we are fighting,” said Womack, who is the executive director of a local environmental justice organization known by its acronym, Chess.

Once home to around 10,000, Africatown’s population has dipped to about 3,000.

Abandoned houses line the town’s quiet and compact residential heart. Paper, asphalt and petrochemical plants, pipelines and coal terminals surround the town, which is just a few miles upriver from downtown Mobile. Residents say the surrounding industry presents serious health and safety issues, as does the continued threat of further industrialization (activists successfully beat back an oil storage tank farm proposal in 2015).

Cancer

Pastor Christopher L Williams Sr says he noticed a high cancer rate almost immediately after moving to Africatown’s Yorktown Missionary Baptist church in 2006. “We must have done 20 funerals that year,” the vast majority due to cancer, he said.

Alarmed by the death rate, he sent out a questionnaire on cancer to the 150 or so active church members. About 100 people replied indicating they or a family member had cancer.

Since then, Williams says he has gone through a handful of lawyers trying to get legal help.

No localized cancer data on Africatown exists – the Alabama department of health averages data across the county – but Williams and others here all describe a similar trend: many longtime residents dying before the age of 65, very often from cancer.

Patricia J Dock, a lifelong resident and Yorktown church member, rattles off her list – a husband who died of spine cancer, a younger brother who died of brain and lung cancer, and another brother who is now fighting leukemia. Her father died years ago from what doctors said was tuberculosis, but she believes was cancer.

Many here the Guardian speaks to are convinced a trail of cancer leads back to International Paper, which has denied any wrongdoing.

Today, all that is left of the plant are a few concrete stumps in an abandoned field. But Patricia Dock and other residents recalled what they say was ubiquitous ash emitted from the plant up until the 1980s and 90s, when pollution control measures used today started to kick in.

“The debris that would fall from the air would be so thick you couldn’t see three feet in front of you,” she said. New cars would rust out within a few years. Airborne pollution would cover the small vegetable gardens many families kept. “You’d wash it off and eat it. You didn’t have anything else,” she said.

Tightening EPA regulations helped to reduce pollutive practices of paper mills around the country years ago. Although residents complain about the current industrialization they say it is not as bad. Past pollution has continued to haunt the town, says a lawsuit filed in Mobile County court last spring. The suit alleges that International Paper released dioxins and furans – highly toxic compounds shown to be directly linked to cancer – into the air, ground and water in amounts that exceeded EPA limits.

It also, it is claimed, failed to follow federal clean-up regulations before shuttering the mill and bulldozing the site in 2000, so that chemicals left behind have continued to spread into the surrounding area, affecting the health and property of residents. Moreover, the suit charges, International Paper and other defendants sought to hide these violations from the public and government officials.

“They were supposed to retrofit the plant so that it didn’t release harmful substances into the community and they chose not to do that,” said Donald W Stewart, one of the lead prosecuting attorneys on the case. “They just shut it down and bulldozed the plant to the ground.”

He expects the case to go to trial sometime this year.

International Paper, which is based in Memphis and reported sales of $21bn in 2016, has denied all allegations in the suit. A spokesman for the company said he could not comment on ongoing litigation. In response to a question on the health and safety practices of its production operations more generally, he said: “As with all our operations, we adhere to all federal, state and local regulations and often go well beyond the standards set.”

Africatown’s plight has attracted the attention of Senator Cory Booker and former EPA environmental justice lead Mustafa Santiago Ali, who now works for a civil and human rights non-profit called the Hip Hop Caucus. Womack and others are eyeing tourism as a potential salve to local economic problems, though they say this has not had enough support from local officials. Under the future land use plan for Mobile, adopted last year, Africatown’s small residential area remains surrounded by land zoned as heavy industry, leaving a path open for new development.

Lorna Gail Woods, 69, a fifth-generation Africatown resident and descendant of a Clotilda survivor, has seen the town’s fortunes rise and fall. “It was people living here that thought they were living a good life and doing pretty good, and all of a sudden you come home and you get sick and in a few weeks or a month you’re dead,” she said. Her grandfather worked at the International Paper plant and died in the 1950s.

Residents say the town has lost its long tradition of self-sufficiency, as creeping industrialization has contributed to a decline in population and a loss of the local businesses. “We don’t have a store that we can stop in and get a bottle of water,” says Woods.

Like others here, Woods is also concerned about Africatown’s history being lost. She has kept a fastidious collection of historical artifacts and records on Africatown in the hopes of one day creating a museum to honor her ancestors and past residents. “I’m here as living hope for those that have gone on, that their life was not in vain,” she said.

W Mae Jones, 79, who moved to Africatown in the 1970s, and whose husband died of cancer a few months ago, said her main concern is raising awareness of what the town has been through. “Before we can get it cleaned up, this community needs to be recognized for what it is and what it has been and what it was.”

The DNA of Iceland's First Known Black Man, Recreated from His Living Descendants

Hans Jonatan, who escaped slavery in 1802, now has hundreds of relatives in the country.

sarah zhang - the atlantic

Hans Jonatan was born into slavery on a Caribbean sugar plantation, and he died in a small Icelandic fishing village. In those intervening 43 years, he fought for the Danish Navy in the Napoleonic Wars, lost a landmark case for his freedom in The General’s Widow v. the Mulatto, then somehow escaped to become a peasant farmer on the Nordic island.

No one knows how he got there. No one knows where in Iceland he is buried today. But the story of the first black man in Iceland, as far as it is known, has endured in local lore, passed down from his Icelandic wife and two children to hundreds of descendants since his death in 1827.

“The old East Fjords people would often say, ‘Oh, yes, you’re descended from the black man,’” one living descendant told Gísli Pálsson in his biography of Jonatan, The Man Who Stole Himself.

Today, Jonatan’s descendants mostly lack the dark skin and curly hair that so obviously marked him as the son of a black mother, an enslaved woman named Emilia Regina, and a white father, identity unknown. But bits of his DNA live on inside his great-great-great-great grandsons and granddaughters, and it is possible, scientists have now shown, to reconstruct parts of his genome from his living descendants. And with that, it is also possible to trace his mother’s ancestry in Africa.

It could only have happened in Iceland. The country’s small and genetically homogeneous population is largely descendants of settlers who arrived from Scandinavia and the British Isles a millennium ago. This, along with, detailed genealogy records tracking centuries of family relationships, have made Iceland a genetics laboratory. The biopharmaceutical company DeCODE Genetics, whose scientists helped carry out the study of Jonatan’s genome, has also analyzed DNA from more than half of Iceland’s adult population—including 182 of Jonatan’s living descendants.

Humans share some 99.5 percent of their DNA with each other, so it is in that other 0.5 percent where geneticists go looking for variations distinguishing one group from one another. In the relatively homogeneous Icelandic background, it was easy to find the African sequences. “If you’re sequencing an Icelander, you will find about one variant per million bases that is not found in any other Icelander. But you go and sequence into the African part [of the genome], you will find at least 100 variants,” says Kári Stefánsson, the CEO of DeCODE.

No single descendant carries all of Jonatan’s original genome. But each carry a small part of it. So the team stitched together sequences found in 182 different descendants to recreate 38 percent of the African half of his genome—presumably the half that came from his mother. The sequences most closely matched present-day populations in Benin, Nigeria, and Cameroon. There are few records about Jonatan’s mother, who was also born into slavery in the Caribbean, so this may be the only hint to her and her ancestors’ origins.

“It’s the writing of history with DNA, basically,” says Hannes Schroeder, an archaeologist at the University of Copenhagen who has used DNA to trace the origins of enslaved Africans. Schroeder was also a coordinator of EUROTAST, an interdisciplinary project studying the slave trade that helped fund the reconstruction of Hans Jonatan’s genome.

Jonatan’s life story was unique, and the methods used to study his DNA may prove unique, too. It would be difficult to reconstruct the genome of any single enslaved African in regions where many of them lived and their DNA mixed together in their descendants. “It’s definitely a special case because of Iceland,” says Schroeder. “The same project wouldn’t have been possible in, say, France.”

For similar reasons, it’s almost impossible to reconstruct the European half of Jonatan’s genome—the half that came from his unknown white father. Kirsten Pflomm, a descendent of Jonatan, says this is the question she hopes DNA can answer. You actually would not need to reconstruct a genome to prove Jonatan’s paternity; you would just need to obtain a DNA sample from potential fathers or their descendants for comparison. Pálsson’s biography suggests suggests Jonatan’s father could have been a secretary named Hans Gram—or Jonatan’s master, Ludvig Schimmelmann, or a certain Count Moltke.

Pflomm, who is American, lives in Copenhagen. When she moved to the city for a job, she was astonished to find that her apartment is across the street from Amaliegade 23, where Jonatan was living when he escaped to Iceland. Pflomm eventually hopes to make it to the small Icelandic fishing village where Jonatan lived out his days—by every account an upstanding citizen. “He seems like a guy I really wish I could have met,” she says.

The Myth of Black Confederates
And the rise of fake racial tolerance

Benjamin Alpers — January 14, 2018
public seminars

One of the latest Confederate monument fights is currently brewing in South Carolina. State Representatives Bill Chumley and Mike Burns have proposed erecting a monument to black Confederate soldiers. The problem, of course, is that there were no black Confederate soldiers. The Confederate government refused to allow blacks to enlist until March 1865, when, desperate for manpower, the Confederate Congress passed a law allowing African Americans to serve in combat roles. Even with the war nearly lost, this move was extremely controversial, as it flew in the face of Confederate racial ideology. “In my opinion, the worst calamity that could befall us would be to gain our independence by the valor of our slaves, instead of own,” wrote Robert Toombs, the first Confederate secretary of state and a general in the Confederate army. “The day that the army of Virginia allows a negro regiment to enter their lines as soldiers they will be degraded, ruined, and disgraced.” Two weeks after the law allowing their service was passed and before any black troops could be enlisted, the war was over.

But in recent years, the myth of the black Confederates has grown. Early “Lost Cause” ideology was often frankly racist. Works like D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915), and the Thomas Dixon novels on which it was based, depicted the Confederacy as explicitly a white man’s cause. While neo-Confederate accounts of the Civil War and Reconstruction often displaced slavery as the cause of the conflict and depicted the South as fighting for “states’ rights” or even a lower tariff, there was at first no attempt to reimagine the Confederacy as a land of racial equality, especially since the vision of the Lost Cause was actively used as a defense of Jim Crow.

But after the rise of the modern civil rights movement, it became convenient to claim that the Confederate fight was an interracial one. On the basis of no evidence whatsoever, the myth grew. “The modern myth of black Confederate soldiers,” notes the Civil War Trust on their webpage devoted to this tale,

is akin to a conspiracy theory—shoddy analysis has been presented, repeated, amplified, and twisted to such an extent that utterly baseless claims of as many as 80,000 black soldiers fighting for the Confederacy (which would roughly equal the size of Lee’s army at Gettysburg) have even made their way into classroom textbooks. It is right to study, discover, and share facts about the complex lives of nineteenth-century black Americans. It is wrong to exaggerate, obfuscate, and ignore those facts in order to suit twenty-first century opinions.

(The Civil War Trust also notes that this story could only grow once all the veterans of that conflict, who clearly never saw tens of thousands of black Confederates in uniform, were no longer around to deny the story.)

But in many ways the most fascinating, and to my mind disturbing, part of the ridiculous attempt in South Carolina to erect a monument to imaginary black Confederates has been the reaction of younger white nationalists to the suggestion. There has apparently been a pushback from the far right against the notion of a “Rainbow Confederacy.” The sorts of people who marched in Charlottesville last year openly embrace white supremacy and, not surprisingly, openly celebrate the Confederacy’s white supremacy, too.

Though historians should all want to see the myth of the black Confederates disappear, its ideological usefulness in recent decades actually reflects positive changes in American life. While white supremacy has remained a powerful force in our political life, open white supremacy grew less socially and politically acceptable. Just as hypocrisy is the tribute that vice plays to virtue, the myth of black Confederates was an attempted accommodation to the new political realities of post-civil rights and Voting Rights Act America. It is the kind of myth that appeals to white supremacists who like to be able to tell themselves that they are not racist.

But especially over the last two years, the open expression of racism has come to play a larger and larger role in our political life. We now have a president who suggests that some neo-Nazis are good people and who rails against accepting immigrants from “shithole” countries in Africa.

No wonder that the far right is losing its felt need to simulate racial tolerance. When people who want to erect a monument to imaginary black Confederates are not the worst players in a story about public commemoration, we are in a very bad place.

“Oh yes, Great White Father, you did surprise us with one thing you did … but it wasn’t you killing us, it wasn’t you raping our women or killing our kids or burning our village down … that didn’t surprise us. What surprised us, Great White Father, was that after you done all them vicious things to us, you go all over the world trying to convince people that the Red Man is the savage.”

— Dick Gregory, “Not Gonna Be Your Injun No More”

Recy Taylor, black Alabama woman raped by six white men in 1944, dies aged 97

Taylor was attacked by six white men as she walked home from church

Men who admitted assault were not indicted by all-white, all-male grand juries

Guardian staff and agencies

Fri 29 Dec ‘17 09.30 EST

Recy Taylor, a black Alabama woman whose rape by six white men in 1944 drew national attention, died on Thursday. She was 97.

Taylor died in her sleep at a nursing home in Abbeville, her brother Robert Corbitt said. He said Taylor had been in good spirits the previous day and her death was sudden. She would have been 98 on Sunday.

Taylor’s story, along with those of other black women attacked by white men during the civil rights era, is told in At the Dark End of the Street, a book by Danielle McGuire released in 2010. A documentary on her case, The Rape of Recy Taylor, was released this year.

The Rape of Recy Taylor is directed by Nancy Buirski, best known for directing The Loving Story, about Mildred and Richard Loving, the couple who toppled laws against interracial marriage

“This is such an important time in this country’s path to recognize Recy Taylor,” Buirski told the Guardian this month. “With women being singled out on Time magazine’s cover, as part of the #MeToo campaign, I really want to draw attention to the black women who spoke up when their lives were seriously in danger.”

Taylor was 24 when she was abducted and raped as she walked home from church in Abbeville. Her attackers left her on the side of the road in an isolated area. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) assigned Rosa Parks to investigate the case, and she rallied support for justice for Taylor.

Two all-white, all-male grand juries declined to indict the six white men who admitted to authorities that they assaulted her.

In a 2010 interview, Taylor said she believed the men who attacked her were dead, but she still would like an apology from officials.

“It would mean a whole lot to me,” Taylor said. “The people who done this to me … they can’t do no apologizing. Most of them is gone.”

The Alabama legislature passed a resolution apologizing to her in 2011.

Buirski told the Guardian that “during the civil rights movement, issues like equal accommodations and voting rights became more vital to the general population than issues about ‘sexual stuff’. That was something that people put aside, that people didn’t want to talk about. It was unseemly to talk about, and certainly, to fight about.”

But Buirski said the movement remained rooted in what one academic has called “a bodily claim to own a space”, a debt Buirski said it owed partly to women like Taylor.

“That was her legacy,” Buirski said. “Recy Taylor was so courageous, so brave to have spoken up.”

A Century Later, a Little-Known Mass Hanging of Black Soldiers Still Haunts Us

by James Jeffrey
December 8, 2017

Sixty-three black soldiers were represented by one lawyer in the largest court martial in U.S. history, the first of three that followed the Houston riot of 1917. In total, 110 men out of 118 were found guilty, and nineteen were sentenced to death by hanging.

From The Progressive: After Hurricane Harvey devastated Houston in September, recovery and clean-up workers discovered that vandals had smeared red paint over a historical marker at the one-time location of Camp Logan, recently rededicated to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Houston “riot” of 1917.

The paint covered the segment of the inscription that explained the history of the Third Battalion of the 24th United States Infantry, a predominantly black unit assigned to guard the camp during its construction shortly after the United States entered World War I.

Beneath the paint, the words read: “The Black Soldiers’ August 23, 1917, armed revolt in response to Houston’s Jim Crow Laws and police harassment resulted in the camps most publicized incident, the ‘Houston Mutiny and Riot of 1917.’ ” The Houston riot grew out of a confrontation between the soldiers and Houston city police, at the end of which sixteen white people were dead, including five policemen, with four soldiers also killed. It was one of the only riots in U.S. history in which more white people died than black people.

At the resulting three courts martial, the first of which was the largest one in U.S. military history, a total of 118 enlisted black soldiers were indicted, with 110 found guilty. Nineteen black men were executed by hanging and fifty-three received life sentences.

For a century, families of the executed soldiers have lived with the memories and loss. Relatives alive today grew up hearing their families talk about the soldiers’ fates, which served as the catalyst to learn more, and to work for justice to make amends.

“My family was upset when I started looking into it,” admits Jason Holt, a relative of Private Hawkins, one of the soldiers hung.

Holt has a 100-year-old letter written by Private Hawkins to his mother the night before his execution, telling her not to be upset about him taking his “seat in heaven,” and of his innocence.

“They sent those soldiers into the most hostile environment imaginable,” Charles Anderson, a relative of Sergeant William Nesbit, one of the hung soldiers, told me over the the phone. “There was Jim Crow law, racist cops, racist civilians, laws against them being treated fairly in the street cars, while the workers building [Logan] camp hated [the soldiers’] presence.”

“The riot was a problem created by community policing in a hostile environment,” agrees Paul Matthews, founder of Houston’s Buffalo Soldiers National Museum, which examines the role of African-American soldiers during U.S. military history. “It’s up to people now to decide whether there are lessons relevant to the present.”

A majority of the soldiers posted at Camp Logan were raised in the South and familiar with segregation and Jim Crow laws. But as army servicemen, they expected fair treatment during their service in Houston. The police and public officials in that city viewed the presence of the black soldiers as a threat. Many Houstonians were concerned that if the black soldiers were shown the same respect as white soldiers, black residents might come to expect similar treatment.

Tensions grew between the troops guarding Camp Logan and the Houston police and locals. The sight of black men wearing uniforms and carrying guns incensed white residents. Many Houstonians were concerned that if the black soldiers were shown the same respects as white soldiers, black residents might come to expect similar treatment. The soldiers themselves were angered by the “Whites Only” signs, being called the n-word by white Houstonians, and streetcar conductors demanding they sit in the rear.

Then, in August, the police arrested a black soldier for interfering with the arrest of a black woman. When one of the battalion’s military police went to inquire about the arrested soldier, an argument ensued, resulting in the military policeman fleeing the police station amid shots, before being arrested himself.

Rumours—which turned out to be false—reached Camp Logan that the military man had been killed and that a white mob was approaching the camp. There was no mob, but the black soldiers had good reason to be fearful. The country was rife with racial tensions. Just two years later cities would erupt in unrest during the “Red Summer,” and in 1921 a white mob in Tulsa, Oklahoma, murdered hundreds of innocent black people.

More than 100 soldiers grabbed rifles and headed into downtown Houston. During a two-hour rampage, the soldiers killed sixteen white residents, including five policemen. The next day martial law was declared in Houston, and the following day the unit was dispatched back to its base in New Mexico. The court martial soon followed.

“It was a dark, rainy night during the riot,” Anderson says. “At the trial the civilian witnesses couldn’t identify one soldier firing shots that killed people.”

Seven mutineers agreed to testify against the others in exchange for clemency.

Only one lawyer represented the sixty-three soldiers during the first court marital. The thirteen sentenced to death on November 28 were not given right to appeal. On December 11, they were taken by truck to the scaffold where thirteen ropes dangled from a crossbeam.

“The men did not have a fair trial,” says Sandra Hajtman, great-granddaughter of one of the policemen killed. “I have no doubt about the likelihood the men executed had nothing to do with the deaths.”

Only two white officers faced courts-martial, and they were released. Not a single white civilian was brought to trial.

In Houston, a rapidly growing city, knowledge of the event is mixed. Most newcomers know nothing about it. But that is changing.

“There was no public acknowledgment of it for a long time,” Lila Rakoczy, program coordinator of military sites and oral history programs at the Texas Historical Commission, said in a phone interview. “The centennial of the American entry into World War I has probably helped heighten awareness and encouraged people to talk about it.”

Earlier this year, relatives of the soldiers helped lobby for gravestones from the Veterans Association for unmarked graves in a Houston cemetery of two soldiers killed during the riot. But more still remains to be done for the soldiers, the relatives say.

“We tried during the Obama presidency for a posthumous pardon and were on the list but missed out,” says Angela Holder, a history professor at Houston Community College and the great niece of Corporal Jesse Moore, one of the soldiers hung. “Perhaps we can approach a Texas politician or the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to help.”

Earlier this year petitions for the pardons were sent to the Trump White House. The relatives are still awaiting a response as the 100th anniversary of the day of execution approaches.

According to a written account by one of the soldiers overseeing the execution, the thirteen men executed on December 11, 1917, showed great bravery that moved all those watching. None made any attempt to resist or even speak as they were taken from the trucks to the scaffold.

“Not a word out of any of you men now!” Sergeant William Nesbit proclaimed to his men in his final living moment.

Vroom Vroom: The Short, but Poignant History of Black Americans In the World of NASCAR

By Tanasia Kenney - November 19, 2017

From Atlanta Black Star: It’s been nearly 46 years since the world of NASCAR saw a full-time African-American driver at the wheel, but all that is about to change.

Rookie driver Darrell “Bubba” Wallace, Jr., is set to drive the iconic No. 43 car for Richard Petty Motorsports next season, making him the first full-time Black driver in the NASCAR Cup Series since Hall of Famer Wendell Scott back in ’71, RPM officials announced late last month. The 24-year-old, slated to replace driver Aric Almirola, is the lone Black face in a sport long-dominated by white men and revered by fans across the Deep South.

“There’s only 1 driver from an African-American background at the top level of our sport … I am the one,” Wallace tweeted. “You’re not gonna stop hearing about ‘the Black driver’ for years. Embrace it, accept it and enjoy the journey.”

Wallace’s upgrade to the driver’s seat is a welcomed change, considering the sport has not always opened its arms to embrace people of color. With a “bread and butter” fanbase that is nearly 60 percent male, 80 percent white and mostly from the Southern and Midwestern states, NASCAR’s dark history of racism and bigotry should come as no surprise. However, racial barriers failed to keep a few noted African-Americans from leaving their mark on the sport.

The poignant, and often untold history of Blacks in NASCAR started with Virginia native Wendell Scott, the sport’s very first African-American driver. Not only was Scott the first Black driver to hit the track, he was, by far, the most successful Black American to touch the sport, snagging a first place win at the Grand National Series race (NASCAR’s highest level) in December 1963. He went on to start a total of 495 races in NASCAR’s top series from 1961 through 1973, according to ThoughtCo., but his success didn’t shield him from discrimination both on and off the track.

Jim Crow laws barred Scott from racing at certain speedways at the time, and he even received death threats warning him not to come to Atlanta, his son, Franklin Scott, told StoryCorps in 2016. He said the bigotry and intimidation wasn’t enough to keep his father off the track, but there was one incident that left him feeling slighted.

“I remember him racing in Jacksonville, Fla. [at the Grand National Series], and he beat ’em all,” Franklin Scott recalled. “But they wouldn’t drop the checkered flag. When they finally did drop the flag, they had my father in 3rd place.”

One of the main reasons they had, he explained, was that there was a white beauty queen who always kissed the winning driver. Scott eventually received his prize money and was named the real winner of the race. By then, however, the crowd, trophy and beauty queen were all gone.

“Did he ever consider not racing anymore? Never,” Franklin Scott said. “That was one of my daddy’s sayings; ‘when it’s too tough for everybody else, it’s just right for me.’ ” His father continued racing until 1973.

NASCAR didn’t see another Black driver until 1986 — motorist Willy T. Ribbs. Ribbs started three races that year, including his first at North Wilkesboro Speedway in South Carolina on April 20, 1986. He was the first African-American to test a Formula 1 car in ’95 and the first Black driver at the Indy500 in ’91, auto enthusiast website Road & Track reported. Despite his success and support from notable figures like Bill Cosby and Paul Newman, the race-car driver’s time with NASCAR was short-lived. The talent and opportunity were there — but he just didn’t have the “right” support.

“The minority base in the United States is growing, but not with the racing community,” he said in an interview with the website. “They wanna keep the neighborhood looking the way it always has. You just hope they realize what they’re missing before it’s too late.”

Ribbs also blasted NASCAR for what he considers a lack of effort on their part to recruit the next generation of Black drivers. The sport launched its Drive for Diversity program in 2004 in an effort to reach historically underrepresented groups through a series of internships, pit-training courses and driver programs with Rev Racing. So far, Ribbs thinks the program has failed to do its job.

“NASCAR … as far as their diversity program is concerned, it’s a scam,” he said. “And what are other racing disciplines doing? IndyCar? Nothing. All of the major-league sports in this country, from baseball to football to basketball, there’s a beginning stage—an outreach—to get minority kids interested. There is none of that in racing.”

Bobby Norfleet, the first Black driver to compete in the NEXTEL Cup series in 2006, also struggled with the lack of diversity in the sport. For him, the issue was finding companies willing to sponsor a Black driver.

“We still didn’t understand sponsorships,” he told the Suffolk News-Herald of his self-titled racing team, Norfleet Motorsports, back in 2005. “About 75 percent of it was inexperience. I’d make 75 phone calls a day, and if one person said ‘Maybe,’ it was a good day. We would ask and get sponsors, and tell other teams, and then other teams would come in and take our sponsors.”

Norfleet eventually earned the support of Black celebrities and companies like songstress Gladys Knight, 40 Street Records, So So Def Records, LaFace Records, Ron Winan’s Chicken and Waffles and RDJ Entertainment-Florida. Altogether, they helped rake in millions for the team, as Norfleet geared up to make his debut on the truck circuit in ’95, according to the newspaper. He stayed there five years before making it to the Craftsman Truck Series in at the Dodge California Truckstop 250 in March 2000.

In his short career (which ended in 2006), Norfleet acknowledged that the sport had made progress in diversifying its workforce. He wasn’t talking about drivers, however.

“I’ve seen true diversity in NASCAR,” he said. “The last few years, I’ve seen more Black executives. When I started, there weren’t any.”

His daughter Tia Norfleet would stand to carry on the legacy of Black NASCAR drivers in 2013, but that all came crashing down when racing officials determined that she’d been lying about her stature in the sport. Tia had promoted herself as an accomplished driver who was working her way to become the first African-American female NASCAR driver. A New York Times report revealed, however, that the younger Norfleet wasn’t even licensed to compete in NASCAR’s top tier series and that the only sanctioned race she had entered was a low–level event.

Another Black driver who left his mark on the sport was Bill Lester, joining the ranks of drivers like Scott and Ribbs after racing in the NASCAR Cup Series back in 2006. He was the last African-American driver to do so before Wallace stepped on the scene.

During an interview with CNN’s Brooke Baldwin in September, Lester recalled how he was not embraced by the racing community despite his success, much like the handful of Black drivers who came before him. The discussion soon turned to President Donald Trump’s call for NFL team owners to fire players who dared kneel during the national anthem to protest racial injustice, an effort sparked by ex-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick last year.

Unsurprisingly, several NASCAR owners like Hall of Famer Richard Petty sided with the President and threatened to fire any driver who participated in the protests. Lester expressed disappointment with the owners’ ultimatum, but wasn’t all that surprised because, “Those that are in NASCAR – that’s a culture. These drivers … they know each other, they all have common beliefs, bonds, culture, and so yeah, they’re all pretty much peas in a pod.”

He went on to describe the times he was heavily booed during races in the Deep South, specifically at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway and in Martinsville, Va. He said he’d “never been so uncomfortable in a racing environment” as he was in those.

“It was surprising to me because I think that I did a great job behind the wheel,” Lester told Baldwin. “I think that I respected the sport, but for no reason that I can foresee, I was booed. So that happened mostly at tracks where it’s very non-progressive.”

Lester’s racing career spanned nine years, ending in 2012. The year before his departure, he earned 6 Top 5 and 5 Top 10 finishes from all 12 races with the Rolex Grand-Am Grand Touring class and won the race at Virginia International Raceway on May 14th.

Black Americans weren’t only making gains on the track, but in the pit too. Twenty-three-year-old Brehanna Daniels recently made history as the first African-American woman to pit a vehicle in a national NASCAR series race, espnW.com reported.

NASCAR has made little racial progress recent decades and it still has a long way to go when it comes to better representing nonwhite racers. The sport’s unwillingness to let go of Confederateand Old Dixie imagery says a lot about the current state of affairs, as well.

With the torch now in Wallace’s hands, Lester offered him these words of advice: “focus on racing and ignore the haters.”

Roy Moore: Acceptance of pedophillia in the South is a legacy of slavery

From Claybeach.blogspot.com: ...To understand why many Southern whites find acceptable, behaviour which would be considered deviant and criminal in most parts of the United States, one must understand the role that Antebellum slavery played in cultivating a culture of sexual abuse and pedophillia in the South.

Before the Civil War, forcing frequent and casual sex on young girl slaves was a prized white privilege of the Southern culture they built on the backs of their slaves. It's no accident that the age of consent is only 16 in all the former Confederate states but Louisiana, Florida, Virginia and Tennessee. Before the women's movement forced a change around 1920, it had been 12 or even 10 in the former Confederate states.

The sexual submission of female slaves was one-hundred percent expected. The slave codes did not recognize the crime of rape for African American women, free or slave. It was considered that they could not be violated because they were already "impure." It was white supremacist mythology that they were promiscuous, so it didn't matter. It was law that they had no rights a white man was bound to respect. When the woman raped belong to another master, it was considered a property crime with damages paid to the slave's owner, the rape victim wasn't even owed an apology. The African American slave woman was considered property with no more right to control her own body and sexuality than a draught animal. This is the culture the white South still celebrates with its statue of Lee and his horse in the town square. Robert E. Lee had the passion to whip young girls himself even when his regular slave-whipper refused. Put a statue of that in the park!

Gloria Sonnen of Bowdoin College writes about The Sexual Abuses Suffered by Female Slaves:
Slave women were forced to comply with sexual advances by their masters on a very regular basis. Consequences of resistance often came in the form of physical beatings; thus, an enormous number of slaves became concubines for these men.

Slavery made rape socially acceptable so long as the woman being raped, either slave or free, was of African descent [or a slave*]. Slavery also made rape profitable. Once slave trading had been banned, the slave owner relied on the reproductive services of slave women to replenish his stock. Usually, this involved forced sex. The owner might choose what he considered a good bull among the male slaves to mate with one of his prime breeders. Former slaves Sam and Louisa Everett told how it was, “if their master thought that a certain man and women might have strong, healthy offspring, he forced them to have sexual relations, even though they were married to other slaves.” This was double rape. Often, the slave owner would impregnate the poor girl himself. This was rape, completely legal, with a very tangible and profitable return. A slave of proven fertility was more valuable, and a pregnant slave would bid a higher price at auction.

One can never fully understand the strong objections to the right to an abortion that comes from this region without seeing the link to his long tradition of denying a woman any control over her own body or reproductive choices. Rape was an essential part of the Southern way of life Moore celebrates in his campaign. This is the culture Roy Moore celebrates when he adorns his office with busts of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson.

Rape is, first and foremost, an exercise in power. The master used sex as another way to enforce his authority over the slaves, both male and female. Rape and sexual assault were much more demeaning to the slaves than other forms of torture such as flogging. Sex put to that purpose was of the most sadistic kind. It was designed to take away slaves dignity, privacy and any sense of family life. A black man had to experience the reality that his woman could be raped in front of him by any white man who chose to do so, and there was nothing he could do about it on pain of death. He could not protect her from sexual abuse. The slave system systematically sought to emasculate black men and take away their role as protectors of women. Now culture has turned that historical reality on its head with the white male sexual fantasy of racial cuckoldry.

While most women think their beauty a blessing and seek to enhance it, slavery turned even this on its head. Of the slave child, ex-slave, Harriet A. Jacobs said “if God has bestowed beauty upon her [the female slave], it will prove her greatest curse.” Some female slaves were sold exclusively for the purpose of concubinage. Just as the Japanese fascists had their Korean "comfort women," the Southern gentlemen had their African American “fancy maids,” attractive female slaves that lived in the big house so that she could be sexually available to her master right under the nose of his white wife. *Robert E. Lee's "Slave Ledgers" reveal that before the Civil War he sent bounty hunters North to kidnap people to work as slaves on his plantation, including girls described as "white looking" to serve as "fancy maids." Sexual practises and morals born in the slave quarters crossed the color-line and furthered the oppression of all women.

Slaves resisted this behaviour. While the records are understandably shallow on these questions, we do know of one case in which the female slave fought back, but with fatal consequences for both her and her master. In the 1850's John Newsome of Callaway County, Missouri purchased Celia, then 14 years old. Newsome raped her repeatedly, causing her to bear two of his children. After years of sexual abuse, she had finally had enough. According court records “On the night of June 23, 1855, Newsome made his last demand. As he approached Celia in her cabin, she hit him with a stick, causing him to fall to his death.”Celia was tried and hung on December 21, 1855. She was then 19 years old.

Another slave told how no woman, either black or white, could restraint the white man's behaviour:

“In them times white men wen [went] with colored gals and women bold[ly]. Any time they saw one and wanted her, she had to go with him, and his wife didn’t say nothin’ bout it.”

The Southern belle may not have had the power to stop her man from raping other women, but she still had the power to make that woman pay dearly. Consider the following story from a slave's memoirs:

"Maria was a thirteen-year-old house servant. One day, receiving no response to her call, the mistress began searching the house for her. Finally, she opened the parlor door, and there was the child with her master. The master ran out of the room, mounted his horse and rode off to escape, 'though well he knew that [his wife's] full fury would fall upon the young head of his victim.' The mistress beat the child and locked her up in a smokehouse. For two weeks the girl was constantly whipped. Some of the elderly servants attempted to plead with the mistress on Maria's behalf, and even hinted that 'it was mass'r that was to blame.' The mistress's reply was typical: 'She'll know better in the future. After I've done with her, she'll never do the like again, through ignorance'" (Stanley Felstein, Once a Slave: The Slaves' View of Slavery, p.132).
---
This remembrance by Jacobs, speaks volumes about what these practices did to the culture and how it was used to brand all African American women as "whores":

I once saw two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister…The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky… How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink.

That same feeling of abashment was felt by Roy Moore's victim in 1979, as she recounted to the Washington Post:
“I felt responsible, I felt like I had done something bad. And it kind of set the course for me doing other things that were bad.”

Slavery made sex with children easy for the masters of the old Dominion. There were no rules. A UK national archives report on the childhood of slaves states:

The trauma of sexual abuse is also a difficult subject to quantify. Sensibilities of the time and the fact that abolition was often associated with religious organisations means that sexual abuse of girls was often only alluded to in veiled terms and sexual abuse of boys was almost never mentioned. The dangers of sexual exploitation are only too obvious with slave children being seen as chattels with no legal protection. The fact that sexuality appears to have rarely discussed also left slave children ignorant and vulnerable to abuse. If the issue of forced marriage of slaves is included in this category along with coercion into sexual activity for preferential treatment, it is easy to see how sexual abuse could be seen as endemic in slave children’s lives

Southern culture explains why Judge Roy Moore could feel comfortable hitting on a child of 14, that was about the age that a female slave was expected to be available to all white men. Again Jacobs relates:

The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear…When she is 14 or 15, her owner, or his sons, or the overseer, or perhaps all of them, begin to bribe her with presents. If these fail to accomplish their purpose, she is whipped or starved into submission to their will.
---
Southern white racists have a long history of cloaking the sins of their very corrupt and profitable system in the trappings of Christian morality. As an Alabama prosecutor, Moore said he spent his time convicting “murderers, rapists, thieves and drug pushers,” so I'm sure he did more than his part to maintain the South's system of racial oppression between sermons.

When the struggle to raise the age of consent finally erupted in the 1920's, some whites argued that it should be lower for the South, saying African American women "matured earlier." This was a common myth about non-white people. Some even had the audacity to stretch the bunk science to the point where they claimed that white girls living in sub-tropical climates "ripened" into women earlier.

Another factor that seemed to propel, if not justify, certain sexual practises outside of marriage in the Antebellum South is the fact that most marriages among the slave owning class were arranged marriages. The children of the planters couldn't marry for love. That is one right the slaves had that they didn't. Their marriages were arranged by their parents to consolidate estates and build family power. We can see just how little things have changed when Judge Moore brags that he would never "date" an underage girl without getting the permission of her mother first. He seems to think that makes it alright.

KKK gathering circa 1920 (Library of Congress)

How African American WWII Veterans Were Scorned By the G.I. Bill

by Brandon Weber
November 10, 2017

From The Progressive: Veteran’s Day is the federal holiday celebrating the bravery of the American men and women in uniform. But while it’s important to give fellow Americans a nod for their service, Veteran’s Day is also an occasion to remember when the federal government failed to honor the sacrifice of some American servicemen as they returned from combat.

A million African Americans joined the military during World War II as volunteers or draftees. Another 1.5 million registered for the draft. But when the war was over, many of those servicemen and women failed to receive their fair share of the benefits under the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944 —the G.I. Bill.
Also known as the G.I. Bill Of Rights, the G.I. Bill provided financial support in the form of cash stipends for schooling, low-interest mortgages, job skills training, low-interest loans, and unemployment benefits.

But many African Americans who served in World War II never saw these benefits. This was especially true in the south, where Jim Crow laws excludedblack students from “white” schools, and poor black colleges struggled to respond to the rise in demand from returning veterans. After World War II, blacks wanting to attend college in the South were restricted to about 100 public and private schools, few of which offered education beyond the baccalaureate and more than a quarter of which were junior colleges, with the highest degree below the B.A.

But those exclusions were by no means limited to states South of the Mason-Dixon line—or to education. Historian Ira Katznelson has documented how and why black Americans have received far less assistance from social programs than white Americans, and argues that the G.I bill was deliberately designed to accommodate Jim Crow laws. He cites a study declaring it was “as though the GI Bill had been earmarked ‘For White Veterans Only.’ ”

Thousands of black veterans were denied admission to colleges, loans for housing and business, and excluded from job-training programs. Programs funded by federal money were directed by local officials, who especially in the south, drastically favored white applicants over black.

In 1947, some 70,000 African American veterans were unable to obtain admission to crowded, under-resourced black colleges. The University of Pennsylvania—one of the least-discriminatory schools at the time--enrolled only 40 African American students in its 1946 student body of 9,000.

The GI bill included support for banks to provide veterans low-cost, zero down-payment home loans across the United States. But of the first 67,000 mortgages secured by the G.I. Bill for returning veterans in New York and northern New Jersey alone, fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites. The G.I. Bill helped place 6,500 former soldiers in Mississippi on nonfarm jobs by fall of 1947, but while 86 percent of the skilled and semiskilled jobs were filled by whites, 92 percent of the unskilled ones were filled by blacks.

In all, 16 million veterans benefited in various ways from the G.I. Bill. President Bill Clinton declared it “the best deal ever made by Uncle Sam,” adding that it “helped to unleash a prosperity never before known.”

For white people, that is. The lack of access to a family home meant a long-term loss of wealth for black Americans. A family home purchased in 1946 in a good neighborhood with a strong tax base and solid schools, became financial wealth to pass onto family members, borrow against to start a business, or to send kids to college.

Of course, it was not only black veterans who lost opportunities to begin building family wealth. Many African Americans who stayed home to work in the factories, which were bustling at the time, were refused employment in the war production industry. Eventually, civil rights activists forced President Roosevelt to issue an executive order in June of 1941 banning employment discrimination and to create a temporary Fair Employment Practices Committee to prevent defense manufacturers from practicing racial discrimination.

This is why programs like affirmative action need defending. While affirmative action won’t replace that lost generational wealth, it can help to right some of the inherited inequity.

Though both black and white soldiers went overseas in World War I and in World War II, the advantage given to those coming from white families was clear. Much like redlining in real estate, the inherent disadvantages to people of color created many, many more barriers to the ability for them to climb the social ladder.

The civil rights movement along with the expansion of federal funding for higher education in the postwar decades have attempted to equalize the distribution of G.I. Bill benefits. More than one million U.S. veterans now receive benefits under the plan. That number will likely increase with this year’s passage of the “Forever G.I. Bill”, which eliminates the fifteen-year limit on benefit use. The bill also includes tuition reimbursement for veterans who earned non-transferable credits at now-shuttered schools, like the for-profit ITT Technical Institute.

But these developments of course come too late for black WWII veterans. Too many were steered away from education, too many were unable to buy, enjoy, and pass down a home in a thriving neighborhood to their children. We live with the remnants of those policies and the racial inequities they exacerbated to this day.

The tireless abolitionist nobody ever heard of

History News Network
25 OCT 2017 AT 10:35 ET

From Raw Story: "The number, difficulties, and success of his labours in the cause of the enslaved Africans in the United States would furnish materials for a volume,” wrote the Gazette of the United States in October 1798 after hearing of the death of a man well known in the streets of the nation’s capital in the 1790s. Another newspaper remembered how “he begat hope in the minds of the miserable,” while slaveholders “(by some of whom he was grossly insulted) trembled at his name.” Richard Allen, founder and minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called him “a spiritual Moses,” and reminded Philadelphians that for many years, the man had been instrumental “in liberating hundreds, if not thousands of the African race,” certain that the memory of “that great and good man . . . will not be forgotten for ages to come.”

But the name of Warner Mifflin has receded into the remote reaches of American memory. Indeed, almost nobody knows his name today. When the new nation was young, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, and the other founding fathers knew him well. There was no such thing as a mid-Atlantic Quaker who couldn’t recognize the man, not just for his unusual height, little short of seven feet, but for his moral intensity that was exceeded only by his haunting fear that he would displease his God with inadequate efforts on behalf of black Americans. So did overseas luminaries of the Enlightenment know and admire Mifflin—figures such as Hector St. John Crevecoeur, famous for his Letters from an American Farmer; Jean Pierre Brissot de Warville, cofounder of the Societe des Amis Noir; the Marquis de Lafayette; and Thomas Clarkson, author of the History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade (1808). In fact, Crevecoeur opened his 1784 French expanded edition of Letters from an American Farmer with eleven pages lauding Mifflin as a consummate reformer and humanitarian. Soon he was celebrated in schoolbooks from which English children learned French, while August von Kotzebue, the most prolific playwright of the Napoleonic period, staged a play about Mifflin that thrilled theater-goers in Vienna, Mannheim, Berlin, and St. Petersburg as Napoleon’s armies approached Russia. But soon he became the forgotten man.

Years ago after reading about Warner Mifflin’s appearance before the First Congress in New York City in February 1790 to lobby in support of petitions from Quakers and the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, I thought that someday time would allow me to look into this Quaker antislavery spokesman. Searching for scraps of information, I found a small mountain of material: hundreds of letters, petitions, and legislative proceedings; court records, newspaper accounts, and essays from his own pen; monthly, quarterly, and yearly minutes of the Society of Friends in Delaware, Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania; and land records, accounts of his traveling ministries, and family bibles. My goal now was to disinter this remarkable man from the dustbin of history.

Mifflin was the key figure bridging the first wave of abolitionists in Pennsylvania—a thin blue line stretching from the Germantown Protest of 1688 through William Southeby, Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet—and an early nineteenth-century second wave of mid-Atlantic antislavery worthies carefully documented in Manisha Sinha’s new book, The Slave’s Cause. From the early 1780s to his death in the yellow fever epidemic of 1798, Mifflin was the most dedicated and tireless abolitionist as the American Revolution wound down and the new nation took form under the Constitution.

Forgotten for his leading role as a part of the post-revolutionary Atlantic-wide abolitionist network, Mifflin has also been overlooked as the pioneer of reparations for enslaved Africans—the radical idea, with roots in Old Testament scripture, that those carried across the Atlantic in chains and consigned to lifelong, uncompensated labor had not only the right to their freedom as fellow humans but some form of restitution from the unchristian pillaging of their bodies and minds. Since the Civil Rights movement of the post-World War II era, the idea of reparations has entered political discourse, but its origins in the conscience of a handful of mid-Atlantic Quakers, as the revolutionary era unfolded, have fallen victim to historical amnesia. Providing reparations through cash payments and land as well as shared crop arrangements for his liberated adult male slaves, Mifflin preached “restitution” on the Eastern Shore of the Delmarva peninsula, making Kent County, Delaware a center of reparationist doctrine.

After the American Revolution he also became the premier legislative lobbyist of his generation, introducing methods of reaching state and national legislators to promote antislavery action. Astride his horse, riding thousands of miles, he haunted legislative houses in Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New York, putting abolitionist pamphlets in the hands of legislators, button-holing them at their lodgings, and peppering the lawmakers with passionate memorials pleading the case of “our black fellow-men.” His key role in Virginia in 1782 led to rolling back the law that prohibited manumission of slaves except by special approval of the governor and council—a feat of lobbying that removed the shackles from as many as ten thousand slaves. In these ceaseless efforts, he was compassionate, he was forgiving, he was self-deprecating—and he was utterly impossible to intimidate

Why did Mifflin disappear from the history books and, more generally, from public consciousness. After the Civil War even readers of Quaker journals found only morsels to remember him by. Why? War was hardly out of fashion, and Quaker peace witnessing was not out of fashion either. But a restless, violence-prone, triumphalist white-dominated America had other heroes in mind—expansionists, Indian haters, military leaders, captains of industry, and racial purity spokesmen. An inward-dwelling man who was certain that history was on his side and that God would not forget if he proved a disappointment hardly fit this mold. As boisterous nationalism, genocidal wars against Native Americans, and segregationist dicta gripped the country, he became nearly an anti-hero best left unmentioned.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the history books began to level charges of fanaticism against those who continued to preach abolitionism after the Constitution of 1787—pertinacious meddling that stoked sectional discord and threatened national unity. in at bay. Dismissed as hopelessly naïve or clinically unhinged for insisting that slavery was the new nation’s Achilles heel and that the republic would not survive slavery’s continuation without massive bloodshed, abolitionists such as Mifflin were left to molder in their graves. Now, it seems, the abolitionists are getting another look.

Ignorance Extolled: Forced Anthem Adherence Antithetical to Justice

by Linn Washington | October 21, 2017 - 5:18am

From Smirking Chimp: This history-making black Major League Baseball player called out race prejudice in all sectors of American society including prejudice practiced by U.S. presidents, lawmakers, law enforcers and others.

This player’s poignant observations about the sinews of the prejudice infecting American society focus antiseptic illumination on toxic stances taken by President Trump on the rights of black pro-football players to protest race-based injustices including police brutality.

Interestingly, this player’s critique of patriotism shares some similarities with a stance taken by U.S. Senator John McCain, a man widely respected for his Vietnam War service -- the service that President Trump has repeatedly disparaged because McCain ended up a POW after his plane was shot down over North Vietnam.

In May 2015 McCain issued a report that slammed the U.S. Department of Defense for funneling millions to pro sports leagues to conduct patriotism inspiring events during games. NFL players standing for the national anthem, now the center of controversy between Trump and some NFL players arose largely from that DoD funding that McCain railed against in the report “Tackling Paid Patriotism.”

This history-making black Major League Baseball player is not Jackie Robinson, the legendary figure who broke the no-blacks-in-MLB barrier in 1947 with his play for the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Prejudice ran so deep in the all-white MLB that in 1945 one pro team fielded a player who only had one arm, refusing to retain any of the phenomenal players of the all-black Negro leagues who were as good as and better than the best MLB players.

Moses Fleetwood Walker, a University of Michigan graduate, was the first and only black to play in Major League Baseball in the 19th Century before segregation soiled that sport. Walker, a catcher, made his mark on baseball in May 1884, when he played his first MLB game, over sixty years before the barrier shattering feat of Jackie Robinson. Robinson had to break the barrier a second time, because MLB officially banned black players in 1889.

Walker's accomplishment of breaking an unwritten barrier the first time is featured in an exhibit inside the new National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian facility located not far from the White House.

President Trump did a [photo-op] visit to that facility in February 2017 where he pledged to fight against bigotry, proclaiming his intent to bring a “divided” country together –- another pledge he has failure to keep.

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