Racism-Foundational 1

Civil Rights History Project

<embed> https://www.loc.gov/collections/civil-rights-history-project/about-this-collection/ </embed>

On May 12, 2009, the U. S. Congress authorized a national initiative by passing The Civil Rights History Project Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-19). The law directed the Library of Congress (LOC) and the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) to conduct a national survey of existing oral history collections with relevance to the Civil Rights movement to obtain justice, freedom and equality for African Americans and to record and make widely accessible new interviews with people who participated in the struggle. The project was initiated in 2010 with the survey and with interviews beginning in 2011.

Junípero Serra's road to sainthood is controversial for Native Americans

<embed> https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jan/25/pope-francis-junipero-serra-sainthood-native-american-controversy </embed>

As Pope Francis plans to canonize ‘the evangeliser of the west’, descendants of those who first encountered the missionary recall a culture lost to violence

Ulysses S. Grant Launched an Illegal War Against the Plains Indians, Then Lied About It

<embed> https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/ulysses-grant-launched-illegal-war-plains-indians-180960787/ </embed>

The president promised peace with Indians — and covertly hatched the plot that provoked one of the bloodiest conflicts in the West

Law and Order, Southern Strategy, Silent Majority, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan: "Monkeys from those African countries uncomfortable wearing shoes", Lee Atwater: "Nigger, nigger, nigger", Barry Goldwater

<embed> https://youtu.be/o1XeY6DHHmA </embed>

Ruby Bridges Daisy Gabriel integrating School 1960

Short Clip of Ruby Bridges integrated school in New Orleans 1960 <embed> https://www.criterionchannel.com/the-children-were-watching </embed>

The Aunt Jemima brand, acknowledging its racist past, will be retired

<embed> https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/17/business/aunt-jemima-logo-change/index.html </embed>

RECONSTRUCTION IN AMERICA: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876 EJI 6/2020

<embed> https://eji.org/reports/reconstruction-in-america-overview/ </embed>

Racial terror: 2,000 black Americans were lynched in Reconstruction era, report says The Guardian 6/16/20

<embed> https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/15/lynchings-report-reconstruction-era-black-americans </embed>

Russell Means of the American Indian Movement speaks to US Senate 1989

<embed> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVANRroxuOo </embed>

The 13th amendment abolishes slavery but allows prisoners to be used for forced labor. A documentary looking at imprisonment in the US

<embed> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krfcq5pF8u8 </embed>

<embed> https://www.history.com/topics/roaring-twenties/tulsa-race-massacre </embed> <embed>https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/caribbean-excavation-offers-intimate-look-lives-enslaved-africans</embed>

Tulsa Race Massacre

History.Com 03/2018

During the Tulsa Race Massacre (also known as the Tulsa Race Riot), which occurred over 18 hours on May 31-June 1, 1921, a white mob attacked residents, homes and businesses in the predominantly black Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma. The event remains one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history, and one of the least-known: News reports were largely squelched, despite the fact that hundreds of people were killed and thousands left homeless.

Deportations on Trial: Mexican Americans During the Great Depression

Zinn Education Project 12/2019

From the late 1920s to the late 1930s, men, women, and children, immigrant and U.S.- born, citizen and noncitizen, longtime residents and temporary workers all became the targets of a massive campaign of forced relocation, based solely on their perceived status as “Mexican.” They were rounded up in parks, at work sites, and in hospitals, betrayed by local relief agencies who reported anyone with a “Mexican sounding” name to what was then called the sounding” name to what was then called the Immigration Service, tricked and terrorized into “voluntary” deportation by municipal and state officials, and forcibly deported in trains and buses, to a country some hadn’t lived in for decades and others never at all.

Historian Mae M. Ngai argues that this 1930s campaign of mass deportations had little to do with law; it was a program of “racial expulsion,” rooted in racism. But unlike other racist and nativist efforts of the era, these deportations were not symbolized or driven by any signature piece of legislation like the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 or the Immigration Act of 1924. Rather, they were orchestrated using a patchwork of federal and local authority, existing but seldom used deportation rules, and simple mob action against a vulnerable population. It is precisely this messiness that is fruitful to surface with students. If no single law or leader ordered these deportations, then why and how did they happen and who or what is responsible for the damage they wrought? These are the questions raised in the Deportations on Trial lesson (modeled after Bill Bigelow’s Rethinking Schools lesson “The People vs. Columbus”).

'It can happen again': America's long history of attacks against Latinos

The Guardian 8/14/2019

Valencia’s great-grandfather was one of the 15 unarmed men and boys who were woken up in the middle of the night in Porvenir, Texas, in 1918, taken outside, and shot to death. The slaughter, which was carried out by white Texas Rangers, US soldiers, and local vigilantes, was justified by labeling the Mexican American families “bandits” and criminals.

The attack on Latino families in El Paso nearly two weeks ago left Valencia deeply afraid. “It’s history repeating itself a hundred years later,” she told the Guardian.

The 3 August mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, which left 22 people dead, appeared to be the deadliest terror attack and hate crime against Latinos in recent American history. A white nationalist manifesto that appeared to be linked to the shooting claimed that Latinos were “invaders”, even though Latinos had been living in the area long before Texas became part of the United States.

Red Summer, 100 years later: Its legacy of racial division and hate is buried in our demography

DailyKos 11/30/19

Lynchings continued at their usual pace through the next year or two, finally beginning their decline in 1925. There were race riots, too, most notably in Ocoee, Florida, on Nov. 2, 1920. That riot was sparked by organized efforts by black people—led by successful black merchants—to claim their franchise by voting. The voting day violence that erupted when they did so turned into a murderous ethnic cleansing event.

When a white mob formed to lynch one of the leaders of the vote drive after he confronted officials at the ballot station, it turned into a rampaging flood of violence. The mob besieged the home of a man believed (wrongly) to be harboring its target and eventually lynched him. White paramilitary forces surrounded the Ocoee black community and laid siege to it. After setting fire to rows of African American houses, they waited outside them and opened fire on the residents who were forced to flee.

Over 20 buildings were consumed, including every African American church, schoolhouse, and lodge room in the vicinity. The black residents fought back in an evening-long gunfight but eventually had to retreat through the orange groves and flee. The remaining black residents of Ocoee with homes outside the besieged area were rounded up and ordered to leave, some 500 in all. Ocoee became an all-white town and remained that way until 1981.

Sand Creek Massacre of November 29th, 1864: 155th Anniversary

DailyKos 11/29/19

Clearly, Roman Nose had sufficient reason to defend his people. Matters became worse for the Cheyenne and Arapaho as the white encroachment increased dramatically with the Pike's Peak gold rush of 1858, despite the land being promised them in the Great Horse Creek Treaty (1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie). The Territory of Colorado was then "declared" a decade after that treaty, and politicians wanted to "renegotiate" the Great Horse Creek Treaty at Fort Wise. It was far from a compromise, it was theft. 

Adding still more misery, were facts that hunting was scarce on this land tract, nor was it suited to farming. Also, white encroachment from the Pike's Peak gold rush escalated, while Civil War soldiers roamed onto their grounds. Then, Chivington, the butcher of Sand Creek, began his campaign of extermination and genocide.

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism

Zinn Education Project Book Review 2005

“Don’t let the sun go down on you in this town.” We equate these words with the Jim Crow South but, in a sweeping analysis of American residential patterns, award-winning and bestselling author James W. Loewen demonstrates that strict racial exclusion was the norm in American towns and villages from sea to shining sea for much of the twentieth century.

Weaving history, personal narrative, and hard-nosed analysis, Loewen shows that the sundown town was—and is—an American institution with a powerful and disturbing history of its own, told here for the first time. In Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere, sundown towns were created in waves of violence in the early decades of the twentieth century, and then maintained well into the contemporary era.

Red Summer, 100 years later: 1919 was a yearlong litany of white brutality against black Americans

DailyKos 11/29/19

The Red Summer of 1919 actually took place over the entire year—things just intensified insanely during the summer. But there was at least one race riot in January in Bedford County, Tennessee, about which little is known except a mention in a New York Times story at year’s end recounting the various events.

The first definitively recorded event occurred March 12, when a black World War I veteran named Bud Johnson was lynched in Pace, Florida. Accused of assaulting a white woman, Johnson was chained to a stake and burnt alive, his skull split with a hatchet.

The next “race riot” took place in Morgan County, West Virginia, where racial tensions were high because mining companies were using black workers as strikebreakers. It began, again, when a black man was accused of assaulting a white woman. A mob of white men intent on lynching the man—a Martinsburg resident named Hugh Johnson—formed outside the county courthouse, forcing officials to flee with the suspect to a nearby town. When the mob followed them there, they had to flee again.

A Lynching Map of the United States, 1900-1931

Slate 1/08/13

This map, compiled using data gathered by the Tuskegee Institute, represents the geographic distribution of lynchings during some of the years when the crime was most widespread in the United States. Tuskegee began keeping lynching records under the direction of Booker T. Washington, who was the institute’s founding leader.

In 1959, Tuskegee defined its parameters for pronouncing a murder a “lynching”: “There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. That person must have met death illegally. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing. The group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race or tradition.”

LYNCHING IN AMERICA: CONFRONTING THE LEGACY OF RACIAL TERROR

EJI.Org

During the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. These lynchings were terrorism. “Terror lynchings” peaked between 1880 and 1940 and claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children who were forced to endure the fear, humiliation, and barbarity of this widespread phenomenon unaided.

Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today. Terror lynchings fueled the mass migration of millions of black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Lynching created a fearful environment where racial subordination and segregation was maintained with limited resistance for decades. Most critically, lynching reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed in America. The administration of criminal justice in particular is tangled with the history of lynching in profound and important ways that continue to contaminate the integrity and fairness of the justice system.

This report begins a necessary conversation to confront the injustice, inequality, anguish, and suffering that racial terror and violence created. The history of terror lynching complicates contemporary issues of race, punishment, crime, and justice. Mass incarceration, excessive penal punishment, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were framed in the terror era. The narrative of racial difference that lynching dramatized continues to haunt us. Avoiding honest conversation about this history has undermined our ability to build a nation where racial justice can be achieved.

The Case for Reparations

The Atlantic 06/14

Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. The majority of the people in the state were perpetually robbed of the vote—a hijacking engineered through the trickery of the poll tax and the muscle of the lynch mob. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in Mississippi than in any other state. “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting,” blustered Theodore Bilbo, a Mississippi senator and a proud Klansman. “You do it the night before the election.”

The state’s regime partnered robbery of the franchise with robbery of the purse. Many of Mississippi’s black farmers lived in debt peonage, under the sway of cotton kings who were at once their landlords, their employers, and their primary merchants. Tools and necessities were advanced against the return on the crop, which was determined by the employer. When farmers were deemed to be in debt—and they often were—the negative balance was then carried over to the next season. A man or woman who protested this arrangement did so at the risk of grave injury or death. Refusing to work meant arrest under vagrancy laws and forced labor under the state’s penal system.

When Clyde Ross was still a child, Mississippi authorities claimed his father owed $3,000 in back taxes. The elder Ross could not read. He did not have a lawyer. He did not know anyone at the local courthouse. He could not expect the police to be impartial. Effectively, the Ross family had no way to contest the claim and no protection under the law. The authorities seized the land. They seized the buggy. They took the cows, hogs, and mules. And so for the upkeep of separate but equal, the entire Ross family was reduced to sharecropping.

Remembering Red Summer — Which Textbooks Seem Eager to Forget

Zinn Education Project 4/08/19

The racist riots of 1919 happened 100 years ago this summer. Confronting a national epidemic of white mob violence, 1919 was a time when Black people defended themselves, fought back, and demanded full citizenship in thousands of acts of courage and daring, small and large, individual and collective. Neither the defiance of Black communities in 1919 nor the racist violence to which it was a response was anomalous. 1919 is a moment that reaches back to the Stono Rebellion, Nat Turner, and Robert Smalls, and forward to the Ferguson and Baltimore uprisings, Bree Newsome’s dramatic removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse, and the fierce backlash to Colin Kaepernick’s on-field protest.

In 1919, Charleston, South Carolina; Longview, Texas; Bisbee, Arizona; Washington, D.C.; Chicago; Knoxville, Tennessee; Omaha, Nebraska; and Elaine, Arkansas experienced a wave of anti-Black collective violence usually and problematically termed “race riots.” In addition, white supremacists lynched nearly 100 Black people and initiated dozens of smaller racist clashes throughout 1919. In Pittsburgh, the Klan made clear the goal of this bloody work in the printed notices posted around a Black neighborhood: “The war is over, negroes. Stay in your place. If you don’t, we’ll put you there.”

Historian Carol Anderson, in her 2016 book White Rage, argues, “The trigger for white rage, inevitably, is Black advancement. It is not the mere presence of Black people that is the problem; rather, it is Blackness with ambition, with drive, with purpose, with aspirations, and with demands for full and equal citizenship.” Red Summer (so deemed by NAACP leader James Weldon Johnson to capture its sheer bloodiness) is a study in white rage. Throughout 1919, the exercise of Black agency — Black veterans wearing their military uniforms in public, Black children swimming in the white section of Lake Michigan, Black sharecroppers in Arkansas organizing for better wages and working conditions — was met with white mob terror broadcasting the message: “Stay in your place.”  

The Red Summer, 100 years later: The centennial Americans want to forget, but need to remember

DailyKos 11/28/19

Book: At The Hands of Persons Unknown

Caribbean excavation offers intimate look at the lives of enslaved Africans

Science 07/2019

To glimpse those lives, archaeology is required. "One of the very few ways to get at the experiences of enslaved Africans is to look at [what] they left behind," Dunnavant says. That's why he and archaeologist Ayana Omilade Flewellen of the University of California (UC), Berkeley, spent 4 weeks directing excavations here this summer, the third of five planned dig seasons. The team is part of a wave of archaeologists around the Caribbean focused on studying not only the institution of slavery, but also the daily lives of enslaved Africans in all the intimacy and texture left out of history. Seen through Dunnavant's and Flewellen's eyes, the lost buttons, cooked bones, and shards of pots and porcelain are vital clues to how enslaved Africans maintained their individuality and humanity within a system designed to strip them of both. And by studying the vegetation, water systems, and other environmental features of plantations, these archaeologists are also documenting how slavery literally reshaped the islands—and the world.