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Supreme Court History-The Dred Scott Decision

Taney, in his decision for the court, wrote, “for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit.” The full court ruled for the enslaver in a 7-2 vote.

Ishi, a Yahi Indian of California who was the last of his tribe, died 102 years ago this Sunday

Native American Net Roots November 25, 2019

That “painful regret” didn’t stop future governors from supporting volunteer militias to hunt and kill Indians. Between 1851 and 1859, the state spent more than $1.3 million for this purpose. The federal government reimbursed California for some of this spending. The state offered scalp bounties of 25 cents each in 1856, raised to $5 in 1860. Some towns also offered their own bounties.

Groups like the Humboldt Home Guard, the Eel River Minutemen, and the Placer Blades terrorized and murdered local Indians. The 19th century historian Hubert Howe Bancroft wrote: “The California valley cannot grace her annals with a single Indian war bordering on respectability. It can, however, boast a hundred or two of them as brutal butchering on the part of our honest miners and brave pioneers, as any area of equal extent in our republic.”

Among them were Ishi, his mother and his sister, survivors of the Three Knolls Massacre of 1865. That is when an impromptu militia of white settlers had killed some 40 Yahi on Mill Creek, a tributary of the Sacramento River near Mt. Lassen in today’s Tehama County. The survivors, including 3-year-old Ishi, had fled.

Half of them were killed in 1867 or ’68 by another ad hoc militia. Its leader, Norman Kingsley, later said that during the slaughter, he had exchanged his .56 caliber Spencer rifle for a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver because the rifle “tore them up so bad,” particularly the babies. The few remaining Yahi fled into the wilderness where they effectively hid out for the next 40 years. In 1908, a survey team ran across Ishi’s camp. He fled with his sister and another man, but his mother was too frail to run. The surveyors looted the camp, taking everything of value. Soon afterward, the rest of Ishi’s tiny band died. For the next three years, he lived alone. But in 1911, starving, he stole into a slaughterhouse where he was caught by the butchers and briefly jailed.

The Austerity Politics of White Supremacy

Dissent magazine Vanessa Williamson ▪ Winter 2021

From the Southern strategy of the 1960s to Donald Trump’s refusal to concede the presidential election, it is easy to trace the Republican Party’s decades-long descent into racial authoritarianism. Despite the president’s unhinged response to the election results, the real locus of power is the Senate, where Republican legislators have been striking sober-sounding notes about the need for smaller government, an end to relief spending, and the danger of higher taxes. Those desperate to see a return to normalcy may hail this born-again fiscal conservatism as a departure from Trump’s racist, antidemocratic politics. Historically speaking, this is a false distinction.

There has been one successful coup in the United States. It foreshadowed the rise of Donald Trump

DailyKos Dartagnan November 24, 2020

Out of the many acts of terroristic violence perpetrated against African Americans since active hostilities concluded in the Civil War, what occurred in Wilmington over a few days in November 1898 was not unique in its lethal character. Some 60 (probably more) Black citizens were massacred at the hands of an angry mob of white supremacists. Similar incidents of racist violence had peppered the South for decades, fueling the inception of such domestic terrorist groups as the Ku Klux Klan. But the parallels with the modern goals of the Republican Party—specifically the political reasons for the massacre, coupled with what sparked the event itself—echo today in the strategy and motives underlying the Trump campaign’s efforts to delegitimize the 2020 election.

What motivated that 1898 Wilmington coup, known as the Wilmington Insurrection—or its longtime white-washed historical descriptor, the “Wilmington Race Riot”—were the same things that motivate Trump and the GOP today: white power, white insecurity and white fear. All of those put together led to a sustained campaign of voter intimidation that directly prefigures the GOP’s modern-day voter suppression script.

Indian Training Schools

John N Mare Washco Day 3 of American Indian Heritage Month. Today we're going to look back at the wonderful experience of "Residential Boarding Schools". Won't hear about this on TV. Between 1869 and the 1960s, (YES 1960s) hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. Though we don't know how many children were taken in total, by 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools, and by 1925 that number had more than tripled. The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. They suffered physical, sexual, cultural and spiritual abuse and neglect, and experienced treatment that in many cases constituted torture for speaking their Native languages. Many children never returned home and their fates have yet to be accounted for by the U.S. government.

The Other Madisons review: an astonishing story of a president's black family

Bettye Kearse’s powerful book acts to memorably illuminate the poet Caroline Randall Williams’ vivid idea of the “rape-colored skin”. By infinite degrees, African Americans’ skins are lighter than our unknown west African ancestors. This is due to our haunted legacy of imposition. Black women submitted to predatory masters. Their husbands accepted and loved white men’s children.

The Black Descendants of President Madison

Bettye Kearse on the Complicated Lineage of Her Ancestors

My earliest recollection of hearing this story was as a five-year-old attempting to stand still while my mother worked on the dress she was creating for me. Every time I had a piano recital, she sewed me a new dress, and every time she sewed for me, I became bored and fidgety. I dreaded the fittings more than the performance itself. The performance lasted little more than two minutes; the fittings took forever. Mom pinned a seam; I tried on the dress. Mom sewed a seam; I tried on the dress. Mom pinned a hem; I tried on the dress . . . It was torture. My mother designed my outfits, but I did not care about ruffles, lace, and satin trim, and I did not want to play the piano. I wanted to dance. The closer the dress came to its final shape, the closer I came to driving my mother to her wits’ end. At every opportunity, I’d slip away and dance to the music in my head. I loved the Nutcracker Suite. I was the Sugar Plum Fairy. I arabesqued, twirled, pliéed, then twirled again, careful not to let the pins stick me. But my reprieves were brief.

Confederate Statues Were Never Really About Preserving History

The biggest spike in Confederate memorials came during the early 1900s, soon after Southern states enacted a number of sweeping laws to disenfranchise Black Americans and segregate society. During this period, more than 400 monuments were built as part of an organized strategy to reshape Civil War history. And this effort was largely spearheaded by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, who sponsored hundreds of statues, predominantly in the South in the early 20th century — and as recently as 2011.

The Frenzy at David Duke’s Campaign Rallies

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, I look around at this country. I love this country deeply. And I believe we’re losing it,” he told them. “And I know what we once were, and I want to make us great again, ladies and gentlemen. We gotta stand up for this country!” see Trump 2016
As a Senate candidate, he used the “welfare queen” myth to rile up his white supporters.See Reagan 1976

Civil Rights History Project

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

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

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

The Politic use of Law and Order and its racist origins

 Southern Strategy, Silent Majority, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan: "Monkeys from those African countries uncomfortable wearing shoes", Lee Atwater: "Nigger, nigger, nigger", Barry Goldwater You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states’ rights, and all that stuff, and you’re getting so abstract. Now, you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… “We want to cut this,” is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger.”

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

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

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

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

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

Tulsa Race Massacre

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.

Here are seven things you probably didn't know were connected to slavery

Throughout the South, monuments and flags celebrating the Confederacy are being taken down. Companies like Mars and Quaker Oats are planning to change or retire racist brand characters like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima. And popular music groups such as Lady Antebellum and The Dixie Chicks -- now Lady A and The Chicks -- have changed their names.
But in a country where enslaved Black people were so essential in its rise to global power, it's impossible to stamp out every link to its painful history. Slavery has marked everything from the US Capitol to the alcohol Americans consume.
Here are seven institutions that many people may not know are linked to slavery:

Deportations on Trial: Mexican Americans During the Great Depression

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

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

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

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

“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

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

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

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

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

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

Caribbean excavation offers intimate look at the lives of enslaved Africans

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.