Emmett Till | 65 Years After His Lynching
He whistled at a white women. A few days later, in the summer of 1955, his mutilated body floated, feet first, to the surface of the Tallahatchie River. Emmett Till was 14 years old. That was 60 years ago. No one has ever been held accountable for Emmett’s kidnapping, torture, and murder. A Youth From the North In Jim Crow South Emmett had left his home in Chicago on August 20, 1955 to visit cousins in […]
Continue readingThe 2013 Supreme Court Decision That Crippled The 1965 Voting Rights Act
America has a long history of passing legislation designed to protect and empower African Americans, then turning its back on that legislation, especially where the right to vote is concerned. Reconstruction Legislation: The 13th Amendment, ratified December 6, 1865, made slavery illegal in the United States, but it lacked the power to prevent the southern states from creating de facto slavery in the form of sharecropping, which kept freed slaves poor and subservient to rich […]
Continue readingPolice Mistreatment of Black Americans |Getting the Picture
His name was Gordon. He was a runaway slave from a Mississippi plantation. Gordon smeared his body with onions to confuse the pursuing hounds and slave catchers. Then he escaped through the swamps and bayous to the sanctuary of the Union army in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. What made Gordon unforgettable was a photograph of his hideously lash-scarred back. The photograph and Gordon’s story appeared in New York’s Harper’s Weekly Magazine on July 4, 1863. Abolitionists […]
Continue readingThe Stubbornness of America’s Police Brutalty
I live in a Boston suburb with few non-white residents. One evening, police pounded on our door, demanding we explain our presence in the community they were charged to protect. My husband helped them come to an “understanding” – We are part of that community. Though the understanding remains in place for us, police have stopped black visitors on their way to my home, requiring them to identify their destination. Virtually at the very […]
Continue readingRace Is An Artificial Construct
Every human being has African ancestry. In March 2015, researchers in Ethopia found a 2.8 million year old lower jaw bone of the oldest known representative of Homo habilis, the ancestor of Homo sapiens, modern man. James Watson and Francis Crick, who unraveled the DNA double helices in 1953, and Alec Jeffreys, who developed DNA fingerprinting in1984, which launched the Human Genome Project in 1990, stood at the threshold of truth about the interrelationship of […]
Continue reading“The Birth of A Nation:” Sparking Racism on The Silver Screen
On February 8, 1915, the blockbuster movie spectacle of The Birth of a Nation appeared on the silver screen, awing millions of white Americans. An on-screen title claims: “This is an historical presentation of the Civil War and Reconstruction, and is not meant to reflect on any race of people today.” To the contrary, the film is a three-hour melodramatic presentation of intense racism disguised as history and displayed in groundbreaking cinematography. With another screen title, […]
Continue readingThe Convenience (or Inconvenience) of Skin Color, Yesterday and Today
For Americans whose skin color is any shade darker than pinkish, “inconvenience” is a euphemism verging on ridiculous understatement. The African slave trade laid the foundations for American racism and for Americans paying so much attention to skin color. The Africans’ dark skin became the foremost symbol of subservience. Later, skin color was quite inconvenient for both escaped slaves and freedmen, long before and long after the Mason-Dixon Line demarcated the regions of our country that […]
Continue readingIf Lincoln Had Lived Would African Americans Be Better Off Today?
On April 14, 1865, an assassin’s bullet entered Abraham Lincoln’s brain, according to the autopsy, “a little to the left of the median line.” With Lincoln’s death early the next day, our country’s political history veered sharply to the right. Would that rightward shift have been more to the center had Lincoln survived? Would African Americans have been spared another hundred years of oppression? Historians speculate endlessly on these questions. Professor Richard Striner, author of Father Abraham: Lincoln’s […]
Continue readingThe Great Migration: More Broken Promises
Wars bring economic and social change. For African Americans, the Civil War brought emancipation and the broken promise of “40 acres and a mule.” World Wars I and II brought about a vast migration of black southern sharecroppers to the industrial north and to a new set of broken promises. From 1915 until about 1940, five to six million African Americans, searching for freedom and economic security, left family, friends, and close-knit communities. Anonymity in large cities like Chicago, New York, […]
Continue readingSeparate & Not Equal | Black Citizens Do Not Receive Equal Legal Protection
On June 7 1892, Homer Plessy, a fair-skinned man, who was one-eighth black, boarded an East Louisiana “whites only” railroad car. He sat down, and then identified himself as Negro. Moments later, he was under arrest. The whole incident was a setup. The Citizens’ Committee of New Orleans had recruited him to challenge a Louisiana railroad segregation law, and it was the committee’s own private investigator who arrested Plessy. Plessy was found guilty of violating the Separate Car Act. He appealed all the way to […]
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