Race Riot in Lincoln’s Hometown
In August 1908, a two-day race riot erupted in Springfield, Illinois, Abraham Lincoln’s hometown and the launching site for Barack Obama’s 2008 run for the White House. After allegations that a black man had murdered a white man and that another black man had raped a white woman, whites sought revenge. When the sheriff slipped the two black prisoners out of town, the frustrated mob of ~1,000 turned its fury on the black community, torching […]
Continue readingSlavery in Manhattan
One evening in the fall of 1991, it was raining, and the traffic was heavy, so I turned on the radio and settled in for a slow ride home. When I heard NPR report that an excavation crew for a new Federal Building in lower Manhattan had unearthed several skeletons of African slaves, I wasn’t surprised. Every American colony had slaves. Of course New York had its share. But the numbers astounded me: Before the […]
Continue readingSankofa: Learn from The Past
“Sankofa,” a word in the Akan language of Ghana, means “reach back and get it” (san – to return; ko – to go; fa – to fetch, to seek and take) and is associated with the proverb, “It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten.” Its message, particularly important to African Americans and other peoples of the African Diaspora, is for us to go back and reclaim what is good from […]
Continue readingAm I A Descendant of President James Madison?
President James Madison did not have children with his wife, Dolley. This widely accepted fact has led scholars to believe that this great historical figure was either impotent, infertile, or both. The oral history of my family says that the scholars are wrong. Madison loved his fledgling country and embraced its ideals. He was gifted with prodigious intellect and, as one of the Founding Fathers, brought that love and those ideals together to help […]
Continue readingMassacre in Colfax/Black Lives Matter
Aiyana Jones was seven years old when a policeman shot and killed her in her Detroit home. Two mistrials released the offending officer from any responsibility for her death. In December 2014, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund named 76 unarmed men, women, and children killed by police throughout the U.S. Aiyana was the youngest. First on the list was Amadou Diallo, killed in New York City on February 4, 1999. Again, the courts cleared the officers of all charges.On April […]
Continue readingYouth Suicide In South Dakota | An Aftermath of Wounded Knee?
Some say that the recent epidemic of suicide among Oglala Lakota youths living on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota results from cyberbullying. In the first 110 days of 2013, 100 youths, including a 6-year-old, attempted suicide. By the end of the year, five adults and children had killed themselves. And from late December 2014 through February 2015, more than 100.young Lakota tried to take their own lives. Nine, between the ages of 12 […]
Continue readingMassacre at Wounded Knee
7 On December 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota, the U.S. 7th Calvary murdered some 350 Lakota men, women, and children. In the eyes of history, the “Wounded Knee Massacre” broke the hearts of the Native American population and put an end to the “Indian Wars.” In the preceding years, the U. S. government continued to seize Lakota lands, white settlers hunted the bison to near-extinction, and treaties promising to protect reservations from encroachment were ignored. Wovoka, a […]
Continue readingThe “Trail of Tears”
From the time the first white settlers landed in North America, there were conflicts between whites and Native Americans. In the southeastern region, five Indian tribes—the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chicasaw, Creek, and Seminole—hunted, fished, and raised families.on land perfect for the settlers to cultivate cotton. Gradually, these tribes adopted the farming practices of the white Americans and, in some cases, owned African-American slaves. These practices led to the […]
Continue readingLincoln and the Dakota Sioux
History holds President Abraham Lincoln in awe, but his decisions about whether or not to punish insurgents were not consistent, perhaps reflecting personal and national biases. After Minnesota became a state in 1861, the U.S. government forced the Dakota Indians to hand over the territory to white settlers, promising food and supplies as partial compensation. In the summer of 1862, the Dakota were starving, […]
Continue reading“The Indians never had any real title to the soil.”
In 1892, nine years before his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt defended the federal government’s treatment of Indians, saying: “This continent had to be won. We need not waste our time in dealing with any sentimentalist who believes that, on account of any abstract principle, it would have been right to leave this continent to the domain, the hunting ground of squalid savages. It had to be […]
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