My Life In Transition

My historical appraisal of racism in America

Though we in the Caribbean live on our individual islands and the United States is a long way from where we are. The United States impacts significantly on many aspects of our way of life, especially on our economy. There are more people from the Caribbean living and working in the United States than any other region of the world.

Thousands of people from the Caribbean visit the The United States every year. Our Tourism Industry depends heavily on visitors from the United States. It is not in our best interest to engage in an antagonistic social or ideological conflict with a country on which we are so dependent, but we cannot ignore what has been happening and when injustice is so blatant we MUST speak out against it.. .

Racial discrimination and injustice existed in the United States. long before “Black Lives Matter” became so polarizing nationally and internationally.

Though we know that this has been in existence for hundreds of years, it is extremely alarming that it is still happening in what has been described as our most technologically advanced and enlightening phase of the human evolution. Technology has made tremendous strides, today children can attend schools from their homes, there are virtual meetings and graduations but unfortunately some aspects of human intelligence have not kept pace with the technological advancements.

It is now impossible to continue resigning ourselves in pusillanimous acquiescence and acceptance to the seeming recrudescence and perpetuation of these glaring injustices, abuses and inhuman brutality being experienced by black people in the United States.

Basic intelligence should tell us that beyond the difference in the colour of our skins, biologically we are not really very different. We all feel pain and hunger, we reproduce ourselves in the form of our children, We all get old, get sick, and we all die.

The racial superiority which some narcissistic groups proclaim, is one of the most baneful and ignorant insult to human intelligence. Racial Superiority has no factual basis, it is not an intrinsic part of the human psyche, it is like putting putrid filth in clean water and declare it to be the best drinking water in the world.

Dealing with racial issues in America is a very complex matter because things are usually viewed differently by people of the races antagonistic towards each other. Very seldom if ever a consensus is reached on what exactly is the nature of the problem and what is the best way to resolve the problem

In the United States, there are five different classifications of Americans, Native Americans, White Americans, African Americans, Hispanic Americans and Asian Americas. The only country I know of where there are five different classifications of citizens. Hopefully one day there will be only Americans!!, there are racial issues between all of these different groups.

In this article I am focusing on the racial divide between whites and blacks.

Before we pass judgement on either the Black or White People in the United States and decide what the real issues are, let us journey back in time and honestly reflect on what really happened and why things are the way they are today.

Most black people in the United States are descendants of people who were brought to America from Africa and were made slaves against their will, for over 200 years black slaves and their posterity were subjected to the most inhuman treatment possible. They were not considered to be humans but property.

Harsh realities are sometimes very difficult to confront but I must chart the course of the American Black people to give clarity to the reason they are still so disrespected and persecuted in the country which their ancestors worked so hard to build.

This video explains the situation better than I ever could, please listen to it.

I have heard a White Supremacist say that “The Black People in America should be thankful for slavery, otherwise they would still be running wild in the jungles of Africa” those are extremist views, but the view that Black people are inferior beings has its roots deep into the history of the American society and one does not have to look very far to verify the veracity of that statement.

There are many who may find what I say to be offensive but the real issue to address is, am I telling the truth.

Let us see if I am telling the truth, like they say on Fox News “We report you decide“

The American Declaration of Independence was written in 1776, which stated that “All men were created equal” how could that be applicable to Black People when it took a civil war and 89 years for slavery to end.

When White Supremacist groups today say “America was created by White People for White People” that is nothing new, history reveals that concept or belief has been there since European colonizers forcefully took the land of the Native People and established what is now known as the “United States of America”

What they are failing to acknowledge is that most of the wealth of what they call “White America” was accumulated through the violent acquisition of lands, slavery and the plunder of the natural resources such as Gold and oil, rightfully belonging to the the people whom they met on the continent.

Actor John Wayne said this when discussing the film “Midnight Cowboy” he did not feel that it was wrong for white Americans to take Native American land, as “There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”

There is never any mention or acknowledgement of the role the forceful acquisition of Indian Lands with its vast natural resources such as gold and oil, the hundreds of years of the enslavement of Black People played in the creation and development of America and its vast wealth. Black People in America have endured 400 years of racial abuse, systematic oppression, discrimination and exploitation, the Indians even more, perpetuated by a succession of racist presidents and politicians.

White racism cloaked in the impenetrable ignorance of history and basic facts, is seen manifested in a white person confronting a Native American and telling him/her to get out and go back to there they came from, it is time for that to end.

Officially recognized Slavery in America lasted for 246 years, after what was miss-called emancipation in 1865, there was an orchestrated plan to keep the freed slaves and their posterity in submission and “as close as possible to the condition of slavery”.

Abraham Lincoln has been credited for his role in the Abolition of Slavery but though Lincoln may have wanted to see an end of slavery, he was not in favour of racial equality between blacks and whites, in an address on September 18, 1858, he made his position clear, below are quotations form from that address:

“I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and Black races,”

“While they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race”

“I have never seen, to my knowledge, a man, woman or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between Negroes and white men“

In the post Lincoln Era, after the so called abolition of slavery and blacks were supposedly free, they were deprived of education, proper housing, economic opportunities and the right to vote. The Jim Crow Laws and segregation were introduced solely to control and marginalize the lives of Black People. It took 150 years for some black people in the South to gain the right to vote, later down in the narrative you will see how and why.

Lynchings

According to the Tuskegee Institute, 3,466 black people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the United States.

A black man could be murdered or lynched with no more evidence than a white person accusing him of committing a crime, even as ridiculous as “flirting with at a white woman”

While visiting family in Money, Mississippi, 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African American from Chicago, was brutally murdered for allegedly flirting with a white woman four days earlier.

His assailants—the white woman’s husband and her brother—made Emmett carry a 75-pound cotton-gin fan to the bank of the Tallahatchie River and ordered him to take off his clothes. The two men then beat him nearly to death, gouged out his eye, shot him in the head and then threw his body, tied to the cotton-gin fan with barbed wire, into the river.

The Devil’s Punch Bowl Concentration Camps, Natchez Mississippi.

 “These camps were located in Natchez, Mississippi and were used to corral freed slaves during and after the American Civil War. As slaves were being emancipated from the plantations, their route to freedom usually took them in the vicinity of the Union army forces. Unhappy with the slaves being freed, the army began recapturing the slaves and forced the men back into hard labor camps. The most notorious of the several concentration camps that were established was located in Natchez, Mississippi”.

20,000 Freed Slaves Died After Being Forced Into Post Slavery Concentration Camp

The fallacious concept of White Supremacy did not suddenly emerge in the twentieth century it has always been there and the Christian Religion was used to support the socially pernicious concept. It is not a fantasy or a fairy tale that the bible was used to justify the enslavement of Black People and segregation..

Romans 6:16

New International Version

“Don’t you know that when you offer yourselves to someone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one you obey—whether you are slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness”?

Peter 2:18-20

English Standard Version

1⁸ Servants, be subject to your masters with all respect, not only to the good and gentle but also to the unjust. ¹⁹ For this is a gracious thing, when, mindful of God, one endures sorrows while suffering unjustly. ²⁰ For what credit is it if, when you sin and are beaten for it, you endure? But if when you do good and suffer for it you endure, this is a gracious thing in the sight of God.

Up until 1959, long after slavery legislatively ended, many of the Southern White Churches did not allow membership to Black People. In 1957, John Buchanan, a prominent pastor designated “Man of the Year” in Birmingham Alabama, defended racial division and told the Birmingham News, “The good Lord set up the customs and practices of segregation.” Just as they opposed integrated schools, many white people feared that recognizing African Americans as equals in the intimate context of church would usher in total social equality, which they found unacceptable..

You will often hear people says that “Children are a reflection of their parents” we could also say that the people of a country are sometimes a reflection of their leaders..

it is not a fantasy or a fairy tale that the first time two black students were accepted in the University of Alabama was in 1963 when Alabama was under the Governorship of then Segregationist George Wallace, the National Guard had to be sent in to stop them from being thrown out.

It is not a fantasy or a fairy tale that the Supreme Court of the United States once ruled that Black People were not Citizens of the United States and could not bring a law suit against a white person.

The image below of Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo and his words is not a fantasy it is a fact and there were and are many more like Bilbo.

Quotes From The Atlantic

“As president, Wilson oversaw unprecedented segregation in federal offices. It’s a shameful side to his legacy that came to a head one fall afternoon in 1914 when he threw the civil-rights leader William Monroe Trotter out of the Oval Office.

Trotter led a delegation of blacks to meet with the president on November 12, 1914 to discuss the surge of segregation in the country.

Eventually, Wilson agreed to meet a second time with Trotter, and on November 12 the persistent editor and a contingent of Trotterites entered the Oval Office for their long-sought, long-awaited follow-up meeting. Trotter came prepared with a statement and launched the meeting by reading it.

The meeting quickly turned sour. The president told Trotter what he previously admitted in private—that he viewed segregation in his federal agencies as a benefit to blacks. Wilson said that his cabinet officers “were seeking, not to put the Negro employees at a disadvantage but … to make arrangements which would prevent any kind of friction between the white employees and the Negro employees.”

Trotter found the claim astonishing, and immediately disagreed, calling Jim Crow in federal offices humiliating and degrading to black workers. But Wilson dug in. “My question would be this: If you think that you gentlemen, as an organization, and all other Negro citizens of this country, that you are being humiliated, you will believe it. If you take it as a humiliation, which it is not intended as, and sow the seed of that impression all over the country, why the consequence will be very serious,” he said.

Trotter was incredulous that the president didn’t seem to understand that separating workers  based on race “must be a humiliation. It creates in the minds of others that there is something the matter with us—that we are not their equals, that we are not their brothers, that we are so different that we cannot work at a desk beside them, that we cannot eat at a table beside them, that we cannot go into the dressing room where they go, that we cannot use a locker beside them.”

There was no letup. In his comments, Trotter had accused the president of lying by saying that race prejudice was the sole motivation for Jim Crow and that to assert otherwise, to claim his administration sought to protect blacks from “friction,” was ridiculous. “We are sorely disappointed that you take the position that the separation itself is not wrong, is not injurious, is not rightly offensive to you,” Trotter said.

Wilson interrupted Trotter: “Your tone, sir, offends me.” To the entire delegation, he said, “I want to say that if this association comes again, it must have another spokesman,” declaring no one had ever come into his office and insulted him as Trotter had. “You have spoiled the whole cause for which you came,” he told The Guardian editor dismissively.

But Trotter would not be dismissed; he was not one to find being surrounded by white people, and the trappings of power either alien or intimidating. He had been the only black in his class at Hyde Park High School outside Boston (where, regardless, he had been elected class president) and, at Harvard, outperformed most white classmates, some of whom had since become governors, congressmen, rich, and famous. Instead, he tried to steer the meeting back on track. “I am pleading for simple justice,” he said.

“If my tone has seemed so contentious, why my tone has been misunderstood.” He said they needed to work this out, given that he and other African American leaders had supported Wilson’s presidential run at the  polls.

But Wilson was angry, stating that bringing up politics and citing black voting power was a form of blackmail. The meeting, which had lasted nearly an hour, was abruptly over. The delegation was shown the door—essentially thrown out. When the incensed Trotter ran into reporters milling around Tumulty’s office, he began letting off steam. “What the President told us was entirely disappointing.”

The story about the dustup between the president and the Guardian editor went viral. The New York Times’s front-page story was headlined, “President Resents Negro’s Criticism” while the front-page headline in the New York Press read: “Wilson Rebukes Negro Who ‘Talks Up’ to Him.” But the larger point was that his tough-talking landed Trotter back on front pages everywhere.

Wilson realized almost instantly his error—unfortunately, not the error of his racism, but the error in public relations. He had “played the fool,’’ he told a cabinet member afterwards, by becoming unnerved in the face of what he considered Trotter’s impertinence. “When the Negro delegate (Trotter) threatened me, I was a damn fool enough to lose my temper and point him to the door. What I ought to have done would have been to listened, restrained my resentment, and, when they had finished, to have said to them that, of course, their petition receive consideration. They would then have withdrawn quietly and no more would have been heard about the matter.’’ 

More on Woodrow Wilson

In this narrative it is imperative that I unequivocally state that not all White People in America are racists or White Supremacists, with the exception of my friends and family members from the Caribbean who migrated to America most of my genuine friends in America are white people whom I unreservedly love and respect.

What I say here may be offensive to some Black people but in their quest for justice and respect Black people must also take responsibility for their own actions. In many cases the actions of some Black People confirm the stereotypical perception which some White People have of them. We cannot condemn the evil deeds of White People and be silent about the evil deeds of Black People.

I am convinced that no human being is totally good or bad, people who do bad things also have the capacity to do good. When we do a historical analysis of the characters, ideologies and racial dispositions of the political protagonists of the United States, presidents and other leaders, those men who were the driving forces behind the machinery of social changes, economic prosperity, academic advancement and the housing revolution, we find many of them to be of a very complex and duplicitous nature.

Political expediences mainly determined what decisions they made. Sometimes, when they did things which benefited black people it was done because it was politically expedient to do so. 18 of the presidents of the United States were slave owners and were known to be racists in their private lives.

According to the Los Angeles Times:

“Throughout American history, presidents have uttered comments, issued decisions and made public and private moves that critics said were racist, either at the time or in later generations.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that “black slaves smelled and couldn’t produce art or poetry” Jefferson was credited as being the author of the Declaration of Independence which said, “All men were created equal”. Woodrow Wilson screened the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House without apology. Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used racist epithets in secretly recorded conversations with aides.

Many of the early presidents owned black slaves. They also held power when African Americans, Native Americans and Latinos did not have the right to vote or serve on juries and could be refused service in public accommodations”

Alabama Governor George Wallace

Governor George Wallace of Alabama pictured in the above photo, in his early political career, declared himself a champion of the cause of the underdog, in Alabama the underdog was mainly black people who were at the bottom rung of the economic ladder. This caused him to loose in his first attempt to become governor of Alabama a very racist state. He declared that he was “out niggered and he would never be out niggered again” for his next attempt to become governor of Alabama he campaigned for segregation, listen to his victory speech.

I believe with the right motivation people can change, in the latter years of his life George Wallace acknowledged his mistakes and he asked for forgiveness form the people he wronged and vilified with his racist rhetoric and actions.

Quoting form the Portland Observer

“From the beginning the American presidency has been stained by racial prejudice, often a reflection of broader sentiment among white citizens. Such views have persisted well into modern times,” so wrote Sarah Mervosh and Niraj Chokshi in the New York Times on Aug. 1. What triggered the article was a newly released audio recording which revealed that, in 1971, then Gov. Ronald Reagan of California called African people monkeys in a telephone conversation with President Richard Nixon.

To laughter from Nixon, Reagan also stated that Africans are still uncomfortable wearing shoes” History records Reagan as one of the greatest presidents of the United States.

Ronald Reagan appointed the first woman to the Supreme Court. He signed legislation for a national holiday honoring Martin Luther King.

President Harry Truman April 12, 1945 – January 20, 1953

Before he was elected as President of the United States in 1948, Harry Truman was known as a racist. On July 26, 1948, Harry Truman now President of the United States did the most shocking thing even to his own party he issued Executive Order 9981 ordering the desegregation of the armed forces. That action to many was the beginning of the Civil Rights movement.

These are some statement supposedly made by Truman

In 1911, the year he turned 27, Truman wrote to his future wife, Bess: “I think one man is just as good as another so long as he’s honest and decent and not a nigger or a Chinaman. Uncle Will says that the Lord made a white man from dust, a nigger from mud, then He threw up what was left and it came down a Chinaman.”

“(Uncle Will) does hate Chinese and Japs,” Truman continued. “So do I. It is race prejudice, I guess. But I am strongly of the opinion Negroes ought to be in Africa, yellow men in Asia and white men in Europe and America.”

More than 25 years later, Truman, then a U.S. senator from Missouri, wrote a letter to his daughter describing waiters at The White House as “an army of coons.” In a letter to his wife in 1939 he referred to “nigger picnic day.”

Many young Americans have no knowledge of the racist history of their country because the system wants to keep it that way.

Ask most young Americans about the “The Dred Scott Law, Black Wall Street, The Jim Crow trumped up laws, the leasing of black prisoners to institutions which treated them even worse than during slavery, the brutal period known as Slavery by another name“, they most likely will not know anything about those things.

I am sure if you did a survey today, asking Americans between the the ages of 16 and 55 years, very few would have heard of the term DRAPETOMANIA.

How many people in America today really understand or care to understand, why the National Anthem is offensive to some of the people called African Americans.

One may argue that those things happened a long time ago and we should not dwell on them. Yes they happened a long time ago but some things which happened then, are still happening now in a more surreptitious manner, like the disparity in the economic and academic prosperity between the four main groups of people living in the America.

I am in no way suggesting that the way forward is to reverse the cycle of evil, I say we end it but we cannot effectively end something we do not understand.

It is difficult to know exactly where we want to go if we do not know where we are coming from. Knowledge of our historical journey can be a chart indicating to us why we are at the cross roads of the present,

.Without knowing with clarity why we are where we are today, it is difficult to effectively chart the road to a future where justice and not laws determine how we treat each other.

Congress and the Senate can pass all the relevant laws they believe will end the cycle of racism and bring about social justice, but social laws do not change people’s hearts and minds, history has proven that fact, that is why we are still seeing things like this.

Barack Obama

When Barack Obama was elected president of the United States in 2009, membership of the White Supremacist and Neo Nazi Groups rose significantly. This had nothing to do with his ability to lead or his intelligence, it all had to do with his race. For the first time in the history of White controlled America, a black man was holding the highest office in the land, that was not an easy challenge for people with racist ideologies to accept.

“In the days before the 2008 election, a life-size likeness of Obama was found hanging from a tree at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. In the town of Wolfeboro, N.H., an elected member of the police commission was forced to resign in 2014, after he acknowledged and refused to apologize for publicly referring to Obama as a “nigger” while in a local restaurant”.

Robert Copeland was head of the town’s three-member police commission when a relatively new resident of Wolfeboro heard him use the slur to describe the president. When she learned who Copeland was, she complained to town officials, who confronted the 82-year-old Copeland. He expanded on his feelings about Obama: “I believe I did use the ‘N’ word in reference to the current occupant of the Whitehouse,” Copeland wrote in an email to the other police commissioners. “For this, I do not apologize — he meets and exceeds my criteria for such.”

Former president Jimmy Carter told “NBC Nightly News” in 2009: “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man.”

The fact that Obama was twice elected as president of the United States is an amazing testimony of the racial changes which have taken place in America and that should not be ignored. Without the support of White people Obama’s Presidential bid would have been a total failure.

Lets look at some of the reactions to Obama’s presidency

We need to be sagacious and well informed on how we judge racism in America and the rest of the world , we should be mindful that not all white Americans are racist, we are seeing the vast numbers of white Americans and other white people across the globe supporting the “Black Lives Matter” movement. We need to work in tandem with the global desire for change, Black people on their own will not achieve the objective they seek because they will never be in isolation from people of other races. For Black Lives Matter to achieve its objectives it needs the support of all races because Black People in America are an intrinsic part of a society with a multiplicity of races and cultures.

When enough people, of all races categorically reject the fallacy of white or any kind of racial supremacy and leave no comfort zone for the protagonists of this baneful ideology to crawl into, they will abandon their misguided mission and join the human family which is made up of all humans.

We have taken a look at the world wide support for “Black Lives Matter”, let us re-focus on America

There will only be real change when people’s actions are not determined by a law which will punish them if they violate that law but when they are guided by their conscience which has encompassed the reality that there is only one race, the human race.

Not until these words are genuinely embedded and indelibly etched in the hearts and minds of all humans will there be real change.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”. 

Tucker Carlson of Fox News said that White Supremacy is not a problem in America it is a hoax. History tells us otherwise, let us listen to Carlson in his own words and then follow the page which will illustrate how White Supremacy has dominated the lives of “people of color” in the United States.:

Does this look like a hoax?

Monuments which Symbolize Slavery and Racism

A memorial to George Preston Marshall before it was removed from the grounds of Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium on June 19.2020.

If you think the football team in the nation’s capital has a controversial name? You should learn about its founder. In 1961, the Washington Redskins were the only of 14 NFL squads that hadn’t integrated.

Interior Secretary Stewart Udall confronted Marshall, explaining then-DC Stadium was on national park land and the team might not keep its lease if Marshall didn’t sign a black player.

The powerful Marshall replied that he wanted to debate the issue with President John F. Kennedy.

Marshall considered his “the team of the South” — the team song at the time included the line, “Fight for old Dixie” — and Marshall had said, “We’ll start signing Negroes when the Harlem Globetrotters start signing whites.”Status: A monument honoring Marshall stood outside what is now Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium until it was removed in June 2020.

Senator Robert Byrd

Sen. Robert Byrd, right, talks with President Jimmy Carter in June 1977.

Senator Byrd was one of the longest serving senators is the US Senate, but before he kicked off his political career in the West Virginia Legislature, he wrote a letter to Sen. Ted Bilbo, a Mississippi segregationist, decrying President Harry Truman’s efforts to integrate the military. He’d rather see his country crumble, he wrote, than fight “with a negro by my side.””Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds,” he wrote. Perhaps this isn’t surprising from a one time exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. Even after he supposedly renounced the Klan, he filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and was the only senator who voted against the confirmations of the country’s two black Supreme Court justices, Thurgood Marshall and Clarence Thomas. In his later years, he referred to same-sex marriage as “aberrant behavior” and told an interviewer in 2001, “There are white niggers. I’ve seen a lot of white niggers in my time.”

Dozens of buildings, several roads and a bridge in West Virginia bear his name. Source: The Washington Post, CNN

John C Calhoun

The courtyard of Yale’s Calhoun College in 2015, two years before the name was changed.

Among his many positions in the federal government, Calhoun served as John Quincy Adams’ and Andrew Jackson’s vice president, and throughout his time in politics, he described black people as inferior and went beyond his Southern cohorts who described slavery as “a necessary evil.“”I hold it to be a good, as it has thus far proved itself to be to both (races), and will continue to prove so if not disturbed by the fell spirit of abolition.

I appeal to facts. Never before has the black race of Central Africa, from the dawn of history to the present day, attained a condition so civilized and so improved, not only physically, but morally and intellectually,” he wrote as a slave-owning senator in 1837. “I hold that in the present state of civilization, where two races of different origin, and distinguished by color, and other physical differences, as well as intellectual, are brought together, the relation now existing in the slaveholding States between the two, is, instead of an evil, a good — a positive good.” Status:

Clemson University removed Calhoun’s name from its honors college in June, and Yale University in 2017 renamed its Calhoun College for mathematician Rear Adm. Grace Murray Hopper. A monument of Calhoun atop a pillar stands in downtown Charleston, South Carolina.

Source: Clemson University

Stone Mountain Georgia

At the memorial service for George Floyd, the Rev. Al Sharpton noted that the recent demonstrations against abusive policing were caused not just by Floyd’s death after a white officer kneeled on his throat. Instead, it was the last straw after centuries of oppression. Mr. Sharpton noted, “Because ever since 401 years ago, the reason we could never be who we wanted and dreamed of being is you kept your knee on our neck.”

Robert E Lee

Click the links below to listen to a descendant of Robert E Lee

https://www.yahoo.com/news/video/descendant-robert-e-lee-black-210621896.html

George Shepherd One weapon to suppress African Americans:

Monuments to white supremacists. Soon after the Civil War, Southern whites began reasserting their dominance. During the following 80 years of Jim Crow segregation, their methods included glorifying confederate leaders. Most of the large monuments began to appear in the early 20th Century, long after the war ended in 1865. The goal was not to preserve “Southern heritage,” as the monuments’ defenders now claim. Instead, the goal was to install white-supremacist icons that would intimidate African Americans and enforce whites’ supremacy.

William Fitzhugh Brundage

Historian W. Fitzhugh Brundage, for example, has written that the monuments “were sometimes explicitly linked to the cause of white supremacy by the notables who spoke at their dedication” and that white industrialist Julian Carr “unambiguously urged his audience to devote themselves to the maintenance of white supremacy with the same vigor that their Confederate ancestors had defended slavery.The history of the giant carvings on Stone Mountain, near Atlanta, is instructive. Planning of the carvings began only in 1914. Substantial funding for the project came from the KKK, which met on the mountain’s top to burn crosses and the project’s first directors and promoters were Klan members. The original plan was to depict General Robert E. Lee leading Confederate soldiers and Klan members up the mountain. Many other Confederate monuments were erected during this period, helping consolidate Jim Crow’s racist hierarchy.

With these racist markers in place, there can be no peace A second wave of white-supremacist monuments appeared in the late 1950s. After the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in public schools in 1954, Southern states vowed a program of “Massive Resistance.” Part of the resistance was installing more white-supremacist icons. This was when the State of Georgia purchased Stone Mountain; finished the huge carvings — bigger than the presidents on Mount Rushmore — of two Confederate military leaders, Stonewall Jackson and Lee, and the political leader, Jefferson Davis; and added the Confederate battle flag to Georgia’s state flag. Like so many Confederate monuments, the carvings on Stone Mountain were not an innocent artifact of Civil War history. Instead, they were a middle finger both to African Americans and to the federal government that was trying to end discrimination. Stone Mountain was such an evil icon that Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. invoked it in his “I have a dream” speech.

Jefferson Davis

“Among us, white men have an equality resulting from a presence of a lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race. The mechanic who comes among us, employing the less intellectual labor of the African, takes the position which only a master-workman occupies where all the mechanics are white, and therefore it is that our mechanics hold their position of absolute equality among us”. Jefferson Davis

Statues and monuments have always carried great symbolic weight. When UK protesters demonstrating against Floyd’s killing dumped a statue of a 17th-century slave trader in the sea on Sunday, they were following the examples of activists who pulled down statues of Joseph Stalin in Russia; Saddam Hussein in Iraq and British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes in South Africa and the UK, among others.In the US, the Stone Mountain carvings continue to be shrines to white supremacy.

To walk up the mountain, an African American must bear the indignity of passing the Confederate stone giants, driving along Robert E. Lee Blvd. past Stonewall Jackson Drive, parking next to Confederate Hall, and marching past four different Confederate flags, including the stars-and-bars battle flag, at this state park. Part of the cost of admission to Stone Mountain’s laser show is prostrating yourself on a picnic blanket at the feet of the Confederate racists.

After the Civil War, War, Robert E Lee told a congressional committee that blacks were “not disposed to work” and did not possess the intellectual capacity to vote and participate in politics.^[84] Lee also said to the committee that he hoped that Virginia could “get rid of them,” referring to blacks.^[84] While not politically active, Lee defended Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson‘s approach to Reconstruction, which according to Foner, “abandoned the former slaves to the mercy of governments controlled by their former owners.”^[85] According to Foner, “A word from Lee might have encouraged white Southerners to accord blacks equal rights and inhibited the violence against the freed people that swept the region during Reconstruction, but he chose to remain silent.”^[84] Lee was also urged to condemn the white-supremacy ^[86] organization Ku Klux Klan, but opted to remain silent.^[82

Lee argued that “slavery was bad for white people but good for black people,^[66] claiming that he found slavery bothersome and time-consuming as an everyday institution to run. In an 1856 letter to his wife, he maintained that slavery was a great evil, but primarily due to adverse impact that it had on white people”:^[67]

A country that is serious about moving beyond its evil history would behave differently. In Germany, many government buildings from the 1930-40s have smudges on their fronts. These are the places where the swastikas, all of them, have been removed. German towns no longer contain Hitler Street or Goring Plaza. All of the statues of Hitler and his henchmen have been destroyed. Germans have rejected arguments that Nazi symbols, street names, and statues should be preserved for purposes of German history and heritage.

The same is true even of the Berghof, Hitler’s mansion in the Bavarian Alps in Germany, where he spent much of World War II, and where he met many historical figures. After the war, the building was destroyed to avoid it becoming a Nazi shrine. The same with the Fuhrer Bunker in Berlin, where Hitler died. The site is now a parking lot.

German government policy is that the country’s only monuments marking the Nazi era are not to the perpetrators, but to the victims. As one walks through German cities, one encounters “Stolpersteine”: markers the size of small paving stones that memorialize the stories of Holocaust victims who lived there. This is how it should be: memorials should exist for evil’s victims, not for evil’s perpetrators. A country cannot begin to cleanse itself of evil while maintaining shrines to those who committed it. As in Germany, all Confederate monuments should be removed. Ideally, they should be removed by state and local governments, not demonstrators; if governments remove them, rather than protestors, society’s rejection of the monuments and the evil that they represent is clearer. The removals would follow the recent lead of cities such as Baltimore,New Orleans, Philadelphia, Birmingham, Ala. and Richmond.

While America protects the right of neo-Nazis, white supremacists, the Ku Klux Klan, and other hate groups to hold public rallies and express their views openly, Germany has strict laws banning Nazi symbols and what’s called Volksverhetzung — incitement of the people, or hate speech. Like more than a dozen European countries, Germany also has a law criminalizing Holocaust denial.

And while Confederate statues can be found in many American cities south of the Mason-Dixon Line, there are no statues of Adolf Hitler or Joseph Goebbels gracing public squares in Berlin, let alone Nazi flags or other Nazi art. Public Nazi imagery was long ago destroyed, and swastikas were long since knocked off the walls of Nazi-era buildings. The only Nazi imagery you’ll find is in exhibits devoted to understanding the horror of the period.

Removing or destroying monuments which symbolizes racism without acknowledging the racist ideology they stand for, is like someone wearing a mask to hide his or her true identity.

I am not advocating the removal of retention of monuments, that is for the American people to decide.

In his interview with Playboy, Actor John Wayne, who died in 1979, stated that he did not “feel guilty about the fact that five or 10 generations ago, these people were slaves” in reference to Black people. Furthermore, Wayne voiced his support of white supremacy.

“I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to a point of responsibility,” Wayne had said. “I don’t believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.”

Oregon is a state that I love very much, the Columbia River Gorge is one of the most beautiful places in America but I never feel comfortable there.

Editor’s note: This story contains racist epithets that some readers may find triggering. Watering down the toxicity of these words in the context of this story, we felt, would dilute the racist reality still present in Oregon’s geographic features.

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Racist monuments have been toppling at the speed of reckoning throughout the country in the wake of George Floyd’s execution by police. Whether it be the statue of Thomas Jefferson being unceremoniously dismounted from the front entrance of the North Portland school that bares his name or Mississippi lawmakers voting to remove the Confederate battle emblem from their state’s flag this week, the layout of America is beginning to look different. However, in Oregon, some of the state’s legacy is more insidiously stitched into the fabric of its colonial roots. 

There are more than a dozen geographic features in the state featuring the word “Negro” in their name, including Negro Ridge and Negro Hallow just southeast of The Dalles in Sherman County, Negro Gulch and Negro Knob mountain peak in Grant County, and Negro Creek in Douglas County. The use of the outdated term for Black Americans was used to replace the epithet “nigger” by the federal U.S. Board of Geographic Names in the 1960s across the country. 

Locally, the president of that organization’s subsidiary, Bruce Fisher of the Oregon Geographic Names Board, describes his faction’s role as being more passive. 

“We typically have to wait for someone to come with a proposal. We’re not proactive,” he said, “we’re reactive.”

Once a proposal is submitted, the 25-person board of volunteers goes to work on researching the history of the place, its surrounding area and how it came to be, to inform a vote on whether to move it up to the chain of command for a final decision. 

One of the proposals they’ll consider in October is to change the name of Negro Ben Mountain in Jackson County. The mountain appears to derive its name from a local blacksmith who owned a shop at the base of the mountain in the late 1800s, a Black man by the name of Ben. While Census records show a man by the name of Ben Johnson and his wife, both listed as “mulatto,” living in the area, historians cannot say with certainty that they are in fact the same people, meaning the mountain’s namesake likely has been lost forever. 

As part of the research for this proposal, the Jackson County commissioners were contacted and responded that they have “no opinion on the matter.”#

When Oregon became a part of the Union in 1844 it banned slavery but it a had a racial exclusionary clause, it banned black people from living in Oregon.

This Racial Exclusionary Clause Preventing Black People From Living In Oregon lasted from 1844 – 2001 one hundred and fifty seven years.

I love to hear Walidah Imarisha talk about Oregon, please listen to her

Please click on the link below to watch a documentary detailing racism in Oregon.

A glimpse into the racist past of Oregon

This documentary chronicles the little known history of racism in Oregon and the moving story of people, both black and white, who worked for civil rights. There are moments of highly disturbing racism in a state not known for diversity. But there are also moments of inspiration and courage as people take a stand to bring about important change.

Portland Oregon The White City

We cannot reverse or change the past but we can create the future we want for our children and our posterity. We can chose not to leave them a legacy of hatred and racism. Being a White Supremacist is a choice not a right or even a sensible choice because it automatically creates animosity between your self and other groups of people whom you claim you are superior to.

White Supremacy has no factual premise to stand on, there is no biological, psychological or sociological evidence to support it. White Supremacy is a fantasy created in minds in which intelligence and reason are either exceptionally quiescent or moribund

Politician with ties or alleged ties to the Ku Klux Klan

Robert Byrd

Main article: Robert Byrd § RaceSenator Robert Byrd was a Kleagle, a Klan recruiter, in his 20s and 30s.

Robert C. Byrd, was a recruiter for the Klan while in his 20s and 30s, rising to the title of Kleagle and Exalted Cyclops of his local chapter. After leaving the group, Byrd spoke in favor of the Klan during his early political career. Though he later said he officially left the organization in 1943, Byrd wrote a letter in 1946 to the group’s Imperial Wizard stating “The Klan is needed today as never before, and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia.” Byrd attempted to explain or defend his former membership in the Klan in his 1958 U.S. Senate campaign when he was 41 years old.

^[1] Byrd, a Democrat, eventually became his party leader in the Senate. Byrd later said joining the Klan was his “greatest mistake,”^[2] and after his death, the NAACP released a statement praising Byrd, acknowledging his former affiliation with the Klan and saying that he “became a champion for civil rights and liberties” and “came to consistently support the NAACP civil rights agenda”.^[3] In a 2001 interview, Byrd used the term “white niggers” twice during a national television broadcast. The full quote ran as follows: “My old mom told me, ‘Robert, you can’t go to heaven if you hate anybody.’ We practice that. There are white niggers. I’ve seen a lot of white niggers in my time.

I’m going to use that word. We just need to work together to make our country a better country, and I’d just as soon quit talking about it so much.” Byrd later apologized for the phrase and admitted that it “has no place in today’s society,” and did not clarify the intended meaning of the term in his context.^[4][5]

Hugo Black

Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black

In 1921, Hugo Black successfully defended E. R. Stephenson in his trial for the murder of a Catholic priest, Fr. James E. Coyle. E.R. Stephenson’s daughter had converted to Catholicism and married a man of Puerto Rican descent, and Coyle had conducted the wedding. Hugo Black got Stephenson acquitted in part by arguing to the jury that Puerto Ricans should be considered black under the South’s one drop rule.

Black, a Democrat, joined the Ku Klux Klan shortly afterwards, in order to gain votes from the anti-Catholic element in Alabama. He built his winning Senate campaign around multiple appearances at KKK meetings across Alabama. Late in life Black told an interviewer:

At that time, I was joining every organization in sight! … In my part of Alabama, the Klan was not engaged in unlawful activities … The general feeling in the community was that if responsible citizens didn’t join the Klan it would soon become dominated by the less responsible members.^[

News of his membership was a secret until shortly after he was confirmed as an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Black later said that joining the Klan was a mistake, but he went on to say, “I would have joined any group if it helped get me votes.”^[7][8]

As the Supreme Court Justice, Black became extremely influential in rulings about the separation of church and state.^[9]. Some have argued that his views on the separation of church and state were influenced by the Klan’s anti-Catholicism.^[10][11]

Despite his former Klan membership however, Black joined the Supreme Court’s unanimous decisions in Shelley v. Kraemer (1948), which outlawed judicial enforcement of racially restrictive covenants, and Brown v Board of Education, which outlawed school segregation. Justice William Douglas would write years later that at least 3 (and possibly as many as 5) Supreme Court justices were originally planning to rule school segregation constitutional, but Black had actually been one of the 4 justices who were planning to strike down school segregation from the beginning of the Brown case.^[12]

Theodore G. Bilbo

Theodore G. Bilbo, Governor of Mississippi

Theodore G. Bilbo (October 13, 1877 – August 21, 1947), a Democrat, the Governor of Mississippi and U.S. Senator for Mississippi, stated he was a member of the KKK .^[13]

John Brown Gordo

John Brown Gordon (February 6, 1832 – January 9, 1904), a Democrat and the U.S. Senator for Georgia, was a founder of the KKK in his home state of Georgia.^[14]

Joseph E. Brown

Joseph E. Brown (April 15, 1821 – November 30, 1894), a Democrat and the U.S. Senator for Georgia, was a key supporter of the KKK in his home state.^[14]

Elmer David Davies

Elmer David Davies (January 12, 1899 – January 7, 1957), a Democrat and a Federal Judge of the United States District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee, was a member of the KKK whilst at university.^[15]

Edward L. Jackson

Edward L. Jackson (December 27, 1873 – November 18, 1954), became Governor of Indiana as a Republican in 1925 and his administration came under fire for granting undue favor to the Klan’s agenda and associates. Jackson was further damaged by the arrest and trial of Grand Dragon D. C. Stephenson for the rape and murder of Madge Oberholtzer. When it was revealed that Jackson had attempted to bribe former Gov. Warren T. McCray with $10,000 to appoint a Klansman to a local office, Jackson was taken to court. His case ended with a hung jury, and Jackson ended his political career in disgrace.^[16]

Clarence Morley

Clarence Morley (February 9, 1869 – November 15, 1948), a Republican and the Governor of Colorado. He was a KKK member and a strong supporter of Prohibition. He tried to ban the Catholic Church from using sacramental wine and attempted to have the University of Colorado fire all Jewish and Catholic professors.^{[17][18][19][20]}

Bibb Graves

Bibb Graves (April 1, 1873 – March 14, 1942), a Democrat who was the Governor of Alabama. He lost his first campaign for governor in 1922, but four years later, with the secret endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan, he was elected to his first term as governor. Graves was almost certainly the Exalted Cyclops (chapter president) of the Montgomery chapter of the Klan. Graves, like Hugo Black, used the strength of the Klan to further his electoral prospects.^[21]

Clifford Walker

Clifford Walker (July 4, 1877 – November 9, 1954), a Democrat and the Governor of Georgia, was revealed to be a Klan member by the press in 1924.^[22]

George Gordon

George Gordon (October 5, 1836 – August 9, 1911), a Democrat and Congressman for Tennessee’s 10th congressional district, became one of the Klan’s first members. In 1867, Gordon became the Klan’s first Grand Dragon for the Realm of Tennessee, and wrote its Precept, a book describing its organization, purpose, and principles.

John Tyler Morgan

John Tyler Morgan (June 20, 1824 – June 11, 1907), a Democrat and the U.S. Senator for Alabama, was the Grand Dragon of the KKK in Alabama.

Edmund Pettus

Edmund Pettus (July 6, 1821 – July 27, 1907), a Democrat and the U.S. Senator for Alabama, was also a Grand Dragon of the KKK in Alabama.^[

John W. Morton

John Morton, a Democrat, was the Tennessee Secretary of State and was the founder of the Nashville chapter of the KKK^[26]

William L. Saunders

William L. Saunders, a Democrat, was the North Carolina Secretary of State and was the founder of the North Carolina chapter.^[27]

John Clinton Porter

John Clinton Porter, a Democrat, was a member of the Klan in the early 1920s and served as mayor of Los Angeles.^[28]

Benjamin F. Stapleton

Benjamin F. Stapleton, a Democrat, was mayor of Denver in the 1920s–1940s. He was a Klan member in the early 1920s and appointed fellow Klansmen to positions in municipal government. Ultimately, Stapleton broke from the Klan and removed several Klansmen from office.^[29]

David Duke

David Duke (born July 1, 1950), a politician who ran in both Democrat and Republican presidential primaries, was openly involved in the leadership of the Ku Klux Klan.^[30] He was founder and Grand Wizard of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in the mid-1970s; he re-titled his position as “National Director” and said that the KKK needed to “get out of the cow pasture and into hotel meeting rooms”. He left the organization in 1980. He ran for president in the 1988 Democratic presidential primaries. In 1989 Duke switched political parties from Democrat to Republican.^[31] In 1989, he became a member of the Louisiana State Legislature from the 81st district, and was Republican Party chairman for St. Tammany Parish.^[32]

Alleged members of the Klan

Warren G. Harding

The consensus of modern historians is that Warren Harding was never a member, and instead was an important enemy of the Klan. While one source claims Warren G. Harding, a Republican, was a Ku Klux Klan member while President, that claim is based on a third-hand account of a second-hand recollection in 1985 of a deathbed statement made sometime in the late 1940s concerning an incident in the early 1920s. Independent investigations have turned up many contradictions and no supporting evidence for the claim. Historians reject the claim and note that Harding in fact publicly fought and spoke against the Klan.

The rejected claim was made by Wyn Craig Wade. He stated Harding’s membership as fact and gives a detailed account of a secret swearing-in ceremony in the White House, based on a private communication he received in 1985 from journalist Stetson Kennedy. Kennedy, in turn had, along with Elizabeth Gardner, tape recorded some time in the “late 1940s” a deathbed confession of former Imperial Klokard Alton Young. Young claimed to have been a member of the “Presidential Induction Team”.

Young also said on his deathbed that he had repudiated racism.^[33][34] In his book, The Strange Deaths of President Harding, historian Robert Ferrell says he was unable to find any records of any such “ceremony” in which Harding was brought into the Klan in the White House. John Dean, in his 2004 book Warren Harding, also could find no proof of Klan membership or activity on the part of Harding.

Review of the personal records of Harding’s Personal White House Secretary, George Christian Jr., also do not support the contention that Harding received members of the Klan while in office. Appointment books maintained in the White House, detailing President Harding’s daily schedules, do not show any such event.^[35]

In their 2005 book Freakonomics, University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt and journalist Stephen J. Dubner alluded to Warren Harding’s possible Klan affiliation. However, in a New York Times Magazine Freakonomics column, entitled “Hoodwinked? Does it matter if an activist who exposes the inner workings of the Ku Klux Klan isn’t open about how he got those secrets?”, Dubner and Levitt said that they no longer accepted Stetson Kennedy’s testimony about Harding and the Klan.^[36]

The 1920 Republican Party platform, which essentially expressed Harding’s political philosophy, called for Congress to pass laws combating lynching.^[37] Harding denounce lynching in a landmark 21 October 1921 speech in Birmingham, Alabama, which was covered in the national press. Harding also vigorously supported an anti-lynching bill in Congress during his term in the White House. His “comments about race and equality were remarkable for 1921.”^[38]

Payne argues that the Klan was so angry with Harding’s attacks on the KKK that it originated and spread the false rumor that he was a member.^[39]

Carl S. Anthony, biographer of Harding’s wife, found no such proof of Harding’s membership in the Klan. He does however discuss the events leading up to the period when the alleged Klan ceremony was held in June 1923:

[K]nowing that the some branches of the Shriners were anti-Catholic and in that sense sympathetic to the Ku Klax Klan and that the Klan itself was holding a demonstration less than a half mile from Washington, Harding censured hate groups in his Shriners speech. The press “considered [it] a direct attack” on the Klan, particularly in light of his criticism weeks earlier of “factions of hatred and prejudice and violence [that] challeng[ed] both civil and religious liberty”.^[40]

In 2005, The Straight Dope presented a summary of many of these arguments against Harding’s membership, and noted that, while it might have been politically expedient for him to join the KKK in public, to do it in private would have been of no benefit to him.^[41]

It was falsely rumored, in his lifetime, that Harding was partly of African-American descent, so he would have been an unlikely recruit for the Ku Klux Klan.

Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman, the Democratic politician who became president in 1945, was accused by opponents of having dabbled with the Klan briefly. In 1924, he was a judge in Jackson County, Missouri. Truman was up for reelection, and his friends Edgar Hinde and Spencer Salisbury advised him to join the Klan. The Klan was politically powerful in Jackson County, and two of Truman’s opponents in the Democratic primary had Klan support. Truman refused at first, but paid the Klan’s $10 membership fee, and a meeting with a Klan officer was arranged.^[42]

According to Salisbury’s version of the story, Truman was inducted, but afterward “was never active; he was just a member who wouldn’t do anything”. Salisbury, however, told the story after he became Truman’s bitter enemy, so historians are reluctant to believe his claims.^[43]

According to Hinde and Margaret Truman’s accounts, the Klan officer demanded that Truman pledge not to hire any Catholics or Jews if he was reelected. Truman refused, and demanded the return of his $10 membership fee; most of the men he had commanded in World War I had been local Irish Catholics.^[44]

Truman had at least one other strong reason to object to the anti-Catholic requirement, which was that the Catholic Pendergast family, which operated a political machine in Jackson County, were his patrons; Pendergast family lore has it that Truman was originally accepted for patronage without even meeting him, on the basis of his family background plus the requirement that he was not a member of any anti-Catholic organization such as the Klan.^[45] The Pendergast faction of the Democratic Party was known as the “Goats”, as opposed to the rival Shannon machine’s “Rabbits”. The battle lines were drawn when Truman put only Goats on the county payroll,^[46] and the Klan began encouraging voters to support Protestant, “100% American” candidates, allying itself against Truman and with the Rabbits, while Shannon instructed his people to vote Republican in the election, which Truman lost.^[47]

Truman later claimed that the Klan “threatened to kill me, and I went out to one of their meetings and dared them to try”,^{[citation needed]} speculating that if Truman’s armed friends had shown up earlier, violence might have resulted. However, biographer Alonzo Hamby believes that this story, which is not supported by any recorded facts, was a confabulation based on a meeting with a hostile and menacing group of Democrats that contained many Klansmen, showing Truman’s “Walter Mitty-like tendency … to rewrite his personal history”.^[48] Sympathetic observers see Truman’s flirtation with the Klan as a momentary aberration, point out that his close friend and business partner Eddie Jacobson was Jewish, and say that in later years Truman’s presidency marked the first significant improvement in the federal government’s record on civil rights since the post-Reconstruction nadir marked by the Wilson administration.^[49]

Lyndon Johnson

Ned Touchstone claimed the Klan had proof of Lyndon Johnson having been a member early in Johnson’s political career, according to a note in documents relating to the John F. Kennedy assassination that were declassified in 2017.^[50]

It is obvious that a long succession of American politicians including presidents were slave owners and blatant racists.

Before he became the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” But in his only book, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published in 1785, the future president expressed a series of beliefs about African Americans that would be seen today as racist.

He wrote that blacks were cursed with “a very strong and disagreeable odor” and were incapable of producing art and poetry. And though he said he believed slavery was immoral, he owned slaves and, historians say, carried on a sexual relationship with at least one of them, Sally Hemings. If every black slave were ever freed, he wrote, they should be deported since he believed blacks and whites could not live together peacefully.

Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, was also a slaveholder from the South. Before he became president, he offered in an 1804 advertisement $50 for the return of a runaway slave and $10 extra “for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of 300.” In Jon Meacham’s 2008 book “American Lion: Andrew Jackson and the White House,” Meacham wrote that Jackson owned around 150 slaves and freed none of them in his will.

As president, Jackson allowed his postmaster general to let Southerners seize anti-slavery publications, in direct violation of the First Amendment. He called the abolitionist pamphlets urging black equality “unconstitutional and wicked.”

Jackson is widely vilified today among Native Americans for his role in forcibly removing indigenous people from their land, especially for the Trail of Tears. The removal of the Cherokee people from Georgia led to thousands of deaths.

“The philanthropist will rejoice that the remnant of that ill-fated race has been at length placed beyond the reach of injury or oppression,” Jackson said in his farewell address.

The Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson worked to keep blacks out of Princeton University while serving as that school’s president. When he became president of the U.S., the Democrat refused to reverse the segregation of civil service, though he had won the White House with the support of some African American men.

In 1915, Wilson sparked outrage by screening the racist film “The Birth of a Nation” at the White House. The silent movie was the retelling of Reconstruction through the eyes of the Ku Klux Klan. The movie portrayed the KKK as heroes and African Americans as uncivilized.

“No explanation or apology followed” after the screening, Patty O’Toole wrote in “The Moralist: Woodrow Wilson and the World He Made.”

Wilson appeared oblivious during the “Red Summer” of 1919 — a time when communities across the country saw white mobs attack African Americans, resulting in hundreds of deaths. He spoke out against lynching but did not use the federal government’s resources to stop the violence.

Democrat Lyndon Johnson assumed the presidency in 1963 after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and sought to push a civil rights bill amid demonstrations by African Americans. Johnson famously convinced skeptical lawmakers to support the measure and gave a passionate speech about his days as a teacher in Mexican American schools to urge Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act.

But according to tapes of his private conversations, Johnson routinely used racist epithets to describe African Americans and some blacks he appointed to key positions.

His successor, Republican Richard Nixon, also regularly used racist epithets while in office in private conversations.

“We’re going to (place) more of these little Negro bastards on the welfare rolls at $2,400 a family,” Nixon once said about what he saw as lax work requirements. Nixon also made derogatory remarks about Jews, Mexican Americans, Italian Americans and Irish Americans.

As with Johnson, many of Nixon’s remarks were unknown to the general public until tapes of White House conversations were released decades later.

Recently the Nixon Presidential Library released an October 1971 phone conversation between Nixon and then California Gov. Ronald Reagan, another future president, The Atlantic reported Tuesday . Reagan in venting his frustration with United Nations delegates who voted against the U.S. dropped some racist language.

“Last night, I tell you, to watch that thing on television as I did,” Reagan said. “To see those, those monkeys from those African countries — damn them, they’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes.”

Nixon began laughing hard.

Reagan would launch his 1980 general election presidential campaign in Mississippi’s Neshoba County — a place where three civil rights activists were murdered in 1964.

Reagan ignored the criticism of his visit and told a cheering crowd of white supporters, “I believe in states’ rights.”

Abraham Lincoln ordered the largest mass execution in America’s history

We can all join hands in the struggle to change things, we can hope and we can dream of a future when the colour of our skins will be admired in the same way we admire the shades of a rainbow.

People should not have walk or drive on the roads in fear that they may be harmed, arrested or even killed mainly because of the colour of their skin, or having to be confronted by things like what happened in this video

I believe that people can change if the motivation to effect change is powerful enough, I think it was Confucius who said “to jerk a mind out of its established routine, very powerful influence must be brought o bear” Ending Segregation was good but it did not end racism, integration even exacerbated racism because the hatred of Black People runs too deep we have to find another way to reach people’s hearts and minds.

If in the 21st Century we are still seeing this, something is very wrong with the methods we have used to end racism.

This is simmering hatred waiting to be unleashed

“that until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned;

that until there are no longer first class and second class citizens of any nation;

that until the color of a man’s skin is of no more significance than the color of his eyes;

that until the basic human rights are equally guaranteed to all without regard to race;

that until that day, the dream of lasting peace and world citizenship and the rule of international morality will remain but a fleeting illusion, to be pursued but never attained”

Haile Selassie’s Address to the United Nations in 1963 sung by Bob Marley of Jamaica.

Let us not make any mistake about this, America was founded on a Racist and White Supremacist ideology, the actions of many of the country’s leaders and influential people testify to this. The Europeans who first came to the continent, felt they had the god given right to take anything they wanted regardless of who what they wanted belonged to.

Sand Creek Massacre. “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians!, .I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice”.
John Chivington a colonel in the United States Volunteers Chivington a Methodist Pastor most likely believed that Killing Indians was sanctioned by his God because he stated that killing Indians was an honourable thing to do. Likewise the Presidents who owned slaves believed that slavery was acceptable.

Black Codes

The Black Codes, sometimes called Black Laws, were laws governing the conduct of African Americans (free blacks). The best known of them were passed in 1865 and 1866 by Southern states, after the American Civil War, in order to restrict African Americans’ freedom, and to compel them to work for low wages. Source Wikipedia

President Andrew Johnson

The Fourteenth Amendment

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

President Johnson objected to granting citizenship to freed slaves

Real change can only be effected when people like Tucker Carlson of Fox News crawl out from behind their shrouds of illusion and accept the reality, America is a racist country and that needs to change. The days of total white domination and control is no longer beneficial to the growth and social stability of the country.

The social and racial landscapes are in a dynamic process of change, white supremacy is no longer socially workable or acceptable. Large numbers of white people have moved beyond that decadent fallacy and have joined the procession of human beings marching towards the acceptance that Blacks and Whites must coexist in harmony and in peace, The only progressive way forward is unconditional acceptance of what was written in the declaration of independence 244 years ago, anyone who deny this is a traitor to the Declaration of America’s Independence.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”.

The Earth is one country and humans are its citizens.

Let me make it clear that I despise racism in what ever form it appears and from whatever group of people promoting it.

Kenneth George-Dill ken@khatts.com 561.372.1462

Check out the Baha’i Perspective on Unity

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