Transcription
A Black History Reader: 101 Questions You Never Thought to Ask by Dr. Claude Anderson
Chapter Five or Part Five: Historical Ironies
Question 23: Who are the first humans on Earth and in the Americas?
After years of studying archaeological artifacts, DNA links, and genes and populations around the world, a large body of scientists has repeatedly concluded that the first humans originated in Eastern Africa. However, there are also scientists who have produced opposing research proclaiming that the first humans originated in Europe, China, or Australia instead of Africa. Their arguments are puzzling and perplexing since biologists and geneticists recognize that all colors are contained only in melanated or dark cells. Anthony T. Brewer, in his book "From the Broader Files," stated a basic biological fact when he wrote that the black race can produce a race of brown, yellow, and white people, but it is impossible for a race of black people to produce from white, yellow, or brown people.
In 1871, Charles Darwin, who became known earlier for his theories on the origin of the species, publicly credited black Africa as the cradle of all mankind. As would be expected in response to the insane insatiable curiosity of people regarding where humans came from, theories about the origin of mankind usually track wherever attitude is considered politically correct at that time. People expect and prefer that any origin of mankind theories align with the population group that is dominant or most preferred. Since black people hold such a low socio-economic status in world societies, it is only natural that many people find it offensive for science to imply that their ancestors were black and that they have black blood surging through their veins. They prefer to bury their African lineage and identify instead with a political stage, language, or the culture of their countries of origin.
For whites, Asians, and other non-blacks to have feelings of superiority, they need a positive image of themselves over blacks. For centuries, ethnic and religious groups have propagandized negative images of Africa while they exploited the continent of its material resources. It is the rare non-black person who chooses to accept their linkage to Africa or blackness. The word "Africa" was originally defined as the land of the blacks. Just like in America, other countries have established a ranking order of social acceptability for populations within their borders. In almost every country, the people have been indoctrinated to assign black people or those persons of African descent to the lowest level of acceptability.
For nearly two centuries, inquiring minds have studied everything from the single cell amoeba to buried bones and fossilized footprints to determine the cradle of mankind. National Geographic magazine published migration patterns on page 75 that track black people as they moved from Africa across the Bering Strait into the North American continent and became the original Native Americans. Similarly, in the early 2000s, the Discovery Channel aired "The Real Eve," a documentary on the origin of humankind. Archaeologists used secular records, archaeological artifacts, and other tools to establish that the birthplace of Eve, the female from whom all life descended, was African. Then they used genetic material and other scientific evidence to track humans from their original birthplace in Africa and their migration patterns around the world. The timeline presentation showed how humans trace mutated according to their migration patterns and in response to changes in climatic conditions.
The color black is powerful; it is the base of the consonants, the essence of all colors. It is physically impossible for Asians, whites, Latinos, Chinese, or Australians to be the first humankind on Earth. Recognition as the first people of the Earth makes black people very special and unique. As amazing as the fact is, black people as a race have not yet demanded the respect that should accompany that scientific finding. They have not proclaimed the work of those scientists that identified blacks as the world's first humans and the labor engine that drove economic development around the world. The first humans were black, and their black descendants should claim them in the name of black exceptionalism, which is the key to black people's survival and empowerment.
Question 24: Why is there such hatred toward black people?
Undoubtedly, every black person and many other people in this country and around the world have pondered the question of why there is such hatred towards black people. Inquiry minds search for satisfying answers. Black people are puzzled, especially after considering what they have done to benefit whites over the centuries without reciprocity. After 460 years of formal slavery and semi-slavery, blacks remain outside and benefit the mainstream society only incidentally when the general public benefits.
Twenty-two generations of black Americans spent and devoted their entire lives to provide enrichment and comfort to white Americans. Black unpaid labor built government buildings, universities, businesses, factories, roads, bridges, and canals. Black maids and servants cleaned their homes, cooked and served their food, and raised white people's children. Though blacks were humble and loyal to this nation, they were still lynched, raped, and castrated by whites who burned down black towns like Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1899; Statesboro, Georgia, in 1905; Springfield, Illinois, in 1908; Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921; and Rosewood, Florida, in 1923.
In the summer of 1919, known as the Red Summer of Hate, whites rioted in 25 cities across the nation and burned, looted, and killed thousands of black persons who were simply seeking access to jobs, housing, educational opportunities, and the basic necessities of life. Until the 1960s, during the black civil rights movement, whites initiated nearly 100 percent of the race riots that occurred in this nation. A contradictory behavior pattern has always existed between the way whites and blacks have treated and cared for each other. But what is at the root of white behavior towards blacks?
Winthrop Jordan, in "American Attitudes Towards the Negro," states that the first European immigrants coming to America had preconceived negative and hateful attitudes towards black people that were formed by European traditions, religion, and culture. The fear and love they felt towards blacks were part of the European culture passed down through the centuries across the continents into Asia and other countries. Jordan says that Europeans associated blackness with evil, badness, filth, the devil, and damnation while associating their own white skin color with goodness, innocence, cleanness, purity, and an angel-like quality.
In 1638, the European colonists institutionalized their hatred of blacks into a public edict in the Maryland colony. That edict of 1638 established a baseline relationship between blacks and whites. The first European colonists had brought a few blacks with them to America as servants. The edict stipulated that neither those blacks nor their offspring would be permitted to enjoy the fruits of white society. In 1663, the American legislature confirmed the public edict with a law stipulating that all Negroes shall serve as slaves for life. That legal expression of hatred towards blacks carried over into the Articles of Confederation, the U.S. Constitution, and was the foundation for the creation of racial slavery in the United States.
Moving along the timeline of history, other writers hypothesized that whites' hatred of blacks relates to the American Civil War and the destruction of the Southern genteel culture and lifestyle. These writers speculate that Southerners hold blacks responsible for the South losing the Civil War. In his book "Honor and Slavery," Kenneth S. Greenberg explains white hatreds of blacks. Greenberg postulates that it stems from two things. The first reason was the belief of Southern whites that there is no honor in being a slave. Southern whites had come from European countries where honor and apparent might were important, and many men had died in duels defending their honor. According to their cultural mores, no honor was due a group of people that allowed itself to be enslaved; such a group was not entitled to sympathy, pity, respect, or honor.
Secondly, according to Greenberg, Southern whites in particular and whites in general view black people as docile, submissive, compromising, forgiving, and weak people who lack manhood; therefore, they deserve to be feminized through symbolic or physical castrations. In summary, Greenberg presents the position that some whites hope that blacks would have been better off fighting and dying rather than allowing themselves to become the lowest and most subservient individuals in society. Greenberg links the dueling-to-the-death attitudes of Europeans and Southern gentlemen to the way whites feel about blacks having been slaves.
If there is truth to Greenberg's work, then the non-violent passage of resistance, compromising, and acquiescence attitudes taught to black ministers, black civil rights leaders, and black elected officials only reinforce the lack of respect and hatred of those who hold those opinions. While these theories are a window into the thinking of some, it is not possible to determine the precise etiology of the negative attitudes held by whites towards blacks. It is a long-standing, complex subject.
Question 25: What is the doctrine of unequal exchange, and is it still being applied to the black race?
The doctrine of unequal exchange is the practice of unbalanced socio-economic trade in which richer parties foolishly trade or are tricked into trading their valuable goods, services, or property for money or items of less value than what a weaker party is trading. Frequently, the exploited parties receive diminished monetary value or only intangible or symbolic benefits. The exploiting party receives excessive value; therefore, by creating a balance of trade in favor of the exploiting party, the lack of reciprocity or equality of trade creates unbalanced socio-economic outcomes between the exploiter and the exploited.
The concept of unequal exchange as an economic strategy was evolving as the entire European continent was suffering catastrophic conditions. Europe had been in a prolonged period of suffering from famine, disease, crime, and dire poverty. Traders and explorers were in search of resources in new world markets. They maximized their economic advances when they engaged classical or African societies. The untapped black human gold in Africa and the abundance of free land with minerals in the Americas became high priorities in resisting the European nations with wealth and power. European slave traders could purchase black human beings in Africa for trinkets but made huge profits—typically fifteen hundred percent—when they sold them as slaves in America.
The slave trade and the doctrine of unequal exchange created a boundary of trade in favor of European countries, the exploiting parties. It infused capital into European nations and gave them massive wealth. The African continent, with its various tribes, had not yet been divided into different nations by European powers. The entire African continent became an exploited party in an exchange in which humans and mineral resources were being traded for cheap trinkets, clothes, cloth, bibles, and violence symbols.
The historical consequence of the practice of the doctrine of unequal exchange left the African continent and its black population exploited, impoverished, and powerless. Even today, in the 21st century, after Columbus's so-called discovery of the Americas, European nations began to realize that their socio-economic salvation could be the commercial enslavement of African blacks. They could see that not only were there enormous profits to be reaped from the slave trade itself, but huge profits could also be realized from owning and processing the slave-made material goods.
Europe was poised for slavery to become the cornerstone for worldwide socio-economic development. A massive number of trading companies emerged with the intent of trading with African native chiefs who would sell members of their own tribes. African chiefs, or tribal potentates, who unwittingly engaged in providing the human capital for slave trading were ignorant of the long-range consequences of their actions. They did not foresee the system of physical and psychological exploitation that the European countries were creating around a sense of white communal solidarity and systematic debasement of black people.
Black slavery became indispensable and was incorporated into all facets of emerging economies around the world. Religious organizations conjured up theological justifications for slavery. Slave traders loaded their boats with bibles, religious artifacts, cheap consumer goods, and old guns and traded them to the Africans for slaves, natural resources, and mineral assets. Records indicate that the worth of one African slave exceeded the useless items slave traders dumped into African and other international markets. Trade expeditions started out looking for strong black slaves, called black gold, but soon expanded to include natural and mineral resources.
The massive displacements of human capital and natural resources weakened the ability of black Africans to become self-sufficient and to profit from the economic development of their own African continent. In 1886, the European nations met in Germany, put a map of the African continent on the table, and divided it up, with each European nation selecting a region of Africa to colonize and take control of the people and natural resources. This gang rape of the world's richest continent further divided and crippled the black population. They were forced to accept European cultures and languages imposed upon them by their conquerors.
With each unequal exchange transaction, the countries of Africa grew weaker and more dependent. In the 1960s, as the world watched the televised black civil rights movement in America, the European nations ceremoniously officially released their rule over African colonies. However, they installed local African blacks in high public offices to be political figureheads while cutting the colonial ties, giving the appearance that all the power and independence had been turned over to the Africans. European whites retained ownership of the exploited continent's massive natural and mineral wealth from behind the scenes.
As Asian countries grew stronger economically, they aggressively joined in the rush to control some part of the African wealth. The destruction from the unequal exchange has been cumulative. Once the pattern became entrenched, the black African nations accepted some symbolic payments for their valuable human and natural resources. It was not possible to reverse the effects. Impoverished black nations are still forced to surrender their master natural resources to the world, and in return, are granted welfare loans from the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, which they are unable to repay.
Clearly, the continuous pattern of unequal exchange has had permanent consequences on Africa. The doctrine of unequal exchange effectively invigorated Europe and engorged nations with wealth. European nations then introduced the doctrine of unequal exchange into America in order for the upcoming population of poor whites to settle and control this new nation. Two elements were readily needed: free land and free labor. The native Indians possessed all the lands, and black slaves were free labor.
European whites had no intention of paying for either. With native Indians, Europeans simply replicated the same techniques and training model the slave traders had successfully used in Africa. Whites colonized in America met with various native Indian chiefs and offered friendship, Christianity, bibles, trinkets, clothing, and housing in exchange for the right to take title to one billion acres of land with its valuable minerals and natural resources. The unequal exchange left native Indians nearly depopulated and poverty-stricken, with no land to support themselves.
The negative effects of the unequal exchange were cumulative also for the native Indians. White immigrants became wealthy from the land and resources they gained from the native Indians and became weak and dependent. While native Indians never totally recovered from the loss of their physical country, they were put into a protected class, and the tribes have been able to reclaim some of their economic losses and restore some independence because they were allowed sovereignty.
After emancipation, the unequal exchange continued to define the operational relationship between blacks and whites into the 21st century. It has become an accepted relationship that is rarely questioned. Practically openly, whites take what is valuable from blacks in exchange for symbolism or trinkets. Blacks have never been able to break free from resilient weakness and rights expect that the uninterrupted practice of unequal exchange gives them permission to continue it.
After 360 years of this practice, blacks in America have been successfully marginalized. They have remained an economically non-competitive people through the centuries. The practice is so embedded it is rarely recognized. However, the following are descriptions of this phenomenon:
1. Blacks give nearly 100% of their vote to the Democratic Party. They are promised nothing, receive only photo ops, yet have remained loyal party voters no matter what happens to them.
2. Blacks create towns in which to live to escape terrorism. Whites either took the property or paid very little for it and built luxury resorts or developments, most often that exclude blacks.
3. Blacks produce a continuous flow of music and dance forms for the world. Whites learn how to sing it, claim it, and enrich themselves by copying, covering, and commercializing what blacks produce.
4. Blacks put their scarce dollars into Freedman's banks for safekeeping. Whites misappropriate all of the funds, and black depositors receive no compensation.
5. Blacks owned thousands of acres of land in Spanish Florida that were stolen by white Southern plantation owners from black settlers without having to pay the black owners.
6. The cervical cancer in the body of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black woman who produced cells that were immortal, changed medical research and produced a new medical industry that generated great wealth for the entrepreneurs but not for her family.
7. Blacks own and control only one-half of one percent of anything of value in this society.
The doctrine of unequal exchange has continuously kept them drained of wealth-generating resources, disposable income, culture, leadership, and material resources. Blacks frequently wonder out loud how whites are able to live in such opulence across America, owning industries, businesses, skyscraper buildings, magnificent homes and mansions with manicured lawns, and luxurious automobiles parked in the driveways. The answer is simple: whites acquired the base assets—free land and free labor—through the doctrine of unequal exchange and then practiced group economics to keep 100% of their disposable annual income and wealth within their own race. They also draw in ninety percent of the disposable income from the pockets of black Americans.
Practicing polynomic principles is the only way blacks can hope to correct the trade balances that have been fostered by unequal exchange. The most important of these polynomic principles is that blacks must never support anyone, any organization, political party, or business that does not support the black race. The second polynomic principle is the practice of group-based economics, which means making money bounce eight to twelve times within their own community before letting it exit into non-black hands and businesses.
Black Americans are nearly 100% consumers and nearly 0% producers. When they do not practice group-based economics, they are contributing to the negative balance of trade that allows the outflow of money from their group to other groups, making other groups wealthy without requiring any promises to patronize black-owned businesses. Blacks must renegotiate their relationships with individuals, political parties, and businesses that profit from them and stop the practice of unequal exchange. If a business is located in the black neighborhood and requires something from them, demand that it is in exchange for the wealth the business extracts. The business must purchase items from a list of black-produced products as well as provide jobs, support efforts to improve the neighborhood, and otherwise provide material benefits to black neighborhoods.
Blacks should never impose standards and simply not permit any business to strip them of their financial assets. Leave nothing of value as black people demand reciprocity, and become more self-sufficient. They will be able to alter the uneven balance of trade deficit that comes from the continued practice of the doctrine of unequal exchange.
Question 26: Is it possible for resource-rich black Africa to become a world superpower?
Even though time is running out, black Africa could become a world superpower if they rise above tribalism, religious differences, and the impact of the Berlin Conference, which was in 1884 and 1885, in which European colonial powers identified and took control of the parts of Africa they wanted and colonized the entire continent. Africa is the richest continent on this earth; it is on the verge of economic recolonization. The European powers have been draining the continent of its vital resources for centuries, and now countries from around the world are competing with Europeans to capture and export resources out of Africa.
For 50 years, black Africans have been visible in political leadership of African nations, but they are not in control of their nation's economies. European powers engaged African politicians in practicing comparative economics instead of competitive economics. In comparative economics, African countries will bring raw materials to the marketplace and sell them to European corporations to be processed. Using comparative economics, Europeans process the raw materials, then use those products to create goods which they sell back to the African countries at a price quadruple what they paid for the raw materials. This trading practice leaves a balance of trade deficit that African nations cannot close unless they borrow money from the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund. This pushes those countries further into debt.
Using competitive economics, African countries will keep their raw materials, manufacture consumer products, sell them to Europeans and other nations, retain profits and wealth, and therefore prosper socio-economically within the African continent. In recent years, African countries have been overrun by countries like China, Japan, and India, which are all in search of raw materials to supply their country's consumer demands. Those countries insert their peoples into the native African population to specially capture materials, resources, and consumers and build influences within African governments. They also exploit the people of Africa, destroy the continent's wildlife, and deplete its natural resources.
China is an example; it invests heavily in infrastructure in African countries in exchange for open-door assets and control of African resources. China wields great influence in South Africa. The newly approved South African national constitution contains an affirmative action provision that grants preferential treatment for Chinese residents of South Africa but does not allow preferential treatment for the nation's approximately 450 million African blacks. African blacks make up about 79 percent of the nation's population but own and control less than one percent of the nation's wealth, income, and management positions.
Why would black political figureheads knowingly approve a national constitution that denies preferential treatment to the impoverished majority black population? Nearly all of the major businesses and industries throughout Africa are owned and controlled by non-blacks. Blacks in Africa are like blacks in America in many respects; they are consumers and not producers, while non-blacks are migrating into Africa to build businesses that produce wealth and power for their countries. African blacks are distracted by internal fights based upon tribal and religious identifications. Every month, thousands of African blacks perish due to lack of food, water, medicine, or war-related conflicts.
Within a few years, foreigners will take control of the resources on the African continent, and African blacks will be locked into a permanent underclass—the same fate that looms for American blacks. Colonization of Africa allowed Europeans to control the enormous wealth from African resources. Later, as the black civil rights movement was underway in the U.S., white colonial powers in Africa reluctantly began to surrender their open control of government and political leadership to African blacks, just as they had done in other nations. As they exited, however, white colonial powers established puppet leaders at high levels of government. By continuing to own and control the businesses, industries, and resources in every African nation, whites were able to continue to control the nations from distant lands.
Like blacks in the United States, strength would come with greater African black unity. Modern Africa would become a superpower if the individual political states could demonstrate a mutual transcontinental self-interest and organize to act as a single social and economic bloc that closed its borders to non-black international exploiters. A number of efforts are currently underway to do just that and to reverse the effects of the 1885 Berlin Conference. The continent of Africa can no longer afford to be divided while their continent is plundered by foreign political interests.
For nearly 130 years, the nations of Africa have been divided, and within each African country, there are hundreds of tribes and languages. In Nigeria, for instance, there are over 200 tribes and 256 different spoken languages. Once the various African nations achieve some degree of unity along socio-economic lines, they will then be able to connect with the people of African descent around the world, and they will have to be recognized as the international superpower. When Africa is acknowledged as a superpower, respect and power for blacks in America will increase. The fate of blacks in Africa and the United States are linked in a way that has the potential to guide and uplift blacks throughout the diaspora.
Question 27: Why don't whites have to march and fight for citizenship and civil rights?
In the mid-60s, with the act of the black civil rights movement dominating the news, the nation seemed to be on the road to realization of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream that someday black children would be judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. Fifty years later, our nation's streets continue to host race riots, Million Man Marches, Black Lives Matter demonstrations for justice and rights in race matters. Why is it that whites do not have to march or fight for their rights in the streets like black Americans routinely do?
As simply as it can be stated, whites do not have to march and fight for their rights because their rights are the foundational principle of this country. More specifically, the nation's founding documents bless whites with freedom, security, and abundance of happiness. They do not have to fight or demonstrate for their rights. Considering these facts:
1. The entire U.S. Constitution and its amendments bestow on all of what the rights, protections, and privileges of first-class citizens.
2. The U.S. Constitution was crafted as the nation's first affirmative action plan, and it was strictly for whites.
3. The nation's first naturalization law of 1790 declared America to be a white nation, which was symbolized as the American dream for Europeans seeking property and the rights to acquire freedom, native Indian land, and free black labor.
4. The nation's immigration laws are designed to ensure that whites will remain the majority population with dominance and control over everyone else's rights and privileges.
5. The U.S. Supreme Court has been filled with white juries who historically rendered judicial decisions that preserve white superiority and advantages.
6. Slavery, race distribution of nearly 100 percent of the nation's wealth and power into the hands of dominant white society determines opportunities and rights that still exist today.
7. Slave codes, black codes, and Jim Crow segregation and extra-legal organizations reinforced and protected white rights.
White Americans have a monopoly on rights in America. Blacks who march for their rights must do so with the full knowledge that the only civil rights laws and three constitutional amendments enacted during Reconstruction, but whose original intents were later corrupted by the U.S. Supreme Court, even sought to guarantee rights for black people. Most of today's problems that confront blacks were created and sustained by whites to protect their institutional rights and privileges and unearned wealth.
Equally as important is the reality that racial segregation was established and fought for because whites believed they had the right to say who would be their neighbor, whom their children would attend school with, and who could sit beside them in a restaurant. Whites hold their rights to be constitutionally sacred and are therefore unwilling to share any portion with black people, whom the U.S. Constitution defined as property—three-fifths of a human and equal to field animals.
It was the 13th and 14th Amendments to the Constitution that granted citizenship and paper or illusionary rights to black ex-slaves, with whites viewing the Constitution as the holy grail. Blacks cannot rely on the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court jurors, who are the guardians of the status quo in race matters. Based on the civil rights historical rulings in black versus white race matters, author Ann Millhiser, in his book "Injustices," appropriately describes the Supreme Court as consistently comforting the comfortable and afflicting the afflicted.
Blacks' best hope for justice and rights is to have well-focused street demonstrations to reclaim the original intent of the 1866 civil rights laws and the 13th and 14th Amendments that Congress passed, especially to reverse the 1857 U.S. Supreme Court Dred Scott decision. Chief Taney's Supreme Court decision declared that blacks have no rights that a white man was bound to respect.
The 10-year Civil War Reconstruction period began in the mid-1860s when the Radical Republicans, members of Congress, enacted civil rights laws and constitutional amendments to convey rights strictly to and for blacks. Reconstruction ended in the mid-1870s when the U.S. Supreme Court exercised its own judicial powers to restore total white dominance and strip blacks of those rights granted to them by Radical Republican congressmen during Reconstruction.
The Supreme Court ended Reconstruction by ruling that civil laws enacted for blacks in the years between 1865 and 1875 were unconstitutional. Since the 1866 civil rights laws have morphed into the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which cannot be ruled as unconstitutional, the Supreme Court chose to corrupt the 1866 civil rights laws by ruling that they were for everybody and not specifically black people. If blacks fail to challenge the Supreme Court's racist rulings and recapture the original rights intended for them in the second U.S. Constitution—the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments and a series of civil rights laws—then blacks have no legitimate constitutional rights in this nation.
Question 28: Was Washington, D.C. ever both the slave capital and the national capital?
The District of Columbia, situated between Maryland and Virginia, has been a showplace of federal government institutions, business enterprises, and tourism throughout its history. But most notably, before the Civil War, Washington, D.C. was the mistress of the enslavement industry, with its main streets studded with slave showrooms, slave ports, depots, and approximately 200 slave auction yards. It earned the title of being the national slave capital. It was the home of the most notorious and lucrative slave auction houses in the country.
On a typical day, there were continuous parades of enchained men, women, and children being moved in the streets in funeral-like processions from one auction house to another. The slaves were held in pens and dungeons until they could be safely sold down the river into the Deep South. Washington, D.C., as the national capital, was distinctive because it was the destination of both enslaved and free blacks. However, free black persons living near or in any city were at risk of being kidnapped and sold back into slavery.
Many reminders of the city's role in slavery still exist. One of the biggest and most infamous auction houses in the city was the Roby Penn Auction House, located near the U.S. Capitol. Its location was convenient for slaveholders who also worked as government officials and wanted to move back and forth easily between the Capitol debates and slave auctions held on the Capitol steps. With the auction houses close to the seat of national government, the slaveholders could run the country and their slave plantations simultaneously.
Thirteen of the nation's first 18 presidents were slave owners. Following the Revolutionary War, so were all of the other members of the U.S. Supreme Court and most of the members of the U.S. Congress. When he was a member of Congress, Abraham Lincoln commented on how close the Roby Penn Auction House was to the Capitol and congressional offices. American slavery and government were the lifeblood of the District of Columbia and the nation. The race that held the slaves in whips 360 years ago holds the reins of government power today.
Question 29: Why did whites routinely lynch blacks?
My examination of historical records does not show a single instance of black lynching whites or members of any other group. Lynching is a form of terrorism used to frighten, punish, exploit, and control blacks. White extra-legal groups, such as the Ku Klux Klan, routinely lynched blacks, especially black men. Lynching peaked in 1896 after the U.S. Supreme Court's Plessy v. Ferguson decision, again in 1918 when black soldiers returned home from World War I, and again in the 1930s following the end of the Great Depression. Lynching blacks was recreational and a festive activity for white men, and it's not difficult to understand why white men lynched blacks.
Primarily because: 1. They could; 2. They faced no persecution by law enforcement; 3. It was such a deceptive part of the culture that nearly a century after slavery ended, U.S. presidents and congressmen refused to enact anti-lynching laws.
In a February 10, 2015, Washington Post article, Mark Berman reported that the number of blacks lynched by whites has been underreported through the years. According to Berman, 3,959 blacks were killed in terror lynchings in just 12 Southern states in the 19th and 20th centuries. Lynching in the Northern big cities was equally as bad, if not worse. Tom Wicker, in his book "Tragic Failure: Racial Integration in America," stated that thousands of blacks were lynched by whites in the U.S. in the late 19th and 20th centuries for any or no reason at all. Race lynchings were conducted in Northern cities during the aftermath of race riots.
There were also pathological factors that drove white men to lynch black men. Lynching is the murder of another human being in public so that everyone knows who did it. Besides killing the victim, the lynching act displays the power of the killer and the powerlessness of the victim. Since I could not find a single recorded instance of black lynching whites in my research, it seemed a reasonable conclusion that blacks were not driven to display revenge or race power by lynching whites.
While whites had such strong hatred for blacks, it would be a mystery were it not for their determination to instill fear in blacks and maintain control over them. For over a century, black leaders and community groups lobbied presidents and the U.S. Congress to enact laws to stop whites from lynching, burning alive, and executing blacks, with crowds celebrating and witnessing the events. But powerful white conservative political and social forces stopped all efforts to block legislation.
In June 2005, the U.S. Senate finally voted to issue a formal apology. As many as 15 conservative Republicans, who represented the North as well as the South, refused to endorse any anti-lynching resolution. As abhorrent as it is now, let's have a look at a century ago: lynching blacks was so embedded in white culture that it was often perceived as a recognition event in both name and practice. In fact, the word "picnic," according to some sources, is a coined expression for picking [ __ ] for the end of the Civil War.
Until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, a black man was lynched on average once every two days. Black men were lynched inside and outside of the law, regardless of whether they were guilty or innocent. However, the practice of lynching is nearly as old as this country. The lynching practice started in America during the Revolutionary War when Colonel Charles Lynch led a bunch of vigilantes to dispense their own brand of justice on British supporters and outlaws. Colonel Charles Lynch routinely used the lynch law on the British loyalists in the Virginian colony.
Later, white terrorist organizations held a monopoly on lynching. White official power and authority gave groups like the Ku Klux Klan the right to conduct lynchings at the slightest provocation. Lynchings were used to kill individual blacks, but the secondary purpose was to terrorize and intimidate all blacks into good behavior. Good black behavior meant black dependency on the submissiveness to the control of whites.
Through the present time, few, if any, whites have been legally tried, let alone punished, for lynching and terrorizing black people. The 10-year period between 1882 and 1892 provides a snapshot of how often lynchings occurred. Whites lynched over 2,000 black men. By early 1918, Booker T. Washington lamented that another 2,522 black men were lynched for no justifiable reason.
Other numerous offenses that white mobs used to justify lynching black men included the following: robbery, slander, upping a wife, beating, cutting leaves, kidnapping, voodooism, poisoning horses, writing insult letters, incendiary language, political activism, gambling, quarreling, poisoning wells, swindling, jilting a girlfriend, organizing Negroes, throwing rocks, unpopularity, making threats, circulating scandal, gossiping, being troublesome, having a bad reputation, drunkenness, rioting, fraud, enticing a servant away, writing a letter to a white woman, asking a white woman for her hand in marriage, conspiracy, introducing smallpox, giving information, conjuring, concealing a criminal, slapping a child, touching a white woman, talking back to or assaulting a white person, passing counterfeit money, owning a barking dog, failing to get off of the sidewalk so whites could pass by, playing games with white persons, paying attention to a white woman, disobeying jury regulations, running quarantine, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, being unwilling to work, reading a black newspaper, and accepting a job and simply doing as well as or better economically than whites.
Blacks suffered lynching and abuses from whites in large measures because of white population and power dominance. There were also social as well as power reasons that explain why blacks didn't lynch whites for a century. White slaveholders and black preachers socially conditioned blacks to protect themselves and their families by playing low and respecting white society's authority. Even justifiably angry blacks were persuaded not to seek revenge against whites but to instead forgive whites and adhere to non-violence and religious passivity. White social acceptance became the ultimate goal. Regardless of what white society did to blacks, blacks did not lynch whites for the very same reason that they were willing to suffer 360 years of slavery.
In all likelihood, another slavery, no lynching would have endured and prevailed if black masses had, in 1516 when slavery began, not accepted the brutalization of slavery and instead demonstrated a willingness to fight to the death rather than cooperate with the slave system.
Question 30: Why do blacks always march to the Lincoln Memorial?
The Lincoln Memorial is the destination of black marches because of the misplaced emotional linkage between blacks and President Abe Lincoln and the black enslavement. That attachment is based upon the myth that Abraham Lincoln was the great emancipator who fought and delivered black Americans from slavery. The reality is quite different. President Lincoln fought the Civil War to save the Union, not to free blacks from slavery.
The fact that millions of blacks adore, demonstrate, and school children visit the memorial, gaze starry-eyed at the Gettysburg Address and the hero of the Emancipation Proclamation, does not change the fact that Lincoln's proclamation did not, in fact, free a single slave. But they leave Washington, D.C. with those false impressions. If they look at Lincoln as the savior, they miss the important roles that blacks played to free themselves through revolts, abolitionist activity, and as Union soldiers.
Up until the mid-1850s, Lincoln had dutifully avoided the slavery issue. The record does not indicate that he identified with the slave or the issues of black slavery. During the 23 years of his trial lawyer in Illinois, there is no record that he defended any runaway slaves or addressed the legal basis of institutionalized slavery. When he became president, Northern public officials were just as silent as Lincoln and walked lockstep with him on race matters.
On the issue of the Civil War and slavery, on July 21, 1864, Northern elected officials expressed their feelings regarding the Civil War in a U.S. congressional resolution which declared, "This war is not being waged for the purpose of overthrowing the established institution of slavery, but to defend the U.S. Constitution and preserve the Union." Clearly, Congress had no intentions of abolishing slavery, and neither did Lincoln.
In a meeting with President Lincoln, Hannibal Hamlin, the vice president, urged Lincoln to make the aim of the war the freeing of blacks and ending slavery rather than saving the Union. President Lincoln, the great emancipator, refused and responded, saying the war was to save the Union. Months later, Lincoln was under pressure to issue an Emancipation Proclamation, but at that time he refused, saying that issuing an Emancipation Proclamation would hurt our Union friends who were slaveholders and turn them against us.
In an effort to aid his Northern slaveholding friends, President Lincoln sent a bill to the U.S. Congress that offered to pay $300 for each black slave that Northern white slaveholders set free or emancipated. When he finally decided to issue an emancipation document, his justification was politically practical. First, the Republican Party wanted to dissuade Europeans from entering the Civil War on the side of the South, and second, it was important to Lincoln not to disrupt agricultural production in the South. Lincoln knew that if slavery was abolished, there would be severe social and economic disruption.
The best-known myth about Abraham Lincoln is that the Emancipation Proclamation actually ended legalized slavery and freed millions of blacks, which is totally untrue. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War was still in progress, and his pronouncement had no authority in the South. When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the Civil War was still in progress, and his pronouncement had no authority in the South, which had seceded from the Union. He did have authority in the North and border states, but this Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to those slaves.
In reality, then, the Emancipation Proclamation did not free slaves anywhere in this country. Not until the Civil War was over and the 13th Amendment was ratified did the entire nation accept the reality that institutionalized slavery had officially ended. Venerating the myth rather than the reality keeps blacks feeling obligated to Lincoln as their great savior.
One of the nation's best-kept secrets is that the Northern states abandoned the newly freed slaves and allowed the Southern states to recast them with Jim Crow semi-slavery for another hundred years. Until the present time, neither the spirit of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation nor the original intent of the 13th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which required that whites lift up the legacies of slavery for blacks, has been adhered to in this nation's national public policies.
After centuries of marching to the Lincoln Memorial, black Americans are still a hated outgroup that mistakenly views Abraham Lincoln as the great emancipator and savior of black people.
Question 31: What role did black slaves play in building the U.S. Capitol?
Black people were the backbone of labor in America and built both the White House and the U.S. Capitol buildings. They also built everything from plantation mansions to government buildings to university campuses. Atop the dome of the Capitol stands the statue of Freedom, a figure of a freedom warrior dressed in the star-spangled helmet and flowing robes. Jefferson Davis, Secretary of War during President Pierce's administration, oversaw construction. He opposed the original design of a woman wearing the French revolutionary liberty cap. Secretary Davis was concerned that the liberty cap on the statue might inspire slaves, many of whom built the Capitol, to seek freedom and revolt. Davis wanted the statue of Freedom on top of the Capitol dome to symbolize freedom for everyone except black people.
The French liberty cap is on the Freedom statue today. The statue was designed for $3,000 by Thomas Crawford in Rome, Italy, in 1856. In 1863, it was cast in bronze in Bladensburg, Maryland, at a foundry owned by Clark Mills, whom the government paid $23,736. Philip Reid, a slave owned by Mills, was given the responsibility of casting the statue of Freedom and transporting it in sections to the east grounds of the national Capitol. Once the sections arrived, Reid and other slaves assembled Freedom to make certain that all of their pieces fit together. Assembling Freedom took 31 days. Thus, the statue of Freedom was disassembled, hoisted, and reassembled by slaves. These slaves then hoisted the statue onto a pedestal in the Capitol dome so that she could signal freedom for everyone.
In 1863, a white superintendent in charge of building the national Capitol building quit, complaining that $8 per day was too little money. He was replaced by Philip Reid, who supervised the construction. Reid was just one of hundreds of black slaves and free men who helped build the U.S. Capitol, the White House, and other monuments, including the Statue of Liberty. Like most slaves, Reid would see no money, praise, plaques, or honors. Clark Mills, Reid's owner, was paid for Reid's labor.
Later on, European laborers and mechanics were important to the construction; they were paid market wages when the work of the slaves was done. The U.S. Department of Treasury paid the whites who owned the slave laborers. Archers and volunteers recently examined the construction and payment records and compiled a list of Capitol workers. They found 122 Negroes referenced by their first names. Although most of the slaves were common laborers, the archive researchers were surprised to find the names of black stone cutters, carpenters, and painters. Slavery had produced an artisan class that worked on the Capitol building as well as in private construction projects.
Question 32: How was the 1955 school desegregation lawsuit switched from unequal funding to social integration?
The 1955 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education was actually the culmination of several court battles filed by blacks, including significantly a case that began in 1953, Briggs v. Elliott, which declared that the public policy on education in effect in South Carolina and across the South at that time was separate but equal because white schools were getting four to five times more funding than black schools. Black parents filed suit not because they quarreled with the fact that the schools were racially separated, but because the funding was unequal. The NAACP joined in the suit.
White social officials, attempting to head off the court's decision, offered massive increases in state appropriations to equalize funding of black schools in a racially separate public system. The offer was unexpected by the NAACP. The organization was astonished that the state was willing to commit such enormous sums of money to Negro schools. The unexpected offer created a major difference between the black parents and clergy in South Carolina, who wanted for their children what the NAACP wanted. The NAACP rejected the state's offer, and the initial intent of the black parents.
In his book "Plural but Equal: Blacks and Minorities in America," Dr. Harold Cruz comments on the devastating long-term effects of the short-sighted decision. He said of the NAACP, the association negated and advanced the possibility of the black political base being fashioned around the important state functions between public school funding and administration. Dr. Cruz further stated that when the NAACP advocated for full integration, they rejected the Southern state's compromise gestures of belated equalization of racially separate school systems.
In fact, the NAACP had done black Americans a terrible disservice. The organization allowed school systems in Southern states to place the physical and financial burdens of implementing school integration on the backs of black Americans. Blacks lost their educational buildings, vehicles, equipment, and so many school-related businesses. More importantly, they lost their educational careers, employment opportunities, and retirement funds.
The effects of the NAACP's action were to convert the original goal of equal funding and resources from the state to seek instead student school integration. Historian Dr. Benjamin Quarles expressed a similar assessment of the NAACP's commitment to social integration at any cost. Dr. Quarles wrote about South Carolina's funding offer, stating that the thinking of the NAACP, in his book "The Negro in the Making of America," observed that the state of South Carolina's huge financial offer would have re-simplified the issue of unequal funding.
But the NAACP was so strongly committed to integration as a policy that it changed the focus of the clergy's lawsuit. It shifted the emphasis of the suit from funding and resources to eradicating racial segregation through physically mixing and integrating the races. The U.S. Supreme Court then ruled, as the NAACP had asked, that black children must attend school together with white children and that all vestiges of Jim Crow segregation must be dismantled with all deliberate speed.
This dismantling of black schools is what happened across the board, from black elementary schools to colleges and universities. According to Quarles, the NAACP's opposition to desegregation meant it was only philosophically opposed to separate but equal black neighborhood schools. The civil rights organization stated that the neighborhood schools were nothing more than the product of white-imposed segregation and needed to be eradicated.
Quarles said that the NAACP felt the nation could only achieve quality education by ending segregation and putting white and black children in close physical proximity. So it pushed for school busing. An untold number of blacks disagreed with the NAACP and wanted quality schools in black communities. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund, however, which included a large number of well-meaning white lawyers, was intent on achieving social integration no matter the cost to black America.
The cost was enormous and so fundamentally destructive that blacks would never totally recover. Black schools were shut down, black teachers and principals were fired, large numbers of black students were assigned to special education classes, and black students were bused as unwanted minority guests into white schools and communities. Dr. Benjamin Quarles observed that once the NAACP made a commitment to the policy of integration and the movement got underway, the organization did not want the white power structure to actually make good on the public policy of separate but equal.
Black leadership did not want a dual system, even if it did allow blacks to operate, control, and quality competitive schools within their community. The NAACP realized that providing the Negro school with better buildings, better equipment, and better salaries for teachers and changing the title of colleges to universities would only strengthen Jim Crow by establishing gilded citadels of segregation demanded by Negro teachers and administrators who would have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo in racial education.
Black economic control over well-funded education systems in their own communities could have been the beginning of real unity, power, and self-determination that could have provided a path up and out of Jim Crow segregation. This was the case of the role not taken. The NAACP assumed that goodness was somehow equality in whites and did not see the goodness and value in blackness. Its end vision of the American black was one that was dependent and extricably intertwined with whites.
Now, 50 years down the path, the NAACP chose in South Carolina. The evidence is in: integration was an end in itself, as far as the NAACP could see. Blacks are now scattered on the illusion of social integration, even though blacks and whites are more resiliently segregated in 2017 than they were in 1954. The improved social integration decision has led blacks into giving up all of their positive advantages of segregation and propelled the entire race down paths toward group destruction.
The social integration process destroyed black communities and made blacks uninvited guests in what whites and other groups owned and controlled. Guests are expendable and have little power in dealing with their host. Schools teach the values and goals of those who are in authority. Black parents should seek to control their schools and require that the education of the children be based on reality. An appropriate educational experience for black children would be to recognize the unique background that black children bring to school.
Black children need basic skills, but they also need to learn to value blackness and how to contribute to building a black community that is strong and self-sufficient. The 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education decision had far-reaching effects and unintended consequences. It reduced black students to a position of being guests in schools, businesses, and communities owned by and controlled by whites, who assigned racial inferiority onto blacks.
The decision itself addressed the separate schools issue, but the NAACP extended the Brown decision beyond public schools into every aspect of the private and public sector. It was a fatal blow. What happened to black schools also happened to traditional black communities, businesses, and institutions. They disappeared, and blacks joined the unemployment rolls. The NAACP apparently meant well but could not envision the erroneous impact of social integration on black America.
The decision established an inappropriate model of self-destruction for blacks, who, no matter how hard they strive, may never regain what they lost in the integration process.