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Southern Blacks were banned from eating Vanilla Ice Cream during the Jim Crow Era, except on the 4th of July. The racist hierarchy in the South manifested in several ways, but most people don’t know that racism even impacted what foods blacks were allowed to buy. As Maya Angelou once wrote, it was custom not to sell vanilla ice cream to blacks in many parts of the South, except on Independence Day. Although it was a black enslaved named Edmund Albius who perfected the flavor of vanilla ice cream its white sweetness was viewed as a representation of the American dream, which is why blacks were kept from eating it !!!
 

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Australia was once 100% BLACK before the British came to exterminate them. The Aboriginals. 100s of years of murder and rapes. Even the study “breeding out the color” in which after generations of raping by whites they removed the “black” look from them. They are now 2% of the country and almost extinct.



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Damn from 100% to 2%

The Palawa people of Tasmania were exterminated and are now extinct. The cartoon character the Tasmanian devil is a facetious rendition of those now extinct people. The virus of their extinction being "white people".
 

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Cecil Williams honored by HBCU hall of fame
  • Special to The T&D
  • Sep 25, 2010

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Cecil J. Williams

Orangeburg photographer Cecil J. Williams, who is known for his work during the Civil Rights Era, was inducted the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame Friday in Atlanta.

"I am extremely pleased to receive this prestigious recognition," Williams said. "To be honored in the company of these extraordinary African-American men and women is truly a humbling experience."

Williams was selected for induction into the National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame for his "exceptional achievements in the field of arts and entertainment."

Williams, a 1960 graduate of Claflin University, is a nationally renowned photographer, publisher and author. His photos have appeared in 126 books, 17 newspapers and 12 television documentaries.

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He started shooting photographs at age nine. By the time he was a teenager, he had already sold his pictures to Jet and the Associated Press.

He authored several books outlining the struggle for equal rights including "Out-of-the-Box in Dixie" and "Freedom and Justice: Four Decades of the Civil Rights Struggle as Seen by a Black Photographer in the Deep South."

For his work, he has previously been recognized by such organizations as the South Carolina Arts Commission, the National Conference of Black Mayors and the NAACP.

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Williams also received a presidential citation from Claflin President Dr. Henry N. Tisdale. In 1994, the S.C. General Assembly gave him a commendation for his exhibit "Quiet Heroes."

The National Black College Alumni Hall of Fame Foundation, Inc. was established 25 years ago by The Council of National Alumni Associations with the goal of preserving and advancing Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

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Other inductees to the Hall of Fame this weekend include: Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee Founder Julian Bond, former Morris College President Dr. Samuel D. Jolley, Chief Judge of the U.S. District Court of Eastern Tennessee Curtis Collier, Merck Executive Vice President Willie A. Deese, North Carolina A&T State University Endowed Chair Dr. Goldie S. Byrd, Johnson Research and Development President Lonnie G. Johnson, Thurgood Marshall College Fund CEO Dr. N. Joyce Payne, former Dallas Cowboy Jethro T. Pugh, Columbia businessman and educator Jasper Salmond and retired Gen. Russel Hornore'.

https://thetandd.com/news/local/cec...cle_6a2bd872-c82f-11df-a603-001cc4c002e0.html
 

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Future Doctor At Age 12: “I Want To Change The World”
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(Joshua at age 12)​

Joshua Beckford has never been the typical child. At two years old, he quickly mastered reading fluently using phonics and was speaking Japanese by the age of three. At the age of six he became the youngest person in the world to study Philosophy and History at the prestigious University of Oxford in England, gaining a distinction in both subjects.

His father, Knox Daniel, said he first noticed his son was clever when he was sitting on his lap while on the computer. “I started telling him what the letters on the keyboard were and I realized that he was remembering and could understand.”

He could read, write and understand the alphabet and point to different colors on a chart when he was just ten months old.


(Joshua at age 6)​

In 2011, his father wanted to challenge his son, so he wrote to the university to see if he could participate in a philosophy course for bright children between the age of eight and thirteen. They agreed, and Joshua was the youngest student ever accepted. He even passed with distinction.

Named one of the smartest kids in the world, the now 12-years-old is far too academically advanced to attend third grade with his peers and is homeschooled instead.

So, what does a super scholar study? Joshua excels at science, math, history, foreign languages and history. He dreams of being a neurosurgeon and is well on his way by practicing gall bladder removals and appendectomy procedures.


“Since the age of four, I was on my dad’s laptop and it had a body simulator where I would pull out organs. I want to save the earth. I want to change the world and change peoples ideas to doing the right things about earth.”

He also plans to be an astronaut and is currently writing a children’s book about Egypt.

When he isn’t studying and achieving more than many adults, Joshua also serves as the face of the National Autistic Society’s Black and Minority (BME) campaign. Diagnosed with high functioning autism himself, Joshua helps to spread the campaign’s mission of highlighting obstacles blacks face when trying to obtain access to necessary autism support and services.

According to a 2011 study, Autism and the African American Community, “evidence demonstrates that although rates of diagnosis for autism occur at the same rates in all racial groups, diagnosis in African American children occurs later than in White children. As a result, African American children may require longer and more intensive intervention.”

In between studying to be the youngest neurosurgeon, Joshua enjoys fund-raising for three Autism Charities, one in the U.K and two in Africa, and campaigns to save the environment.

Between medical school and the years associated with that, Joshua should reach his goal of being named Doctor within the next two years.

Young Joshua is definitely living proof that no obstacle is too great to keep you from achieving greatness.


https://blackdoctor.org/443741/6-year-old-attends-oxford/
 

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Sailors assigned to work as laborers at the U.S. Naval Supply Depot on Guam.
Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
These Photos of a Segregated U.S. Navy Unit Were Lost for Decades. They Still Have a Story to Tell

By John Edwin Mason | Photographs by Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
February 22, 2019
There are many ways to photograph a black person, and it’s easy for things to go horribly wrong. America’s long history of racist imagery makes that quite clear. Wayne Miller, a white man, was notable for doing it right. In the mid-20th century, a time when American visual culture was suffused with photographs that reinforced demeaning notions about black people, Miller created deeply empathetic images with a understated, yet unmistakable anti-racist intent. He made his best known photographs of African Americans on Chicago’s South Side, between 1946 and 1948. But they were not his first.

In 1944 and 1945, while serving as a U.S. Navy photographer, he created a photographic series about a segregated all-black unit that was assigned to the Naval Supply Depot on Guam. The men called their unit “Pot Luck,” and that was the name that Miller gave to the book that he planned to publish about them. The book never appeared; its maquette, or mock-up, was lost until 2018, when one of Miller’s daughters rediscovered it. And what she found, images from which are published here for the first time, reveals a gifted young photographer grappling with the complexities of race in American culture.

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A soldier assigned to work as a laborer at the U.S. Naval Supply Depot on Guam, in 1945.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
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Sailors at the US Naval Supply Depot on Guam in 1945.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
By 1945, when Miller made his Pot Luck photographs, which appear in the maquette alongside text that he wrote to accompany them, African Americans had long been irresistible objects of white curiosity. Racist ideologies created ways of seeing that made black life seem exotic and threatening — something to be explored and explained. Generations of white photographers had met the demand for images of black people, often by making images that reproduced ugly stereotypes of black inferiority.

Miller’s decision, in 1941, to study photography at the Art Institute of Los Angeles followed closely on the rise of social documentary photography, a movement that, among other things, rejected the old ways of seeing African Americans. Its adherents wanted to use their cameras as weapons against injustice. The plight of workers and racial minorities particularly concerned them. Social documentary photographers — such as Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Gordon Parks and Marion Post Wolcott, at the federal government’s renowned Farm Security Administration documentary unit, and Aaron Siskind, Jack Manning and Marion Palfi, members of the radical Photo League — produced images of black people that spoke with an artist’s power and a sociologist’s clarity. Their message was unambiguous: People of all races were equal and equally deserving of the rights of American citizenship.

The photographs that Miller made after leaving art school to join the Navy show that he had absorbed social documentary’s modernist style. Sharp focus, uncluttered framing and crisp contrast between blacks and white make the images in the Pot Luck series, like his other work for the Navy, instantly legible. Recurring diagonal lines give the photographs energy. Miller was already a competent professional photographer, working in a by-now-conventional style.

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Sailors assigned to work as laborers at the U.S. Naval Supply Depot on Guam, stockpiling aviation fuel.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
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Sailors assigned to work as laborers at the US Naval Supply Depot on Guam.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
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Sailors assigned to work as laborers at the US Naval Supply Depot on Guam.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
But while Miller’s style may not yet have been distinctive, his concern for black servicemen was. Throughout the war, few photographers paid much attention to African American soldiers and sailors. Gordon Parks, who was black, and Toni Frissell, who was white, are notable exceptions. All three photographers adopted similar photographic strategies while making an implicit argument for racial equality. Miller’s images, for instance, emphasize the just-like-white-people normality of the men in the Pot Luck unit. He shows them playing baseball and ping-pong; making music together; doing laundry; praying during a chapel service; and getting haircuts in the base barbershop. Overwhelmingly, however, the photographs are about the heavy labor that the men performed in order to keep the American war machine moving. These are hard-working, patriotic men who are fighting for freedom abroad and deserve to enjoy it when they return to civilian life.

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Sailors at the barbershop of the U.S. Naval Supply Depot on Guam, getting their hair cut at the base barbershop, in 1945.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
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Sailors assigned to work as laborers at the U.S. Naval Supply Depot on Guam playing baseball.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
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Sailors playing cards at the U.S. Naval Supply Depot on Guam.
Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
Miller’s text, which is believed to have been inspired by conversations with the sailors, attempts, rather unconvincingly, to mimic the cadences of African American speech. He invents an unnamed sailor and puts words into his mouth to mirror the concerns of the photographs. “We work long hours and welcome rest. We command each other’s respect and the respect of those we meet,” the sailor says. “Why, man, we practically run the Navy and part of the Army.” Miller’s stand-in sailor also wants his presumably white audience to know that, like them, “We are average American citizens.”

Yet Pot Luck’s text also introduces an element of suppressed anger over racial discrimination, something that cannot be discerned in the photographs. In the segregated armed forces, most black servicemen and servicewomen were assigned to support roles, where they served as cooks, stewards, drivers and laborers. Although some of the Pot Luck men had been trained to perform highly skilled tasks, they remained laborers. Miller’s fictional sailor gives voice to the frustration that the men felt when he says that, “There is only one gripe I feel is justified. …We can’t advance.”

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Page 23 of the maquette for "Pot Luck", a 1945 story about black US sailors assigned to supply duty on Guam.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
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Page 24 of the maquette for "Pot Luck", a 1945 story about black US sailors assigned to supply duty on Guam.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
It’s probably just as well that Pot Luck never saw the light of day. The presumptuousness of creating a text that speaks in the voice of an African American sailor would almost certainly have embarrassed the more mature Miller of only a few years later. In his magnificent study of the black community on Chicago’s South Side, which he worked on between 1946 and 1948, his captions are informative and restrained, allowing the photographs to carry all the emotional punch. While the Pot Luck images themselves are strong, they lack the intimacy and insight that distinguishes Miller’s work on the South Side. Just as crucially, he had not developed a visual language that could convey the lived experience of racism.

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A sailor assigned to work as a laborer at the U.S. Naval Supply Depot on Guam saluting an officer.

Wayne Miller—Magnum Photos
Pot Luck is nevertheless a fascinating historical document and an important one — a crucial landmark on Miller’s path to becoming one of the most significant American photographers of the 20th century, and a singular window into what it can mean to document discrimination.

John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia.



Contact us at editors@time.com.
 

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The Plot to Kill Martin Luther King: Survived Shooting, Was Murdered in Hospital
Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Review of William Pepper's Book
By Craig McKee
Global Research, April 06, 2018
Truth and Shadows 3 September 3016
Region: USA
Theme: History, Law and Justice, Media Disinformation, Police State & Civil Rights



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Let us Commemorate Martin Luther King Day, January 21 2019. This article was first published by GR on September 5, 2016

For one bright moment back in the late 1960s, we actually believed that we could change our country. We had identified the enemy. We saw it up close, we had its measure, and we were very hopeful that we would prevail. The enemy was hollow where we had substance. All of that substance was destroyed by an assassin’s bullet. – William Pepper (page 15, The Plot to Kill King)

The revelations are stunning. The media indifference is predictable.

Thanks to the nearly four-decade investigation by human rights lawyer William Pepper, it is now clear once and for all that Martin Luther King was murdered in a conspiracy that was instigated by then FBI director J. Edgar Hoover and that also involved the U.S. military, the Memphis Police Department, and “Dixie Mafia” crime figures in Memphis, Tennessee. These and many more incredible details of the King assassination are contained in a trilogy of volumes by Pepper culminating with his latest and final book on the subject, The Plot to Kill King. He previously wrote Orders to Kill (1995) and An Act of State (2003).

With virtually no help from the mainstream media and very little from the justice system, Pepper was able to piece together what really happened on April 4, 1968 in Memphis right down to who gave the order and supplied the money, how the patsy was chosen, and who actually pulled the trigger.

Without this information, the truth about King’s assassination would have been buried and lost to history. Witnesses would have died off, taking their secrets with them, and the official lie that King was the victim of a racist lone gunman named James Earl Ray would have remained “fact.”

Instead, we know that Ray took the fall for a murder he did not commit. We know that a member of the Memphis Police Department fired the fatal shot and that two military sniper teams that were part of the 902ndMilitary Intelligence Group were sent to Memphis as back-ups should the primary shooter fail. We have access to the fascinating account of how Pepper came to meet Colonel John Downie, the man in charge of the military part of the plot and Lyndon Johnson’s former Vietnam briefer. We also learn that as part of the operation, photographs were actually taken of the shooting and that Pepper came very close to getting his hands on those photographs.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media has ignored all of these revelations and continues to label Ray as King’s lone assassin. In fact, Pepper chronicles in detail how a disinformation campaign has featured the collaboration of many mainstream journalists over almost half a century. He says he suspects that those orchestrating the cover-up, which continues to this day, are no longer concerned with what he writes about the subject.

“I’m really basically harmless, I think, to the power structure,” Pepper said in an interview.

“I don’t think I threaten them, really. The control of the media is so consolidated now they can keep someone like me under wraps, under cover, forever. This book will probably never be reviewed seriously by mainstream, the story will not be aired in mainstream – they control the media. It was bad in the ’60s but nowhere near as bad as now.”

And the most stunning revelation in The Plot to Kill King – which some may question because the account is second hand – is that King was still alive when he arrived at St. Joseph’s Hospital and that he was killed by a doctor who was supposed to be trying to save his life.

“That is probably the most shocking aspect of the book, that final revelation of how this great man was taken from us,” Pepper says. (By the way, when I quote Pepper as having “said” something I mean in our interview. If I’m quoting from the book, I’ll indicate that.)

The hospital story was told to Pepper by a man named Johnton Shelby, whose mother, Lula Mae Shelby, had been a surgical aide at St. Joseph’s that night. Shelby told Pepper the story of how his mother came home the morning after the shooting (she hadn’t been allowed to go home the night before) and gathered the family together. He remembers her saying to them, “I can’t believe they took his life.”

She described chief of surgery Dr. Breen Bland entering the emergency room with two men in suits. Seeing doctors working on King, Bland commanded, “Stop working on the ****** and let him die! Now, all of you get out of here, right now. Everybody get out.”

Johnton Shelby says his mother described hearing the sound of the three men sucking up saliva into their mouths and then spitting. Lula Mae described to her family that she looked over her shoulder as she was leaving the room and saw that the breathing tube had been removed from King and that Bland was holding a pillow over his head. (The book contains the entire deposition given by Johnton Shelby to Pepper, so readers can judge for themselves whether they think Shelby is credible – as Pepper believes he is.)

In fact, a second invaluable source was Ron Adkins, whose father, Russell Adkins Sr., was a local Dixie Mafia gangster and conspirator in the planning of the assassination even though he died a year before it took place. Ron told Pepper he had overheard Bland, who was his family’s doctor, tell his father that if King did survive the shooting he had to be taken to St. Joseph’s and nowhere else. As Pepper describes it:

He remembers Breen Bland saying to his father, ‘If he’s not killed by the shot, just make sure he gets to St. Joseph Hospital, and we’ll make sure that he doesn’t leave.’

Ron, who was just 16 when the shooting took place, was apparently taken everywhere by his father in those days, and he was able to recount many details of what happened as the assassination was planned and carried out.

“I definitely found him credible,” Pepper says. “I found him troubled, I found him disturbed in a lot of ways by things that went on earlier in his life.”

His deposition is also contained in the book, which Pepper explains was important so that readers could judge the statements for themselves.

“What I wanted to do was to make sure that the entire deposition of these critical moments and this critical information was there, so that one could go and read the depositions and see that I was being accurate,” Pepper says.

Besides describing what he heard Bland tell his father, Ron Adkins described the many visits made to Russell Sr. by Clyde Tolson, J. Edgar Hoover’s right hand man. Known to Ron as “Uncle Clyde,” the high-level FBI official often delivered cash to the elder Adkins for jobs he and his associates would carry out on behalf of Hoover. Among those the younger Adkins said were paid to supply information about the activities of Martin Luther King were the reverends Samuel “Billy” Kyles and Jesse Jackson.

The basics of the official story

If you seek out any information from a mainstream source about James Earl Ray, you’ll find him described as the killer of Martin Luther King, just as Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan are labelled “assassins” in the murders of John and Robert Kennedy.

But once you read any or all of Pepper’s three books on the King slaying, you see very clearly that Ray is not a killer at all. Instead, he was a petty criminal who was a perfect “follower.” Like Oswald and Sirhan, Ray was set up to take the fall for an assassination that originated within the American deep state. In fact, Pepper says he’s convinced that knowledge of the plot went all the way to the top.

“The whole thing would have been part of Lyndon Johnson’s playbook,” Pepper says. “I think Johnson knew about this.”

As the official story of the shooting goes, at 5:50 p.m. on April 4, Kyles knocked on the door of room 306 of the Lorraine Motel to let King and the rest of his party know that they were running late for a planned dinner at Kyles’s home. Kyles then walked about 60 feet down the balcony where he remained even after King came out of the room at about 6 p.m. (Although Kyles has maintained ever since that he spent the last half hour in the room, Pepper has proven otherwise.)


Andrew Young (left) and others on balcony of the Lorraine pointing to where the shot originated while King lies at their feet. (Joseph Louw photo)

Members of a militant black organizing group the Invaders, who were also staying in the motel because of King’s visit, were told shortly before the shooting by a member of the motel staff that their rooms would no longer being paid for by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and that they had to leave immediately. When they asked who had given this order, they were told it was Jesse Jackson. At the time of the shooting, Jackson was waiting down by the swimming pool. Ron Adkins also identified Jackson as the person who called the owners of the Lorraine Motel and demanded that King be moved from a more secure inner courtyard room to an exposed room on the second floor facing the street.

The Memphis Police Department usually formed a detail of black officers to protect King when he was in town, but did not this time. Emergency TACT support units were pulled back from the Lorraine to the fire station, which overlooked the motel. Pepper also learned that the only two black members of the Memphis Fire Department had been told the day before the shooting not to report for work the next day at the fire station. And black detective Ed Redditt was told an hour before the shooting to stay home because a threat had been made on his life.

Just about a minute after King exited his room, a single shot was fired and the bullet ripped through King’s jaw and spinal cord, dropping him immediately. The shot appeared to come from across Mulberry Street. King was rushed to hospital, where he was pronounced dead just after 7 p.m.

According to the official story, the shot was fired by Ray from the bathroom of a rooming house above a bar called Jim’s Grill, which backed on to Mulberry and faced onto South Main Street. But, as Pepper’s investigation proves, the shot actually came from the bushes located in between the rooming house and the street. In fact, the only “witness” who placed Ray at the scene was a falling-down-drunk named Charles Stephens, who later did not recognize Ray in a photograph and who cab driver James McCraw had refused to transport a short time before because he was too intoxicated.

The bushes that concealed the shooter were conveniently trimmed the day after the shooting, giving a false impression that a shooter could not have been concealed there. Several witnesses, including journalist Earl Caldwell and King’s Memphis driver, Solomon Jones, described seeing the shot come from the bushes and not from the bathroom of the rooming house as the official story states.

Another casualty of the King murder was cab driver Buddy Butler who reported that he saw a man running from the scene right after the shot, going south on Mulberry St., and jumping into a police car (this would turn out to be MPD Lieutenant Earl Clark). Butler reported this to his dispatcher and later to fellow cab driver Louie Ward. Butler was interviewed at the Yellow Cab Company later that evening by police. Ward was told the next day that Butler had either fallen, or was pushed, to his death from a speeding car on the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge.

The owner of Jim’ Grill, Loyd Jowers, would later admit to being part of the conspiracy to kill King, and he would be found responsible – along with various government agencies – for the killing in a 1999 civil lawsuit by the King family, which was represented by Pepper.

“The King family got enormous comfort out of the results of that trial and the evidence that came forward from that,” Pepper says.

Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill and girlfriend of Jowers, says she saw him rush into the back of the Grill through the back door seconds after the shot, white as a ghost and holding a rifle, which he then wrapped in a tablecloth and hid on a shelf under the counter. He turned to her and said, “Betty, you wouldn’t do anything to hurt me, would you?” She responded, “Of course not, Loyd.” Spates, who didn’t come forward until the 1990s, also recounted that Jowers had been delivered a large sum of money right before the assassination.

James McCraw stated that Jowers had shown him a rifle the day after the shooting and told him it was the one used to kill King.

“We confronted Loyd,” Peppers explains. “We told him he was likely to be indicted if he didn’t help us, if he didn’t give more information. Jowers didn’t know there was no way the grand jury was going to indict him. All he knew was what he did, what he participated in, how much money he got for it – he got quite a large sum of money, built a taxi cab company with it, had his gambling debt with [local Mafia figure Frank] Liberto forgiven.”

Liberto, an associate of Louisiana crime boss Carlos Marcello, turned out to be involved in the assassination also. He owned a produce warehouse and one of his regular customers, John McFerren, was making his weekly shopping trip there when he overheard Liberto shout into the phone an hour before the shooting: “Shoot the son of a bitch on the balcony.” Nathan Whitlock and his mother, LaVada Addison Whitlock, who owned a restaurant frequented by Liberto, stated that Liberto had told them he was responsible for the King murder.

Setting up the patsy

One thing that many don’t know is that Ray was in prison in 1967, the year before the assassination, serving a 20-year sentence for a grocery store robbery in 1959. After a couple of unsuccessful escape attempts, Ray succeeded in breaking out of prison on April 23, 1967. Unknown to Ray was the fact that the escape had been orchestrated, because he had already been chosen as the patsy in the planned assassination of King, which was still a year away.

The warden of Missouri State Penitentiary was paid $25,000 by Russell Adkins Sr. to allow the escape (as confirmed by Ron Adkins). The money was delivered to Adkins by Tolson, and it was this same connection that would later be used to finance the assassination of King.

After his escape from prison, Ray went to Chicago for a few weeks where he got a job. But, worried about getting caught, he went to Canada, specifically Montreal, and took the name Eric S. Galt. His intention was to get a passport under a false name and to travel to a country from which he could not be extradited.

At the Neptune Bar in the Montreal dock area in August 1967, Ray met a mysterious figure who identified himself as “Raul.” Raul asked Ray to help him with a smuggling scheme, and Ray agreed. In the months ahead, Ray would do a number of jobs, including gun running, for Raul for which he was paid and given a car. Always, Ray had to wait to be contacted by Raul, who Ray said co-ordinated his activities right up until the day of the assassination.

At one point Ray was instructed to purchase a deer rifle with a scope (although Raul was not satisfied with the one he bought and made him exchange it for another). Ray was instructed to go to Memphis (he arrived April 3, 1968) and upon meeting with Raul in his motel was given the name of Jim’s Grill, where the two were to meet at 3 p.m. the next day. He also handed the rifle over to Raul and always maintained that he never saw it again.

Ray rented a room at the rooming house above Jim’s Grill (the two met the day of the assassination as planned). About an hour before the shooting, he was given money to go to the movies, but first he tried to have a tire repaired because Raul had said he wanted to use the car. But when Ray heard the sirens that followed the shooting, he got scared and left the area.

Fearing he had been set up, Ray left the country and ended up in England where he was captured on June 8, 1968 at London’s Heathrow Airport as he was trying to leave the UK. Once charged with the crime, Ray was pressured by his second lawyer, Percy Foreman, to plead guilty on the grounds that the evidence was too strong against him and Foreman was not in good health and couldn’t offer a strong defence.

“Foreman was sent in with the purpose of replacing the original lawyers,” Pepper says.

Foreman offered Ray $500 to get another lawyer if he pleaded guilty and even put this in writing. Ray would regret accepting this offer for the rest of his life. He tried unsuccessfully to rescind the guilty plea and get a trial for the next 30 years, finally dying in prison of cancer in 1998.

Pepper becomes convinced of Ray’s innocence

It was 10 years after the assassination before Pepper would even consider meeting with Ray. He had taken for granted at first that Ray was the assassin, but he was encouraged to meet him by Rev. Ralph Abernathy, who had succeeded King as President of the SCLC. Abernathy had remained unsatisfied with the official account of the shooting.

In the book, Pepper describes his first meeting with Ray in 1978 and how he quickly came to believe that Ray had not been the shooter and that the case was essentially still unsolved. It wasn’t until 1988 before Pepper became certain that Ray had not played any knowing part in the conspiracy, and at that point he agreed to represent him, which he did until his death.

Purveyors of the official story of the assassination have always claimed that Raul was an invention of Ray’s, and mainstream media accounts refer to this question as still unanswered even though Pepper not only found witnesses who described their connections to Raul, he actually found Raul himself with the help of witness Glenda Grabow (Pepper learned that his last name was Coelho). She identified Raul as someone she had known in Houston in 1963 and who around 1974, in a fit of rage, had implicated himself in the King assassination right before raping her. Grabow also identified Jack Ruby as someone who she had seen with Raul in 1963. This fascinating story is recounted both in An Act of State and The Plot to Kill King.

One of the most intriguing things to come out of both of these books is the account of a young FBI agent named Don Wilson who after the assassination was sent to check out a white Mustang with Alabama plates (Ray drove a white Mustang) that had been abandoned and that was thought to be connected to the assassination. Wilson opened the car door and some papers fell out. He examined them later and found a torn-out piece of a 1963 Dallas, Texas telephone directory. Written on the page was the name “Raul” and the initial “J” and a phone number, which turned out to be that of a Las Vegas night club run by Jack Ruby, the man who had shot Lee Harvey Oswald in the basement of the Dallas police station. A second piece of paper had a list of names with amounts of money beside each. Wilson decided to hold on to this evidence, fearing it would disappear forever if he turned it in. He held on to it for 29 years before making it available to Pepper and the King family.

The shooter revealed

Another incredible revelation in The Plot to Kill King is the identity of the man who appears to have fired the fatal shot. Pepper learned his identity from Lenny B. Curtis, who was a custodian at the Memphis Police Department rifle range. Curtis told Pepper this in 2003, and Pepper recorded a deposition with him but kept it confidential out of fear for Curtis’s life. Only after his death in 2013 did Pepper reveal what Curtis had said – that the shooter was Memphis police officer Frank Strausser.

“We had to be very careful about [Curtis’s safety],” Pepper says.

Curtis said to Pepper in his deposition that he heard Strausser say about King four or five months before the assassination that somebody was going to “. . . blow his motherfucking brains out.” He also described that Strausser had practised in the rifle range with a particular rifle that had been brought in four or five days earlier by a member of the fire department. That fireman had shown the rifle to Curtis and asked, “How would you like that scoundrel, that baby there?” When Curtis said it look like any other rifle, he replied, “No, this is a special one; that baby is special.” Lenny remembered that on the day of the assassination, Strausser spent the whole day practicing with it. (Strausser has given several conflicting accounts of where he was and what he was doing that day.)

After the assassination, Curtis says he was followed and intimidated by Strausser. Pepper writes:

Lenny said that he subsequently became aware that strange things were happening around him. His gas was strangely turned on once when he was about to enter his house. He had lit a cigarette, but as he opened the door he smelled gas and quickly put out the cigarette. A strange Lincoln was occasionally parked across the street from his apartment house. He was frightened. One morning when the car was there, he got into his own car and quickly drove off, and the strange car pulled out and followed him. He managed to see the driver. It was Strausser.

In the book, Pepper describes how he came to meet with Strausser, who he describes as a committed and devoted racist.

“He had no respect for black people at all,” Pepper says. “He wasn’t explicit about his racism. But he was not at all sympathetic to what Martin King was all about.”

In the hope of prompting an admission, Pepper lied and told him that he had been implicated in the killing by Loyd Jowers – but Strausser didn’t take the bait. Pepper also told Strausser that the footprints found in the bushes after the shooting were from size 13 shoes (which they were). Then he asked him about the size of his feet:

“He had a bit of a grin on his face, and he said ‘13 large,’” Pepper says.

Pepper also arranged to have cab driver Nathan Whitlock, who Strausser knew, tell him that there was a good possibility that he (Strausser) would be indicted for the shooting. He responded: “What are they going to indict me for, something I did 30 years ago?” Then he caught himself and added, “Or something I knew about 30 years ago?”

A threat to the powers that be

As Pepper explains, King was not only hated by the establishment as he rose to prominence in the 1960s, he was feared. Not only did he have the ability to move large numbers of people with his message of peace and tolerance, but he had designs on a political career. According to Pepper, King was planning to run for president on a third-party ticket with fellow anti-war activist Dr. Benjamin Spock. He was also causing panic in powerful circles because he intended to bring hundreds of thousands of poor people to an encampment in Washington, D.C. in the spring of 1968 to bring attention to the plight of the poor.

“They were terrified that the anger level when [the demonstrators] were not going to get what they wanted was going to rise to such a point where Martin was going to lose control of that group and the more radical among them would take it over and they’d have a revolution,” Pepper explains. “And they didn’t have the troops to put it down. That was a real fear that the Army had. And I think it was a justifiable fear.”

King would also have posed an increasing threat to the political establishment because he intended to become much more vocal in his opposition to the Vietnam War. He had been influenced by an article and photos by Pepper called, “The Children of Vietnam,” which was published in Ramparts Magazine in January 1967 and later reprinted in Look magazine. (The man who published the piece in Look, Bill Atwood, actually told Pepper he received a visit from former New York governor and ambassador to the Soviet Union Averill Harriman who passed on a message from President Johnson that he would appreciate it if Atwood never published anything by Pepper.)

Beyond King’s importance as a powerful force for justice, peace, and equality, he was also Pepper’s friend. And the lawyer/journalist had to deal with that loss as he sought the truth about who really killed King and fought for justice for the man falsely accused of his murder. He writes:

For me, this is a story rife with sadness, replete with massive accounts of personal and public deception and betrayal. Its revelations and experiences have produced in the writer a depression stemming from an unavoidable confrontation with the depths to which human beings, even those subject to professional codes of ethics, have fallen. In addition, there is an element of personal despair that has resulted from this long effort, which has made me even question the wisdom of undertaking this task. (page xiv, The Plot to Kill King)

But he did undertake it, and we should all be grateful that he did.



The original source of this article is Truth and Shadows
Copyright © Craig McKee, Truth and Shadows, 2018

https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-p...ital-an-interview-with-william-pepper/5544005
 

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PAT MCGRATH BIOGRAPHY

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The queen of American fashion, Vogue’s Anna Wintour, proclaimed her “the most influential makeup artist in the world.” Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II made her a Member of the Order of the British Empire for services to the fashion and beauty industry. It’s undeniable: Pat McGrath is the most influential and sought-after makeup artist in the world.

For more than two decades, Pat McGrath has been concepting, launching and developing luxury cosmetic brands, countless runway shows, breakthrough advertising campaigns and editorial spreads.

Her ascent to the pinnacle of fashion began in the 1990s with an introduction to legendary lensman Steven Meisel by supermodel Amber Valleta. Fast friends and symbiotic collaborators, they’ve created every cover and lead editorial story for every issue of Vogue Italia, indisputably iconic images for leading global publications and countless brand-defining campaigns.

Each season, Pat McGrath conceptualizes and creates beauty looks for more than 60 ready-to-wear and couture shows in Milan, Paris, London and New York for a luminous roster of the world’s most prestigious brands and visionary designers: Prada, Miu Miu, Dolce & Gabbana, Givenchy, Gucci, Lanvin, Louis Vuitton, Versace, Maison Margiela, Yohji Yamamoto, Valentino, Bottega Veneta, Balenciaga, Nina Ricci, Calvin Klein, Loewe, and Alexander McQueen, to name a select few.

With her incomparable mastery and iconoclastic vision, Pat McGrath has transformed the beauty industry. Name any trend of the past two decades, and you’ll find her at its origin, from 1990s dewy skin to no-retouching-necessary foundation specifically designed for this decade’s selfies.

When Giorgio Armani hired her to develop and launch a line of cosmetics in 1999, the minimalist maestro said, “I was struck by the way she interpreted colour and by her ideas about beauty and femininity.”

Engaged as Global Beauty Creative Design Director by Procter & Gamble in 2004, Pat McGrath oversees Covergirl, Max Factor and created Dolce & Gabbana: The Makeup. Recently, she also designed and launched Gucci’s debut cosmetic collection. “She is a terrific business partner. Our success is her success, and vice versa,” says Esi Eggleston Bracey, Vice President and General Manager of Procter & Gamble Cosmetics.

A true creator and innovator at the forefront of the multi-billion dollar global beauty industry with an ever-expanding reach on social media, her recent blockbuster success with PAT McGRATH LABS further proves that she’s poised to elevate beauty to even headier altitudes.

With a creative vision that’s made her a tour de force that touches everything from couture to club kids and street culture; her influence is everywhere, from screen to stage to digital: it’s undeniable, Pat McGrath knows no boundaries.

https://www.patmcgrath.com/pages/pat-mcgrath-biography


At $1 Billion, Pat McGrath Labs Is Officially Worth More Than Kylie Cosmetics
The legend just became more legendary.

BY LEAH PRINZIVALLI
JULY 20, 2018
Kylie Jenner made waves last week whenForbesannounced that she was on track to become theyoungest billionaire in history. Even more impressive, she's done it all with beauty products (and, of course, a leg up from her famous family). ButPat McGrath, the mother of all beauty innovators and runway makeup, is coming for Kylie's beauty billionaire title.

AsFashionistareports, New York City–based Eurazeo Brands announced on Monday that they had signed a $60 million deal to become a minority shareholder in McGrath's's eponymous beauty line,Pat McGrath Labs. The influx of cash means Pat McGrath Labs's external funding has jumped to $88 million. According toFashionista, industry sources estimate that the investment brings the company's valuation to more than $1 billion, a sizable jump ahead ofKylie Cosmetics' $800 million valuation. Pat McGrath Labs is also expected to bring in a whopping $60 million in sales in 2018, according toWWD.

"It has always been my dream to create an iconic beauty brand that goes beyond the usual limitations, that lives outside the parameters of what is expected," McGrath said of the funding deal in a press release. "I am thrilled to be working with the unique and expert team at Eurazeo Brands."

Jill Granoff, CEO of Eurazeo Brands, echoed McGrath's sentiments: "We are honored to be working with Pat, whose vision, talent, and trailblazing history in the beauty industry have set Pat McGrath Labs up to be one of the most authentic and innovative makeup brands to ever come to market. We're excited to combine our experience of building global beauty and fashion brands with Pat and her team's unmatched creativity and passion."

What's ahead for McGrath? In her statement, the legendary makeup artist described the next steps for the company as a continuation of her brand's "incredible trajectory." That includes expanding into 90 Sephora stores (they're currently in 54), continuing to release merchandise, and staying focused on their surprise "product drop" strategy.

https://www.allure.com/story/pat-mc...FrIWVIc05jFM5CWdWQy92QTzge3tW5VJVjz0MrY2bcjHY
 

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In 1943 the Detroit rebellion occurred. The tragedy happened as Black renters attempted to enter their homes in a newly developed housing project in the Motor City.

As WW II ended, Blacks who (through the great migration) believed they were heading to a promised land found a northern bigotry every bit as pervasive and virulent as what they thought they had left behind in the Deep South. And southern whites brought their own traditional prejudices with them as both races journeyed northward. On Sept. 29, 1942 a housing project planned for the newcomers began. The project was named Sojourner Truth in memory of the female Negro leader and poet of Civil War days.

Despite being completed on Dec. 15, no tenants moved into the homes because of mounting opposition from the white neighborhood. On Jan. 20, 1942, Washington informed the Housing Commission that the Sojourner Truth project would be for whites and another site would be selected for Black workers. But when a suitable site for Blacks could not be found, Washington housing authorities agreed to allow blacks into the finished homes.

On Feb. 27, with a cross burning in a field near the homes, 150 angry whites picketed the project vowing to keep out any Black homeowners. By dawn the following day, the crowd had grown to 1,200, many of whom were armed. The first Black tenants, rent paid and leases signed, arrived at 9 a.m. but left the area fearing trouble. It wasn't long in coming.

Fighting began when two Blacks in a car attempted to run through the picket line. Clashes between white and Black groups continued into the afternoon when 16 mounted police attempted to break up the fighting. Tear gas and shotgun shells were flying through the air. Officials announced an indefinite postponement of the move. Detroit newspapers, union leaders, and many other whites campaigned for the government to allow the Black workers to move into the homes.

The families, having given up whatever shelter they had in anticipation of their new homes, were left with no place to go and were temporarily housed with other families in the Brewster Homes and other sites around Detroit.
 

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‘Green Book’ Helped Keep African Americans Safe on the Road
The cover of an issue of the segregation era Green Book for African American motorists
January 10, 2013 | BY Maria Goodavage
POSTED IN Civil Rights
MORE ABOUT Soul Food Junkies
The Negro Motorist Green Book promised safer travel without embarrassment.
In Soul Food Junkies (airing 10 p.m. Jan. 14 on Independent Lens; check local listings), filmmaker Byron Hurt briefly describes what it used to be like for African Americans to travel in the United States. He talks about how blacks would take along boxed lunches in order to avoid being turned away from restaurants or dining cars. And he mentions in passing a guide called The Negro Motorist Green Book, later known as The Negro Travelers’ Green Book, or more commonly, simply The Green Book.

Because of the limitations of the film’s length, the documentary couldn’t devote much time exploring this sidebar in black history. So we decided to delve a little more deeply into the guide many considered indispensable for safe and “embarrassment-free” travel.


The Green Book
, which was published from 1936 until the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, listed establishments across the U.S. (and eventually North America) that welcomed blacks during a time when segregation and Jim Crow laws often made travel difficult — and sometimes dangerous.

“Carry The Green Book with you. You may need it,” advises the cover of the 1949 edition. And under that, a quote from Mark Twain, which is heartbreaking in this context: “Travel is fatal to prejudice.”

The Green Book became very popular, with 15,000 copies sold per edition in its heydey. It was a necessary part of road trips for many families.

As horrendous as some of the issues African Americans were faced with, the guide referred to them in a sideways, almost genteel way. Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to the spring 1956 edition:

Millions of people hit the road each year, to get away from their old surroundings, to see and learn how people live, and meet new and old friends.

Modern travel has given millions of people an opportunity to see the wonders of the world. Thousands and thousands of dollars are spent each year on various modes of transportation. Money spent in this manner brings added revenue to tradesmen throughout the country.

The white traveler has had no difficulty in getting accommodations, but with the Negro it has been different. He, before the advent of a Negro travel guide, had to depend on word of mouth, and many times accommodations were not available.

Now things are different. The Negro traveler can depend on The Green Book for all the information he wants, and has a wide selection to choose from. Hence this guide has made traveling more popular, without encountering embarrassing situations.

The tone was the same throughout the guide’s history. Wendell P. Alston wrote in the 1949 edition that, “The Negro traveler’s inconveniences are many and they are increasing because today so many more are traveling, individually and in groups.” Inconveniences?
Embarrassments? They abounded, to be sure, but the guide tended not to directly allude to the genuine dangers faced by black travelers in certain areas.

The Green Book, with its list of hotels, boarding houses, restaurants, beauty shops, barber shops and various other services can most certainly help solve your travel problems,” Alston wrote. “It was the idea of Victor H. Green, the publisher, in introducing The Green Book, to save the travelers of his race as many difficulties and embarrassments as possible.”

Green, a Harlem postal worker and activist, thought of the guide in 1932, and four years later the first edition rolled out. Writes Novera C. Dashiell in the spring 1956 edition:

The idea crystallized when, not only himself but several friends and acquaintances complained of the difficulties encountered; oftentimes painful embarrassments suffered which ruined a vacation or business trip.

Our leaders and educators look forward to the day when as a racial group, we will enjoy the rights and privileges guaranteed us, but as of now withheld in certain areas of these United States.

In looking ahead…A trip to the moon? Who knows? It may not be so improbable as it sounds. A New York scientist is already offering for sale pieces of real estate on the moon. When travel of this kind becomes available, you can be sure your Green Book will have the recommended listings!

Green and others involved in the book had a wish that the publishers of most guidebooks and periodicals don’t: They looked forward to the time they would have to cease publishing.

“There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published,” Green himself wrote in one introduction. “That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States.”

For further reading: Click here to see the 1949 book in its entirety. The spring 1956 edition is available online. An award-winning book, Ruth and the Green Book, is an excellent fictional introduction to The Green Book for children. And here’s an interactive map of the listings in the 1956 edition.

http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/blog/green-book-helped-keep-african-americans-safe-on-the-road/



Those are the happy days WASP's are crying about missing. "When everyone knew their place."
 

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Tignon Law of the 18th Century


BLACK HISTORY
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ByJameelah Nasheed
|
Apr 10 2018, 3:39pm
When Black Women Were Required By Law to Cover Their Hair
In the 1700s, the Tignon Laws forced Black women in Louisiana to wear head wraps because their beautiful, elaborate hairstyles were considered a threat to the status quo.
  • An increase in the free African and African-American populations of New Orleans. This was because some people of African descent were newly able to make money, buy their freedom, and subsequently increase the free Black population. And with that came an increase in interracial relationships, to the dismay of colonial authorities. As Ze Winters notes inThe Mulatta Concubine: Terror, Intimacy, Freedom, and Desire in the Black Transatlantic,“Charles III of Spain demanded that the colonial governor of Louisiana ‘establish public order and proper standards of morality,’ with specific reference to a ‘large class of ‘mulattos’ and particularly “mulatto’ women.”

    During this time, women of African descent were known to wear their hair in elaborate styles (yes, we’ve been fly for centuries). By incorporating feathers and jewels into their hairstyles, they showcased the full magic and glory of their gravity-defying strands, and appeared wealthier than they actually were. As a result, these enticing styles attracted the attention of men—including white men.

    To address this “problem,” in 1786, Spanish colonial Governor Don Esteban Miró enacted the Edict of Good Government, also referred to as theTignon Laws, which “prohibited Creole women of color from displaying ‘excessive attention to dress’ in the streets of New Orleans.” Instead, they were forced to wear a tignon (scarf or handkerchief) over their hair to show that they belonged to the slave class, whether they were enslaved or not. In The Devil’s Lane: Sex and Race in the Early South, historian Virginia M. Gould notes that Miró hoped the laws would control women “who had become too light skinned or who dressed too elegantly, or who competed too freely with white women for status and thus threatened the social order.”

    1523385545766-463px-Agostino_Brunias_-_A_West_Indian_Flower_Girl_and_Two_other_Free_Women_of_Color_-_Google_Art_Project.jpeg

    "A West Indian Flower Girl and Two other Free Women of Color" by Augostino Brunias (1769) via Wikimedia Commons.
    In response to the laws, Creole women did cover their hair, but they did so with intricate fabrics and jewels (think Angela Bassett inAmerican Horror Storyas real-life New Orleans sorceress, Marie Laveau). As Baton Rouge curator Kathe Hambrick put it in a recent interview with The Advocate, “they owned it and made it a part of their fashion.” Instead of a cover-up, the wraps became a symbol style. And, of course, the women continued to attract men with their extravagant hairdos.

    Once the United States took ownership of Louisiana through the 1803 Louisiana Purchase, the Tignon Laws were no longer enforced. Still, some enslaved and free women of African descent continued to wear headwraps as a symbol of resistance to white colonialism.

    By the end of the 19th century, however, many Black women began straightening their hair in order to blend into a society that had established a Eurocentric ideal of beauty. This started with the use of hot combs (invented by a French hairdresser in 1872) and grew after the influence of Madam C.J. Walker, who became the first Black female millionaire after she improved the hot comb and produced various products for straightening the hair of Black women. Then when the Black pride movements of the 60s and 70s took place decades later, the afro became the hairstyle of choice. It was seen as a form of resistance against the white status quo.

    So where are we now? In the centuries since, we’ve seen the abolition of slavery, the Civil Rights Movement, and the first Black president of the United States. But have things changed for Black women’s hair? In a sense, yes. My hair is no longer criminal (despite the fact that my skin appears to be, considering the fates of Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Alton Sterling, and many others), but it still causes some people discomfort.

    Still today, the act of not manipulating my hair is perceived as radical to a certain extent. It’s 2018, and natural hair still catches many people off guard. It fascinates people. So much so, that I, like many Black women, am forced to bob and weave as I politely sing Solange’s black girl anthem,“Don’t Touch My Hair,” when curious hands come my way.

    For More Stories Like This, Sign Up for Our Newsletter

    Nonetheless, times have changed. Here we are, taking off our metaphoric tignons and embracing our kinks and curls publicly. From the world bearing witness to women like Lupita Nyong’o and Viola Davis of Black Pantheras they grace screens and stages worldwide, to our former First Lady rocking her natural hair. According to research firm Mintel, 71% of Black adults wore their hair natural at least once in 2016 and “Black spending on relaxers dropped 30.8% between 2011 and 2016.” More and more Black women, like myself, are becoming comfortable with our hair standing out and standing up. We’re slowly, but surely, changing society’s definition of beauty.

    So, to every kinky-haired girl looking in the mirror frustrated with what they see, cringing as the comb gets stuck in their coily strands, tempted by the allure of the “creamy crack:” remember that history proves the actual reason your hair is considered unruly is that it’s so beautiful, it has the potential to upend white supremacy. https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/arti...air-illegal-tignon-laws-new-orleans-louisiana
 

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A Black History Moment: George Glenn. Born 1850 died in 1931. George Glenn, black traildriver, son of Wash Glenn, was born into slavery on March 8, 1850, probably in Colorado County, Texas. He was raised on the ranch of Robert B. Johnson of Columbus and trained in ranching activities and as a trail cook. After the Civil War and emancipation, Glenn evidently continued at the Johnson ranch as a cowhand. In the spring of 1870 he accompanied Johnson on a cattle drive to Abilene, Kansas. At the Red River, when a fresh group of cowhands displaced the original ones, Johnson and Glenn continued with the new group to Abilene, where they sold the herd. Johnson fell ill and died at age thirty-six in Abilene in July 1870. Glenn had his employer embalmed and buried in a metal casket in the area. The following September he decided to bring Johnson's body back to Texas for burial and had the casket disinterred and placed in a wagon. Reportedly, Glenn traveled alone with Johnson's body for forty-two days across three states, to arrive in Columbus in November 1871. Historian notes that famous Western Miniseries "Lonesome Dove” was lifted from the life of a black trail driver born into slavery named George Glenn. “There’s no way Larry McMurtry would have written that story without knowing about George Glenn."
 

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Levittown Pennsylvania in 1957 STATE-SANCTIONED VIOLENCE
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Levittown, Pennsylvania, 1954. A crowd mobilizes before proceeding to harass the first African American family to move into the all-white development.

IN 1952, WILBUR GARY, a building contractor, was living with his family in one of Richmond, California’s, public housing projects. He was an African American navy war veteran, a former shipyard worker, and vice-commander of his American Legion post. The Gary family needed to find a new residence—their apartment complex was slated for demolition because the federal Lanham Act had required government projects for war workers to be temporary. A fellow navy veteran, Lieutenant Commander Sidney Hogan, was moving out of Rollingwood, the suburb just outside Richmond built during World War II with an FHA requirement that the suburb be covered with restrictive covenants. Four years earlier, though, the Supreme Court had ruled that covenants were not enforceable, so Hogan sold his property to Wilbur Gary and his wife.

Nonetheless, the Rollingwood Improvement Association, a homeowners group, insisted that its covenants gave it the right to evict African Americans. The NAACP came to the family’s aid and dared the group to try to enforce the covenant. The neighbors then attempted to buy back the Gary house for nearly 15 percent more than the Garys had paid. They refused the offer.

Soon after the Garys arrived, a mob of about 300 whites gathered outside their house, shouting epithets, hurling bricks (one crashed through the front window), and burning a cross on the lawn. For several days, police and county sheriff deputies refused to step in, so the NAACP found it necessary to organize its own guards. A Communist Party–affiliated civil rights group also provided help. The journalist Jessica Mitford, in her book A Fine Old Conflict, described her participation in the group’s efforts, which included escorting Mrs. Gary and the children to work and school and patrolling nearby streets to alert the Garys to mobs that might be gathering.

Meanwhile, the NAACP pressed California governor Earl Warren, Attorney General Brown, and the local district attorney to step in. They eventually did so, ordering the city police and county sheriff to provide the family with protection. Still, the protests and harassment continued for another month, with continued pleas from Wilbur Gary and civil rights groups for the police to intervene. No arrests, however, were made. The sheriff claimed that he did not have enough manpower to prevent the violence. Yet a single arrest is probably all that would have been required to persuade the mob to withdraw.

I

AT ABOUT the same time, the Levitt company began to build its second large development, this one in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Philadelphia. Built post-Shelley, the Pennsylvania project did not have restrictive covenants, but the FHA continued to support Levitt and other developers only if they refused to sell to African Americans. Robert Mereday, the African American trucker who had delivered material to Levitt’s Long Island project, won another contract with the company to deliver sheetrock to the Bucks County site. He settled his family in an African American neighborhood in nearby Bristol. His son, Robert Jr., attended Bristol High School, graduating in 1955. He had a girlfriend there, Shirley Wilson, and he recalls that the Wilson family had attempted to move to Levittown but was rebuffed by the Levitt company despite the negative publicity that the Wilsons’ rejection had generated.

I mention the “flap” (the term Robert Mereday, Jr., uses in recalling the Wilson incident) because such instances were more commonplace than historians can document, and they must have had a profound effect on the awareness within the African American community of how their housing options were limited. It is remarkable that African American families continued to make the attempt to break into white suburban life—as they did at the Levittown in Bucks County.

By the late 1950s, white homeowners wanting to leave that development realized that it would be to their benefit to sell to African Americans who, because they were desperate for housing, would pay more than whites. So it happened that in 1957 an African American veteran, Bill Myers, and his wife Daisy, found a Levittown homeowner willing to sell.

Like many Levittown residents, Myers had served in World War II. He was discharged as a staff sergeant and held a steady job as a lab technician in the engineering department of a factory in nearby Trenton, New Jersey. Daisy Myers was a college graduate, and Bill Myers was taking courses toward a degree in electrical engineering. When no bank would provide a mortgage because the Myers family was black, a New York City philanthropist offered to give them a private mortgage, and Bill and Daisy Myers, with their three children, occupied their new home.

A few days later, the U.S. Post Office mail carrier, a federal government employee performing his official duties, noticed that he was delivering mail to an African American family. As he made his rounds, he shouted, “******* have moved into Levittown!” As many as 600 white demonstrators assembled in front of the house and pelted the family and its house with rocks. Some rented a unit next door to the Myerses and set up a clubhouse from which the Confederate flag flew and music blared all night. Police arrived but were ineffective. When Mr. Myers requested around-the-clock protection, the police chief told him that the department couldn’t afford it. The town commissioners accused the state police of “meddling” because troopers were dispatched when the police failed to end the harassment. It was a needless worry; the state troopers also declined to perform their duty.

For two months law enforcement stood by as rocks were thrown, crosses were burned, the Ku Klux Klan symbol was painted on the wall of the clubhouse next door, and the home of a family that had supported the Myerses was vandalized. Some policemen, assigned to protect the African American family, stood with the mob, joking and encouraging its participants. One sergeant was demoted to patrolman because he objected to orders he had been given not to interfere with the rioters.

The district attorney approached Bill Myers and offered to purchase his property for a price substantially above what he had paid. Even though riot leaders were well known, for several weeks the police made no attempt to arrest them or to shut down the clubhouse. The federal government did not discipline or reprimand the mail carrier. Eventually, the Pennsylvania attorney general prosecuted some of the rioters for harassment and obtained an injunction against its continuation. But Bill and Daisy Myers, feeling constantly under threat, lasted only another four years; in 1961, they sold their Levittown home and returned to the African American neighborhood in York, Pennsylvania, where they had previously lived.

Does the failure of police to protect the Gary and Myers families constitute government-sponsored, de jure segregation? When police officers stood by without preventing the intimidation these families endured, were the African American families’ constitutional rights violated, or were they victims of rogue police officers for whom the state was not responsible? Certainly, we cannot hold the government accountable for every action of racially biased police officers. Yet if these officers’ superiors were aware of racially discriminatory activities conducted under color of law, as they surely were, and either encouraged these activities or took inadequate steps to restrain them, then these were no longer merely rogue actions but expressed state policy that violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantees of due process and equal protection.

If we apply that standard to police behavior in Rollingwood and in Levittown, we must conclude that law enforcement officers conspired to violate the civil rights of the Garys and of the Myerses and that this unremedied conspiracy of government authorities contributed to de juresegregation of the communities for whose welfare they were responsible.

II

WHAT THE Gary and the Myers families experienced was not an aberration. During much of the twentieth century, police tolerance and promotion of cross burnings, vandalism, arson, and other violent acts to maintain residential segregation was systematic and nationwide.

The attacks on African American pioneers, sanctioned by elected officials and law enforcement officers, could not have been attributable to whites’ discomfort with a lower social class of neighbors. Wilbur and Borece Gary and Bill and Daisy Myers were solidly middle class. Because more affluent communities were closed to them, the African Americans who were victimized by such mob action often had higher occupational and social status than the white neighbors who assaulted them. This circumstance belies the oft-repeated claim that resistance to integration has been based on fears of deteriorating neighborhood quality. Indeed, when African Americans did succeed in moving to previously white neighborhoods, they frequently were “on their best behavior,” giving no cause, or pretext, for complaint, taking pains to make certain that their homes and lawns were better cared for than others on their blocks.

Events in Chicago were only slightly more pervasive than elsewhere. Although most frequent in the post–World War II period, state-sanctioned violence to prevent integration began at the turn of the twentieth century, during the beginnings of the Jim Crow era.

In 1897, white property owners in Chicago’s Woodlawn neighborhood “declared war” on African Americans, driving all African American families from the area with threats of violence, unimpeded by public authority. A decade later in Hyde Park, adjacent to Woodlawn, the Hyde Park Improvement Protective Club organized boycotts of merchants who sold to African Americans and offered to buy out the homes of African Americans who lived in the area. If these tactics were unsuccessful, whites engaged in vandalism, throwing rocks through African Americans’ windows. The leader of the club was a prominent attorney, and the club published a newsletter promoting segregation, so it would not have been difficult for authorities to interfere with the conspiracy, but no measures were undertaken.

From 1917 to 1921, when the Chicago ghetto was first being rigidly defined, there were fifty-eight firebombings of homes in white border areas to which African Americans had moved, with no arrests or prosecutions—despite the deaths of two African American residents. In one case, explosives were lobbed at the home of Richard B. Harrison, a well-known black Shakespearean actor who had purchased a house in a white neighborhood. The bombs were thrown from a vacant and locked apartment in a building next door. The police did not make a serious attempt to find the perpetrator, failing even to question the building’s occupants, although few possible conspirators could have had access to the apartment.

Nearly thirty of the fifty-eight firebombings were concentrated in a six-month period in the spring of 1919, leading up to one of the nation’s worst race riots, set off when a white youth stoned an African American swimmer who had drifted toward a public beach area, generally understood to be for whites’ use only. The swimmer drowned, and policemen at the scene refused to arrest the attacker. Subsequent battles between whites and blacks left thirty-eight dead (twenty-three of whom were African American) and poisoned race relations in Chicago for years afterward.

Interracial violence continued unabated. In the first five years after World War II, 357 reported “incidents” were directed against African Americans attempting to rent or buy in Chicago’s racial border areas. From mid-1944 to mid-1946, there were forty-six attacks on the homes of African Americans in white communities adjacent to Chicago’s overcrowded black neighborhoods; of these, twenty-nine were arson-bombings, resulting in at least three deaths. In the first ten months of 1947 alone, twenty-six arson-bombings occurred, without an arrest.

In 1951, Harvey Clark, an African American Chicago bus driver and air force veteran, rented an apartment in all-white Cicero, a Chicago suburb. At first, the police forcefully attempted to prevent him, his wife Johnnetta, and two small children from occupying the apartment. They threatened him with arrest and worse if the family did not depart. “Get out of Cicero,” the police chief told the real estate agent who rented the apartment, adding, “Don’t come back . . . or you’ll get a bullet through you.” When Harvey Clark got a court injunction ordering the police to cease interfering with his occupancy and “to afford him full protection from any attempt to so restrain him,” the police ignored it, making no effort, for example, to impede a group of teenagers who were pelting the apartment’s windows with stones. When the Clarks refused to leave, a mob of about 4,000 rioted, raiding the apartment, destroying the fixtures, and throwing the family’s belongings out the window onto the lawn where they were set ablaze. The officers present arrested no one. Time magazine reported that the police “acted like ushers politely handling the overflow at a football stadium.”

Governor Adlai Stevenson mobilized the National Guard to restore order. Although 118 rioters were arrested, a Cook County grand jury did not indict a single one. The grand jury, however, did indict Harvey Clark, his real estate agent, his NAACP attorney, and the white landlady who rented the apartment to him as well as her attorney on charges of inciting a riot and conspiring to lower property values. Thirty-six years later, when an African American family again attempted to live in Cicero, it was met with firebombs and rifle shots. Nobody was convicted of these attacks, either. Cicero’s council president boasted after the clash that “[t]he area is well-secured.”

In 1953, the Chicago Housing Authority leased apartments to African American families for the first time in its Trumbull Park project in the all-white South Deering neighborhood. Ten years of sporadic mob violence ensued. The African American families required police protection during the entire period. As many as 1200 policemen were deployed to guard African American families on the day a group of them moved in, but little was done to end the attacks by arresting and prosecuting the perpetrators. A neighborhood association, the South Deering Improvement Association, led the violence, but its officers were not charged with any crime. A few bomb throwers were arrested but only after police had passively watched them launch their bombs. They faced only minor charges. An observer concluded that “sympathy for the white rioters on the part of the average policeman . . . [was] extreme.” Addressing a South Deering Improvement Association meeting, the chief of the Chicago Park District Police commiserated with his audience that “it is unfortunate the colored people chose to come out here.” The mob’s attacks were successful. The Chicago Housing Authority fired Elizabeth Wood, its executive director who had authorized the leasing of apartments in previously all-white projects to African Americans.*

In 1964, a white civil rights activist in Bridgeport, Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley’s all-white neighborhood, rented an apartment to African American college students. A mob gathered and pelted the apartment with rocks. Police entered the apartment, removed the students’ belongings, and told them when they returned from school that they had been evicted.

Events in Detroit and its suburbs were similar. During the immediate postwar period, the city saw more than 200 acts of intimidation and violence to deter African Americans from moving to predominantly white neighborhoods. Such an epidemic was possible because police could be counted on to stand by, making no effort to stop, much less to prevent, the assaults. In 1968, an official of the Michigan Civil Rights Commission reported that “our experience has been that nearly all attempts by black families to move to Detroit’s suburbs have been met with harassment.”

In the Philadelphia area, the attacks encountered by the Myers family were not unusual. In the first six months of 1955, 213 violent incidents ensured that most African Americans remained in the North Philadelphia ghetto. Some incidents involved move-in violence like that experienced by the Myerses; others involved white teenagers defending what they considered a neighborhood boundary that African Americans should not cross. Although in some cases perpetrators might have been difficult to identify, it is improbable that police were incapable of finding a sufficient number to prevent repetitive conflict.

In the Los Angeles area, cross burnings, dynamite bombings, rocks thrown through windows, graffiti, and other acts of vandalism, as well as numerous phone threats, greeted African Americans who found housing in neighborhoods just outside their existing areas of concentration. In 1945, an entire family—father, mother, and two children—was killed when its new home in an all-white neighborhood was blown up. Of the more than one hundred incidents of move-in bombings and vandalism that occurred in Los Angeles between 1950 and 1965, only one led to an arrest and prosecution—and that was because the California attorney general took over the case after local police and prosecutors claimed they were unable to find anyone to charge.

Although the 1968 Fair Housing Act made violence to prevent neighborhood integration a federal crime and the Department of Justice prosecuted several cases, frequent attacks on African Americans attempting to leave predominantly black areas continued into the 1980s. The Southern Poverty Law Center found that in 1985–86, only about one-quarter of these incidents were prosecuted, but the share in which charges were brought grew rapidly from 1985 to 1990, up to 75 percent. That such an increase in the rate of prosecution was possible suggests how tolerant of such crimes police and prosecutors had previously been. Still, the center documented 130 cases of move-in violence in 1989 alone.

During the mid-twentieth century, local police and the FBI went to extraordinary lengths to infiltrate and disrupt liberal and left-wing political groups as well as organized crime syndicates. That they did not act similarly in the case of a nationwide terror campaign against African Americans who integrated previously white communities should be deemed, at the least, complicity in the violence. Had perpetrators been held to account in even a few well-publicized cases, many thousands of others might have been prevented.

Nor can the failure to control mob assaults be blamed on police officers who acted without explicit authorization of their superiors. In recent years we have seen several examples of the choices that confront public officials in analogous situations. When a police officer has killed or beaten an African American man with apparent racial motivation, we now expect that the officer’s superiors will fire him (or her) or, if there is doubt about whether a citizen’s civil rights were violated, will suspend the officer, pending an investigation. If superiors fail to take such measures, we expect still higher authorities to intervene. If they do not, we can reasonably assume that the police officer’s approach fit within the bounds of what his or her superiors consider appropriate response and reflect governmental policy.

III

IN 1954, Andrew Wade—an African American electrical contractor and Korean War navy veteran—wanted to purchase a house in a middle-class African American neighborhood of Louisville, Kentucky, but couldn’t find anything suitable. A friend and prominent left-wing activist, Carl Braden, suggested he look at a white middle-class community instead; Braden and his wife, Anne, then agreed to buy a house for Andrew Wade and his wife, Charlotte. The Wades found a property in Shively, an all-white suburb, which the Bradens bought, signing over the deed.

When the Wades and their child were moving in, a crowd gathered in front, and a cross was burned on an empty lot next door. On the first evening the family spent at home, a rock crashed through its front window with a message tied to it, “****** Get Out,” and later that night, ten rifle shots were fired through the glass of its kitchen door. Under the watch of a police guard, demonstrations continued for a month until the house was dynamited. The police guard said he saw nothing. There was one arrest following the Wades’ moving in: of Andrew Wade and a friend for “breach of the peace,” because Mr. Wade had failed to notify the police that the friend would be visiting. The police chief was familiar enough with the bombers to warn Carl Braden that the people responsible for blowing up the Wade property were targeting the Braden home next.

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Charlotte, Rosemary, and Andrew Wade, after rocks were hurled through the windows of their Shively, Kentucky, home in 1954.

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A policeman inspects damage after the Wades’ house was dynamited.

Although the chief acknowledged that both the dynamiter and the cross burners had confessed, the perpetrators were not indicted. Instead, a grand jury indicted Carl and Anne Braden, along with four others whom the jury accused of conspiring to stir up racial conflict by selling the house to African Americans. The formal charge was “sedition.” Charges against the others were dropped, but Carl Braden was sentenced to fifteen years in prison (he eventually won release on appeal), and the Wades went back to Louisville’s African American area.

Such violence in Kentucky did not end in the 1950s. In 1985, Robert and Martha Marshall bought a home in Sylvania, another suburb of Louisville that had remained exclusively white. Their house was firebombed on the night they moved in. A month later, a second arson attack destroyed the house, a few hours before a Ku Klux Klan meeting at which a speaker boasted that no African Americans would be permitted to live in Sylvania. The Marshall family then sued a county police officer who had been identified as a member of the Klan. The officer testified that about half of the forty Klan members known to him were also in the police department and that his superiors condoned officers’ Klan membership, as long as the information did not become public.†

Many years ago I read The Wall Between, Anne Braden’s memoir that describes how she and her husband were prosecuted by the state of Kentucky for helping Andrew Wade attempt to live in a white neighborhood. I remembered that account when, in 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court prohibited the Louisville school district from carrying out a racial integration plan, on the ground that the segregation of Louisville is “a product not of state action but of private choices.”

State-sponsored violence was a means, along with many others, by which all levels of government maintained segregation in Louisville and elsewhere. The Wades and Marshalls were only two middle-class families confronted with hostile state power when they tried to cross the residential color line. How many other middle-class African Americans in Louisville were intimidated from attempting to live in neighborhoods of their own choosing after hearing of the Wade and Marshall experiences? Did the next generation imbibe a fear of integration from their parents? How long do the memories of such events last? How long do they continue to intimidate?

___________

* Wood had been pressing the Chicago Housing Authority board to abandon its practice of segregation. The CHA’s purported reason for firing Wood was that, without authorization, she had disclosed to the press her futile efforts to persuade the CHA to follow its stated nondiscrimination policy.

† Two perpetrators, one of whom was the brother-in-law of the Klan member at whose house a Klan rally was held, were convicted of committing the initial firebombing, but no arrests were made of those responsible for the later, more serious arson attack. It can be presumed that if a police department in which twenty officers were Klan members wanted to identify the perpetrators, it could have done so.

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Lexx Diamond

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8

LOCAL TACTICS
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Miami, 1966. Mayor Chuck Hall sends the first wrecking ball into homes of African Americans near downtown, fulfilling the city’s plan to relocate them to a distant ghetto.

WHEN FRANK STEVENSON and his carpoolers needed housing near the new Ford plant, FHA- and VA-insured subdivisions were rapidly filling the area between Milpitas and the African American communities of Richmond and Oakland. The most active developer was David Bohannon, who had built the whites-only Rollingwood subdivision just outside Richmond in 1943. The following year, he created the massive whites-only San Lorenzo Village about five miles south of the Oakland border. With more than 5,000 units and 17,000 residents, San Lorenzo Village was the nation’s largest wartime government-insured project, intended for workers at naval shipyards and support factories. Like the homes in Rollingwood, each house included a bedroom with a separate entrance, so the owner could rent it to another war worker.

The development was financed by a seven-million-dollar FHA-authorized loan from the Bank of America and the American Trust Company. As was the case with other FHA developments, houses were sold at relatively low prices so as to be within reach of war workers, and the deeds included restrictive covenants to prevent future resales to African Americans. Within easy commuting distance of Milpitas, San Lorenzo Village was an ideal location for Ford workers. Sales brochures in the early to mid-1950s, when Ford workers would have been seeking housing in the area, assured prospective buyers that the village was “a safe investment” because “farsighted protective restrictions . . . permanently safeguard your investment.”

I

IN 1955, Bohannon began developing Sunnyhills, a project in Milpitas itself. After Western Pacific announced plans to create its new industrial zone, other builders had also obtained FHA guarantees to construct whites-only, single-family subdivisions in the area. One, Milford Village, a development of 1,500 units on unincorporated land just outside the town boundaries, was guaranteed by the VA and required little or no down payment for veterans and low monthly payments.

When it became apparent that no existing Milpitas-area development would sell or rent to black workers, the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a Quaker group committed to racial integration, offered to assist Ben Gross—the chair of the Ford plant’s union housing committee—by finding a developer who would agree to build an interracial subdivision. The AFSC had an existing campaign to press (unsuccessfully) Richmond to desegregate its public housing and find adequate, integrated residences for its African American population being displaced by the demolition of federal war projects. The group also operated a settlement house in North Richmond with after-school tutoring, dances and other youth recreational opportunities, a well-baby clinic for mothers, a day care program for children of working parents, a small playground for toddlers, and a meeting room for community organizations. Ford workers were involved in all these activities.

The rapid growth of the Milpitas area had resulted in some overbuilding, and several new subdivisions had unsold units that were affordable to Ford workers. Despite this excess inventory, the AFSC was unsuccessful in persuading any existing developer to sell to African Americans.

The first builder recruited by the AFSC selected a plot in an unincorporated area south of Mountain View, a Santa Clara County community about ten miles west of Milpitas and accessible to other growing industrial areas in Silicon Valley. The AFSC, however, could not find a financial institution in the San Francisco Bay or San Jose areas willing to provide funds for a development that would permit sales to African Americans. After a few months, an AFSC official flew to New York to meet with a Quaker vice-president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company who, despite his skepticism about the feasibility of integrated suburban development, agreed to issue a loan for initial construction. Only as a result of this Quaker connection was the AFSC able to obtain a financial commitment. It may also have helped that Metropolitan Life was a bit chastened by the reversal of its racial segregation policy by New York city and state legislative bodies.

But when the builder’s intent to sell both to blacks and whites became known, the Santa Clara Board of Supervisors rezoned the site from residential to industrial use. When he found a second plot, Mountain View officials told him that they would never grant the necessary approvals. He next identified a third tract of land in another town near the Ford plant; when officials discovered that the project would not be segregated, the town adopted a new zoning law increasing the minimum lot size from 6,000 to 8,000 square feet, making the project unfeasible for working-class buyers. After he attempted to develop a fourth site on which he had an option, the seller of the land canceled the option upon learning that the project would be integrated. At that point, the builder gave up.

Ben Gross then recruited another builder who proposed to the union that he create two projects, one integrated and the other all white. Because white buyers would be directed to the all-white project, it was apparent that the plan for a nominally integrated project would result in an all-black one. The builder proposed to construct the white project in a suburban area and the integrated one in a less desirable environment—a plot sandwiched between the Ford plant and two tracts zoned for heavy industry.

Workers at Ford, members of the United Auto Workers (UAW), were divided over whether to accept this proposal, and at the next local union election, candidates who opposed the two-project concept challenged those who were in favor. It was a difficult decision, because the union was faced with choosing between segregated housing and no new housing for any union members, black or white. It was a dilemma similar to the one confronted by Hubert Humphrey and other congressional liberals when they attempted to enact President Truman’s housing proposal. But the union decided differently from the congressional liberals. Although the membership was overwhelmingly white, the union adopted a policy that it would support only developers who would commit to integrated housing.

A San Jose businessman in the meatpacking business, with no previous experience as a developer, obtained a tract adjoining David Bohannon’s all-white Sunnyhills project and proposed an all-black development. When the UAW and AFSC became aware of these plans, they persuaded the developer to construct an integrated project instead, and the union promised to promote the project to its white as well as to its African American members. For six months, the businessman sought financing, but every bank or thrift institution he approached, knowing that FHA backing would be unavailable, either refused to lend money for a project that was open to African Americans or agreed to lend only if he paid higher interest, a premium for integration ranging from an additional 5½ percent to an additional 9 percent. Such a payment would have greatly increased project costs and made the houses unaffordable to union members. The businessman advised the UAW that he would have to drop his plans. The union was able to persuade him to continue only by promising that the union itself would take responsibility for finding a lender. UAW and AFSC representatives again went to New York to ask Metropolitan Life to provide construction financing, which the insurance company agreed to do.

In January 1955, more than a year after Ford notified its Richmond workers that their jobs were going to Milpitas, and only a month and a half before the scheduled transfer of automobile assembly, the UAW was able to advise its black members in Richmond that a nondiscriminatory housing development, called Agua Caliente, was going to be available in the Milpitas area. By this time, many white workers had already found housing in racially restricted Santa Clara County neighborhoods.

David Bohannon’s company, however, remained fiercely opposed to an integrated project adjoining Sunnyhills, and after a San Francisco newspaper article revealed the plan to establish “the first subdivision in the Bay Area where Negro families will be sold homes without discrimination,” the company began to pressure the newly formed Milpitas City Council to prevent the construction of Agua Caliente by denying it access to sewer lines.

The sanitary district for Milpitas, whose chair was a member of the Santa Clara County board of supervisors and whose other members were the Milpitas mayor and a Milpitas city councilman, had advised the Agua Caliente builder that its fee for sewer access would be one hundred dollars an acre, based on the project’s anticipated use of about 3 percent of the sewer line’s capacity. The union and its builder estimated project costs and set sale prices using this figure; Metropolitan Life had extended its financing based on it. Under pressure from David Bohannon’s company, the sanitary district board held an emergency meeting and adopted an ordinance that increased the sewer connection fee by more than ten times the hundred-dollar figure.

The new charge caused the builder to suspend work. He attempted unsuccessfully to negotiate a compromise with the sanitary district and the Bohannon organization, whose representatives acknowledged that the purpose of the ordinance was to prevent minorities from living close to Sunnyhills. The mayor of Milpitas, however, denied that his motive in voting to increase the sewer fee was discriminatory but added that he did not think it would be a great loss if the subdivision never got developed because, he asserted, the Ford workers’ tract would depress property values in Milpitas. A real estate agent himself, the mayor claimed that Negroes inquiring about housing had told him that they did not want to go where they weren’t wanted. He was only deferring to these customers’ wishes, he said, in declining to show them properties in the city.

Problems persisted even after the UAW’s builder indicated he would proceed with the Agua Caliente project, despite the higher sewer connection fees. The Bohannon group next filed suit to prevent the project from using a drainage ditch alongside its tract. This was purely a nuisance suit because the drainage ditch belonged to the county, not to Bohannon. The UAW then mounted a public campaign against the Sunnyhills project. Not only did union members refrain from purchasing the houses, but they flooded open houses to disrupt sales to white buyers. Meanwhile the UAW and the AFSC contacted California attorney general Edmund C. (Pat) Brown, who sent an assistant to Milpitas to investigate the sewer fee controversy. Brown promised help “in overcoming any racial discrimination by governmental units which might be disclosed.”

The Agua Caliente builder could no longer sustain the delays; nor could he afford the legal bills that would be incurred if he persisted. The Bohannon company, perhaps influenced by the attorney general’s implicit threat, also tired of the fight. The union’s boycott had been responsible, or partly responsible, for the company’s being stuck with finished but unsold homes. In November 1955, both the Agua Caliente builder and Bohannon sold out to a new developer recruited by the UAW, making the sewer connection controversy moot, and a combined project was finally constructed.

The combined development took the name of the original Bohannon project, Sunnyhills. California banks and thrift institutions continued to refuse, without an exorbitant interest rate surcharge, to issue individual mortgages, without FHA insurance, to borrowers living in an integrated project. At first the UAW’s own pension fund offered to guarantee the African American workers’ loan repayments. Eventually the FHA agreed to guarantee mortgages with a favorable rate only if the subdivision were converted to a cooperative, in which the owners would possess shares of the overall project rather than their individual houses. The union and its member-buyers agreed, and on this basis twenty of the project’s first 500 units were sold to African American families.

By this time, however, the Milpitas Ford plant had been operational for nearly a year, and almost all white workers who wanted to move to the area had done so. The delays, legal fees, and financing problems had raised the cost of the combined Sunnyhills project to a level that was unaffordable to all but the most highly skilled and highly paid Ford workers. Many of the African American workers had become so discouraged about housing opportunities in the Milpitas area that, like Frank Stevenson, they had formed carpools to share the hundred-mile daily round trip from Richmond. As a last alternative, the UAW and other area unions pressed for a public authority to create rental housing, but the idea was met with strong resistance from the local finance and real estate industry—the local association of savings and loan institutions called it “dangerous to our American way of life”—and the county refused to act.

In the ensuing years, African American residence in Milpitas continued to be confined to Sunnyhills and a relatively undesirable project, built in the 1960s between two freeways and a heavily trafficked main shopping thoroughfare. The Ford plant closed in 1984. Milpitas is no longer all white—it now has many Hispanic and Asian families—but the effects of its earlier segregation remain visible: African Americans make up only 2 percent of the population.

As the Milpitas area developed, other plants transferred there from the Oakland-Richmond corridor. One was a Trailmobile factory that relocated from Berkeley in 1955. Soon after, the plant manager announced a change in hiring policy: the company would accept only new workers who lived in the vicinity, and they, of course, were almost exclusively white. Black workers, he said, attempting to commute from the Oakland area, were too likely to have car accidents from the long drives, leading to excessive absenteeism. Before Trailmobile moved from Berkeley, its workforce was 16 percent African American. By 1967 it had dropped to 6 percent, mostly carryovers from before the new hiring policy was adopted.

II

THE MILPITAS story illustrates the extraordinary creativity that government officials at all levels displayed when they were motivated to prevent the movement of African Americans into white neighborhoods. It wasn’t only the large-scale federal programs of public housing and mortgage finance that created de jure segregation. Hundreds, if not thousands of smaller acts of government contributed. They included petty actions like denial of access to public utilities; determining, once African Americans wanted to build, that their property was, after all, needed for parkland; or discovering that a road leading to African American homes was “private.” They included routing interstate highways to create racial boundaries or to shift the residential placement of African American families. And they included choosing school sites to force families to move to segregated neighborhoods if they wanted education for their children.

Taken in isolation, we can easily dismiss such devices as aberrations. But when we consider them as a whole, we can see that they were part of a national system by which state and local government supplemented federal efforts to maintain the status of African Americans as a lower caste, with housing segregation preserving the badges and incidents of slavery.

III

DEVICES LIKE those that Milpitas and surrounding towns employed to exclude African Americans were common segregation tactics throughout the country after World War II. In numerous instances, local governments condemned or rezoned property to prevent African Americans from residing there.

For example, in 1954 a University of Pennsylvania professor and his wife purchased a site in Swarthmore, a town just outside Philadelphia, where they planned to develop a tract of twenty-eight middle-class homes to be sold to both African Americans and whites. The couple’s intent was to prove that “families of differing races, colors, and religions can live together in harmony.” The Swarthmore Property Owners’ Association petitioned the borough council that it did not want the town to become “a laboratory” for social experiments. The council reacted by refusing to consider the housing plan without a certified engineer’s drawing, an expensive condition that it had not imposed on other developments.

After the couple submitted the drawing, the council made a series of objections, none of which it had made when considering other recent projects: It blocked the construction of a private drive leading to some of the homes, and it required a costly new sewer system. The professor and his wife forged ahead, scaling back their plans to avoid the need for a private drive. Adjoining property owners then asserted that the project could not proceed because the main road accessing the property was also private, notwithstanding that the borough had made public improvements to the road in the past without anyone raising similar issues. When the neighbors sued to halt the project on these grounds, borough officials supported the neighbors and did not intervene. With no prospect that such impediments would ever end, the professor and his wife abandoned the project.

A similar situation developed in Deerfield, Illinois, a white suburb of Chicago. In 1959 a developer purchased two tracts of vacant land and proposed to subdivide and build fifty-one houses on them, with a plan to sell ten to African Americans. He specifically chose Deerfield for the project because it was far from an existing African American community; he hoped it would be less likely to attract the attention of real estate speculators who could spur panic selling and white flight. Without knowing that the developer intended an integrated project, the village approved his plans, and water, sewer, and street improvements proceeded. Work had begun on two model homes when village officials discovered his intention.

Almost immediately speculators did arrive and attempt to create fear among village residents by offering to purchase their properties for as little as half of fair market values. A citizens committee was organized, and 600 protesters marched on a town board meeting being held in a school gymnasium. By a show of hands, the crowd vowed its uncompromising rejection of integration. The police were unable or unwilling to prevent the model homes from being vandalized. A survey of Deerfield residents found that opposition to the development ran nearly eight to one.

The day after the survey results were announced, the village’s park district announced it would condemn the land. The idea was not new. Several months earlier, voters had rejected a proposal that the district take these properties, but now they overwhelmingly approved a bond issue for that purpose. A federal court held that the park district’s exploitation of community hostility to integration was not unlawful because the district was not itself racially motivated; it had unsuccessfully attempted to get voter approval before the likelihood of African American buyers had arisen. The court concluded that voters cannot be compelled to express nonracial motives at the ballot box. By this logic, though, a democratic vote could insulate any racially discriminatory action from legal challenge. The Bill of Rights and Civil War amendments are designed to restrict popular majorities in just this way.

IV

AT THE time, condemning a proposed African American residence for park purposes was a useful device for whites-only communities because, as a Missouri appeals court ruled, also in 1959, the judicial system could not inquire as to the motives for a condemnation, provided the purpose of the condemnation was public, which a park surely was. In the Missouri case, an African American couple had attempted to build a home in the white St. Louis suburb of Creve Coeur. Again, permits had been approved and work had begun when the town discovered that the purchasers were African American. A hastily organized citizens committee then raised contributions to purchase the property. White property owner groups frequently attempted this ploy when faced with integration: in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play, A Raisin in the Sun, an owners’ group in a white Chicago community attempts a similar buyout of African American neighbors. As in the Hansberry drama, the Creve Coeur couple refused the offer. The city then condemned the property for recreational use.

Condemnations of property and manipulations of zoning designations to prevent African Americans from building occurred almost routinely in the 1950s and 1960s. But one case caught national attention. In 1969, a Methodist church-sponsored nonprofit organization proposed to construct a federally subsidized, racially integrated complex for moderate- and low-income families in Black Jack, an all-white suburb in unincorporated St. Louis County. In response, voters in Black Jack incorporated their community and adopted a zoning ordinance that prohibited future development of more than three homes per acre. This made development of new moderate-income housing impossible, although such modest units already existed within the new city boundaries. Several African Americans in St. Louis City sued. They claimed they had been unable to find decent homes outside the ghetto and therefore had little access to jobs that were increasingly suburban. The incident attracted national attention, and the Nixon administration deliberated for many months about whether to file its own suit to enjoin the zoning ordinance.

Eventually it did, and a federal appeals court ordered Black Jack to permit the pro-integration group to proceed. The court observed that hostility to the development was “repeatedly expressed in racial terms by persons whom the District Court found to be leaders of the incorporation movement, by individuals circulating petitions, and by zoning commissioners themselves.” The court continued: “Racial criticism [of the proposed development] was made and cheered at public meetings. The uncontradicted evidence indicates that, at all levels of opposition, race played a significant role, both in the drive to incorporate and the decision to rezone.”

Citing similar cases from elsewhere in the country, the court concluded that Black Jack’s actions were “but one more factor confining blacks to low-income housing in the center city, confirming the inexorable process whereby the St. Louis metropolitan area becomes one that has the racial shape of a donut, with the Negroes in the hole and with mostly Whites occupying the ring.” The court further noted that Black Jack’s actions were exacerbating residential segregation that was “in large measure the result of deliberate racial discrimination in the housing market by the real estate industry and by agencies of the federal, state, and local governments.” This is de jure segregation.

The Methodist organization, however, did not win its legal victory until 1974, five years after it had first proposed the integrated project. By then, financing was no longer available, interest rates had climbed, and the federal government had become less supportive of subsidizing integrated housing. The lawyers for the church group said that, despite the court ruling, “no developer in his or her right mind” would proceed with the project in the face of such hostility. It was never built. “Justice delayed is justice denied” was the frequent experience of African Americans having to fight legal battles to obtain housing in white neighborhoods.

V

WHILE MANY de jure segregation policies aimed to keep African Americans far from white residential areas, public officials also shifted African American populations away from downtown business districts so that white commuters, shoppers, and business elites would not be exposed to black people.

“Slum clearance” was the way to accomplish this. By the mid-twentieth century, “slums” and “blight” were widely understood euphemisms for African American neighborhoods. Once government had succeeded in preventing black families from joining their white peers in the suburbs, and in concentrating them within a few urban districts, these communities were indeed blighted. In many cases, slum clearance could have been a good idea. Where low-income African Americans were living in squalor, plans to demolish substandard structures and provide new, decent homes in integrated neighborhoods would have been appropriate. But mostly policy makers contemplated no such relocation. Instead, slum clearance reinforced the spatial segregation of African Americans as well as their impoverishment. This, in turn, led to further segregation because the more impoverished African Americans became, the less welcome they were in middle-class communities.

One slum clearance tool was the construction of the federal interstate highway system. In many cases, state and local governments, with federal acquiescence, designed interstate highway routes to destroy urban African American communities. Highway planners did not hide their racial motivations.*

The story of such highway planning begins in 1938, when the federal government first considered aid for interstate highways. Secretary of Agriculture (and subsequently Vice President) Henry Wallace proposed to President Roosevelt that highways routed through cities could also accomplish “the elimination of unsightly and unsanitary districts.” Over the next two decades, the linkage between highway construction and removal of American Americans was a frequent theme of those who stood to profit from a federal road-building program. They found that an effective way to argue a case for highway spending was to stress the capacity of road construction to make business districts and their environs white. Mayors and other urban political leaders joined in, seizing on highway construction as a way to overcome the constitutional prohibition on zoning African Americans away from white neighborhoods near downtowns.

In 1943, the American Concrete Institute urged the construction of urban expressways for “the elimination of slums and blighted areas.” In 1949, the American Road Builders Association wrote to President Truman that if interstates were properly routed through metropolitan areas, they could “contribute in a substantial manner to the elimination of slum and deteriorated areas.” An important influence on national legislation and administration of the highway system was the Urban Land Institute, whose 1957 newsletter recommended that city governments survey the “extent to which blighted areas may provide suitable highway routes.” By 1962 the Highway Research Board boasted that interstate highways were “eating out slums” and “reclaiming blighted areas.”

Alfred Johnson, the executive director of the American Association of State Highway Officials, was the lobbyist most deeply involved with the congressional committee that wrote the 1956 Highway Act. He later recalled that “some city officials expressed the view in the mid-1950s that the urban Interstates would give them a good opportunity to get rid of the local ‘niggertown.’” His expectation did not go unfulfilled.

Hamtramck, Michigan, for example, was an overwhelmingly Polish enclave surrounded by Detroit. The city’s 1959 master plan called for a “program of population loss,” understood to refer to its small number of African American residents. In 1962, with federal urban renewal funds, the city began to demolish African American neighborhoods. The first project cleared land for expansion of a Chrysler automobile manufacturing plant. Then, federal dollars were used to raze more homes to make way for the Chrysler Expressway (I-75) leading to the plant. In advance, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights had warned that the expressway would displace about 4,000 families, 87 percent of whom were African American.

Twelve years later, a federal appeals court concluded that HUD officials knew that the highway would disproportionately destroy African American homes and make no provision for assisting them in finding new lodgings: “The record supports a finding that HUD must have known of the discriminatory practices which pervaded the private housing market [in Hamtramck] and the indications of overt prejudice among some of the persons involved in carrying out the urban renewal projects of the City.” The court-ordered remedy was construction of new housing in the city only for those families who had been displaced, who could still be found, and who had indicated to interviewers that they would be willing to return to Hamtramck. Because the litigation had dragged on, their number was a small share of those who had suffered harm, most of whom had no choice but to move into the Detroit ghetto.

Federal interstate highways buttressed segregation in cities across the country. In 1956, the Florida State Road Department routed I-95 to do what Miami’s unconstitutional zoning ordinance had intended but failed to accomplish two decades earlier: clear African Americans from an area adjacent to downtown. An alternative route utilizing an abandoned railway right of way was rejected, although it would have resulted in little population removal. When the highway was eventually completed in the mid-1960s, it had reduced a community of 40,000 African Americans to 8,000.

In Camden, New Jersey, an interstate highway destroyed some 3,000 low-income housing units from 1963 to 1967. A report by the New Jersey State Attorney General’s office concluded: “It is obvious from a glance at the . . . transit plans that an attempt is being made to eliminate the Negro and Puerto Rican ghetto areas by . . . building highways that benefit white suburbanites, facilitating their movement from the suburbs to work and back.”

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After Miami-Dade mayor Chuck Hall sent the first wrecking ball to destroy an African American neighborhood, buildings were demolished to make way for I-95, as children look on.

In Los Angeles, routing of the Santa Monica Freeway in 1954 destroyed the city’s most prosperous black middle-class area, Sugar Hill. In an all-too-familiar series of events, when the first African American—an insurance company executive—arrived there in 1938, neighborhood association leaders suggested to him that he would be happier if he lived elsewhere. When the executive failed to act on that advice, the group proposed to buy the property from him but then could not raise the funds. By 1945, a few middle-class African Americans had settled in Sugar Hill, and the association went to court to apply its restrictive covenant and have them evicted. But anticipating the U.S. Supreme Court’s Shelley ruling by three years, a state judge ruled that enforcement of the covenant would violate the Fourteenth Amendment. After more African Americans bought houses in the area, the Los Angeles City Council rezoned the neighborhood for rentals, over the protests of affluent African Americans who already lived in Sugar Hill. More lower-income black families then moved in. The routing of the Santa Monica Freeway through Sugar Hill succeeded in demolishing the black community where other efforts had failed. African American leaders pleaded that the freeway be shifted slightly north, but the city engineer dismissed their concerns, assuring them that they would have up to five years to find new housing before properties were seized.

In few of these cases did federal or local agencies provide assistance to displaced African Americans in finding adequate and safe new housing. When enacted into law in 1956, the interstate highway program did not impose even a nominal obligation on federal or state governments to assist those whose residences were being demolished. Although the House version of the bill permitted (but did not require) payment of moving costs to tenants in demolished homes, the Eisenhower administration objected. Council of Economic Advisors chairman Arthur Burns warned that compensation would “run up costs” of the highway program, predicting that the system would evict nearly 100,000 people a year as it grew. The Senate then removed language permitting such payments from the final legislation. In 1965, the federal government began to require that new housing be provided for those forced to relocate by future interstate highway construction, but by then the interstate system was nearly complete.

VI

IN SOUTHERN and border states and in some northern cities where explicit school segregation was practiced before the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown decision, authorities developed another tactic to impose residential segregation where it would not otherwise exist: placing the only schools that served African American children in designated African American neighborhoods and providing no transportation for black students who lived elsewhere. African American families who wanted their children to be educated had no choice but to find new housing in the newly segregated areas.

When in 1928 Austin, Texas, adopted its master plan that proposed a single African American neighborhood on the Eastside, the document explicitly lamented the Buchanan ruling. It noted that “there has been considerable talk in Austin, as well as other cities, in regard to the race segregation problem. This problem cannot be solved legally under any zoning law known to us at present. Practically all attempts at such have proven unconstitutional.”

Unable to legislate explicit segregation, the master plan proposed creating an “incentive to draw the negro population to this [Eastside] area.” The incentive was to relocate segregated schools and other public services for African Americans to Austin’s Eastside. These actions were effective, and soon almost all African Americans in Austin had moved east. For example, in 1930, the integrated neighborhood of Wheatsville had an African American population of 16 percent. In 1932, its segregated school for African American pupils was shut down, and by 1950 the community’s African American population was 1 percent.

The city closed other schools and parks for African Americans outside the Eastside area that had been designated for their residence. Additional inducements for African Americans to consolidate were created by the construction on the Eastside of a new segregated library, a new park, and an improved segregated high school. Then, in 1938, the segregation of the African American population in the area was further reinforced when the planning commission chose it as the location for Rosewood Courts, the all-black public housing project that had been won for Austin by Congressman Lyndon Johnson, while he also won a companion project for whites close to downtown.

Once African Americans had been pushed into the Eastside, municipal services in the neighborhood declined. Streets, for example, were more likely to be unpaved than in other parts of the city; sewers were poorly maintained and often clogged; and bus routes that served the Eastside were suspended during the summer, because the same routes served the University of Texas and were not needed for students when the university was on break. Zoning rules to preserve neighborhoods’ residential characters were not enforced on the Eastside, leading to the establishment of industrial facilities in the area.

Although the strategic placement of schools to designate racial zones was a tactic primarily available to southern cities with codified school segregation, the device was occasionally employed in the North as well. In the 1920s, Indianapolis used its school siting policy to pursue the goal of residential segregation. The school board shifted the academically prestigious and all-white high school to an exclusive white community, far from the city’s racial boundary. This left the former high school in an area near the border between the city’s black and white neighborhoods, but the board refused to designate it for use by African Americans; rather, it constructed a new high school for African American students near a glue factory and city dump, far from white areas.

The case of Raleigh and surrounding Wake County, North Carolina, is particularly noteworthy because, in recent years, advocates of school integration have praised the county for its program of busing children to make its schools more diverse. Barred by the Supreme Court from explicitly integrating schools by race, the district—which includes the city of Raleigh and its suburbs—has bused low-income children from the south and east sides of the county to middle-class neighborhoods in the north and west. As it happens, children in the southeast are mostly black, while those in the northwest are mostly white. The segregated design that the busing was designed to overcome was no accident. It was created, in part, by racially motivated school siting decisions in the early twentieth century.

Karen Benjamin, a historian at St. Xavier College in Chicago, has uncovered records that reveal how school placement decisions helped force the segregation of Raleigh as well as of Houston and Atlanta. In Raleigh in the early twentieth century, neighborhoods of black and white concentration were scattered across the city. They included two relatively prosperous African American neighborhoods, Idlewild and College Park, on what was then the city’s northeast side. These middle-class communities of owner-occupied single-family homes no longer exist because in the 1920s the school board decided to transfer all schools for black students to the far southeastern section of the city, where planners hoped to isolate Raleigh’s African Americans. (Making matters worse, when the board provided Idlewild’s and College Park’s middle-class residents with a new school, it put the campus next to the city dump and a rock quarry filled with stagnant water.) At the same time, it established the newest and most well-equipped schools for white students in far northwestern neighborhoods. In some cases, these areas were still largely undeveloped, where real estate interests hoped to attract white families.

There was nothing hidden about the racial context of these school-site decisions, and they generated considerable debate. An editorial in the moderate Raleigh Times said:

The negroes making protest are of the best element of the race in Raleigh. Many of them live in the northeastern section already occupied by a numerous, growing population of negro citizens, the majority of whom are owners of their own homes. They have built up with who knows what sacrifice a self-respecting and steadily improving community. . . . It is a fact well-known that the northeastern negro section was due largely to the desire of better class negroes to escape the very Rock Quarry locality in which it is suggested the new school will take place.

In Atlanta, the school board also helped to segregate a city that previously had some mixed-race housing. Before World War I, mostly black and white blocks were interspersed in central city neighborhoods. After the war, however, city planners determined that future city growth would be rigidly segregated. Even though courts had struck down an explicit Atlanta racial zoning ordinance in 1924, the segregation maps guided school closure and construction decisions by the Atlanta School Board for the next two decades.

Gradually, schools for whites were closed if they were in zones designated for future African American residence, and schools for African Americans were closed if they were in zones reserved for whites. New schools for white students were built in the developing white suburbs, which forced white families to move to these communities if their children were to have access to the most up-to-date schools. As with white families, black families who did not already live in their racially designated area were forced to find new housing if they wanted their children to attend a modern school.

In 1919, when the policy was developing but still not fully formal, the school board converted the Ashby Street School on the west side in a planned ghetto area, from a school for whites to one for African Americans. The minutes of a school board meeting report the adoption of a motion that white families may be given one year to keep their children in the school, “to allow the white residents of that section to sell their homes, it being understood that the school [would be] turned over to the negroes at the close of the year.”

Two high schools for white students in a racially mixed downtown area were closed and moved to the northern suburbs, while the city’s first high school for black students was constructed far west of downtown, in a still relatively undeveloped area but one intended for African Americans. The Atlanta School Board commissioned a study by two Columbia University experts, who recommended placing a new junior high school for whites in a densely populated neighborhood northwest of the central city area where elementary school overcrowding was most severe. Because this area was racially mixed (and designated for future African American residence), the board rejected the consultants’ recommendation and instead constructed a new white junior high school across the railroad tracks in the far northern suburbs, forcing white families to cease living in an integrated community if they wished their adolescent children to be educated.

In Houston, in the 1920s the city plan commission also drew up a map designating “Race Restriction Areas.” Seeing that a Georgia court had rejected Atlanta’s zoning ordinance, Houston never formally adopted the map. But as in Atlanta, the school board used it as a guide. At the beginning of the twentieth century, many Houston neighborhoods were integrated; substantial numbers of African American and white children lived in each of the city’s six wards. Each ward had a school for African American children that was near, and in some cases on the same block as, the school for whites. Over one-fourth of African American children lived in a school attendance district that was at least 70 percent white. The city plan, however, foresaw developing the west side of Houston for exclusive white residence while pushing African Americans out of the west side and into developing ghettos in the south and northeast.

To accomplish this, in the 1920s and ’30s the school board built, on the west side, new schools with advanced facilities for whites; it set up, on the far south side, a modern high school for African Americans, to induce middle-class black families to move there. The city also established a new Houston Negro Hospital near the new high school as a further incentive for African Americans to relocate. The school board closed an elementary school for African American pupils on the west side and built better-equipped schools for them in the working-class neighborhoods of the northeast. While building relatively expensive schools for African Americans on the south and northeast sides, the school board appropriated little money for improvements at schools for African American pupils in the west. Similarly, white schools in the area designated for African Americans were closed or allowed to deteriorate. Each time the board made a decision about schools for African American pupils, a chief consideration was avoiding “proximity to white districts.” Professor Benjamin concludes that Houston’s “school building programs were the key to preserving school segregation long after the Brown decision declared it unconstitutional.”

___________

* “Urban renewal” programs, to clear slums not only for highways but for hospitals, universities, middle-class housing, and offices, operated similarly. That “urban renewal means Negro removal” was a frequent twentieth century slogan of civil rights groups protesting such displacement.

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7

IRS SUPPORT AND COMPLIANT REGULATORS
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Denver, 1961. When a few African Americans moved to a middle-class white neighborhood, speculators panicked white homeowners into selling at a deep discount.

AS PUBLIC HOUSING packed African Americans into urban projects, and federal loan insurance subsidized white families to disperse into single-family suburban homes, other racial policies of federal, state, and local governments contributed to, and reinforced, the segregation of metropolitan areas. One was the willingness of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to grant tax-exempt status to churches, hospitals, universities, neighborhood associations, and other groups that promoted residential segregation. Another was the complicity of regulatory agencies in the discriminatory actions of the insurance companies and banks they supervised.

The Color of Law does not argue that merely because government regulates a private business, the firm’s activities become state action and, if discriminatory, constitute de jure segregation. Such a claim would eliminate the distinction between the public and private spheres and be inimical to a free democratic society. But because of slavery’s legacy, the Constitution gives African Americans a special degree of protection. The three constitutional amendments—the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth—adopted after the Civil War were specifically intended to ensure that African Americans had equal status. When government regulation is so intrusive that it blesses systematic racial exclusion, regulators violate their constitutional responsibilities and contribute to de jure segregation.

Real estate brokers don’t become government agents simply by dint of their state licensure. But when state real estate commissions licensed members of local and national real estate boards whose published codes of ethics mandated discrimination, acts to establish de jure segregation were committed. Similarly, universities, churches, and other nonprofit institutions cannot be considered state actors simply by dint of their tax exemptions. But we have a right to expect the IRS to have been especially vigilant and to have withheld tax-exempt status when the promotion of segregation by nonprofit institutions was blatant, explicit, and influential.

I

THE IRS has always had an obligation to withhold tax favoritism from discriminatory organizations, but it almost never acted to do so. Its regulations specifically authorize charitable deductions for organizations that “eliminate prejudice and discrimination” and “defend human and civil rights secured by law.” The IRS leadership recognized this in 1967 when the agency exercised its authority to withhold the tax exemption of a recreational facility that excluded African Americans. Yet until 1970, sixteen years after Brown v. Board of Education, the IRS granted tax exemptions to private whites-only academies that had been established throughout the South to evade the ruling. It rejected the exemptions only in response to a court injunction won by civil rights groups.

In 1976, the IRS denied the tax exemption of Bob Jones University because the school would not allow interracial dating by its students. The university mounted a court challenge to the IRS action, and when the case reached the Supreme Court the Reagan administration refused to defend the agency. So the Supreme Court appointed an outside lawyer, William T. Coleman, Jr., to make the argument that the government itself should have presented. Coleman’s brief asserted: “Indeed, if [the charitable organization provision of the IRS code] were construed to permit tax exemptions for racially discriminatory schools, the provision would be unconstitutional under the Fifth Amendment. The Government has an affirmative constitutional duty to steer clear of providing significant aid to such schools.”

In its widely noticed 1983 decision, the Court upheld the IRS decision and concluded that “an institution seeking tax-exempt status must serve a public purpose and not be contrary to established public policy.” It did not adopt Coleman’s constitutional argument to make its case, but neither did the Court reject it. In his opinion, Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote that many of those who submitted briefs in the case, including Coleman, “argue that denial of tax-exempt status to racially discriminatory schools is independently required by the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment. In light of our resolution of this litigation, we do not reach that issue.” But Coleman’s argument was solid, and it implicitly condemned the decades-long passivity of the IRS by confronting how its tax-exemption policy strengthened residential segregation. Support for a ban on interracial dating certainly offended the Constitution, but its national policy significance was trivial in comparison to the IRS’s silence when nonprofit institutions promoted restrictive covenants or engaged in other activities to prevent African Americans from moving into white neighborhoods.

Churches, synagogues, and their clergy frequently led such efforts. Shelley v. Kraemer, the 1948 Supreme Court ruling that ended court enforcement of restrictive covenants, offers a conspicuous illustration. The case stemmed from objections of white St. Louis homeowners, Louis and Fern Kraemer, to the purchase of a house in their neighborhood by African Americans, J.D. and Ethel Shelley. The area had been covered by a restrictive covenant organized by a white owners’ group, the Marcus Avenue Improvement Association, which was sponsored by the Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church. Trustees of the church provided funds from the church treasury to finance the Kraemers’ lawsuit to have the African American family evicted. Another nearby church, the Waggoner Place Methodist Episcopal Church South, was also a signatory to the restrictive covenant; its pastor had defended the clause in a 1942 legal case arising from the purchase of a nearby house by Scovel Richardson, a distinguished attorney who later became one of the first African Americans nationwide appointed to the federal judiciary.

Such church involvement and leadership were commonplace in property owners’ associations that were organized to maintain neighborhood segregation. In North Philadelphia in 1942, a priest spearheaded a campaign to prevent African Americans from living in the neighborhood. The same year a priest in a Polish American parish in Buffalo, New York, directed the campaign to deny public housing for African American war workers, stalling a proposed project for two years. Just south of the city, 600 units in the federally managed project for whites went vacant, while African American war workers could not find adequate housing.

In Los Angeles, the Reverend W. Clarence Wright, pastor of the fashionable Wilshire Presbyterian Church, led efforts to keep the Wilshire District all white. He personally sued to evict an African American war veteran who had moved into the restricted area in 1947. Wright lost the case, one of the few times before Shelley in which a state court held covenants to be unconstitutional. In a widely publicized ruling, the judge said that there was “no more reprehensible un-American activity than to attempt to deprive persons of their own homes on a ‘master race’ theory.” Yet the IRS took no notice; Reverend Wright’s activities didn’t threaten his church’s tax subsidy.

The violent resistance to the Sojourner Truth public housing project for African American families in Detroit was organized by a homeowners association headquartered in St. Louis the King Catholic Church whose pastor, the Reverend Constantine Dzink, represented the association in appeals to the United States Housing Authority to cancel the project. The “construction of a low-cost housing project in the vicinity . . . for the colored people . . . would mean utter ruin for many people who have mortgaged their homes to the FHA, and not only that, but it would jeopardize the safety of many of our white girls,” Reverend Dzink wrote, adding this warning: “It is the sentiment of all people residing within the vicinity to object against this project in order to stop race riots in the future.”

On Chicago’s South Side, signatures on a 1928 restrictive covenant were obtained in door-to-door solicitations by the priest of St. Anselm Catholic Church, the rabbi of Congregation Beth Jacob, and the executive director of the area’s property owners association. Trinity Congregational Church was also party to the agreement. In 1946, the Congregational Church of Park Manor sponsored a local improvement association’s efforts to cancel an African American physician’s home purchase in the previously all-white neighborhood.

On Chicago’s Near North Side, a restrictive covenant was executed in 1937 by tax-exempt religious institutions, including the Moody Bible Institute, the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and the Board of Foreign Missions of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Other nonprofit organizations also participated, including the Newberry Library and the Academy of Fine Arts.

Tax-exempt colleges and universities, some religious-affiliated and some not, also were active in promoting segregation. In Whittier, a Los Angeles suburb, the Quaker-affiliated Whittier College participated in a restrictive covenant covering its neighborhood.

The University of Chicago organized and guided property owners’ associations that were devoted to preventing black families from moving nearby. The university not only subsidized the associations but from 1933 to 1947 spent $100,000 on legal services to defend covenants and evict African Americans who had arrived in its neighborhood. When criticized for these activities, University of Chicago president Robert Maynard Hutchins wrote in 1937 that the university “must endeavor to stabilize its neighborhood as an area in which its students and faculty will be content to live,” and that therefore the university had the “right to invoke and defend” restrictive covenants in its surrounding areas.

II

INSURANCE COMPANIES also participated in segregation. They have large reserve funds to invest, and because they are heavily regulated, state policy makers are frequently involved in plans for any housing projects that insurers propose.

In 1938, when Frederick Ecker, president of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, wanted to build the 12,000-unit Parkchester apartments in New York City, he could not proceed without an amendment to the state’s insurance code, permitting insurers to invest in low-rent housing. The state legislature adopted the amendment, fully aware that it was authorizing a project from which African Americans would be excluded.

After Parkchester was completed in 1942, Metropolitan Life embarked on a new project, the 9,000-unit Stuyvesant Town housing complex on the east side of Manhattan. For the development, New York City condemned and cleared eighteen square city blocks and transferred the property to the insurance company. The city also granted Metropolitan Life a twenty-five-year tax abatement, whose value meant that far more public than private money was invested in the project. The subsidies were granted despite Metropolitan Life’s announcement that, like Parkchester, the project would be for “white people only.” Ecker advised the New York City Board of Estimate that “Negroes and whites don’t mix. If we brought them into this development . . . it would depress all of the surrounding property.” Because of the project’s refusal to accept African Americans, the board was divided whether to allow it to proceed. It eventually paired its approval with an ordinance forbidding racial segregation in any subsequent developments for which the city had to engage in “slum clearance.” In response to public protests against its policy of excluding African Americans from Stuyvesant Town, Metropolitan Life built the Riverton Houses, a smaller development for African Americans in Harlem. Abiding by the new ordinance, the project was open to whites, but in practice it rented almost exclusively to African American families.

In 1947, a New York State court rejected a challenge to Stuyvesant Town’s racial exclusion policy. The decision was upheld on appeal in 1949; the U.S. Supreme Court declined review. The following year, the New York State legislature enacted a statute prohibiting racial discrimination in any housing that received state aid in the form of a tax exemption, sale of land below cost, or land obtained through condemnation. That same year, Metropolitan Life finally agreed to lease “some” apartments in Stuyvesant Town to “qualified Negro tenants.” But by then, the development was filled. New York City’s rent control laws, by which existing tenants pay significantly less than market-rate rents, helped to ensure that turnover would be slow. Rapidly rising rents in apartments that had been vacated made the development increasingly unaffordable to middle-income families. These conditions combined to make the initial segregation of Stuyvesant Town nearly permanent. By the 2010 census, only 4 percent of Stuyvesant Town residents were African American, in a New York metropolitan area that was 15 percent African American.

As in so many other instances, the low-income neighborhood that the city razed to make way for Stuyvesant Town had been integrated and stable. About 40 percent of those evicted were African American or Puerto Rican, and many of them had no alternative but to move to racially isolated communities elsewhere in the city and beyond. Although New York ceased to allow future discrimination in publicly subsidized projects, it made no effort to remediate the segregation it had created.

III

EVEN WHEN mortgage loans were not insured by the FHA or the VA, banks and savings (thrift) institutions pursued discriminatory policies. Banks and thrifts, however, are private institutions. Can it fairly be said that these discriminatory lending activities contributed to de jure segregation? I think so.

Government deposit insurance programs underwrite bank and thrift institution profits; in return, there is extensive oversight of lending practices. Examiners from the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Office of Thrift Supervision all have regularly reviewed loan applications and other financial records of bank and savings and loan offices to ensure that lending practices were sound. Banks and thrifts were able to refuse service to African Americans only because, until recently, federal and state regulators chose to allow it.

The Federal Home Loan Bank Board, for example, chartered, insured, and regulated savings and loan associations from the early years of the New Deal but did not oppose the denial of mortgages to African Americans until 1961. It did not enforce the new race-blind policy, however—perhaps because it was in conflict with the board’s insistence that mortgage eligibility account for “economic” factors. Like the FHA, it claimed that judging African Americans to be poor credit risks because they were black was not a racial judgment but an economic one. As a result, its staff failed to remedy the industry’s consistent support for segregation.

In 1961 the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights challenged regulators about their complicity in banks’ redlining practices. Ray M. Gidney, then Comptroller of the Currency (responsible for chartering, supervising, regulating, and examining national banks), responded, “Our office does not maintain any policy regarding racial discrimination in the making of real estate loans by national banks.” FDIC chairman Erle Cocke asserted that it was appropriate for banks under his supervision to deny loans to African Americans because whites’ property values might fall if they had black neighbors. And Federal Reserve Board chairman William McChesney Martin stated, “[N]either the Federal Reserve nor any other bank supervisory agency has—or should have—authority to compel officers and directors of any bank to make any loan against their judgment.” Martin’s view was that federal regulators should only prohibit the approval of unsound loans, not require the nondiscriminatory approval of sound loans. If a black family was denied a loan because of race, Martin asserted, “the forces of competition” would ensure that another bank would come forward to make the loan. With his regulatory authority over all banks that were members of the Federal Reserve System, and with all such banks engaging in similar discriminatory practices, Martin surely knew (or should have known) that his claim was false.

When regulated businesses engage in systematic racial discrimination, when government regulation is intense, and when regulators openly endorse the racial discrimination carried out by the sector they are supervising, then in those cases the regulators ignore the civil rights they are sworn to uphold and contribute to de jure discrimination. As the Supreme Court once said, referring to banks chartered by the federal government: “National banks are instrumentalities of the federal government, created for a public purpose.”

IV

RACIALLY DISCRIMINATORY government activities did not end fifty years ago. On the contrary, some have continued into the twenty-first century. One of the more troubling has been the regulatory tolerance of banks’ “reverse redlining”—excessive marketing of exploitative loans in African American communities. This was an important cause of the 2008 financial collapse because these loans, called subprime mortgages, were bound to go into default. When they did, lower-middle-class African American neighborhoods were devastated, and their residents, with their homes foreclosed, were forced back into lower-income areas. In the early 2000s, reverse redlining was tolerated, sometimes winked at, by bank regulators.

Banks, thrift institutions, and mortgage companies designed subprime loans for borrowers who had a higher risk of default, and they charged higher interest payments to subprime borrowers to compensate for that risk. In itself, this was a legitimate practice. But federally regulated banks and other lenders created many subprime loans with onerous conditions that were designed to make repayment difficult. These mortgages had high closing costs and prepayment penalties and low initial “teaser” interest rates that skyrocketed after borrowers were locked in. Some subprime loans also had negative amortization—requirements for initial monthly payments that were lower than needed to cover interest costs, with the difference then added to the outstanding principal.

Borrowers should have been more careful before accepting loans they could not understand or reasonably repay, but they were victims of a market that was not transparent—in some cases deliberately not so. For example, mortgage broker compensation systems included incentives to pressure borrowers into accepting subprime mortgages, without the brokers disclosing the consequences. Brokers received bonuses, in effect kickbacks (called “yield spread premiums,” or YSPs), if they made loans with interest rates higher than those recommended by their banks on formal rate sheets for borrowers with similar characteristics. Regulators and banks that purchased these mortgages from marketers did not require brokers to disclose to borrowers what these rate sheets specified. The 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform and consumer protection act banned YSPs. It took another year for the Federal Reserve to issue a rule implementing the ban, but borrowers who were deceived as a result of the kickback system are without recourse. Nothing, however, would have prevented the Federal Reserve from banning the practice years earlier.

Brokers and loan officers manipulated borrowers by convincing them they could take advantage of perpetually rising equity to refinance their loans before the teaser rates expired and take cash out of the increased equity (with a share left as profit for the lending institution). But frequently these mortgages were promoted and sold to African Americans who lived in distressed neighborhoods where little or no gain in equity could be expected—even before the housing bubble burst. In these areas where property values would be unlikely to appreciate, the scheme could not possibly work as promised, even if the nationwide housing boom continued.

These discriminatory practices were widespread throughout the industry at least since the late 1990s, with little state or federal regulatory response. Data on lending disparities suggest that the discrimination was based on race, not on economic status. Among homeowners who had refinanced in 2000 as the subprime bubble was expanding, lower-income African Americans were more than twice as likely as lower-income whites to have subprime loans, and higher-income African Americans were about three times as likely as higher-income whites to have subprime loans. The most extreme case occurred in Buffalo, New York, where three-quarters of all refinance loans to African Americans were subprime. In Chicago, borrowers in predominantly African American census tracts were four times as likely to have subprime loans as borrowers in predominantly white census tracts.

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Before the 2008 burst of a housing bubble, lenders targeted African American and Hispanic homeowners for the marketing of subprime refinance loans. When the economy collapsed, many homes went into foreclosure, devastating entire neighborhoods—like this block of boarded-up homes on Chicago’s Southwest Side.

In 2000, 41 percent of all borrowers with subprime loans would have qualified for conventional financing with lower rates, a figure that increased to 61 percent in 2006. By then, African American mortgage recipients had subprime loans at three times the rate of white borrowers. Higher-income African Americans had subprime mortgages at four times the rate of higher-income whites. Even though its own survey in 2005 revealed a similar racial discrepancy, the Federal Reserve did not take action. By failing to curb discrimination that its own data disclosed, the Federal Reserve violated African Americans’ legal and constitutional rights.

In 2010, the Justice Department agreed that “[t]he more segregated a community of color is, the more likely it is that homeowners will face foreclosure because the lenders who peddled the most toxic loans targeted those communities.” Settling a lawsuit against the Countrywide mortgage company (later a subsidiary of the Bank of America), Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Shaun Donovan remarked that because of Countrywide’s and other lenders’ practices, “[f]rom Jamaica, Queens, New York, to Oakland, California, strong, middle-class African American neighborhoods saw nearly two decades of gains reversed in a matter of not years—but months.” For those dispossessed after foreclosures, there has been greater homelessness, more doubling up with relatives, and more apartment rental in less stable neighborhoods where poor and minority families are more tightly concentrated.

In its legal action against Countrywide, the government alleged that the statistical relationship between race and mortgage terms was so extreme that top bank officials must have been aware of the racial motivation. And if top bank officials were aware, so too must have been the government regulators. Indeed, the Justice Department got involved only because Countrywide modified its government charter in 2007 so that the Office of Thrift Supervision assumed responsibility for its regulation from the Federal Reserve Board. The office noticed the racially tinged statistics and referred the lender to the Department of Justice for prosecution. The discriminatory practices had continued for years under the Federal Reserve’s supervision.

Several cities sued banks because of the enormous devastation that the foreclosure crisis imposed on African Americans. A case that the City of Memphis brought against Wells Fargo Bank was supported by affidavits of bank employees stating that they referred to subprime loans as “ghetto loans.” Bank supervisors instructed their marketing staffs to target solicitation to heavily African American zip codes, because residents there “weren’t savvy enough” to know they were being exploited. A sales group sought out elderly African Americans, believing they were particularly susceptible to pressure to take out high-cost loans.

A similar suit by the City of Baltimore presented evidence that Wells Fargo established a unit staffed exclusively by African Americans whom supervisors instructed to visit black churches to market subprime loans. The bank had no similar practice of marketing such loans through white institutions.

In 2008 the City of Cleveland sued a large group of subprime lenders, including Citicorp, the Bank of America, Wells Fargo, and others. The lawsuit alleged that the institutions should not have marketed any subprime loans in Cleveland’s depressed black neighborhoods because the lenders knew that high poverty and unemployment rates and flat property values in those communities would preclude borrowers from capturing sufficient appreciation to afford the higher adjustable rates they faced, once the initial low “teaser” rates expired.

Cleveland’s suit argued that the banks should be held liable for the harm they created, including loss of tax revenues and an increase in drug dealing and other crime in neighborhoods with many foreclosed and abandoned buildings. The city charged that the financial firms had created a public nuisance. A federal court dismissed the suit, concluding that because mortgage lending is so heavily regulated by the federal and state governments, “there is no question that the subprime lending that occurred in Cleveland was conduct which ‘the law sanctions.’”

The consequences of racially targeted subprime lending continue to accumulate. As the housing bubble collapsed, African American homeownership rates fell much more than white rates. Families no longer qualify for conventional mortgages if they previously defaulted when they were unable to make exorbitant loan payments; for these families, the contract buying system of the 1960s is now making its return. Some of the same firms that exploited African Americans in the subprime crisis are now reselling foreclosed properties to low- and moderate-income households at high interest rates, with high down payments, with no equity accumulated until the contract period has ended, and with eviction possible after a single missed payment.

By failing to ensure that banks fulfilled the public purposes for which they were chartered, regulators shared responsibility for reverse redlining of African American communities. When federal and state regulatory agencies chartered banks and thrift institutions whose unhidden policy was racial discrimination, the agencies themselves defaulted on their constitutional obligations.

https://erenow.net/modern/color-of-law-forgotten-history/8.php
 

Lexx Diamond

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"In 1904 two black men were arrested in Statesboro, Georgia, for a particularly gruesome mass murder of a white farmer, his wife, and their three children. The accused were kept in Savannah, about fifty miles away, to allow tempers to cool. After two weeks the accused were brought to Statesboro for trial and were found guilty. As the judge pronounced their sentence, death by hanging, a mob stormed into the courtroom, seized the men, dragged them outside, and burned them alive. As the convicted men were roasting alive, the mob turned on other blacks, singling out anyone perceived to be a threat to the white order. In this case, as in many lynchings, the punishment was not merely intended for the accused: the mob would use the lynching as the starting point for a general riot and attack on any black person it could find."

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Sango

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Future Doctor At Age 12: “I Want To Change The World”
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(Joshua at age 12)​

Joshua Beckford has never been the typical child. At two years old, he quickly mastered reading fluently using phonics and was speaking Japanese by the age of three. At the age of six he became the youngest person in the world to study Philosophy and History at the prestigious University of Oxford in England, gaining a distinction in both subjects.

His father, Knox Daniel, said he first noticed his son was clever when he was sitting on his lap while on the computer. “I started telling him what the letters on the keyboard were and I realized that he was remembering and could understand.”

He could read, write and understand the alphabet and point to different colors on a chart when he was just ten months old.


(Joshua at age 6)​

In 2011, his father wanted to challenge his son, so he wrote to the university to see if he could participate in a philosophy course for bright children between the age of eight and thirteen. They agreed, and Joshua was the youngest student ever accepted. He even passed with distinction.

Named one of the smartest kids in the world, the now 12-years-old is far too academically advanced to attend third grade with his peers and is homeschooled instead.

So, what does a super scholar study? Joshua excels at science, math, history, foreign languages and history. He dreams of being a neurosurgeon and is well on his way by practicing gall bladder removals and appendectomy procedures.


“Since the age of four, I was on my dad’s laptop and it had a body simulator where I would pull out organs. I want to save the earth. I want to change the world and change peoples ideas to doing the right things about earth.”

He also plans to be an astronaut and is currently writing a children’s book about Egypt.

When he isn’t studying and achieving more than many adults, Joshua also serves as the face of the National Autistic Society’s Black and Minority (BME) campaign. Diagnosed with high functioning autism himself, Joshua helps to spread the campaign’s mission of highlighting obstacles blacks face when trying to obtain access to necessary autism support and services.

According to a 2011 study, Autism and the African American Community, “evidence demonstrates that although rates of diagnosis for autism occur at the same rates in all racial groups, diagnosis in African American children occurs later than in White children. As a result, African American children may require longer and more intensive intervention.”

In between studying to be the youngest neurosurgeon, Joshua enjoys fund-raising for three Autism Charities, one in the U.K and two in Africa, and campaigns to save the environment.

Between medical school and the years associated with that, Joshua should reach his goal of being named Doctor within the next two years.

Young Joshua is definitely living proof that no obstacle is too great to keep you from achieving greatness.


https://blackdoctor.org/443741/6-year-old-attends-oxford/

:bravo::bravo:
Young Joshua is brilliant.
 

Lexx Diamond

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The chilling details of Patrice Lumumba’s assassination and how he was dissolved in acid

January 17, 2019 at 03:44 pm | History

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Ismail Akwei | Head of Content

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January 17, 2019 at 03:44 pm | History

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Ismail Akwei is the Head of Content at Face2face Africa. He is an international journalist (digital/ broadcast media), human rights advocate, pan-Africanist, tech enthusiast and a lover of art and culture. He has worked with multinational media companies in three African countries and has over a decade's experience in journalism.


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Since January 17, 1961, no one has been held accountable for the brutal murder of Congo’s independence leader and first prime minister Patrice Lumumba who was shot dead with two of his ministers, Joseph Okito and Maurice Mpolo.

However, all fingers point to multinational perpetrators who sanctioned the elimination of one of Africa’s bravest politicians and independence heroes who stood his ground against colonizers.



He led the Democratic Republic of Congo to independence on June 30, 1960, after the country was passed on from King Leopold II, who took control of it as his private property in the 1880s, to Belgium in 1908 as a colony.

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Lumumba was inspired by the independence movement of Africa after attending the All-African Peoples’ Conference in Ghana in 1958. This spurred him on to organize nationalist rallies in his country resulting in deadly protests that got him arrested and later released to negotiate Congo’s independence.

Independence came with lots of problems including a political divide and an unapologetic Belgium led by King Baudouin who minced no words during the independence declaration while praising his predecessor, the brutish King Leopold II.

“Don’t compromise the future with hasty reforms, and don’t replace the structures that Belgium hands over to you until you are sure you can do better. Don’t be afraid to come to us. We will remain by your side and give you advice,” he said.

An outraged Lumumba rather gave a damning speech highlighting “humiliating slavery, which was imposed upon us by force.” This heightened Belgium’s disinterest in Lumumba whose government was already being opposed by his political rival and president Joseph Kasavubu.


Only three months into the new and independent Congo, soldiers mutinied against Belgian commanders who refused to leave and some regions, including the mineral-rich Katanga and South Kasai, rebelled against the central government and seceded with the backing of Belgian troops who were sent to protect their interests.

The Congolese government called for the United Nation’s help and a resolution was passed by the Security Council calling on Belgium to withdraw its troops. UN peacekeepers were sent into the Congo to restore order and “use force in the last resort” to secure the country’s territories.

However, Belgium did not leave and the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld failed to provide the Congolese government with military assistance as demanded by Lumumba and sanctioned by the Security Council. He also ignored the prime minister’s appeal to send troops to Katanga but rather chose to negotiate with secession leader Moise Tshombe.

Hammarskjöld died in a plane crash on his way to meet Tshombe in September 1961, winning him a posthumously Nobel peace prize. Meanwhile, the country was in turmoil and Lumumba got no help from the West and the United Nations. He called on Russia and the Soviet Union sent weapons and “technical advisors” which incensed the United States.

The U.S. was a strong ally of Belgium and had a stake in Congo’s uranium. It is suspected to have planned an assassination as disclosed by a source in the book, Death in the Congo, written by Emmanuel Gerard and published in 2015.

U.S. President Dwight Eisenhower was reported to have given the order without any discussion. Lawrence Devlin, CIA station chief in Congo at the time, told the BBC in 2000 that a CIA plan to lace Lumumba’s toothpaste with poison was never carried out.

By September, the Congolese President Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba as Prime Minister after receiving a telegram from Belgian Prime Minister Gaston Eyskens. Lumumba also declared Kasavubu deposed. This ushered in the takeover by army chief Colonel Mobutu Sese Seko who placed Lumumba under house arrest and guarded by his troops and the United Nations troops.

Lumumba escaped in late November with his wife and baby son hidden in the back of a car leaving his residence. They headed towards the east where he had loyal followers in Kisangani (then Stanleyville). He engaged villagers on his way and on the evening of December 2 as they waited for a ferry to cross the Sankuru River, Mobutu’s forces appeared.

He was captured and another plea to the United Nations to save him fell on deaf ears. He was flown to Léopoldville (now Kinshasa), where he was humiliated in public in the presence of journalists, UN officials and his wife, Pauline.


Mobutu ordered his detention at a military prison at Thysville, a hundred miles from Léopoldville. For six weeks, Lumumba was kept in cells and that’s where he wrote letters to the United Nations for help and to his wife to calm her nerves.

While Lumumba’s speeches from prison were creating confusion, Belgian Minister of African Affairs Harold d’Aspremont Lynden was putting pressure on the government to move him from Thysville where he could be freed by his supporters.

Lynden later insisted on Lumumba being transferred to Katanga despite a discussion by the Belgian parliament against the decision that will result in his death, cites Belgian sociologist and historian, Ludo De Witte, who made public the gory details of Lumumba’s death in a book published in Dutch in 1999.

Lumumba and his two former ministers were flown to Katanga on January 17 while being beaten so badly that the pilot warned the violence was threatening the flight, says De Witte.

They arrived at the Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi) airport and taken into custody by Katangese police and military under the supervision of Belgian forces. They were driven to a colonial villa owned by a wealthy Belgian, Villa Brouwe, and the beatings continued by both the Congolese and Belgian forces.

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LUMUMBA…FILE TO GO WITH STORY SLUGGED BELGIUM CONGO LUMUMBA– Hands tied behind his back, deposed Congo ex-premier Patrice Lumumba (center) leaves a plane at Leopoldville airport, Dec. 2, 1960, under guard of Congolese soldiers loyal to Col. Joseph Mobutu. European Parliament opened an investigation Tuesday May 2, 2000 into possible government involvement in the 1961 killing of Lumumba, whose death shocked the world during the months following Congolese independence from Belgium. (AP-Photo/File)
By that evening, they were semi-conscious and had been visited by Katangese cabinet ministers and President Tshombe himself. Later around 10, a decision was taken on their fate and they were dragged from Villa Brouwe into a nearby bush where a firing squad awaited them.

The execution was commanded by Belgian Captain Julien Gat and Belgian Police Commissioner Frans Verschurre, who had overall command, discloses De Witte in his book based on documents he discovered in the Belgian archives. They were shot separately by a big tree as President Tshombe and two of his cabinet ministers looked on. The bodies were quickly thrown into shallow graves.

To conceal their crimes the next morning of January 18, the Interior Minister Godfried Munongo called a senior Belgian policeman, Gerard Soete, to his office and ordered that the bodies disappeared.

“You destroy them, you make them disappear. How you do it, it doesn’t interest me. All I want is that it happens that they disappear. Once it is done nobody will talk about it. Finished,” Soete recalled Munongo’s orders.

Soete said he and another helper exhumed the corpses and “hacked them in pieces and put them into the acid. As far as our acid because we had two bottles like that of acid, big bottles, but we hadn’t got enough so we burned what we could in those bottles. For the rest I know that my helper made a fire and put them in and we destroyed everything.

“We were there two days. We did things an animal wouldn’t do. And that’s why we were drunk, stone drunk. We couldn’t do things like that. Cut your own, your own – no, no, no. Nobody could say now, today, it’s there, it happened. That’s impossible, you couldn’t,” Soete was quoted in a BBC documentary, Who Killed Lumumba?, which aired in 2000 based on accounts from De Witte’s book published in English in June 2001.

Just as planned, Lumumba’s death was announced a month later on February 13, 1961. Interior Minister Munongo announced that the three prisoners killed their guards and escaped in a getaway car before they were recognized by villagers, who beat them to death.

The truth was hidden despite international protests at Belgian embassies nationwide until 1999 when Ludo De Witte’s book titled, The Assassination of Lumumba, presented new evidence taken from documents long hidden in official archives and interviews of surviving witnesses.

The Belgian Parliament established a commission of enquiry three months after the book was published to determine the circumstances of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba and if the Belgian government was involved.

The report was presented after 18 months of investigation in 2002 and then published as a book in 2004 for the public. It concluded that Belgium had a moral responsibility in the assassination of Lumumba and that it “acted under pressure from the Belgian public, which had heard for days about violence against Belgian citizens in Congo.”

It said there were plans to kill Lumumba and the Belgian government showed little respect for the sovereign status of the Congolese government. The commission confirmed that secret funds (about $8 million today) were used to finance the policy against the Lumumba government by the Ministry of African Affairs, reports the Brussels Times.

It, however, stated that execution was carried out by Kantangese authorities in the presence of the Belgian officials and there was no evidence to prove that Belgium was part of the decision-making to kill Lumumba.

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The Belgian government admitted to having had “undeniable responsibility in the events that led to Lumumba’s death” but did not take full responsibility and issued a public pardon of the Belgians involved in the assassination of Lumumba.

The foreign minister at the time, Louis Michel, said “The government feels it should extend to the family of Patrice Lumumba … and to the Congolese people, its profound and sincere regrets and its apologies for the pain inflicted upon them.”

This was accepted by Lumumba’s son, Francois Lumumba, who later filed court cases against Belgium for hiding its role in the assassination of his father.

In January 2016, it was reported that a tooth of Lumumba was confiscated in the former home of police officer Gerard Soete who died in June 2000 during the parliamentary enquiry.

In his 1978 novel, the Belgian who helped dissolve Lumumba’s body in acid described the taking of two teeth, two fingers and bullets from the body, reports Brussels Times. He later declared that he had thrown them into the sea.


https://face2faceafrica.com/article...ssassination-and-how-he-was-dissolved-in-acid
 

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ST. PATRICK'S DAY huh?. The Twa are a pygmy tribe from Africa that has a history that pre-dates the story of Adam & Eve by almost 8500 years. The Twa journeyed to Northern Ireland very early in it's conception prior to the influence of the Roman Catholic Church. Now, the Roman Catholic Church seeing the practices of the Druids wanted to convert them, and if they couldn't, the would remove them & their beliefs as well along with the Twa who were still present in Northern Ireland at that time. This guy now known as ST PATRICK was given an order to set up Roman Catholic Churches all over Northern Ireland, and in the process, convert or remove the Druid & Twa influence. Guess which one Mr. Patrick carried out??????? He killed countless numbers of Druids & the Twa in the name of Father, the Son, & the Holy spirit. So when you hear people tell you that he was made a saint because he removed the snakes from Northern Ireland, it's really referring to the Uraeus head garment worn by the Druids & the Twa. And the leprechaun myth comes from the short Black men that were murdered all in the name of religion. THE CONQUEROR WILL NEVER TELL THE TRUE STORY! ONLY HIS/HER SIDE WILL BE TOLD! IT'S UP TO YOU TO FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF!
 

Lexx Diamond

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Black Christian Slave Codes of 1724
November 14, 2012 admin 0 Comments
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Louisiana’s Code Noir (1724)



Primary Documents:

To regulate relations between slaves and colonists, the Louisiana Code noir, or slave code, based largely on that compiled in 1685 for the French Caribbean colonies, was introduced in 1724 and remained in force until the United States took possession of Louisiana in 1803. The Code’s 54 articles regulated the status of slaves and free blacks, as well as relations between masters and slaves. The entire body of laws appears below.

BLACK CODE OF LOUISIANA
I. Decrees the expulsion of Jews from the colony.

II. Makes it imperative on masters to impart religious instruction to their slaves.

III. Permits the exercise of the Roman Catholic creed only. Every other mode of worship is prohibited.

IV. Negroes placed under the direction or supervision of any other person than a Catholic, are liable to confiscation.

V. Sundays and holidays are to be strictly observed. All negroes found at work on these days are to be confiscated.

VI. We forbid our white subjects, of both sexes, to marry with the blacks, under the penalty of being fined and subjected to some other arbitrary punishment. We forbid all curates, priests, or missionaries of our secular or regular clergy, and even our chaplains in our navy to sanction such marriages. We also forbid all our white subjects, and even the manumitted or free-born blacks, to live in a state of concubinage with blacks. Should there be any issue from this kind of intercourse, it is our will that the person so offending, and the master of the slave, should pay each a fine of three hundred livres. Should said issue be the result of the concubinage of the master with his slave, said master shall not only pay the fine, but be deprived of the slave and of the children, who shall be adjudged to the hospital of the locality, and said slaves shall be forever incapable of being set free. But should this illicit intercourse have existed between a free black and his slave, when said free black had no legitimate wife, and should said black marry said slave according to the forms prescribed by the church, said slave shall be thereby set free, and the children shall also become free and legitimate ; and in such a case, there shall be no application of the penalties mentioned in the present article.

VII. The ceremonies and forms prescribed by the ordinance of Blois, and by the edict of 1639, for marriages, shall be observed both with regard to free persons and to slaves. But the consent of the father and mother of the slave is not necessary; that of the master shall be the only one required.

VIII. We forbid all curates to proceed to effect marriages between slaves without proof of the consent of their masters; and we also forbid all masters to force their slaves into any marriage against their will.

IX. Children, issued from the marriage of slaves, shall follow the condition of their parents, and shall belong to the master of the wife and not of the husband, if the husband and wife have different masters.

X. If the husband be a slave, and the wife a free woman, it is our will that their children, of whatever sex they may be, shall share the condition of their mother, and be as free as she, notwithstanding the servitude of their father; and if the father be free and the mother a slave, the children shall all be slaves.

XI. Masters shall have their Christian slaves buried in consecrated ground.

XII. We forbid slaves to carry offensive weapons or heavy sticks, under the penalty of being whipped, and of having said weapons confiscated for the benefit of the person seizing the same. An exception is made in favor of those slaves who are sent a hunting or a shooting by their masters, and who carry with them a written permission to that effect, or are designated by some known mark or badge.

XIII. We forbid slaves belonging to different masters to gather in crowds either by day or by night, under the pretext of a wedding, or for any other cause, either at the dwelling or on the grounds of one of their masters, or elsewhere, and much less on the highways or in secluded places, under the penalty of corporal punishment, which shall not be less than the whip. In case of frequent offences of the kind, the offenders shall be branded with the mark of the flower de luce, and should there be aggravating circumstances, capital punishment may be applied, at the discretion of our judges. We command all our subjects, be they officers or not, to seize all such offenders, to arrest and conduct them to prison, although there should be no judgment against them.

XIV. Masters who shall be convicted of having permitted or tolerated such gatherings as aforesaid, composed of other slaves than their own, shall be sentenced, individually, to indemnify their neighbors for the damages occasioned by said gatherings, and to pay, for the first time, a fine of thirty livres, and double that sum on the repetition of the offence.

XV. We forbid negroes to sell any commodities, provisions, or produce of any kind, without the written permission of their masters, or without wearing their known marks or badges, and any persons purchasing any thing from negroes in violence of this article, shall be sentenced to pay a fine of 1500 livres.

XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, provide at length for the clothing of slaves and for their subsistence.

XX. Slaves who shall not be properly fed, clad, and provided for by their masters, may give information thereof to the attorney-general of the Superior Council, or to all the other officers of justice of an inferior jurisdiction, and may put the written exposition of their wrongs into their hands ; upon which information, and even ex officio, should the information come from another quarter, the attorney-general shall prosecute said masters without charging any costs to the complainants. It is our will that this regulation be observed in all accusations for crimes or barbarous and inhuman treatment brought by slaves against their masters.

XXI. Slaves who are disabled from working, either by old age, disease, or otherwise, be the disease incurable or not, shall be fed and provided for by their masters ; and in case they should have been abandoned by said masters, said slaves shall be adjudged to the nearest hospital, to which said masters shall be obliged to pay eight cents a day for the food and maintenance of each one of these slaves ; and for the payment of this sum, said hospital shall have a lien on the plantations of the master.

XXII. We declare that slaves can have no right to any kind of property, and that all that they acquire, either by their own industry or by the liberality of others, or by any other means or title whatever, shall be the full property of their masters ; and the children of said slaves, their fathers and mothers, their kindred or other relations, either free or slaves, shall have no pretensions or claims thereto, either through testamentary dispositions or donations inter vi-vos ; which dispositions and donations we declare null and void, and also whatever promises they may have made, or whatever obligations they may have subscribed to, as having been entered into by persons incapable of disposing of any thing, and of participating to any contract.

XXIII. Masters shall be responsible for what their slaves have done by their command, and also for what transactions they have permitted their slaves to do in their shops, in the particular line of commerce with which they were intrusted ; and in case said slaves should have acted without the order or authorization of their masters, said masters shall be responsible only for so much as has turned to their profit; and if said masters have not profited by the doing or transaction of their slaves, the pcculium which the masters have permitted the slaves to own, shall be subjected to all claims against said slaves, after deduction made by the masters of what may be due to them ; and if said peculium should consist, in whole or in part, of merchandises in which the slaves had permission to traffic, the masters shall only come in for their share in common with the other creditors.

XXIV. Slaves shall be incapable of all public functions, and of being constituted agents for any other person than their own masters, with powers to manage or conduct any kind of trade ; nor can they serve as arbitrators or experts; nor shall they be called to give their testimony either in civil or in criminal cases, except when it shall be a matter of necessity, and only in default of white people ; but in no case shall they be permitted to serve as witnesses either for or against their masters.

XXV. Slaves shall never be parties to civil suits, either as plaintiffs or defendants, nor shall they be allowed to appear as complainants in criminal cases, but their masters shall have the right to act for them in civil matters, and in criminal ones, to demand punishment and reparation for such outrages and excesses as their slaves may have suffered from.

XXVI. Slaves may be prosecuted criminally, without their masters being made parties to the trial, except they should be indicted as accomplices; and said slaves shall be tried, at first, by the judges of ordinary jurisdiction, if there be any, and on appeal, by the Superior Council, with the same rules, formalities, and proceedings observed for free persons, save the exceptions mentioned hereafter.

XXVII. The slave who, having struck his master, his mistress, or the husband of his mistress, or their children, shall have produced a bruise, or the shedding of blood in the face, shall suffer capital punishment.

XXVIII. With regard to outrages or acts of violence committed by slaves against free persons, it is our will that they be punished with severity, and even with death, should the case require it.

XXIX. Thefts of importance, and even the stealing of horses, mares, mules, oxen, or cows, when executed by slaves or manumitted persons, shall make the offender liable to corporal, and even to capital punishment, according to the circumstances of the case.

XXX. The stealing of sheep, goats, hogs, poultry, grain, fodder, peas, beans, or other vegetables, produce, or provisions, when committed by slaves, shall be punished according to the circumstances of the case ; and the judges may sentence them, if necessary, to be whipped by the public executioner, and branded with the mark of the flower de luce.

XXXI. In cases of thefts committed or damages done by their slaves, masters, besides the corporal punishment inflicted on their slaves, shall be bound to make amends for the injuries resulting from the acts of said slaves, unless they prefer abandoning them to the sufferer. They shall be bound so to make their choice, in three days from the time of the conviction of the negroes ; if not, this privilege shall be forever forfeited.

XXXII. The runaway slave, who shall continue to be so for one month from the day of his being denounced to the officers of justice, shall have his ears cut off, and shall be branded with the flower de luce on the shoulder : and on a second offence of the same nature, persisted in during one month from the day of his being denounced, he shall be hamstrung, and be marked with the flower de luce on the other shoulder. On the third offence, he shall suffer death.

XXXIII. Slaves, who shall have made themselves liable to the penalty of the whip, the flower de luce brand, and ear cutting, shall be tried, in the last resort, by the ordinary judges of the inferior courts, and shall undergo the sentence passed upon them without there being an appeal to the Superior Council, in confirmation or reversal of judgment, notwithstanding the article 26th of the present code, which shall be applicable only to those judgments in which the slave convicted is sentenced to be hamstrung or suffer death.

XXXIV. Freed or free-born negroes, who shall have afforded refuge in their houses to fugitive slaves, shall be sentenced to pay to the masters of said slaves, the sum of thirty livres a day for every day during which they shall have concealed said fugitives ; and all other free persons, guilty of the same offence, shall pay a fine of ten livres a day as aforesaid ; and should the freed or free-born negroes not be able to pay the fine herein specified, they shall be reduced to the condition of slaves, and be sold as such. Should the price of the sale exceed the sum mentioned in the judgment, the surplus shall be delivered to the hospital.

XXXV. We permit our subjects in this colony, who may have slaves concealed in any place whatever, to have them sought after by such persons and in such a way as they may deem proper, or to proceed themselves to such researches, as they may think best.

XXXVI. The slave who is sentenced to suffer death on the denunciation of his master, shall, when that master is not an accomplice to his crime, be appraised before his execution by two of the principal inhabitants of the locality, who shall be especially appointed by the judge, and the amount of said appraisement shall be paid to the master. To raise this sum, a proportional tax shall be laid on every slave, and shall be collected by the persons invested with that authority.

XXXVII. We forbid all the officers of the Superior Council, and all our other officers of justice in this colony, to take any fees or receive any perquisites in criminal suits against slaves, under the penalty, in so doing, of being dealt with as guilty of extortion.

XXXVIII. We also forbid all our subjects in this colony, whatever their condition or rank may be, to apply, on their own private authority, the rack to their slaves, under any pretence whatever, and to mutilate said slaves in any one of their limbs, or in any part of their bodies, under the penalty of the confiscation of said slaves ; and said masters, so offending, shall be liable to a criminal prosecution. We only permit masters, when they shall think that the case requires it, to put their slaves in irons, and to have them whipped with rods or ropes.

XXXIX. We command our officers of justice in this colony to institute criminal process against masters and overseers who shall have killed or mutilated their slaves, when in their power and under their supervision, and to punish said murder according to the atrocity of the circumstances; and in case the offence shall be a pardonable one, we permit them to pardon said masters and overseers without its being necessary to obtain from us letters patent of pardon. XL. Slaves shall he held in law as movables, and as such, they shall be part of the community of acquests between husband and wife ; they shall not be liable to be seized under any mortgage whatever; and they shall be equally divided among the co-heirs without admitting from any one of said heirs any claim founded on preciput or right of primogeniture, or dowry.

XLI, XLII. Are entirely relative to judicial forms and proceedings.XLIII. Husbands and wives shall not be seized and sold separately when belonging to the same master : and their children, when under fourteen years of age, shall not be separated from their parents, and such seizures and sales shall be null and void. The present article shall apply to voluntary sales, and in case such sales should take place in violation of the law, the seller shall be deprived of the slave he has illegally retained, and said slave shall be adjudged to the purchaser without any additional price being required.

XLIV. Slaves, fourteen years old, and from this age up to sixty, who are settled on lands and plantations, and are at present working on them, shall not be liable to seizure for debt, except for what may be due out of the purchase money agreed to be paid for them, unless said grounds or plantations should also be distressed, and any seizure and judicial sale of a rea,l estate, without including the slaves of the aforesaid age, who are part of said estate, shall be deemed null and void.

XLV, XLVI, XLVII, XLVIII, XLIX. Are relative to certain formalities to be observed in judicial proceedings.

L. Masters, when twenty-five years old, shall have the power to manumit their slaves, cither by testamentary dispositions, or by acts inter vivos. But, as there may be mercenary masters disposed to set a price on the liberation of their slaves ; and whereas slaves, with a view to acquire the necessary means to purchase their freedom, may be tempted to commit theft or deeds of plunder, no person, whatever may he his rank and condition, shall be permitted to set free his slaves, without obtaining from the Superior Council a decree of permission to that effect ; which permission shall be granted without costs, when the motives for the setting free of said slaves, as specified in the petition of the master, shall appear legitimate to the tribunal. All acts for the emancipation of slaves, which, for the future, shall be made without this permission, shall be null ; and the slaves, so freed, shall not be entitled to their freedom ; they shall, on the contrary, continue to be held as slaves; but they shall be taken away from their former masters, and confiscated for the benefit of the India Company. LI. However, should slaves be appointed by their masters tutors to their children, said slaves shall be held and regarded as being thereby set free to all intents and purposes.

LII. We declare that the acts for the enfranchisement of slaves, passed according to the forms above described, shall be equivalent to an act of naturalization, when said slaves are not born in our colony of Louisiana, and they shall enjoy all the rights and privileges inherent to our subjects born in our kingdom or in any land or country under our dominion. We declare, therefore, that all manumitted slaves, and all free-born negroes, are incapable of receiving donations, either by testamentary dispositions, or by acts inter vivos from the whites. Said donations shall be null and void, and the objects so donated shall be applied to the benefit of the nearest hospital.

LIII. We command all manumitted slaves to show the pro foundest respect to their former masters, to their widows and children, and any injury or insult offered by said manumitted slaves to their former masters, their widows or children- shall be punished with more severity than if it had been offered to any other person. We, however, declare them exempt from the discharge Of all duties or services, and from the payment of all taxes or fees, or any thing else which their former masters might, in their quality of patrons, claim either in relation to their persons, or to their personal or real estate, either during the life or after the death of said manumitted slaves.

LIV. We grant to manumitted slaves the same rights, privileges, and immunities which are enjoyed by free-born persons. It is our pleasure that their merit in having acquired their freedom, shall produce in their favor, not only with regard to their persons, but also to their property, the same effects which our other subjects derive from the happy circumstance of their having been born free.
In the name of the King,
Bienville, De la Chaise.

Fazende, Bruslé, Perry, March, 1724.

Sources:

B. F. French, Historical Collections of Louisiana: Embracing Translations of Many Rare and Valuable Documents Relating to the Natural, Civil, and Political History of that State (New York: D. Appleton, 1851)


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Meet the pan-Africanist from Ghana who was the first to send a ship to the U.S. for blacks to voyage back to Africa

September 03, 2018 at 02:00 pm |HISTORY

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FARIDA DAWKINS| Contributor

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September 03, 2018 at 02:00 pm |HISTORY

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Chief Alfred Sam...Black America Web
In 1913, after traveling to the United States, gold coast merchant and Chief Alfred Sam began a quest to recall African-Americans back to their ancestral home. He enticed prospects by stating that there were “diamonds lying on the ground after a rain, trees that produced bread, and sugar cane as large as stove pipes.”

His aim was to convince African-Americans to not only invest in his company but to also reject the colonizers and “live a life of freedom.”

Alfred Charles Sam was born in the Gold Coast, in modern-day Ghana in 1880. More specifically he was born in Appasu, in the West Akim district. Before becoming instrumental in the Back-to-Africa movement, he traded rubber and other goods. He claimed to acquire the title of Chief from his uncle, to honor the fact that he traveled to either the U.S. or the U.K.

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Sam was educated at a mission school in Kyebi, in eastern Ghana.

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Herbert Macaulay…Premium Times NG

In 1913, Sam began correlating with Herbert Macaulay; the “Father of Nigerian Nationalism”. Sam then visited the U.S. and began organizing meetings in Oklahoma and throughout America in an attempt to convince African-Americans to purchase $25 worth of stock in his company, Akim Trading Company.

Seemingly a ploy to gain money, Sam was seen as a fraudster and later cleared by the U.S. government of trying to scheme others. Rather, he proposed his intention was to boost trading between Africa and America by trading cocoa, coffee and mahogany.

Sam was supported by African Pioneer a journal dedicated to chronicling the Back-to-Africa movement.

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Marcus Garvey, one of the pioneers of the Back-to-Africa movement…World Atlas

The Back-to-Africa movement, the Colonization movement or the After slave act was a cause that originated in the U.S. in the 19thcentury. The movement aimed to embolden those of African descent to return to Africa. The movement sparked the formulation of the American Colonization Society, sparked religious movements such as African-Americans questioning their conversion to Christianity and founding colonies in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

In 1914, 500 Americans were geared to set sail to America on the Curityba, a former German steamer. Sam renamed the ship,S.S. Liberia and they all reconvened at Galveston, Texas.

In August 1914, the first round of travelers, 60 trained men and women voyaged with Sam. The group brought along agricultural tools, cement, flour, lime, lumber and household goods in hopes of establishing a settlement. They arrived in Bathurst now Banjul, Gambia and Freetown, Sierra Leone in December 1914. They halted in Freetown due to the length of time it took the British government to verify the owner of the ship.

They eventually reached their destination, Saltpond in January 1915.

The settlers were filled with hope and received a gracious welcome at first. Ultimately, the local leaders in Akim stopped them from owning land. Other difficulties such as official restrictions, shortage of materials and malaria dampened their spirit. Some experienced financial and physical problems and others felt misled by Sam’s promises and were disheartened.

In the end, some emigrated to Liberia and surrounding areas and others returned to Oklahoma.

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The departure of the Back-to-Africa Movement ship Laurada bound for Liberia, March 1896…Illustrated American Magazine

In September 1915, Sam attempted to send a second group to Ghana. Nonetheless, his company collapsed with many of the future settlers losing their valuable possessions and savings.

Sam then sold the S.S. Liberia and continued to work as a merchant.

Sources are divided on how and where Sam spent his last days. There are accounts of him either moving to the U.S. or Liberia.

Sam died in the 1930s.
 

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John Edmonstone, the black taxidermist who taught and inspired Charles Darwin

March 22, 2019 at 02:10 pm |HISTORY

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ELIZABETH OFOSUAH JOHNSON| Staff Writer

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March 22, 2019 at 02:10 pm |HISTORY

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John Edmonstone and Charles Darwin
Celebrated for his contribution to natural science, botany and evolution, Charles Darwin was initially working towards becoming a doctor to follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps.

He, however, grew in natural science while learning taxidermy from a freed black slave who had moved from Guyana to the UK to help his former master and start a life of his own.

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Charles Darwin. Photo -Hitsory.com
Born a slave in Guyana, John Edmonstone, as he was named by his owner, worked for Charles Edmonstone, a Scottish politician and plantation owner. Charles Edmonstone owned plantations in Demerara, modern-day Guyana which was then known as British Guiana. At the time, Charles Edmonstone lived in British Guiana to ensure that work on his plantations was properly regulated and supervised.

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According to an article on OZY, while working as a slave for Charles Edmonstone, John exhibited great intelligence and was, therefore, allowed to learn to read and write.

John would eventually learn taxidermy from an English naturalist and explorer, Charles Waterton, who happened to be the son-in-law of Charles Edmonstone after he married 17-year old Anne Edmonstone when he was 47.

Waterson would later request that John accompany him on a bird collection expedition in which John’s main task was to stuff the birds before they rot.

It is highly likely that John worked as a domestic servant for Charles Edmonstone rather than a plantation worker because only enslaved Africans who worked in the homes of their masters were able to learn to read, write and gain their freedom.

John gained his freedom after Charles Edmonstone decided to move back to the United Kingdom, and relocated with his former master, hoping to start a new life while offering services to his master.

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Depiction of John Edmonstone and Charles Darwin
In 1807, John successfully moved to the UK with the help of his former master, Charles Edmonstone, and settled in Edinburgh where he lived very close to his former master and Charles Darwin. Darwin was then living with his brother, Erasmus Darwin.

With his great skill in taxidermy, John soon began to earn a living by teaching several students of the University of Edinburgh who hired him to take them through the course. Some articles explain that John was actually a teacher at the university, but there are no facts to prove that yet.

Aside from teaching, John also made a living by stuffing captured birds for the Natural History Museum.

While having a huge argument with his father over his career, Charles Darwin heard of John and immediately hired him to take him through taxidermy.

During Darwin’s interaction with John, he developed a keen interest in natural science and learned from John about plantation life and rainforests, as well as skills on how to preserve fossils which Darwin used during his Voyage of the Beagle.

In his memoir, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin, Darwin makes mention of John, stating that “I spent many hours in conversation at his side” and that John “was a very pleasant and intelligent man”.

The two often discussed Charles Waterson’s books and human development as well. He writes: “By the way, a negro lived in Edinburgh, who had traveled with Waterton and gained his livelihood by stuffing birds, which he did excellently; he gave me lessons for payment, and I used often to sit with him, for he was a very pleasant and intelligent man”.

Personal details about John, like who he married ,his children or information about his death have still not been dug up.

https://face2faceafrica.com/article...ndRrUcZl-gzqdx3Kz2o6l_v1rMoIZeU-VQrJd8t5N9v_I
 

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This Photo of Harriet Tubman Was Lost for Close to a Century



A previously unknown portrait of Harriet Tubman, "conductor" of the Underground Railroad.

Library of Congress

By Olivia B. Waxman
March 6, 2018
More than a century after Harriet Tubman died in March of 1913, the Library of Congress announced on Tuesday that it has conserved and digitized a previously unrecorded portrait of the “conductor” of the Underground Railroad, the secret network that helped fugitive slaves in the South get to freedom in the North.

Catalogers believe that the photograph was taken between 1867 and 1869, when she lived in Auburn, N.Y., where Tubman — who had herself escaped from bondage in 1849 — took care of fugitive slaves in their old age.

“Other iconic portraits present her as either stern or frail,” Lonnie G. Bunch III, the founding director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, said in a statement. “This new photograph shows her relaxed and very stylish.”

The fact that she’s seated in a parlor chair sporting a lace collar and elegant bodice reflects a deliberate way she carried herself at the time. As TIME has previously reported, she often donned lace and fine clothes, believing that if she dressed respectably, then people would treat African Americans with respect. She particularly prized a lace shawl that Queen Victoria had given her in 1897.

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This new portrait of Tubman was part of an album of 48 rare photographs previously owned by Emily Howland, a Quaker schoolteacher and abolitionist who lived 20 minutes south from Tubman in Sherwood, N.Y. Howland died in 1929.

The Library of Congress and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture acquired the photos, which appear to date back to the 1860s, at auction in 2017. Highlights include pictures of Charles Dickens, Former Massachusetts U.S. Senator and abolitionist Charles Sumner, the writer and abolitionist Lydia Maria Child, and the only known photograph of John Willis Menard, the first African-American man elected to Congress. The album also contained a copy of a more famous image of Tubman.

Catalogers have identified all but three of the individuals photographed. To see if you recognize the other three, view all of the images here.

Write to Olivia B. Waxman at olivia.waxman@time.com.

http://time.com/5186893/harriet-tubman-photo/
 

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‍HANNIBAL‍

In 219 B.C., Hannibal of Carthage led an attack on Saguntum, an independent city allied with Rome, which sparked the outbreak of the Second Punic War...

He then marched his massive army across the Pyrenees and Alps into central Italy in what would be remembered as one of the most famous campaigns in history...

After a string of victories, the most notable coming at Cannae in 216 B.C., Hannibal had gained a foothold in southern Italy, but declined to mount an attack on Rome itself...

The Romans rebounded, however, driving the Carthaginians out of Spain and launching an invasion of North Africa...

In 203 B.C., Hannibal abandoned the struggle in Italy to defend North Africa, and he suffered a devastating defeat at the hands of Publius Cornelius Scipio at Zama the following year...

Though the treaty concluding the Second Punic War put an end to Carthage’s status as an imperial power, Hannibal continued to pursue his lifelong dream of destroying Rome up until his death in 183 B.C.

Hannibal Barca was a Carthaginian general, considered one of the greatest military commanders in history

Greek historian Polybius and the Roman historian Livy are the two primary sources for his life...

According to them, Hannibal was taken to Spain by his father and at an early age was made to swear eternal hostility to Rome...

Hannibal’s life was one of near constant struggle against the Roman Republic.

He became a general at the age of 26 and managed to unite barbarian tribes to stop Rome’s imperial rise...

The military genius was arguably most famous for climbing the Alps with war elephants whose sole purpose was to stomp the Roman army...
 

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Ota Benga
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Ota Benga

Benga at the St. Louis World's Fair, 1904
Born c. 1883
Ituri Rainforest, Colonial Congo
Died March 20, 1916 (aged 32)
Lynchburg, Virginia, United States
Cause of death Suicide by gunshot to the heart
Resting place White Rock Cemetery, Lynchburg, Virginia
37°23′56.23″N 79°7′58.41″W
Height 4 ft 11 in (150 cm)
Weight 103 lb (47 kg)



Ota Benga (c. 1883[1] – March 20, 1916) was a Mbuti (Congo pygmy) man, known for being featured in an anthropology exhibit at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904, and in a human zoo exhibit in 1906 at the Bronx Zoo. Benga had been purchased from African slave traders by the missionary and anthropologist Samuel Phillips Verner,[2] a businessman searching for African people for the exhibition.[3] He accompanied Verner to the United States. Later, at the Bronx Zoo, Benga had free run of the grounds before and after he was exhibited in the zoo's Monkey House. Except for a brief visit with Verner to Africa after the close of the St. Louis Fair, Benga lived in the United States, mostly in Virginia, for the rest of his life.

African-American newspapers around the nation published editorials strongly opposing Benga's treatment. Robert Stuart MacArthur, spokesman for a delegation of black churches, petitioned New York City Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. for his release from the Bronx Zoo.[year needed] In late 1906, the mayor released Benga to the custody of James M. Gordon, who supervised the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum in Brooklyn.

In 1910, Gordon arranged for Benga to be cared for in Lynchburg, Virginia, where he paid for him to acquire American clothes and to have his teeth capped. This would enable the young man to be more readily accepted in local society. Benga was tutored in English and began to work at a Lynchburg tobacco factory. He proved a valuable employee because he could climb up the poles to get the tobacco leaves without having to use a ladder.

He began to plan a return to Africa, but the outbreak of World War I in 1914 stopped all ship passenger travel. Benga fell into a depression. He committed suicide in 1916.[4]



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It has long been believed that a man named Cudjo Lewis was the last living survivor of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in the United States. Now a researcher at Newcastle University in Britain says she has discovered testimony from someone who may have lived even longer — a woman named Redoshi.

The new findings, published last week in the journal Slavery & Abolition, are likely to be subject to scholarly debate, because there are few records documenting the lives of the last Africans to be captured and brought to the United States on slave ships.

Regardless of Redoshi’s precise historical status, the researcher, Hannah Durkin, has pieced together accounts from different sources and census records to carve out the remarkable life of a woman who survived the treacherous Middle Passage voyage at age 12, was sold as a child bride, and lived through the Civil War and the Great Depression. According to Dr. Durkin, Redoshi died in 1937; Lewis died in 1935.

Redoshi, who was known as Sally Smith after she became enslaved, with her husband, called Uncle Billy or Yawith.Credit Creditvia Shirley Quarles
By Sandra E. Garcia
 
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