#Crispus; Black Lives Matter.

[popo1720]

Tu Mama!😢🌹😷🙏♒️🐕☮️

vm.tiktok.com/ZMety6r9Q/

[the-real-john-laurens]

I lost three to eight soldiers after what I wrote of Crispus Attucks. Congratulations! I didn't want you anyway!

[petervintonjr]

Lesson 22: "...a stout mulatto fellow, whose very looks was enough to terrify any person." --Defense Counsel John Adams, from the Boston Massacre trial transcripts, using verbiage to justify the British troops' violent actions (in other words, the standard "I feared for my life" defense)

Unfortunately there is precious little solid biographical information on the "First Casualty of American Independence," but hyperbole or not, Crispus Attucks is forever enshrined as the first victim of British aggression in the American colonies, and was swiftly transformed into a cause celebre to provoke outrage and to rally support for the growing independence movement. Massachusetts-born, Attucks is alternately described as an escaped slave and free-born; fully black ("Negro") or of mixed descent ("mulattoe"), or in some accounts even described as full-blooded Native American.

What is known, is that Attucks was a career sailor and dockworker, and was among a group of angry colonials who approached a nervous company of British soldiers on the evening of March 5, 1770. According to testimony, the colonials threw debris, rocks, and chunks of ice at the soldiers (keep in mind this was in early March --Boston natives know full well that chunks of ice could easily be classed as lethal weapons). In the chaos the soldiers fired back and killed Attucks and four other colonists. All five victims laid in state at Fanueil Hall before ultimately being buried at the Old Granary Burial Ground.

Years later Attucks's name again rose to iconic prominence, this time playing a particular role in the abolitionist movement. The only known depiction of Attucks (aside from the artist-unknown portrait that I have humbly attempted to replicate here), is in a popular lithograph by Paul Revere depicting the events of the Boston Massacre. This particular piece was re-created in 1858, in a manner which depicts Attucks in greater prominence at the center of the violence, and became a popular symbol in the years leading up to the Civil War. Attucks's role as perennial martyr would later be referenced by Dr. Martin Luther King in his 1964 book Why We Can't Wait. Stevie Wonder's 1976 song Black Man is referencing Attucks in its very first line: "First man to die for the flag we now hold high was a black man."

[starrynight0612]

Crispus Attucks: The First death in the American Revolution

Did you know the first victim of the American Revolution was a black man? His name was Crispus Attucks. He is regarded as the first person to die in the Boston Massacre in 1770. Yet, we never learn about him. We never hear of the mixed black and Native American dockworker who died in the skirmish. How textbooks and history classes paint the Boston Massacre is a skirmish between white colonists and white British soldiers. But he was there. I didn't learn about him until college when I had a black male professor (my first one). Remember Crispus Attucks. If you're ever in Boston there's a statue of him and it'd do you good to pay your respects. 

https://www.masslive.com/news/2020/06/as-america-confronts-racism-death-of-crispus-attucks-a-black-man-gunned-down-by-a-british-soldier-in-the-boston-massacre-is-recalled.html

[reading-writing-revolution]

Did you hear what happened in Boston?

In Boston, during a verbal dispute, an unarmed teenage boy was forcefully hit in the head with the butt of a weapon by local law enforcement.

Word of the incident spread quickly, and a large number of locals gathered in the street where the incident had happened to protest almost immediately.

As the crowd grew, angry protesters shouted slogans; some business owners, fearing property damage, shut their doors. The local authorities called for uniformed backup; backup came, well armed.

The assembly was deemed "unlawful," and the crowd was ordered to disperse. The protesters began to throw dirt clods in response.

In response, multiple uniformed law enforcers fired on the crowd. The first protester to die was a black man and the authorities justified the shooting by claiming that they "feared for their lives".

The year was 1770, the authorities were British soldiers, the protest would later be called the Boston Massacre, and the first protester killed in that conflict was Crispus Attucks, a black man considered by many to be a heroic American patriot and the first casualty of the American Revolution.

If, while reading this story, you found yourself siding with the authorities and thinking that the protesters should have dispersed when ordered, and/or that the protesters armed with dirt and sticks deserved to be met with deadly force by armed law enforcement, be aware that you chose the side of the tyrant King George III, not the American patriots.

Ponder that.

——————-

American History. Literally in your textbooks, no matter your generation.

[nightcoremoon]

Black Lives Matter wouldn’t have been called Black Lives Matter if it wasn’t predominantly BLACK people getting killed by the police for no reason besides having dark skin, and those inept bastard swine not even getting so much as a slap on the wrist for it. cops don’t kill white people. they just don’t. (unless they’re mentally ill or queer or jews etc) they took dylan roof to the same place the white house catered the national football champions with. kyle rittenhouse lived. the same can’t be said for Michael brown or Sandra bland or Tamir rice or any number of other victims, hundreds of them, coming close to thousands if we haven’t reached that point already, dating back to rodney king, dating back to malcolm x, dating back to crispus motherfucking attucks. police corruption and brutality goes hand in hand with antiblack systemic racism SPECIFICALLY. and it has since before this country even existed. and it always will.

you’re a moron if you feel personally offended by BLM.

[the-wanted-man]

Comrades-in-Arms .II

Warnings: Potential 5.x spoilers regarding Garlemald. Part [1] Imperial Garlemald | Levi’s Theme

“The whole damn country’s gone to hell in a hand-basket, boys. Now, I don’t, and I mean this from the bottom of my heart, say this to be an alarmist but...just look at the facts. Losing royalty left and right. People disappearing in the dead of night. I mean I love this country as much as any true son but we’re eating ourselves from the inside out, and it doesn’t seem to matter what side you’re on anymore.  I know you can feel it. The noose tightening in around the neck. The cross-hairs on the back. We’re coming up to the point of no return. Loyalist...or otherwise.”

The windstorm comes on much quicker than they’d anticipated and it makes those last few malms a miserable journey for the small unit. Even fully suited the harsh winds cut through the layers of their like phantom swords and moving became a matter of necessity to keep the chill at bay. Even silver-spoon Leviticus found it necessary to walk eventually.

Companionable moods from even minutes before seemed to lessen at the same rate their visibility did. The snowy haze of the blizzard made seeing more than five fulms ahead a near impossible feat after a time and were it not for the pulsing red light of the old guard tower beacon ahead they might’ve surely been lost to the white.

Eventually, they came upon an impenetrable wall of steel that seemed to simply rise up out of the snow. It wasn’t exactly the kind of sight that most would consider welcoming with its clinically grey exterior, and structured lighting that barely seemed to shine through the thick coat of hoarfrost that had built upon its metal surface. What bliss it would be to leave this place behind.

“Now, talk of insurrection is on the winds...and I’m not saying I support it but I DO understand it. You’re kidding yourself too, if you think I’m the only one who sees how this is going to get. Everyone’s thinking it, even if no one’s out right saying it. I mean...civil war...When its neighbor against neighbor....friend against friend...Brother against brother...It’s only a matter of time before you have to -really- start asking yourself -- Well, who can you really trust?”

A kind of tense silence seems to sweep over the convoy by the time the magitek vehicle rolls to a halt in front of the castellum gates. It starts as the usual routine first: the declaration of ranks, unit and business into a blue screen that takes their information. .

Albina quo Silvius. XIth Auxilliary. Supply drop.

The terminal flashes, and then beeps in acceptance of the credentials provided. With an almighty, groaning, screech of moving metal, the barricade begins to lower itself. Sinking into the earth like some kind of retreating monolith.The ice along its frame spider-webs and cracks, before falling away.

They are waved through, just past the barricades where two armed guards walk forward to greet them. Little more than a skeleton crew was necessary to keep the checkpoint appearing operational. Papers were exchanged and one guard points something out to verify it with the other. They nod, and then the first guard lifts his rifle up to Bastille’s chest, and fires twice.

“Times like this, might SEEM like you can’t trust anyone at all. Like you got to keep your guard up to keep the knife from sticking in your back. Like its all you can do to keep it from twisting... You might even feel like you’re alone. Like the whole world is pitted against you. Well, I’m here to tell you that you are NOT alone. There’s people you can trust. ”

It was absolute chaos.

Gunfire erupts from behind them and the team scatters. Albina shoves Quintus just as the second guard opens a volley of fire where he’d previously been sitting. Her weapon is drawn, and she cuts down one of the soldiers before he can fire again.

Tatius tackles one of the castellum guards as two more flank them from the gates. Cicero dives for cover, taking Levi with him as he goes. He screams for Crispus to radio for help while they’re pinned down by fire. Leviticus thanks the man by flossing the space between his ears with a bullet.

His unit starts to fall, one by one. Tatius manged to take on with him before he is pulled into a chokehold and he struggles until he doesn’t. Everything happens so fast, Albina barely has time to process as she pulls her blade from the body of an imperial soldier. It begins to dawn on her though, as she turns to her treacherous fiance.

“What did you do?”

“Matter fact, they’re right here in this very room. Take a look around boys, to the left, and to the right of you. Ahead and behind. Look around and witness them - your family! Us who’ve slept together. Who’ve bled together...Killed together.  -Trust- in them. Your fellow brothers-in-arms. Trust...in me.”

She knows before they’re even at each others throats. She knows the man she’d intended to marry so well she empowers him in moments and backs him blade tip first into the caravan. She knows that somehow this is his fault and doesn’t understand how she could have been so blind.

Leviticus only answers with a shameless smirk, but she catches the flick of his silver eyes and turns in time to be impaled by Crispus. He had always been quiet, and she had thought, dependable. She realized now, just not to her. Albina slumps to the ground. The battle is over and the damage done as quickly and as suddenly as a lightning strike.

The world starts to muffle and fade into black. Albina hears her fiance say “Took your sweet time.” As he brushes off his uniform and looks to the two remaining guards. He steps over her body, pausing long enough to tell her “Consider this an end to our engagement, darling. It’s not that its me, it’s just that it’s you. Quintus -- you can come out from hiding now.”

Harsher blows couldn’t be dealt as the young medic crawls out from the mud and snow, shivering as he stands and looks Albina in the eyes as they close. “R-really, Levi. Sh-she was your fiance.”

“I know! What was I thinking? Marriage never would have suited me.” 

“You see, commitment is important. How long have we been at this -game-, Family? Four years? Five? Because that’s what it comes down to. Our lives, are a -game- to...to these people! Heartless, and arrogant leaders who care more about their image than those who make them -look- good...Who are so quick to kill their own loyal brothers and sisters, if it makes them look good. Greedy, selfish leaders. That’s what they are.”

“Load those supply crates in that freighter there. We’ll need all the money we can get across the border and these weapons will flip for a pretty gil piece there. Especially now.” 

Equipment is quickly  transferred and stored within the cargo hold of a small airship, none of which Levi lifted so much as a finger for. The ship itself was weaponless luxury class and couldn’t pass for militaristic if it tried. Too spacious. Too comfortable. Being royalty had its perks, and no one said escaping couldn’t be done in style.

“Did we really have to...do all this?”  Leviticus looked over to Quintus, who stood anxiously over the body of Bastille. He seemed like he was having second thoughts, and Levi couldn’t have that.

“Having doubts, are we? You know they never would have hesitated for us. Even my loving fiance was too committed to the country for us to ever work. It still hurt me, having to do this to them. Him though...I never liked Bastille. It might be terrible but..It’s true. He always acted like he was...better than all of us. Better than you.”  Bastille croaks and Levi considers it the definition of a corpse turning in its grave.

“I...oh jeez, I think he’s still alive..?”

Leviticus passes the young man a knife. “You said you could kill for a bath, right? Well, how bad did you want it?”

"Was it those officers starving in the cold beside us while they shouted orders from the back lines? Hm? Was it them? Huddling in the trenches, never knowing if  they’d see the light of day? Do you think they care? What about the people. We serve citizens that don’t even care for the sacrifices we make. Who spit on us when we marched in the cities. They don’t know what we had to do, to survive. What we -will- do.”

They staged the scene, positioning the bodies of their fellows more deliberately. Stripped the castellum of its valuable supplies and spilled a trail of ceruleum around the encampment with whatever excess they could find.

A more immediate guess once discovered might lead the assumption of an encounter with savages and he relied on the fact that resources would be stretched too thin to make an in-depth investigation. It wasn’t perfect but it would do.

The four loaded themselves onto the new convoy, an airship no bigger than standard fare civilian transport and luggage but it was enough for them and  their haul. At the hatch, Leviticus turned to look behind him. Struck a match off his chest, and tossed it into the shimmering pool of oil. Blue fire spreads like spilled ink over thin cloth. Leviticus leaves brimstone in his wake, and it makes him feel divine.

If he can do this, he can do anything.

“The hand that claims to feed, has only ever taken away. Everything we did, we did for nothing. But I promise you...if you follow me...if you trust me...trust the man on your left, and on your right...Nothing, is what’s going to stand in our way.

The ship full of defectors takes off from a blazing outpost and veers off into the distant sky.

                                            To be continued...                                                    

[urbanartuploads]

black lives matter [ above is a photo of graffiti street art found anno 2018 in Los Angeles CA that depicts specifically: | a mural (by artist @obeygiant) featuring a young Black woman activist, found during the protests following the killing of George Floyd - Black Lives Matter @blmlosangeles - rest in power George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Mike Brown, Crispus Attucks, etc. ]

[americanifesto - 場黑麥 - jpr - urbanartopia - whorphan]

[mistermaf]

To everyone who is also cynical about the state of the country on this July 4th

Remember that today is not called “America Day”. It’s not “Patriotism Day”. It’s not about celebrating the institutions of our government today that seek to oppress, that seek to suppress. It’s Independence Day—a commemoration for the people who put their lives on the line to stand up to tyranny.

I’m with you. The USA has lost its way at the hands of modern tyrants who seek to abuse the working class and disenfranchise minorities for their own political and financial gain. But don’t forget that ideal that this country was forged in with blood that has inspired every sociopolitical reformer who came after—that everyone is equal, and that everyone has an intrinsic right to life and happiness.

The rebels of the American Revolution, the workers’ union activists of the industrial revolution, the abolitionists of the Civil War era, the suffragettes, the civil rights activists, the draftee voting age activists—these were ordinary, lower- and middle-class people who fought and literally died in the name of granting the country’s constitutional ideals to those for whom they had been systematically deprived.

Yes, I am aware that many of these movements had hands that were not entirely clean. The men who wrote the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Many advocates for abolition still fell prey to a pervasive racial bias. Many suffragettes threw racial minorities under the bus to further their cause. But all of these causes, in the end, brought reform—brought the country one step closer to its original promise.

It’s been nearly 250 years since the first casualty of the Revolution—a black man named Crispus Attucks—was killed in battle by colonial oppressors. I find it a lot easier to stomach the idea of July 4th by eschewing the blind, jingoistic, and often hypocritical nature the holiday has adopted today, and instead to remember Crispus Attucks and the others like him who sacrificed so that one day, the rest of us could enjoy the promise of liberty.

You are angry, and you are hurt, and you are justified—but like those who came before us, we will make it better. It’s taken 250 years and we’re still not there yet, but history has taught us that no matter how long it takes, bit by bit, the people eventually win and the tyrants eventually lose.

#BLM

[redrikki]

DC Comics, Movies & Shows Masterpost

Batman Comics

Comedy Hour - In his experience, a bird in the hand trumps a bat in the bush. Joker’s spending some quality time with Robin and it’s gonna be fun. Follow up to Batman & Robin #14. (Joker, Damian Wayne)

Damian Wayne: Gotham’s Youngest Man of Mystery - Despite being the son of one of Gotham’s most prominent citizens, little is known about Damian Wayne. A Gotham Gazettereporter sits down with the family for an exclusive interview with the city’s youngest man of mystery. (Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne, Titus, Alfred the Cat, Bat-Cow)

Always Another One (The Robin Recruitment Remix) - There have been Robins in Gotham City for almost twenty years. The detectives of the M.C.U. have opinions about that. Remix of Currently looking for a sidekick to teach in the ways of righteousness by Havisham. (Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Damian Wayne, Jim Gordon, Harvey Bullock, Renee Montoya, Maggie Sawyer, Josie MacDonald, Crispus Allen, Romy Chandler)

Mother of Pearl - Damian knew nothing about his grandmother aside from the manner of her death. It was time to change that. (Damian Wayne, Martha Wayne)

Get By With A Little Help -You’re nobody, Maya’s dad used to say, but not, like, in an abusive sort of way. It was more…aspirational. Be nobody. Be invisible. Strike unseen from the shadows. It was only after months of hanging out with Damian Wayne that Maya realized just how abusive that actually was.

After the end of Robin: Son of Batman, three damaged kids and their giant bat-thing start to heal with the magic of friendship and really good food. (Damian Wayne, Maya Ducard, Suren Draga, Goliath the Bat)

W.W.B.D. - As the latest Batgirl prepares to unfurl her little bat-wings, Steph is there to offer her some advice. (Stephanie Brown, Nell Little)

Insert Bird Joke Here - The first meeting of the Formerly Dead Robins Society is called to order. Let the snark-fest begin. (Stephanie Brown, Jason Todd)

Story in Scars - A newly-resurrected Damian tries to get used to his scars (Damian Wayne)

Soulmate City - There’s something in the water and everyone wakes up with someone else’s name on their wrist. If you think this ends well, you don’t know Gotham. (Damian Wayne, Bruce Wayne, Alfred Pennyworth, Jim Gordon)

The One You’ll Know By - After losing his memory, Bruce asked Alfred not to tell him about his vigilante life, but he’s beginning to think his butler left a few other things out. Like, say, his kids. (Bruce Wayne, Duke Thomas, Alfred Pennyworth, Lucius Fox, Damian Wayne)

Black Lightning (TV)

Boom, Flash, Lightning Crash - If I’m gonna join your super hero team, I’m gonna need a cool code name (Jennifer Pierce, Jefferson Pierce, Anissa Pierce, Lynn Stewart)

Rapunzel on the Road - Jennifer is miles past done being kept like a princess in a tower. Tag to 2.09 (Jennifer Pierce/Khalil Payne)

Comic Book Life - Comic book Thunder’s boyfriend knew what his woman did, so why couldn’t Anissa tell her girlfriend? (Anissa Pierce/Grace Choi)

Truth Will Out - Three times Anissa thought about telling Grace and one time she actually did. (Anissa Pierce/ Grace Choi, Lynn Stewart, Jennifer Pierce)

DC’s Legends of Tomorrow (TV)

The Beast You Made of Me - The Waverider’s resident shapeshifters compare notes. (Mona Wu, Charlie)

Neither Should You (The Real People Remix) - Rescuing her clones was the right thing to do. They deserved the right to live their lives and make their own choices. Ava just wished they’d stop sleeping with Gary. Remix of We Should Kiss Like Real People Do by Netgirl_y2k. (Ava Sharpe/Sara Lance, Gary Green, Ava clones)

The Flash (TV)

Three Relationships Harrison Wells Ruined and One He Made Possible - (Barry Allen/Faith in Humanity, Cisco Ramon/His Powers, Martin Stein/ Clarissa Stein/ Ronnie Raymond/ Caitlin Snow, Team Flash)

Wonder Woman (Movies)

After the Glory Fades (The Last Lesson Learned Remix) - Glory fades, but what truly matters remains. Diana takes a moment to remember everything her aunt taught her. (Diana, Antiope, Charlie, Chief, Sameer, Etta Candy)

Young Justice

Dénouement - The war is done and it’s time for them to find home. Post-season 2. (Tye Longshadow, Roy Harper, Jade Nguyen, Karen Beecher, Mal Duncan, Bart Allen)

[borealiis]

REALLY  LONG  CHARACTER  SURVEY.

BASICS.

FULL NAME: richard paul montgomery de kimbly iv  / felix crispus valeria  NICKNAME/S: rich AGE: 2200 +, looks ~13, 14 BIRTHDAY: 19/20 of January ETHNIC GROUP: european / roman NATIONALITY: has several passports---main on is american since he is currently residing in the unites states LANGUAGE/S: latin, greek ( ancient & modern ),  various other languages in both their older and current forms SEXUAL ORIENTATION: heterosexual ROMANTIC ORIENTATION: heteroromantic RELATIONSHIP STATUS: single and not really looking CLASS: wealthy HOMETOWN / AREA: rome, rome CURRENT HOME: new haven, currently residing with noel vohn and auburn hayden-vohn PROFESSION: a rich student 

PHYSICAL.

HAIR: dark brown, always kept neat and controlled. his natural hair is curly. EYES: blue with some steely gray, changes depending on lighting NOSE: has that aristocratic look to it, uses it to look down on people no matter if he is taller or shorter FACE: boyish at first look, arrogant at second and ancient if youre really looking LIPS: not that full and not too thin---theyre lips. never chapped, though. COMPLEXION: fair and the kind where he needs sunscreen BLEMISHES: not too many, a rare and yet, cute blush (even fay thinks so, but he doesnt know that) SCARS: an annoying one on his left arm he got, but nothing big TATTOOS: none HEIGHT: 5'3" / 160 cm WEIGHT: 110 lbs / 48.8kg BUILD: scrawny, but a bit athletic from fencing  FEATURES: has an old money, aristocratic look and air to him ALLERGIES: shellfish USUAL HAIR STYLE: gelled up neatly to avoid curls. USUAL FACE LOOK: arrogant, nose in the air USUAL CLOTHING: tailored clothes and clean pullovers

PSYCHOLOGY.

FEAR/S: abandonment, being in constant danger, not being able to sustain his lifestyle ASPIRATION/S: to be able to relax, to find a home POSITIVE TRAITS: intelligent, decisive, honest, cautious, witty, good conversationalist, insightful NEGATIVE TRAITS: snobbish, impatient, arrogant, stubborn, sarcastic, self-serving, can and will hold grudges MBTI: ISTG ZODIAC: capricorn, aquarius cusp TEMPERAMENT: chloeric SOUL TYPE / S: thinker (19), leader (12), hunter (9), educator (12), spiritualist (6), helper (3), creator (4), caregiver (3), performer (6) ANIMAL: fox VICE HABIT/S: freezing on people, has a tough time letting people in, his impatience can get in the way as well and he gets frustrated by others easily  FAITH: mostly agnostic with some lingering, private belief in roman deities, mostly concerning afterlife. GHOSTS?: not completely unlikely AFTERLIFE?: hopefully not REINCARNATION?: hopefully not ALIENS?: he’s arrogant, but not that arrogant POLITICAL ALIGNMENT: n/a ECONOMIC PREFERENCE: n/a SOCIOPOLITICAL POSITION: n/a EDUCATION LEVEL: very high. multiple degrees in various fields.

FAMILY.

FATHER: deceased MOTHER: deceased SIBLINGS: n/a EXTENDED  FAMILY: had an aunt and uncle he lived with after his parents’ death--doesn’t mention them or think of them too fondly. other immortals, such as noel vohn and auburn hayden-vohn who are his adopted parents NAME MEANING/S: richard - ruler/king HISTORICAL CONNECTION?: was around for a lot of it---he was always involved with carious noble families as well as royal ones 

FAVOURITES.

BOOK: he likes mostly academic ones but he did enjoy the harry potter series  MOVIE: he enjoys ones with deeper plots 5 SONGS: classical music, but he has a soft spot for jazz so  DEITY: when he truly believed-- he was into mercury. its embarassing. MONTH: january SEASON: winter PLACE: hard to pick, but always a soft spot for rome WEATHER: snowy SOUND: violin SCENT/S: peppermint, older books TASTE/S: minty FEEL/S:  the softness of cashmere, silky sheets, huggs ANIMAL/S: cats NUMBER: 1 COLOUR: blue, dark purple, black

EXTRA.

TALENTS: fencing, violin  BAD  AT: being patient with people, opening up TURN ONS: n/a TURN OFFS: n/a HOBBIES: fencing, reading, art TROPES: lonely tsundere 

VOICE CLAIM/S: tba?

[popo1720]

Good Morning From The Reading Pa Boogie Down Everyone!😷🙏♒️🐕🇺🇸🆙🌎😷😎

twitter.com/martinespinal10/status/1394636186661138434

[the-real-john-laurens]

Hi! How's your day going? Also, what do you think about the police killing innocent people for no reason?

It is unjust.

It is tyranny.

It is the life that began the fight for a change.

[bountyofbeads]

The 1619 Project https://nyti.ms/2Hjvu0L

New York Times Magazine has a project called the '1619 Project' in commemoration of the first slaves brought to Jamestown, Virginia. The project provides a different perspective, from prominent African-Americans and others, than what most of us have been taught or told. Included are essays, photojournalism and poetry.

I will post several pieces from the series as I am a subscriber to my timeline. If possible please take time to READ 📖 and SHARE their stories.

"The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are."

Our Democracy’s founding ideals were false when they were written.  Black  Americans have fought to make them true.

By Nikole Hannah-Jones | August 14, 2019 | New York Times Magazine | Posted August 16, 2019 |

My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge of our lawn, high on an aluminum pole, soared the flag, which my dad would replace as soon as it showed the slightest tatter.

My dad was born into a family of sharecroppers on a white plantation in Greenwood, Miss., where black people bent over cotton from can’t-see-in-the-morning to can’t-see-at-night, just as their enslaved ancestors had done not long before. The Mississippi of my dad’s youth was an apartheid state that subjugated its near-majority black population through breathtaking acts of violence. White residents in Mississippi lynched more black people than those in any other state in the country, and the white people in my dad’s home county lynched more black residents than those in any other county in Mississippi, often for such “crimes” as entering a room occupied by white women, bumping into a white girl or trying to start a sharecroppers union. My dad’s mother, like all the black people in Greenwood, could not vote, use the public library or find work other than toiling in the cotton fields or toiling in white people’s houses. So in the 1940s, she packed up her few belongings and her three small children and joined the flood of black Southerners fleeing North. She got off the Illinois Central Railroad in Waterloo, Iowa, only to have her hopes of the mythical Promised Land shattered when she learned that Jim Crow did not end at the Mason-Dixon line.

Grandmama, as we called her, found a house in a segregated black neighborhood on the city’s east side and then found the work that was considered black women’s work no matter where black women lived — cleaning white people’s houses. Dad, too, struggled to find promise in this land. In 1962, at age 17, he signed up for the Army. Like many young men, he joined in hopes of escaping poverty. But he went into the military for another reason as well, a reason common to black men: Dad hoped that if he served his country, his country might finally treat him as an American.

The Army did not end up being his way out. He was passed over for opportunities, his ambition stunted. He would be discharged under murky circumstances and then labor in a series of service jobs for the rest of his life. Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism. It deeply embarrassed me.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been. That my dad felt so much honor in being an American felt like a marker of his degradation, his acceptance of our subordination.

Like most young people, I thought I understood so much, when in fact I understood so little. My father knew exactly what he was doing when he raised that flag. He knew that our people’s contributions to building the richest and most powerful nation in the world were indelible, that the United States simply would not exist without us.

In August 1619, just 12 years after the English settled Jamestown, Va., one year before the Puritans landed at Plymouth Rock and some 157 years before the English colonists even decided they wanted to form their own country, the Jamestown colonists bought 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from English pirates. The pirates had stolen them from a Portuguese slave ship that had forcibly taken them from what is now the country of Angola. Those men and women who came ashore on that August day were the beginning of American slavery. They were among the 12.5 million Africans who would be kidnapped from their homes and brought in chains across the Atlantic Ocean in the largest forced migration in human history until the Second World War. Almost two million did not survive the grueling journey, known as the Middle Passage.

Before the abolishment of the international slave trade, 400,000 enslaved Africans would be sold into America. Those individuals and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. Through backbreaking labor, they cleared the land across the Southeast. They taught the colonists to grow rice. They grew and picked the cotton that at the height of slavery was the nation’s most valuable commodity, accounting for half of all American exports and 66 percent of the world’s supply. They built the plantations of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, sprawling properties that today attract thousands of visitors from across the globe captivated by the history of the world’s greatest democracy. They laid the foundations of the White House and the Capitol, even placing with their unfree hands the Statue of Freedom atop the Capitol dome. They lugged the heavy wooden tracks of the railroads that crisscrossed the South and that helped take the cotton they picked to the Northern textile mills, fueling the Industrial Revolution. They built vast fortunes for white people North and South — at one time, the second-richest man in the nation was a Rhode Island “slave trader.” Profits from black people’s stolen labor helped the young nation pay off its war debts and financed some of our most prestigious universities. It was the relentless buying, selling, insuring and financing of their bodies and the products of their labor that made Wall Street a thriving banking, insurance and trading sector and New York City the financial capital of the world.

But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom. More than any other group in this country’s history, we have served, generation after generation, in an overlooked but vital role: It is we who have been the perfecters of this democracy.

The United States is a nation founded on both an ideal and a lie. Our Declaration of Independence, approved on July 4, 1776, proclaims that “all men are created equal” and “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” But the white men who drafted those words did not believe them to be true for the hundreds of thousands of black people in their midst. “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” did not apply to fully one-fifth of the country. Yet despite being violently denied the freedom and justice promised to all, black Americans believed fervently in the American creed. Through centuries of black resistance and protest, we have helped the country live up to its founding ideals. And not only for ourselves — black rights struggles paved the way for every other rights struggle, including women’s and gay rights, immigrant and disability rights.

Without the idealistic, strenuous and patriotic efforts of black Americans, our democracy today would most likely look very different — it might not be a democracy at all.

The very first person to die for this country in the American Revolution was a black man who himself was not free. Crispus Attucks was a fugitive from slavery, yet he gave his life for a new nation in which his own people would not enjoy the liberties laid out in the Declaration for another century. In every war this nation has waged since that first one, black Americans have fought — today we are the most likely of all racial groups to serve in the United States military.

My father, one of those many black Americans who answered the call, knew what it would take me years to understand: that the year 1619 is as important to the American story as 1776. That black Americans, as much as those men cast in alabaster in the nation’s capital, are this nation’s true “founding fathers.” And that no people has a greater claim to that flag than us.

In June 1776, Thomas Jefferson sat at his portable writing desk in a rented room in Philadelphia and penned these words: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” For the last 243 years, this fierce assertion of the fundamental and natural rights of humankind to freedom and self-governance has defined our global reputation as a land of liberty. As Jefferson composed his inspiring words, however, a teenage boy who would enjoy none of those rights and liberties waited nearby to serve at his master’s beck and call. His name was Robert Hemings, and he was the half brother of Jefferson’s wife, born to Martha Jefferson’s father and a woman he owned. It was common for white enslavers to keep their half-black children in slavery. Jefferson had chosen Hemings, from among about 130 enslaved people that worked on the forced-labor camp he called Monticello, to accompany him to Philadelphia and ensure his every comfort as he drafted the text making the case for a new democratic republic based on the individual rights of men.

At the time, one-fifth of the population within the 13 colonies struggled under a brutal system of slavery unlike anything that had existed in the world before. Chattel slavery was not conditional but racial. It was heritable and permanent, not temporary, meaning generations of black people were born into it and passed their enslaved status onto their children. Enslaved people were not recognized as human beings but as property that could be mortgaged, traded, bought, sold, used as collateral, given as a gift and disposed of violently. Jefferson’s fellow white colonists knew that black people were human beings, but they created a network of laws and customs, astounding for both their precision and cruelty, that ensured that enslaved people would never be treated as such. As the abolitionist William Goodell wrote in 1853, “If any thing founded on falsehood might be called a science, we might add the system of American slavery to the list of the strict sciences.”

Enslaved people could not legally marry. They were barred from learning to read and restricted from meeting privately in groups. They had no claim to their own children, who could be bought, sold and traded away from them on auction blocks alongside furniture and cattle or behind storefronts that advertised “Negroes for Sale.” Enslavers and the courts did not honor kinship ties to mothers, siblings, cousins. In most courts, they had no legal standing. Enslavers could rape or murder their property without legal consequence. Enslaved people could own nothing, will nothing and inherit nothing. They were legally tortured, including by those working for Jefferson himself. They could be worked to death, and often were, in order to produce the highest profits for the white people who owned them.

Yet in making the argument against Britain’s tyranny, one of the colonists’ favorite rhetorical devices was to claim that they were the slaves — to Britain. For this duplicity, they faced burning criticism both at home and abroad. As Samuel Johnson, an English writer and Tory opposed to American independence, quipped, “How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?”

Conveniently left out of our founding mythology is the fact that one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery. By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy.

Jefferson and the other founders were keenly aware of this hypocrisy. And so in Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration of Independence, he tried to argue that it wasn’t the colonists’ fault. Instead, he blamed the king of England for forcing the institution of slavery on the unwilling colonists and called the trafficking in human beings a crime. Yet neither Jefferson nor most of the founders intended to abolish slavery, and in the end, they struck the passage.

There is no mention of slavery in the final Declaration of Independence. Similarly, 11 years later, when it came time to draft the Constitution, the framers carefully constructed a document that preserved and protected slavery without ever using the word. In the texts in which they were making the case for freedom to the world, they did not want to explicitly enshrine their hypocrisy, so they sought to hide it. The Constitution contains 84 clauses. Six deal directly with the enslaved and their enslavement, as the historian David Waldstreicher has written, and five more hold implications for slavery. The Constitution protected the “property” of those who enslaved black people, prohibited the federal government from intervening to end the importation of enslaved Africans for a term of 20 years, allowed Congress to mobilize the militia to put down insurrections by the enslaved and forced states that had outlawed slavery to turn over enslaved people who had run away seeking refuge. Like many others, the writer and abolitionist Samuel Bryan called out the deceit, saying of the Constitution, “The words are dark and ambiguous; such as no plain man of common sense would have used, [and] are evidently chosen to conceal from Europe, that in this enlightened country, the practice of slavery has its advocates among men in the highest stations.”

With independence, the founding fathers could no longer blame slavery on Britain. The sin became this nation’s own, and so, too, the need to cleanse it. The shameful paradox of continuing chattel slavery in a nation founded on individual freedom, scholars today assert, led to a hardening of the racial caste system. This ideology, reinforced not just by laws but by racist science and literature, maintained that black people were subhuman, a belief that allowed white Americans to live with their betrayal. By the early 1800s, according to the legal historians Leland B. Ware, Robert J. Cottrol and Raymond T. Diamond, white Americans, whether they engaged in slavery or not, “had a considerable psychological as well as economic investment in the doctrine of black inferiority.” While liberty was the inalienable right of the people who would be considered white, enslavement and subjugation became the natural station of people who had any discernible drop of “black” blood.

The Supreme Court enshrined this thinking in the law in its 1857 Dred Scott decision, ruling that black people, whether enslaved or free, came from a “slave” race. This made them inferior to white people and, therefore, incompatible with American democracy. Democracy was for citizens, and the “Negro race,” the court ruled, was “a separate class of persons,” which the founders had “not regarded as a portion of the people or citizens of the Government” and had “no rights which a white man was bound to respect.” This belief, that black people were not merely enslaved but were a slave race, became the root of the endemic racism that we still cannot purge from this nation to this day. If black people could not ever be citizens, if they were a caste apart from all other humans, then they did not require the rights bestowed by the Constitution, and the “we” in the “We the People” was not a lie.

On Aug. 14, 1862, a mere five years after the nation’s highest courts declared that no black person could be an American citizen, President Abraham Lincoln called a group of five esteemed free black men to the White House for a meeting. It was one of the few times that black people had ever been invited to the White House as guests. The Civil War had been raging for more than a year, and black abolitionists, who had been increasingly pressuring Lincoln to end slavery, must have felt a sense of great anticipation and pride.

The war was not going well for Lincoln. Britain was contemplating whether to intervene on the Confederacy’s behalf, and Lincoln, unable to draw enough new white volunteers for the war, was forced to reconsider his opposition to allowing black Americans to fight for their own liberation. The president was weighing a proclamation that threatened to emancipate all enslaved people in the states that had seceded from the Union if the states did not end the rebellion. The proclamation would also allow the formerly enslaved to join the Union army and fight against their former “masters.” But Lincoln worried about what the consequences of this radical step would be. Like many white Americans, he opposed slavery as a cruel system at odds with American ideals, but he also opposed black equality. He believed that free black people were a “troublesome presence” incompatible with a democracy intended only for white people. “Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals?” he had said four years earlier. “My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not.”

That August day, as the men arrived at the White House, they were greeted by the towering Lincoln and a man named James Mitchell, who eight days before had been given the title of a newly created position called the commissioner of emigration. This was to be his first assignment. After exchanging a few niceties, Lincoln got right to it. He informed his guests that he had gotten Congress to appropriate funds to ship black people, once freed, to another country.

“Why should they leave this country? This is, perhaps, the first question for proper consideration,” Lincoln told them. “You and we are different races. ... Your race suffer very greatly, many of them, by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side.”

You can imagine the heavy silence in that room, as the weight of what the president said momentarily stole the breath of these five black men. It was 243 years to the month since the first of their ancestors had arrived on these shores, before Lincoln’s family, long before most of the white people insisting that this was not their country. The Union had not entered the war to end slavery but to keep the South from splitting off, yet black men had signed up to fight. Enslaved people were fleeing their forced-labor camps, which we like to call plantations, trying to join the effort, serving as spies, sabotaging confederates, taking up arms for his cause as well as their own. And now Lincoln was blaming them for the war. “Although many men engaged on either side do not care for you one way or the other ... without the institution of slavery and the colored race as a basis, the war could not have an existence,” the president told them. “It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.”

As Lincoln closed the remarks, Edward Thomas, the delegation’s chairman, informed the president, perhaps curtly, that they would consult on his proposition. “Take your full time,” Lincoln said. “No hurry at all.”

Nearly three years after that White House meeting, Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox. By summer, the Civil War was over, and four million black Americans were suddenly free. Contrary to Lincoln’s view, most were not inclined to leave, agreeing with the sentiment of a resolution against black colonization put forward at a convention of black leaders in New York some decades before: “This is our home, and this our country. Beneath its sod lie the bones of our fathers. ... Here we were born, and here we will die.”

That the formerly enslaved did not take up Lincoln’s offer to abandon these lands is an astounding testament to their belief in this nation’s founding ideals. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote, “Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries.” Black Americans had long called for universal equality and believed, as the abolitionist Martin Delany said, “that God has made of one blood all the nations that dwell on the face of the earth.” Liberated by war, then, they did not seek vengeance on their oppressors as Lincoln and so many other white Americans feared. They did the opposite. During this nation’s brief period of Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877, formerly enslaved people zealously engaged with the democratic process. With federal troops tempering widespread white violence, black Southerners started branches of the Equal Rights League — one of the nation’s first human rights organizations — to fight discrimination and organize voters; they headed in droves to the polls, where they placed other formerly enslaved people into seats that their enslavers had once held. The South, for the first time in the history of this country, began to resemble a democracy, with black Americans elected to local, state and federal offices. Some 16 black men served in Congress — including Hiram Revels of Mississippi, who became the first black man elected to the Senate. (Demonstrating just how brief this period would be, Revels, along with Blanche Bruce, would go from being the first black man elected to the last for nearly a hundred years, until Edward Brooke of Massachusetts took office in 1967.) More than 600 black men served in Southern state legislatures and hundreds more in local positions.

These black officials joined with white Republicans, some of whom came down from the North, to write the most egalitarian state constitutions the South had ever seen. They helped pass more equitable tax legislation and laws that prohibited discrimination in public transportation, accommodation and housing. Perhaps their biggest achievement was the establishment of that most democratic of American institutions: the public school. Public education effectively did not exist in the South before Reconstruction. The white elite sent their children to private schools, while poor white children went without an education. But newly freed black people, who had been prohibited from learning to read and write during slavery, were desperate for an education. So black legislators successfully pushed for a universal, state-funded system of schools — not just for their own children but for white children, too. Black legislators also helped pass the first compulsory education laws in the region. Southern children, black and white, were now required to attend schools like their Northern counterparts. Just five years into Reconstruction, every Southern state had enshrined the right to a public education for all children into its constitution. In some states, like Louisiana and South Carolina, small numbers of black and white children, briefly, attended schools together.

Led by black activists and a Republican Party pushed left by the blatant recalcitrance of white Southerners, the years directly after slavery saw the greatest expansion of human and civil rights this nation would ever see. In 1865, Congress passed the 13th Amendment, making the United States one of the last nations in the Americas to outlaw slavery. The following year, black Americans, exerting their new political power, pushed white legislators to pass the Civil Rights Act, the nation’s first such law and one of the most expansive pieces of civil rights legislation Congress has ever passed. It codified black American citizenship for the first time, prohibited housing discrimination and gave all Americans the right to buy and inherit property, make and enforce contracts and seek redress from courts. In 1868, Congress ratified the 14th Amendment, ensuring citizenship to any person born in the United States. Today, thanks to this amendment, every child born here to a European, Asian, African, Latin American or Middle Eastern immigrant gains automatic citizenship. The 14th Amendment also, for the first time, constitutionally guaranteed equal protection under the law. Ever since, nearly all other marginalized groups have used the 14th Amendment in their fights for equality (including the recent successful arguments before the Supreme Court on behalf of same-sex marriage). Finally, in 1870, Congress passed the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing the most critical aspect of democracy and citizenship — the right to vote — to all men regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”

For this fleeting moment known as Reconstruction, the majority in Congress seemed to embrace the idea that out of the ashes of the Civil War, we could create the multiracial democracy that black Americans envisioned even if our founding fathers did not.

But it would not last.

Anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country, as does the belief, so well articulated by Lincoln, that black people are the obstacle to national unity. The many gains of Reconstruction were met with fierce white resistance throughout the South, including unthinkable violence against the formerly enslaved, wide-scale voter suppression, electoral fraud and even, in some extreme cases, the overthrow of democratically elected biracial governments. Faced with this unrest, the federal government decided that black people were the cause of the problem and that for unity’s sake, it would leave the white South to its own devices. In 1877, President Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to secure a compromise with Southern Democrats that would grant him the presidency in a contested election, agreed to pull federal troops from the South. With the troops gone, white Southerners quickly went about eradicating the gains of Reconstruction. The systemic white suppression of black life was so severe that this period between the 1880s and the 1920 and ’30s became known as the Great Nadir, or the second slavery. Democracy would not return to the South for nearly a century.

White Southerners of all economic classes, on the other hand, thanks in significant part to the progressive policies and laws black people had championed, experienced substantial improvement in their lives even as they forced black people back into a quasi slavery. As Waters McIntosh, who had been enslaved in South Carolina, lamented, “It was the poor white man who was freed by the war, not the Negroes.”

Georgia pines flew past the windows of the Greyhound bus carrying Isaac Woodard home to Winnsboro, S.C. After serving four years in the Army in World War II, where Woodard had earned a battle star, he was given an honorable discharge earlier that day at Camp Gordon and was headed home to meet his wife. When the bus stopped at a small drugstore an hour outside Atlanta, Woodard got into a brief argument with the white driver after asking if he could use the restroom. About half an hour later, the driver stopped again and told Woodard to get off the bus. Crisp in his uniform, Woodard stepped from the stairs and saw the police waiting for him. Before he could speak, one of the officers struck him in his head with a billy club, beating him so badly that he fell unconscious. The blows to Woodard’s head were so severe that when he woke in a jail cell the next day, he could not see. The beating occurred just 4½ hours after his military discharge. At 26, Woodard would never see again.

There was nothing unusual about Woodard’s horrific maiming. It was part of a wave of systemic violence deployed against black Americans after Reconstruction, in both the North and the South. As the egalitarian spirit of post-Civil War America evaporated under the desire for national reunification, black Americans, simply by existing, served as a problematic reminder of this nation’s failings. White America dealt with this inconvenience by constructing a savagely enforced system of racial apartheid that excluded black people almost entirely from mainstream American life — a system so grotesque that Nazi Germany would later take inspiration from it for its own racist policies.

Despite the guarantees of equality in the 14th Amendment, the Supreme Court’s landmark Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 declared that the racial segregation of black Americans was constitutional. With the blessing of the nation’s highest court and no federal will to vindicate black rights, starting in the late 1800s, Southern states passed a series of laws and codes meant to make slavery’s racial caste system permanent by denying black people political power, social equality and basic dignity. They passed literacy tests to keep black people from voting and created all-white primaries for elections. Black people were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying in court against a white person. South Carolina prohibited white and black textile workers from using the same doors. Oklahoma forced phone companies to segregate phone booths. Memphis had separate parking spaces for black and white drivers. Baltimore passed an ordinance outlawing black people from moving onto a block more than half white and white people from moving onto a block more than half black. Georgia made it illegal for black and white people to be buried next to one another in the same cemetery. Alabama barred black people from using public libraries that their own tax dollars were paying for. Black people were expected to jump off the sidewalk to let white people pass and call all white people by an honorific, though they received none no matter how old they were. In the North, white politicians implemented policies that segregated black people into slum neighborhoods and into inferior all-black schools, operated whites-only public pools and held white and “colored” days at the country fair, and white businesses regularly denied black people service, placing “Whites Only” signs in their windows. States like California joined Southern states in barring black people from marrying white people, while local school boards in Illinois and New Jersey mandated segregated schools for black and white children.

This caste system was maintained through wanton racial terrorism. And black veterans like Woodard, especially those with the audacity to wear their uniform, had since the Civil War been the target of a particular violence. This intensified during the two world wars because white people understood that once black men had gone abroad and experienced life outside the suffocating racial oppression of America, they were unlikely to quietly return to their subjugation at home. As Senator James K. Vardaman of Mississippi said on the Senate floor during World War I, black servicemen returning to the South would “inevitably lead to disaster.” Giving a black man “military airs” and sending him to defend the flag would bring him “to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.”

Many white Americans saw black men in the uniforms of America’s armed services not as patriotic but as exhibiting a dangerous pride. Hundreds of black veterans were beaten, maimed, shot and lynched. We like to call those who lived during World War II the Greatest Generation, but that allows us to ignore the fact that many of this generation fought for democracy abroad while brutally suppressing democracy for millions of American citizens. During the height of racial terror in this country, black Americans were not merely killed but castrated, burned alive and dismembered with their body parts displayed in storefronts. This violence was meant to terrify and control black people, but perhaps just as important, it served as a psychological balm for white supremacy: You would not treat human beings this way. The extremity of the violence was a symptom of the psychological mechanism necessary to absolve white Americans of their country’s original sin. To answer the question of how they could prize liberty abroad while simultaneously denying liberty to an entire race back home, white Americans resorted to the same racist ideology that Jefferson and the framers had used at the nation’s founding.

This ideology — that black people belonged to an inferior, subhuman race — did not simply disappear once slavery ended. If the formerly enslaved and their descendants became educated, if we thrived in the jobs white people did, if we excelled in the sciences and arts, then the entire justification for how this nation allowed slavery would collapse. Free black people posed a danger to the country’s idea of itself as exceptional; we held up the mirror in which the nation preferred not to peer. And so the inhumanity visited on black people by every generation of white America justified the inhumanity of the past.

Just as white Americans feared, World War II ignited what became black Americans’ second sustained effort to make democracy real. As the editorial board of the black newspaper The Pittsburgh Courier wrote, “We wage a two-pronged attack against our enslavers at home and those abroad who will enslave us.” Woodard’s blinding is largely seen as one of the catalysts for the decades-long rebellion we have come to call the civil rights movement. But it is useful to pause and remember that this was the second mass movement for black civil rights, the first being Reconstruction. As the centennial of slavery’s end neared, black people were still seeking the rights they had fought for and won after the Civil War: the right to be treated equally by public institutions, which was guaranteed in 1866 with the Civil Rights Act; the right to be treated as full citizens before the law, which was guaranteed in 1868 by the 14th Amendment; and the right to vote, which was guaranteed in 1870 by the 15th Amendment. In response to black demands for these rights, white Americans strung them from trees, beat them and dumped their bodies in muddy rivers, assassinated them in their front yards, firebombed them on buses, mauled them with dogs, peeled back their skin with fire hoses and murdered their children with explosives set off inside a church.

For the most part, black Americans fought back alone. Yet we never fought only for ourselves. The bloody freedom struggles of the civil rights movement laid the foundation for every other modern rights struggle. This nation’s white founders set up a decidedly undemocratic Constitution that excluded women, Native Americans and black people, and did not provide the vote or equality for most Americans. But the laws born out of black resistance guarantee the franchise for all and ban discrimination based not just on race but on gender, nationality, religion and ability. It was the civil rights movement that led to the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which upended the racist immigration quota system intended to keep this country white. Because of black Americans, black and brown immigrants from across the globe are able to come to the United States and live in a country in which legal discrimination is no longer allowed. It is a truly American irony that some Asian-Americans, among the groups able to immigrate to the United States because of the black civil rights struggle, are now suing universities to end programs designed to help the descendants of the enslaved.

No one cherishes freedom more than those who have not had it. And to this day, black Americans, more than any other group, embrace the democratic ideals of a common good. We are the most likely to support programs like universal health care and a higher minimum wage, and to oppose programs that harm the most vulnerable. For instance, black Americans suffer the most from violent crime, yet we are the most opposed to capital punishment. Our unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white Americans, yet we are still the most likely of all groups to say this nation should take in refugees.

The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of black resistance. Our founding fathers may not have actually believed in the ideals they espoused, but black people did. As one scholar, Joe R. Feagin, put it, “Enslaved African-Americans have been among the foremost freedom-fighters this country has produced.” For generations, we have believed in this country with a faith it did not deserve. Black people have seen the worst of America, yet, somehow, we still believe in its best.

They say our people were born on the water.

When it occurred, no one can say for certain. Perhaps it was in the second week, or the third, but surely by the fourth, when they had not seen their land or any land for so many days that they lost count. It was after fear had turned to despair, and despair to resignation, and resignation to an abiding understanding. The teal eternity of the Atlantic Ocean had severed them so completely from what had once been their home that it was as if nothing had ever existed before, as if everything and everyone they cherished had simply vanished from the earth. They were no longer Mbundu or Akan or Fulani. These men and women from many different nations, all shackled together in the suffocating hull of the ship, they were one people now.

Just a few months earlier, they had families, and farms, and lives and dreams. They were free. They had names, of course, but their enslavers did not bother to record them. They had been made black by those people who believed that they were white, and where they were heading, black equaled “slave,” and slavery in America required turning human beings into property by stripping them of every element that made them individuals. This process was called seasoning, in which people stolen from western and central Africa were forced, often through torture, to stop speaking their native tongues and practicing their native religions.

But as the sociologist Glenn Bracey wrote, “Out of the ashes of white denigration, we gave birth to ourselves.” For as much as white people tried to pretend, black people were not chattel. And so the process of seasoning, instead of erasing identity, served an opposite purpose: In the void, we forged a new culture all our own.

Today, our very manner of speaking recalls the Creole languages that enslaved people innovated in order to communicate both with Africans speaking various dialects and the English-speaking people who enslaved them. Our style of dress, the extra flair, stems back to the desires of enslaved people — shorn of all individuality — to exert their own identity. Enslaved people would wear their hat in a jaunty manner or knot their head scarves intricately. Today’s avant-garde nature of black hairstyles and fashion displays a vibrant reflection of enslaved people’s determination to feel fully human through self-expression. The improvisational quality of black art and music comes from a culture that because of constant disruption could not cling to convention. Black naming practices, so often impugned by mainstream society, are themselves an act of resistance. Our last names belong to the white people who once owned us. That is why the insistence of many black Americans, particularly those most marginalized, to give our children names that we create, that are neither European nor from Africa, a place we have never been, is an act of self-determination. When the world listens to quintessential American music, it is our voice they hear. The sorrow songs we sang in the fields to soothe our physical pain and find hope in a freedom we did not expect to know until we died became American gospel. Amid the devastating violence and poverty of the Mississippi Delta, we birthed jazz and blues. And it was in the deeply impoverished and segregated neighborhoods where white Americans forced the descendants of the enslaved to live that teenagers too poor to buy instruments used old records to create a new music known as hip-hop.

Our speech and fashion and the drum of our music echoes Africa but is not African. Out of our unique isolation, both from our native cultures and from white America, we forged this nation’s most significant original culture. In turn, “mainstream” society has coveted our style, our slang and our song, seeking to appropriate the one truly American culture as its own. As Langston Hughes wrote in 1926, “They’ll see how beautiful I am/And be ashamed —/I, too, am America.”

For centuries, white Americans have been trying to solve the “Negro problem.” They have dedicated thousands of pages to this endeavor. It is common, still, to point to rates of black poverty, out-of-wedlock births, crime and college attendance, as if these conditions in a country built on a racial caste system are not utterly predictable. But crucially, you cannot view those statistics while ignoring another: that black people were enslaved here longer than we have been free.

At 43, I am part of the first generation of black Americans in the history of the United States to be born into a society in which black people had full rights of citizenship. Black people suffered under slavery for 250 years; we have been legally “free” for just 50. Yet in that briefest of spans, despite continuing to face rampant discrimination, and despite there never having been a genuine effort to redress the wrongs of slavery and the century of racial apartheid that followed, black Americans have made astounding progress, not only for ourselves but also for all Americans.

What if America understood, finally, in this 400th year, that we have never been the problem but the solution?

When I was a child — I must have been in fifth or sixth grade — a teacher gave our class an assignment intended to celebrate the diversity of the great American melting pot. She instructed each of us to write a short report on our ancestral land and then draw that nation’s flag. As she turned to write the assignment on the board, the other black girl in class locked eyes with me. Slavery had erased any connection we had to an African country, and even if we tried to claim the whole continent, there was no “African” flag. It was hard enough being one of two black kids in the class, and this assignment would just be another reminder of the distance between the white kids and us. In the end, I walked over to the globe near my teacher’s desk, picked a random African country and claimed it as my own.

I wish, now, that I could go back to the younger me and tell her that her people’s ancestry started here, on these lands, and to boldly, proudly, draw the stars and those stripes of the American flag.

We were told once, by virtue of our bondage, that we could never be American. But it was by virtue of our bondage that we became the most American of all.

[historydojo]

Black Lives Matter: The Boston Massacre

Black Lives Matter: The Boston Massacre

Become a Patron! The Inspiration of the Boston Massacre The podcast above will explain to you why we all need to remember the lessons of the Boston Massacre. The martyr of the Boston Massacre was, of course, Crispus Attucks, the first person to die for American Independence. His sacrifice inspired other patriots to take up arms against the tyranny of the police state that was taking over…

[livinginlandmarketing]

Academic success, Black history and college access are the top three priorities for Black students and their parents in the Inland Empire, according to a first-of-its-kind report focused on local communities and their perspectives on education.

The report, “The Inland Empire Black Education Agenda,” released Friday, Feb. 19, was led by BLU Educational foundation in San Bernardino, which provides educational services and resources for area youth and adults, in collaboration with Center for Social Innovation at UC Riverside and the Inland Empire Black Equity Initiative.

Key priorities named

The study, which includes a survey of nearly 1,100 Black parents, students and community members in the Inland Empire, recommends five major area of focus to improve Black students’ educational experience:

Academic success

Black history

College and career access

Effective teachers

High school graduation rates

The report also calls for more equitable Local Control and Accountability Plans, three-year plans developed by school districts that describe the goals, action, services and expenditures to support student achievement, and the creation and funding of an equity office at the school district level.

The survey stemmed from perceptions within the Black community about the priorities of schools in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, said Dina Walker, president and CEO of BLU Educational Foundation.

Dina Walker, Blu CEO, third from top right, and other educators are part of The Black Equity Initiative which released its Inland Empire Black Education Agenda at Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. Nearly 1,100 Black parents, students and community members in the Inland Empire were surveyed. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Tawon Green, Blu program director, takes a group picture of The Black Equity Initiative members which released its Inland Empire Black Education Agenda at Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

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Blu Educational Foundation was involved in The Black Equity Initiative which released its Inland Empire Black Education Agenda. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

The Black Equity Initiative member Dr. April Clay, Clay Counseling Foundation CEO, and other educators gather at Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Dr. Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, Rialto’s Werner Elementary principal, and other educators form The Black Equity Initiative gather at Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

The Black Equity Initiative member Dr. April Clay, Clay Counseling Foundation CEO, and educators meet at Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Black Equity Initiative members Dr. April Clay, right, embraces Dr. Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, Rialto’s Werner Elementary principal, at Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

The Black Equity Initiative members Dr. April Clay, right, embraces Dr. Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, Rialto’s Werner Elementary principal, at Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Rakayla Simpson, Blu public policy advocate fellow, from left, Felicia Jones, COPE asst. director, Dr. Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, Rialto’s Werner Elementary principal, Dar’rell Jones, Blu college prep advisor, and Dina Walker, Blu CEO, are part of The Black Equity Initiative which released its Inland Empire Black Education Agenda in Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Blu staffers Dar’rell Jones, college prep advisor, and Dina Walker, CEO, are part of The Black Equity Initiative which released its Inland Empire Black Education Agenda in Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

Rakayla Simpson, Blu public policy advocate fellow, from left, Dar’rell Jones, Blu college prep advisor, Dr. Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, Rialto’s Werner Elementary principal and Dina Walker, Blu CEO, are part of The Black Equity Initiative which released its Inland Empire Black Education Agenda at Fontana Park on Tuesday, February 23, 2021. (Photo by Cindy Yamanaka, The Press-Enterprise/SCNG)

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“I’ve been a part of several committees around the Inland Empire and the feedback I’ve constantly heard is that our schools are not focused on what Black students or parents cared about,” she said. “So at this point we had to find out what the educational priorities in our community are.”

Some of the report’s findings surprised Walker. For example, she said, she did not expect to see Black history emerge as the second most significant issue among students, right behind academic achievement, which was the biggest concern.

“We learned from this report that Black people across generations want Black history to be taught in our schools,” Walker said. “It was even in the top five for our high schoolers, which to me, was surprising and unexpected.”

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Better engagement needed

One issue that surfaced as a top area of concern — student discipline — did not surprise Walker.

A report published October by the UC Riverside’s Center for Social Innovation found disproportionately high discipline for Black and Native American students in Inland Empire schools. In 2001, the suspension rate for Black students in the Inland Empire was 14.8 for every 100 students. In 2018, the rate was 10.9 suspensions for every 100 students. That rate is much higher than the rate of four suspensions per 100 white or Latino students, and one suspension per 100 for Asian students, the report stated.

According to Walker, the Black community is focusing on finding solutions to the disparity.

“A lot of the disciplining data has to do with teachers’ perceptions and biases of the Black community,” she said. “We cannot control that. So the feeling now is let’s not spend time on those negative things, but see how we can get the support our children need to be successful in school.”

The report also emphasizes the need for more Black teachers and administrators on campuses. The BLU Educational Foundation already runs the Black Educator Pipeline, a program to support, guide and mentor Black students who want to become educators.

The report accurately echoes what educators are hearing and seeing out in the community, said Ayanna Blackmon-Balogun, principal of Warner Elementary School, the largest elementary school in Rialto Unified School District. About 16% of the school’s student population is African American.

“Black parents are not engaged and we have to do a better job as a system to get them more engaged,” Blackmon-Balogun said.

For example, she said, schools and school districts use plenty of jargon that goes over the heads of parents. Using words and terms that people can clearly understand will help give them the information they need to advocate for their children, she added.

Telling authentic stories

Meanwhile, there is a hunger in the Black community to hear their stories being shared, Blackmon-Balogun said.

“When we talk about American history in schools, the only times Blacks are mentioned is in the context of slavery, the Civil War and Black regiments,” she said.

“Certain Black voices are left out,” she added. “The triumphs of Black people in history must be acknowledged and intentional. This is about reclaiming our identity in our country.”

Blackmon-Balogun points to a number of accomplishments by Black people that are rarely, if at all, talked about in school, such as the contributions of Crispus Attucks and Benjamin Banneka.

Attucks was the first man to fall during the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770. A monument to Attucks was unveiled in Boston Common in 1888. Before him was Banneka, a free Black man born in 1731, taught himself astronomy and mathematics. He was called upon to assist in the surveying of territory for the construction of Washington, D.C., and became an active writer of almanacs who exchanged letters with Thomas Jefferson challenging the third U.S. president to promote racial equality.

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“We talk about the Black women who worked for NASA, but we leave out the context,” Blackmon-Balogun said. “We don’t talk about what they had to give up, how much they had to fight for it and what it meant in our society. The ugliness of racism in our country didn’t stop with slavery. It continued on long after.”

The new report gives educators “a common language,” Blackmon-Balogun said.

“This is an agenda that supports and affirms specific educational goals for Black students,” she said. “As a Black educator, I now have policy, research and boots on the ground that are saying this is what it’s about and these are the things that matter. When I walk in with this agenda, it’s more powerful.”

-on February 24, 2021 at 07:48AM by Deepa Bharath