KKK March Washington DC, 1925
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
Reconstruction Redux?
The photo above was 1925...over 85 years ago.
As a 62 year old black person raised by parents and grandparents who lived during those years, 1925 is not so long ago and far away.
This one is of our current Tea Partiers in the Nations capitol.
Those Klan marchers have long since gone to their graves. Some of the children who were brought to the march to wave and cheer for their parents now have children and grandchildren of their own. I can be fairly sure that they raised those kids to embrace the principles of American Exceptionalism; the specialness of whiteness. The rejection of all those who were not born to rule and a hatred of those who refused to "stay in their proper place" at the bottom of the hierarchy.
After the civil war, which freed slaves...a new order swept through the states – particularly in the South.
Black men who had been servitors in chains could now vote. In many areas of the south blacks were a majority, and with the help of Federal officials and Northern abolitionist groups they began to assert themselves – electing blacks to the Congress, and to state legislatures.
In the ensuing years, those who were defeated in battle – started a new war. A right wing terrorist resistance to change. Change of the world the way they knew it. Change of the world that was built for them. Change of the future that they wanted for their children. Their white children.
They trained those children to hate. They took them to fish fries and lynchings.
Hate is based on fear. Fear of loss of control. Fear of loss of social position. Fear of the dark "other".
And so they raised an army. To defend their way of life. An army dressed in symbolic white. An army that raided by night and marched by day. An army that called itself Christian. An Army fighting under the flag of supremacy, a red white and blue banner unfurled alongside of Dixie banners.
This sweeping tide of hate permeated every corner of the States.- North, South East and West.
Lest we forget, it was not just blacks who were the "other" to be feared and suppressed.
By 1920 women as well could vote, adding new faces to the ranks of the enemy to be feared. And then after years of struggle red and yellow men and women soon swelled the voting rolls:
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1831 that "Indians" were a "domestic dependent nation." As such, Native Americans lacked citizenship rights as long as they remained within their nation. In 1906, the Burke Act granted citizenship to those Native Americans who privately farmed their land and left the jurisdiction of the reservation. But it would not be until 1924 that Congress would pass the Indian Citizenship Act granting all Native Americans, on or off the reservation, citizenship and the possibility of suffrage. In 1956 Utah was the last state to give Native Americans the vote.
Chinese Americans faced similar barriers to voting. Three hundred thousand Chinese arrived in the U.S. between 1854 and 1882, drawn to the California gold rush and jobs in mining and railroad construction. Chinese immigrants quickly became targets for white workers, who blamed them for driving down wages. Riots against Chinese in California were commonplace in the 1870s and 80s. Pressure for action grew so great that the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, the first anti-immigrant act in U.S. history. The law ended Chinese immigration and prevented Chinese and later other Asian immigrants from becoming naturalized citizens, thus disfranchising that population.
Children of Chinese born in the United States were also excluded from citizenship until an 1896 law established their rights as citizens. Not until 1926 would California's suffrage provision, allowing "no native of China" to vote be overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Chinese Exclusion Act would remain in effect until 1943, when the United States lifted the immigration ban.
I have talked in the past about resistance to the Klan and other hate groups.
I'm old enough to remember seeing cross-burnings...in Baton Rouge LA in the 50's and on suburban lawns in Queens NY in the 60's.
Today I see the same hate etched on the faces of my neighbors in upstate NY.
My little town of Kingston NY has been visited by the KKK in recent years.
I follow the upswings in hate and haters in my area using the "hate maps" provided by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Let's take a look at the KKK and its past - and its present reconstruction, or reconfiguration.
Three Klans
First KKK
The first Klan was founded in 1865 in Tennessee by veterans of the Confederate Army. Although it never had an organizational structure above the local level, similar groups across the South adopted the name and methods. Klan groups spread throughout the South as an insurgent movement after the war. As a secret vigilante group, the Klan reacted against Radical Republican control of Reconstruction by attempting to restore white supremacy by threats and violence, including murder, against black and white Republicans. In 1870 and 1871 the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes. Prosecution of Klan crimes and enforcement of the Force Acts suppressed Klan activity. In 1874 and later, however, newly organized and openly active paramilitary organizations, such as the White League and the Red Shirts, started a fresh round of violence aimed at suppressing Republican voting and running Republicans out of office. These contributed to white conservative Democrats' regaining political power in all the Southern states by 1877.
Second KKK
In 1915, the second Klan was founded. It grew rapidly nationwide after 1921 in a period of postwar social tensions, where industrialization in the North attracted numerous waves of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and the Great Migration of Southern blacks and whites. The second KKK preached racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Communism, nativism, and antisemitism. Some local groups took part in attacks on private houses, and carried out other violent activities. The violent episodes were generally in the South. The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation's eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930. It finally faded away in the 1940s
Third KKK
The "Ku Klux Klan" name was used by many independent local groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, they often forged alliances with Southern police departments, as in Birmingham, Alabama; or with governor's offices, as with George Wallace of Alabama.[6] Several members of KKK groups were convicted of murder in the deaths of civil rights workers and children in the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham. Today, researchers estimate that there may be approximately 150 Klan chapters with 5,000[7]–8,000 members nationwide. Today, a large majority of sources consider the Klan to be a "subversive or terrorist organization". In 1999, the city council of Charleston, South Carolina passed a resolution declaring the Klan to be a terrorist organization. A similar effort was made in 2004 when a professor at the University of Louisville began a campaign to have the Klan declared a terrorist organization so it could be banned from campus. In April 1997, FBI agents arrested four members of the True Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Dallas for conspiracy to commit robbery and to blow up a natural gas processing plant.
Why am I musing about this today?
While surfing the web I happened upon this statement(my bold):
The Ku Klux Klan was overshadowed in the late 1990s and early 2000s by growing neo-Nazi activity; however, by 2005 neo-Nazi groups had fallen on hard times, with many groups collapsing or fragmenting. This collapse has helped create a rise of racist skinhead activity, but has also provided new opportunities for Klan groups. In addition, in the early 2000s, many communities in the United States began to experiences a significant influx of immigrants, especially Hispanics, for the first time in their histories. A single-issue movement opposing immigration has helped create fear and anxiety about immigration in the minds of many Americans.
Many Ku Klux Klan groups have attempted to take advantage of that fear and uncertainty, using anti-immigration sentiments for recruitment and propaganda purposes, and to attract publicity.
and I thought about Reconstruction – and hate, and now the age of Obama laced with hate, and the advent of an America with a black, brown, yellow, red majority future and the upswing of hatred against certain immigrants and I want us to remember.
There are many people who want to deny what they see happening – right in front of our eyes. There are those who want to shove the hatred out of sight out of mind, or deny its cause.
What makes this any different from those days gone by?
Why do photos like these raise my ire?
I’ve read too many "well meaning" expressions of "concern" about the Tea Party folks and the Rand Paul's of America, attributing the right wing anger to a broad range of variables.
But for me, the root of the cancer points in one direction only. These people hate me, and mine and everything we’ve gained since 1865.
We’ve slowed them down before, and they’ve come back. They will not go gently into the night of the past. They confront us now in the harsh light of day.
Correction - they are not "back". Sadly - they never went away.
We have a task in front of us. More than ever we need to be united.
Black, white, brown, red, yellow....women, men... straight, gay... religious, agnostic or atheist.
Fight Back against Hate
Dare to Struggle, Dare to Win
Pa'lante Siempre Pa'lante
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William Henry Hunt and Ida Alexander Gibbs lived exceptional lives against impossible odds at a time of rigid segregation. The Root: A Black Power Couple in the Early 20th Century.
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When Adele Logan Alexander was doing research for her doctorate at Howard University, she stumbled on a remarkable and largely forgotten power couple who were born nearly 150 years ago: William Henry Hunt and Ida Alexander Gibbs. Hunt was the first African American to enjoy a full-fledged career in the U.S. State Department; he served as consul in Madagascar, in eastern France and Guadeloupe. His wife was one of the early black female internationalists, helping W.E.B. Du Bois organize the Pan-African conferences that crystallized many important intellectual and political concepts. Their accomplishments would be notable even today; they were practically miraculous in their time.
The Gibbs-Hunts, as they were called, have come to light because of a wave of new research in black history that is focused less on the grand figures of history and more on individuals who made their mark despite the huge obstacles they faced. This new focus reflects a broader trend toward a history of ordinary people and the insights they provide into daily life.
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Apples to oranges, the Traditional Media always does crap like this! Race Talk: What really separates the Tea Party from the Black Panther Party.
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I was three years old when I watched my father, mother, and three-week-old baby brother nearly murdered in a hail of bullets during a police raid on our home in September 1973.
My father, Robert Seth Hayes, was a member of the Black Panther Party (BPP), and ever since that day some 37 years ago, he has been a political prisoner in the state of New York. So when I read Cord Jefferson‘s article, "Is the Tea Party the New Black Panther Party?" on The Root.com, I could not help but remember, and relive, the pain and trauma of that day. I also became frustrated and angry because Jefferson’s article is ahistorical and continues the tradition of attacking the Party and misrepresenting its history and legacy. What’s more, it does so in a forum that prides itself on getting African American history correct.
Jefferson begins his piece predictably, by drawing on caricatures of the Party - images of armed, angry, Black men going to war against the US government. But the images that are used aren’t even of Panther members. His opening lines are accompanied by a photo of Malik Zulu Shabazz, a member of the New Black Panther Party (NBPP), an unaffiliated group founded in 1989 that has no connection to the BPP other than the name that it appropriated.
In fact, original BPP members openly reject the NBPP because its ideology promotes violence, separatism, and nationalism, values my father and other BPP members have long abandoned as part of an effective political ideology and strategy. In fact, the NBPP was successfully sued by Huey P. Newton’s foundation in an effort to keep them from calling themselves the Black Panther Party for Self Defense, the BPP’s original name.
This is just one example of the article’s glaring inaccuracies; there are many more Chief among them is the central argument that Tea Partiers waving guns, screaming racial epithets, threatening violence against Black elected officials, and holding anti-tax rallies is similar to the BPP’s response to systematic police brutality, which involved developing community-based projects that promoted self defense, Black political power, and freedom from economic exploitation.
Jefferson admits that "reconciling the...Marxist underpinnings of the [BPP ideology] with the laissez-faire philosophy of the Tea Party is impossible," but appears determined to overlook this and other core differences in his effort to make the case that BPP and Tea Party political grievances are similar enough to legitimately link the two.
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Since 1977, dance fans have been flocking to Davis' dance festival to see African dance in all its incarnations, from all around the world. (The shopping at the Dance Africa Bazaar isn't bad, either.) The Root: An Interview with Dance Africa Founder Chuck Davis.
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Dr. Charles ''Chuck'' Davis founded Dance Africa in Brooklyn in 1977, thereby creating the country's first festival solely devoted to the legacy of African dance. From that modest beginning at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, it has blossomed into one of our largest celebrations of African and African-American culture, encompassing dance, music, art and film. It also features the lively outdoor Dance Africa Bazaar, where 300 vendors sell everything from dresses and sandals to baskets and drums.
On Memorial Day weekend, people come from far and wide to see what Dr. Davis has cooked up for them. This year, the agenda includes the Pamodzi Dance Troupe, from Zambia, two American companies, Dallas Black Dance Theatre and Philadelphia's Illstyle & Peace Productions, plus the BAM/Restoration Dance/Africa Ensemble.
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Washington Post: Lawrence Fishburne is supremely pleased to perform 'Thurgood' in Washington.
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For an actor alone on a stage, there's pressure -- and then there's PRESSURE. Laurence Fishburne encountered the italicized variety one evening early in the Broadway run of "Thurgood," the one-man show in which he portrays the larger-than-life Thurgood Marshall, the late lion of the civil rights movement and long a formidable presence on the U.S. Supreme Court.
Staring at him from a prominent seat was Marshall's widow, Cecilia. "She came on her birthday and sat front-row center," Fishburne recalls. It was the sort of fraught theatrical moment that could have ended in joy or tears. Who held more power to validate or undermine Fishburne's efforts to convey the essence of this earthy, self-effacing man of history?
Any lingering insecurity -- though this actor doesn't seem to be hindered by much of that -- was erased when the widow and the performer met face to face. He didn't merely like her reaction; he loved it, and he quotes her winking, irreverent reply with affection: "I'm sorry you're married," she said to him.
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With graffiti and protests, from sweltering tents to air-conditioned offices, Haitians are desperately trying to get a message to their government and the world: enough with the status quo. New York Times: Rubble of a Broken City Strains Haitians’ Patience.
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The simple phrase "Aba Préval" (Down with Préval, a reference to Haiti’s president, René Préval) has become shorthand for a long list of frustrations, and an epithet expressing a broader fear — that Haitians will be stuck in limbo indefinitely, and that the opportunity to reinvent Haiti is being lost.
While few have given up entirely on the dream that a more efficient, more just Haiti might rise from the rubble, increasingly, hope is giving way to stalemate and bitterness. "Is this really it?" Haitians ask. They complain that the politically connected are benefiting most from reconstruction work that has barely begun. They shake their heads at crime’s coming back, unproductive politicians and aid groups that are struggling with tarpaulin metropolises that look more permanent every day.
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New York Times: Jamaica Accused of Brutality in Hunting Suspect.
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The search for her son’s body brought Lynette Armstrong down a cemetery path in west Kingston on Friday, past bushes of Chinese honeysuckle and bloodstained clothes to a jumble of 24 wooden coffins, strewn this way and that.
Stones atop the lid of one coffin did not stop a bloated arm from showing through. The rest of the coffins were nailed shut, guarded by maggots and flies, leaving Ms. Armstrong still wondering where to find her 26-year-old son, Ishawni Harrison, who she believes was killed by a government sniper this week when Mr. Harrison went outside, unarmed, to buy marijuana.
Her accusations, which could not be independently confirmed, were among the growing list of claims of excessive force made by west Kingston residents since a battle between the Jamaican security forces and the backers of a wanted gang leader broke out here on Sunday.
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Africa may still be suffering from a chronic brain drain but some of the continent's elite are turning their backs on the West and taking their talents back home according to film-maker Andy Jones. BBC: Brain gain: African migrants returning home
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The story is as old as the hills. Man leaves village to seek riches in the big city.
In recent years, the village has been the continent of Africa, the city represented by the bright lights of Europe and America.
Any number of Africans seek to cross the ocean and make their fortunes, never to be seen again.
But when our team travelled around Africa recently to film a new TV documentary series, we found a different story. Many of the Africans I met had worked or been educated in the West and come back.
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New York Time: Hunting for Liberia’s Missing Millions.
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How much money did Charles G. Taylor, the deposed president of Liberia, siphon out of his destitute, war-shattered country, and where is it?
For almost seven years, since an international warrant was issued for his arrest, the search has stretched from the mangrove swamps and diamond fields of West Africa to Swiss banks and shell corporations — a state-of-the-art version of the sweeping asset hunts that have accompanied the fall of autocrats since the shah of Iran’s demise in the 1970s.
Investigators have crawled in the dirt under porches and buildings in this impoverished capital to seek out financial records. They have confronted bankers and government officials on four continents. They have cross-referenced mazes of documents charting the transfer of millions of dollars into and out of dozens of accounts.
But they have come up dry for any money in Mr. Taylor’s name. In fact, four years ago, Mr. Taylor was classified as "partially indigent" by the Special Court for Sierra Leone at The Hague, where he is charged with instigating murder, mutilation, rape and sexual slavery during intertwined wars in Liberia and Sierra Leone that claimed more than 250,000 victims from 1989 to 2003.
That has left donor nations — the United States being the largest — to cover his monthly $100,000 legal bill and the broader costs of his $20 million trial.
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New York Times: Blacks in Memphis Lose Decades of Economic Gains.
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For two decades, Tyrone Banks was one of many African-Americans who saw his economic prospects brightening in this Mississippi River city.
Then the Great Recession rolled in like a fog bank. He refinanced his mortgage at a rate that adjusted sharply upward, and afterward he lost one of his jobs. Now Mr. Banks faces bankruptcy and foreclosure.
"I’m going to tell you the deal, plain-spoken: I’m a black man from the projects and I clean toilets and mop up for a living," said Mr. Banks, a trim man who looks at least a decade younger than his 50 years. "I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished. But my whole life is backfiring."
Not so long ago, Memphis, a city where a majority of the residents are black, was a symbol of a South where racial history no longer tightly constrained the choices of a rising black working and middle class. Now this city epitomizes something more grim: How rising unemployment and growing foreclosures in the recession have combined to destroy black wealth and income and erase two decades of slow progress.
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Voices and Soul by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
In the middle of August 1936, soldiers loyal to Franco arrested Federico García Lorca. Considered by many to be the premier poet of the early 20th century, Lorca wrote the following poem in 1929 while a student at Columbia University. It was published posthumously. The Gacela (gazelle) of the poem is a symbol for a young black man who was lynched in the state of South Carolina early in 1929; though it might have been a prescience of Lorca's own death. A few days after his arrest, he was executed and his books burned in Granada's Plaza del Carmen. To this day, even after 35 years since Franco's death, the grave of Federico García Lorca remains a mystery.
Gacela of the Dark Death
(translated by Robert Bly)
I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
I want to get far away from the busyness of the cemeteries.
I want to sleep the sleep of that child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.
I don't want them to tell me again how the corpse keeps all its blood,
how the decaying mouth goes on begging for water.
I'd rather not hear about the torture sessions the grass arranges for
nor about how the moon does all its work before dawn
with its snakelike nose.
I want to sleep for half a second,
a second, a minute, a century,
but I want everyone to know that I am still alive,
that I have a golden manger inside my lips,
that I am the little friend of the west wind,
that I am the elephantine shadow of my own tears.
When it's dawn just throw some sort of cloth over me
because I know dawn will toss fistfuls of ants at me,
and pour a little hard water over my shoes
so that the scorpion claws of the dawn will slip off.
Because I want to sleep the sleep of the apples,
and learn a mournful song that will clean all earth away from me,
because I want to live with that shadowy child
who longed to cut his heart open far out at sea.
-- Federico García Lorca
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