The “NYC Draft Riot.” The massacring of Black people is a key part of the erased American history white racists don’t want our children taught
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
While white supremacist legislators froth at the mouth like the rabid racists they are, passing bills to ensure that the children in their districts will be protected from the ugly reality of foundational parts of American History, we face yet another “anniversary” of the murder of Black folks this week. This time it’s the massacre of Black people in New York City which took place in July of 1863, which is called “the Draft Riots” obscuring much of what really took place.
Euell A. Nielsen, wrote this overview for BlackPast
The New York City Draft Riots (1863)
When the draft came to New York City in July 1863, anti-government anger turned to anti-government and anti-black violence. The anti-black violence was driven by the resentment that the Irish would have to compete with freedpeople for jobs in the city now that the Union had embraced emancipation.
On the first day of the draft, July 11, the city was relatively quiet. However, by day three, July 13, tensions boiled over. Volunteer firefighters from Engine Co. No. 33, were known for their violent nature. Angry at their commissioner, they set fire to their own company firehouse which attracted an angry mob. Led by the firefighters, the mob continued down 3rd Avenue, ransacking and burning businesses in their wake. They focused on those enterprises known to employ African Americans including Brooks Brothers, Harper’s Weekly, Knickerbockers, and other wealthy businesses. They also attacked the homes of prominent white abolitionists. When the mob reached the Colored Orphans’ Asylum, filled with mostly women and children, it began looting the building before setting it on fire. The 200 children inside were led out of the back by their benefactors and taken to safety.
There were many accounts in New York City newspapers of black individuals killed during the riot. Although there were an estimated 663 deaths, only 120 were reported to the police. Of those, however, 106 were African Americans. One account of Ebrahim Franklin’s death was typical. Franklin was in church, praying. He was a disabled man who made his living working as a carriage driver. He lived at home and supported his elderly mother. The mob reached him just as he was rising to his feet from his prayers and beat him to his death. They then dragged him outside and hung him in the church yard in front of his mother. Finally, they mutilated his corpse.
This history is being addressed as part of a project at The Shed, a New York City Arts organization. The Shed Presents New Audio Tour and Film FIGHTING DARK
“The immersive, self-guided audio tour maps 11 sites in Manhattan and Brooklyn with narration by Kamau Ware.”
"Collectively our country has focused on the racial violence inflicted on free Black communities in the South after the Civil War, specifically during the Reconstruction Era," said Kamau Ware. "The insurrection that took place in the streets of New York City the week of July 13th, 1863, less than two weeks after the Battle of Gettysburg, was a blueprint for disenfranchising Black people before the Reconstruction Amendments were drafted. This racial violence has been hiding in plain sight with the incorrect label of 'draft riots' for over a century and a half."
The Shed commissioned Kamau Ware (Black Gotham Experience) to create digital audio and video tours titled “Fighting Dark” in dialogue with the investigation of the legacy of racial violence in the United States in the exhibition “Howardena Pindell: Rope/Fire/Water.” The tours focus on Manhattan and Brooklyn’s 19th-century racial history and connect to Pindell’s investigation of touch points in that same, long history. Tracing back 100 years from the May 1963 Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, Alabama, explored by Pindell in the exhibition’s Shed-commissioned film, Ware’s tours draw a line between that moment in the civil rights movement and New York City’s 1863 race riots.
These riots have often been explained as a consequence of the Civil War draft, an alibi that obscures the racial violence that white New Yorkers directed at their Black neighbors during the unrest.Within this historiography, “Fighting Dark” speaks to a dark side of American history as well as the dark-skinned people who have been impacted by it, especially the Black New Yorkers who fled in the dark of night during the 1863 riots and those who enlisted in the Union Army during the Civil War in what was called the “Colored Troops 20th Infantry” from New York City.
The tours ultimately provide a platform to draw out lessons on how Black people find resilience in the face of racial violence. Ware presents an audio and a video tour that probe this history in areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn: the audio version invites immersive, self-guided and site-specific engagements with the city, and the video version offers the chance to experience the same from wherever you call home—from Ocean Hill, Brooklyn, to anywhere in the world.
Transcript of the video.
The Zinn Education Project, which can always be counted on to cover history that has been erased or whitewashed posted several tweets today — please share them.
Lest you forget, or in case you didn’t get taught — massacres of Black people took place, north, south and in the midwest.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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It was a normal day in one of my 11th grade US history courses. During class, a kid, I’ll call him Billy, asked, “Why is it such a big deal that the police killed someone? Why is there so much fuss about this one? He should have just listened to the police.”
While this conversation could have happened this year, it occurred in the spring of 2015, amid the media uproar surrounding Freddie Gray, a young black man who died while in Baltimore police custody. But Billy didn’t understand why this was happening, and now I — a high school teacher — was tasked with explaining this national moment to my young student. So I took a deep breath and launched into a brief historical context about the history of police brutality, Black resistance to it, and how all of this goes back to America’s Reconstruction era.
These conversations take place often in my class. Young people want to understand the world around them, and it’s my job to do my absolute best to help them make sense of things, even if it’s just by providing them with knowledge of past events that created the inequalities they witness on a regular basis. Whether it’s police killing unarmed Black people, anti-Asian violence during the Covid-19 pandemic, or viral videos of people making racist 911 calls, students want to know. I pride myself on helping kids to make connections between these kinds of events and our nation’s history.
This is one reason why I get so frustrated at all the bad takes circulating among politicians, social media, and the news related to critical race theory and the teaching of America’s racial history in K-12 classrooms. The reality is that kids are talking about race, systems of oppression, and our country’s ugly past anyway — from media coverage to last summer’s protests to even this very controversy itself, my students are absorbing these conversations and want to know more. I’m just one teacher, and there’s no way to generalize what’s happening everywhere. But I believe that my students are smart and mature enough to handle the truth.
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When Hervis Rogers went viral on social media for being the last person in line at Texas Southern University to cast a vote at 1 a.m. on Super Tuesday in March 2020, he was applauded as a tenacious, civic-minded man who worked hard to exercise his right to vote.
Now, Rogers is being prosecuted by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton's office for allegedly voting illegally.
The arrest came just one day before the Texas Legislature convened on Thursday to begin a special session, where a controversial voting bill is on the agenda. Republicans in favor of new voting restrictions point to cases like Rogers' as proof of an insecure system. However, there was no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
The charges against Rogers
In 1995, Rogers was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison for burglary and intent to commit theft. He was out on parole May 20, 2004, and his parole was set to end June 13, 2020.
Rogers was one of millions of people in America without the right to vote, because of laws in a number of states, including Texas, prohibiting formerly convicted felons from participating in elections while still on parole.
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Figures from across the world of football have shown their support for England’s black stars after they were subjected to another night of racist abuse on social media following defeat in the European Championship final.
Provisional data analysis conducted by the Guardian, in collaboration with Hope Not Hate, found more than 120 instances of England players receiving direct racial abuse on Twitter in the hours following the game. The majority of messages contained the n-word while others compared players to monkeys or used emojis associated with racist slurs. This compares to 44 racist messages during England’s first three matches of the tournament. Streams of abuse were also posted on Instagram.
The Metropolitan police say they will investigate the “offensive and racist” posts directed at players. Greater Manchester police are also conducting an inquiry into “racially aggravated damage” after a mural in south Manchester celebrating local hero Marcus Rashford was defaced.
By early evening several people had added notes and decorated England flags at the site, professing solidarity with Rashford as well as his teammates Sancho and Saka. A crowdfunder Withington Walls, who maintain the mural and others locally, has raised more than £18,000. In a statement posted on Monday evening, Rashford said the response in Withington had him “on the verge of tears”.
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The Biden administration has so far given no indication it will provide military assistance in the aftermath of President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination. The Grio: ‘We need help’: Haiti’s interim leader requests US troops
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Haiti’s interim government said it asked the U.S. to deploy troops to protect key infrastructure as it tries to stabilize the country and prepare for elections in the aftermath of President Jovenel Moïse’s assassination.
Amid the confusion, hundreds of Haitians gathered outside the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince pleading for a way out of the country. Women carried babies and young men waved passports and ID cards as they cried out, “Refuge!” and “Help!”
“We definitely need assistance and we’ve asked our international partners for help,” Interim Prime Minister Claude Joseph told The Associated Press in a phone interview late Friday. “We believe our partners can assist the national police in resolving the situation.”
The stunning request for U.S. military support recalled the tumult following Haiti’s last presidential assassination, in 1915, when an angry mob dragged President Vilbrun Guillaume Sam out of the French Embassy and beat him to death. In response, President Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines into Haiti, justifying the American military occupation — which lasted nearly two decades — as a way to avert anarchy.
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Thabani nkomonye was last seen alive on May 8th. A few days later the body of the 25-year-old law student was found in a field near Manzini in Eswatini. The police say he died in a car crash. Friends and family say the police killed him.
Mr Nkomonye’s death has sparked protests across the country of 1.2m people. On June 29th, after demonstrations intensified, the government announced a dusk-to-dawn curfew and shut off the internet. Swazi journalists say that doctors have confirmed at least 50 deaths at the hands of security forces. The government says that 27 people have died and that its forces were defending themselves and private property against “rioters and foreign agents”.
In many ways the protests are like those elsewhere in Africa. “There are no jobs and opportunities for young people,” says Xolani Maseko, the president of the union of students. More than 46% of 15- to 24-year-olds are unemployed, the third-highest rate in the world. What distinguishes Eswatini is the protests’ target, King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch.
That he rules at all is a historical curiosity. Britain, the colonial power, left in 1968, perfunctorily bequeathing a Westminster-style system. Five years later the then king, Sobhuza II, revoked the constitution and declared “supreme power”. After Sobhuza died in 1982 elders of the ruling Dlamini clan picked as heir his 14-year-old illegitimate son, whom they hoped to control. The future King Mswati III was brought into the royal kraal, says a confidant, and told, “From now on you call your mother ‘Queen Mother’.” She had been a cleaner for one of Sobhuza’s 65 wives, according to a report published in 2013 by Freedom House, an American think-tank. The boy-king was sent to boarding school in England, returning to sit on the throne in 1986.
Though analysts speculate about how much the king himself calls the shots, the monarchy certainly operates unchecked. Mswati is immune from prosecution. Political parties are banned. Opposition activists are jailed. Journalists are intimidated; on July 4th reporters from New Frame, a South African publication, were taken to a police station and allegedly tortured with plastic bags over their heads. The king (pictured on next page) appoints the prime minister and other key office-holders.
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Life is a journey.
In the past few weeks, my journey took an unexpected path but one that has taught me so much and helped me grow. I learned a couple of key lessons.
Lesson one: you can never please everyone. The world is as divided now as I can remember in my short 23 years. Issues that are so obvious to me at face value, like wearing a mask in a pandemic or kneeling to show support for anti-racism, are ferociously contested. I mean, wow. So, when I said I needed to miss French Open press conferences to take care of myself mentally, I should have been prepared for what unfolded.
Lesson two was perhaps more enriching. It has become apparent to me that literally everyone either suffers from issues related to their mental health or knows someone who does. The number of messages I received from such a vast cross section of people confirms that. I think we can almost universally agree that each of us is a human being and subject to feelings and emotions.
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