WAKE UP to LIVE!

The African woman is the great divide in the consciousness of freedom because of the interference of European thought and aggressive terrorism. . . ~ Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 8/22/18

the Art of the Feminine melanin.

Black History: equal distribution

● More than half of all drug arrests are for marijuana-related offenses, according to a June 2013 study by the American Civil Liberties Union

● African Americans are about three and a half times more likely to be arrested [in the United States for marijuana-related offenses] than their white counterparts; Latinos are about two times more likely.

“After 40 years of impoverished black men getting prison time for selling weed, white men are planning to get rich doing the same things - So that’s why I think we have to start talking about …How do we repair the harms caused?” ~ Michelle Alexander

https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/aclu-thewaronmarijuana-rel2.pdf

Weed fairness.

Lynching in America [2.]

Fighting for Freedom: The Civil War and its Aftermath

When 11 Southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America and sparked the Civil War in 1861, they made no secret of their ultimate aim:  to preserve the institution of slavery. In the words of Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, the ideological “cornerstone” of the new nation they sought to form was that “the negro is not equal to the white man” and “slavery and subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.”¹⁰

Congress officially authorized the Union army to accept black soldiers on July 17, 1862. But national leaders largely considered the Civil War “a white man’s war” and the Union was reluctant to use black soldiers in combat. Northern military personnel, politicians, and President Abraham Lincoln himself expressed fear that armed black soldiers would ruin white soldiers’ morale, be harmful to the war effort, or as one Ohio Congressman warned, prove so essential that victory would weaken white supremacy. “If you make [the black man] the instrument by which your battles are fought, the means by which your victories are won,” the congressman argued in his plea against black soldiers in combat, “you must treat him as a victor is entitled to be treated, with all decent and becoming respect.”¹¹

As the war dragged on and the Union incurred more casualties,¹² objections to black combat troops faded. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which applied only to those enslaved in the Confederate states, provided that black soldiers would be accepted into all military positions.¹³
The navy gained 19,000 black sailors and 179,000 black men joined the army, making up 10 percent of its troops. Some 40,000 were killed fighting for the United States.¹⁴

Black Union soldiers included men who had been free in the North before the war, black men who had lived free in the South in the midst of slavery, and some who escaped slavery after the war began and joined the fight in hopes of guaranteeing their freedom and winning that of others. But acceptance into the military did not mean equal treatment. As the war against the Confederacy raged, black soldiers also had to fight for equal pay and rations that the War Department promised during recruitment. A black soldier from Pennsylvania reported that his unit was overcome with despair upon learning they would be paid less than white soldiers, and many protested by refusing to accept any payment. Despite protests and pleas from leaders including Frederick Douglass, Congress refused to pass legislation equalizing black and white soldiers’ pay until 1864.¹⁵

Black participation was far less common, more complicated, and more staunchly resisted on the other side of the conflict. The Confederacy was based on a belief in white supremacy and black inferiority and a commitment to continue slavery. The Confederate army refused to enlist or arm black soldiers even as the turning tide of the war led some Confederates to urge that enslaved black people should be ordered to fight just as they were ordered to work. Some enslaved black men were taken to the battlefield as servants for Confederate officers, but formal black enlistment in the Confederate army was prohibited until a desperate and largely inconsequential act of the Confederate Congress authorized black Confederate military service on March 13, 1865, just weeks before the Confederacy surrendered. As historian Leon Litwack wrote:

Few slaves were ever enlisted [in the Confederate Army], and none of them apparently had the opportunity to fight. Had the Confederacy managed to raise a black army, it would seem unlikely, particularly after 1863, that it could have fought with the same sense of commitment and self-pride that propelled the black troops in the Union Army. When he first heard of the act to recruit blacks for the Confederate Army, a Virginia freedman recalled, he had suddenly found himself unable to restrain his emotions. “They asked me if I would fight for my country. I said, ‘I have no country.’”¹⁶

The Civil War ended with the Confederacy’s surrender in the spring of 1865. The formal, nationwide end of slavery came in December 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits slavery “except as punishment for crime.” The legal instruments that ended racialized chattel slavery in America nonetheless did nothing to address the myth of racial hierarchy that sustained slavery. Black people were free under the law, but that did not mean whites recognized them as fully human. Nationwide but particularly in the South, white identity was grounded in the belief that whites are inherently superior to African Americans.

After the war, whites reacted violently to the notion that they would now have to treat their former human property as equals and pay for their labor. In numerous recorded incidents, plantation owners attacked black people simply for claiming their freedom.¹⁷ Many surviving black veterans returned to the South, where they had lived — many in the status of slave — before the war. Carrying hopes of starting farms and finding loved ones lost for years or even decades, these veterans frequently faced grave danger from violent attacks and racist laws designed to restore the racial hierarchy. The success of African Americans as trained soldiers challenged the idea that black people were fit only for servitude and undermined a central tenet of white supremacy. With their military training, black soldiers “represented both a viable alternative source of community leadership and a direct physical threat to white supremacy when they came home.”¹⁸

After a brief period, the victorious federal government gave up on Reconstruction and withdrew from the South in 1877, abandoning its duty to protect newly freed black people and enforce the citizenship rights they now held. Exploitative systems of convict leasing and sharecropping impeded economic progress and returned many black people to a status very similar to slavery. President Andrew Johnson took office following President Lincoln’s assassination and adopted policies that opposed black voting rights, restored Confederates’ citizenship, and allowed Southern former rebels to reestablish white supremacy and dominate black people with impunity.¹⁹

The Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, established that all persons born in the United States, regardless of race, are full citizens of the United States and the of the states in which they reside, and are entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship, including due process. Though a hopeful development, the Supreme Court quickly dismantled the amendment’s promise in The Slaughterhouse Cases and U.S. v. Cruikshank.²⁰ As a result, African Americans accused of violating the racial order were met with violence and terror; they received little protection from local officials, and they had no claim to federal assistance.

Black veterans were seen as a particularly strong threat to racial hierarchy and were an early target of discriminatory state laws. To eliminate black gun ownership, which had reached unprecedented levels during the war due to black military service, states including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi passed laws that made it a crime for an African American to possess a firearm.²¹

Florida’s Black Code of 1866 prohibited black people from possessing “any Bowie-knife, dirk, sword, firearms or ammunition of any kind” and made violations punishable by public whipping.²² Mississippi’s statute declared “that no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her country, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife.” Whites were free to own and carry firearms, but law enforcement officials were stationed at train stations to seize black veterans’ guns when they arrived; veterans who did not comply were beaten and some were even shot by police.²³

Southern newspapers fueled whites’ fears of black veterans by publishing sensational accounts of so-called “race wars”: conflicts between supposedly innocent white police and drunk and armed former black soldiers intent on starting trouble. In May 1866, after whites attacked the black community in Memphis in what became known as the Memphis Massacre, the white-owned Memphis Argus published an editorial blaming the massacre on black gun ownership. The editorial board wrote:

Again the irrepressible conflict of races has broken out in our midst, and again our streets are stained with blood. And this time, there can be no mistake about it; the whole blame of this most tragical [sic] and bloody riot lies, as usual, with the poor, ignorant, deluded blacks. . . . [W]e cannot suffer the occasion to pass without again calling the attention of the authorities to the indispensable necessity of disarming these poor creatures, who have so often shown themselves utterly unfit to be trusted with firearms. On this occasion the facts all go to show that but for this much-abused privilege accorded to them by misguided and misjudging friends, there would have been no riot . . . The universal questions asked on all corners of the streets is, “Why are not the negroes disarmed?”²⁴

The violence in Memphis is now widely acknowledged as a racially-motivated massacre. Dozens of black people were raped, injured, or killed, and many black homes, churches, and schools were destroyed by fire. The two white casualties were killed by white rioters.²⁵

As the white Southern press decried their access to weapons and state legislatures strived to disarm them, black veterans were in dire need of protection.26 In 1868, the Secretary of War reported to Congress that black soldiers in Kentucky, “[h]aving served in the Union Army, were the special objects of persecution, and in hundreds of instances have been driven from their homes.”27 Peter Branford, a United States Colored Troops veteran, was shot and killed “without cause or provocation” in Mercer County, Kentucky, while numerous other veterans were threatened, beaten, and whipped merely for attempting to locate their families and rebuild their lives after the war.

At Bardstown in Nelson County, Kentucky, a mob brutally lynched a United States Colored Troops veteran. The mob stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and then cut off his sexual organs. He was then forced to run half a mile to a bridge outside of town, where he was shot and killed. The terror inflicted upon black veterans by Southern whites served to perpetuate the racial caste system and maintain power in the hands of whites after the defeat of the Confederacy.29

[to be continued] 

Colored soldiers. The 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, 1863.

Learn More: Houston Riot of 1917

Lynching in America

Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans

Introduction

From the end of the Civil War to the years following World War II, thousands of African Americans were the victims of lynchings and other forms of racial terror in the United States, often in violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black communities throughout the country. The terror and violence of the lynching era profoundly impacted race relations and shaped the geographical, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today.

Lynching and racial violence fueled the migration of millions of black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West during the first half of the 20th century and created a social environment in which racial subordination and segregation was maintained for decades with limited official resistance. This violence reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed and continues to be evident in the injustice and unfairness of the administration of criminal justice in America.

Military service sparked dreams of racial equality for generations of African Americans. But most black veterans were not welcomed home and honored for their service. Instead, during the lynching era, many black veterans were targeted for mistreatment, violence, and murder because of their race and status as veterans. Indeed, black veterans risked violence simply by wearing their uniforms on American soil.³ 

The United States condoned the racial terror and Jim Crow segregation that plagued the entire black population even as it purported to fight for freedom and democracy and against fascism and racism abroad. This report is a supplement to Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror that specifically examines the history of racial violence targeting African American veterans in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Between the end of Reconstruction and the years following World War II, thousands of black veterans were accosted, assaulted, and attacked, and many were lynched. Black veterans died at the hands of mobs and persons acting under the color of official authority; many survived near-lynchings; and countless others suffered severe assaults and social humiliation. Documenting these atrocities is vital to understanding the incongruity of our country’s professed ideals of freedom and democracy while tolerating ongoing violence against people of color within our own borders. As veteran and later civil rights leader Hosea Williams said, “I had fought in World War II, and I once was captured by the German army, and I want to tell you the Germans never were as inhumane as the state troopers of Alabama.”⁴ 

EJI believes that understanding the persecution of African American veterans is an important step toward understanding how racial violence and hatred terrorized black Americans in the century following emancipation.

The Myth of Racial Inferiority and the Black Soldier

Throughout our country’s history, African Americans have looked hopefully to military service as a way to achieve racial equality and opportunity.⁵ 

But the dream that donning a military uniform and fighting for national honor would earn black soldiers respect and human dignity conflicted with the status black people in America had held for centuries — and often resulted in disappointment.

The enslavement of black people in the United States for more than 200 years built wealth, opportunity, and prosperity for millions of white Americans. At the same time, American slavery assigned to black people a lifelong status of bondage and servitude based on race, and created a myth of racial inferiority to justify the racial hierarchy. Under this racist belief system, whites were hard working, smart, and morally advanced, while black people were dumb, lazy, childlike, and uncivilized.

The idea that black people were naturally and permanently inferior to white people became deeply rooted in individual’s minds, state and federal laws, and national institutions. This ideology grew so strong that it survived the abolition of slavery and evolved into new systems of racial inequality and abuse. In the period from 1877 to 1950, it took the form of lynching and racial terror.

For a century after emancipation, African American servicemen and the black community at large “staked much of their claims to freedom and equality on their military service, and had cited it as a vindication of African American manhood.”⁶

Fighting for democracy was emblematic of the equality African Americans desired, and by serving their country, black veterans displayed their attachment to the nation and commitment to American values. In the face of this persistent racial hierarchy, and despite being denied full citizenship, many African Americans fought for the United States and for the aspiration that conditions would improve.⁷

Instead, black soldiers who served in the armed forces from the Civil War to World War II, during the height of racial terror and violence, faced hatred and racism even in “peace” time.

On the other side of African Americans’ hopes were whites’ fears that black veterans asserting and demanding equality would disrupt the social order built on white supremacy and the racialized economic order from which many benefitted. Many politicians feared that black veterans would believe they were equal to whites and worthy of more than poverty, poor educational opportunities, and menial labor, and would no longer be satisfied to work on farms for low wages. Southern politicians in particular feared that independent and empowered black veterans would lead other African Americans — especially in the South, where most still lived — to challenge racial segregation and subordination in bold and dangerous ways. In the minds of fearful whites, black veterans’ training in weapons and combat and their success defending the nation in battle were more a threat than a source of pride, and many voiced concerns about how those skills could be used at home. Black veterans epitomized white Southern fears of “a black population that had either forgotten or outright rejected its place in the region’s racial hierarchy.”⁸

The hopeful determination of black veterans seeking equality after military service challenged the defiant determination of white Americans to reinforce white supremacy, maintain racial inequality, and suppress black veterans’ potential as leaders and change agents. During the Civil War, white leaders viewed black soldiers as liable to use violence to destroy the social order. Throughout the lynching era, African American veterans were seen as an increasingly imminent threat to the South’s racial caste system.⁹

This tension made black servicemen targets for discrimination, mistreatment, and violence within the military and for deadly racial terror at home. . . [to be continued] 

FIGHTING FOR our freedom!

Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans

“It is impossible to create a dual personality which will be on the one hand a fighting man toward the enemy, and on the other, a craven who will accept treatment as less than a man at home.”¹

The end of the Civil War marked a new era of racial terror and violence directed at black people in the United States that has not been adequately acknowledged or addressed in this country. Following emancipation in 1865, thousands of freed black men, women, and children were killed by white mobs, former slave owners, and members of the Confederacy who were unwilling to accept the anticipated end of slavery and racial subordination. The violent response to freedom for former slaves was followed by decades of racial terror lynchings and targeted violence designed to sustain white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

No one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than black veterans who had proven their valor and courage as soldiers during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Because of their military service, black veterans were seen as a particular threat to Jim Crow and racial subordination. Thousands of black veterans were assaulted, threatened, abused, or lynched following military service.

The disproportionate abuse and assaults against black veterans have never been fully acknowledged. This report highlights the particular challenges endured by black veterans in the hope that our nation can better confront the legacy of this violence and terror. No community is more deserving of recognition and acknowledgment than those black men and women veterans who bravely risked their lives to defend this country’s freedom only to have their own freedom denied and threatened because of racial bigotry.

- Bryan Stevenson, Director

Colored infantry soldiers from the Civil War era.

Looky here, America
What you done done —
Let things drift
Until the riots come.
Now your policemen
Let your mobs run free.
I reckon you don’t care
Nothing about me.
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
From the ku klux klan.
You tell me mussolini’s
Got an evil heart.
Well, it mus-a been in Beaumont
That he had his start —

Cause everything that hitler
And mussolini do,
Negroes get the same
Treatment from you.
You jim crowed me
Before hitler rose to power —
And you’re STILL jim crowing me
Right now, this very hour.
Yet you say we’re fighting
For democracy.
Then why don’t democracy
Include me?
I ask you this question
Cause I want to know
How long I got to fight
BOTH HITLER — AND JIM CROW. 

- Langston Hughes, Beaumont to Detroit: 1943² 

Soldiers in the 'Nam

Dis White Folk!

hung by white men, Joseph Richardson, because whites assumed

he'd assaulsted an 11 year old white girl. Ain't that um shit!

"Joseph Richardson was removed from the county jail in Leitchfield by a mob and lynched on the public square at 1:00 a.m. on September 26, 1913. The mob presumed he had assaulted an eleven-year-old white girl named Ree Goff.

The photographer who took this picture peddled the cards door-to-door. A descendent of the original purchaser expressed the remorse the townspeople felt upon recognizing the victim as the town drunk, who had "merely stumbled into the child, and not even torn her dress"'


p180, exhibit 39 • Without Sanctuary / Lynching Photography in America

As It Is.

Funny. This illustrates one of the reasons I don't buy American, unless there is no other choice. The other reason is the large amount of American product is made in prisons. You have to learn how to read the tags. My aversion stems from the The United States Constitution that allows for the continuation of slavery to be practiced. 13th Amendment...

Business. Quality of Product.

WHEN AMERICA WAS GREAT: Negro woman's story.

“We Are Literally Slaves”: An Early Twentieth-Century Black Nanny Sets the Record Straight

In folklore the black nursemaid was seen as a dutiful, self-sacrificing black woman who loved her white family and its children every bit as much as her own. Yet the popular images of the loyal, contented black nursemaid, or “mammy,” were unfortunately far from the reality for the Negro women who worked in these homes. In 1912 the Independent printed this quasi-autobiographical account of servant life, as related by an Negro domestic worker, which dispelled the comforting “mammy” myth.

I am a negro woman, and I was born and reared in the South. I am now past forty years of age and am the mother of three children. My husband died nearly fifteen years ago, after we had been married about five years. For more than thirty years—or since I was ten years old—I have been a servant in one capacity or another in white families in a thriving Southern city, which has at present a population of more than 50,000. In my early years I was at first what might be called a “house-girl, "or, better, a “house-boy.” I used to answer the doorbell, sweep the yard, go on errands and do odd jobs. Later on I became a chambermaid and performed the usual duties of such a servant in a home. Still later I was graduated into a cook, in which position I served at different times for nearly eight years in all. During the last ten years I have been a nurse. I have worked for only four different families during all these thirty years. But, belonging to the servant class, which is the majority class among my race at the South, and associating only with servants, I have been able to become intimately acquainted not only with the lives of hundreds of household servants, but also with the lives of their employers. I can, therefore, speak with authority on the so-called servant question; and what I say is said out of an experience which covers many years.


To begin with, then, I should say that more than two-thirds of the negroes of the town where I live are menial servants of one kind or another, and besides that more than two-thirds of the negro women here, whether married or single, are compelled to work for a living, — as nurses, cooks, washerwomen, chambermaids, seamstresses, hucksters, janitresses, and the like. I will say, also, that the condition of this vast host of poor colored people is just as bad as, if not worse than, it was during the days of slavery. Tho today we are enjoying nominal freedom, we are literally slaves. And, not to generalize, I will give you a sketch of the work I have to do—and I’m only one of many.


I frequently work from fourteen to sixteen hours a day. I am compelled by my contract, which is oral only, to sleep in the house. I am allowed to go home to my own children, the oldest of whom is a girl of 18 years, only once in two weeks, every other Sunday afternoon—even then I’m not permitted to stay all night. I not only have to nurse a little white child, now eleven months old, but I have to act as playmate or “handy-andy,” not to say governess, to three other children in the home, the oldest of whom is only nine years of age. I wash and dress the baby two or three times each day, I give it its meals, mainly from a bottle; I have to put it to bed each night; and, in addition, I have to get up and attend to its every call between midnight and morning. If the baby falls to sleep during the day, as it has been trained to do every day about eleven o’clock, I am not permitted to rest. It’s “Mammy, do this, ”or "Mammy, do that,” or “Mammy, do the other,” from my mistress, all the time. So it is not strange to see “Mammy” watering the lawn in front with the garden hose, sweeping the sidewalk, mopping the porch and halls, dusting around the house, helping the cook, or darning stockings. Not only so, but I have to put the other three children to bed each night as well as the baby, and I have to wash them and dress them each morning. I don’t know what it is to go to church; I don’t know what it is to go to a lecture or entertainment or anything of the kind. I live a treadmill life; and I see my own children only when they happen to see me on the streets when I am out with the children, or when my children come to the “yard” to see me, which isn’t often, because my white folks don’t like to see their servants' children hanging around their premises. You might as well say that I’m on duty all the time—from sunrise to sunrise, every day in the week I am the slave, body and soul, of this family. And what do I get for this work—this lifetime bondage? The pitiful sum of ten dollars a month! And what am I expected to do with these ten dollars? With this money I’m expected to pay my house rent, which is four dollars per month, for a little house of two rooms, just big enough to turn round in; and I’m expected, also, to feed and clothe myself and three children. For two years my oldest child, it is true, has helped a little toward our support by taking in a little washing at home. She does the washing and ironing of two white families, with a total of five persons; one of these families pays her $1.00 per week, and the other 75 cents per week, and my daughter has to furnish her own soap and starch and wood For six months my youngest child, a girl about thirteen years old, has been nursing, and she receives $1.50 per week but has no night work. When I think of the low rate of wages we poor colored people receive, and when I hear so much said about our unreliability, our untrustworthiness, and even our vices, I recall the story of the private soldier in a certain army who, once upon a time, being upbraided by the commanding officer because the heels of his shoes were not polished, is said to have replied “Captain, do you expect all the virtues for $13 per month?”


Of course, nothing is being done to increase our wages, and the way things are going at present it would seem that nothing could be done to cause an increase of wages. We have no labor unions or organizations of any kind that could demand for us a uniform scale of wages for cooks, washerwomen, nurses, and the like; and, for another thing, if some negroes did here and there refuse to work for seven and eight and ten dollars a month, there would be hundreds of other negroes right on the spot ready to take their places and do the same work, or more, for the low wages that had been refused So that, the truth is, we have to work for little or nothing or become vagrants! And that, of course, in this State would mean that we would be arrested, tried, and despatched to the "State Farm,” where we would surely have to work for nothing or be beaten with many stripes!


Nor does this low rate of pay tend to make us efficient servants. The most that can be said of us negro household servants in the South—and I speak as one of them—is that we are to the extent of our ability willing and faithful slaves. We do not cook according to scientific principles because we do not know anything about scientific principles. Most of our cooking is done by guesswork or by memory. We cook well when our “hand” is in, as we say, and when anything about the dinner goes wrong, we simply say, “I lost my hand today!” We don’t know anything about scientific food for babies, nor anything about what science says must be done for infants at certain periods of their growth or when certain symptoms of disease appear, but somehow we “raise” more of the children than we kill, and, for the most part, they are lusty chaps—all of them. But the point is, we do not go to cooking-schools nor to nurse-training schools and so it can not be expected that we should make as efficient servants without such training as we should make were such training provided And yet with our cooking and nursing, such as it is, the white folks seem to be satisfied—perfectly satisfied. I sometimes wonder if this satisfaction is the outgrowth of the knowledge that more highly trained servants would be able to demand better pay!


Perhaps some might say, if the poor pay is the only thing about which we have to complain, then the slavery in which we daily toil and struggle is not so bad after all. But the poor pay isn’t all—not by any means! I remember very well the first and last place from which I was dismissed. I lost my place because I refused to let the madam’s husband kiss me. He must have been accustomed to undue familiarity with his servants, or else he took it as a matter of course, because without any love-making at all, soon after I was installed as cook, he walked up to me, threw his arms around me, and was in the act of kissing me, when I demanded to know what he meant, and shoved him away. I was young then, and newly married, and didn’t know then what has been a burden to my mind and heart ever since: that a colored woman’s virtue in this part of the country has no protection. I at once went home, and told my husband about it. When my husband went to the man who had insulted me, the man cursed him, and slapped him, and—had him arrested! The police judge fined my husband $25. I was present at the hearing, and testified on oath to the insult offered me. The white man, of course, denied the charge. The old judge looked up and said “This court will never take the word of a nigger against the word of a white man.”


Many and many a time since I have heard similar stories repeated again and again by my friends. I believe nearly all white men take, and expect to take, undue liberties with their colored female servants—not only the fathers, but in many cases the sons also. Those servants who rebel against such familiarity must either leave or expect a mighty hard time, if they stay. By comparison, those who tamely submit to these improper relations live in clover. They always have a little "spending change,” wear better clothes, and are able to get off from work at least once a week—and sometimes oftener. This moral debasement is not at all times unknown to the white women in these homes. I know of more than one colored woman who was openly importuned by white women to become the mistresses of their white husbands, on the ground that they, the white wives, were afraid that, if their husbands did not associate with colored women, they would certainly do so with outside white women, and the white wives, for reasons which ought to be perfectly obvious, preferred to have their husbands do wrong with colored women in order to keep their husbands straight! And again, I know at least fifty places in my small town where white men are positively raising two families—a white family in the "Big House” in front, and a colored family in a “Little House” in the backyard. In most cases, to be sure, the colored women involved are the cooks or chambermaids or seamstresses, but it cannot be true that their real connection with the white men of the families is unknown to the white women of the families. The results of this concubinage can be seen in all of our colored churches and in all of our colored public schools in the South, for in most of our churches and schools the majority of the young men and women and boys and girls are light-skinned mulattoes. The real, Simon-pure, blue-gum, thick-lip, coal black negro is passing away—certainly in the cities; and the fathers of the new generation of negroes are white men, while their mothers are unmarried colored women.


Another thing—it’s a small indignity, it may be, but an indignity just the same. No white person, not even the little children just learning to talk, no white person at the South ever thinks of addressing any negro man or woman as Mr., or Mrs., or Miss. The women are called, “Cook,” or “Nurse,” or “Mammy,” or “Mary Jane,” or “Lou,” or “Dilcey,” as the case might be, and the men are called “Bob,” or “Boy, "or “Old Man,” or “Uncle Bill,” or “Pate.” In many cases our white employers refer to us, and in our presence, too, as their “niggers.” No matter what they call us—no matter what they teach their children to call us—we must tamely submit, and answer when we are called; we must enter no protest; if we did object, we should be driven out without the least ceremony, and, in applying for work at other places, we should find it very hard to procure another situation. In almost every case, when our intending employers would be looking up our record, the information would be give by telephone or otherwise that we were “impudent,” "saucy,“ "dishonest, "and “generally unreliable.” In our town we have no such thing as an employment agency or intelligence bureau, and, therefore, when we want work, we have to get out on the street and go from place to place, always with hat in hand, hunting for it.


Another thing. Sometimes I have gone on the street cars or the railroad trains with the white children, and, so long as I was in charge of the children, I could sit anywhere I desired, front or back. If a white man happened to ask some other white man, “What is that nigger doing in here?” and was told, “Oh, she’s the nurse of those white children in front of her!” immediately there was the hush of peace. Everything was all right, so long as I was in the white man’s part of the street car or in the white man’s coach as a servant—a slave—but as soon as I did not present myself as a menial, and the relationship of master and servant was abolished by my not having the white children with me, I would be forthwith assigned to the “nigger” seats or the “colored people’s coach. "Then, too, any day in my city, and I understand that it is so in every town in the South, you can see some “great big black burly” negro coachman or carriage driver huddled up beside some aristocratic Southern white woman, and nothing is said about it, nothing is done about it, nobody resents the familiar contact. But let that same colored man take off his brass buttons and his high hat, and put on the plain livery of an average American citizen, and drive one block down any thoroughfare in any town in the South with that same white woman, as her equal or companion or friend, and he’d be shot on the spot!


You hear a good deal nowadays about the “service pan.” The “service pan” is the general term applied to “left-over” food, which in many a Southern home is freely placed at the disposal of the cook or, whether so placed or not, it is usually disposed of by the cook. In my town, I know, and I guess in many other towns also, every night when the cook starts for her home she takes with her a pan or a plate of cold victuals. The same thing is true on Sunday afternoons after dinner—and most cooks have nearly every Sunday afternoon off. Well, I’ll be frank with you, if it were not for the service pan, I don’t know what the majority of our Southern colored families would do. The service pan is the mainstay in many a home. Good cooks in the South receive on an average $8 per month. Porters, butlers, coachmen, janitors, “office boys” and the like receive on an average $16 per month. Few and far between are the colored men in the South who receive $1 or more per day. Some mechanics do; as for example, carpenters, brick masons, wheelwrights, blacksmiths, and the like. The vast majority of negroes in my town are serving in menial capacities in homes, stores and offices.


Now taking it for granted, for the sake of illustration, that the husband receives $16 per month and the wife $8. That would be $24 between the two. The chances are that they will have anywhere from five to thirteen children between them. Now, how far will $24 go toward housing and feeding and clothing ten or twelve persons for thirty days? And, I tell you, with all of us poor people the service pan is a great institution; it is a great help to us, as we wag along the weary way of life. And then most of the white folks expect their cooks to avail themselves of these perquisites; they allow it; they expect it. I do not deny that the cooks find opportunity to hide away at times, along with the cold “grub,”a little sugar, a little flour, a little meal, or a little piece of soap; but I indignantly deny that we are thieves. We don’t steal; we just “take” things—they are a part of the oral contract, exprest or implied. We understand it, and most of the white folks understand it. Others may denounce the service pan, and say that it is used only to support idle negroes, but many a time, when I was a cook, and had the responsibility of rearing my three children upon my lone shoulders, many a time I have had occasion to bless the Lord for the service pan!


I have already told you that my youngest girl was a nurse. With scores of other colored girls who are nurses, she can be seen almost any afternoon, when the weather is fair, rolling the baby carriage or lolling about on some one of the chief boulevards of our town. The very first week that she started out on her work she was insulted by a white man, and many times since has been improperly approached by other white men. It is a favorite practice of young white sports about town—and they are not always young, either—to stop some colored nurse, inquire the name of the “sweet little baby,” talk baby talk to the child, fondle it, kiss it, make love to it, etc., etc., and in nine of ten cases every such white man will wind up by making love to the colored nurse and seeking an appointment with her.


I confess that I believe it to be true that many of our colored girls are as eager as the white men are to encourage and maintain these improper relations; but where the girl is not willing, she has only herself to depend upon for protection. If their fathers, brothers or husbands seek to redress their wrongs, under our peculiar conditions, the guiltless negroes will be severely punished, if not killed, and the white blackleg will go scot-free!


Ah, we poor colored women wage earners in the South are fighting a terrible battle, and because of our weakness, our ignorance, our poverty, and our temptations we deserve the sympathies of mankind. Perhaps a million of us are introduced daily to the privacy of a million chambers thruout the South, and hold in our arms a million white children, thousands of whom, as infants, are suckled at our breasts—during my lifetime I myself have served as “wet nurse” to more than a dozen white children. On the one hand, we are assailed by white men, and on the other hand, we are assailed by black men, who should be our natural protectors; and, whether in the cook kitchen, at the washtub, over the sewing machine, behind the baby carriage, or at the ironing board, we are but little more than pack horses, beasts of burden, slaves!


In the distant future, it may be, centuries and centuries hence, a monument of brass or stone will be erected to the Old Black Mammies of the South, but what we need is present help, present sympathy, better wages, better hours, more protection, and a chance to breathe for once while alive as free women. If none others will help us, it would seem that the Southern white women themselves might do so in their own defense, because we are rearing their children—we feed them, we bathe them, we teach them to speak the English language, and in numberless instances we sleep with them—and it is inevitable that the lives of their children will in some measure be pure or impure according as they are affected by contact with their colored nurses.



Source: "More Slavery at the South," by a Negro Nurse, Independent, 25 January 1912, 196–200.

RACE Plays

Negro men in Lincoln, Nebraska. Historic photographs of black Lincolnites in the early 1900s

Negro women's faces telling stories of their times in the 1940's. It was very different from white life, and what white people in retrospect like to believe about the 1940's. What isn't told is the struggle to live and not get killed by whites, and how deep it was for Negroes.

Old people today are willing to talk about those times remembering how and why millions migrated North from the hell of the South. What has changed in the U.S. is laws. Transformation of the heart lags behind as an ideal, a wistful dream alluding to a promise of equality. Barely concealed has always been the face of the Klan in suits and farm clothes. That dark evil spirit, the bane of Negro life, has catapulted Donald Trump to the presidency and whites to this day insist other things are at play.

Boy, if white folk ever woke up they'd be in the nightmare they pretending ain't there! - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories (Nov. 24, 2016)

A Symbol

beautiful Jessica Chastain in black dress

How Americans feel about their children

"Enough is enough. We demand more empathy, more accountability, more economic opportunity, more compassion, more dignity, more power and more opportunity for all. We demand healthier communities, which means more from each other; more from our school systems and more from our judicial systems." Those are the words of Manifest Justice, the creative community exhibition. The exhibt, which took place last week - in Los Angeles’ gang affected Baldwin Village - featured protest posters, paintings, and three-dimensional works. Mostly focused on police brutality, the exhibition also touched on issues like education, racial justice, and LGBT rights. Programme coordinator Nijeul Porter says, “The idea is that art is at the center of social change". See some of the featured works below.

By Alexander Aplerku, AFROPUNK Contributor

art - California Prisons exhibit c
photo by @alwayspaisley

 

BLOOD MEMORIES

absolute beauty of a Mashpee Wampanoag woman - Cheryl

Great strides have been made to liberate Western women from the shackles of historical tyrannies administered by church and state. Some things were lost over the centuries of Western domination, and thought. In the wake of so much upheaval of European, and American social structures the divinity and the sacredness of womanhood, motherhood, the breasts, and the sanctity of the womb; of the punany were barely regarded in the political forays into the intellectual and emotional drama of changing the lives and conditions of Western women for the better! In that mix white Americans, for example, have all but forgotten the importance of the Black African slave mothers who raised generations of white boys and girls during slavery, and the Black mothers employed during long period of neo-slavery from the aftermath of the Civil War through the dawn of World War II.

When Moses was found by the Pharaoh's daughter, and his mother came out of the reeds and offered to be the handmaiden she deepened, and raised the level of sacrifice, and emphasis, and power of blood covenant far beyond the sacrifices, and the meaning of covenants laid by men in her time, and of her culture. In her time the Hebrew men laid covenants between one another. There were seven (7) steps to that ritual.

Standing before each other in front of witnesses each man takes off his coat. The gesture says, "this (coat) represents me. I am giving you me. We possess each other". Next they take off their belts. The belts represents one's strength. It is the symbol of a man's strength. This is where the weapons are worn. The third step is central to the ceremony and the point I want to make. An animal is sacrificed and split in two."The halves are split amongst us and put behind us".  The two men walk through the mounds of blood, and flesh making a figure 8 (the symbol of infinity) until they are standing face to face in the center of blood. They are inside death prepared.

What supports and builds community and relationships better: the letting or the giving of blood? The Hebrew covenant ceremony was between men. It was inclusive. Each man's family and generations were included in the ceremony. Vows were made when each man slashed their wrists or palms, placed their wrists in the air and locked them together. In their vow they are beginning to enter Blood Covenant prepared to die as the animals had died.

"My life is yours. If we break this covenant Let God do this to me!" they said looking at the dead flesh surrounding them

The scars say, "I have made a covenant for life and it is a responsibility. What talents I do not have I now have through this new relationship." The witnesses hear all the terms of the covenant, and a memorial is built to the covenant. In the end a loaf of bread is broken and shared between the friends saying to each other, "This is me into you. We are one flesh of each other's flesh." A cup of wine is shared that tells the two and the witnesses present; "This is my blood. It has become yours as you drink. We are together. We are blood-relatives for life."

I purposely severely limited the number of wombs I entered. One of the reasons was a logical one. There is a distinction between intimacy and sexual intercourse, and the two I envisioned as a teenager, but at 13 years of age it was taught to me quite clearly: make it now. I made the choice thus embarking upon a journey of such magnificence and magnitude! Women's Moontime opens them up to the energies of the Moon, Water, and Earth Mother. What that feels like, as a woman, I know not.

~ Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 3.16.12

absolute & compelling black power within Kina

making ourselves OBSOLETE

vintage wedding dress by designer Akira Isogawa

Dictating thought by Patriotism 

There is an appeal to vintage wedding trends I like to savor not only because of history, but because old styles tell stories we hide from ourselves! But, fashion can be a trick of perception. Fashion connects dots in American sensibilities in important ways. In the American lexicon there is a deep seated vagueness about what is hip, and what is important. Fashion's appeal is in these same virtues. Fashion, as I will describe vaguely, is woven throughout American culture beyond cloth and heels into politics, poverty, the whims of the elite, race issues and into the why of who gets served and who doesn't.

Being morose and fatalistic was en vogue during the decade after the second World War. The Jimmy Dean and Marlon Brando characters sulking about the conditions of 'society', or how their families misunderstood them, or being despondent after the war's end about their place in the world set in the minds of youth how to be dangerous and rebellious. But, these were white men. They were the heroes dominating the screen and magazines with their brooding good looks and the charm of a vague roughness. They were not Colored men, who were continually in the way of white men's progress and subject to invisibility, hangings, and second class treatment. Negroes challenged the notions of supremacy white man felt they could squander through the new generation's sulking heroes. How did an Indian man on a reservation or a Black man in a ghetto feel about a white man with all his privilege and his power to kill an Indian and a Black when he killed any of us? We knew he'd get away with it! It was his world!

This is a long story, but in the 21st century the reins of cultural, economic and military powers held by white Euro-Americans are still in their hands protected by time rights, and their insistence that it should be that way always. Today's whining white men have taken up rallying calls about losing America to others and keeping America for real Americans. That is always a nostalgic nod towards Jim Crow's day with a murderous overtone, if you listen carefully. Millions of whites are overwhelmed by diversity. Color barriers made the world a simple place for them. It was a time white men and women knew where they stood. Today the skeleton of Jim Crow and the apartheid system set up over the Palestine people in Israel are comforting forces for many of today's Euro-Americans. If it weren't for the growing numbers of ethnic groups in the country many whites feel they could better order the world into their designs of the world-at-large.

flag worn as t-shirt by African Brazilian woman

Maybe a lot of Americans sleep a lot, but the dismantling of the Constitution has been a decades long process that has become an anthem of millions of white Americans. Either political party can take blame for it, but most I place on the American pastime of being notoriously uninformed about the crucial things citizens of a super power should know and fully understand.

The Patriot Act was one instrument removing our so-called rights. Think of the regulatory rules we allowed to be dismantled that affect our freedoms. What of our propensity to war and our insistence on punishment, and commitment to allowing others to make decisions for us? We, more often than not, enjoy the luxury of being under informed and are not alarmed how badly we fare in the arena of analytical thought. If the ingredients are set and in place for us to relinquish claims and rights whose fault is it, and what guarantees that our freedoms will be in place for our grandchildren if we are asleep?

Gregory E. Woods
9.8.14

flag draped around woman's naked body !!!!

Catwoman mortal kombat vs dc comics

MUSANGWE FIGHTERS

Anti Lynching Parade in Washington, DC - Crisis Magazine, August, 1922.
VOICE

Musangwe Boxing is an ancient South African tradition that was used to find the bravest of warriors and to teach men to fight for their tribe and land. The Venda Tribe of South Africa is well known for continuing this custom. Musangwe Boxing has only three rules. The fight can only end if one of the fighters loses a massive amount of blood, someone is knocked out, or one of the fighters raises his hand to give up. There are no scheduled match ups. Each fight starts by a man coming into the center of a circle formed by the audience with his hands raised. He then waits for someone in the audience to challenge him. There is no money involved and the only reward is respect. It is taken very seriously in South Africa and hundreds of people gather to watch each battle. Many people would call this tradition barbaric or savage-like but I disagree. It is their culture. It’s their tradition. It’s what they do and in a time where many African Customs have been lost due to colonization, I think it’s great that they are holding on to what their ancestors strived for.

“This is a sacred place. The blood of our forefathers and their teeth have all fallen here. My grandfather was a fighter here in 1939 and then my father, and then I started in the 1970s. There is so much crime these days. Fighting here keeps the young men away from crime. It also teaches them not to beat their women. They must be men to fight other men." African Fighter Poison

Written by @KingKwajo

Musangwe boxing

'We're in denial of the African holocaust'

world news

Malcolm X's daughter on Juneteenth

Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of civil rights activist, speaks at 17th century burial ground to remember the end of slavery in the US

Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of Malcolm X, is known for her work as a memoirist and activist. Photograph: Stephen Chernin/AP

Speaking at a burial ground for hundreds African slaves in New York in commemoration of Juneteenth – the day in 1865 when Texas learned that the civil war had ended – Ilyasah Shabazz, daughter of human and civil rights activist Malcolm X, implored African Americans not to forget their history.

"We're in denial of the African holocaust," Shabazz said. "Most times, people don't want to talk about it. One is often restless or termed a racist just for having compassion for the African experience, for speaking truth to the trans-Atlantic and Arab slave trades, for speaking truth to the significant omission of our history. We don't want to sit down and listen to these things, or to discuss them. But we have to."



To this, the audience cheered, clapped and nodded their heads in agreement. Around 150 people turned up to hear the daughter of the civil rights icon speak.

Juneteenth is a celebration that takes place annually on the 19 June to commemorate the end of slavery in the United States. Juneteenth is recognized in most US states, and, in 1997, Congress officially recognized the day as Juneteenth Independence Day.

Shabazz spoke passionately and at times poignantly of the African American experience, and said that understanding the role slavery played in shaping the modern world is a way of paying hommage to their ancestors.

"As we share in a discussion of civil rights, we must reflect on their sacrifices and contributions of their lives," Shabazz said, adding, "The struggle is not over. The struggle continues."

One of Malcolm X's six daughters, Shabazz was only two when her father, widely-regarded as one of the most notable and influential African Americans in history, was assassinated on 21 February 1965. She is an author and motivational speaker, and is perhaps best well known for her memoir, Growing Up X.

"Malcolm taught … the truth that our history did not begin in slavery but that our ancestors, refined and industrious African men and women, were the architects of great civilizations," she said.

At the end of her speech, the audience stood for a moment of silence while Shabazz read off a list of names that included the Queen of Sheba, Nelson Mandela, Dr Martin Luther King, and her father, highlighting the long and global history of Africans.

On 19 June, 1865, Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas, with news that the civil war had ended.

Granger officially delivered General Order No3, which stated: "The people of Texas are informed that in accordance with a proclamation from the executive of the United States, all slaves are free."

Shabazz spokle at the African Burial Ground National Monument in downtown Manhattan that perseveres a colonial-era cemetery. More than 400 men, women and children of African descent – some free, most enslaved – are buried there.

The late 17th century burial site had been forgotten for nearly two centuries until it was rediscovered in the early 1990s during excavation.

The late poet Dr Maya Angelou spoke at a dedication ceremony opening the slave burial site to the public in 2007.

"You may bury me in the bottom of Manhattan," she said. "I will rise. My people will get me. I will rise out of the huts of history’s shame."


Lauren Gambino in New York
Thursday 19 June 2014 17.55 EDT

Meeting POWERS

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

The meeting of men in dangerous times to discuss each step of an intention to liberate, or offer freedom to bound and chained people on both sides of the equation of slavery and neo-slavery was daunting. But in those moments the negotiations of the first 70 years of the 20th century Negroes did not ask of Power all of the questions a bound people could not ask, and needed to ask. It is reflected in the 21st century by what Black Americans do and don't do.

Free? Are Black Americans free? Have Black Americans evolved beyond the dream of being able to eat with white people? Is freedom defined by dependence? Can a person, or a people be free if their freedom is handed to them piecemeal? If a people treasure their tragedies are they free? Is freedom alive within someone whose image of themselves comes from outside themselves? Are a people free who define themselves from outside themselves? Are people free disconnected from their Mother Land intellectually, and spiritually or emotionally?

I don't think so, but there are millions of Black Americans who disagree with me. Such is the plight and spiritual dilemma of the Wasicun Sapa, the Black White People. - Gregory E. Woods 3.17.13

Black BEAUTY

 Jan. 15, 2014 

I have heard it many times, and said myself a few times, "Segregation was the best thing for Black people in AMERICA; they had their own businesses, banks; hospitals, family unity; police stations, leaders; a true spiritual foundation; and etc." but that is wrong. What is wrong with the assertion is the narrow view of segregation. Colored businesses were not the great aspect of the era more accurately called the period of neo-slavery. It was a reign of terror where Black men did not have the right to equal protection under the law to protect their families, for example.

Often Black folks sing that slave song about how good it was to be in segregated society the way runaway slaves longed to return to their masters. It seems to come from several worldviews none of which are willing or able to endure the trails of building freedom into their patterns, their thinking and their lives. I've said it before and again I bring up the spirit of Black Americans leaning deep into being Black White Person. How white Black Americans are is a subject of debate until one steps out of the country for a long enough period to see what has become of the soul of Black folks, and how repulsed Black Americans are of Africa and Africans.

There is a lot of myth in belief. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 1.15.14