Breaking News
When the past is present…
Jan 17
2013
By Thom Hartmann, Truthout
The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified…was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia’s vote.
Slave patrols were organized groups of three to six white men who enforced discipline upon black slaves during the antebellum U.S. southern states. They policed the slaves on the plantations and hunted down fugitive slaves. Patrols used summary punishment against escapees, which included maiming or killing them. Beginning in 1704 in South Carolina, slave patrols were established and the idea spread throughout the southern states. The institution of policing in America can be traced back to the slave patrols. (Wikipedia)
Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that . . . and we all should be too.
In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the “slave patrols,” and they were regulated by the states….
As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998, “The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search ‘all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition’ and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.”
It’s the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, “Why don’t they just rise up and kill the whites?” If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.
A slave police badge. You can buy one online today.
Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, “Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller.” There were exemptions so “men in critical professions” like judges, legislators and students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most southern men between ages 18 and 45 – including physicians and ministers – had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.
And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy.
By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.
Read the rest of the article here.
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Jan 16
2013
By Tambay A. Obenson, Shadow and Act: Cinema of the African Diaspora
With just about every post on this site announcing the production of a movie centered around stories of slavery in the United States,
A scene from Twelve Years A Slave
the inevitable question asked by readers, comes in the form of something like: what’s the deal with all these slave-themed movies?
Indeed… what’s the deal?
To summarize a recent post in which I gave one potential answer to that quesiton - Hollywood seems to be in a *celebratory* mood, if we can call it that, honoring the 150 year anniversary of the Civil War, and those 4 years that would eventually lead to making slavery illegal in this country – USA. Although I should note that not every project is set in slavery-era USA….
If you’re already exhausted by what we can call “slave movie fever,” with films like Case départ, Django andLincoln especially behind us (although conversation about those films continues – especially the last 2), you should know that there are several more on the way, scheduled to be released throughout 2013; and I thought I’d take a look at some of them (those that we’re currently aware of anyway), and hopefully get your prepped and ready for the wave that’s to come.
Read the rest of the article to see the list of movies with descriptions.
To read more Breaking News, click here.
Jan 14
2013
From the African American Registry
Julian Bond, an African-American Civil rights activist and politician, was born on this date in 1940, in Nashville, TN.
In 1960, Bond was one of several hundred students who helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Five years later Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. He was barred from taking his seat in the House because of his outspoken statements against the Vietnam War and his sympathy for those unwilling to serve in the war. In December 1966, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor and he served four terms as representative and six terms in the Georgia Senate, from 1975-86…
Bond served as chairman of the NAACP from 1998 to 2008. He continues to write and lecture about the history of the civil rights movement and the condition of African Americans and the poor. He is President Emeritus of the Southern Poverty Law Center….
Julian Bond is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C., and a faculty member in the history department at the University of Virginia.
Read the full article here.
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Jan 14
2013
By Tambay Obenson, theRoot.com
Congrats Don Cheadle -
Cheadle accepts the award for Best Actor, Television Comedy Or Musical
the only black winner (actually the only non-white winner) at the Golden Globes AwardsCeremony last night. Then again, there weren’t that many non-white nominees.
La-di-dah… business as usual.
Don Cheadle won the Best Actor, Television Comedy Or Musical trophy, for his work in the hit Showtime series,House of Lies. This is his second Golden Globe.
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Jan 13
2013
By Jorge Rivas, Colorlines. com
Is someone taking “Django Unchained” a little too seriously?
On Friday, the chairman of Gun Appreciation Day Larry Ward told CNN slavery wouldn’t of happened if slaves had been armed.
“The truth is, I think Martin Luther King would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history,” Ward said on CNN.
See the full CNN interview here.
A coalition of gun rights and conservative groups announced on Monday that January 19, 2013 is “Gun Appreciation Day.” Organizers hope “Gun Appreciation Day” rivals “Chick-fil-A Day” as a public statement of protest against government policies, according to a press release.
Read more Breaking News here.
Jan 12
2013
By Jamilah King, Colorlines.com
Billboards are everywhere in New York City. They’re on subway trains and in stations, and on top of and inside taxis.
But few, if any, have been anything like a series of anonymous billboards that have popped up on bus shelters in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn. They’re not selling anything but a delcaration: that racism still exists.
That’s also the name of the appropriately titled campaign. At least half a dozen billboard sites have sprung up around the neighborhood since August, with each month dedicated to highlighting racial disparities that impact black people in America. So far, the billboards have touched on topics ranging from the entertainment industry, education, fast food, smoking, policing, and black wealth. Each month’s billboard is also accompanied by an detailed post on Tumblr that provides background information, news articles, studies, charts, and statistics to back up each claim.
A “Racism Still Exists” billboard in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn on the corner of Nostrand Avenue and Halsey Street. Photo: Jamilah King
A brief statement on the Tumblr page says, in part, that “RISE is a proejct designed to illuminate some of the ways in which racism operates in this country.” But who’s behind the project remains a mystery.
Read more about this poster campaign here.
See more posters here and read their background information by clicking on each poster.
Read more Breaking News here.
Jan 10
2013
Concordia University Celebrates Black History Month
by Exhibiting the Work of Jennifer Scott
Jan. 27, Artist’s Reception 2-4 PM
Jan. 29, Tuesday, 7- 8 PM: Special Artist’s Talk
McCormick Hall, located in Kretzmann Hall next to the Gallery
Concordia University Chicago
7400 Augusta Street
River Forest, Il 60305-1499
708 209 3013
See Scott’s exhibit, Stories Behind the Postcards, here in the One Hundred Years of Jim Crow Gallery.
Visit Scott’s website here.
Jan 10
2013
Editorial, the New York Times
A North Carolina trial judge recently resentenced three death-row inmates to life without parole under the state’s Racial Justice Act, which allows inmates to have their sentences reduced if it can be shown they were tainted by racial bias.
The New Jim Crow? Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
In the trials of two blacks and one Lumbee Indian, the judge found “powerful evidence”of such bias.
The law does not require proof that the bias was deliberate. But, in this case, the judge found “intentional” prosecutorial bias aimed at securing a death sentence for the defendants, bringing grave “harm to African-Americans and to the integrity of the justice system.”
The bias was manifested in the prosecutors’ use of peremptory strikes of prospective jurors during the jury selection process. In one case, the prosecutor struck prospective blacks at two times the rate for whites. In each of the other two cases, the rate was almost four times greater. Even when adjustments were made for other factors, like the criminal record of a prospective juror, race was “a significant factor” in the rigorous ways that the North Carolina statute required the defendants to prove.
The judge found that words and deed of the prosecutors themselves confirmed his conclusions about racial influence in the jury selection process.
In one case, the prosecutor compiled pages of notes called “Jury Strikes” to help guide him as he challenged prospective jurors. The judge concluded from the notes that any blacks summoned for jury duty “had a strike against them before they even entered the courthouse.”
A prospective black juror with no criminal record was struck because she was said to live in a “bad area,” whereas a white juror who had been a marijuana dealer was picked in part because he was a “fine guy.”
The judge observed that the injustice abundantly proven in each case was common throughout North Carolina during the past two decades. Prosecutors excluded blacks from juries for going to church too often or for other reasons that “simply make no sense” and that could be explained only by intentional and ugly bias.
Read about this case and the response by families of the victims here.
Jan 10
2013
By Imara Jones, Colorlines.com
Much hullabaloo has been made recently about slavery as entertainment in movies like “Django Unchained.”
Christoph Waltz and Jamie Foxx in “Django Unchained.” Photo: The Weinstein Company
But lost in the discussion is slavery as history, and the simple fact that it was an economic system which seized the economic know-how of Africans in order to construct unimaginable wealth in North America, Europe and throughout the Western Hemisphere. Wealth from the slave trade took Western Europe from being one of the world’s poorest regions to its wealthiest and most powerful in under a century.
Though sadistic and macabre, the plain truth is that slavery was an unprecedented economic juggernaut whose impact is still lived by each of us daily. Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.
1) Slavery laid the foundation for the modern international economic system.
The massive infrastructure required to move 8 to 10 million Africans halfway around the world built entire cities in England and France, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bordeaux. It was key to London’s emergence as a global capital of commerce, and spurred New York’s rise as a center of finance. The industry to construct, fund, staff, and administer the thousands of ships which made close to 50,000 individual voyages was alone a herculean task. The international financial and distribution networks required to coordinate, maintain and profit from slavery set the framework for the modern global economy.
2) Africans’ economic skills were a leading reason for their enslavement.
Africans possessed unique expertise which Europeans required to make their colonial ventures successful. Africans knew how to…
Want to finish that sentence and read the other eight points? Click here.
Jan 6
2013
By Jim Downs, the New York Times
The Emancipation Proclamation, which Abraham Lincoln signed on Jan. 1, 1863, was primarily a military tool. When he issued it in preliminary form in September 1862, it was meant to be a warning to the South: give up, or your slaves will be set free.
A group of freed slaves who worked as laborers and servants with the 13th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment in the Civil War. (Corbis)
And, once in place, emancipation did just what Lincoln wanted — it drew untold thousands of freed slaves to the advancing Union armies, depleting the Southern work force and providing the North with much-needed cheap labor. But it also created an immense humanitarian crisis in which hundreds of thousands of former slaves died from disease, malnutrition and poverty.
Emancipation did, of course, free the slaves in the Confederacy. But Lincoln can no longer be portrayed as the hero in this story. Despite his efforts to end slavery, his emancipation policies failed to consider the human cost of liberation.
Little if any thought was given to what would happen to black people after emancipation. Questions about where they would go, what they would eat, how they would work and, most important, how they would survive the war were not considered, either by policy makers in Washington or the majority of generals in the field.
Learn the awful truth of what happened to thousands of newly freed men, women and children, here.
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