Do We Owe Black Men an Apology?

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An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow

Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow

Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.

Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters

Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.

An Iconic Lynching in the North

Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two

Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali

Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity

Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie

Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage

What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829

Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

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November 7, 2024

By Joseph Williams, Word in Black

After Kamala Harris’s defeat by Donald Trump, the question remains: Did 20% of Black men really decide this race?

black_voter_083012_400jrw — A large majority of Black men voted for Harris despite media worries (Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images)

After Kamala Harris’s stinging loss to Donald Trump in the election on Tuesday, the social media Blackisphere chopped up why an accomplished Black woman — the sitting vice president, a former senator and prosecutor — lost. How, they wondered, could Harris have crashed out to a scandal-plagued, insurrectionist convicted felon, an old white man who was one of the least popular presidents in recent history?

To some, the villains are obvious: the roughly 20% of Black men who, according to exit polls, voted for Trump.

“I just seen a black man say ‘i didn’t vote for Trump…. I voted against Trans rights and LGBTQ people rights, High inflation and a Broken Economy,’” television personality Ts Madison wrote on X. “Trying to Hurt a small group of people as a BLACK person definitely shows me that you don’t want rights…. You want privilege!”

Not so fast, said Joy-Ann Reid, host of MSNBC’s “The Reid Report.”

“Every four years, I go through this ritual,” she said Tuesday night, noting 8 in 10 brothers chose Harris, not Trump, at the ballot box. “The world just wants to say that Black men are realigning, and they’re all gonna run to Donald Trump,” even though the Latino vote shifted far more dramatically to the former president than in 2020.

“It is not Black men. They are not shifting,” she said. “You are not seeing Black men shift. Please stop.”

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The Struggle for Justice included the fight for voting rights.

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