by Allison Keyes | May 2016
An Oklahoma lawyer details the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood where hundreds died 95 years ago. The ten-page manuscript is typewritten, on yellowed legal paper, and folded in thirds. But the words, an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street,” are searing. “I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [History] [Economics] [Reparations] [Myths] [Silencing POC]
by Domonique Foxworth | June 2016
Can you imagine an America when a child’s life was so insignificant that he was intentionally put into the pen of a dangerous zoo animal? An America when a child was intentionally placed at the edge of alligator-infested waters to lure the ferocious beast for hunters? “Baits Alligators with Pickaninnies,” reads a Washington Times headline on June 3, 1908. The article continues, “Zoo Specimens Coaxed to Summer Quarters by Plump Little Africans.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Black Lives Matter] [Systemic Racism]
by Brianna Theobald | November 2019
Over the six-year period that had followed the passage of the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 1970, physicians sterilized perhaps 25% of Native American women of childbearing age, and there is evidence suggesting that the numbers were actually even higher. Some of these procedures were performed under pressure or duress, or without the women’s knowledge or understanding. The law subsidized sterilizations for patients who received their health care through the Indian Health Service and for Medicaid patients, and black and Latina women were also targets of coercive sterilization in these years.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [Indigenous] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Accountability] [White Supremacy] [Silencing POC]
by Boston Magazine | June 2020
The school’s president wrote about his own experiences as a Black man in America, and his exhaustion over the continued state of police brutality in America in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. Today, I write to you as a Black man and as President of Emerson College. There is no other way to write to you, given recent events. I didn’t sleep Friday night. Instead, I spent the night, like a moth drawn to a flame, looking again and again at the video of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis white police officer. It was a legalized lynching. I also intently watched the fiery protests in American cities.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [Police Shootings] [Policing] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Calling Police] [Assumptions]
by Jerome Karabel | September 2019
Given the magnitude of the Elaine Massacre, its absence from standard narratives in American history is striking. In America’s bloody history of racial violence, the little-known Elaine Massacre in Phillips County, Arkansas, which took place in October 1919, may rank as the deadliest. The reasons why the event has remained shrouded and obscure, despite a shocking toll of bloodshed inflicted on the African-American inhabitants of Phillips County, speak to a legacy of white supremacy in the US and ruthless suppression of labor activism that disfigures American society to this day.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2010’s] [White Supremacy] [History] [White Culture] [Systemic Racism] [Systemic Racism] [Policing] [Police Shootings] [Silencing POC] [Economics] [Employment]
by Becky Ankeny | July 2020
Mr. and Miss Bodwin, brother and sister, Quakers, for decades worked to abolish slavery from their home in Cincinnati. Their anti-slavery stance was based on the teaching that “human life is holy, all of it.” This work gave their lives meaning and purpose, so much so that to Edward Bodwin, life after the Civil War had lost its “spit and conviction.”…Nearly a decade after emancipation, when 18-year-old Denver goes to ask the Bodwins for work, she knocks on the front door. The Black maid tells her that the first thing she has to learn is which door to knock on, namely, the back door. On her way out the back door, Denver sees a figurine of a kneeling Black man, head back, mouth wide open to hold any number of small objects or even jelly. Painted across the pedestal he knelt on were the words “At Yo Service.”
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Quaker] [Slavery] [History] [Civil War] [Systemic Racism] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Blindness] [Faith-Based/Spiritual]
