Civil War Archives - Tools For Racial Justice

The Racist History of Abortion and Midwifery Bans; Today’s attacks on abortion access have a long history rooted in white supremacy.

by Michele Goodwin | July 2020
Just like slavery, anti-abortion efforts are rooted in white supremacy, the exploitation of Black women, and placing women’s bodies in service to men. Just like slavery, maximizing wealth and consolidating power motivated the anti-abortion enterprise. Then, just as now, anti-abortion efforts have nothing to do with saving women’s lives or protecting the interests of children. Today, a person is 14 times more likely to die by carrying a pregnancy to term than by having an abortion, and medical evidence has shown for decades that an abortion is as safe as a penicillin shot—and yet abortion remains heavily restricted in states across the country. Prior to the Civil War, abortion and contraceptives were legal in the U.S., used by Indigenous women as well as those who sailed to these lands from Europe. For the most part, the persons who performed all manner of reproductive health care were women — female midwives. Midwifery was interracial; half of the women who provided reproductive health care were Black women. Other midwives were Indigenous and white.
TAGS: [Collective Action] [2020’s] [Indigenous] [History] [Slavery] [Black Lives Matter] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [Politics] [Civil War] [Asian]

Why The U.S. Needs to do Reparations Now; Addressing centuries of racist Policy is a Critical Solution to Today’s Social Unrest, Explains Law Professor Mehrsa Baradaran in an Interview with HuffPost.

by Emily Peck | June 2020
Defunding the police is just part of the structural reform needed to root out racism in the U.S., says Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, who studies the economic inequities between Black and white Americans. What’s truly needed is a big-picture rethink of U.S. policy at every level, she told HuffPost in an interview by phone and in follow-ups over email this week. In her 2017 book “The Color of Money,” Baradaran lays out how, over centuries, policymakers wrote Black Americans out of the economic system — and how policies blocking Black people from obtaining mortgages, land and credit created an immense wealth gap between Black and white Americans that persists to this day. In her book, Baradaran says that after slavery was abolished, Black Americans held just .5% of all the wealth in the U.S. Today, the number is barely higher, at about 1%.
TAGS: [Assumptions] [2020’s] [Reparations] [Economics] [History] [Housing] [Civil War] [Policing] [Systemic Racism]

Not Just Tulsa: Five Other Race Massacres That Devastated Black America; There is a Long History of White Terrorism Destroying Black Communities.

by Clay Cane | July 2020
COLFAX, LOUISIANA, MASSACRE (1873)
WILMINGTON, NORTH CAROLINA, MASSACRE (1898)
ATLANTA MASSACRE (1906)
ELAINE, ARKANSAS, MASSACRE (1919)
ROSEWOOD, FLORIDA, MASSACRE (1923)…
[Ed note: and this isn’t counting the ones against Native Americans]
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [2020’s] [Systemic Racism] [History] [Black Lives Matter] [Civil War] [White Supremacy] [White Culture] [White Privilege] [Silencing POC]

Why Juneteenth Matters: Professor Brenna Greer Shares the History and Significance

by Wellesley College | June 2020
Historians are increasingly illuminating the nature, extent, and consistency of investments in Black people’s oppression, which accounts for why, in this nation, Black freedom and racial equality have always required hard-fought battles, sometimes in the most literal and bloodiest sense. Juneteenth reminds us that, in this nation’s history, Black people’s freedom has traditionally been a question of economics and politics, not morality.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Economics] [Politics] [History] [Systemic Racism] [Slavery] [Civil War] [White Blindness] [White Supremacy] [Policing]

What Toni Morrison Taught Me about My People, the Quakers

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]

A Conversation about Truth and Reconciliation in the US

by Ezra Klein | July 2020
What would it take for America to heal? To be the country it claims to be? This is the question that animates Bryan Stevenson’s career. Stevenson is the founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, a clinical professor at the New York University School of Law, a MacArthur “genius,” and the author of the remarkable book Just Mercy — which was recently turned into a feature film where Stevenson was played by Michael B. Jordan.
TAGS: [Strategies] [2020’s] [Confederate Monuments] [Role Model] [Advocacy] [Prison System] [History] [Denial] [White Blindness] [Slavery] [Civil War] [Economics] [White Supremacy] [Systemic Racism]

Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong

by James W. Loewen | July 2015
“As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists—which is why a presidential candidate can suggest, as Michele Bachmann did in 2011, that slavery was somehow pro-family and why the public, per the Pew Research Center, believes that the war was fought mainly over states’ rights.”
TAGS: [Assumptions] [History] [Confederate Monuments] [White Supremacy] [Civil War] [Slavery] [2010’s] [Myths]

Why Do People Believe Myths about the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments are Wrong

by James W. Loewen | July 2015
The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public monuments and our history books. With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about, and our Army honoring Southern generals, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until recently.
TAGS: [Racial Terrorism] [Myths] [Confederate Monuments] [Civil War] [Slavery] [History] [White Supremacy]