American Autocthonous History aka Black/African American History & History of Autocthonous People World Wide
- Thread starter Lexx Diamond
- Start date
The Massacre of Black Sharecroppers That Led the Supreme Court to Curb the Racial Disparities of the Justice System
White Arkansans, fearful of what would happen if African-Americans organized, took violent action, but it was the victims who ended up standing trial
Read more: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/hist...ican-americans-180969863/#y44OpsGPGqmh81Sk.99
The sharecroppers who gathered at a small church in Elaine, Arkansas, in the late hours of September 30, 1919, knew the risk they were taking. Upset about unfair low wages, they enlisted the help of a prominent white attorney from Little Rock, Ulysses Bratton, to come to Elaine to press for a fairer share in the profits of their labor. Each season, landowners came around demanding obscene percentages of the profits, without ever presenting the sharecroppers detailed accounting and trapping them with supposed debts.
“There was very little recourse for African-American tenant farmers against this exploitation; instead there was an unwritten law that no African-American could leave until his or her debt was paid off,” writes Megan Ming Francis in Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State. Organizers hoped Bratton’s presence would bring more pressure to bear through the courts. Aware of the dangers – the atmosphere was tense after racially motivated violence in the area – some of the farmers were armed with rifles.
At around 11 p.m. that night, a group of local white men, some of whom may have been affiliated with local law enforcement, fired shots into the church. The shots were returned, and in the chaos, one white man was killed. Word spread rapidly about the death. Rumors arose that the sharecroppers, who had formally joined a union known as the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America (PFHUA) were leading an organized “insurrection” against the white residents of Phillips County.
Governor Charles Brough called for 500 soldiers from nearby Camp Pike to, as the Arkansas Democrat reported on Oct 2, “round up” the “heavily armed negroes.” The troops were “under order to shoot to kill any negro who refused to surrender immediately.” They went well beyond that, banding together with local vigilantes and killing at least 200 African-Americans (estimates run much higher but there was never a full accounting). And the killing was indiscriminate—men, women and children unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity were slaughtered. Amidst the violence, five whites died, but for those deaths, someone would have to be held accountable.
Out of this tragedy, known as the Elaine massacre, and its subsequent prosecution, would come a Supreme Court decision that would upend years of court-sanctioned injustice against African-Americans and would secure the right of due process for defendants placed in impossible circumstances.
Despite its impact, little about the carnage in Elaine was unique during the summer of 1919. It was part of a period of vicious reprisals against African-American veterans returning home from World War I. Many whites believed that these veterans (including Robert Hill, who co-founded PFHUA) posed a threat as they claimed greater recognition for their rights at home. Even though they served in large numbers, black soldiers “realized over the course of the war and in the immediate aftermath that their achievement and their success actually provoked more rage and more vitriol than if they had utterly failed,” says Adriane Lentz-Smith, associate professor of history at Duke University and author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I.
During the massacre, Arkansan Leroy Johnston, who had had spent nine months recovering in a hospital from injuries he suffered in the trenches of France – was pulled from a train shortly after returning home and was shot to death alongside his three brothers. In places like Phillips County, where the economy directly depended on the predatory system of sharecropping, white residents were inclined to view the activities of Hill and others as the latest in a series of dangerous agitations.
In the days after the bloodshed in Elaine, local media coverage continued to fan the flames daily, reporting sensational stories of an organized plot against whites. A seven-man committee formed to investigate the killings. Their conclusions all too predictable: the following week they issued a statement in the Arkansas Democrat declaring the gathering in Elaine a “deliberately planned insurrection if the negroes against the whites” led by the PFHUA, whose founders used “ignorance and superstition of a race of children for monetary gains.”
The paper claimed every individual who joined was under the understanding that “ultimately he would be called upon to kill white people.” A week later, they would congratulate themselves on the whole episode and their ability to restore order confidently claiming that not one slain African-American was innocent. “The real secret of Phillips county’s success…” the newspaper boasted, is that “the Southerner knows the negro through several generations of experience.”
To counter this accepted narrative, Walter White, a member of the NAACP whose appearance enabled him to blend in with white residents, snuck into Phillips County by posing as a reporter. In subsequent articles, he claimed that “careful examination…does not reveal the ‘dastardly’ plot which has been charged” and that indeed the PFHUA had no designs on an uprising. He pointed out that the disparity in death toll alone belied the accepted version of events. With African-Americans making up a significant majority of local residents, “it appears that the fatalities would have been differently proportioned if a well-planned murder plot had existed among the Negroes,” he wrote in The Nation. The NAACP also pointed out in their publication The Crisis that in the prevailing climate of unchecked lynchings and mob violence against African-Americans, “none would be fool enough” to do so. The black press picked up the story and other papers began to integrate White’s counter-narrative into their accounts, galvanizing support for the defendants.
The courts were another matter altogether. Dozens of African-Americans became defendants in hastily convened murder trials that used incriminating testimony coerced through torture, and 12 men were sentenced to death. Jury deliberations lasted just moments. The verdicts were a foregone conclusion – it was clear that had they not been slated for execution by the court, they mob would have done so even sooner.
“You had 12 black men who were clearly charged with murder in a system that was absolutely corrupt at the time – you had mob influence, you had witness tampering, you had a jury that was all-white, you had almost certainly judicial bias, you had the pressure of knowing that if you were a juror in this case that you would almost certainly not be able to live in that town...if you decided anything other than a conviction,” says Michael Curry, an attorney and chair of the NAACP Advocacy and Policy Committee. No white residents were tried for any crime.
The outcome, at least initially, echoed an unyielding trend demonstrated by many a mob lynching: for African-American defendants, accusation and conviction were interchangeable.
Nonetheless, the NAACP launched a series of appeals and challenges that would inch their way through Arkansas state courts and then federal courts for the next three years, an arduous series of hard-fought victories and discouraging setbacks that echoed previous attempts at legal redress for black citizens. “It’s a learning process for the NAACP,” says Lentz-Smith. “[There is] a sense of how to do it and who to draw on and what sort of arguments to make.” The cases of six of the men would be sent for retrial over a technicality, while the other six defendants – including named plaintiff Frank Moore – had their cases argued before the United States Supreme Court. The NAACP’s legal strategy hinged on the claim that the defendants’ 14th Amendment right to due process had been violated.
In February 1923, by a 6-2 margin, the Court agreed. Citing the all-white jury, lack of opportunity to testify, confessions under torture, denial of change of venue and the pressure of the mob, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote for the majority that “if the case is that the whole proceeding is a mask – that counsel, jury and judge were swept to the fatal end by an irresistible wave of public passion,” then it was the duty of the Supreme Court to intervene as guarantor of the petitioners’ constitutional rights where the state of Arkansas had failed.
The verdict marked a drastic departure from the Court’s longstanding hands-off approach to the injustices happening in places like Elaine. “This was a seismic shift in how our Supreme Court was recognizing the rights of African-Americans,” says Curry. After a long history of having little recourse in courts, Moore vs. Dempsey (the defendant was the keeper of the Arkansas State Penitentiary) preceded further legal gains where federal courts would weigh in on high-profile due process cases involving black defendants, including Powell vs. Alabama in 1932, which addressed all-white juries, and Brown vs. Mississippi in 1936, which ruled on confessions extracted under torture.
Moore vs. Dempsey provided momentum for early civil rights lawyers and paved the way for later victories in the ’50s and ’60s. According to Lentz, “when we narrate the black freedom struggle in the 20th century, we actually need to shift our timeline and the pins we put on the timeline for the moments of significant breakthrough and accomplishments.” Despite Moore vs. Dempsey being relatively obscure, “if the U.S. civil rights movement is understood as an effort to secure the full social, political, and legal rights of citizenship, then 1923 marks a significant event,” writes Francis.
The ruling also carried broad-ranging implications for all citizens in terms of federal intervention in contested criminal cases. “The recognition that the state had violated the procedural due process, and the federal courts actually weighing in on that was huge,” says Curry. “There was a deference that was being paid to state criminal proceedings, then this sort of broke that protection that existed for states.”
The sharecroppers that had gathered in Elaine had a simple goal: to secure a share in the profits gained from their work. But the series of injustices the events of that night unleashed would - through several years of tenacious effort - end up before the nation’s highest court and show that the longstanding tradition of declaring African-Americans guilty absent constitutional guarantees would no longer go unchallenged.
https://www.bgol.us/forum/threads/l...y-sharecropper-massacre-in-elaine-ar.1013943/
Now this right here is one story I never knew. Now the civil rights ppl were fighting for back then were real life and life-threatening problems. Nowadays ppl are TRYING to equate the circumstances of this article with what Social Justice Warriors call racism nowadays. The two are not even close.
Dr. Gladys West, Who Helped Develop The GPS, Inducted Into Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame
Government
This “hidden figure” is finally getting her due praise.
A “hidden figure” in the development of GPS technology has officially been honored for her work. Mathematician Dr. Gladys West was recognized for doing the computing responsible for creating the Geographical Positioning System, more commonly referred to as the GPS.
On December 6, the 87-year-old woman was inducted into the Air Force Space and Missile Pioneers Hall of Fame by the United States Air Force during a ceremony at the Pentagon.
The Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority member, born in Dinwiddie County, Virginia, earned a full scholarship to Virginia State University after graduating high school at the top of her class. Gwen James, her sorority sister, told The Associated Press she discovered her longtime friend’s achievements when she was compiling a bio for senior members of the group.
“GPS has changed the lives of everyone forever,” James said. “There is not a segment of this global society — military, auto industry, cell phone industry, social media, parents, NASA, etc. — that does not utilize the Global Positioning System.”
Dr. West spent 42 years working on the naval base at Dahlgren, Virginia. During this time, she was one of the few women hired by the military to do advanced technological work. During the early 1960s, she was commissioned by the U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory to support research around Pluto’s motion. From the mid-1970s to the 1980s, her computing work on a geodetic Earth model led to what became the first GPS orbit.
“This involved planning and executing several highly complex computer algorithms which have to analyze an enormous amount of data,” Ralph Neiman, her supervisor who recommended her for commendation in 1979, said. “You have used your knowledge of computer applications to accomplish this in an efficient and timely manner.”
Continue onto Blavity to read the complete article.
https://www.blackeoejournal.com/201...d-air-force-space-missile-pioneers-hall-fame/
Saharan remains may be evidence of first race war, 13,000 years agoThe skeletons – from the east bank of the Nile in northern Sudan – are from victims of the world’s oldest known relatively large-scale human armed conflict
Scientists are investigating what may be the oldest identified race war 13,000 years after it raged on the fringes of the Sahara.
French scientists working in collaboration with the British Museum have been examining dozens of skeletons, a majority of whom appear to have been killed by archers using flint-tipped arrows.
The bones – from Jebel Sahaba on the east bank of the Nile in northern Sudan – are from victims of the world’s oldest known relatively large-scale human armed conflict.
Over the past two years anthropologists from Bordeaux University have discovered literally dozens of previously undetected arrow impact marks and flint arrow head fragments on and around the bones of the victims.
This is in addition to many arrow heads and impact marks already found embedded in some of the bones during an earlier examination of the skeletons back in the 1960s. The remains – the contents of an entire early cemetery – were found in 1964 by the prominent American archaeologist, Fred Wendorf, but, until the current investigations, had never been examined using more modern, 21 century, technology.
Some of the skeletal material has just gone on permanent display as part of the British Museum’s new Early Egypt gallery which opens officially today. The bones – from Jebel Sahaba on the east bank of the River Nile in northern Sudan – are from victims of the world’s oldest known relatively large-scale human armed conflict.
Now British Museum scientists are planning to learn more about the victims themselves – everything from gender to disease and from diet to age at death. The discovery of dozens of previously undetected arrow impact marks and flint arrow fragments suggests that the majority of the individuals – men, women and children – in the Jebel Sahaba cemetery were killed by enemy archers, and then buried by their own people. What’s more, the new research demonstrates that the attacks – in effect a prolonged low-level war – took place over many months or years.
Parallel research over recent years has also been shedding new light as to who, in ethnic and racial terms, these victims were.
Work carried out at Liverpool John Moores University, the University of Alaska and New Orleans’ Tulane University indicates that they were part of the general sub-Saharan originating population – the ancestors of modern Africans.
The identity of their killers is however less easy to determine. But it is conceivable that they were people from a totally different racial and ethnic group – part of a North African/ Levantine/European people who lived around much of the Mediterranean Basin.
Certainly the northern Sudan area was a major ethnic interface between these two different groups at around this period. Indeed the remains of the North African/Levantine/European originating population group has even been found 200 miles south of Jebel Sahaba, thus suggesting that the arrow victims were slaughtered in an area where both populations operated.
What’s more, the period in which they perished so violently was one of huge competition for resources – for they appear to have been killed during a severe climatic downturn in which many water sources dried up, especially in summer time.
The climatic downturn – known as the Younger Dryas period – had been preceded by much lusher, wetter and warmer conditions which had allowed populations to expand. But when climatic conditions temporarily worsened during the Younger Dryas, water holes dried up, vegetation wilted and animals died or moved to the only major year-round source of water still available – the Nile.
Humans of all ethnic groups in the area were forced to follow suit – and migrated to the banks (especially the eastern bank) of the great river. Competing for finite resources, human groups would have inevitably clashed – and the current investigation is demonstrating the apparent scale of this earliest known substantial human conflict .
The skeletons were originally found during UNESCO-funded excavations carried out to investigate archaeological sites that were about to be inundated by the Aswan High Dam. All the Jebel Sahaba material was taken by the excavator Fred Wendorf to his laboratory in Texas, and some 30 years later was transferred to the care of the British Museum which is now working with other scientists to carry out a major new analysis of them.
- “In Louisiana, black women were put in cells with male prisoners and some became pregnant. In 1848, legislators passed a new law declaring that all children born in the penitentiary of African American parents serving life sentences would be property of the state. The women would raise the kids until the age of ten, at which point the penitentiary would place an ad in the newspaper. Thirty days later, the children would be auctioned off on the courthouse steps 'cash on delivery.' The proceeds were used to fund schools for white children. . . many of [the black children] were purchased by prison officials.” Source: American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer
- “In Louisiana, black women were put in cells with male prisoners and some became pregnant. In 1848, legislators passed a new law declaring that all children born in the penitentiary of African American parents serving life sentences would be property of the state. The women would raise the kids until the age of ten, at which point the penitentiary would place an ad in the newspaper. Thirty days later, the children would be auctioned off on the courthouse steps 'cash on delivery.' The proceeds were used to fund schools for white children. . . many of [the black children] were purchased by prison officials.” Source: American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer
unbelievably sad
- “In Louisiana, black women were put in cells with male prisoners and some became pregnant. In 1848, legislators passed a new law declaring that all children born in the penitentiary of African American parents serving life sentences would be property of the state. The women would raise the kids until the age of ten, at which point the penitentiary would place an ad in the newspaper. Thirty days later, the children would be auctioned off on the courthouse steps 'cash on delivery.' The proceeds were used to fund schools for white children. . . many of [the black children] were purchased by prison officials.” Source: American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment by Shane Bauer
Love this thread
- (1919-1924)
The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was a militant black liberation group founded in 1919 by West Indian journalist Cyril Briggs. The ABB advocated armed defense against racist assaults and the creation of an independent black socialist commonwealth. It sought to unite black radicals around the issues of racism, colonialism, black nationalism, and anti-capitalism and, through its merger of class and race consciousness, provided the primary gateway for black radicals' entrance into the Communist movement in the early to mid 1920s.
Centered in Harlem, the ABB established local branches throughout the country. The group operated in semi-secrecy for much of its existence, making estimates of its membership problematic. Although it boasted membership figures in excess of 50,000, in all likelihood the ABB never drew more than 3,500 adherents nationwide. However, especially in Harlem its membership included some of the most influential black radicals of the period, including Briggs and fellow West Indian immigrants Richard B. Moore and Otto Huiswoud, as well as American-born Grace Campbell. Primarily a propaganda organization, the ABB's most important platform and recruitment tool was Briggs' newspaper, the Crusader, which had been founded in 1918. In 1921, the ABB gained notoriety and a boost in membership after its Tulsa, Oklahoma branch was linked to the armed resistance of local blacks during the Tulsa race riot.
Briggs and the ABB increasingly gravitated toward the Communist (Workers) Party in the early 1920s. The shift entailed moderating some of the group's nationalist militancy in favor of more class-conscious interracial solidarity. Nevertheless, Briggs was able to forge an ideological fusion of black liberation and revolutionary socialism that animated black activists within the Communist Party for years to come and anticipated the Party's own embrace of "self-determination" for African Americans after 1928. Beset by financial difficulties, the ABB's formal end came in 1924 when it folded into the Party's American Negro Labor Congress.
The African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), led by
Cyril Briggs, identified capitalism as the underlying cause of oppression of poor people of all races. In 1921 the ABB ended its support of Marcus Garvey's UNIA because of the failure of the Black Star Line and Garvey's meeting with a Ku Klux Klan leader.
Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library.
Muhammad Ali and his younger brother Rahman Ali, with their grandmother.
to lead a slave uprising at the Triumvirato sugar mill in
Matanzas Province and was killed. She was one of the
3 leaders of the rebellion. Her name was later given to
Cuba's 1980's operation Black Carlota in Southern
Africa, which culminated in the battle of Cuito
Cuanavale and the defeat of the South African army in
pitch battle. Today, people can visit the remains of the
Triumvirato sugar mill and see the monument to
Carlota's rebellion.
Carlota and Fermina were among the few slaves that
initiated the slave revolt in 1843-1844 until their violent
repression in 1844.
In 1843, Cuba was an island under Spanish control.
Spain signed in 1817and in 1835 treaties stipulating
that they wouldn't be part of the slave trade. However
they still used illegal slave trade to have more slaves
on the plantation. In fact the culture of the sugar cane
was central to the economy of the island and required
an important and cheap labor force. In this context, an
increased number of slave revolts took place in these
years. This culminated with the revolts in 1843-1844.
These revolts started in July 1843 when the slaves'
drums started in the plain of Havana-Matanzas where
the slave exploitation was the most intense. This was
the call for a first revolt organized by a man called
Evaristo and a woman called Fermina on the sugar
estate Acana. In August they got arrested, chained and
locked up.
However this didn't discourage the slaves since they
revolted against, released Fermina on November 3rd
and on November 5th their was a new uprising in the
sugar estate of Triumvirato led by three African slaves,
including Carlota. This group, led by Carlota, first
destroyed this plantation and then liberated the slaves
from the administrations of Santa Ana, Guanbana
and Sabanilla del Encomendador, belonging to the
Concepci6n, San Lorenzo, San Miguel, San Rafael
sugar mills, and the neighboring coffee plantations
and dairy farms. The revolt spread and led to
successive rebellions on the part of African and
Cuban-born slaves.
The slaves immediately had to face a brutal
repression, they were one by one arrested and
executed. A few days after the beginning of the revolt
a US Navy Corvette was sent to Havana with a letter
from American officials, notifying Captain General
0'Donnell, the man in charge of the repression in Cuba,
that he would have the support of the American
government. The repression led to the execution of
thousands of black and mixed-race free persons and
slaves. This is to our days remembered as"the Year of
the Strap". Carlota, as an active organizer of the revolt, was
arrested and torn apart in March 1844. These enslaved
women were at the forefront at the resistance to
slavery, as participants and organizers. They were part
of the slave resistance to slavery that ended with the
abolition of slavery in Cuba on October 7th, 1886.
The first picture is how Europeans depicted Menelik the II Of Ethiopia. They found it hard to believe a Black African man could raise an army to defeat a European superpower. So they depicted him like a savage and demonized him like they did most people of African descent at the time. Menelik was remembered for leading Ethiopian troops against the Kingdom of Italy in the First Italo-Ethiopian War. A war where Menelik scored a decisive victory at the Battle of Adwa.
The German garrison itself and commander Von Zulow used the name"Death Island" for the camp. Shark Island, German South West Africa was the world's first Extermination Camp (Vernichtungslager). The objective of the policy of German South West Africa Governor Theodor von Leutwein was not to destroy the indigenous populations (Herero, Nama, Damara) in order to seize their land to encourage settlement of German farmers; nor was it to seize or kill the cattle. Leutwein's objective was not genocide, and he was wise enough to realize that the indigenous population could be used as a labor supply.
However, such Flavian tactics (Fabius Maximus, opposing Hannibal) left Leutwein open to attack at home, with a public who wanted the instant gratification of a decisive defeat of the indigenous peoples of German South West Africa. (This was the same problem Fabius Maximus had with the Roman public, who wanted him to quickly defeat Hannibal.) As a consequence, Leutwein was pushed aside by Kaiser Wilhelm II and replaced by Lothar von Trotha, already known for his brutality in China as well as German East Africa.
The result was the genocide of the indigenous population, the economic ruin of German South West Africa, and the eventual loss of the German colonial empire. As a consequence of this failed, brutal policy, Trotha was forced to leave German South West Africa and replaced by Friedrich von Lindequist, who completed the genocide with the use of extermination camps and concentration camps. In order for this policy to be acceptable at home, propaganda was employed. The claim was made that the 'barbaric' indigenous population wished to murder defenseless women and children. In fact, only four German women were killed, and one German child.
A Forgotten Presidential Candidate From 1904
December 1, 20159:04 AM ET
LINTON WEEKS
George Edwin Taylor in 1904.
Courtesy of Eartha M.M. White Collection, Thomas G. Carpenter Library, University of North Florida
Despite what you read in some history books — such as theBiographical Dictionary of Congressional Women— Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) was not in 1972 the first African-American candidate to run for president of the United States.
In 1904, George Edwin Taylor — often forgotten in the discussion of black American political pioneers — ran for president as the candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party, sometimes known as the National Liberty Party.
Son Of A Slave
A journalist by trade, Taylor — who lived in Iowa — gained distinction, according to the Tacoma, Wash.,Timeson Aug. 17, 1904, as a leader in the Republican national convention of 1892, "to which he was an alternate delegate-at-large from his state. The next campaign he was delegate-at-large to the Democratic convention."
In 1904, 36 states sent representatives to the Liberty Party convention. According to theTimes, the party denounced the Democrats' disenfranchisement of black Americans. It questioned Theodore Roosevelt's fidelity to African-Americans and it stood for "unqualified enforcement of the constitution," reparations for ex-slaves and independence for the Philippines.
The candidate Taylor, the paper announced, was one of a dozen children whose father was a slave and his mother was born a free person in the South. "When his mother died," the paper notes, "young Taylor was left a waif and slept in dry goods boxes. He finally drifted north and attended the Baptist academy at Beaver Dam, in Wisconsin. Feeble health and an exhausted pocketbook caused him to leave school within a year of graduating."
according to the Murphy Libraryat the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Taylor was a key player in both the Wisconsin's People's Party and the Union Labor Party. "HisWisconsin Labor Advocatewas the voice of Wisconsin's labor party in 1886-1887," the library explains. "From 1891 to 1910, Taylor lived in Oskaloosa and Ottumwa, Iowa, where he published a national magazine called theNegro Solicitor. During this period he rose to prominence in national black politics, acting as president of the National Colored Men's Protective Association and the National Negro Democratic League and served high office in various other black organizations."
The library adds: "From 1910 to 1925, Taylor retreated from the national stage and lived an active life in Jacksonville, Florida."
Historian Bruce L. Mouser pieced Taylor's remarkable life together for the 2011 biography:For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, and the Making of Independent Black Politics.
Questions And Answers
So who was George Edwin Taylor. this erstwhile newspaper editor with a groundbreaking political career? For answers, we turn toDavid Brodnaxwho teaches history at Trinity Christian College.
NPR:As perhaps the first African-American to run for president in the United States, was George Edwin Taylor the right man at the right time?
David Brodnax:Given the fact that Taylor received fewer than 2,000 votes when he ran for president in 1904, it is hard to call him "the right man at the right time." Another way to look at this is to ask why he in particular became the first African American to run for president; why did he do what Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Blanche K. Bruce, and other leading black politicians before him could or would not. Part of the irony of the situation is that Taylor's marginal status may have made him more likely to be first.
Right before the Civil War, African American men could only vote in New York and five New England states, and their percentage of the population in those states was far too small for any party to consider nominating them. In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave black men around the country the right to vote (black women did not gain this right nationally until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920), and so black politicians in southern states or in the northern cities with rapidly growing black populations might have considered a run for the White House. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats, though, would have seriously considered nominating an African-American for president; the Republicans would not have risked alienating white voters for the sake of gaining black votes that they felt sure to get anyway, and the Democrats had a well-earned reputation for racial hostility.
Because of the great expense of running for president, the only African-Americans who could even consider funding a serious third-party campaign were members of the upper-class who were also the most likely to remain loyal to the GOP. Taylor, who had first been a Republican and then a Democrat, was the first to run for president because he was the first black politician who (1) no longer cared about what either major party thought of him and (2) was able to find allies among progressive whites who took the incredibly bold step of nominating him.
NPR:What was the political climate of the time?
Brodnax:Taylor had spent many years inIowa, which was the first state [outside of New England] after the Civil War to give black men the right to vote and where they had never lost that right. Specifically, Taylor lived in and near the mining towns of southeast Iowa, which was a major center of black political and labor activity even before he arrived. At the same time, blacks in Iowa, whether in the southeast or elsewhere, held no statewide office and could not even get nominated by the GOP to serve in the state legislature, whereas African Americans in Chicago, New York, and other large northern cities had sufficient numbers to accomplish this on at least a token level. This environment of political activity without direct political power may have helped to shape Taylor's willingness to pursue a political goal that he must have known he had no chance of winning.
NPR:What lessons can Americans learn from Taylor 90 years after his death?
Brodnax:Every four years, Iowa and New Hampshire are depicted in contrast to South Carolina as the "white" early primary states. In 2008, for instance, Barack Obama gained massive credibility by winning Iowa and thus showing that he could appeal to white voters. Although Iowa is in fact overwhelmingly white, the story of George Edwin Taylor shows that African Americans have always played a role in the state's presidential politics and therefore in national presidential politics as well.
Also, Taylor's story shows that some things have not changed over the last 90 years. Today, African Americans overwhelmingly vote for a party that has been accused of taking their votes for granted while the other party seems to not at all support issues that matter to them. Most African Americans will not cast ballots for a third party, even when it nominates black candidates; for instance, the Green Party ticket of Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente in 2008, although to be fair in that campaign, black voters had the unprecedented choice of two different parties that had nominated a black person for president. There is still the feeling that it is better to press for change within a major party and at least win marginal gains than to waste votes on a losing cause and get nothing. The ever-increasing cost of running for president no doubt factors into this.
NPR:Are there other lessons?
Brodnax:The fact that Taylor became the first African American to run for president in 1904, decades after nearly all African Americans had gained the right to vote, also shows that understanding black "firsts" is not just a matter of when white Americans became liberal enough to support such a thing, or when African Americans were finally able to win their fight for the right to do a thing, but instead depends on many different factors.
Finally, George Taylor shows us the great diversity of political thought and the robust political debate that takes place within the African American community. The media tends to depict African Americans as monolithic and simplemindedly loyal to the Democratic Party, just as it once depicted us as monolithic and simplemindedly loyal to the Republican Party. The story of Taylor shows that this simply is not true and never has been. Even the decision to support a major party over an independent party with more racially progressive views, which happened in 1904 and has happened many more times since then, is part of this discussion and is a matter of pragmatism, not blind allegiance.
https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-hi...f2iAzs6GwUBoSWkNapeyDfcwMsCvgAw1AAIUbHe1OmE0g
December 1, 20159:04 AM ET
LINTON WEEKS
Courtesy of Eartha M.M. White Collection, Thomas G. Carpenter Library, University of North Florida
Despite what you read in some history books — such as theBiographical Dictionary of Congressional Women— Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-NY) was not in 1972 the first African-American candidate to run for president of the United States.
In 1904, George Edwin Taylor — often forgotten in the discussion of black American political pioneers — ran for president as the candidate of the National Negro Liberty Party, sometimes known as the National Liberty Party.
Son Of A Slave
A journalist by trade, Taylor — who lived in Iowa — gained distinction, according to the Tacoma, Wash.,Timeson Aug. 17, 1904, as a leader in the Republican national convention of 1892, "to which he was an alternate delegate-at-large from his state. The next campaign he was delegate-at-large to the Democratic convention."
In 1904, 36 states sent representatives to the Liberty Party convention. According to theTimes, the party denounced the Democrats' disenfranchisement of black Americans. It questioned Theodore Roosevelt's fidelity to African-Americans and it stood for "unqualified enforcement of the constitution," reparations for ex-slaves and independence for the Philippines.
The candidate Taylor, the paper announced, was one of a dozen children whose father was a slave and his mother was born a free person in the South. "When his mother died," the paper notes, "young Taylor was left a waif and slept in dry goods boxes. He finally drifted north and attended the Baptist academy at Beaver Dam, in Wisconsin. Feeble health and an exhausted pocketbook caused him to leave school within a year of graduating."
according to the Murphy Libraryat the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Taylor was a key player in both the Wisconsin's People's Party and the Union Labor Party. "HisWisconsin Labor Advocatewas the voice of Wisconsin's labor party in 1886-1887," the library explains. "From 1891 to 1910, Taylor lived in Oskaloosa and Ottumwa, Iowa, where he published a national magazine called theNegro Solicitor. During this period he rose to prominence in national black politics, acting as president of the National Colored Men's Protective Association and the National Negro Democratic League and served high office in various other black organizations."
The library adds: "From 1910 to 1925, Taylor retreated from the national stage and lived an active life in Jacksonville, Florida."
Historian Bruce L. Mouser pieced Taylor's remarkable life together for the 2011 biography:For Labor, Race, and Liberty: George Edwin Taylor, His Historic Run for the White House, and the Making of Independent Black Politics.
Questions And Answers
So who was George Edwin Taylor. this erstwhile newspaper editor with a groundbreaking political career? For answers, we turn toDavid Brodnaxwho teaches history at Trinity Christian College.
NPR:As perhaps the first African-American to run for president in the United States, was George Edwin Taylor the right man at the right time?
David Brodnax:Given the fact that Taylor received fewer than 2,000 votes when he ran for president in 1904, it is hard to call him "the right man at the right time." Another way to look at this is to ask why he in particular became the first African American to run for president; why did he do what Frederick Douglass, T. Thomas Fortune, Blanche K. Bruce, and other leading black politicians before him could or would not. Part of the irony of the situation is that Taylor's marginal status may have made him more likely to be first.
Right before the Civil War, African American men could only vote in New York and five New England states, and their percentage of the population in those states was far too small for any party to consider nominating them. In 1870, the 15th Amendment gave black men around the country the right to vote (black women did not gain this right nationally until the 19th Amendment was ratified in 1920), and so black politicians in southern states or in the northern cities with rapidly growing black populations might have considered a run for the White House. Neither the Republicans nor Democrats, though, would have seriously considered nominating an African-American for president; the Republicans would not have risked alienating white voters for the sake of gaining black votes that they felt sure to get anyway, and the Democrats had a well-earned reputation for racial hostility.
Because of the great expense of running for president, the only African-Americans who could even consider funding a serious third-party campaign were members of the upper-class who were also the most likely to remain loyal to the GOP. Taylor, who had first been a Republican and then a Democrat, was the first to run for president because he was the first black politician who (1) no longer cared about what either major party thought of him and (2) was able to find allies among progressive whites who took the incredibly bold step of nominating him.
NPR:What was the political climate of the time?
Brodnax:Taylor had spent many years inIowa, which was the first state [outside of New England] after the Civil War to give black men the right to vote and where they had never lost that right. Specifically, Taylor lived in and near the mining towns of southeast Iowa, which was a major center of black political and labor activity even before he arrived. At the same time, blacks in Iowa, whether in the southeast or elsewhere, held no statewide office and could not even get nominated by the GOP to serve in the state legislature, whereas African Americans in Chicago, New York, and other large northern cities had sufficient numbers to accomplish this on at least a token level. This environment of political activity without direct political power may have helped to shape Taylor's willingness to pursue a political goal that he must have known he had no chance of winning.
NPR:What lessons can Americans learn from Taylor 90 years after his death?
Brodnax:Every four years, Iowa and New Hampshire are depicted in contrast to South Carolina as the "white" early primary states. In 2008, for instance, Barack Obama gained massive credibility by winning Iowa and thus showing that he could appeal to white voters. Although Iowa is in fact overwhelmingly white, the story of George Edwin Taylor shows that African Americans have always played a role in the state's presidential politics and therefore in national presidential politics as well.
Also, Taylor's story shows that some things have not changed over the last 90 years. Today, African Americans overwhelmingly vote for a party that has been accused of taking their votes for granted while the other party seems to not at all support issues that matter to them. Most African Americans will not cast ballots for a third party, even when it nominates black candidates; for instance, the Green Party ticket of Cynthia McKinney and Rosa Clemente in 2008, although to be fair in that campaign, black voters had the unprecedented choice of two different parties that had nominated a black person for president. There is still the feeling that it is better to press for change within a major party and at least win marginal gains than to waste votes on a losing cause and get nothing. The ever-increasing cost of running for president no doubt factors into this.
NPR:Are there other lessons?
Brodnax:The fact that Taylor became the first African American to run for president in 1904, decades after nearly all African Americans had gained the right to vote, also shows that understanding black "firsts" is not just a matter of when white Americans became liberal enough to support such a thing, or when African Americans were finally able to win their fight for the right to do a thing, but instead depends on many different factors.
Finally, George Taylor shows us the great diversity of political thought and the robust political debate that takes place within the African American community. The media tends to depict African Americans as monolithic and simplemindedly loyal to the Democratic Party, just as it once depicted us as monolithic and simplemindedly loyal to the Republican Party. The story of Taylor shows that this simply is not true and never has been. Even the decision to support a major party over an independent party with more racially progressive views, which happened in 1904 and has happened many more times since then, is part of this discussion and is a matter of pragmatism, not blind allegiance.
https://www.npr.org/sections/npr-hi...f2iAzs6GwUBoSWkNapeyDfcwMsCvgAw1AAIUbHe1OmE0g
Freedom Marker: Courage and Creativity
by Dr. Bryan Walls
Precipitating factor that motivated Brown's escape:
Henry “Box” Brown was born enslaved in Louisa County, Virginia in 1815. When he was 15, he was sent to Richmond to work in a tobacco factory. His life was filled with unrewarded drudgery, although he had it better than most of his enslaved peers. The loss of freedom prevented him from living with his wife, Nancy, who was owned by a slave master on an adjacent plantation. She was pregnant with their fourth child when, in 1848, he heard the tragic news: Nancy and his children were to be sold to a plantation in North Carolina. He stood with tears in his eyes on the side of the street as he watched 350 slaves in chains walk by him, including his wife with their unborn child and three young children. He could only wish them a tearful last farewell— he was helpless to save them.
After months of mourning his loss, Henry resolved to escape from slavery. He was a man of faith and a member of the First African Baptist Church where he sang in the choir. He acknowledged that, through his faith in God, he was given the inspiration and courage to put together a creative plan of escape.
The plan and preparation to obtain his freedom:
Henry enlisted the help of his choir-member friend, James Caesar Anthony Smith, a free Black who knew Samuel Alexander Smith, a White sympathizer. (They were not related but had the same last name.) Samuel Smith liked to gamble and, for a profit, agreed to help Henry Brown with his plan. The plan that Henry envisioned was for himself to be shipped in a box by rail from Richmond to Philadelphia, a very creative, unique, and dangerous endeavour.
Samuel Alexander Smith in turn contacted James Miller McKim, a White abolitionist and seasoned member (along with William Still) of the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society. Samuel Alexander Smith shipped Henry by Adams Express Company on March 23, 1849, in a box 3 feet long by 2 feet 8 inches deep by 2 feet wide, and sent the box as “dry goods.” Henry Brown traveled in the box lined with baize, a coarse woollen cloth, carrying with him only one bladder of water and a few biscuits. There was a hole cut in the box for air, and it was nailed and tied with straps; in large words, “This side up” was written on the box. Brown traveled by a variety of wagons, railroads, steamboats, ferries, and finally, for added safety, a delivery wagon that brought the box to the Philadelphia Anti-Slavery Society before daybreak.
During the 27- hour journey, the box was turned upside down on several occasions and handled roughly. Henry wrote that he “was resolved to conquer or die, I felt my eyes swelling as if they would burst from their sockets; and the veins on my temples were dreadfully distended with pressure of blood upon my head.” At one point, Henry thought that he might die, but fortunately two men needed a place to sit down and, “so perceiving my box, standing on end, one of the men threw it down and the two sat upon it. I was thus relieved from a state of agony which may be more imagined than described.” The box with Brown in side was received by William Still, James Miller McKim, Professor C.D. Cleveland, and Lewis Thompson. Upon the box being opened, Brown said, “How do you do, Gentlemen?” then recited a psalm: “I waited patiently on the Lord and He heard my prayer.” He then began to sing the psalm to the delight of the four men present, and was christened Henry “Box” Brown.
The aftermath of Henry "Box" Brown's Courageous journey to freedom:
Samuel Alexander Smith attempted to ship more enslaved from Richmond to Philadelphia on May 8, 1849, but was discovered and arrested. In November of that year, he was sentenced to six-and-one-half years in the state penitentiary. James Caesar Anthony Smith, the free Black, was also arrested on September 25 for attempting another shipment of slaves, but he fared better. The trial that followed resulted in a divided panel of magistrates, and James Caesar Anthony Smith was released and later joined Brown in Boston.
The abolitionist movement of the day held two opposing points of view. Frederick Douglass made it clear that Henry Brown’s escape should not be made public, as others could use this same method. However, others thought that the publicity would help the movement, and that it was just too good a story to keep from the growing number of the public who opposed slavery.
Henry Brown was intoxicated with the feeling that freedom brought, and his personality would not allow him to remain quiet about
Henry “Box” Brown again showed his creativity late in 1849 when he hired artists and others to begin work on a moving panorama about slavery. In April 1850 Henry “Box” Brown’s “Mirror of Slavery” opened in Boston and was exhibited throughout the summer. With the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act on August 30, 1850, it was no longer safe for Brown to remain in the Northern Free States, as he could be captured and returned to Virginia. Therefore, he sailed for England in October 1850. His panorama was exhibited throughout England. In May 1851, Brown’s own “First English Edition” of the narrative of his life was published in Manchester.
All, however, was not well for Henry “Box” Brown. He was being criticized over finances and for not trying harder to purchase his own family. Thus, Brown left the abolitionist circuit completely and embraced English show business for the next 25 years. He married in 1859, and in 1875, accompanied by his wife and daughter Annie, he returned to the United States. He performed as a magician and continued to climb into his original box as part of his act throughout the eastern United States.
Brown’s last performance is reported to have taken place in Brantford, Ontario, Canada as stated in a Brantford newspaper on February 26, 1889. No later information on Henry “Box” Brown and his family has been discovered. The date and location of his death are unknown.
What is known is that he was a symbol of the Underground Railroad Freedom Movement. He was a man who took courage and combined it with creativity. Henry “Box” Brown soon discovered that in order to survive in the free world, he had to reinvent himself. He realized also that courage is not always given to you. By an act of faith, he said to that “Higher Power” who gave him the creative idea to seek freedom in a box, “Continue to command me now as a freeman, to do the impossible!”
http://www.pbs.org/black-culture/shows/list/underground-railroad/stories-freedom/henry-box-brown/
NEVER EVER FORGET!
A Lynching’s Long Shadow
Elwood Higginbotham was murdered by a mob in 1935. For his descendants, a new historical inquiry into his death offers a chance to confront the past.
A possible burial site of Elwood Higginbotham in Oxford, Miss. Credit Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times
By Vanessa Gregory
But one hot and clear afternoon in September, a day before the 82nd anniversary of her paternal grandfather’s death, Washington sat in the back seat of her sister’s car ready to crack open her family’s painful history. Her father, E.W. Higginbottom, sat beside her in a white dress shirt and cuff links, and her sister and brother-in-law, Delois and Irven Wright, rode up front. Washington’s children — Trinity, Bailee and Rico — squabbled quietly in the S.U.V.’s third row.
They had left the suburbs outside Memphis, Tenn., and were headed south, past deep green woods and an old railway line, toward Oxford, Miss., where Washington’s grandfather lived and died. The family planned to meet there with staff members from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, a Mississippi nonprofit, and tour sites significant in her grandfather’s lynching: the county courthouse, the killing grounds and two graveyards where he might be buried.
Washington, who wore rectangular glasses and a sleek ponytail, teaches high school Spanish and possesses an educator’s enthusiasm for history. She has visited Tuskegee University and George Washington Carver’s birthplace. She has walked across the Selma bridge, where Alabama state troopers beat nonviolent voting rights activists in 1965, and traveled to Booker T. Washington’s grave. The broad sweep of black history has come easily; her black family’s experience remained frustratingly elusive. “I’ve kind of seen the house where my mama lived as a child,” she said a few days earlier. “It was built over, but I kind of know where it is. I can go there. But I don’t know any of my daddy’s history.”
Washington’s grandfather was one of at least 4,100 African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in 12 states clustered along the curve from Virginia to Texas. Although racially motivated lynchings also took place in other states, they were far more common in the South. Black men accused of violent crimes — many of whom were very likely innocent — were frequent targets. But other black men, and women and even children, too, were lynched for insisting on their rights, or for minor violations of the racial caste system, like failing to step off a sidewalk to make way for a white person. On April 26, Stevenson’s organization will open the country’s first memorial to lynching victims, alongside a museum to racial injustice, in Montgomery.
E.J.I.’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice will feature 800 suspended columns — one for each county where documented lynchings occurred — engraved with victims’ names. The design is intended to convey scope but also, more ambitiously, to reshape a Southern landscape awash in Confederate symbols by asking each of those 800 counties to claim a duplicate marker and erect the six-foot monolith on its home soil. “In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Stevenson said. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that I think is necessary for that society to recover. In the American South, we’ve done the opposite. We’ve actually created symbols designed to make us feel great about our history, about the 19th century, about the good old days of the early 20th century.”
Stevenson has advocated fuller acknowledgment of the impact lynching had on African-Americans, both in terms of the trauma sustained and the concrete ways lynching disadvantaged communities. In some places, lynchings were accompanied by mob destruction of black business districts, adding economic devastation to sorrow. And African-Americans who migrated north or west to escape the threat of violence had to start over. Many left social networks, homes and businesses, making it extraordinarily difficult for families to build intergenerational wealth.
Image
Newspaper articles about Elwood Higginbotham’s death in 1935. Clockwise from top left: The Chicago Daily Tribune; The New York Times; The Atlanta Daily World; The North Mississippi Herald.
E.J.I.’s point of view stems from earlier scholarship and activism that tried to foster lasting conversations about lynching and puncture popular myths about the practice, like the notions that lynchings were isolated aberrations, pioneer justice or the work of social outsiders like the Ku Klux Klan. The unsettling “Without Sanctuary” exhibit, for example, made its debut in New York in 2000 and featured graphic photos of burned and mutilated black bodies surrounded by jubilant white crowds, some of which swelled into the thousands. Among the most disturbing images were those of white children in the crowds, some with expressions of smug delight on their faces. “If you want to talk about what stands in that place of distrust between blacks and whites, that’s part of it — not that there are just individuals, but hundreds or thousands of white witnesses who might stand beside and fail to stop this,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the author of “On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century.” “This is powerful, to unpack the complicity of those who remained silent and stood by and watched. That always has to be reckoned with, and we have to deal with that today.”
The gruesome nature of lynchings, Ifill noted, was the main point; they were meant to haunt and intimidate, and to thus ensure the continuation of white supremacy. Stevenson makes a point of calling them “racial terror lynchings.” The killings rippled beyond individual victims and their families to shroud entire communities in fear and shame. In some places, lynching memories suppressed black voter participation for decades. Even today, Ifill and Stevenson said, memories of racial violence can be so traumatic that survivors, witnesses and inheritors stay locked in silence — much like Higginbottom’s mother, who took her husband’s memory to her grave. “There are thousands of African-American families with histories of horrific victimization and racial oppression that have never openly talked because it hasn’t felt safe or healthy to have those conversations,” Stevenson said. “We’re just finding our voice, many of us, to insist on truth telling. And my view on truth and reconciliation is that it’s sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first get to truth.”
Washington — and her five siblings —wanted to get to the truth about their family long before they ever imagined returning to Oxford. When they were kids, their father was too angry to talk about his father at length, and other relatives spoke only hesitantly, if at all, about the killing. So the children spun their own stories, embroidering fragments of truth with scenarios lifted from movies and books. Over the years, the theories hardened into beliefs. Wright felt certain that someone — maybe her mother? — had said that white men lynched her grandfather because he protested when they tried to force his wife to work the cotton fields. Her brother, David Higginbottom, worried that his grandfather might have been murdered for having an interracial romance. Washington thought about her grandmother’s light skin and wondered if she had been the object of a dispute. “We grew up thinking that maybe somebody liked my grandmother and maybe it had something to do with her,” Washington said a few days before returning to Oxford. “Maybe it was her fault — you know, not her fault. But maybe somebody liked her and tried to get to her, and my grandfather tried to protect her.”
The trip to Oxford’s Winter Institute, which was housed inside a Brutalist hulk of a building on the University of Mississippi campus, marked the culmination of a monthslong unraveling of their grandfather’s story. Earlier in the year, a Northeastern University law student named Kyleen Burke emailed Washington’s cousin Tyrone Higginbottom, who then put her in touch with the rest of the family. She told them that she had done extensive research on their grandfather’s life and death as part of Northeastern’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which investigates Jim Crow-era cold cases, and she shared some of what she learned so far. As Washington settled into the Winter Institute’s high-ceilinged meeting room, she — and her sister, father, brother-in-law and children — were still processing Burke’s avalanche of new information and wondering what else might be revealed.
A few interested community members, black and white, trickled into the room to listen. Tyrone, a son of E.W.’s brother, Willie Wade, who died in 2005, also joined them. Framed photographs of the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike hung on the walls, and the leaves of an enormous magnolia tree could be seen fluttering through a window. A tiny woman in her 40s introduced herself as April Grayson, the Winter Institute’s community-building coordinator. Grayson, who is white, grew up in Rolling Fork, Miss., and has done reconciliation work in some of the state’s most divided places, including Neshoba County, where she helped grass-roots activists who pushed to reopen the cases of the Freedom Summer volunteers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who were abducted and murdered in 1964. In 2005, a ringleader and former Klansman who had escaped justice, Edgar Ray Killen, was finally convicted and sentenced to 60 years for the crimes. Grayson read a poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop, “Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone,” and then she invited the family members to introduce themselves.
“I’m glad to be here, and so excited about learning information, having never met my grandfather,” Wright began. Wright, who is 55, has a beautiful singing voice and an outgoing nature despite the grief she has experienced. Her first husband and her eldest son died young; the son was shot and killed before he turned 30. Sometimes she thinks about her grandfather and wonders if a curse hovers over the family’s men. “I’m just ready to get some information so I can talk to my grandkids, because I have seven,” she said.
Burke was there, too, in the form of a disembodied voice emanating from a phone speaker. Grayson asked her to provide an overview of the lynching, and everyone turned to face a beige landline propped on a chair. Irven Wright aimed his cellphone camera at the room, so he could stream video for family members who couldn’t be there. From his home in Killeen, Tex., David, a 56-year-old Army and Marine Corps veteran, watched and listened. He scrutinized his father, a man who dropped out of school in seventh grade and picked cotton so his mother and siblings could eat, who fought in the Korean War and who for decades worked backbreaking jobs to support Morline Lowe, the Arkansas beauty he married in 1955, and their children. The older man had removed his newsboy-style cap and sat apart from his daughters and grandchildren. “I try to put myself in his shoes,” David said. “I try to be him. I thought, What would my heart feel right now?” As Burke began to speak, David’s father sat bolt upright in his chair, as if braced for a blow.
Higginbottom’s father,Elwood Higginbotham, was around 28 in 1935, working as a sharecropper in the Woodson Ridge area northeast of Oxford’s city limits. (It’s unclear how father and son came to spell their surnames differently, but the family believes Higginbotham’s widow may have changed the spelling to cover their tracks after fleeing.) Higginbotham shared a three-bedroom house with his 22-year-old wife, Melissa, and their three children. The youngest, Willie Wade, was still a baby.
In the 1930s, Oxford and the surrounding areas of Lafayette County remained, in many ways, hardly different from the time of Reconstruction. Cotton reigned as the dominant crop. The county’s population was around 20,000. But change was afoot. Main streets gleamed with pavement rather than dirt. Men found work, even during the Great Depression, building a government-funded dormitory at the University of Mississippi campus, which remained segregated until James Meredith began attending in 1962 amid notoriously violent protests. The town’s most famous literary son, William Faulkner, had already written “The Sound and the Fury,” and he lived a short walk from the busy town square. Nearby, African-Americans nurtured a middle class in a vibrant Freedmen Town that offered taxis, grocery stores and a Rosenwald School; one former resident described the neighborhood as “a black man’s city in a white man’s town.”
But Oxford was still a white man’s town, as Higginbotham would discover. Archival documents offer differing accounts of the killing, as is the case with many lynchings. Often newspapers document that a lynching occurred but otherwise prove unreliable. Reporters frequently omitted key facts or filed sensationalized tales of black criminality. Some explicitly sanctioned lynching, even going so far as to announce killings in advance. The Oxford Eagle delivered lackluster coverage of Higginbotham’s death. As recorded in the papers of the civil rights worker Jessie Daniel Ames, an editor at The Eagle later explained to an anti-lynching investigator that “he had to live in Oxford and that he wanted to get along with the people there, and that the race situation made it practically impossible to carry the facts about the killing.”
Those facts began on the night of May 21, 1935, months before Higginbotham was killed, according to an investigation by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an anti-lynching organization founded in Atlanta in 1919. Higginbotham and his wife, the commission reported, were in their bedroom that spring evening when a white farmer and neighbor named Glen Roberts arrived. He had at least one other man, his brother, in tow, and according to other records, he was armed. The sharecropper and Roberts had quarreled earlier; Higginbotham had objected to Roberts’s running cattle over his rented field. Now Roberts wanted to whip him for it. When Higginbotham refused to open the door, Roberts broke down an exterior shed room with an ax. Then he chopped his way into the hallway. Higginbotham, the investigators wrote, warned Roberts to stop. Roberts crashed into the bedroom next, at which point Higginbotham shot and killed him.
The gravity of that moment must have registered with Higginbotham immediately. Roberts was a prominent member of the Oxford community: He enjoyed a reputation as a crack fox hunter, he played fiddle at local celebrations and he was white. Higginbotham fled, and the sheriff rallied hundreds of men to pursue him. They trailed bloodhounds across forests and fields, arrested another black man on suspicion of helping Higginbotham escape and severely beat one of Higginbotham’s sisters. Higginbotham evaded them for two nights before the searchers found him submerged in a creek across the county line.
E.W. Higginbottom in Memphis, Tenn.CreditJoshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York TimesThe search parties might have lynched Higginbotham right then and there, but the Pontotoc County sheriff sent him to Jackson, Miss., 150 miles away, for safekeeping. A district attorney and the county attorney, who was Roberts’s nephew, arrived at the Jackson jail the next day. They left, boasting of having obtained a written murder confession from Higginbotham despite the fact that, according to census records, he could neither read nor write. “We have a clear-cut case of coldblooded murder against the Negro,” the district attorney told a reporter. “The Negro is a vindictive type.” They sought the death penalty.
Although he had supposedly confessed, Higginbotham pleaded not guilty when he returned to Oxford three months later for trial on Sept. 17. Melissa testified, an act that would have exposed her to possible retribution and that undoubtedly influenced her decision to leave. The hearing lasted a mere afternoon, but records suggest that some jurors doubted the prosecution’s story. The judge issued careful instructions to the jury, advising them that if they believed that Roberts had entered the home in “a rude, an angry manner, and then and there held a pistol pointing toward the defendant,” that they should find Higginbotham not guilty. Hours later, the jury had yet to reach a verdict, and two jurors were rumored to be holding out for acquittal.
What might have become a victory for Higginbotham and for the rule of law instead devolved into an extrajudicial killing. Not far from the white courthouse at the center of Oxford’s square, a mob formed early in the evening outside the jail. Estimates put the crowd at as many as 150 men. Anyone walking to or from the heart of town would have witnessed the lynching party. They would have seen the killers enter the jail, where, through force or persuasion, they bypassed three sheriff’s deputies and the jailer before pulling Higginbotham from his cell. They would have seen the men force Higginbotham into a car and begin driving up North Lamar Boulevard. The caravan swept by the grand homes of Oxford’s wealthy, then past the edge of town and the lonely Three-Way intersection, before stopping in the woods off old Russell Road. Higginbotham, one newspaper reported, stayed quiet during the ride. The men took the sharecropper out of the car, hanged him from a tree and shot him.
As Burke summarized Higginbotham’s story —his fateful encounter with Roberts, the “ridiculously quick trial” and the lynching itself — his elderly son remained dry-eyed. His mother never told him about his father’s desperate escape or about the trial. Higginbottom’s stoicism didn’t surprise his son David, and it didn’t fool him either. “He taught us that men don’t cry,” David said. “But I can tell when he’s emotional.” He saw pain registering on his father’s face. “It would look like he kind of just left the room,” David said. “He looked like he sort of just left the room, and then he’d come back in.” Wright didn’t weep, either. She was still trying to grasp the meaning of everything she was learning. “I may have been in a little bit of shock,” she said. “Like, really? This is what really happened?”
Washington, for her part, had already read Burke’s written report and was more familiar with the story than her siblings. But there was one revelation she never tired of hearing about: that before his death, her grandfather might have been a labor activist. “It’s possible,” Burke said, “very possible, that Elwood Higginbotham was actually involved in union organizing within a Communist labor group, trying to build power among the local sharecroppers, particularly the black sharecroppers in the area.” Lynchings to eliminate African-Americans who advocated political, social and economic reforms peaked in the early 20th century, and a union affiliation provided an additional motive for Higginbotham’s lynching — perhaps he had been targeted before the argument with Roberts. But Washington cared more about what a labor role suggested about her granddaddy’s character than what it said about his killers. The image of her grandfather as a labor organizer, a man fighting for his people, made her think of Cesar Chavez. “Here he was, only 20-something years old,” she said. “To be that brave and young in the South? Brave.”
Burke’s research brought David Higginbottom great relief. His grandfather, it turned out, hadn’t cheated on their grandmother, as in the tale his young mind had invented. “You sort of feel a little proud, in a crazy sort of sense,” he said. “Proud that he’s not the guy that you perceived that he had been.” The chronology, horrible as it was, also helped David better understand his own father. E.W. Higginbottom’s hatred of Mississippi was family legend, and that antipathy made sense now that the family was talking more openly about the killing. So did other things. As an adolescent, David spent what felt like every waking moment at his father’s side, traversing Memphis in a red 1964 Malibu, going from one lawn-mowing job to the next. He hated it; he felt smothered. But the more he thought about his grandfather’s death, the more he saw his father’s behaviors — the angry flashes and the hovering — as fear for a black son in a hostile world: “His thoughts were, If I can keep you around me working, I don’t worry.”
Wright asked Burke about her family tree. “Kyleen, you said his family was big? How many?” she asked. “I’m wondering how many siblings my grandfather had.” Burke read nine names: Dela, Hosey, Rella, Jumilla, Walter, Bee, Hulette, Queen and Evelena. She also knew the name of Wright’s great-grandparents: Robert and Katie.
Conversation flowed toward the future. Lafayette County has two Confederate soldier statues, erected in 1906 and 1907, standing in prominent locations. One faces south behind the courthouse. The other statue — whose creators conceived it as a monument to “heroes not forgotten” — looms above a grassy circle on the University of Mississippi campus. It’s now accompanied by a “contextualization plaque” installed in 2016 at the insistence of student activists and faculty, who observed that the statue’s creators wanted not merely to remember the dead but to extol white Southern nationalism and reframe the Civil War as a defense of states’ rights. Not long before the Higginbottoms’ visit, the Lafayette County board of supervisors heard public comments about the Confederate statue on the square, some of which called for removal. “There is a growing movement of people in the state who seem very committed to bringing this up,” Grayson said. “As we’re in conversation about Civil War memorials, Confederate memorials, how do we broaden that discussion to memorializing people like Elwood Higginbotham?”
There’s no marker to him or to the six other men who were lynched in the county, one of whom remains unidentified. John Ashworth, the project manager for the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, which is trying to partner with E.J.I. to erect markers to 37 lynching victims in Shelby County, said that remembering men like Higginbotham is delicate work. He has researched cases in which family members had no idea their relative was lynched or didn’t wish to revisit the traumatic story, and he has seen others in which the killing grounds have been obliterated by parking lots or office buildings. But for descendants who can and do participate in memorialization efforts, he said, the process can be healing. “It is a validation of their humanity,” Ashworth said. “At least somebody cares about what happened.”
Washington was thinking about hearing those family names — Robert and Katie — for the first time. “That’s my great-grandparents,” Washington said. She and her family followed Grayson downstairs to a rear parking lot and climbed into a rented blue van. Another cousin, a brother of Tyrone’s, had arrived late, which brought the total of Elwood Higginbotham’s gathered children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to eight. They represented just a fraction of Higginbotham’s direct descendants, and in the months to come, Washington and Wright would describe for many of the others — their four siblings who couldn’t attend that day, as well as children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and cousins — the places they were about to see.
The inhumanity oflynching is hard enough to fathom, but the culture of impunity that allowed the killings to continue for so long is perhaps even more mind-boggling. Seventeen years before Higginbotham died, for example, a lynching party dragged another black man, Nelse Patton, from the Oxford jail. Afterward, a former Mississippi representative and senator, William Van Amberg Sullivan, boasted about his involvement to The New York Times: “I directed every movement of the mob, and I did everything I could to see that he was lynched. ... I saw his body dangling from a tree this morning, and I’m glad of it.”
It’s tempting to level blame entirely at the 12 states where lynching ran rampant, but the practice persisted only because the rest of the country averted its gaze. Sullivan could brag because he knew there was virtually no chance he’d be charged or prosecuted by local or state authorities. Nor did he need to fear that the federal government would intervene on behalf of its black citizens. Congress failed to pass nearly 200 federal anti-lynching bills during the first half of the 20th century and spurned requests for action from seven presidents. Ignorance wasn’t a factor. African-American activists, including Ida B. Wells, who was born into slavery not far from Oxford, in Holly Springs, Miss., had thoroughly exposed lynching as a brutal tool of racial subjugation before the turn of the century. Wells published “Southern Horrors” in 1892, a work she hoped would “arouse the conscience of the American people.”
Descendants of Elwood Higginbotham — E.W. Higginbottom, Delois Wright, Rico Washington, Crystin Scruggs and Tina Washington — at the possible site of Higginbotham’s death.CreditPhotograph by Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times
Higginbotham’s death, as it happens, figured somewhat prominently in this little-known struggle for reform, and today it serves as a case study in how federal indifference contributed to the brutal killings of thousands of black Americans. Higginbotham died shortly after the failure of the Costigan-Wagner Act, which would have provided compensation to victims’ families and brought federal charges against any law-enforcement officer who aided lynching parties or turned a blind eye during killings. The N.A.A.C.P. made lynching a key focus in 1912 and later pushed Costigan-Wagner with a petition that included the signatures of nine governors and ex-governors, 27 mayors, 58 clergy members and more than 150 lawyers, editors, jurists and academics. Franklin Roosevelt, however, offered only lukewarm support for the bill. Southern conservatives then, as one historian put it, tried to simply “talk it to death,” filibustering and deflecting by pointing to social ills in Northern and Western states, like gang murders and the deaths of miners in labor disputes. Southern lawmakers traditionally prevailed by arguing against federal interference in local affairs, by positing that anti-lynching laws would be unconstitutional and by playing on racial fears with rhetoric about black rapists, a favorite boogeyman of lynching apologists. In the case of Costigan-Wagner, the Southern bloc delayed until its opponents, who were eager to pass other legislation, recessed in April 1935. The bill fell off the calendar without a vote.
When Higginbotham died later that year, the outraged N.A.A.C.P. telegraphed the president: “Action of mob in seizing victim in open daylight as jury deliberated ... is anarchy and nothing else. It is certain nothing will be done by Mississippi authorities to punish lynchers. This clearly proves filibusters against Costigan-Wagner bill during last session of Congress lied and knew they were lying when they claimed states could and would prevent lynchings and punish lynchers.”
Despite congressional inaction, the N.A.A.C.P. was nonetheless winning in the court of public opinion by the 1930s. Some Southern newspapers came out against lynching not on moral grounds but because the practice imperiled the region’s economy and image. A glimpse of that shifting public sentiment — the tiniest sliver of shame — can be found at the end of a newspaper article about Higginbotham’s death, in which a reporter observed that “there is much apprehension on the part of whites” over how the killing might affect enrollment at the University of Mississippi.
When the Senate finally apologized to African-Americans in 2005 for its near-century of intransigence, it acknowledged that “protection from lynching was the minimum and most basic of federal responsibilities” toward its citizens. The resolution declared lynching the “ultimate expression of racism” and accepted responsibility for repeatedly rejecting anti-lynching legislation despite requests from people like Arthur Raper, a sociologist and field secretary for the mostly white Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which investigated Higginbotham’s killing. Raper, who studied more than 100 lynchings, implored the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1940 to consider anti-lynching legislation yet again, noting that the ever-present threat of lynching operated to keep African-Americans “in their places, to rob them of the opportunity to exercise their basic human rights.” He recounted Higginbotham’s story as an illustration of the futility of allowing Southern states to police themselves. “What happened to the parties who did the lynching?” a Wisconsin senator asked him. Raper replied: “Nothing in the world. Nobody was ever punished.”
When he wasa child, E.W. Higginbottom daydreamed about doing what the law had not, about returning to Oxford to avenge his father. But he abandoned that suicidal fantasy ages ago. Now he just wanted to stand in the place where his father died, although he could not fully explain why. Maybe, he thought, it would make room in his mind for something else.
Grayson drove Higginbottom and his family to the courthouse first, which looks much as it did in 1935, and which Washington’s 7-year-old son, Rico, declared “just like the White House.” But the surrounding square, once full of car dealerships and theaters, has given way to boutiques, restaurants and fitness studios — the markers of a prosperous New South. Because it was Saturday, the courthouse doors were locked. Washington stood outside and posed for a photo, her arms flung wide and her face lit by a broad smile. It was a tourist’s gesture of pleasure, an outward expression of the enlightenment she felt. She also wanted photos to show her students. She had already shocked them by telling them about her granddaddy’s lynching. Some didn’t know what she was talking about. “They asked me, ‘What is “lynched”?’ ” Washington said, shaking her head. “African-Americans. I have African-American and Hispanic kids in my class.”
From the courthouse, Grayson then traced the route of Higginbotham’s kidnappers to the Three-Way, an intersection that’s now a four-way — flanked by gas stations and an auto mechanic, a forgettable gateway to and from town. David Higginbottom originally planned to come to Oxford, too, to join his family in that van as they considered his grandfather’s last moments, but he changed his mind; it was too hard to think about how someone could hang and shoot another human being. “I didn’t want to open nothing in my heart that I can’t close,” he said. “I want to think people are the same. I just wasn’t ready for it.”
Grayson swung the van onto a short street that was formerly known, she believed, as old Russell Road. She parked beside a little white house with a For Sale sign planted in the front yard. The family climbed out of the van, and Higginbottom almost immediately gestured to an oak. “I wonder if that’s the tree, right there?” he said. They didn’t know, of course, but from then on the suggestion seemed to linger in the air around it. Higginbottom’s nephew Tyrone looked at its branches and searched the trunk for bullet holes. Higginbottom thought of his father’s final moments, of his agony. Elwood Higginbotham reportedly struggled mightily at the end, biting a length of the noose so tightly that his killers pried his mouth open with a tire iron in order to hang him. “He was trying to protect us,” Higginbottom said. “I know that.”
Washington hustled her kids back into the van after just a few minutes. They sat in the sweltering interior while their relatives traced aimless circles on the grass. Washington’s feelings about the trip to Oxford were hard to express, even months afterward. She wasn’t exactly sad. How could she be? She didn’t know her grandfather. Yet standing in front of the courthouse and at the approximate spot where he died gave her a sense of closeness; those were places, she said, “where we know he was at.” In January, a kitchen fire would scorch the rented house Washington shared with her husband, children and father, and she would find herself thinking and talking more about Elwood Higginbotham. “Now I feel like he may have been more interesting to have known,” she said. “I feel like he may have been a stronger person than we know. I think if he had been alive, there might have been more stability in the family, our lives might have been different.”
They left the oak as the afternoon light began to soften. Burke had narrowed Higginbotham’s burial site to two possibilities. At the first, she parked alongside a rural highway, perpendicular to a pasture and wooden fence. The cemetery lay on private property that was for sale; a real estate agent had told Grayson that the site contained only seven graves with marked headstones, none of which read Higginbotham. Because they couldn’t enter the property, no one bothered to get out of the van, and they paused for only a few minutes before Grayson set a course southward, skirting suburban-style subdivisions before plunging into rural territory again. Higginbottom sat beside her, and they chatted about muscadines, the South’s bittersweet wild grapes.
The second cemetery was also on private land, upslope behind a house fronted by roses and a shiny pickup truck. The owner, Randy McCluskey, wanted to help, and he greeted the Higginbottoms in his driveway. He had prematurely gray hair and wore shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Rebels,” the name of the University of Mississippi athletic teams. He guided Higginbottom into a camouflage A.T.V. so that the older man wouldn’t have to limp uphill. Rico, Bailee and Trinity, eager for a diversion, clamored into the cargo bed behind them. “Hold on,” Washington shouted as the little vehicle puttered off. “Hold on.”
She and the rest of the family picked their way up the grassy field to reach the border of woods thick with cedars and oaks. In the shade of the trees, the air felt like a wet blanket, and mosquitoes homed in on open flesh. When McCluskey bought the 35-acre property six years ago, the graveyard was largely hidden by vegetation and crawling with ticks. He cleared brush to reveal markers, some bearing names and others mere stones, and tried to learn about the plot’s history. One neighbor told him that blacks and whites lay here together, so maybe this was the right place.
The family fanned out among the trees. They were overdressed — Higginbottom in his suspenders and Wright in red gladiator sandals — and uncomfortable. Higginbottom talked about how young his mother was, just 22, when she was forced to remake their lives. Rico drifted into the field below and found McCluskey’s son and a friend. The boys horsed around with a sapling, pulling on its branches and laughing in the sunlight. The adults stared at the ground but found no proof that their relative was interred there. In the dark woods, amid the crumbling gravestones, Elwood Higginbotham’s life and death remained, to a great degree, beyond the limits of understanding.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/magazine/a-lynchings-long-shadow.html
Elwood Higginbotham was murdered by a mob in 1935. For his descendants, a new historical inquiry into his death offers a chance to confront the past.
A possible burial site of Elwood Higginbotham in Oxford, Miss. Credit Joshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times
By Vanessa Gregory
- April 25, 2018
But one hot and clear afternoon in September, a day before the 82nd anniversary of her paternal grandfather’s death, Washington sat in the back seat of her sister’s car ready to crack open her family’s painful history. Her father, E.W. Higginbottom, sat beside her in a white dress shirt and cuff links, and her sister and brother-in-law, Delois and Irven Wright, rode up front. Washington’s children — Trinity, Bailee and Rico — squabbled quietly in the S.U.V.’s third row.
They had left the suburbs outside Memphis, Tenn., and were headed south, past deep green woods and an old railway line, toward Oxford, Miss., where Washington’s grandfather lived and died. The family planned to meet there with staff members from the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation, a Mississippi nonprofit, and tour sites significant in her grandfather’s lynching: the county courthouse, the killing grounds and two graveyards where he might be buried.
Washington, who wore rectangular glasses and a sleek ponytail, teaches high school Spanish and possesses an educator’s enthusiasm for history. She has visited Tuskegee University and George Washington Carver’s birthplace. She has walked across the Selma bridge, where Alabama state troopers beat nonviolent voting rights activists in 1965, and traveled to Booker T. Washington’s grave. The broad sweep of black history has come easily; her black family’s experience remained frustratingly elusive. “I’ve kind of seen the house where my mama lived as a child,” she said a few days earlier. “It was built over, but I kind of know where it is. I can go there. But I don’t know any of my daddy’s history.”
Washington’s grandfather was one of at least 4,100 African-Americans who were lynched between 1877 and 1950 in 12 states clustered along the curve from Virginia to Texas. Although racially motivated lynchings also took place in other states, they were far more common in the South. Black men accused of violent crimes — many of whom were very likely innocent — were frequent targets. But other black men, and women and even children, too, were lynched for insisting on their rights, or for minor violations of the racial caste system, like failing to step off a sidewalk to make way for a white person. On April 26, Stevenson’s organization will open the country’s first memorial to lynching victims, alongside a museum to racial injustice, in Montgomery.
E.J.I.’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice will feature 800 suspended columns — one for each county where documented lynchings occurred — engraved with victims’ names. The design is intended to convey scope but also, more ambitiously, to reshape a Southern landscape awash in Confederate symbols by asking each of those 800 counties to claim a duplicate marker and erect the six-foot monolith on its home soil. “In Berlin, you can’t go anywhere without seeing stones and markers dedicated to the Jewish and Roma residents who were forced from their homes and taken to the concentration camps,” Stevenson said. “And that iconography creates a consciousness of what happened that I think is necessary for that society to recover. In the American South, we’ve done the opposite. We’ve actually created symbols designed to make us feel great about our history, about the 19th century, about the good old days of the early 20th century.”
Stevenson has advocated fuller acknowledgment of the impact lynching had on African-Americans, both in terms of the trauma sustained and the concrete ways lynching disadvantaged communities. In some places, lynchings were accompanied by mob destruction of black business districts, adding economic devastation to sorrow. And African-Americans who migrated north or west to escape the threat of violence had to start over. Many left social networks, homes and businesses, making it extraordinarily difficult for families to build intergenerational wealth.
Image
Newspaper articles about Elwood Higginbotham’s death in 1935. Clockwise from top left: The Chicago Daily Tribune; The New York Times; The Atlanta Daily World; The North Mississippi Herald.
E.J.I.’s point of view stems from earlier scholarship and activism that tried to foster lasting conversations about lynching and puncture popular myths about the practice, like the notions that lynchings were isolated aberrations, pioneer justice or the work of social outsiders like the Ku Klux Klan. The unsettling “Without Sanctuary” exhibit, for example, made its debut in New York in 2000 and featured graphic photos of burned and mutilated black bodies surrounded by jubilant white crowds, some of which swelled into the thousands. Among the most disturbing images were those of white children in the crowds, some with expressions of smug delight on their faces. “If you want to talk about what stands in that place of distrust between blacks and whites, that’s part of it — not that there are just individuals, but hundreds or thousands of white witnesses who might stand beside and fail to stop this,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense and Educational Fund and the author of “On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century.” “This is powerful, to unpack the complicity of those who remained silent and stood by and watched. That always has to be reckoned with, and we have to deal with that today.”
The gruesome nature of lynchings, Ifill noted, was the main point; they were meant to haunt and intimidate, and to thus ensure the continuation of white supremacy. Stevenson makes a point of calling them “racial terror lynchings.” The killings rippled beyond individual victims and their families to shroud entire communities in fear and shame. In some places, lynching memories suppressed black voter participation for decades. Even today, Ifill and Stevenson said, memories of racial violence can be so traumatic that survivors, witnesses and inheritors stay locked in silence — much like Higginbottom’s mother, who took her husband’s memory to her grave. “There are thousands of African-American families with histories of horrific victimization and racial oppression that have never openly talked because it hasn’t felt safe or healthy to have those conversations,” Stevenson said. “We’re just finding our voice, many of us, to insist on truth telling. And my view on truth and reconciliation is that it’s sequential. You can’t get to reconciliation until you first get to truth.”
Washington — and her five siblings —wanted to get to the truth about their family long before they ever imagined returning to Oxford. When they were kids, their father was too angry to talk about his father at length, and other relatives spoke only hesitantly, if at all, about the killing. So the children spun their own stories, embroidering fragments of truth with scenarios lifted from movies and books. Over the years, the theories hardened into beliefs. Wright felt certain that someone — maybe her mother? — had said that white men lynched her grandfather because he protested when they tried to force his wife to work the cotton fields. Her brother, David Higginbottom, worried that his grandfather might have been murdered for having an interracial romance. Washington thought about her grandmother’s light skin and wondered if she had been the object of a dispute. “We grew up thinking that maybe somebody liked my grandmother and maybe it had something to do with her,” Washington said a few days before returning to Oxford. “Maybe it was her fault — you know, not her fault. But maybe somebody liked her and tried to get to her, and my grandfather tried to protect her.”
The trip to Oxford’s Winter Institute, which was housed inside a Brutalist hulk of a building on the University of Mississippi campus, marked the culmination of a monthslong unraveling of their grandfather’s story. Earlier in the year, a Northeastern University law student named Kyleen Burke emailed Washington’s cousin Tyrone Higginbottom, who then put her in touch with the rest of the family. She told them that she had done extensive research on their grandfather’s life and death as part of Northeastern’s Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project, which investigates Jim Crow-era cold cases, and she shared some of what she learned so far. As Washington settled into the Winter Institute’s high-ceilinged meeting room, she — and her sister, father, brother-in-law and children — were still processing Burke’s avalanche of new information and wondering what else might be revealed.
A few interested community members, black and white, trickled into the room to listen. Tyrone, a son of E.W.’s brother, Willie Wade, who died in 2005, also joined them. Framed photographs of the civil rights leader Fannie Lou Hamer and the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike hung on the walls, and the leaves of an enormous magnolia tree could be seen fluttering through a window. A tiny woman in her 40s introduced herself as April Grayson, the Winter Institute’s community-building coordinator. Grayson, who is white, grew up in Rolling Fork, Miss., and has done reconciliation work in some of the state’s most divided places, including Neshoba County, where she helped grass-roots activists who pushed to reopen the cases of the Freedom Summer volunteers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman, who were abducted and murdered in 1964. In 2005, a ringleader and former Klansman who had escaped justice, Edgar Ray Killen, was finally convicted and sentenced to 60 years for the crimes. Grayson read a poem by the Senegalese poet Birago Diop, “Those Who Are Dead Are Never Gone,” and then she invited the family members to introduce themselves.
“I’m glad to be here, and so excited about learning information, having never met my grandfather,” Wright began. Wright, who is 55, has a beautiful singing voice and an outgoing nature despite the grief she has experienced. Her first husband and her eldest son died young; the son was shot and killed before he turned 30. Sometimes she thinks about her grandfather and wonders if a curse hovers over the family’s men. “I’m just ready to get some information so I can talk to my grandkids, because I have seven,” she said.
Burke was there, too, in the form of a disembodied voice emanating from a phone speaker. Grayson asked her to provide an overview of the lynching, and everyone turned to face a beige landline propped on a chair. Irven Wright aimed his cellphone camera at the room, so he could stream video for family members who couldn’t be there. From his home in Killeen, Tex., David, a 56-year-old Army and Marine Corps veteran, watched and listened. He scrutinized his father, a man who dropped out of school in seventh grade and picked cotton so his mother and siblings could eat, who fought in the Korean War and who for decades worked backbreaking jobs to support Morline Lowe, the Arkansas beauty he married in 1955, and their children. The older man had removed his newsboy-style cap and sat apart from his daughters and grandchildren. “I try to put myself in his shoes,” David said. “I try to be him. I thought, What would my heart feel right now?” As Burke began to speak, David’s father sat bolt upright in his chair, as if braced for a blow.
Higginbottom’s father,Elwood Higginbotham, was around 28 in 1935, working as a sharecropper in the Woodson Ridge area northeast of Oxford’s city limits. (It’s unclear how father and son came to spell their surnames differently, but the family believes Higginbotham’s widow may have changed the spelling to cover their tracks after fleeing.) Higginbotham shared a three-bedroom house with his 22-year-old wife, Melissa, and their three children. The youngest, Willie Wade, was still a baby.
In the 1930s, Oxford and the surrounding areas of Lafayette County remained, in many ways, hardly different from the time of Reconstruction. Cotton reigned as the dominant crop. The county’s population was around 20,000. But change was afoot. Main streets gleamed with pavement rather than dirt. Men found work, even during the Great Depression, building a government-funded dormitory at the University of Mississippi campus, which remained segregated until James Meredith began attending in 1962 amid notoriously violent protests. The town’s most famous literary son, William Faulkner, had already written “The Sound and the Fury,” and he lived a short walk from the busy town square. Nearby, African-Americans nurtured a middle class in a vibrant Freedmen Town that offered taxis, grocery stores and a Rosenwald School; one former resident described the neighborhood as “a black man’s city in a white man’s town.”
But Oxford was still a white man’s town, as Higginbotham would discover. Archival documents offer differing accounts of the killing, as is the case with many lynchings. Often newspapers document that a lynching occurred but otherwise prove unreliable. Reporters frequently omitted key facts or filed sensationalized tales of black criminality. Some explicitly sanctioned lynching, even going so far as to announce killings in advance. The Oxford Eagle delivered lackluster coverage of Higginbotham’s death. As recorded in the papers of the civil rights worker Jessie Daniel Ames, an editor at The Eagle later explained to an anti-lynching investigator that “he had to live in Oxford and that he wanted to get along with the people there, and that the race situation made it practically impossible to carry the facts about the killing.”
Those facts began on the night of May 21, 1935, months before Higginbotham was killed, according to an investigation by the Commission on Interracial Cooperation, an anti-lynching organization founded in Atlanta in 1919. Higginbotham and his wife, the commission reported, were in their bedroom that spring evening when a white farmer and neighbor named Glen Roberts arrived. He had at least one other man, his brother, in tow, and according to other records, he was armed. The sharecropper and Roberts had quarreled earlier; Higginbotham had objected to Roberts’s running cattle over his rented field. Now Roberts wanted to whip him for it. When Higginbotham refused to open the door, Roberts broke down an exterior shed room with an ax. Then he chopped his way into the hallway. Higginbotham, the investigators wrote, warned Roberts to stop. Roberts crashed into the bedroom next, at which point Higginbotham shot and killed him.
The gravity of that moment must have registered with Higginbotham immediately. Roberts was a prominent member of the Oxford community: He enjoyed a reputation as a crack fox hunter, he played fiddle at local celebrations and he was white. Higginbotham fled, and the sheriff rallied hundreds of men to pursue him. They trailed bloodhounds across forests and fields, arrested another black man on suspicion of helping Higginbotham escape and severely beat one of Higginbotham’s sisters. Higginbotham evaded them for two nights before the searchers found him submerged in a creek across the county line.
E.W. Higginbottom in Memphis, Tenn.CreditJoshua Rashaad McFadden for The New York Times
Although he had supposedly confessed, Higginbotham pleaded not guilty when he returned to Oxford three months later for trial on Sept. 17. Melissa testified, an act that would have exposed her to possible retribution and that undoubtedly influenced her decision to leave. The hearing lasted a mere afternoon, but records suggest that some jurors doubted the prosecution’s story. The judge issued careful instructions to the jury, advising them that if they believed that Roberts had entered the home in “a rude, an angry manner, and then and there held a pistol pointing toward the defendant,” that they should find Higginbotham not guilty. Hours later, the jury had yet to reach a verdict, and two jurors were rumored to be holding out for acquittal.
What might have become a victory for Higginbotham and for the rule of law instead devolved into an extrajudicial killing. Not far from the white courthouse at the center of Oxford’s square, a mob formed early in the evening outside the jail. Estimates put the crowd at as many as 150 men. Anyone walking to or from the heart of town would have witnessed the lynching party. They would have seen the killers enter the jail, where, through force or persuasion, they bypassed three sheriff’s deputies and the jailer before pulling Higginbotham from his cell. They would have seen the men force Higginbotham into a car and begin driving up North Lamar Boulevard. The caravan swept by the grand homes of Oxford’s wealthy, then past the edge of town and the lonely Three-Way intersection, before stopping in the woods off old Russell Road. Higginbotham, one newspaper reported, stayed quiet during the ride. The men took the sharecropper out of the car, hanged him from a tree and shot him.
As Burke summarized Higginbotham’s story —his fateful encounter with Roberts, the “ridiculously quick trial” and the lynching itself — his elderly son remained dry-eyed. His mother never told him about his father’s desperate escape or about the trial. Higginbottom’s stoicism didn’t surprise his son David, and it didn’t fool him either. “He taught us that men don’t cry,” David said. “But I can tell when he’s emotional.” He saw pain registering on his father’s face. “It would look like he kind of just left the room,” David said. “He looked like he sort of just left the room, and then he’d come back in.” Wright didn’t weep, either. She was still trying to grasp the meaning of everything she was learning. “I may have been in a little bit of shock,” she said. “Like, really? This is what really happened?”
Washington, for her part, had already read Burke’s written report and was more familiar with the story than her siblings. But there was one revelation she never tired of hearing about: that before his death, her grandfather might have been a labor activist. “It’s possible,” Burke said, “very possible, that Elwood Higginbotham was actually involved in union organizing within a Communist labor group, trying to build power among the local sharecroppers, particularly the black sharecroppers in the area.” Lynchings to eliminate African-Americans who advocated political, social and economic reforms peaked in the early 20th century, and a union affiliation provided an additional motive for Higginbotham’s lynching — perhaps he had been targeted before the argument with Roberts. But Washington cared more about what a labor role suggested about her granddaddy’s character than what it said about his killers. The image of her grandfather as a labor organizer, a man fighting for his people, made her think of Cesar Chavez. “Here he was, only 20-something years old,” she said. “To be that brave and young in the South? Brave.”
Burke’s research brought David Higginbottom great relief. His grandfather, it turned out, hadn’t cheated on their grandmother, as in the tale his young mind had invented. “You sort of feel a little proud, in a crazy sort of sense,” he said. “Proud that he’s not the guy that you perceived that he had been.” The chronology, horrible as it was, also helped David better understand his own father. E.W. Higginbottom’s hatred of Mississippi was family legend, and that antipathy made sense now that the family was talking more openly about the killing. So did other things. As an adolescent, David spent what felt like every waking moment at his father’s side, traversing Memphis in a red 1964 Malibu, going from one lawn-mowing job to the next. He hated it; he felt smothered. But the more he thought about his grandfather’s death, the more he saw his father’s behaviors — the angry flashes and the hovering — as fear for a black son in a hostile world: “His thoughts were, If I can keep you around me working, I don’t worry.”
Wright asked Burke about her family tree. “Kyleen, you said his family was big? How many?” she asked. “I’m wondering how many siblings my grandfather had.” Burke read nine names: Dela, Hosey, Rella, Jumilla, Walter, Bee, Hulette, Queen and Evelena. She also knew the name of Wright’s great-grandparents: Robert and Katie.
Conversation flowed toward the future. Lafayette County has two Confederate soldier statues, erected in 1906 and 1907, standing in prominent locations. One faces south behind the courthouse. The other statue — whose creators conceived it as a monument to “heroes not forgotten” — looms above a grassy circle on the University of Mississippi campus. It’s now accompanied by a “contextualization plaque” installed in 2016 at the insistence of student activists and faculty, who observed that the statue’s creators wanted not merely to remember the dead but to extol white Southern nationalism and reframe the Civil War as a defense of states’ rights. Not long before the Higginbottoms’ visit, the Lafayette County board of supervisors heard public comments about the Confederate statue on the square, some of which called for removal. “There is a growing movement of people in the state who seem very committed to bringing this up,” Grayson said. “As we’re in conversation about Civil War memorials, Confederate memorials, how do we broaden that discussion to memorializing people like Elwood Higginbotham?”
There’s no marker to him or to the six other men who were lynched in the county, one of whom remains unidentified. John Ashworth, the project manager for the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, which is trying to partner with E.J.I. to erect markers to 37 lynching victims in Shelby County, said that remembering men like Higginbotham is delicate work. He has researched cases in which family members had no idea their relative was lynched or didn’t wish to revisit the traumatic story, and he has seen others in which the killing grounds have been obliterated by parking lots or office buildings. But for descendants who can and do participate in memorialization efforts, he said, the process can be healing. “It is a validation of their humanity,” Ashworth said. “At least somebody cares about what happened.”
Washington was thinking about hearing those family names — Robert and Katie — for the first time. “That’s my great-grandparents,” Washington said. She and her family followed Grayson downstairs to a rear parking lot and climbed into a rented blue van. Another cousin, a brother of Tyrone’s, had arrived late, which brought the total of Elwood Higginbotham’s gathered children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren to eight. They represented just a fraction of Higginbotham’s direct descendants, and in the months to come, Washington and Wright would describe for many of the others — their four siblings who couldn’t attend that day, as well as children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews and cousins — the places they were about to see.
The inhumanity oflynching is hard enough to fathom, but the culture of impunity that allowed the killings to continue for so long is perhaps even more mind-boggling. Seventeen years before Higginbotham died, for example, a lynching party dragged another black man, Nelse Patton, from the Oxford jail. Afterward, a former Mississippi representative and senator, William Van Amberg Sullivan, boasted about his involvement to The New York Times: “I directed every movement of the mob, and I did everything I could to see that he was lynched. ... I saw his body dangling from a tree this morning, and I’m glad of it.”
It’s tempting to level blame entirely at the 12 states where lynching ran rampant, but the practice persisted only because the rest of the country averted its gaze. Sullivan could brag because he knew there was virtually no chance he’d be charged or prosecuted by local or state authorities. Nor did he need to fear that the federal government would intervene on behalf of its black citizens. Congress failed to pass nearly 200 federal anti-lynching bills during the first half of the 20th century and spurned requests for action from seven presidents. Ignorance wasn’t a factor. African-American activists, including Ida B. Wells, who was born into slavery not far from Oxford, in Holly Springs, Miss., had thoroughly exposed lynching as a brutal tool of racial subjugation before the turn of the century. Wells published “Southern Horrors” in 1892, a work she hoped would “arouse the conscience of the American people.”
Higginbotham’s death, as it happens, figured somewhat prominently in this little-known struggle for reform, and today it serves as a case study in how federal indifference contributed to the brutal killings of thousands of black Americans. Higginbotham died shortly after the failure of the Costigan-Wagner Act, which would have provided compensation to victims’ families and brought federal charges against any law-enforcement officer who aided lynching parties or turned a blind eye during killings. The N.A.A.C.P. made lynching a key focus in 1912 and later pushed Costigan-Wagner with a petition that included the signatures of nine governors and ex-governors, 27 mayors, 58 clergy members and more than 150 lawyers, editors, jurists and academics. Franklin Roosevelt, however, offered only lukewarm support for the bill. Southern conservatives then, as one historian put it, tried to simply “talk it to death,” filibustering and deflecting by pointing to social ills in Northern and Western states, like gang murders and the deaths of miners in labor disputes. Southern lawmakers traditionally prevailed by arguing against federal interference in local affairs, by positing that anti-lynching laws would be unconstitutional and by playing on racial fears with rhetoric about black rapists, a favorite boogeyman of lynching apologists. In the case of Costigan-Wagner, the Southern bloc delayed until its opponents, who were eager to pass other legislation, recessed in April 1935. The bill fell off the calendar without a vote.
When Higginbotham died later that year, the outraged N.A.A.C.P. telegraphed the president: “Action of mob in seizing victim in open daylight as jury deliberated ... is anarchy and nothing else. It is certain nothing will be done by Mississippi authorities to punish lynchers. This clearly proves filibusters against Costigan-Wagner bill during last session of Congress lied and knew they were lying when they claimed states could and would prevent lynchings and punish lynchers.”
Despite congressional inaction, the N.A.A.C.P. was nonetheless winning in the court of public opinion by the 1930s. Some Southern newspapers came out against lynching not on moral grounds but because the practice imperiled the region’s economy and image. A glimpse of that shifting public sentiment — the tiniest sliver of shame — can be found at the end of a newspaper article about Higginbotham’s death, in which a reporter observed that “there is much apprehension on the part of whites” over how the killing might affect enrollment at the University of Mississippi.
When the Senate finally apologized to African-Americans in 2005 for its near-century of intransigence, it acknowledged that “protection from lynching was the minimum and most basic of federal responsibilities” toward its citizens. The resolution declared lynching the “ultimate expression of racism” and accepted responsibility for repeatedly rejecting anti-lynching legislation despite requests from people like Arthur Raper, a sociologist and field secretary for the mostly white Commission on Interracial Cooperation, which investigated Higginbotham’s killing. Raper, who studied more than 100 lynchings, implored the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1940 to consider anti-lynching legislation yet again, noting that the ever-present threat of lynching operated to keep African-Americans “in their places, to rob them of the opportunity to exercise their basic human rights.” He recounted Higginbotham’s story as an illustration of the futility of allowing Southern states to police themselves. “What happened to the parties who did the lynching?” a Wisconsin senator asked him. Raper replied: “Nothing in the world. Nobody was ever punished.”
When he wasa child, E.W. Higginbottom daydreamed about doing what the law had not, about returning to Oxford to avenge his father. But he abandoned that suicidal fantasy ages ago. Now he just wanted to stand in the place where his father died, although he could not fully explain why. Maybe, he thought, it would make room in his mind for something else.
Grayson drove Higginbottom and his family to the courthouse first, which looks much as it did in 1935, and which Washington’s 7-year-old son, Rico, declared “just like the White House.” But the surrounding square, once full of car dealerships and theaters, has given way to boutiques, restaurants and fitness studios — the markers of a prosperous New South. Because it was Saturday, the courthouse doors were locked. Washington stood outside and posed for a photo, her arms flung wide and her face lit by a broad smile. It was a tourist’s gesture of pleasure, an outward expression of the enlightenment she felt. She also wanted photos to show her students. She had already shocked them by telling them about her granddaddy’s lynching. Some didn’t know what she was talking about. “They asked me, ‘What is “lynched”?’ ” Washington said, shaking her head. “African-Americans. I have African-American and Hispanic kids in my class.”
From the courthouse, Grayson then traced the route of Higginbotham’s kidnappers to the Three-Way, an intersection that’s now a four-way — flanked by gas stations and an auto mechanic, a forgettable gateway to and from town. David Higginbottom originally planned to come to Oxford, too, to join his family in that van as they considered his grandfather’s last moments, but he changed his mind; it was too hard to think about how someone could hang and shoot another human being. “I didn’t want to open nothing in my heart that I can’t close,” he said. “I want to think people are the same. I just wasn’t ready for it.”
Grayson swung the van onto a short street that was formerly known, she believed, as old Russell Road. She parked beside a little white house with a For Sale sign planted in the front yard. The family climbed out of the van, and Higginbottom almost immediately gestured to an oak. “I wonder if that’s the tree, right there?” he said. They didn’t know, of course, but from then on the suggestion seemed to linger in the air around it. Higginbottom’s nephew Tyrone looked at its branches and searched the trunk for bullet holes. Higginbottom thought of his father’s final moments, of his agony. Elwood Higginbotham reportedly struggled mightily at the end, biting a length of the noose so tightly that his killers pried his mouth open with a tire iron in order to hang him. “He was trying to protect us,” Higginbottom said. “I know that.”
Washington hustled her kids back into the van after just a few minutes. They sat in the sweltering interior while their relatives traced aimless circles on the grass. Washington’s feelings about the trip to Oxford were hard to express, even months afterward. She wasn’t exactly sad. How could she be? She didn’t know her grandfather. Yet standing in front of the courthouse and at the approximate spot where he died gave her a sense of closeness; those were places, she said, “where we know he was at.” In January, a kitchen fire would scorch the rented house Washington shared with her husband, children and father, and she would find herself thinking and talking more about Elwood Higginbotham. “Now I feel like he may have been more interesting to have known,” she said. “I feel like he may have been a stronger person than we know. I think if he had been alive, there might have been more stability in the family, our lives might have been different.”
They left the oak as the afternoon light began to soften. Burke had narrowed Higginbotham’s burial site to two possibilities. At the first, she parked alongside a rural highway, perpendicular to a pasture and wooden fence. The cemetery lay on private property that was for sale; a real estate agent had told Grayson that the site contained only seven graves with marked headstones, none of which read Higginbotham. Because they couldn’t enter the property, no one bothered to get out of the van, and they paused for only a few minutes before Grayson set a course southward, skirting suburban-style subdivisions before plunging into rural territory again. Higginbottom sat beside her, and they chatted about muscadines, the South’s bittersweet wild grapes.
The second cemetery was also on private land, upslope behind a house fronted by roses and a shiny pickup truck. The owner, Randy McCluskey, wanted to help, and he greeted the Higginbottoms in his driveway. He had prematurely gray hair and wore shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Rebels,” the name of the University of Mississippi athletic teams. He guided Higginbottom into a camouflage A.T.V. so that the older man wouldn’t have to limp uphill. Rico, Bailee and Trinity, eager for a diversion, clamored into the cargo bed behind them. “Hold on,” Washington shouted as the little vehicle puttered off. “Hold on.”
She and the rest of the family picked their way up the grassy field to reach the border of woods thick with cedars and oaks. In the shade of the trees, the air felt like a wet blanket, and mosquitoes homed in on open flesh. When McCluskey bought the 35-acre property six years ago, the graveyard was largely hidden by vegetation and crawling with ticks. He cleared brush to reveal markers, some bearing names and others mere stones, and tried to learn about the plot’s history. One neighbor told him that blacks and whites lay here together, so maybe this was the right place.
The family fanned out among the trees. They were overdressed — Higginbottom in his suspenders and Wright in red gladiator sandals — and uncomfortable. Higginbottom talked about how young his mother was, just 22, when she was forced to remake their lives. Rico drifted into the field below and found McCluskey’s son and a friend. The boys horsed around with a sapling, pulling on its branches and laughing in the sunlight. The adults stared at the ground but found no proof that their relative was interred there. In the dark woods, amid the crumbling gravestones, Elwood Higginbotham’s life and death remained, to a great degree, beyond the limits of understanding.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/magazine/a-lynchings-long-shadow.html
Born: 1398 BC, Akhmim, Egypt
Died: 1338 BC, Thebes
Spouse: Amenhotep III
Children: Akhenaten, Sitamun, The Younger Lady, Thutmose, Beketaten, Iset, Henuttaneb, Nebetah, Kiya
Place of burial: Valley of the Kings, Egypt, KV35, Egypt
Parents: Yuya, Tjuyu
Family and early life Edit
Tiye's father, Yuya, was a non-royal, wealthy landowner from the Upper Egyptian town of Akhmim,[1] where he served as a priest and superintendent of oxen or commander of the chariotry. Tiye's mother, Tjuyu, was involved in many religious cults, as her different titles attested (Singer of Hathor, Chief of the Entertainers of both Amun and Min...),which suggests that she was a member of the royal family.
Egyptologists have suggested that Tiye's father, Yuya, was of foreign origin due to the features of his mummy and the many different spellings of his name, which might imply it was a non-Egyptian name in origin. Some suggest that the queen's strong political and unconventional religious views might have been due not just to a strong character, but to foreign descent.
Tiye also had a brother, Anen, who was Second Prophet of Amun. Ay, a successor of Tutankhamun as pharaoh after the latter's death, is believed to be yet another brother of Tiye; despite no clear date or monument confirming a link between the two, Egyptologists presume this by Ay's origins, also from Akhmin, because he is known to have built a chapel dedicated to the local god Min there, and because he inherited most of the titles that Tiye's father, Yuya, held at the court of Amenhotep III during his lifetime.
Tiye was married to Amenhotep III by the second year of his reign. He had been born of a secondary wife of his father and needed a stronger tie to the royal lineage.] He appears to have been crowned while still a child, perhaps between the ages of six to twelve. They had at least seven, possibly more children:.............
Mary Eliza Mahoney 1845-1926-The First African American to study and work as a professionally trained Nurse in the United States.
Mary grew up before the American Civil War as a free woman in Massachusetts, however as a black woman, her career options were limited, Mary knew from an early age that she wanted to be a nurse. When she was eighteen years old, she started working at the New England Hospital for Women and Children, she wasn’t saving lives yet, she has to work as a cook and a scrubber.
Although Massachusetts was a leading state in the antislavery movement, discrimination and segregation were still a way of life. The hospital, however prided itself on the fact that it did take care of both black and white patients. It also had a nursing program that admitted one Black student and one Jewish student per year, the hospital thought this was VERY progressive. Mary worked on the hospital staff for fifteen years before being admitted into the nursing program at the age of thirty-three. That year, forty-two students were accepted but only four graduated. Mary was one of them.
As a private nurse, Mary had an incredible reputation as being very patient and skillful. She traveled around the East Coast and her helped challenge racism in the South, she would soon be inducted into the American Nurse Association. In 1908, she helped support the founding of the National Association of Colored Graduate Nurses which later name a major award in her honor.
Mary’s nursing career lasted frothy-three years. She was recognized as a pioneer, and in 1976 was inducted into the ANA Nurses Hall of Fame. Her old hospital, the New England Hospital for Women and Children, renamed the Dimock Center in 2007, features a new health care facility named after her: the Mary Mahoney Center.
From the time she could walk, Emma felt drawn to the land. She would roam the woods, plucking, sniffing, tasting weeds. She grew up that way, collecting the leaves, stems, roots and bark of sweet gum, white mint, mullen, sassafras in her coattail or a tin bucket. She'd tote them back to the farm, rinse them in well water and tie them in bunches to dry. In the backyard, she'd raise a fire under a kettle and boil her herbs to a bubbly froth, then pour it up in brown-necked stone jugs: A white-mint potion for poor circulation; catnip tea for babies with colic; tansy tea - hot or cold - for low blood sugar; mullein tea for a stomach ache. Mixed with molasses or peppermint candy to knock out the bitterness. Her kind of folk medicine dates back centuries. In the 1600s, African slaves brought root-doctor remedies to America. Indians and immigrants had cure-alls, too. In some rural areas, scattered herbalists still practice.
First African Woman to Win Her Freedom in Court
Elizabeth Key was the first woman of African ancestry in the American colonies to sue for her freedom from slavery and win. Elizabeth Key won her freedom and that of her infant son on July 21, 1656 in the colony of Virginia, in one of the earliest freedom suits in the colonies. She sued based on the fact that her father was an Englishman and that she was a baptized Christian.
Born in Warwick County, Virginia in 1630, Elizabeth Key was the illegitimate daughter of an enslaved black mother and a white English planter father, Thomas Key, who was also a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses. She spent the first several years of her life with her mother.
Before moving back to England in 1636, Thomas Key made arrangements for Elizabeth’s godfather, Humphrey Higginson, to have possession of her for nine years. It stipulated that Higginson would be Elizabeth’s guardian, that she would be treated like a member of his family, and that she be given her freedom at the age of fifteen.
Thomas Key died later that year, and Higginson sold Elizabeth to Colonel John Mottram, for whom she was required to serve another nine years before being released from bondage. Mottram took her to Northumberland County, where he built a plantation, Coan Hall.
There Elizabeth remained until 1650, when Colonel Mottram brought over a group of white indentured servants from England, including a young lawyer named William Grinstead. Under the English law of primogeniture, only the eldest son could inherit the father’s real property, so many younger sons crossed the Atlantic to seek their lives in the American colonies.
During this time, William and Elizabeth fell in love, and had a son together, whom they named John. They were prohibited from marrying while Grinstead was serving his indenture, and Elizabeth Key’s future was uncertain.
After Mottram’s death in 1655, Elizabeth Key sued for her freedom after the executors of her late master’s estate classified her and her infant son as Negroes (and part of the property assets of the estate) rather than as an indentured servant with a free-born child. Unwilling to accept permanent servitude, Elizabeth Key petitioned the court for her freedom. By that time, she had already served as an indentured servant for nineteen years.
Key’s lawsuit was one of the earliest freedom suits in the American colonies filed by a person of African ancestry. With Grinstead acting as her lawyer, Key asked the court to free her based on an English law that stated that if a child’s father was a free man, then the child should be free. The court gave Elizabeth her freedom:
We whose names are underwritten being impaneled upon a Jury to try a difference between Elizabeth pretended slave to the Estate of Colonel John Mottram deceased and the overseers of the said Estate do find that the said Elizabeth ought to be free…
Unfortunately, the decision was later overturned by a higher court that ruled that Key was a slave, but she did not stop there. She appealed to Virginia’s General Assembly. This excerpt is from the General Assembly’s report:
It appears to us that she is the daughter of Thomas Key by several Evidences… That she hath been by verdict of a Jury impaneled 20th January 1655 in the County of North Umberland found to be free by several oaths which the Jury desired might be Recorded. That by the Common Law the Child of a Woman slave begot by a freeman ought to be free. That she hath been long since Christened… That Thomas Key sold her only for nine Years to Higginson with several conditions to use her more Respectfully than a Common servant or slave… For these Reasons we conceive the said Elizabeth ought to be free and that her last Master should give her Corn and Clothes and give her satisfaction for the time she hath served longer than She ought to have done.
The committee sent the case back to the courts to be retried, and Elizabeth finally won her freedomin 1656. After winning the case, Elizabeth and William were married, and they had another son together, William.
William Grinstead died early in 1661. The widow Elizabeth Grinstead later remarried, to the widower John Parse. Upon his death, she and her sons John and William Grinstead II inherited 500 acres, helping to secure their future.
In 1662, Virginia reacted to lawsuits like Key’s by passing a law to clarify the status of the children of women of African descent. This statute imposed lifetime hereditary bondage on Africans, and stated that a child would be “bond or free according to the condition of the mother,” rather than the father, as was the case in England.
This legislation ensured that all children of women slaves would be kept as slaves for labor unless explicitly freed. It also freed the fathers from acknowledging the children as theirs, providing support or arranging for apprenticeships, or emancipating them. Some white fathers did take an interest in their mixed-race children and gave them an education or land; many others abandoned them.
Whatever their origins, free blacks in seventeenth-century Virginia seem to have formed a larger share of the total black population than at any other time during slavery. In some counties, perhaps a third of the black population was free in the 1660s and 1670s. And these free blacks interacted with their white neighbors basically as equals.
http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2008/01/elizabeth-key.html
The Nazis were not the only ones who operated concentration camps. Britain used them in South Africa and Kenya.
In Kenya, the camps were sites for random executions and Interrogation involved stuffing detainees mouth with mud and stomping their throats till they passed out.
Slave With Iron Muzzle
1839
When persons being held as slaves were accused by their masters of insubordination, or of eating more than their allotment of food, they might expect to be fitted with an iron muzzle.
In his autobiography, Olaudah Equiano described his first encounter with such a device in the mid-1700s. . . "I had seen a black woman slave as I came through the house, who was cooking the dinner, and the poor creature was cruelly loaded with various kinds of iron machines; she had one particularly on her head, which locked her mouth so fast that she could scarcely speak, and could not eat or drink. I [was] much astonished and shocked at this contrivance, which I afterwards learned was called the iron muzzle." Credit:
PBS
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part1/1h308.html
The Hill Collection of Pacific Voyages, Mandeville Special Colections Library, University of California, San Diego
NEVER EVER FORGET!
'The Whipping Post' _this structure was one of the tools frequently used in many Southern states to torment and demean Black men publicly, but this lesson in history is one of significance.
'The Whipping Post' _this structure was one of the tools frequently used in many Southern states to torment and demean Black men publicly, but this lesson in history is one of significance.
Slave Raffle
Raffles allowed people who could not afford to buy slaves the privilege of still owning slaves