L.A.’S LESSER-KNOWN RACIST HISTORY: THE CONFEDERATE MAYOR WHO WAS ANTI-MEXICAN AND TRIED TO MAKE CALIFORNIA INTO A SLAVE STATE

In the wake of the protests sparked by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, monuments to White supremacy have been falling across the country. This moment builds off the recent efforts following the racist killing of nine black churchgoers at the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston and the White supremacist violence in Charlottesville, as well as generations of unheeded protests and advocacy amongst Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities.

Plaques, statues, and busts—from Alabama to downtown Los Angeles, and even outside the United States in Bristol and Brussels—have been removed, sometimes by acts of government, but quite often by groups of citizens taking the question of historical memory quite literally into their own hands. Popular Mechanics even published the handy article, “How to Topple a Statue Using Science – Bring that sucker down without anyone getting hurt.”

Here in Los Angeles, where a plaque erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy commemorating the dozens of Confederate soldiers buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery was removed in 2017, the University of Southern California has recently removed the name of its fifth president, noted eugenicist Rufus B. von KleinSmid, from its Center for International and Public Affairs. On June 20, in Father Serra Park next to El Pueblo, the historic birthplace of the city, Indigenous activists tore down a statue of Junipero Serra. Otherwise, public attention has largely focused on the well-documented history of brutality of the LAPD and the Sheriff’s Department—further accentuated by the murder of 18-year old Andres Guardado in Gardena—District Attorney Jackie Lacey’s handling of police misconduct cases as she faces a stiffening re-election, and the fast-changing political dynamics around re-envisioning community safety.

His epitaph reads – “He Was A Man.”

Los Angeles, however, still has a fair number of ex-Confederates in its midst. The Glendale neighborhood of Rossmoyne takes its name from the estate of the Confederate soldier and eventual federal judge Erskine Mayo Ross, who is also the namesake of the city’s Ross Street. Hilgard Avenue, which forms the eastern boundary of the UCLA campus in Westwood, is named for Eugene Hilgard, the UC Berkeley geologist, and chemist who served in the Confederate Nitre Bureau, assisting in the South’s war-making capacity.  Hilgard’s colleague in both the Nitre Bureau and at Berkeley was Joseph Le Conte, the slave-owning White supremacist co-founder of the Sierra Club, whose name adorns the LAUSD middle school in East Hollywood. And then there is Captain Cameron Erskine Thom, safely ensconced in the 26th-floor mayoral portrait gallery in City Hall, whose monuments are not so easily torn down.

Thom’s Memorial in Evergreen Cemetery. Source: FindAGrave.com

Confederacy in a Boyle Heights Cemetery

There are few places that still reveal the varied and discordant strata of the region’s history better than Evergreen Cemetery, the oldest private, non-religious burial ground in Los Angeles. Since its opening in 1877, the once-fashionable cemetery has become the final resting place for an array of characters from the city’s past, stretching from real estate barons to carnival workers in the “Pacific Coast Showmen’s Association.” Evergreen, while open to most Angelenos of color, was initially racially segregated, and distinct ethnic and racial enclaves remain to this day.

A still-active cemetery that sees families tailgating next to gravestones or neighbors utilizing the track along its perimeter, Evergreen has for many years been severely neglected, a victim of water rationing from the state’s recent drought as well as revocation of its operating license and legal action stemming from circumspect burial practices.

Near the entrance of the cemetery stands the weathered, but still imposing obelisk that marks the grave of Cameron Erksine Thom. His epitaph reads—“He Was A Man.” Indeed, Thom’s life stretched the arc of 19th-century America. Born in Culpepper, Virginia in 1825, Thom, whose father was an officer in the War of 1812 and was a longtime Virginia state senator, studied law at the University of Virginia before heading west for California in search of gold, arriving at Sutter’s Fort in late 1849. After a brief and stint as a prospector, Thom relocated to Sacramento, where he opened a law practice.

In his later career, Thom served two additional stints as Los Angeles District Attorney—in which he was the lead prosecutor of the racist lynch mob that brutally murdered at least 17 Chinese immigrants in the 1871 Chinatown Massacre…

An appointment as a deputy agent for the U.S. Land Commission brought Thom to the small town of Los Angeles in 1854 to help resolve property disputes stemming from the end of the Mexican War. In short order, Thom was appointed both City Attorney and District Attorney for Los Angeles, and in 1857 he was elected to the California State Senate to represent a district that covered the near entirety of Southern California, a position Thom held for two years, covering the 9th and 10th legislative sessions.

In his later career, Thom served two additional stints as Los Angeles District Attorney—in which he was the lead prosecutor of the racist lynch mob that brutally murdered at least 17 Chinese immigrants in the 1871 Chinatown Massacre—and he was elected the 16th Mayor of Los Angeles, a position he held for two years, from December 1882 to December 1884. Having invested heavily in real estate, Thom co-founded the city of Glendale and was at one point the city’s single largest taxpayer.

Thom also served as an incorporator and board member of the Farmers and Merchant Bank, a charter member of the Southern California Historical Society, a member of the 1888 City of Los Angeles Board of Freeholders that rewrote the city’s charter, a founding member of the California chapter of the Society of Colonial Wars, and a member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, among his many civic and professional activities.

Thom’s grave at Evergreen Cemetery. Source: FindAGrave.com

Noting his death at the age of 89 on February 2, 1915, the Los Angeles Herald remarked that Thom was one “of the most prominent, best-loved and oldest pioneers of Los Angeles” and that he “took a conspicuous part in the upbuilding of Southern California.” The Los Angeles Times was equally laudatory, noting that “the company of several hundred persons who assembled to do honor to his memory was the most notable gathering of leading men of the old school scene at any similar service in the city in recent years.” In the midst of describing his West Adams home as “evidence everywhere of refinement, culture, and wealth,” The Times makes a brief, passing reference to another element of the life of “Capt.” Thom—his service to the Confederacy.

The life of Cameron Thom and his family embodied the early history of Los Angeles, and the corresponding development of the United States, through their efforts to uphold and expand White supremacy. From birth, Thom was surrounded by and benefited from the institution of chattel slavery. Berry Hill, the Thom family’s 600-acre plantation, was run by 200 enslaved persons. As noted in My Dear Brother: A Confederate Chronicle, a collection of the family’s correspondence, “The Negroes were singled out for their abilities: taught carpentry, iron-work, shoemaking…and of course, the various skills required in the growing of tobacco, for long months of cultivation by many careful hands were needed to bring the money crop from seedbed to curing barn, to hogshead, and finally to market.” On his Gold Rush journey to California, Cameron and his compatriots had enslaved persons with them—per his family’s correspondence, “They proposed to buy eight conestoga wagons, to equip them with all necessary supplies, and to man each with its own Negro wagoner and cook.”

Thom was also supportive of the 1859 effort to divide California into two states, an undertaking supported by Southern politicians hoping to extend slavery to the Pacific.

Moving west did not diminish Thom’s connection slavery—in fact, Thom used his tenure in the State Senate to try to undermine California’s status as a free state. In 1859, Thom proposed legislation to rework the state’s forcible apprenticeship laws to allow for the importation of enslaved Black youths into California. Chronicling the machinations in  “Freedoms Frontier: California and the Struggle Over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction,” Professor Stacey Smith quotes from The Sacramento Daily Unionthat the intent of Thom’s bill was “negroes under the age of 21 years, the property of Southern gentlemen emigrating to the state, may be admitted and held in bondage until they have reached a majority.” Thom was also supportive of the 1859 effort to divide California into two states, an undertaking supported by Southern politicians hoping to extend slavery to the Pacific.

In March 1863, Thom, one of the most notable political figures in early Los Angeles, would leave his recently motherless child—named Albert after the Confederate general Albert Sidney Johnson and who would die before his father’s return to Los Angeles—and his adopted home to take up arms in support of the Confederacy. In a letter sent to his brother Pembroke weeks before departing, Thom wrote, “God grant a speedy termination of this terrible struggle, but may it never end until the South has all her right is my most ardent prayer.” Thom would eventually reach Virginia, and he spent the next two years in various volunteer aide positions through the end of the war. With the benefit of a presidential pardon from Andrew Johnson, Thom returned to Los Angeles, to live the next fifty years amassing wealth and high esteem.

Exterior front view of a two-story house belonging to lawyer Cameron Erskine Thom, hidden behind trees on the southwest corner of Main and Mayo Streets, Los Angeles. Photo via the LA Public Library

Cameron Thom’s antebellum support for Southern interests, and his eventual joining of the Confederate army, was very much keeping with Los Angeles in the early years following its American conquest. Though a county of less than 12,000 in 1860, Los Angeles had a sizable contingent of southern-born residents, a number of which held influential roles. The powerful local Democratic Party machine, known as “the Democracy,” was part of the broader statewide pro-slavery “Chivalry” faction of the party.

The head of the Democracy, southern-born attorney and former assemblyman Joseph Lancaster Brent, would also leave Los Angeles to fight for the Confederacy, rising to the rank of brigadier general. The “fire-breather” Edward J.C. Kewen, the state’s first Attorney General and a former Los Angeles district attorney and superintendent of schools, would be thrown in Alcatraz prison for treason. Henry Hamilton, the virulently racist Editor of the city’s major Democratic newspaper, The Los Angeles Star, was also arrested and held by Federal authorities. As noted in John Mack Faragher’s “Eternity Street—Violence and Justice in Frontier Los Angeles,” the Los Angeles Mounted Rifles—a group of secessionist Angelenos—would be the only company of troops from a free state that would take up arms against the Union.

After the Civil War, Cameron Thom’s California-born wife would follow her husband’s efforts to propagate a racist social order through her work with the United Daughters of the Confederacy. Born Belle Cameron Hathwell in Marysville, California, she was the younger sister of Thom’s first wife Susan, who had passed away in 1862. Belle was 34 years younger than Thom, and according to the early Los Angeles chronicler Harris Newmark, Thom’s goddaughter, whom he helped name.

In January 1899, Belle Thom co-founded the Los Angeles Chapter, No. 277, of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (“UDC”), five years after the national organization was formally organized. The local Los Angeles weekly journal The Capital, in reporting the group’s founding, quotes directly from the UDC’s constitution in laying out the group’s purpose, “To collect and preserve the material for a truthful history of the war between the States; to honor the memory of those who served and those who fell in the service of the Confederate States, and to record the part taken by Southern women, as well in the uplifting effort after the war, in reconstruction of the South, as in the patient endurance of hardships and patriotic devotion during the struggle.”

In California, which historian Kevin Waite notes had more monuments to the Confederacy than any state outside of the South…

Less than six years later, the Los Angeles Times, discussing the upcoming UDC state convention in Los Angeles – to which Belle Thom was a delegate—noted that the state organization had over 1,000 members, and Los Angeles Chapter, with its 128 members, was one of the largest. In 1905, and so too today, greater Los Angeles would boast three different UDC chapters.

In early 20th century Los Angeles, the UDC’s events were a mainstay of the society pages. A 1903 “Ye Halloween Charity Ball,” per the Los Angeles Times, “struck out a note of originality highly enjoyable to the brilliant throng of society folk who tripped the light fantastic and otherwise participated in its joys.” Planning for the Los Angeles Chapter’s February 1905 Charity Ball—“one of the gala events of the season”—began in December 1904. In December 1917, the Robert E. Lee Chapter was set to host on the same day both its “annual bazaar” and “an old-fashioned plantation dinner at which a large number of men from the Naval Reserve Camp at the harbor will be entertained.”

The UDC was not a benign social club, but rather one of the driving forces for enshrining the “Lost Cause” mythology across the county and whitewashing the real cause of the Civil War—the preservation of slavery – from history. In an updated preface to “Dixie’s Daughters,” a history of the organization, historian Karen Cox writes, “UDC members became leaders of a movement that looked not only to past to memorialize the Confederate generation but also to the future in hopes of shaping a New South that, absent slavery, would continue to emulate the Old South in its preservation of White supremacy.”

In California, which historian Kevin Waite notes had more monuments to the Confederacy than any state outside of the South, the UDC similarly played an outsized role in transporting the White supremacist propaganda west. “Women played the leading role in California’s Confederate renaissance,” writes Waite. “They did so primarily through the UDC.” After Belle Thom’s death, the UDC would go on to install the Confederate memorial in Hollywood Forever, where dozens of former Confederates would ultimately be laid to rest, in 1925, and open “Dixie Manor,” an old soldiers’ home for aging Confederate soldiers, in 1929.

…his mayoral biography in City Hall notes his “foresighted investments made him a wealthy man”—was in part a result of his ability to exploit the financial ruin of the Californios, the once-powerful Mexican landed gentry…

Writing three days after her passing, the Los Angeles Times columnist Harry Carr lamented, “The death of Mrs. Cameron Thom takes away one of the last grande dames who ruled California society before the flappers and the movie stars came in. In the 1880s, Los Angeles, in its upper crust, was almost a Southern town. And Mrs. Thom was a leader of that old southern group.” California-born, Belle Thom helped imbue early Los Angeles society with the spirit of “Dixie,” by co-founding a chapter of the UDC that helped enforced a racist social hierarchy far beyond the borders of the former Confederacy.

Cameron de Hart Thom, the son of Cameron and Belle, brought the family’s support for institutional racism squarely into the twentieth century through his work in real estate. Cameron Erskine Thom’s much-heralded prescience and real estate acumen—his mayoral biography in City Hall notes his “foresighted investments made him a wealthy man”—was in part a result of his ability to exploit the financial ruin of the Californios, the once-powerful Mexican landed gentry, through land disputes and lawsuits in the decades after the end of the Mexican War.

In 1870, Thom purchased 2,700 acres of the once 30,000-acre Rancho San Rafael from the blind 88-year-old, Catalina Verdugo, the daughter of Corporal Jose Maria Verdugo, who had been ceded the land by the Spanish empire in 1784. Thom also received 724 acres of Rancho San Rafael from the infamous “Great Partition of 1871,” where 28 individuals received 31 different tracts of lands due to questions around book-keeping and actual ownership. Thom would go on to sell a portion of his land to his nephew and longtime business partner, the fellow Confederate Erskine Mayo Ross.

Thom’s sons, Cameron de Hart and Erskine Pembroke, operating from suite 414 in the Bradbury Building in Downtown, went about selling subdivided portions of the old Rancho San Rafael their father had acquired, which at that point had been renamed “Bellehurst,” in northeast Glendale. In the Saturday evening edition of the March 29, 1913, Los Angeles Herald, the Thom brothers ran a prominently sized ad, declaring “Bellehurst – NOT a Fairy Tale.” The ad asked readers to imagine a pastoral lot with unobstructed views, “with all the delights of fresh country air, wholesome surroundings, fine neighbors, clean streets, in a fine residence section…this is no fairy tale.”.

In 1920, Cameron de Hart Thom co-founded the Glendale Realty Board, which would become today’s Glendale Association of Realtors, serving as the organization’s charter Vice President, and later its president. Writing in his 1922 “History of Glendale and Vicinity,” JC Scherer extolled the virtues of the organization in uplifting the city, claiming it as “one of the progressive factors in the development of the community.” The realtors, according to Scherer, “have been instrumental in bringing many families to this city and most of them take personal responsibility in the fact that Glendale is “The Fastest Growing City in America.”

The work of Cameron de Hart’s fellow realtors laid the foundation for Glendale earning the designation of a “sundown” town, where no Black people were functionally permitted after dusk.

The work of the Glendale Realty Board made clear that the “fine neighbors” from the 1913 Bellehurst ad and the inflow of new families were to be exclusively white. As detailed by Douglas Flamming in “Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America,” in responding to a 1927 survey from the all-White California Real Estate Association on how Glendale enforces racial restrictions, the board president William McMillan asserted, “The Glendale Realty Board, and the Glendale brokers, as a whole, cooperate in every way to keep Glendale and “All American City,” and by enforcing race restrictions, we have been able to keep our standard well up in the front of “All American.”

McMillan would go further in the survey form, responding to the question of how “this important problem” could be dealt with by the real estate industry: “In an American town like Glendale, which has the smallest percentage of foreign population of any city in the State, that by insisting on the subdividers putting in and enforcing suitable race restrictions, we can maintain our high standard of American citizenship.” And while a population of Japanese was moving into one part of the city, they were “mostly gardeners,” and “all property carries race restrictions against Asiatics.”

Per the Glendale Realty Board’s rationale, Whites were the only group who were truly American. Discriminatory real estate practices, then, were expressly positive for the flourishing of “American” communities. A decade before the implementation of redlining, organizations like the Glendale Realty Board were devising ways by which to embed discrimination into the fabric of cities. The work of Cameron de Hart’s fellow realtors laid the foundation for Glendale earning the designation of a “sundown” town, where no Black people were functionally permitted after dusk. In a July 16, 1963, Los Angeles Times article around allegations of the city’s racism, Glendale’s city attorney Henry McClernan bluntly states, “no Negroes are living in Glendale. Some come into the city in the daytime to work as domestics.”

L.A.’s Uncelebrated Legacy of Confederacy Still Lives On in 2020 Across the County

Writing in his 1915 “A History of California,” the historian and educator James Guinn gushed, “The life story of Captain Thom is as full of interest as a romance and contains as many thrilling experiences as a detective story or a tale of the South Seas…It is indeed almost a fairy tale from some enchanted volume of ancient lore.” Contrary to Guinn’s hyperbole, the lives of Cameron Thom and his family were not “fairy tales,” but rather ubiquitous reflections of racial discrimination in California.

Cameron Thom was far from the only Confederate to find a home in the Golden State, UDC chapters held sway from San Diego to San Francisco, and most major cities in the state had realty boards devising exclusionary tactics. What is noteworthy about the Thoms is that over the course of roughly sixty years, the family would go from taking up arms against the United States to using real estate to enforce segregation, a clear distillation of white supremacy’s evolution, and adaptation.

There is also Thom’s mayoral portrait in City Hall. Set against an indistinct background, Thom is a well-coiffed and prominently bearded man shown in his later years, staring quietly into the distance. The four-sentence description below the portrait is almost equally devoid of context…

With its longtime identity as a boomtown fixated on the future, Los Angeles has largely forgotten about Cameron Thom. The Long Beach Camp #2007 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans bears the name Captain Cameron Thom. In the Verdugo Mountains, overlooking the city of Glendale in what was once the Rancho San Rafael land grant, is the 2,462-foot peak, Mt. Thom. While not an official designation, and per Glendale historians Katherine Peters Yamada, Mike Lawler, and Rich Toyon, the peak has been called a variety of names, “Mt. Thom” can be found on Glendale city park maps and municipal telecom contracts.

In the South Park neighborhood of Downtown, there are three alleys—Cameron Lane, Catesby Lane, and Pembroke Lane—that bear the names of Thom’s three sons that reached adulthood. In a November 1964 audio recording of her reminisces of early life in Los Angeles, Thom’s daughter Belle Buford Thom Collins, known in the early society pages as “Jette Thom” prior to her marriage to a London theater manager, recounts that her father fell into extensive land holdings in that for years went undeveloped, “Where the Standard Oil Building stands at the corner of Hope and Olympic” west to Figueroa. “The only thing that remains to remind us that it was once his property,” the octogenarian notes, is an alley, “a little strip of land,” Thom had named for his son, Pembroke.  That alley is still visible on LA County assessor maps, and while the development around L.A. Alive has reshaped the area, Thom’s three sons can still be found south of Pico.

There is also Thom’s mayoral portrait in City Hall. Set against an indistinct background, Thom is a well-coiffed and prominently bearded man shown in his later years, staring quietly into the distance. The four-sentence description below the portrait is almost equally devoid of context, incorrectly noting his 1854 arrival to Los Angeles from Virginia, and lists a few assorted events that occurred during his mayoralty—acreage set aside for Elysian Park, the founding of the Historical Society of Southern California, a production of “School for Scandal” – meant to convey Los Angeles’s continued emergence into a major city. Left unmentioned is his service to the Confederacy, as well as his ultimately failed prosecution of the 1871 Chinatown Massacre.

The aptest testament to Cameron Thom remaining in Los Angeles, however, is a parking lot. The southeast corner of 3rd and Main Street in downtown was the site of Thom’s longtime home. County parcel maps and city planning documents for the site still read “Property of C.E. Thom.” Where once was Thom’s opulent estate is now a surface parking lot, and where the last rumblings a long-planned second phase to a residential development was an environmental impact report filed back in 2015. The property also serves as the very northwest corner of Skid Row, the epicenter of homelessness in Los Angeles. A line of tents rings the perimeter of the lot.

Civic leaders may not construct monumental structures honoring Thom or other Confederates along Broadway or Sunset, but Union Station was built on what was once Old Chinatown…

That the site of Cameron Thom’s mansion is now the boundary of Skid Row, a mostly Black neighborhood that reflects the structural racism underpinning the region’s unaffordability and housing crises, is the perfect testament to his legacy. Thom and his family, along with other such early “pioneers,” set about constructing Los Angeles for the exclusive benefit of White people.

That the West, and Los Angeles specifically, would be the triumphs of Whiteness was actively promoted by civic boosters. The Press Reference Library’s 1915 “Notables of the West,” a collection of biographies sent to newspapers across the country, begins with “A Word in Advance” from the Los Angeles journalist Otheman Stevens.“Because the great West frowned on white men,” writes Stevens, “and presented to his advantage its redoubts of deserts, mountains, freezing cold, withering heat, vast pathless stretches, inhabited by savage beasts and more savage barbarians, the white man conquered it.” Writing in 1924, the year of Belle Thom’s passing, the longtime Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce trade manager and harbor official Clarence Matson pronounced, “Angle Saxon civilization must climax in the generations to come…The Los Angeles of Tomorrow will be the center of this climax.”

In modern Los Angeles, that Black Angelenos make up 34 percent of the county’s homeless population but are only 8 percent of the total population, that Black and Brown Angelenos are disproportionately arrested or murdered by law enforcement, that pre-pandemic Los Angeles had the largest incarcerated population in the country, that Black, Latinx, and Native Hawaiian Angelenos are dying at far higher rates than whites as a result of COVID-19 and Indigenous Angelenos remain critically left out of the safety net– these are not “accidents” or unforeseen externalities, but rather the result of generations of intentional policymaking that recognized White Angelenos as the only real citizens. These are all monument to Cameron Thom, and the continued legacy of racism central to life in Los Angeles.

Civic leaders may not construct monumental structures honoring Thom or other Confederates along Broadway or Sunset, but Union Station was built on what was once Old Chinatown, the palaces of culture and 1980s high-rises on Bunker Hill sit on the ruins of the multi-ethnic neighborhood redlined and “urban blight”-ed out of existence, and Dodger Stadium dominates Chavez Ravine as a result of red-baiting and broken promises of affordable housing. The creation, and brutal enforcement, of White space that uplifted statues across the South similarly compelled the contours of Los Angeles’s development and growth.

There are plenty of monuments to be toppled in Los Angeles—start thinking about what should be built in their place.

While updating the plaque beneath Cameron Thom’s City Hall portrait can be a minor corrective for the gauzy narratives Los Angeles has devised about its past, such a move does nothing to improve communities that have suffered from decades of antipathy or outright brutality, or for the hundreds of thousands of Angelenos who sit dangerously at the margins due to the convergence of COVID-19 and structural racism.

To dismantle the legacy of Cameron Thom, Los Angeles, for the first time in its 239-year history, must be reconstructed in a way so as to fully and unambiguously recognize the humanity of its entire populace. This work has been ongoing for generations, but an expansive vision for a more just Los Angeles can be seen in the hundreds of thousands who have taken to the streets in the past month; in Professor Melina Abdullah and Black Lives Matter’s presentation to the City Council calling for a budget truly reflective of people’s needs and values; in the work of the JusticeLA coalition other community activist groups pushing the county towards decarceration; in the tireless advocacy of the LA Street Vendor Campaign and the vendors themselves to demand recognition that was for too long denied; and in the envisioning and creation of the 1.3-mile long Destination Crenshaw in the heart of historic Black Los Angeles, that, as chronicled by Sahra Sulaiman, “Will not just be a place to celebrate unapologetically Black contributions, but also a place where it is safe to be unapologetically Black in Public: A Black Space, full stop.”

There are plenty of monuments to be toppled in Los Angeles—start thinking about what should be built in their place.

source: https://www.lataco.com/la-confederate-mayor/

Racist slurs permeate Oregon geography

This canyon in Jefferson County originally had the N-word in its name and was renamed John Brown Canyon in 2013. Many Oregon geographical features still contain the word “Negro” in their names. (Photo courtesy of Oregon Humanities)

 

The names serve as a reminder of the state’s colonial history while also providing clues to early Black presence

by Donovan M. Smith

Editor’s note: This story contains racist epithets that some readers may find triggering. Watering down the toxicity of these words in the context of this story, we felt, would dilute the racist reality still present in Oregon’s geographic features.

---

Racist monuments have been toppling at the speed of reckoning throughout the country in the wake of George Floyd’s execution by police. Whether it be the statue of Thomas Jefferson being unceremoniously dismounted from the front entrance of the North Portland school that bares his name or Mississippi lawmakers voting to remove the Confederate battle emblem from their state’s flag this week, the layout of America is beginning to look different. However, in Oregon, some of the state’s legacy is more insidiously stitched into the fabric of its colonial roots.

There are more than a dozen geographic features in the state featuring the word “Negro” in their name, inlcuding Negro Ridge and Negro Hallow just southeast of The Dalles in Sherman County, Negro Gulch and Negro Knob mountain peak in Grant County, and Negro Creek in Douglas County. The use of the outdated term for Black Americans was used to replace the epithet “nigger” by the federal U.S. Board of Geographic Names in the 1960s across the country.

Locally, the president of that organization’s subsidiary, Bruce Fisher of the Oregon Geographic Names Board, describes his faction’s role as being more passive.

“We typically have to wait for someone to come with a proposal. We’re not proactive,” he said, “we’re reactive.”

Once a proposal is submitted, the 25-person board of volunteers goes to work on researching the history of the place, its surrounding area and how it came to be, to inform a vote on whether to move it up to the chain of command for a final decision.

One of the proposals they’ll consider in October is to change the name of Negro Ben Mountain in Jackson County. The mountain appears to derive its name from a local blacksmith who owned a shop at the base of the mountain in the late 1800s, a Black man by the name of Ben. While Census records show a man by the name of Ben Johnson and his wife, both listed as “mulatto,” living in the area, historians cannot say with certainty that they are in fact the same people, meaning the mountain’s namesake likely has been lost forever.

As part of the research for this proposal, the Jackson County commissioners were contacted and responded that they have “no opinion on the matter.”

This map, courtesy of Oregon Humanities, shows a number of Oregon locations whose names contain racial slurs for Black people. Previous names of these locations are also listed.

Map created by Ryan Sullivan for Oregon Humanities

Filmmaker Sika Stanton co-produced a short film on a canyon not far from the area with a similar history. The video, shot in 2016 as part of the nonprofit Oregon Humanities’ “This Land” series showcasing stories of the state from Black, Indigenous and other non-white storytellers.

The documentary pieces together the history of John A. Brown, Oregon’s first known Black homesteader.

“He made his life there,” said Stanton, who had no idea of the 900-acre canyon’s existence before the project, despite living in Oregon for more than a decade. “It’s a shame that this history was lost or that there wasn’t more documentation of it because how he got there, how he was able to thrive there — I’m just so curious to know more.”

What is known of the man further reveals a life of cultivation and defiance. Although it was constitutionally illegal for Black people to own property in Oregon at the time, he came in, likely by way of Canada around the time of the Gold Rush. After working the land for number of years, Brown managed to acquire the title to the 160-acre property close to the Deschutes River where he would grow fruits and vegetables, selling parts of his crop in nearby Prineville. Eventually he would sell part of his property, before dying in 1903 around the age of 63.

He’s said to have had a daughter, but a lack of documentation makes it difficult to trace the extent of his family tree. While there are rumblings of possible Brown descendants in the Portland-area today, no one can say with certainty at present.

A small headstone was erected in Brown’s honor in 2007 by the Crook County Genealogy and Historical Societies in Prinveville, where he’s buried.

Despite Fisher’s assertion that the Oregon Geographic Name Board is mostly passive, he does note it was actually then board member Jarold Ramsey who filed this name change proposal.

It was renamed from Negro Brown Canyon to John A. Brown canyon in 2013.

Problematic terrain doesn’t end with this canyon, or even anti-Blackness in the Beaver State though. Features named for “Dead Indians,” a “Jew Valley” and terms like “Chinaman” and the equally misogynistic and racist “squaw” permeate the trails, creeks and mountains that carve out Oregon’s majestic landscape in droves.

Fisher says his board is considering about 20 name-change proposals at present. “There’s been a lot more activity on (renaming offensive feature names) worldwide in the last year,” he said.

Once a proposal clears the federal level, the change is made almost instantaneously in their database, which will be reflected on digital platforms like Google Maps quickly. However, physical maps can take years to update, he said, because of a downtick in their usage in the face of the massive takeover of technology.

However, the pathway to upending Oregon’s colonial roots remains a tireless one.

Although the board is deciding whether to change the name of Negro Ben Mountain, the road that surrounds it bears the same name and is simultaneously out of their jurisdiction.

Examples as such are plentiful throughout the state.

“A number of our counties are named after people with backgrounds that were racist, pro-slavery or KKK,” said Fisher, who noted that Lane County is named for Joseph Lane, one of the state’s first legislators and a documented slaveowner.

---

Stanton said ultimately wiping offensive names from Oregon’s geography cuts down to something much deeper than policy: humanity.

“How can you value someone’s contributions if you’re disrespecting them in how you speak about them?” she said. “I think by correcting those names, it’s part of all the work that we’re doing to kind of rewrite history and re-tell Black people’s place in it because it’s been erased basically by the white supremacists who’ve written and told the history up until this point.”

According to the Oregon Historical Society, anyone can submit a formal proposal for a geographic feature name change. You can learn more about the procedures for changing geographic names on its website.

source: https://www.streetroots.org/news/2020/07/04/racist-slurs-permeate-oregon-geography

 

‘The Confederacy of California’: life in the valley where Robert Fuller was found hanged

Damn you scary ass muthfucks back on this pussy ass bullshit. Well  you want to bring the noize this way come wit it cause i am  that big Black muthfucker that your parents warned you about. So make damn sure when you step to me make sure you got your big boy pants on and you better be ridin 10 deep cause truth be told 2 or 3 weak bitch made girlie men can’t hang.

In a corner of desert country at the northernmost edge of Los  Angeles county, Black boys have grown up watching their fathers handcuffed by sheriff’s deputies during routine traffic stops. Black girls have had racial slurs shouted at them from passing cars and been warned not to go out by themselves at night.

They have stood in line at the grocery store alongside white men with swastika tattoos. They have organized to protect themselves when they felt no one else would. They have learned which streets to not drive down to avoid law enforcement traffic stops. Some have stopped driving at night al together.

“The Confederacy of southern California is the Antelope Valley,” said Ayinde Love, a longtime Lancaster resident and organizer.

When the body of Robert Fuller, a 24-year-old Black man, was discovered hanging from a tree near Palmdale city hall earlier this month, it plucked at a trauma that had been etched into the Black community for generations. Just over a week before, the body of Malcolm Harsch, a 38-year-old Black man, had been found hanging from a tree just 50 miles east. Together, Fuller and Harsch’s deaths ignited a firestorm of fear in the region, of white supremacist hate group violence and police conspiracy, during a time of racial reckoning nationwide.

Coroners with the Los Angeles county sheriff’s department preliminarily declared Fuller’s death a suicide. But following widespread outcry, the Los Angeles sheriff, Alex Villanueva, backtracked on the finding and announced that the FBI and the state attorney general’s office would monitor the department’s investigation.

Two days later, Los Angeles sheriff’s deputies fatally shot Fuller’s brother. It was the department’s sixth fatal shooting since the killing of George Floyd sparked worldwide protests and heightened scrutiny of police violence.

Two mysterious deaths of Black men, a thin investigation from a sheriff’s department with a documented history of misconduct, another police killing, all within a dry desert landscape rife with historic anti-black hate. To many in Antelope Valley’s Black community, it came to represent the years of racism, bigotry and violence that has gone overlooked in what is considered one of the most left-leaning counties in America.

Photograph: The Washington Post/Getty Images

“People are arguing whether it was homicide or whether it was suicide, but that’s not the position that I’m taking,” Love said. “It’s a lynching regardless, because it is an act of violence when the people that are supposed to serve your community send a message through their lack of concern.”

‘Black men’s fear? The police’

Fewer than 500,000 people live in this sunbaked valley, where the gnarled branches of the Joshua trees splay under miles of open sky. About 70 miles from the city of Los Angeles, hardscrabble brown mountains loom far in the distance on clear days – the Tehachapi mountains to the north and the San Gabriel mountains to the south.

Of those living in Antelope Valley, about 15% are black, compared with 9% in all of Los Angeles county, and 6.5% statewide. The community has grown rapidly, and recently: from 1990 to 2010, the Black population in Lancaster, one of the main cities, grew from just 7% to 21%, while the white population shrank from nearly 80% to less than 50%.

As that population shifted, in the years leading up to 2010, the region saw the highest rate of hate crimes in Los Angeles county.

A 2013 US justice department investigation documented a series of white supremacist-related crimes that had haunted Antelope Valley in the 1990s and early 2000s. The First African Methodist Episcopal church in Palmdale was firebombed in 2010. Three white youths allegedly killed a Black man in 1997 to earn a white supremacist tattoo. Two Black men were stabbed by a white mayoral candidate’s son who had been reciting “white power” slogans, and homes were vandalized with racial slurs and a swastika.

But when asked about what they feared more in Antelope Valley, Black men overwhelmingly responded: the police.

“I don’t care about the KKK because I’m allowed to defend myself against the KKK,” said Arthur Calloway II, 39, a Lancaster resident and president of the Democratic Club of the High Desert. “But every day I have to leave the house, not knowing if I’m going to get pulled over that day and if that could end up in an escalated situation with me actually not coming home.”

At the tree where Robert Fuller’s body was found in the early hours of 10 June, supporters had placed a bright green sign, splattered with red paint, among the flowers and the candles: “Cops and Klan go hand in hand”. Just 30 years ago, a group of deputies described by a federal judge as a “neo-Nazi, white supremacist gang” had been rooted out through a lawsuit that cost the county $9m. Authorities are investigating whether similar other gang-like cliques of deputies, stationed primarily in black and Latino neighborhoods, persist today.

Combined with the stories of the Black community, the Los Angeles sheriff’s department’s reputation of racism has solid footing in the valley. While working for a car rental agency, Love, the community organizer, was pulled over so many times that he had to ask his manager to call the sheriff’s station.

“One time, I was driving into a community and deputies were coming out and passing me and immediately, they turned their lights on and turned around and pulled me over,” said T, a black Lancaster man who asked to only be identified by his first initial out of fear of retaliation. “They said there was a break-in in the neighborhood I was going into. If there was a break-in, why would I be going back into the neighborhood where I just broke into a home?”

In 2015, the US justice department settled a lawsuit against Lancaster, Palmdale and the Los Angeles sheriff’s department for targeting black people with discriminatory enforcement of the federal housing choice voucher program. The investigation that preceded the settlement found that deputies in Antelope Valley engaged in a pattern of misconduct that included pedestrian and vehicle stops in violation of the fourth amendment, “stops that appear motivated by racial bias”, unreasonable use of force and discrimination against residents on the basis of race. A review of use-of-force cases from 2010 to 2011 in which the only charge was obstruction-related – resisting arrest – found that 81% involved black or Latino subjects.

‘If this had been a white man’

Jamon Hicks reacted the same way many others in the black community did when he learned about Robert Fuller’s death. His initial thought was that it felt odd, that he had never heard of a Black man committing suicide in such a public way, and from a tree. When he learned of the other hangings, not just Malcolm Harsch’s in San Bernardino county but around the country, he got scared.

The poppy fields of Antelope Valley, California. Photograph: Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images

A few days later, he was retained as the attorney for Fuller’s family. Sitting at his home about an hour south of Palmdale on Juneteenth, he took a more reasoned approach. He was preparing the family for the findings to come back as a suicide, or even undetermined, he said. What mattered, he argued, was that the findings came back at all, and followed a thorough investigation.

“What I look at is: if this had been a white man hanging from a tree, if this had been a white woman hanging from a tree, would you have so easily just said, ‘Well, we think it’s a suicide?’” Hicks said. “I’m saying the investigation seemed very haphazard from the beginning. And I wonder, was it that way because this was just a 24-year-old black man?”

The family needed answers, he said. Instead, they were left with more questions.

Seven days after Robert Fuller’s body was discovered in Palmdale, Fuller’s brother, Terron Boone, was fatally shot by Los Angeles county deputies. According to the sheriff’s department, when they tried to stop his car, Boone opened the door and started shooting. The sheriffs were reportedly in plainclothes and an unmarked car, trailing Boone, a suspect in a domestic violence case.

“My question,” Hicks said slowly, “is did they know beforehand that it was his brother, before they attempted surveillance and before they followed the car?”

He wondered about the fears and conspiracy theories floating around the community, and whether they had reached Boone, who had been deep in grief. “If he’s thinking, ‘I’m being followed, something happened to my brother, now it’s me’ – if he’s in that mindset and he doesn’t know that they’re police, he’s in defense mode,” Hicks said. “He’s paranoid. He’s scared.”

‘You have to constantly think about your safety’

That sense of fear blanketed a Juneteenth rally in Lancaster, where hundreds came to demand justice for Robert Fuller, Malcolm Harsch, Michael Thomas, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor. Amid the high energy and rousing speeches, a tension thrummed through the crowd.

Protesters demonstrate in front of the Palmdale Sheriff’s Station after Fuller’s death. Photograph: Apu Gomes/AFP/Getty Images

There had been rumors that the local Ku Klux Klan chapter would be hosting a meeting at the same park where the march would end. The Los Angeles sheriff’s department said it had been unable to confirm whether the meeting was to take place. Still, organizers put out warnings for everyone to travel in groups. They had a check-in system – when people got home, they had to text someone, and if that person did not receive a text message, then everyone had to mobilize as if it were an emergency. At the rally, people were on alert, watching to see if people got too close to the speakers.

Giovanni Pope, 17, had been scheduled to speak at a press conference a few days earlier. His parents have been incredibly supportive of his efforts as a young Black and gay activist – but they told him he couldn’t speak at this one, not with the rumors of hate groups.

At a recent protest, he left his face uncovered because he had been a main organizer and wanted to make sure he was recognizable. Near the end of it, a white man whom nobody could identify kept following him and taking his picture.

“In other parts of Los Angeles county, people don’t have to think about this at all,” said Pope, a Lancaster resident. “I go to Pasadena regularly and every young person there seems so carefree in that sense. It’s really easy to be an activist for things you believe in in those areas. Out here, you have to constantly think about your safety.”

Homicide by society

On Juneteenth, the family of Malcolm Harsch, the 38-year-old man found hanging from a tree 50 miles from where Robert Fuller was found dead, posted on Facebook that after reviewing surveillance video, they had accepted that Harsch’s death was a suicide. “We urge you all to continue your efforts concerning the hanging deaths of African Americans,” they wrote.

The next day, a small crowd gathered for a vigil at the tree where Harsch died near the Victorville public library. Harsch had been living in a nearby homeless encampment at the time of his death. Organizers of the vigil brought food and water for the encampment residents, stepping around the debris and garbage under the unforgiving sun.

“Even if it wasn’t murder, it was still homicide by society,” said Kareema Abdul-Khabir, an organizer, pointing out that city hall spent more of its budget on policing than on care for vulnerable people of color.

That’s why Love, the Antelope Valley community organizer, has characterized these hangings as lynchings. Racism comes in many forms in the high desert. There’s the specter of the hate groups. There’s police violence and overcriminalization. And there’s the damage of the passive slights and the allowance of racism. It’s Pope sitting in on a meeting with the mayor of Lancaster, listening to him talk about the need to differentiate “between the hip-hop kids and the good African American students”. It’s 24-year-old Isabel Flax, learning that when her family moved to Palmdale in 2000, her white mother was informed at two homes she had tried to rent that it was “a problem” that she had a Black husband. “It was always the little things, the things that happened when I was seven and I didn’t understand until I got older,” Flax said.

“Lynching was a tactic to instill fear and control the slaves. It had to be something perpetual,” Love said. “When all Black people have to experience the unacceptance of society to the point that life in itself can seem harder than death, it’s a lynching. It’s a lynching via the white supremacist systems that have been set up in place to oppress us.”

‘We’re not going anywhere’

Black people across the US are exhausted, and those in Antelope Valley appear to feel no different. With each passing day come more Black lives lost, and in making sure all Black lives matter, they find themselves forced to wear the mantle of slain names, loudly and publicly, even as their legs buckle under the fatigue.

One day after Robert Fuller’s body was found, sheriff’s deputies fatally shot 62-year-old Michael Thomas in his home in Lancaster. Deputies had been responding to a domestic violence call and said Thomas had reached for their gun. His family and his fiancee, who was at the scene, disputed that account.

Pastor Jacob Johnson, vice-president of the Antelope Valley chapter of the NAACP, said the deputies appeared to have violated at least several points of the consent decree set by the federal justice department as part of the 2015 settlement of the housing discrimination lawsuit – a section of the settlement covers use of force. Yet it’s unclear whether the officers will face any repercussions. This same drama has played out too often in police departments across the country. Officers violate policy. Black people die. No one is held accountable. “What’s the penalty if they break a consent decree – the oversight committee stays on for two more years?” Johnson said. “To be honest, if I’m the sheriff’s department, I could care less. Right now, there seems to be no repercussions. There seems to be no penalties.”

Related: Oakland moves to bar police from schools as bigger cities reject change

When it comes to police killings, people tend to ask first what the person killed did to deserve it – if he was suspected of a violent crime, if he had resisted arrest, if he had been armed. Always with this question, Black organizers think of Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who killed nine in a mass shooting of a black church in South Carolina and was taken into custody unharmed. “Obviously there is no need for extra training because white adult males make it out alive all the time,” said Arthur Calloway, the Lancaster community organizer.

Johnson is tired. But in talking about the movement in Antelope Valley – and the Los Angeles sheriff’s department – he is reminded of another valley mentioned in the Bible, the Valley of Elah. “When David comes to fight Goliath, Goliath had been taunting the children of Israel for a while now, standing in the middle of this valley,” Johnson said. “By the time David shows up, his brothers say, ‘What are you doing, David? You can’t really do anything.’ And David says, ‘Is there not a cause?’

“That’s what keeps bringing people back,” he continued. “We’re tired, but we’re not going anywhere because there is a cause.”

Police will be held accountable

After years of living with racism, the black organizers in Antelope Valley are working to make sure this moment of protest is more than just that. Calloway has co-founded Vote Your Power Back not just to encourage people to vote, but to shape the next generation to run for leadership roles as well. “Once you get a mom on the city council who can feel the pain of Robert Fuller hanging from that tree, who can put that emotion and passion and empathy into legislation, police will have to be held accountable,” Calloway said.

Giovanni Pope, the 17-year-old activist, had planned on leaving for Syracuse University in the fall. But he too recognized that a shift was happening in his home, and he chose to take college courses from Antelope Valley for at least his first year so that he could also continue his work on some local campaigns. “I decided that having that localized attention on our valley was very, very important,” he said.

Ayinde Love leads a crowd of protesters during a Juneteenth demonstration. Photograph: Kyle Grillot/AFP/Getty Images

At the Juneteenth rally, Isabel Flax spoke about her five-year-old son, and how she wanted him to grow up in a different world than she did. In a later interview, she said that after watching the video of George Floyd, she couldn’t sit by the sidelines any more. She organized the first protest in Lancaster, and, together with the other organizers, has a strong future planned for the movement.

As Flax spoke, supporters were still on high alert for hate groups, watching the stage and pacing through the crowd. Armed sheriff’s deputies stood at a distance. “You almost fear the sheriffs, if they’re here to protect us and make sure nothing happens or if they’re here just to say they were here and to look the other way if something happens,” one protester wondered.

But for just one moment after Flax passed on the microphone, in a brief musical interlude, Frank Beverly and Maze’s Before I Let Go blasted out over the speakers. A wide smile broke out over Flax’s face and she allowed the beat to take her. Soon, she was leading an entire group of Black women and children in the Electric Slide, the BLM tattoo she got after her first protest still bold and fresh on her left calf.

Beyonce’s Formation came on next to loud cheers and the handful of dancers grew. Pope jumped into the middle of the circle to groove, as everyone sang along. And for one brief moment, there was celebration.

source: https://www.yahoo.com/news/confederacy-california-life-valley-where-100007342.html

Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh ¡presente!

This editorial first appeared on workers.org on May 18, 2018.  

We celebrate on May 19 the birthdays of two world-bending revolutionaries, Ho Chi Minh and Malcolm X.

Born in 1890 in central Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh was the Marxist-Leninist communist who forged and led a people’s movement and army that defeated the invading imperialist might of both France and the United States and ultimately liberated Vietnam from colonialism.

Born in 1925 in the U.S., Malcolm X was the African-American leader who raised to global attention the concepts of Black nationalism, Black self-defense and the right of self-determination of Black peoples. Malcolm X also made a major contribution to the global movement for Pan-Africanism.

Neither met the other, yet their deeds and words intertwine, and together they continue to inspire us toward revolution.

At this moment, as the U.S. ruling class fans the deadly fires of racist hatred, Malcolm X and Ho Chi Minh unite to give a profound lesson in building international solidarity with oppressed people and nations.

In 1924 — the year before Malcolm X was born — at the Fifth Congress of the Communist International in Moscow, Ho Chi Minh made a presentation during a session on the “National and colonial question.” He emphasized the importance of support for the Black liberation struggle in the U.S., saying in part: “It is well-known that the Black race is the most oppressed and the most exploited of the human family. It is well-known that the spread of capitalism and the discovery of the New World had as an immediate result the rebirth of slavery. … What everyone does not perhaps know is that after sixty-five years of so-called emancipation, [Black people in the U.S.] still endure atrocious moral and material sufferings.” (tinyurl.com/n5nlck6)

Forty years later, in 1964, Malcolm X, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, put the Black liberation struggle in a worldwide context, saying: “It is incorrect to classify the revolt of [Black people] as simply a racial conflict of Black against white, or as a purely [U.S.] American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.” (Malcolm X Speaks)

And he acknowledged the centrality of the national liberation war led by Ho Chi Minh to that global rebellion, saying: ”Viet Nam is the struggle of all third-world nations — the struggle against imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism.” (1972 interview with Yuri Kochiyama, tinyurl.com/k93cq2n)

The voices of both these revolutionaries ring out with the clarion call of SOLIDARITY as the path to a future of justice and liberation.

They remind us that we of the multinational, multigendered, global working class have a common oppressor in imperialist capitalism.

We can resist its racism, its anti-woman and anti-LGBTQ bigotry, its anti-immigrant hatred.

We can — and must — rise up in resistance.

 

 

source: Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh ¡presente!

Amerikan Crime: May 13, 1985: The MOVE Massacre

THE CRIME: 5:35 am, May 13, 1985. Philadelphia Police Commissioner Gregore Sambor aims his bullhorn at the house at 6221 Osage Avenue and declares: “Attention MOVE! This is America.”

Seven adults and six children, members of the MOVE organization, were in their home. Outside, hundreds of heavily armed police and city officials surrounded them.

Fifteen minutes later the police assault began. Explosives blew holes in the side of the house and tear gas was pumped in; fire hoses streamed water onto the roof. Police opened fire with over 8,000 rounds from handguns, Uzis, and anti-tank weapons. There was no solid evidence that the people inside ever fired a shot.

When the occupants still did not come out, a police helicopter hovered over the roof and dropped a powerful bomb. The roof burst into flames so hot that homes across the street ignited. Flames raced downward through the MOVE house toward the people huddled in the basement. The fire trucks on hand did nothing to stop the fire, which then quickly spread to the surrounding homes.

The MOVE house became an unbearable hell of intense heat, fire, tear gas. and smoke. Some residents burst outside, but were met by police gunfire and either killed or forced back into the flames, to be burned alive.

By the end, five children ages 9 to 14 were murdered by the police, as were six adults, their bodies mostly in pieces. Sixty-one homes were burned; 250 people rendered homeless. The one adult who survived—Ramona Africa—was arrested and served seven years in jail. The one child survivor was torn from those who love him and put in foster care.

Above: Osage Avenue burns after Philadelphia police dropped bomb on MOVE house. May 13, 1985. 11 people died and 61 homes burned down.

THE CRIMINALS AND CO-CONSPIRATORS: Mayor Wilson Goode, the first Black mayor of Philadelphia, authorized and oversaw the massacre, along with other city leaders, which included former generals, and FBI agents.

The Philadelphia Police Department carried it out.

The FBI took part in the months of planning that went into this atrocity, and provided the city with the military-grade C-4 explosives for the bomb and other heavy weaponry.

The news media collaborated, before and after the crime, in painting MOVE as “dangerous terrorists” who left the authorities “no choice” except a full-scale military assault.

Dozens of political leaders, including U.S. Attorney General Edwin Meese III, defended and praised Mayor Goode for his handling of the assault. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates called Goode a “hero.” Not a single major political leader—Democrat or Republican, Black or white—denounced it.

THE ALIBI: Philadelphia authorities claimed that MOVE was a violent terrorist organization, holding a peaceful neighborhood hostage. The city claimed that it “just wanted to protect the neighborhood,” and that MOVE was digging a network of tunnels, building a weapons stockpile and plotting a major incident, perhaps a hostage taking. They further claimed that MOVE “wanted a violent confrontation” and the city was just responding to that threat. According to then-district attorney Ed Rendell, “These are people who essentially committed suicide, and murdered their own children.”

Above: As the neighborhood burned, hundreds gathered in the street, indicting the police and chanting “Murderers! Murderers!”

THE ACTUAL MOTIVE: MOVE was a Black radical organization formed in the early 1970s that refused to respect present-day America and its prevailing values. It exposed the rulers of this society for the liars, racists and murderers they are, denounced their brutal police, and talked about “revolution.”

MOVE thought of revolution as changing people’s thinking and behavior, not overthrowing the whole system, and MOVE’s political actions were peaceful. But when MOVE members were threatened and confronted by the authorities, they did not back down. The rulers of this system considered this to be intolerable, especially coming just a few years after the U.S. had been rocked by mass rebellions of Black people.

Over a year before the May 13 attack, city authorities began meeting and planning how to put a stop to MOVE once and for all—these plans included building models of the MOVE house and practicing exploding it!

Mayor Goode said: “If I had to make the decision all over again, knowing what I know now, I would make the same decision because I think we cannot permit any terrorist group, any revolutionary group in this city, to hold a whole neighborhood or a whole city hostage. And we have to send that message out loud and clear, over and over again…” (Emphasis added.) Never mind the fact that the most common definition of terrorism is the murder of innocent civilians for a political purpose—and that MOVE never did anything remotely resembling that, while Goode committed exactly that crime in his bombing.

While the perpetrators of this horrendous crime – the mayor and the police – walked free, the only adult survivor, Ramona Africa (shown here speaking in 2014), was arrested and spent seven years in prison for refusing to renounce MOVE, while the surviving child, Birdie Africa, was seized by the system and taken away from his family. Photo: YouTube

Addendum: Repeat Offenders

The MOVE massacre is not the first time this system has bombed and burned out rebellious Black people.

In June 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, a white mob attempting to lynch a Black prisoner was stopped, partly by Black residents armed with shotguns. In response, white supremacists went on a rampage. A mob of over 1,000—and including police—stormed the Greenwood area, at that time known as the “Negro Wall Street” because of its vibrant Black-owned economy. Looting, burning, and shooting people, the mob met fierce resistance from armed Blacks. The police commandeered a half-dozen small planes, supposedly to provide surveillance for their attack, though many reported that the planes also dropped explosive and incendiary devices on the Black community.

By the time it was over, up to 100 Black people had been murdered, and perhaps two dozen of their white attackers killed. The population of Greenwood had been rounded up by police and forced into detention centers. The whole neighborhood, including 1,256 homes, had been burned to the ground; only a few buildings survived.

Taken in by an unending media and police campaign against MOVE and shocked by the scale of violence unleashed against MOVE, too many people stood by paralyzed and did not rise up in response. A “Draw the Line” statement, initiated by Carl Dix and others, was signed by more than 100 prominent Black figures and others denouncing the collusion of Black elected officials in the repression of the Black community.

Download JPG | PDF

source: https://revcom.us/a/438/american-crime-case-99-move-massacre-en.html

Remember the MOVE Massacre – May 13, 1985

Racist Government Bombed Black Philadelphia The following article is reprinted in slightly edited form from Workers Vanguard No. 959 (21 May). May 13 marks the 25th anniversary of the 1985 MOVE massacre. Eleven people, five children, were burned alive after police, acting on orders from black Democratic mayor Wilson Goode and in collusion with the Feds, dropped a powerful incendiary bomb on the Osage Avenue home of the largely black MOVE commune in West Philadelphia. The firebombing followed a 12-hour siege during which the cops unloaded over 10,000 rounds of ammunition into the house. Firefighters on site were held back, and cops shot at anyone who tried to escape the burning building. The inferno spread, destroying 61 houses and leaving hundreds homeless in the black neighborhood. Then-president Ronald Reagan, the FBI, the Philly cops and Wilson Goode were all responsible for this hideous crime, a stark example of the racist terror that black people are subject to in capitalist America. None of the perpetrators ever faced charges, while Ramona Africa, the sole adult survivor, served every day of her seven-year prison sentence. Immediately after the massacre, and ever since, the Spartacist League and Partisan Defense Committee, a class-struggle, non-sectarian legal and social defense organization associated with the SL, have sought to sear this racist atrocity into the memory of the working class. In July 1985, the SL held a public forum in New York City to honor the MOVE martyrs, at which family members and supporters spoke. We wrote in protest that the mass murder carried the bloody signature of the Reagan years and was intended “to send a message to black America and ‘radicals’ of every stripe. ‘Anti-terrorism’ means massive government terror against anyone who is out of step in Reagan’s America” (Workers Vanguard No. 379, 17 May 1985). Under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the onslaught against black people, synonymous with Reagan reaction, has continued unabated to this day. From the moment that MOVE surfaced in the early 1970s in the racist hellhole of Philadelphia, denouncing “the system” and defending the right to armed self-defense, this back-to-nature group was subjected to police harassment, beatings and hundreds of arrests. On 8 August 1978, 600 cops unleashed a barrage of gunfire as they stormed MOVE’s Powelton Village compound. When MOVE members emerged from their home, the police dragged, kicked and stomped Delbert Africa nearly to death. Nine MOVE members were framed up and sentenced in 1981 to 30-100 years on charges of killing a cop who died in the police crossfire at Powelton Village—even though the judge stated that he didn’t have the “faintest idea” who killed the cop. Merle Africa died in her prison cell in 1998. The rest of the MOVE 9 are still in Pennsylvania’s dungeons. In an expression of solidarity with those imprisoned for standing up to racist capitalist repression, the PDC provided monthly stipends for Ramona Africa during her imprisonment as it has also done for the MOVE 9 and death row political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, who became a MOVE supporter while reporting on the MOVE 9 trial. Mumia, an innocent man framed up on false charges of killing police officer Daniel Faulkner, was sentenced to death in 1982 for his political views. His case is what the death penalty is all about—a legacy of chattel slavery, the lynch rope made legal. A former Black Panther leader as a teenager in the 1960s, Mumia became a prominent radical radio journalist known as “The Voice of the Voiceless” who reported on the racist Philly cops and courts. It was during the sham trial of the MOVE 9 that Mumia became sympathetic to the MOVE organization. To avenge the MOVE martyrs, the working class must fight to smash this capitalist system, whose rulers inflict a special oppression on black people as a means to divide and attack the entire working class. We will not forget the MOVE massacre! Free the MOVE members, Mumia and all class-war prisoners! For black liberation through socialist revolution! source: http://www.partisandefense.org/csdn/36/move.html

LAW AND DISORDER: NON-VIOLENT CIVIL RIGHTS CAMPAIGNS “THEN” VS. ARMED PROTESTORS “NOW”

“I think this is the most ridiculous thing that has ever happened. The nigras are just as free as we are, they have the same opportunity to work and build their part of the town up the same as we have. I just don’t understand it and don’t approve of it. I’m gonna stand up for my rights.”

“Well I think if they remain peaceful it would be a lot better than perhaps the violence.”

“I don’t think it’s the time right now, I think they have equal rights though.”

“I don’t like it, I think it’s tryin to put something on us that we don’t want.”

“I sure don’t like it that’s for sure… I’m afraid we might have niggers next door.”

– Random whites in Albany, Georgia asked about their reaction to 1964 Civil Rights Bill and black protests

As I look at the footage of assault weapon-toting white men pushing their way into the State Capitol building in Lansing, Michigan I can’t help but to ask why white people can call themselves “peaceful” protestors when they freely carry assault weapons as they threaten their governor because she will not open the state up before public health officials deem it safe. I saw armed white men in Madison, Wisconsin during a protest that was also called “peaceful.”

America has a clear double standard for armed whites versus everyone else. I don’t even care if there is a law that allows open carry in place because I know that this would never be allowed if the people with military grade assault rifles were not white. And don’t try to convince me that these were simply Americans taking advantage of their Second Amendment rights. What they are protesting against are stay-at-home orders designed to slow the spread of a deadly pandemic that has taken more American lives than the Vietnam War and has nothing to do with the Second Amendsecond amendment rights ment.

None of the stay-at-home orders has ruled that people can’t bear arms. Obviously people have the right to protest unless they are strictly told they don’t have a permit as was done in Madison. These so-called law abiding citizens not only violated a state order by Governor Evers to stay home but also dared the authorities to stop them from marching without a permit. They did not even try.

I did not see the same response when peaceful protests happened around the country to demand an end to police violence against blacks. I know that none of these protests included assault weapons carried by someone other than the heavily armed police. Can you imagine what the news coverage would have said if just one black man showed up at one of these Black Lives Matter protests with a weapon? All hell would have broken lose.

Tear gas and rubber bullets were raining down on unarmed black protestors in Ferguson and Baltimore. Police were standing in ballistic hardware behind armored vehicles with snipers targeting unarmed civilians including children in peaceful protests. There were no armored vehicles, snipers or police helicopters on hand as crowds of protestors including armed white men descended on Madison and Lansing. No news reports clamored to talk about how dangerous and violent these protestors were.

This is a perfect example of the frustration at the hypocrisy we as black people talk about in this country. These double standards are clear for us to see, but white people generally see nothing nefarious in them. I get tired of hearing white  defend these “thugs.” Yes I said thugs, because this is who these men are. They bring their assault rifles, Confederate flags, swastikas and bad attitudes to try to bully their way into getting what they want.

Every time I hear someone refer to a black child or adult with sagging pants as a thug it makes me angry. I see people that obviously don’t see assault weapon carrying white men in the same light. How can anyone be frightened at the sight of a black person whose pants are not pulled up, but feel perfectly safe when a group of clearly angry white men with assault weapons are pushing their way into the state Capitol in Michigan?

“Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us. Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our Sergeants-at-Arms more than today.” – Michigan State Senator Dayna Polehanki, Tweet from inside Capitol building on April 30

Much as he did when White Supremacists wreaked havoc in Charlottesville in 2017, President Trump defended these men by Tweeting “The Governor of Michigan should give a little, and put out the fire. These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal.” He’s promoting their bullying tactics and claiming these are good people, a term he also used to describe the mobs of White supremacists in Charlottesville yet there has been no national outrage over this Tweet.

Back in 2015 while still a Republican presidential candidate, Trump complained about unarmed Black Lives Matter protestors by telling Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, “I think they’re trouble. I think they’re looking for trouble.” He went further by asserting, “I looked at a couple of the people that were interviewed from the group. I saw them with hate coming down the street last week talking about cops and police, and what should be done to them. And that was not good. And I think it’s a disgrace that they’re getting away with it.” And most significantly he said, “I don’t think it’s going to end up good. The fact is all lives matter. That includes black and it includes white and it includes everybody else.”

Well what does the COVID-19 outbreak in Michigan tell us? If all lives supposedly matter then why are people angrily demanding an end to measures put in place to save lives. As of May 2nd black people in Michigan were 32 percent of the coronavirus cases and 41 percent of the COVID-19 deaths despite being just 15.2 percent of the population. Do these protestors care about those statistics? Is it a crisis to them that over 1,600 black people in Michigan have been killed by the virus or is opening the economy more important? 1,049 people have died in Detroit, 77.3 percent of them have been black.

Last year a heavily armed right-wing militia group calling themselves the United Constitutional Patriots kidnapped and detained at gunpoint Central American migrants at the U.S. border. How did the government respond? They sent border patrol agents to force them to release the captives but did not arrest a single one of these men but did take the migrants into custody. The group had been posting videos of their activity online for months. “These individuals should not attempt to exercise authority reserved for law enforcement,” New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas said in a statement.

The New Mexico American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent a letter to New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grishman saying, “The vigilante members of the organization…who posted videos and photographs of the unlawful arrests to social media, are not police or law enforcement and they have no authority under New Mexico or federal law to detain or arrest migrants in the United States. Their actions undermine the legitimate efforts of our state’s law enforcement officials to keep New Mexico families safe and they erode community trust.” A spokesman for Customs and Border Protection said that the agency does not endorse “private groups or organizations taking enforcement matters into their own hands.”

Back in January 2016 a group of armed, far-right white men led a six-week standoff against federal law enforcement officers after they illegally seized and occupied the headquarters of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Harney County, Oregon. The leader of the group Ammon Bundy, along with three other men were arrested and charged in federal court with multiple charges. In January 2018 the trial judge declared a mistrial stating that, “The court finds that the universal sense of justice has been violated,” as a result of misconduct by the federal government.

Bundy became a cult hero. On March 26, 2020, Idaho’s Governor Brad Little issued a stay-at-home order. Bundy held a public meeting declaring he would fight the order and provide support for protestors. “I will be there,” Bundy said. “I will bring as many people as we can. We will form a legal defense for you, a political defense for you, and we will also, if necessary, provide a physical defense for you, so that you can continue in your rights.” This veiled threat about a “physical defense” should have been national news but it was never considered important enough to cover.

A group of armed, angry white men are allowed to confront law enforcement and flaunt “their rights” without suffering bodily harm in Idaho while the FBI has labeled unarmed black protestors “Black Identity Extremists” (BIE). They made false claims that Black Lives Matter protestors were making “premeditated, retaliatory lethal” attacks on police officers around the country. They issued an “intelligence assessment” sent to law enforcement agencies around the country warning them of “ideologically motivated, violent criminal activity within the BIE movement.” Of course this has proven to be not only highly inaccurate and inflammatory but incited opposition to Black Lives Matter protests around the country.

We recall very clearly that just hours after he murdered nine black members of the Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina the avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof was treated with kid gloves in the eyes of many and even brought a meal from Burger King during his interrogation by police.

When we see armed, angry white men in Madison and Lansing we are reminded that not so long ago armed, angry white men beat down and attempted to burn to death Freedom Riders in Birmingham and Anniston, Alabama. We remember the images and video of armed, angry white State Troopers in Selma, Alabama trampling and beating unarmed peaceful black protestors on the Edmund Pettis Bridge in 1965. We remember the images of armed, angry white men destroying property and murdering blacks when James Meredith attempted to integrate “Ole Miss” in 1962 before 3,000 federal troops quelled the riot.

We also remember that in each of these instances police took a hands off approach, standing by watching, and in the case of Freedom Riders beaten in Birmingham Police Commissioner Bull Connor made it clear to the mobsters that, “when the bus arrives at the terminal, the mob will have 15 minutes to burn, bomb, kill and maim without police intervention or arrests.” The FBI made was aware of the attack in Birmingham ahead of time but did nothing to intervene.

Howard K. Smith, a CBS reporter, described the violence on the radio: “Toughs grabbed the passengers into alleys and corridors, pounding them with pipes, with key rings, and with fists. One passenger was knocked down at my feet by twelve of the hoodlums, and his face was beaten and kicked until it was a bloody pulp.”

All of these examples of law and disorder are singed in the collective memory of black people. When we see our community being devastated by the COVID-19 pandemic and armed, angry white men fighting for their “rights” to end the stay-at-home orders of multiple governors it is a clear reminder that white people can arm themselves in so-called peaceful demonstrations while no alarm bells go off among most of their white peers.

When we look back on the reactions to peaceful protests by unarmed blacks in recent years and during the Civil Rights Movement the hypocrisy is plain as day. Dr. King was celebrated because he took a non-violent stand against violent mobs of white citizens and law enforcement agencies. The Black Panther Party for Self Defense (known as the Black Panthers) in Oakland, California was formed to protest rampant police brutality against blacks in that city. California was at that time an open carry state. The Panthers marched to Sacramento, the capitol of California, on March 2, 1967 legally armed with rifles, shotguns and pistols. They were described by the Sacramento Bee has having “invaded” the Capitol. “Two dozen armed Negroes entered the state Capitol at noon today and 10 made their way to the back of the Assembly Chamber before they were disarmed and marched away by the state police.” They were perfectly within their rights under California law to carry weapons into the Capitol.

Black Panther leader Bobby Seale of Oakland read a page-long statement declaring: “The Black Panther party for self-defense calls upon the American people in general and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California Legislature which is considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time that racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder and repression of black people.”

Later Governor Ronald Reagan along with the state legislature passed the Mulford Act, a state bill prohibiting the open carry of loaded firearms, along with an addendum prohibiting loaded firearms in the state Capitol. Interestingly, the National Rifle Association (NRA) at the time backed that law and others that mandated stricter gun regulations in the 1960s.

“The law was part of a wave of laws that were passed in the late 1960s regulating guns, especially to target African-Americans,” according to Adam Winkler, author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms. “Including the Gun Control Act of 1968, which adopted new laws prohibiting certain people from owning guns, providing for beefed up licensing and inspections of gun dealers and restricting the importation of cheap Saturday night specials [pocket pistols] that were popular in some urban communities.” What he did not mention was that these particular weapons were intentionally flooding black communities as gun makers saw a huge profit.

When we see such double standards we must call them out. We are not blindly sitting by not paying attention to the actions of these armed, angry white men while our community suffers disproportionately during this pandemic. It is time someone calls out this inaction and lack of outrage by white people around the country. They are not outraged enough at the sight of armed, angry white men pushing an agenda that is certain to lead to more premature re-openings of states and the subsequent reemergence of the coronavirus in the months ahead.

Malcolm X called out the double standard whereby blacks had to be non-violent in the face of constant violence from whites.

“We will be nonviolent with those who are nonviolent with us… I don’t call it violence when it’s in self-defense. I call it intelligence.” – Malcolm X

When armed, angry white men are allowed to freely express themselves by showing their assault rifles at “peaceful” protests none of us are truly safe. There is no rational reason these men need to bring assault weapons designed for use by the military to a “peaceful” protest. White Americans just chalk it up to “boys will be boys.” The black community sees the dishonesty and duplicity in this double standard. We would never be allowed to express ourselves in this same way without facing the wrath of law enforcement.

The fact that organized groups of armed, angry white men have been allowed to grow unabated over the past several decades should scare everyone. America did not learn from what happened in Charlottesville. The clear message sent that day was not just one of hate but of growing power since they received a pat on the back and wink from the President of the United States.

White Supremacists groups are now using the pandemic to actively recruit new members online as many are stuck inside with plenty of screen time on their computers. Last month, the Department of Homeland Security warned law enforcement officials throughout the United States of the mobilization of violent extremists in response to stay-at-home measures, according to the New York Times. The New Jersey Office of Homeland Security and Preparedness issued a statement on March 21st warning about how these groups are ramping up to exploit the anger over stay-at-home orders.

“White supremacist extremists are taking advantage of the COVID-19 pandemic to advocate for the theory of accelerationism. The theory states that participating in mass attacks or creating other forms of chaos will accelerate the imminent and necessary collapse of society in order to build a racially pure nation. A neo-Nazi media group that promotes this theory has encouraged supporters to incite panic while people are practicing social isolation during the COVID-19 outbreak, which includes discharging firearms in cities and putting bullet-sized holes into car windows.”

These groups have also spread disinformation to stoke fear across the nation. In early March they sent a text falsely stating, “that President Donald Trump would enact the Stafford Act and order a two-week mandatory quarantine. The National Security Council quickly took to Twitter on March 15 to disprove the rumors of a national quarantine.” When we see these men carrying military grade arms wearing bulletproof vests among these protestors we better pay attention to the clear message that’s being sent. Let’s not just wantonly dismiss them as a bunch of gun fanatics or pretend they are like the American colonists protecting their rights. It is more sinister because these far-right groups have used these images to promote the coming race war by showing that they are building an army of supporters. Many of the protestors in the crowds are clearly not understanding how their presence at these protests allow them to be a proxy of the White Supremacists pushing this agenda. They stand side by side with these people and are in effect showing their support for them.

Despite some people attempting to claim these protests as being aligned with those of the Civil Rights Movement, nothing could be further from the truth. We were fighting to save the lives of blacks killed by white Ku Klux Klan members, vigilantes and lynch mobs just as these stay-at-home orders are saving lives that would be taken by the coronavirus. Those 1950s and 60s protests were clearly justified. We can learn a valuable lesson from what Dr. King said about the inaction of white moderates in his famous Letter From a Birmingham Jail.

“You deplore the demonstrations taking place in Birmingham. But your statement, I am sorry to say, fails to express a similar concern for the conditions that brought about the demonstrations … It is unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham, but it is even more unfortunate that the city’s white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative … I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure. Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.”

© PHOTO

source: http://www.milwaukeeindependent.com/featured/law-disorder-non-violent-civil-rights-campaigns-vs-armed-protestors-now/

Lester Maddox and Jim Brown Get Into Heated Debate on Segregation | The Dick Cavett Show

 

Governor Lester Maddox and Ex-Football player Jim Brown get into a heated race debate. Date aired – 18 December 1970 – Lester Maddox

For clip licensing opportunities please visit https://www.globalimageworks.com/the-…

Dick Cavett has been nominated for eleven Emmy awards (the most recent in 2012 for the HBO special, Mel Brooks and Dick Cavett Together Again), and won three. Spanning five decades, Dick Cavett’s television career has defined excellence in the interview format. He started at ABC in 1968, and also enjoyed success on PBS, USA, and CNBC

His most recent television successes were the September 2014 PBS special, Dick Cavett’s Watergate, followed April 2015 by Dick Cavett’s Vietnam. He has appeared in movies, tv specials, tv commercials, and several Broadway plays. He starred in an off-Broadway production ofHellman v. McCarthy in 2014 and reprised the role at Theatre 40 in LA February 2015

Cavett has published four books beginning with Cavett (1974) and Eye on Cavett (1983), co-authored with Christopher Porterfield. His two recent books — Talk Show: Confrontations, Pointed Commentary, and Off-Screen Secrets (2010) and Brief Encounters: Conversations, Magic moments, and Assorted Hijinks(October 2014) are both collections of his online opinion column, written for The New York Times since 2007. Additionally, he has written for The New Yorker, TV Guide, Vanity Fair, and elsewhere.

Whites See Black Kids as “Disturbing the Peace”

 

Sky-high rates of suspension of Black students are caused by a pervasive “system of anti-Blackness” rooted in slavery and Jim Crow, said Dr. Justin Coles, who specializes in Urban Education and Critical Race Studies at the Fordham University Graduate School. “The design of schooling in a ‘slave’ society is not meant for Black youth survival,” said Coles. “When Black bodies enter space they are disturbing the white mythical peace.”

source: Whites See Black Kids as “Disturbing the Peace”

The Black Plague

The Black Plague

The rapidity with which the pandemic has consumed black communities provides an unvarnished look into the dynamics of race and class that existed long before it emerged

“Racism in the shadow of American slavery has diminished almost all of the life chances of African-Americans.”

The old African-American aphorism “When white America catches a cold, black America gets pneumonia” has a new, morbid twist: when white America catches the novel coronavirus, black Americans die.

Thousands of white Americans have also died from the virus, but the pace at which African-Americans are dying has transformed this public-health crisis into an object lesson in racial and class inequality. According to a Reuters report, African-Americans are more likely to die of covid-19 than any other group in the U.S. It is still early in the course of the pandemic, and the demographic data is incomplete, but the partial view is enough to prompt a sober reflection on this bitter harvest of American racism.

Louisiana, with more than twenty-one thousand reported infections, has the largest number of coronavirus cases outside of the Northeast and the Midwest. When the state’s governor, John Bel Edwards, announced recently that it would begin to provide data about the racial and ethnic breakdowns of those who have died, he included the grim acknowledgement that African-Americans, thirty-three per cent of Louisiana’s population, comprise seventy per cent of the dead.

The small city of Albany, Georgia, two hundred miles south of Atlanta, was the site of a heroic civil-rights standoff between the city’s black residents and its white police chief in the early nineteen-sixties. Today, more than twelve hundred people in the county have confirmed covid-19 cases, and at least seventy-eight people have died. According to earlier reports, eighty-one per cent of the dead are African-American.

“African-Americans are more likely to die of covid-19 than any other group in the U.S.”

In Michigan, African-Americans make up fourteen per cent of the state’s population, but, currently, they account for thirty-three per cent of its reported infections and forty per cent of its deaths. Twenty-six per cent of the state’s infections and twenty-five per cent of deaths are in Detroit, a city that is seventy-nine per cent African-American. covid-19 is also ravaging the city’s suburbs that have large black populations.

The virus has shaken African-Americans in Chicago, who account for fifty-two per cent of the city’s confirmed cases and a startling seventy-two per cent of deaths—far outpacing their proportion of the city’s population.

As many have already noted, this macabre roll call reflects the fact that African-Americans are more likely to have preëxisting health conditions that make the coronavirus particularly deadly. This is certainly true. These conditions—diabetes, asthma, heart disease, and obesity—are critical factors, and they point to the persistence of racial discrimination, which has long heightened black vulnerability to premature death, as the scholar Ruthie Wilson Gilmore has said for years. Racism in the shadow of American slavery has diminished almost all of the life chances of African-Americans. Black people are poorer, more likely to be underemployed, condemned to substandard housing, and given inferior health care because of their race. These factors explain why African-Americans are sixty per cent more likely to have been diagnosed with diabetes than white Americans, and why black women are sixty per cent more likely to have high blood pressure than white women. Such health disparities are as much markers of racial inequality as mass incarceration or housing discrimination.

“African-Americans are more likely to have preëxisting health conditions.”

It is easy to simply point to the prevalence of these health conditions among African-Americans as the most important explanation for their rising death rates. But it is also important to acknowledge that black vulnerability is especially heightened by the continued ineptitude of the federal government in response to the coronavirus. The mounting carnage in Trump’s America did not have to happen to the extent that it has.  Covid-19 testing remains maddeningly inconsistent and unavailable, with access breaking down along the predictable lines. In Philadelphia, a scientist at Drexel University found that, in Zip Codes with a “lower proportion of minorities and higher incomes,” a higher number of tests were administered. In Zip Codes with a higher number of unemployed and uninsured residents, there were fewer tests. Taken together, testing in higher-income neighborhoods is six times greater than it is in poorer neighborhoods.

Inconsistent testing, in combination with steadfast denials from the White House about the threat of the virus, exacerbated the appalling lack of preparation for this catastrophe. With more early coördination, hospitals might have procured the necessary equipment and staffed up properly, potentially avoiding the onslaught that has occurred. The consequences are devastating. In the Detroit area, where the disease is surging, about fifteen hundred hospital workers, including five hundred nurses at Beaumont Health, Michigan’s largest hospital system, are off of the job with symptoms of covid-19. Early in the crisis, at New York City’s Mount Sinai Hospital, nurses were reduced to wearing garbage bags for their protection. Across the country, health-care providers are being asked to ration face masks and shields, dramatically raising the potential of their own infection, and thereby increasing the strain on the already overextended hospitals.

“Testing in higher-income neighborhoods is six times greater than it is in poorer neighborhoods.”

The early wave of disproportionate black deaths was hastened by Trumpian malfeasance, but the deaths to come are the predictable outcome of decades of disinvestment and institutional neglect. In mid-March, Toni Preckwinkle, the president of the Cook County Board in Illinois, which encompasses Chicago, lamented the covid-19 crisis and proclaimed that “we are all in this together,” but, weeks later, she closed the emergency room of the public Provident Hospital in the predominantly black South Side. Preckwinkle claimed that the closure would last for a month and was a response to a single health-care worker becoming infected with the virus. Leave aside the fact that nurses, doctors, and other health-care workers have been testing positive for covid-19 across the country, and their facilities have not been shuttered. It is a decision that simply could not have been made, in the midst of a historic pandemic, in any of the city’s wealthy, white neighborhoods on the North Side.

Meanwhile, in Cook County Jail, three hundred and twenty-three inmates and a hundred and ninety-six correctional officers have tested positive for covid-19. Not only have officials not closed the county jail as a result but they also have yet to release a significant number of jailed people, even though the facility has the highest density of covid-19 cases in Chicago. These are the kinds of decisions that explain why there is a thirty-year difference in life expectancy—in the same city—between the black neighborhood of Englewood and the white neighborhood of Streeterville. They are also just the latest examples of the ways that racism is the ultimate result of the decisions that government officials make, regardless of their intentions. Preckwinkle is African-American, and the chairperson of the Cook County Democratic Party, but her decisions regarding Provident Hospital and Cook County Jail will still deeply wound African-Americans across Chicago.

“There is a thirty-year difference in life expectancy between the black neighborhood of Englewood and the white neighborhood of Streeterville.”

The rapidity with which the pandemic has consumed black communities is shocking, but it also provides an unvarnished look into the dynamics of race and class that existed long before it emerged. The most futile conversation in the U.S. is the argument about whether race or class is the main impediment to African-American social mobility. In reality, they cannot be separated from each other. African-Americans are suffering through this crisis not only because of racism but also because of how racial discrimination has tied them to the bottom of the U.S. class hierarchy.

Since emancipation, racism has underwritten black economic hardship. That hardship is expressed through the concentration of African-Americans in low-wage jobs—many of which are now ironically designated “essential.” According to a report in the Times, Annie Grant, a fifty-five-year-old black woman who worked at the Tyson Foods poultry plant in Camilla, Georgia, said that she was suffering from fevers and chills, and she told her children that she was ordered to return to work despite exhibiting symptoms of the virus. Earlier this month, she died from covid-19. Two more workers at the plant have died, and others have complained about the lack of protective equipment and the difficulty of social distancing there, but Tyson has kept it open. (A spokesperson for Tyson Foods has said that the company has instituted safeguards for employees, including “an adequate supply of protective face coverings for production workers.”) When Vice-President Mike Pence spoke about the role of low-wage, essential work amid a widening outbreak in food-processing plants, he said, “You are giving a great service to the people of the United States of America, and we need you to continue, as a part of what we call critical infrastructure, to show up and do your job.”

“Race and class cannot be separated from each other.”

The intersecting threats of hunger, eviction, and unemployment drive poor and working-class African-Americans toward the possibility of infection. Fewer than twenty per cent of African-Americans have jobs that allow them to work at home. Black workers are concentrated in public-facing jobs, working in mass transit, home health care, retail, and service, where social distancing is virtually impossible. And then there is the concentration of African-Americans in institutions where social distancing is impossible, including prisons, jails, and homeless shelters. African-Americans make up the majority of the incarcerated and the homeless. Forty-six per cent of African-Americans perceive covid-19 as a “major threat” to their health, and yet race and class combine to put black people in danger. These numbers are the crisis wrapped inside of the pandemic.

Poverty, in turn, reinforces ideological assumptions about race. When working-class black neighborhoods have high rates of substandard housing and poor maintenance, and black communities suffer from poor diets and widespread obesity, these characteristics are conflated with race. Racializing poverty helps to distract from the systemic factors at the foundation of both racial and economic inequality. Instead, there is an overabundance of attention placed on the diagnosis and repair of supposedly damaged African-Americans. On April 10th, Trump’s Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, who is black, instructed African-American and Latino communities to avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs during the pandemic. In a familiar paternalistic ode, Adams advised, “We need you to do this, if not for yourself, then for your abuela. Do it for your granddaddy. Do it for your big mama. Do it for your pop-pop.” He added, “We need you to step up.”

These remarks were a reminder of how the focus on the comorbidities accompanying covid-19, such as diabetes and hypertension, can be easily transformed into discussions about the dietary and exercise habits of the black working class. But that is an irresponsibly one-sided discussion, one that ignores the comorbidities of food deserts, the diminishing returns of food stamps, and the depression and alienation that blanket poor and working-class black neighborhoods. It is not the absence of willpower that is fuelling the pandemic’s deadly effects in black communities. And the disproportionate impact of the virus is not caused by a language barrier requiring that African-Americans be spoken to with “targeted language,” as Adams later explained.

“Fewer than twenty per cent of African-Americans have jobs that allow them to work at home.”

Adams’s remarks were also a reminder that, even when poverty is not the issue, racism or racially inflected assumptions about African-Americans influence the ways that they are cared for within the health-care industry. Not only are black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women are but college-educated black women’s mortality rates in childbirth are higher than those of white women with just a high-school degree. The stereotypes of African-Americans as fat and lazy, carefree and reckless, impetuous, irresponsible, and ultimately undeserving, are absorbed into the consciousness of the general public, health-care providers among them. These stereotypes are rooted in misperceptions of poor and working-class black life, but, because race is widely seen as biologically based in our society, including by doctors, they are assumed to be characteristics inherited by all black people. In a series of studies published in 2017, researchers found “an implicit preference for white patients, especially among white physicians.” Another study found that doctors believed that white patients were more medically coöperative than African-American patients. A 2016 study of medical students and residents found that almost half of them believe that there are biological differences between black bodies and white bodies—including the false notion that the nerve endings of black people are less sensitive than those of whites. These findings may give some insight into a more recent study that showed that black patients were forty per cent less likely to receive medication to ease acute pain.

Discrimination against African-American patients is so embedded in health-care practices that a national study found that, even when hospitals and insurers relied on an algorithm to manage care, African-American patients received on average eighteen hundred dollars less of care per year than white patients with the same chronic health conditions. African-Americans had to be sicker than whites before they were referred for more specialized help. It’s not just poverty that leads to misdiagnoses and inconsistent care; it is also deeply embedded assumptions that black bodies are damaged and, thus, disposable.

“African-Americans had to be sicker than whites before they were referred for more specialized help.”

It’s not just Trump appointees who make condescending or ignorant statements. Even a liberal stalwart like Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is not immune to fixating on perceptions of black complicity in poor health outcomes. In response to the reporting on black deaths from the coronavirus, Lightfoot said, “Now, we’re not going to be able to erase decades of health disparities in a few days or a week, but we have to impress upon people in these communities that there are things they can do—there are tools at their disposal that they can use to help themselves, but we have to call this out as it is and make sure we’ve got a very robust, multitiered response now and going forward, and we will.”

What are the “tools” at the disposal of black communities in Chicago that would allow them to “help themselves” out of the covid-19 crisis? Lightfoot did not elaborate, but this sounds like loaded language that shifts the blame for black health disparities onto the segregated black neighborhoods of Chicago. Lightfoot’s comments underestimate the difficulty of achieving good health and wellness while also combatting the forces of underemployment, evictions, and police violence—all of which define much of working-class black life in Chicago. The over-all unemployment rate for young black men and women in Chicago is thirty-seven per cent, compared with six per cent for their white peers. It is certainly easier to promote these mysterious “tools” than it is to confront the decades-long crisis of disinvestment and unemployment in the city, but that is actually what is necessary to change these circumstances.

There is an additional consequence of letting the coronavirus crisis lapse into a narrow focus on the personal choices of African-Americans. The assumption that if African-Americans just change their personal behavior then they can join the ranks of the fit and healthy ignores the systemic issues that have created a general crisis of health and wellness and access to medical care in the United States. The problem that black people face is not just one of exclusion from adequate health care, with inclusion as the cure. Simply calling for “equal access” can reinforce the perception that the problem is one of exclusion alone, when the deeper problem is U.S. society itself.

“The over-all unemployment rate for young black men and women in Chicago is thirty-seven per cent.”

When James Baldwin, in his searing 1963 book The Fire Next Time, posed the question of whether African-Americans should integrate into the “burning house” of the United States, he argued that the question demanded a deeper look into U.S. society. Baldwin wrote, “White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live. Rather, the white man is himself in sore need of new standards, which will release him from his confusion and place him once again in fruitful communion with the depths of his own being. And I repeat: The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.”

Racism has meant that most African-Americans suffer to greater degrees than most white Americans. But, in the past several years, there have been multiple reports showing that the life expectancy for the average white person has gone in reverse. This does not normally happen in the developed world. But, in this country, this phenomenon is driven by alcoholism, opioid abuse, and suicide. Far from white privilege, this is white pathos.

Unequal access to health care may be important in the immediate context of the pandemic, but this alone doesn’t tell us much about the general crisis with for-profit health care in the United States. It also doesn’t tell us much about the larger social crises in the U.S. that underwrite the particular health-care problems of African-Americans and white Americans. A glimpse into those larger crises was provided by the United Nations in 2017, when its investigators interviewed people in several cities about poverty in the United States. The report concluded that “the United States already leads the developed world in income and wealth inequality, and it is now moving full steam ahead to make itself even more unequal. . . . High child and youth poverty rates perpetuate the intergenerational transmission of poverty very effectively, and ensure that the American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.” The U.S. has the highest youth and infant mortality rates among wealthy countries. U.S. citizens live “shorter and sicker” lives than those of other prosperous democratic nations.

“The American dream is rapidly becoming the American illusion.”

When public officials lament the way that covid-19 is engulfing black communities, the larger question is, what are they prepared to do about it? The immediate answer should be the rapid expansion of Medicaid and Medicare. But access to health care is only one small piece of the dynamic that compromises the health of African-Americans. Good health-care practice must also include relief from the threat and stress of evictions. Black women constitute about forty-four per cent of those who are evicted from their homes in urban areas; as a result, they disproportionately experience homelessness and depression and, in extreme cases, commit suicide. Good health care means higher-paying jobs that allow black women and their families to worry less about monthly bills and the costs of child care and education. Black women in Louisiana, the state where African-Americans face the highest mortality rates from covid-19, make forty-seven cents to every dollar made by white men.

We periodically endure national crises that force us to look at the poverty and inequality that exist all around us. We hear those in power, including elected officials, breathlessly discuss the shameful conditions that produce these outcomes, but they pledge little in terms of specific policies and concrete actions to reverse them. Trump says that the higher rates of black death are “a tremendous challenge. . . . We want to find the reason to it.” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, who dutifully accompanies Trump to his press briefings, provided an explanation that included existing health problems, but, Fauci concluded, “There is nothing we can do about it right now except to give them the best possible care and to avoid complications.”

Expressions of concern, well wishes, and promises of “a very robust multitiered response” sound good at press conferences. But many elected officials who tell us that they mean well are so trapped by a prevailing hostility to spending in order to rebuild the public sector that they are unable to reach actual solutions. In the midst of this surging pandemic, the mayor of Philadelphia, Jim Kenney, a Democrat, recently announced a round of budget cuts and reduced services, saying, “It’s not going to be easy, and it’s not going to be pleasant . . . but, at the end of it, we need a balanced budget.” Philadelphia is the poorest of the large American cities where African-Americans are suffering the most from the covid-19 outbreak. And, at just the moment when many are highlighting the ways that inequality and our poor civic infrastructure are failing the public—especially the black public—the mayor has announced “unpleasant” budget cuts.

“Good health care means higher-paying jobs that allow black women and their families to worry less about monthly bills.”

It’s not just Philadelphia. For decades, across the country, cities large and small have been committed to a development model that prioritizes attracting private corporations with promises of tax relief while neglecting to invest heavily in public institutions. Instead, public hospitals have been closed, public housing has been detonated or left in disrepair, public schools have been starved of investment, and public health clinics have been shuttered. Even as the horrifying consequences of these political choices during the covid-19 epidemic appear in news stories across the country, elected officials have no meaningful plans to change course.

Knowledge alone about these health disparities and the racism in which they are rooted will not be enough to inspire action by elected officials or government entities. When Hurricane Katrina exposed the brutal racism of the Gulf Coast, it did not lead to a new regime of robust investments in the public sector or an infusion of high-paying jobs to pull African-Americans out of poverty. Instead, corporate vultures and their public enablers forced the closure of nearly all of the city’s public schools, which were “auctioned off” to charters. The New Orleans City Council voted unanimously to tear down public housing undamaged by the hurricane. And tens of thousands of black New Orleanians were given one-way tickets out of the city, and then disparagingly referred to as “refugees” in their own country. Unless public spending is restored and coupled with access to high-paying employment, preventive and emergency health care, and safe, secure, and affordable housing, then it is hard to take seriously the expressions of outrage at the poverty and racism in this country.

In the past month, we have seen that it is possible for local and national governments to act in ways that protect people. The federal government has suspended interest and collection of federal student-loan payments until September, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development has declared a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions of government-insured mortgages. Some cities and states have halted evictions from rental properties, and municipalities across the country have released thousands of people from jails and prisons. Local law enforcement has pledged not to make arrests for misdemeanor offenses. In Detroit, officials pledged to stop turning people’s water off when they can’t pay their bills. If all of these actions are possible in a national emergency, because we believe that they will mitigate people’s vulnerability to disease and death, then why can’t this always be the standard? After all, when is it ever a good time to turn off someone’s access to potable water? One cannot continue to decry the rising rates of black death while preparing to change not a single thing about our failing political and economic systems.

“When is it ever a good time to turn off someone’s access to potable water?

The difficulty in making these decisions is not only about a lack of political will. In 1968, during another period of social upheaval, Martin Luther King, Jr., explained that the power of the black movement lies not only its capacity to fight for the rights of African-Americans but in its revelation of the “interrelated flaws” of American society, including “racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism.” The “black revolution,” King continued, has the power to expose “the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. It reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced.”

Even when the flaws in our society are so easy to point out, resolving them comes into immediate conflict with the very basic assumptions of governance in the country today. Repairing the deep, historical, and continuing harm done to black people will require deep, abiding transformations. It was true when King wrote these words, more than a half century ago, and it has never been truer than it is today. To fulfill the promise that black lives matter, the United States must change in systemic and not superficial ways.

source: https://www.blackagendareport.com/black-plague