1) This year, 2019, marks an important centennial anniversary in America—but it is one that not only are we not celebrating, it’s also a significant moment most of us aren’t even aware of: the 100th anniversary of the Red Summer of 1919. https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/remembering-red-summer …
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3) There are reasons we do not commemorate the events of those months. Nearly all of them have to do with the deep shame that lingers for one of the darkest, most violent moments in American history—not to mention the monstrousness it reveals.pic.twitter.com/e5AdVd5oKw
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4) Yet the truth is that the summer of 1919 was one of the most momentous in our history, and NEEDS to be remembered, because it forever and irrevocably altered the face of the American landscape, shaping our demographics in ways that remain with us today.pic.twitter.com/clbaHHOFBB
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5) The American public recently received a little taste of this deliberately hidden corner of history when the debut episode of the new HBO series Watchmen opened with a flashback to a child’s-eye view of the Tulsa race riot of 1921. https://screenrant.com/watchmen-show-location-tulsa-explained-1921-massacre/ …pic.twitter.com/0mmNbGDv8Q
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6) Many, probably a majority, of white viewers in the audience was shocked by the sequence and was unaware that it was portraying a true historical event, and doing so with horrifying accuracy. Black people, in general, were much less surprised. They knew.pic.twitter.com/piMf3KnKFf
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7) The series’ producer, Damon Lindelof, acknowledges that the scene was inspired in large part by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ powerful description of the Tulsa riot in his persuasive essay, 'The Case for Reparations.' http://theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631 …
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8) The sociocultural context that Coates explores is what’s most relevant now. But it’s also important to understand the larger historical context in which the Tulsa riot happened, if nothing else to limn Coates’ point. Knowing about the Red Summer of 1919 is fundamental to this.pic.twitter.com/XHKlExDO3m
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9) These events were in many ways the fevered culmination of the long campaign after the Civil War to reverse its outcome by putting the now-freed slaves into a continued state of submission by other means—violent ones.https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/2/6/1832592/-Red-MAGA-hats-are-actually-the-new-Red-Shirts-and-their-defenders-the-new-Confederate-revisionists …
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10) The centerpiece of this campaign was lynching. As a form of terrorism intended to keep blacks from participating in the political process or from even objecting to their subjugation under Jim Crow laws, it was brutally effective.https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/
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11) Between 1870 and 1930, literally thousands of black people were summarily executed by their white neighbors, most often for the crime of being somehow “uppity”—that is, a threat to their own social status in one way or another.https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/#lynching-in-america …
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13) The Tuskegee Institute in Alabama began keeping statistics in 1900, though the peak of the phenomenon may have been during the early 1870s, in the fight over Reconstruction. Regardless, the 20th-century numbers alone tell the story.https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/01/lynching-map-tuskegee-institute-s-data-on-lynching-from-1900-1931.html …
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14) The rationale for these horrific acts lay in a kind of guilty white projection, in which black males—many of whom were in fact the progeny of their mothers’ rapes by their white masters—were demonized widely as likely rapists, sexual with brutes ravenous appetites.pic.twitter.com/f0H3iq8MRz
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15) The supposed threat of black rape, and the ensuing protection of “white womanhood” by “gallant men” of determination who moved in mobs and slaughtered with extreme violence, made it all justified as necessary self-defense in the popular white view.pic.twitter.com/JcMFpHqdbW
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16) Civil-rights pioneer Ida B. Wells in the 1880s began examining the facts behind the wave of lynchings still gaining momentum in America and determined that in most cases, “rape” was merely a pretext for other reasons, usually a white woman caught with a black man.pic.twitter.com/jLjG762Nnb
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17) Later studies have found that actual black criminality was only occasionally the actual cause of lynchings. Far more often, black people were lynched for being _too_ successful by white standards. Economic jealousy fueled many a lynching.
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18) It’s also difficult to convey just how terribly barbaric these events were, especially for black people, without shocking people’s modern sensibilities. Yet part of the reason for our continuing racial divide is white people’s unwillingness to look this history in the face.pic.twitter.com/fuX3ukKSYG
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19) So let me use words instead of images—though many hundreds of them exist—to convey this history. Because they are shocking enough. And it is history that most white people are utterly, blithely, happily ignorant about. That has to end.
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20) A memorial museum dedicated to the victims of lynching opened this year in Montgomery, Alabama. It is powerful and devastating, especially for people who know nothing of this history, which is frequently the case.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/25/us/lynching-memorial-alabama.html …
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21) White apologists for these events often demur by claiming that white people were lynched too. This is true, especially regarding the Old West and its vigilantes. Yet the numbers of these lynchings of whites were tiny compared to black lynchings.pic.twitter.com/YYueaCr3bV
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22) Moreover, when whites were lynched, they were simply hung till dead, and that was it. They remained clothed. Their bodies weren’t desecrated. They were taken down and buried. That didn’t happen often for black people.
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23) When blacks were lynched—as we shall see, not merely in the South, but throughout white America—truly horrific violence was visited upon their bodies. They were tortured and maimed during the hangings. Dying black men were fed their own penises.
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. 24) The crowds often set large bonfires over which they would raise and lower the victim, often already dead, until he burned up. At times the mobs would deliberately prolong their suffering. And then they would all pose for photos afterwards.pic.twitter.com/TeIJsgRHdi
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25) These photos became popular postcards that were widely circulated in the early part of the 20th century. A collection of these postcards and similar photos can be found in the essential collection, 'Without Sanctuary. ' https://www.amazon.com/Without-Sanctuary-Lynching-Photography-America/dp/0944092691/ …
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26) Lynchings were hugely popular community events. Parents ensured that their children, especially their daughters, had front-row seats, so they could see what it took to preserve white maidenhood. And it was all justified in their minds.pic.twitter.com/XCfjEvZsZC
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[The horror of all this did not go unremarked at the time. This is a New Yorker cartoon by Reginald Marsh from 1934.]pic.twitter.com/OdCOJgGgjh
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27) Lynching was celebrated in popular culture. One of the bestsellers of the age was Thomas Dixon’s _The Clansman_, a 1905 encomium to the Ku Klux Klan that features the lynching of a black rapist. The book and play had audiences in the millions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clansman:_A_Historical_Romance_of_the_Ku_Klux_Klan …
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28) In 1915, filmmaker D.W. Griffith turned it into his epic _The Birth of a Nation_, which was a national sensation which millions viewed, including a White House audience. It not only made Hollywood the epicenter of filmmaking, it also revived the KKK. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_a_Nation …pic.twitter.com/JOlo0x55KE
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29) This period has become known among historians as the nadir of American race relations, an apt if too antiseptic a term for its horrors. It began in earnest in 1890, when Republicans abandoned Reconstruction, and black Southerners with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations …
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30) One of the major factors the fueled the Nadir was the Great Migration—the mass movement of former slaves out of the South to the North and Midwest. The majority first moved into rural areas and took up farming, since that was what most of them knew. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Migration_(African_American) …pic.twitter.com/z1LaiuqIcM
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31) The demographic shift seemed to work fine for about a generation, but eventually, non-Southern whites’ attitudes about their black neighbors began to shift, thanks in no small part to the common demonization of black males found in popular culture.pic.twitter.com/kl9A61OTOd
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32) Likewise, the increasing celebration of lynching as a response to the presence of “threatening” black men meant that this became a common event not merely in the South, but in the Midwest and elsewhere.
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