The Past Is Not Past: Echoes of Racial Terror Remain in Today’s America
In 1934, a lynch mob kidnapped Claude Neal in Alabama after he was arrested for supposedly raping a white woman. Such a charge back in those days, whether true or not, often resulted in crazed white supremacists murdering a Black man without the due process of law. He was taken by a mob and carried across the border into Florida and tortured first and then hanged. Thousands of ignorant crazed white supremacists showed up to laugh and grin at the horrible sight like some devil worshipers in the 12th Century. This was not an isolated incident, but part of the global power of white supremacy. There is no other racism but that of white supremacy. Other people can hate but have no real institutional power like that of those infected with the great crime of white supremacy.
Tortured With a Branding Iron at Age 16
In the 1940 case of the United States vs Sutherland, a 16-year-old Black child was tortured with a hot branding iron by Atlanta police officers in order to get a confession. In Georgia (1921), a farmer, named John S. Williams, bought Black prisoners from prisons or those who worked on chained road crews to work for free on his plantation. In order to keep them from testifying he murdered 10 or 12 of them. These crimes are only a tip of hatred meted out to Black people across hundreds of years with few arrests and hardly any convictions by all-white juries. It makes sense that crimes like this would be ignored when the President, during part of this time, was Woodrow Wilson who was known for telling racist jokes. Wilson promoted segregation with signs over federal toilets that said “White Only.” President Wilson likely loved the racist KKK film, Birth of a Nation, when he allowed a private screening of it at the White House.
The “Agitator Index”
All of this was part of the global scheme to attack Black and Brown people, including attacks on the Black press and Black Civil Rights organizations. All Black newspapers and activists who demanded justice and equality were represented as “subversive threats.” Agents of the federal government tapped the phones and bugged the offices of the NAACP, the Nation of Islam, SNCC, CORE, and many others, and later the Black Panthers for Self-Defense. In the 1960s, a list of freedom fighters (termed extremists, radicals, leftists, or out of town agitators) was created called the “Agitator Index.” The list included pictures of Black civil and human rights activists to be targeted and a “racial calendar” of events to go along with the photos. All of this done by J. Edgar Hoover, the discredited head of the FBI at the time.
George Floyd Called a “Scumbag”
Things got a little better after the civil rights struggle, but now there are people calling George Floyd a “scumbag” and calling for the end of the 1964 and 1965 Civil Rights Acts. Martin Luther King is now being called an “awful person.” Diversity programs are being attacked and freedom of speech on college campuses is being curtailed. Teachers are being fired for not following the whims of a dictator president and people are being deported illegally and children being separated from their parents across the country. Nameless masked agents are arresting anyone that is a “suspect” of some sort and federal troops are being used in cities using faked or exaggerated reasons.
We Are Going Through Hell Again
It will not be so easy to destroy democracy as history has shown. Jimmy Kimmel was rehired and teachers across the country are being rehired as a result of protests and legal actions. We are going through hell again.
