L’époque «Jim Crow»: quand le «terrorisme racial» sévissait aux États-Unis
Après l’abolition de l’esclavage aux États-Unis en 1865, un puissant système raciste s’est employé pendant des décennies à dominer, reléguer et tuer les Noirs. C’est l’ère «#JimCrow». De cette période, le sociologue #LoïcWacquant élabore un modèle sociologique pour penser la domination raciale.
Today in Labor History March 21, 1965: 3,200 people began the third march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, to protest racial violence. Earlier efforts to hold the march had failed when police attacked demonstrators and a minister was fatally beaten by a group of Selma whites. The five-day walk ended March 26, when 20,000 people joined the marchers in front of the Alabama state Capitol in Montgomery. This time they were defended by national guards and FBI agents. Soon after, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Very much enjoyed talking with Joe Coohill, aka Professor Buzzkill, about our project to document all the sites listed in The Green Book. The conversation was phenomenal.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember the first of the Nashville sit-ins, which occurred at three lunch counters in Nashville, Tennessee on this date, February 13, 1960. The protests were organized by black college students and lasted through May and were intended to end segregation at lunch counters. They were coordinated by the Nashville Student Movement and the Nashville Christian Leadership Council, and were part of the broader sit-in movement that spread across the southern United States in the wake of the Greensboro sit-ins in North Carolina.
The students were represented by a group of 13 lawyers, headed by Z. Alexander Looby. Racists bombed Looby's home on April 19. He, and his family, escaped uninjured. Later that day, over 3,000 people marched to City Hall to confront the mayor about the escalating violence. After subsequent negotiations, an agreement was reached in May, and six downtown stores began serving black customers at their lunch counters for the first time.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman (December 3, 1889 – January 13, 1939), an American political activist and functionary for the Communist International (Comintern). Time Magazine once called him “the reddest of the blacks.” As a young man, he lived in the Yucatan, during the Mexican Revolution, which radicalized him and introduced him to anarcho-syndicalist labor organizing. After this, he moved back to the U.S. and became a leading activist and speaker during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote two works of fiction during this period. In 1918, he met anarchist cartoonist Robert Minor, who inspired him to visit the Soviet Union. Soon after, they both joined the Communist Labor Party of America. In 1927, he moved to Moscow, where he worked as a teacher at an English-language school. However, in 1937, he was caught up in The Great Purge, and was sentenced to hard labor in a Siberian prison camp because of his Trotskyist affiliations. There, he died of malnutrition in 1939.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we remember the Orangeburg Massacre, which occurred on February 8, 1968 in South Carolina, when highway patrolmen opened fire on black student protesters from South Carolina State, who were trying to integrate a bowling alley. They killed 3 African American students and wounded 33. They were the first student demonstrators killed by the police in the 1960s.
Today, in honor of Black History Month, we celebrate the life of Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927), a West Indian-American writer, speaker, educator, political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by union leader A. Philip Randolph as the father of Harlem radicalism and by John G. Jackson as "The Black Socrates." Harrison’s activism encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, secular humanism, social progressivism, and free thought. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, and said that black Christians needed their heads examined. He refused to exalt a "lily white God " and "Jim Crow Jesus," and criticized Churches for pushing racism, superstition, ignorance and poverty. Religious extremists were known to riot at his lectures. At one of his events, he attacked and chased off an extremist who had attacked him with a crowbar.
In the early 1910s, Harrison became a full-time organizer with the Socialist Party of America. He lectured widely against capitalism, founded the Colored Socialist Club, and campaigned for Eugene V. Debs’s 1912 bid for president of the U.S. However, his politics moved further to the left than the mainstream of the Socialist Party, and he withdrew in 1914. He was also a big supporter of the IWW, speaking at the 1913 Paterson Silk Strike, and supporting the IWW’s advocacy of direct action and sabotage. In 1914, he began working with the anarchist-influenced Modern School movement (started by the martyred educator Francisco Ferrer). During World War I, he founded the Liberty League and the “Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro,” as radical alternatives to the NAACP. The Liberty League advocated internationalism, class and race consciousness, full racial equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense.
Today in Labor History February 1, 1960: Activists began a series of sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina. Woolworth’s denied service to 4 black college students because of the color of their skin. In response, they refused to move from a lunch counter, setting off a series of similar protests. By September, 1961, over 70,000 students, white and black, had participated in the sit-ins.
Today in Labor History January 30, 1956: Klansmen bombed the home of Martin Luther King Jr in retaliation for the Montgomery bus boycott. No one died in the bombing. However, the explosion destroyed the King’s porch and blasted out their windows. At the time of the bombing, King was giving a speech at the Montgomery Improvement Association at Rev. Ralph Abernathy’s First Baptist Church. No one was ever indicted or convicted for the bombing. The authorities did indict King, and 80 other activists, for “interfering with business,” during the bus boycott and demonstrations.
David Pepper offers a cartoon from a reader named Kevin, commenting on the strong tendency of American culture to white out racism in the nation's past. He states,
"The sad truth is, so much history has already been whited out, long before Nikki Haley got into the business."
Black Bottom and Paradise Valley in Detroit are just two examples of the destruction of Black communities and businesses in America. Black owned homes, businesses and churches were flattened in the name of "Urban Renewal" and "Slum Clearance".
These were walkable urban centers of commerce and housing in the center of the city. The income and generational wealth from those houses and businesses should be in the hands of African-Americans in downtown Detroit. Instead we have I-75. Destruction of these neighborhoods not only stole uncountable wealth from black communities, it increased car dependence by removing walkable neighborhoods in favor of high speed roads that were no longer crossable on foot.
#EdmondsWA City Council member #VivianOlson and Mayor #MikeNelson are overt, despicable #racists who should be run out of town on a rail. These people apparently believe #JimCrow is still the #law of the land, and they can get away with such virulent #bigotry. Let's name and shame these disgusting #monsters!
Today in Labor History December 18, 1865: US Secretary of State William Seward proclaimed the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment, prohibiting slavery throughout the USA. However, the thirteenth amendment included the following clause: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” Jim Crow laws in the past and racial profiling today result in large numbers of African Americans and poor people being incarcerated and subjected to legal slavery. Some were even rented out to plantations that had used chattel slaves in the past. But with the U.S. having both the world’s highest number of incarcerated people (2.1 million) and the highest incarceration rate (665 per 100,000), there are plenty of people from all ethnicities who continue to be subjected to legal slavery.
Ian Milhiser says the opinion of the Texas Supreme Court in Kate Cox's case "reads like something out of Franz Kafka, or maybe something out of Jim Crow. ...
The state Supreme Court sits on cases for days before determining whether a patient, who may need an abortion immediately to save their life, may actually receive that care."
"And then the court will deny relief because, it claims, the patient’s doctor failed to use the right magical words.
We’ve seen these kinds of legal tactics before. It is the same tactic that Southern courts used to disenfranchise Black voters because they could not count the number of bubbles in a bar of soap."