On February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in Kentucky. Exactly 100 years later, journalists, reformers, and scholars meeting in New York City deliberately chose the anniversary of his birth as the starting point for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
The treatment of Black people in America is sickening. The violence and dehumanization and removal of dignity is an awful history. Suppressing the teaching of these historical facts is collusion with this criminal and immoral behavior.
Where did such intense fear and hatred of Black people come from? In the spirit of explanation rather than excuse: The successful 1791-1804 revolution in Haiti shocked and terrified the white slave-owning world in the U.S. and Caribbean. Blacks on the island, inspired by France's own democratic revolution in 1789, demanded the end of slavery and the establishment of civil rights in Haiti. That led to suppression, revolution, war, and the massacre of whites. The revolution changed the course of history. The massacre was said to have soured the French on the Americas and may have helped motivate the French to sell Louisiana to the U.S. Haiti has since been desperately poor, even relative to its next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The white world largely cancelled it as punishment for the rebellion. Apropos of that: Since 1804, black efforts for equality in the US--including the recent Black Lives Matter movement--are often characterised as provocations, rather than as understandable human responses. "Black Lives Matter" was a response to the tacit but ubiquitous message: "Black lives don't matter." It is a blind spot in our culture, in media, and in government that we seem incapable of conceding that a people responded to a white Western provocation. We persist in characterising their aggression as striking for no reason at all. But unless we understand our role in that dynamic, and "retain the blow," as Saul Bellow wrote, the cycle of revenge rolls through history. Eventually everyone forgets how it started.
Many, many thanks for this history of the NAACP. I was completely ignorant, in every way, of its origins, if not the violence that gave birth to the organization.
I will join the NAACP today. I did not realize that folks who are not black could join.
I would also like to recognize Mahomes and Hurts for their leadership in the NFL. You can see how both quarterbacks treat their team mates in a way that Tom Brady never, ever did. Each man treats their team mates as EQUALS. As VALUABLE. Brady only treated Gronkowski as an equal, and, probably not even him. Brady was the man in his own mind. Still is.
Lastly, I was told, in 1992, by a manager at a big corporation, in highly segregated northern city, upon learning where I was planning on purchasing a house: "I remember when people knew their place".
Actually, at the time the words were spoken to me I did understand what he meant. Growing up down south I had never, even once, heard something like that. It was a few years of watching what was going on inside the corporation and meeting folks in the segregated north that enlightened me as to those words meaning.
"I remember when people knew their place" meant that I had purchased a house in an all white area that he remembered (and believed should be) as off limits to "you people" like me, EVEN though I am light skinned and not African American. I do have a minority last name. My father was from Mexico. But, honestly, I never thought all that much about that growing up down south (nobody believes me up here in the north when I say this but it is true).
!992. And? I live in the same town now and I can assure everyone who reads this, nothing has changed since 1992, and, honestly has grown WORSE since then.
Thank you for a beautiful Letter. We have even greater challenges now now that did not even exist a century ago.
We have a planet whose capacity to support civilization is collapsing under the pressures of how we live. We have more people being killed by class privilege placing universal access to health care so far beyond the reach of citizens that it kills us at rates greater than wars and domestic violence.
We cannot unite in the ways needed to deliver ourselves out of these challenges so long as we allow ourselves to be divided and directed into reviving a second civil war. Either we engage in ending this self-destructive division ASAP, or we engage in hastening the ending of ourselves. There is no alternative middle road in dinking, dithering, do-nothingness.
Long ago, I taught history (social studies was the term). That was before I became a school official. Well after my retirement I learned about the 1921 race massacres and destruction of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street." It was less than ten years ago, visiting friends who retired in Wilmington, NC, that I learned about the 1898 coup d'etat and killings in that city. And today, I read for the first time, about the 1908 racial killings and destruction of the Black community in Springfield, IL. This may be a confession of my ignorance, but I intend it as a call for more study of the history of race in America rather than the suppression of that history as advocated by the distasteful governor of Florida.
William English Walling is my great-grandfather. The family story about the founding of NAACP is that Walling and his wife Anna Strunsky Walling were speaking at Cooper Union in NYC about the Russian revolution. (They were committed Socialists and had spent time in Russia.) They were both to speak with my great-grandmother following to talk about the women's situation in Russia. But as I heard it when it was her turn to speak her heart was heavy with the news of the Springfield lynching and that's what she spoke about. As she was speaking she worried about how her husband would respond. After that speech Ida B Wells approached my great-grandparents and the plan for the first meeting was held. I thought it was at their Greenwich house.
Thought it would be fun to add this story. And I note, how my great grandmother's role gets overlooked. :)
Professor, you demonstrate every day how and why History is alive, how critical it is for every American to understand what came before us, how today is connected to the past. This morning I listened to “Up First”NPR podcast,”The Civil Rights Generation.”
“The story of civil rights in America is the story of legends like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also the story of countless ordinary people who made a difference in their own, less-visible ways.” A must 30 minutes listen at a time when Civil Rights and Human Rights are in danger in the USA. Voting Rights! Gerrymandering. Supreme Court decisions. Gun laws. Prison and law enforcement. Education. CRT and books banned. Poverty. Overt Racism. Still. How do we achieve equality (we do not have equality in America) when we are in danger of our lawmakers and courts dismantling protections? Black Lives Matter. Here is the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/up-first/id1222114325?i=1000599181487
I mourn the loss of Lincoln's birthday as a separate, national holiday. Not only for his championing of Abolition, an essential step toward healing one of Americas most grievous crimes, but for his lucid understanding and elucidation of democracy. Real democracy. Lincoln's understanding of the black race was far from perfect, but he understood the evil that was slavery was consuming America's soul.
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of those may be turned against our liberties, without making us weaker or stronger for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
Two tenacious NAACP legal bulldogs, Thurgood Marshall and his extraordinary mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, targeted Plessy v Ferguson, 19th century Supreme Court ruling that ‘separate but equal’ was OK for African American students. Their focus was to eliminate racial discrimination in education.
Theirs was a decades long struggle. When Houston, the first NAACP legal counsel died, Marshall succeeded him. He pursued a deliberate policy of gradually chipping away at Plessy v. Ferguson bit by bit. He won 29 of his 32 cases on racial discrimination before the Supreme Court.
His monumental triumph was the 9-0 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education that totally overturned PvF. While implementation of this decision has been a long and tortuous path, it remains one of the truly precedent-changing rulings in Supreme Court history.
Marshall was the first Black to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He was a liberal on the Court. Following his death, after a contentious Senate hearing Clarence Thomas was named to fill the ‘Marshall seat.’
Thank for writing so clearly and compellingly about our history, especially the bits that point out how we, as a nation, have so often failed to live up to the ideal that we are all created equal and are to be treated as equals under the law.
What a good column. It is a vivid reminder of how racism has infected the US and created wounds, scars and injustices that have torn apart the social and political fiber of the country. Notwithstanding fighting a Civil War to eradicate the injustices of racism the infection remains and we have seen its fruit borne by the current trends of political chaos and violence. The failure to deal with these issues are debilitating the prospects of achieving a great country and society.
Powerful, poignant, and timely. You are a national treasure, speaking truth to power. Thank you for this. It brings our current crisis into perspective.
And knowing & respecting the knowing of this history is what today is called "woke", which in my mind clearly means to be "awake", "Christian" and a humanitarian.
Too many politicians and leaders have been spreading bigotry and hatred among white Christians against racial and religious minorities for too long. It all started on this continent in 1619 which is why the NY Times chose the "1619 Project" for it's American Black history project. The seed of racism in America was sown with the sale and purchase of black African slaves in Virginia in 1619, and has grown into a jungle of poisonous vines wrapping throughout the American civilization, fed and led by every politician who promotes their race from behind masks and hoods of self righteousness, claiming white victimhood, banning words, books and education addressing our full and accurate history, as they dismiss the violence and oppression that they and people like them have fostered and foisted on the nation that first said "all men are created equal".
The treatment of Black people in America is sickening. The violence and dehumanization and removal of dignity is an awful history. Suppressing the teaching of these historical facts is collusion with this criminal and immoral behavior.
Thankyou,Heather. And thankyou for telling THE history I never learned in school.
Where did such intense fear and hatred of Black people come from? In the spirit of explanation rather than excuse: The successful 1791-1804 revolution in Haiti shocked and terrified the white slave-owning world in the U.S. and Caribbean. Blacks on the island, inspired by France's own democratic revolution in 1789, demanded the end of slavery and the establishment of civil rights in Haiti. That led to suppression, revolution, war, and the massacre of whites. The revolution changed the course of history. The massacre was said to have soured the French on the Americas and may have helped motivate the French to sell Louisiana to the U.S. Haiti has since been desperately poor, even relative to its next-door neighbor, the Dominican Republic. The white world largely cancelled it as punishment for the rebellion. Apropos of that: Since 1804, black efforts for equality in the US--including the recent Black Lives Matter movement--are often characterised as provocations, rather than as understandable human responses. "Black Lives Matter" was a response to the tacit but ubiquitous message: "Black lives don't matter." It is a blind spot in our culture, in media, and in government that we seem incapable of conceding that a people responded to a white Western provocation. We persist in characterising their aggression as striking for no reason at all. But unless we understand our role in that dynamic, and "retain the blow," as Saul Bellow wrote, the cycle of revenge rolls through history. Eventually everyone forgets how it started.
Dr. Richardson,
Many, many thanks for this history of the NAACP. I was completely ignorant, in every way, of its origins, if not the violence that gave birth to the organization.
I will join the NAACP today. I did not realize that folks who are not black could join.
I would also like to recognize Mahomes and Hurts for their leadership in the NFL. You can see how both quarterbacks treat their team mates in a way that Tom Brady never, ever did. Each man treats their team mates as EQUALS. As VALUABLE. Brady only treated Gronkowski as an equal, and, probably not even him. Brady was the man in his own mind. Still is.
Lastly, I was told, in 1992, by a manager at a big corporation, in highly segregated northern city, upon learning where I was planning on purchasing a house: "I remember when people knew their place".
Actually, at the time the words were spoken to me I did understand what he meant. Growing up down south I had never, even once, heard something like that. It was a few years of watching what was going on inside the corporation and meeting folks in the segregated north that enlightened me as to those words meaning.
"I remember when people knew their place" meant that I had purchased a house in an all white area that he remembered (and believed should be) as off limits to "you people" like me, EVEN though I am light skinned and not African American. I do have a minority last name. My father was from Mexico. But, honestly, I never thought all that much about that growing up down south (nobody believes me up here in the north when I say this but it is true).
!992. And? I live in the same town now and I can assure everyone who reads this, nothing has changed since 1992, and, honestly has grown WORSE since then.
Thank you again.
Thank you for a beautiful Letter. We have even greater challenges now now that did not even exist a century ago.
We have a planet whose capacity to support civilization is collapsing under the pressures of how we live. We have more people being killed by class privilege placing universal access to health care so far beyond the reach of citizens that it kills us at rates greater than wars and domestic violence.
We cannot unite in the ways needed to deliver ourselves out of these challenges so long as we allow ourselves to be divided and directed into reviving a second civil war. Either we engage in ending this self-destructive division ASAP, or we engage in hastening the ending of ourselves. There is no alternative middle road in dinking, dithering, do-nothingness.
Long ago, I taught history (social studies was the term). That was before I became a school official. Well after my retirement I learned about the 1921 race massacres and destruction of Tulsa's "Black Wall Street." It was less than ten years ago, visiting friends who retired in Wilmington, NC, that I learned about the 1898 coup d'etat and killings in that city. And today, I read for the first time, about the 1908 racial killings and destruction of the Black community in Springfield, IL. This may be a confession of my ignorance, but I intend it as a call for more study of the history of race in America rather than the suppression of that history as advocated by the distasteful governor of Florida.
William English Walling is my great-grandfather. The family story about the founding of NAACP is that Walling and his wife Anna Strunsky Walling were speaking at Cooper Union in NYC about the Russian revolution. (They were committed Socialists and had spent time in Russia.) They were both to speak with my great-grandmother following to talk about the women's situation in Russia. But as I heard it when it was her turn to speak her heart was heavy with the news of the Springfield lynching and that's what she spoke about. As she was speaking she worried about how her husband would respond. After that speech Ida B Wells approached my great-grandparents and the plan for the first meeting was held. I thought it was at their Greenwich house.
Thought it would be fun to add this story. And I note, how my great grandmother's role gets overlooked. :)
Professor, you demonstrate every day how and why History is alive, how critical it is for every American to understand what came before us, how today is connected to the past. This morning I listened to “Up First”NPR podcast,”The Civil Rights Generation.”
“The story of civil rights in America is the story of legends like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is also the story of countless ordinary people who made a difference in their own, less-visible ways.” A must 30 minutes listen at a time when Civil Rights and Human Rights are in danger in the USA. Voting Rights! Gerrymandering. Supreme Court decisions. Gun laws. Prison and law enforcement. Education. CRT and books banned. Poverty. Overt Racism. Still. How do we achieve equality (we do not have equality in America) when we are in danger of our lawmakers and courts dismantling protections? Black Lives Matter. Here is the link: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/up-first/id1222114325?i=1000599181487
I mourn the loss of Lincoln's birthday as a separate, national holiday. Not only for his championing of Abolition, an essential step toward healing one of Americas most grievous crimes, but for his lucid understanding and elucidation of democracy. Real democracy. Lincoln's understanding of the black race was far from perfect, but he understood the evil that was slavery was consuming America's soul.
"What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence? It is not our frowning battlements, our bristling sea coasts, the guns of our war steamers, or the strength our gallant and disciplined army? These are not our reliance against a resumption of tyranny in our fair land. All of those may be turned against our liberties, without making us weaker or stronger for the struggle. Our reliance is in the love of liberty which God has planted in our bosoms. Our defense is in the preservation of the spirit which prizes liberty as the heritage of all men, in all lands, everywhere. Destroy this spirit, and you have planted the seeds of despotism around your own doors. Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you are preparing your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of those around you, you have lost the genius of your own independence, and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises."
Such a necessary lesson in the history and initial workings of the NAACP. Thank you for a sensitive and helpful recounting, Heather.
Two tenacious NAACP legal bulldogs, Thurgood Marshall and his extraordinary mentor, Charles Hamilton Houston, targeted Plessy v Ferguson, 19th century Supreme Court ruling that ‘separate but equal’ was OK for African American students. Their focus was to eliminate racial discrimination in education.
Theirs was a decades long struggle. When Houston, the first NAACP legal counsel died, Marshall succeeded him. He pursued a deliberate policy of gradually chipping away at Plessy v. Ferguson bit by bit. He won 29 of his 32 cases on racial discrimination before the Supreme Court.
His monumental triumph was the 9-0 1954 Supreme Court Brown v. Board of Education that totally overturned PvF. While implementation of this decision has been a long and tortuous path, it remains one of the truly precedent-changing rulings in Supreme Court history.
Marshall was the first Black to be appointed to the Supreme Court. He was a liberal on the Court. Following his death, after a contentious Senate hearing Clarence Thomas was named to fill the ‘Marshall seat.’
Thank for writing so clearly and compellingly about our history, especially the bits that point out how we, as a nation, have so often failed to live up to the ideal that we are all created equal and are to be treated as equals under the law.
What a good column. It is a vivid reminder of how racism has infected the US and created wounds, scars and injustices that have torn apart the social and political fiber of the country. Notwithstanding fighting a Civil War to eradicate the injustices of racism the infection remains and we have seen its fruit borne by the current trends of political chaos and violence. The failure to deal with these issues are debilitating the prospects of achieving a great country and society.
Powerful, poignant, and timely. You are a national treasure, speaking truth to power. Thank you for this. It brings our current crisis into perspective.
Sad that so little progress has been made.
And knowing & respecting the knowing of this history is what today is called "woke", which in my mind clearly means to be "awake", "Christian" and a humanitarian.
Too many politicians and leaders have been spreading bigotry and hatred among white Christians against racial and religious minorities for too long. It all started on this continent in 1619 which is why the NY Times chose the "1619 Project" for it's American Black history project. The seed of racism in America was sown with the sale and purchase of black African slaves in Virginia in 1619, and has grown into a jungle of poisonous vines wrapping throughout the American civilization, fed and led by every politician who promotes their race from behind masks and hoods of self righteousness, claiming white victimhood, banning words, books and education addressing our full and accurate history, as they dismiss the violence and oppression that they and people like them have fostered and foisted on the nation that first said "all men are created equal".