Part 6: Racial injustice in American history

Author

Kat C.
January 04, 2025

This part of the series is a work in progress, and it's not meant to be comprehensive. My intention is more to draw attention to the vast complexity of America's racial history. I've tried to include topics that don't always come to mind. My hope is that, by doing so, I can prompt readers to do even more digging on their own.

  • Bearing Witness to Racism in America Today, SMITHSONIANMAG.COM, Aug. 27, 2021. (This article refers to a special exhibit "Reckoning with Remembrance: History, Injustice and the Murder of Emmett Till”, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, from Sept. 3-Oct 5, 2021. However, the article will remain important to this list long after the exhibit is closed. We can't simply forget America's racist past, because that part of our history continues.)

Black History Month: a time to celebrate and educate

  • Black Resistance: The theme of Black History Month 2023: A powerful, compelling statement by the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, reposted by Kat.

  • A history of Black History Month (or, Why Did They Pick the Short Month?), by Kat.

  • 28 days of Black history - Black History Month, 2023, by Kat. (This 28-day series of articles covers a variety of historical figures and events, many of which involve slavery in the U.S.)

  • On this day in Black history {2024}, a series of uploads by Sunn m'Cheaux, by Kat. (This is a guide to m'Cheaux's daily YouTube shorts about Black historical figures, along with links to additional information.)

  • What Do the Black History Month Colours Stand For?, by Thea Fraser, a page of the Gleeson Recruitment Group website (archived), Oct. 2020. ("For me, Black History Month is about promoting the knowledge, culture and heritage of black history: it’s about normalising conversations that we would usually avoid and encouraging others to learn and share new things. Pan-African colours and flags have been used to represent black pride and liberation movements around the world for over a century, and I take pride in knowing a little more about their history.")

Lynchings

There are two schools of thought about showing the graphic details of Black deaths at the hands of white people. Some consider it disrespectful to the dead, and I can't disagree with that.

On the other hand, white people have always minimized the horror that takes place here — the incredible brutality that is summed up in the word "lynching." I believe that minimizing those acts — not telling the whole story — only contributes to the continuation of the horror. Like the Germans after World War II, white people must face what's gone on here: The full, unredacted story of lynchings and other white-on-Black brutality, in all their callous, entitled, brazenly-cruel detail. Otherwise, we'll just continue pretending these monstrous acts didn't happen.

  • There have been more than 6,400 lynchings since the end of the Civil War, new study reveals, by Anagha Srikanth, The Hill, Jun. 16, 2020. (This article serves as a reasonable overview of lynching in America. However, i'm adding it to this list for the information it doesn't include, namely, the murders of men like James Byrd Jr. and Ahmaud Arbery. Like George Floyd, their deaths were rightfully categorized as "hate crimes," but they were also lynchings. Period.)

    The linked study is Documenting Reconstruction Violence, chapter 3 of Reconstruction In America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865-1876, Equal Justice Initiative, 2020.

  • The Psychology of Racism in Jim Crow America, uploaded Nov. 11, 2021 to the Then & Now channel on YouTube. ("And as in my exploration of the psychology of the perpetrators' Holocaust, I want to try and understand the factors that led both to the violence of lynchings, but also ask how ordinary Americans justified their racism more broadly.)
    TRIGGER WARNING: This video begins with the extremely graphic description of a lynching. To skip it, begin watching the video at 3:33. However, I suggest that every white person should watch from the beginning. We absolutely need to hear what happened during a lynching.

  • The Root: How Racism Tainted Women's Suffrage, by Monee Fields-White, NPR, Mar. 25, 2011. (The story of journalist Ida B. Wells, whose anti-lynching campaign led to the civil rights movement. "[Her] 1894 showdown [with] temperance leader Frances E. Willard revealed the grip that racial resentment had over the American suffrage movement.")

  • #SayHerName: 100 Years Ago, Mary Turner Was Lynched, by Lawrence Ware, The Root, May 19, 2018. ("We need to remember Mary Turner. We need to remember her unborn child. Failing to do so, we say retroactively that their lives do not matter." TRIGGER WARNING: This article includes a graphic account of the lynching.)

  • Considering History: The Role of Women in the Lynching Epidemic, by Ben Railton, The Saturday Evening Post, Mar. 13, 2019.

  • Afro-American {sic} Soldiers and lynching during WWI, by John Simkin, Spartacus Educational, Sept. 1997.
    (NOTE: I've included Spartacus Educational because of the first-hand accounts cited in its articles — and because the author identifies his sources in detailed footnotes. HOWEVER, he based much of his work on secondary sources, and some of those sources are unreliable. As such, he has come under fire for inaccuracies. The site’s critics include the Southern Poverty Law Center. READ WITH CARE. CROSS-CHECK HIS INFORMATION. )

Massacres

  • Justice Department Announces Results of Review and Evaluation of the Tulsa Race Massacre, U.S. Department of Justice Office of Public Affairs, Jan. 10, 2025. This news release includes an overview of the Tulsa Massacre.
    RELATED: The report itself can be found here.

  • The Ocoee Massacre: A Documentary Film, uploaded to WFTV Channel 9's channel on YouTube, Nov. 2, 2020. ("The atrocity in the rural settlement started on Nov. 2, 1920. An untold number of people were killed, Black and white. It led to the lynching of one of Ocoee’s most successful Black businessmen, Julius ‘July’ Perry, in downtown Orlando. Described as the 'single bloodiest day in modern American political history,' it brought about the forced removal of hundreds of Black citizens from Ocoee.")
    The trauma of the massacre continued through later generations of Ocoee's Black descendants, despite suppression of information about the massacre. People were afraid without knowing the history of that fear.

    For an overview, see the Wikipedia article here)*

Slavery in American history

  • 7 Slave Codes that Still Affect African Americans Today, a page of the Black Statistics website, Mar. 15, 2022. (The rules and laws that eventually became know as the slave codes developed over time. Also, they were primarily for the 'protection' of free people more so than outlining how to treat slaves. ... At their core, these laws resulted from a sick combination of arrogance and fears of white inferiority.)

  • American Experience: Riveted: The History of Jeans, uploaded to archive.org. (Begins with the connection between enslavement, indigo plantations, and denim. PBS.org offers a transcript here.)
    RELATED: The Blue That Enchanted the World, by Latria Graham, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2022. ("A lot of people don’t even realize that it’s an African American crop, and how important it was to the slaves.")
    RELATED: The Dark History of Indigo, Slavery's Other Cash Crop, by Jesslyn Shields, How Stuff Works.

  • Slavery in America, an origin story, posted by Kat. (Includes YouTube links for the WGBH series, "Africans in America: America's Journey through Slavery.)

  • Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936 to 1938, Library of Congress Digital Collections. (This incredible collection "contains more than 2,300 first-person accounts of slavery and 500 black-and-white photographs of former slaves. These narratives were collected in the 1930s as part of the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) of the Works Progress Administration." The easily-accessed, downloadable material is enhanced by a collection of articles and essays.)

  • Alfred Irving is believed to be the last chattel slave in the United States.. He was freed by the FBI in September 1942. Picture posted by Kat.

  • The World War II Effect, by Douglas A. Blackmon, The Wall Street Journal, Mar. 29, 2008.
    NOTE: This article is behind a paywall. If it opens for you, don't close it until you've had a chance to read it all.

  • The Most Damaging Myths About Slavery, Debunked, by Yohuru Williams, History.com.

  • More than 1,700 congressmen once enslaved Black people. This is who they were, and how they shaped the nation., by Julie Zauzmer Weil, Adrian Blanco and Leo Dominguez, The Washington Post, Jan. 10, 2022. (This article requires a sign-in. You can find a summary here.)

  • Did slaves build the White House?, a page from The White House Historical Association website.

  • The 1619 Project, "an ongoing initiative from The New York Times Magazine that began in August 2019, the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative."
    You can also read the book: The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, Nikole Hannah-Jones, One World, London, 2019.

  • Betrayal at Ebenezer Creek, by Edward M. Churchill, HistoryNet, Jun. 12, 2006. This article first appeared October 1998 in Civil War Times Magazine. (“Trapped between charging Rebels and a deadly flooded creek, thousands of fugitive slaves watched in horror as the Union army abandoned them. Then came catastrophe--and excuses.”)

  • The story of the Clotilde and Africatown, by Kat. (According to historian Sylviane Anna Diouf, the Clotilda is "the best documented story of a slave voyage in the Western Hemisphere.")

Neoslavery

  • The Part of History You've Always Skipped: Neoslavery, uploaded April 4, 2022 to Knowing better, a YouTube channel. (This must-watch video skips back and forth from accurate history to the versions we all grew up with, including PragerU clips. This highlights the difference between traditional American history courses and what really happened, including the legal maneuverings that enabled post-Civil War convict leasing. Includes the discussions about debt peonage, sundown towns and Black codes, as well as the racist origins of plea bargaining and the criminalization of vagrancy and other "petty" crimes.)

    RELATED: "Alfred Irving, (c 1900 – after 1942) was an American man believed to be the last person to be freed from slavery in the United States."

  • Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, a 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner by Douglas A. Blackmon, Doubleday, NY, 2009. (This book is available to read online here.)

    RELATED: Slavery by Another Name, a 90-minute PBS documentary, adapted from Blackmon's book, 2012.

Forced reproduction (aka slave breeding)

The death-rate amongst slaves was high. To replace their losses, plantation owners encouraged the slaves to have children. Child-bearing started around the age of thirteen, and by twenty the women slaves would be expected to have four or five children. ~John Simkin

"History books when they even mention it, suggest slave breeding didn't begin until after the banning of the Atlantic slave trade. In truth, it began decades earlier on plantations and farms and only because America was prepared to produce the slaves it needed did it allow the end of the importation of slaves from Africa." ~William Spivey

For the record, not even my college American History teacher mentioned slave breeding, or the fact that it had been a part of American slavery from earliest colonial days. Throughout my education, the ban on slave importation was credited solely to the moral superiority of abolitionists. I recall it having been implied — or even stated outright — that with time and attrition, slavery would naturally become more limited. There was never any mention of the ballooning numbers of slaves that followed the ban, all of which were born on colonial/U.S. soil through forced breeding programs.

The teaching of American History must be changed — at all levels.

NOTE: I've included several articles by William Spivey, of Spartacus Educational, because of the first-hand accounts cited in his articles — and because the author identifies his sources in detailed footnotes. HOWEVER, he based much of his work on secondary sources, and some of those sources are unreliable. As such, he has come under fire for innacuracies. The site's critics include the Southern Poverty Law Center. READ SPIVEY’S ARTICLES WITH CARE. CROSS-CHECK HIS INFORMATION. )

Post-slavery repression

  • I took a real Jim Crow literacy test: here's what happened, uploaded Oct. 25, 2023 to the NYTN channel on YouTube, includes a computer-generated transcript. (A woman with a master's degree attempts — and fails — to pass a Jim Crow-era literacy test from the state of Louisiana. Anyone who couldn't prove they had a fifth grade education was required to pass this test before they could register to vote.)
    To follow along, here's a copy of the test, uploaded by the Jim Crow Museum, 1010 Campus Drive, Big Rapids, MI.

  • The ugly history of tipping in America, by Kai Ryssdal, Marketplace, Apr. 22, 2016.

  • Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson, Random House, 2020. (400 pages, plus an "impressive list of research sources.")
    Wilkerson's newly-released book explores systemic racism — and the history of its development in America — through the lens of the caste systems in India and Nazi Germany. (During the course of Wilkerson's extensive research, she learned that Germany studied America's Jim Crow laws before developing its own caste system. Books on eugenics, written by American doctors, were also popular reading in pre-war Germany.)
    The linked NPR review points out a major gap in Wilkerson's study: She barely touches on Africa's pre-colonial slave trade, or on its colonial and post-colonial caste systems.
    But overall, it appears that Wilkerson has done a thorough job of explaining the development of America's caste-based racial hierarchy. Her book might go a long way toward helping white Americans grasp the full extent of their privilege — and why America's systemic racism is so deeply entrenched. (For more details, go here.)

Forced sterilization and medical experiments

Jim Crow

Scientific racism

  • Scientific racism, a Wikipedia overview.

  • Human Zoos: America's Forgotten History of Scientific Racism, ©2018 Discovery Institute, uploaded to the Discovery Science channel on YouTube. (The exploration of scientific racism includes the story of Ota Benga, Darwin's role in the "science" of eugenics, the American Museum of Natural History eugenics exhibits, conservative Christian opposition to eugenics in the early 20th century, eugenicists' promotion of forced sterilization laws, promotion of eugenics in the 21st century, today's coverup of the history of scientific racism, and the current revival of evolutionary arguments for racism.)

Historic — and current — appropriations of Black-owned property

Why reparations?

This section has been moved to a separate post, here.

What is DEI?

  • What has DEI — diversity, equity and inclusion — done for U.S. workers and employers?, by Megan Cerullo, CBS News, Jan. 28, 2025. (DEI is often misperceived as focusing only on race, according to DEI experts. But such initiatives comprise many practices that aim to uplift different marginalized groups in the workplace. For example, a policy that accommodates working parents, such as flexible work hours, could qualify as DEI. So could establishing affinity groups based on shared identities, like sexual orientation.)

  • Maga FINDS OUT They Too Are DEI, uploaded Jan. 31, 2025 to the Reese Waters channel on YouTube. (There's no shortage of snark in this video, but it also includes solid information about who benefits from DEI, and why. One important TL;DR: Of the categories who benefit from DEI, Black workers come in last.)

The past is not over.... How historical events led us to the present

  • I Am Not Your Negro, available free with ads on YouTube. (From the YouTube description: "...a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using [the late author James] Baldwin’s original words and a flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. It is a film that questions black representation in Hollywood and beyond. And, ultimately, by confronting the deeper connections between the lives and assassination of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., [I Am Not Your Negro] challenges the very definition of what America stands for.")

Miscegenation laws and the "one drop" rule

Black protests in American history

Racist tropes in history and the present

Racist symbols and hate codes

The role of white women in promoting white supremacy

Thriving in spite of disenfranchisement

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