Racism in the United States

"Every measure of prudence... ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States."

"Slavery in this country, I have seen hanging over it like a black cloud for half a century."

"I, John Brown, am now quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land can never be purged away but with blood. I had as I now think, vainly flattered myself that without very much bloodshed, it might be done."

"Many in the south once believed that slavery was a moral and political evil. That folly and delusion are gone. We see it now in its true light, and regard it as the most safe and stable basis for free institutions in the world."

"This country was founded by slave owners who wanted to be free."

"As to the doctrine of slavery and the right of Christians to hold Africans in perpetual servitude, and sell and treat them as we do our horses and cattle, that, it is true, has been heretofore countenanced by the Province Laws formerly, but nowhere is it expressly enacted or established. It has been a usage, a usage which took its origin from the practice of some of the European nations, and the regulations of British government respecting the then-colonies, for the benefit of trade and wealth. But whatever sentiments have formerly prevailed in this particular or slid in upon us by the example of others, a different idea has taken place with the people of America, more favorable to the natural rights of mankind, and to that natural, innate desire of liberty, with which Heaven, without regard to color, complexion, or shape of noses-features, has inspired all the human race. And upon this ground our constitution of government, by which the people of this Commonwealth have solemnly bound themselves, sets out with declaring that all men are born free and equal, and that every subject is entitled to liberty, and to have it guarded by the laws, as well as life and property, and in short is totally repugnant to the idea of being born slaves. This being the case, I think the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and constitution; and there can be no such thing as perpetual servitude of a rational creature, unless his liberty is forfeited by some criminal conduct or given up by personal consent or contract."

"During slavery, "Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon," writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, "Flush Times and Fever Dreams." That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the , the and the . It is the culture that has produced and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a capitalism of poverty wages, and ; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is."

"We are told, that the subjection of Americans may tend to the diminution of our own liberties; an event, which none but very perspicacious politicians are able to foresee. If slavery be thus fatally contagious, how is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

"If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave? If ye do not feel the chain, When it works a brother's pain, Are ye not base slaves indeed, Slaves unworthy to be freed?"

"They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three."

"Where slavery exists the republican Theory becomes still more fallacious."

"To Americans, that some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain, is rather lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, christianized people should approve, and be concerned in the savage practice, is surprising; and still persist, though it has been so often proved contrary to the light of nature, to every principle of Justice and Humanity, and even good policy, by a succession of eminent men, and several late publications."

"In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate."

"In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it."

"The universal body of the human without a race is already de facto occupied by the unmarked white body in narratives of transcendence like American “post-racial” discourse."

"To be blind to color and colorism in this context is to license racial injustice and to ignore the historical trajectory of disenfranchisement and exploitation that have landed African Americans and people of color in a subordinate status position. ... Whites have inherited wealth that was ostensibly generated on the backs of African Americans. What's passed down through generations is an abdication of responsibility for this legacy and for the spoils that even working-class whites continue to reap from it. The situation is akin to finding a bloodied bag of money at your doorstep every month and spending it freely without seriously questioning where it came from or whose blood has been spilled to make it possible."

"This idea of a post-racial society was quite possibly the most sophisticated racist idea ever created. Because unlike previous racist ideas, that specifically told us how we should think about particular people of color, or how we should think about this particular racial group. What post-racial ideas did was it said to us racism doesn't exist, racist policy doesn't exist, in the face of all of these racial inequities. And so then it caused us to say, OK, this inequity, like, the black unemployment rate being twice as high as the white unemployment rate, it can't exist because of racism. It must exist because there's something wrong with black workers."

"Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know now, that it isn't enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger?"

"The problem of the twenty-first century, then, is the problem of the color-blind. This problem is simple: it believes that to redress racism, we need to not consider race in social practice, notably in the sphere of governmental action. The state, we are told, must be above race. ... We are led to believe that racism is prejudicial behavior of one party against another rather than the coagulation of socioeconomic injustice against groups. If the state acts without prejudice (this is, if it acts equally), then that is proof of the end of racism. Unequal socioeconomic conditions of today, based as they are on racisms of the past and of the present, are thereby rendered untouchable by the state. Color-blind justice privatizes inequality and racism, and it removes itself from the project of redistributive and anti-racist justice. This is the genteel racism of our new millennium."

"American families are in the process of passing along a $9 trillion legacy from one generation to the next. ... Hand in hand with this money, I submit, what is really being handed down from generation to generation is the profound legacy of reproducing racial inequality. The legacy is difficult to discern because the language of family heritage hides it from our political consciousness."

"If ... the tax scheme allows enormous intergenerational wealth transfers within families, some families will maintain considerable socioeconomic advantages over others, which allows them to provide better educations and better environments (both residential and familial) for their children, and their children's children. ... Even in a constitutional democracy in which each citizen has a publicly recognized claim to all the basic political and civil liberties, these socioeconomic inequalities would create an informal social hierarchy by birth: some would be born into great wealth and other social and political advantages while others would be born into poverty and its associated disadvantages. ... If, because a social scheme had the characteristics described above, the life prospects of some children were vastly inferior to those of others, it would be reasonable to regard these disadvantaged children as members of the lowest stratum in a descent-based social hierarchy. When such a hierarchy is, and has long been, marked by racial distinctions, equal citizenship, in any meaningful sense, does not obtain. In a society with an established democratic tradition, such a quasi-feudal order does not warrant the allegiance of its most disadvantaged members, especially when these persons are racially stigmatized. Indeed, the existence of such an order creates the suspicion that, despite the society's ostensible commitment to equal civil rights, white supremacy has simply taken a new form."

"A well-educated black has a tremendous advantage over a well-educated white in terms of the job market. I think sometimes a black may think they don't have an advantage or this and that... I've said on one occasion, even about myself, if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated black, because I believe they do have an actual advantage."

"Of course! Do you think if I wanted to be a member they would have turned me down? I wouldn't join that club, because they don't take blacks and Jews."

"George Miller: Is this you? Discussing "Indian blood?" We're going to judge people by whether they have "Indian blood"? Whether they're qualified to run a gaming casino or not? Donald Trump: That probably is me, absolutely, because I'll tell you what. If you look, if you look at some of the reservations that you've approved. You, sir, in your great wisdom, have approved, I will tell you right now, they don't look like Indians to me, and they don't look like the Indians. Now, maybe we say politically correct or not politically correct, they don't look like Indians to me. And they don't look like Indians to Indians, and a lot of people are laughing at it and you're telling how tough it is, how rough it is to get approved. Well, you go up to Connecticut and you look. Now, they don't look like Indians to me sir. George Miller: Thank God that's not the test of whether or not people have rights in this country, or not. Whether or not they pass your "look test..." Mr Trump, do you know, do you know in the history of this country where we've heard this discussion before? "They don't look Jewish to me." "They don't look Indian to me." "They don't look Italian to me." And that was a test for whether people could go into business or not go into business. Whether they could get a bank loan. "You're too black. You're not black enough.""

"Donald Trump: Do you like it? Howard Stern: Yes Trump to : Do you like it? Quivers: Well, I think you’re going to have a riot. Trump:It would be the highest-rated show on television,”"

"Well, I think I was born with a drive for success. I had a father who was successful. He was a builder in Brooklyn and Koreans. And he was successful. And, you know, I have a certain gene. I'm a gene believer. Hey, when you connect two race horses, you usually end up with a fast horse. And I really was -- you know, I had a -- a good gene pool from the standpoint of that."

"I have a great relationship with the blacks. I've always had a great relationship with the blacks."

"Mitt Romney had his chance to beat a failed president but he choked like a dog. Now he calls me racist-but I am least racist person there is"

"It's just, like, a total catastrophe, the unemployment rates, everything is bad — no health care, no education, no anything, no anything. And poverty is unbelievable. Then, I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute, vote for me. What have you got to lose? You can't do worse, you can't do any worse than what these people have been doing and I will do better."

"They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists"

"So here's the story folks. Number one, I am the least anti-Semitic person that you've ever seen, in your entire life. Number two, racism, the least racist person, in fact we did very well, relative to other people running as a Republican. [Shouts from the crowd] Quiet, quiet, quiet! See he lied about he was going to get up and ask a very straight, simple question, so, you know, so welcome to the world of the media. But let me just tell you something, that, erm, I hate the charge, I find it repulsive, I hate even the question because people that know me, and you heard the Prime Minister, you heard, er, Netanyahu yesterday, you do hear him, Bibi, he said, "I've known Donald Trump for a long time", and then he said, "Forget it!" So you should take that and, instead of having to get up and ask a very insulting question."

"If you're telling me they're horrible people, horrible racist people, I would certainly apologize, if you'd like me to do that."

"We had a great event yesterday, an event that was so beautiful, young African American leaders. One of the things I asked them, and I’ve been thinking about this for a long time… And great people, great people. Some of them are here tonight. Do you like the name African American or Black? And they said, “Black!” all at the same time. No, true. I tell you. Because you say, “African American or Black?” And they said almost immediately, “Black.”"

"You know, I had an uncle. He's the longest-serving professor, Doctor John Trump, in the history of MIT, with same genes—we have genes, we're smart people, we're smart people... We're like race—Mr. Lieutenant Governor—we're like racehorses, too. You know, the fast ones produce the fast ones, and the slow ones doesn't work out so well, right? But we're no different in that sense."

"[B]lack people are too stupid to vote for me."

"Name one country run by a black person that's not a shithole... Name one city."

"I have black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day. Those are the kind of people I want counting my money. Nobody else. Besides that, I've got to tell you something else. I think that the guy is lazy. And it's probably not his fault because laziness is a trait in blacks. It really is, I believe that. It's not anything they can control... Don't you agree?"

"[Donald Trump] seems to harbor racist feelings about people of color from other parts of the world."

"Heidi Beirich, head of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, noted “an incredible increase in anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment over the past few years,” particularly “within the ranks of the anti-government movement.” The presidential campaign, she added, has “produced some of the rawest nativist appeals in recent memory.” She says those appeals might have played a role in the surge of hate incidents since the election, including a wave of anti-Semitic threats and attacks and anti-Muslim hate crimes. Many incidents, she notes, “involved attackers who self-identified as Trump supporters or committed their acts in his name,” such as swastika-laden graffiti saying, “Make America White Again,” or an assault on a Muslim student and his Latino friend in which the attacker shouted Trump’s name. While Trump, in his February address to Congress, did respond to these incidents in general terms, saying, “We are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all of its very ugly forms,” his policies appear to have sent a different message. In hundreds of the nearly 1,400 hate incidents around the nation that the Southern Poverty Law Center counted in the three months following the Nov. 8 elections, the perpetrators directly referenced the election or Trump."

"Trump launched his 2015 campaign demonising immigrants from Mexico and continues to put border security front and centre. “It decomplexifies the world. Instead of abstract social structures and historical developments, you have one specific group of people that you can blame all your problems on.”"

"Trump Is a Racist. Period."

"What Trump is doing has popped up periodically, but in modern times, no president has been so racially insensitive and shown outright disdain for people who aren't white."

"[Donald Trump is] clearly racist... It fits into a pattern that we have seen since the beginning of his career, maybe through his father's career, frankly. There's been a consistency, pattern of harsh judgment against black and brown people."

"We have a racist in the Oval Office."

"Let me put it this way, I think he is very eager not to upset the racists who like him. Too eager."

"Days after a deadly attack on two mosques in New Zealand by a gunman who appeared to align with the white supremacist movement, Virginia Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine said President Trump's rhetoric emboldens white nationalists around the world. "The president uses language often that's very similar to the language used by these bigots and racists. And if he's not going to call it out, then other leaders have to do more to call it out and I certainly will," Kaine told "Face the Nation." "I think the president is using language that emboldens them." The suspected gunman in the New Zealand shooting had written a manifesto referencing "white genocide" driven by "mass immigration" and accused Muslims of invading the country. He also directly referenced Mr. Trump in his writings."

"In 2015, Trump launched his own campaign for President with another racist lie. He described Mexican immigrants as rapists and criminals. And he accused the Mexican government of actively sending them across the border. None of that is true. Oh, and by the way, Mexico’s not paying for his wall either. If it ever gets built, you can be sure that American taxpayers will be stuck with the bill. Since then, there’s been a steady stream of bigotry."

"Trump claims he's surprised his election has unleashed a barrage of hate across the country. But he shouldn't be. It's the predictable result of the campaign he waged. Rather than feign surprise, Mr. Trump should take responsibility for what's occurring, forcefully reject hate and bigotry, reach out to the communities he's injured, and follow his words with actions to heal the wounds his words have opened."

"Trump's statements disparaging immigrants who have come to this country legally are particularly unhelpful. Maine has benefited from people from Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and, increasingly, Africa — including our friends from Somalia."

"Expressing deep frustration and anger over President Donald Trump’s ongoing refusal to unequivocally condemn white nationalism, critics on Sunday pushed back against the White House’s dismissal of reports that the suspect in last week’s Christchurch mosque attacks admired the president—even as Trump once again expressed support for white supremacist views... “This is a president who peddled the birther conspiracy about President Obama, called for a complete and total shutdown of Muslims, said he was open to closing down mosques in this country after the Paris attacks, has suggested that he’s open to getting rid of Muslims in this country,” said Waleed Shahid, communications director for Justice Democrats, on CNN. “I mean if that’s not white nationalism then I don’t know what is.” The mention of Trump in the suspect’s writings called to mind for many Trump critics the president’s refusal to condemn white supremacists who staged a violent rally in Charlottesville in 2017, his characterization of Central American immigrants as “invaders,” and his executive order banning travelers from several majority-Muslim countries—one of his very first actions as president."

"The [Trump] family subscribes to a racehorse theory of human development... They believe that there are superior people and that if you put together the genes of a superior woman and a superior man, you get a superior offspring."

"For the fourth year in a row, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that tracks hate groups, reports that hate and domestic extremism are rising in an unabated trend. The center found a 30 percent increase in U.S. hate groups over the past four years and a 7 percent increase in hate groups in 2018 alone, according to the center's annual "Year in Hate and Extremism" report. The group designated 1,020 organizations as hate groups in 2018, a high of at least 20 years. The watchdog group blames President Trump, his administration, right-wing media outlets and the ease of spreading hate on social media platforms for the alarming increase. The growth, it says, is largely driven by "hysteria over losing a white-majority nation to demographic change." "The numbers tell a striking story — that this president is not simply a polarizing figure but a radicalizing one," Heidi Beirich, director of the SPLC's Intelligence Project, said in a statement. "Rather than trying to tamp down hate, as presidents of both parties have done, President Trump elevates it — with both his rhetoric and his policies. In doing so, he's given people across America the go-ahead to to act on their worst instincts.""

"The facts here are clear: These men were exonerated. Another man has admitted to committing the crime, as proven by DNA evidence. Trump rushed to judgment on the case, has refused to admit he is wrong and continues to peddle yet another racist lie."

"There should be little doubt about US President Donald Trump's views on race, despite his occasional 'denials', assertions of 'fake news', and/or his semantic distinctions. His election campaign theme was effectively a promise to 'Make America Great Again; America First and Only' and – nod, nod, wink, wink."

"[I]n many ways, he embodies nearly every aspect of a racist. He's someone who regularly expresses racist ideas, like Latinx immigrants are invading this country, that Mexicans are animals, that black people live in hell, that their communities are infested. But then he simultaneously is supporting policies that specifically target racial groups. We're seeing what's happening at the southern border. We see the ways in which his policies, he's not seeking to protect black people being killed by police. We can see the Muslim ban. And then when you put that all together, when we charge him with being racist, what does he say? He says, no, no. I'm not racist. I'm actually the least-racist person you've ever interviewed. I'm actually the least-racist person in the world. And so his consistent denial of his racism is the heartbeat of racism."

"I don't see what else we can call him but a racist."

"[N]o matter what your feelings are about Trump, you should hope that these tapes, if they do exist, never see the light of day. It sounds counterintuitive. But let’s game out—honestly—what we think would happen if such a tape of the future president of the United States surfaced tomorrow. Do you think he’d lose support from his base? Do you think he’d pay a price for lying about the tape’s existence? Or for using the N-word? I do not. Everything we know about the president's base supporters suggests that there is no straw that will break the camel's back—only goalposts, receding constantly to the horizon."

"[Donald Trump is] this racist 94-year-old grandpa."

"His hateful rhetoric has no place in the White House."

"Everything is a racial stereotype with him half the time; we've got to admit that about Trump."

"[T]he larger moral cowardice that has overtaken the party... Trump's shtick is that he's the grievance candidate... He's focused on the economically squeezed Caucasian voter... He is speaking to that rage. Mexican rapists, clever Chinese traders, African American people as dogs. That's Trump's DNA."

"Since Donald Trump won the Presidential election, there has been a dramatic uptick in incidents of racist and xenophobic harassment across the country. The Southern Poverty Law Center has reported that there were four hundred and thirty-seven incidents of intimidation between the election, on November 8th, and November 14th, targeting blacks and other people of color, Muslims, immigrants, the L.G.B.T. community, and women. One woman in Colorado told the S.P.L.C. that her twelve-year-old daughter was approached by a boy who said, “Now that Trump is President, I’m going to shoot you and all the blacks I can find.” At a school in Washington State, students chanted “build a wall” in a cafeteria. In Texas, someone saw graffiti at work: “no more illegals 1-20-17,” a reference to Inauguration Day. Such harassment occurred throughout Trump’s campaign, but now appears to have taken on a new boldness, empowered by the election of a Ku Klux Klan-endorsed candidate who has denigrated women and racial and religious minorities."

"Last Thursday night I happened to be on Twitter when news of the New Zealand massacre hit. Not realizing the magnitude of the horror... I quickly clicked away, but I'm afraid I won't ever be able to forget what I saw before I did. But the one thing I knew from the moment I saw the guns and heard the words, "Let's get this party started" was that this was a white supremacist terrorist. That macho, pseudo-warrior, "white power" swagger is all too familiar these days... The killer's manifesto, entitled "The Great Replacement," which he posted online... filled with white supremacist dogma and coy internet tropes designed to troll people who are unfamiliar with the jargon, while speaking to his mates in the racist online forums he frequented. There can be no doubt that there is a growing international white identity movement. And we can no longer ignore the fact that by failing even to admit that such a movement exists, the president of the United States is empowering and enabling it. In using the rhetoric of hate, he has aligned himself with it."

"We have a president, and I say this without any joy in my heart, who is a racist. It’s hard to believe that we have a president of the United States who is, in fact, a racist."

"Remember, Trump began his ascent to political power on a racist lie: birtherism. He launched his campaign for the presidency calling Mexican immigrants criminals and rapists. His first major policy initiative was travel restrictions on Muslim-majority nations that felt a lot like a travel ban on people with darker skin. His supporters cited "economic anxiety" as their motivation, but they were driven by racial animus. Former KKK leader David Duke endorsed Trump twice for president. Trump's presidency has always been about race and reacting to a nation more diverse than it has ever been. We've been reminded of that time and again since he announced his candidacy. So how can anyone still say, "This is not who we are"? Why do we continue to hear that same lie as the worst of America rears its head?"

"Perhaps Trump is a racist. Perhaps not. Either way, we can have a productive conversation about whether particular Trump statements or actions are racist. But we can't have a productive conversation that starts from the premise that Trump is a racist overall, and that every action he takes and every statement he makes is therefore covered with the patina of racism. That conversation is about insults, not truth."

"All of Trump's constant bragging about his money and his poll numbers and his virility speak directly to this surprisingly vibrant middle American fantasy about a castrated white America struggling to re-grow its mojo... as basketball star turned pundit Kareem Abdul-Jabbar pointed out earlier this week, PC isn’t a new thing, or even a thing at all. It’s just an “emotional challenge every generation has had to go through.” We get older, our kids correct our bad habits, it happens. Not to Trump’s supporters. They’ve turned some minor cultural changes into a vast conspiracy of white victimhood. They're eating up Trump's Make America Great Again theme, which one supporter hilariously explained must be his true goal, because 'it's on his hat', because it's a fantasy tale of a once-great culture ruined by an invasion of mongrel criminals."

"For reasons that are, again, obvious to everyone but Republican voters, this “woe is us” narrative is never to fly with the rest of the country, including especially (one imagines) the nonwhite population. Few sane people are going to waste a vote on a sob story about how rough things have gotten for white people. But Trump supporters are clinging to this fantasy far more fiercely than red-state voters were ever clinging to guns or religion. That leaves us facing a future in which national elections will no longer be decided by ideas, but by numbers. It will be a turnout battle between people who believe in a multicultural vision for the country, and those who don’t. Every other issue, from taxes to surveillance to war to jobs to education, will take a distant back seat to this ongoing, moronic referendum on white victimhood. And there’s nothing any of us can do about it except wait it out, and wonder if our politics only gets dumber from here."

"We thought the blatant racism on display during Donald's announcement speech would be a deal breaker, but we were disabused of that idea when Jerry Falwell, Jr., and other white evangelicals started endorsing him. Maryanne, a devout Catholic since her conversion five decades earlier, was incensed. "What the fuck is wrong with them?" she said. "The only time Donald went to church was when the cameras were there. It's mind boggling. He has no principles. None!""

"Within a month of the election, I found myself compulsively watching the news and checking my Twitter feed, anxious and unable to concentrate on anything else. Though nothing Donald did surprised me, the speed and volume with which he started inflicting his worst impulses on the country- from lying about the crowd size at the inauguration and whining about how poorly he was treated to rolling back environmental protections, targeting the Affordable Care Act and enacting his racist Muslim ban- overwhelmed me. The smallest thing- seeing Donald's face or hearing my own name, both of which happened dozens of times a day- took me back to the time when my father had withered and died beneath the cruelty and contempt of my grandfather. I had lost him when he was only forty-two and I was sixteen. The horror of Donald's cruelty was being magnified by the fact that his acts were now official US policy, affecting millions of people."

"The full-page screed he paid to publish in the New York Times in 1989 calling for the Central Park Five to be put to death wasn't about his deep concern fro the rule of law; it was an easy opportunity for him to take on a deeply serious topic that was very important to the city while sounding like an authority in the influential and prestigious pages of the Gray Lady. It was unvarnished racism meant to stir up racial animosity in a city already seething with it. All five boys, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, were subsequently cleared, proven innocent via incontrovertible DNA evidence. To this day, however, Donald insists that they were guilty- yet another example of his inability to drop a preferred narrative even when it's contradicted by established fact."

"Trump is a racial arsonist who encourages bigotry and xenophobia to rouse his base and advance his electoral prospects. In this, he inspires imitators."

"This is racism, plain and simple, and we need to call it that."

"He claims that he's bringing people together but make no mistake, he is a dangerous, unprincipled, divisive, and shameful racist."

"[M]y own view is that Donald Trump is incapable of being a racist in the traditional sense of that word, because racism is derived from a perverted and misapplied sense of loyalty, a sentiment from which President Trump is manifestly immune."

"He [Donald Trump] doesn't mind being called a racist, because he is one."

"Trump is a walking contradiction – but his nativism is consistent. [...] Watching this pinball president ricochet around Europe, you could be forgiven for thinking there’s no method to Donald Trump’s madness. Nato is both a rip-off and very strong. Theresa May’s Brexit plan is both pathetic and terrific. Trump’s interview with the Sun was both and generally fine. Trump has all the consistency of Katy Perry’s Hot N Cold, except when it comes to two things: immigrants and Vladimir Putin."

"Immigration is where Trump’s journey begins and ends: the message running all the way through this stick of rock. [...] There was a time when politicians like you preferred to use a dog whistle, but those days seem quaint now. There’s something to be said for using a foghorn to blast your racism across the continents. At least we all know what kind of politics you represent."

"The president of the United States just threatened the safety and security of immigrants the world over. [...] So now we know. The reason Trump ordered the separation of thousands of immigrant children from their parents – some never to be reunited again – was because they better watch themselves. They are changing the culture and it better stop or else they’ll get hurt. Trump has mused before about how good it would be to deport people without judges messing things up. He doesn’t consider his own country’s ample s to be actual laws that he respects. It’s one short step for a president – but one long step for democracy – to go from disrespecting the laws to ignoring them. This is the language and mentality of so many extreme-right and neo-Nazi parties in Europe. So in the Trump spirit of saying it loud, it’s time to drop the euphemisms: Trump is today’s first major government to be led by the racist far right. It’s not some kind of new populist politics; it’s the old National Front."

"In many ways, pseudo-science merely provided sophisticated rationales for such measures. Ideas like 'Social Darwinism', which erroneously inferred from Darwin's theories a struggle for survival between the races, or 'racial hygiene', which argued that physical and mental degeneration would result from miscegenation, came some time after prohibitions had been enacted. This was especially obvious in Britain's North American colonies and the United States. From the earliest phase of British settlement in North America there had been laws designed to discourage miscegenation and to circumscribe the rights of mulattos. Interracial marriage may have been a punishable offence in Virginia from as early as 1630 and was formally prohibited by legislation in 1662; the colony of Maryland had passed similar legislation a year earlier. Such laws were passed by five other North American colonies."

"In the century after the foundation of the United States, no fewer than thirty-eight states banned interracial marriages. In 1915, twenty-eight states retained such statutes; ten of them had gone so far as to make the prohibition on miscegenation constitutional. There was even an attempt, in December 1912, to amend the federal constitution so as to prohibit 'forever . . . intermarriage between negros or persons of color and Caucasians . . . within the United States'. The language of the various statutes and constitutional articles certainly changed over time, as rationalizations for the ban on interracial sex evolved, and as new threats to racial purity emerged. Definitions of whiteness and blackness became more precise: in Virginia, for example, anyone with one or more 'Negro' grandparents was defined as a 'Negro', but it was possible to have one 'Indian' great-grandparent and still be white in the eyes of the law. Depending on patterns of immigration, a number of states extended their prohibitions to include 'Mongolians', 'Asiatic Indians', Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos and Malays. Penalties also varied widely. Some laws simply declared interracial unions null and void, depriving couples of the legal privileges of marriage; others specified penalties of up to ten years in prison. Nevertheless, the underlying motivation seems remarkably consistent and enduring."

"The hundred-year period of racial apartheid and racial terrorism known as Jim Crow."

"And what was the cost of this Jim Crow? Not merely that the precious words "America" and "freedom" became suspect in the eyes of the world, but more than that. It cost us lives. Lives of white men, of Frenchmen, Russians and Chinese-because there were many battles in this war when replacements were needed. But the American rule of war was "No Negroes allowed on the front lines" until the 92d finally got there. I listened to the Axis radio. Tokyo Rose said, and she quoted American sources, that Negroes were good enough to serve in the American Army, but they weren't good enough to pitch in the American Big League baseball. And they broadcast this not only to our own troops but also to the billion and a half colored peoples of the earth."

"To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. ... We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished."

"We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun."

"The Glock pistol reportedly used by alleged South Carolina mass killer Dylann Roof stands as a stark example of the gun industry’s marketing of increased lethality. Since the mid-1980s, increased firepower and capacity have defined the products of the gun industry — of both U.S. and foreign manufacture. Glock pistols have been part of the arsenals of some of the most infamous mass shooters in the United States, including the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, which left 33 dead and 17 wounded, as well as the January 2011 attack at a Tucson, Arizona Safeway parking lot by Jared Loughner which left six dead and 13 wounded — including then-U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords. Examples of additional mass shootings involving Glock pistols include: * The 2012 attack at a Sikh Temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin that left seven dead (including the shooter). * The 2012 mass shooting at the Century Aurora 16 movie theater that left 12 dead. * A 1999 shooting at a Xerox Office Building in Honolulu, Hawaii, that left seven dead. * A 1999 shooting in Springfield, Oregon, where the 15-year-old shooter killed his parents, and then went to school where he killed two of his classmates. * A 1998 workplace shooting at the Connecticut State Lottery Headquarters where the shooter killed four before taking his own life. * The 1991 shooting at Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Texas that left 24 dead (including the shooter)."

"On Thursday, investigators did a trace of the handgun used in Wednesday's shooting and determined that it was a .45-caliber handgun Roof purchased from a Charleston gun store in April, two law enforcement officials told CNN's Perez and Bruer. Roof purchased a Glock .45-caliber model 41, which holds 13 rounds, a federal law enforcement source with knowledge of the investigation said. Witnesses have reported that Roof reloaded a number of times."

"Authorities say Roof shot to death nine people during a Bible study class at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Roof walked into the church carrying a Glock .45-caliber pistol with eight magazines loaded with hollow-point bullets, which are designed to do maximum damage."

"Shooting: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina Date: June 18, 2015 Suspect: Dylann Roof Gun: .45-caliber Glock. Roof killed nine people and injured one. How he got it: A flaw in the FBI’s background check system allowed Roof to buy the handgun at a South Carolina store eight days after his 21st birthday. When the gun dealer asked the FBI for approval to sell the gun to Roof, the bureau noted that he’d recently been arrested and exercised its three-day investigation period to get more information. Two days later, an FBI agent found that Roof had not been convicted of the felony drug possession charge, so an immediate denial was not merited. She tried to contact the appropriate police department for more information, but because of a jurisdictional issue the agent couldn’t get the police report in time to make the three-day deadline. Had she gotten the report, she would have seen that Roof had admitted to drug possession, which would have kept him from obtaining the weapon."

"In the last nine years, Glocks have figured prominently in at least five mass shootings. In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho, a senior at Virginia Tech University, used a Glock 19 and Walther P22 to kill 32 people and wound 17 others in two separate attacks on campus. The Glock 19 is a smaller pistol that is easier to conceal. Three years later, Jared Lee Loughner used a Glock 19 to shoot 20 people in Arizona, gravely wounding US Representative Gabrielle Giffords and killing six others, including a nine-year-old girl. In 2013, Pedro Vargas went on a shooting rampage inside his apartment complex in Hialeah, Florida. With his Glock 17, Vargas murdered six people and held two neighbors hostage during an eight-hour stand-off until a SWAT team stormed the building and killed him. On June 17, 2015, Dylann Roof killed nine people with a .45-caliber Glock pistol at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina. Two months later, Vester Lee Flanagan II shot and killed a Roanoke, Virginia, television reporter and a cameraman with a Glock 19 during a live news broadcast."

"Then Felicia Sanders heard the first startling boom, she said, as Dylann S. Roof removed a Glock .45-caliber handgun from his fanny pack and methodically shot one African-American worshiper after the next, nine in all, starting with the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney."

"Mr. Roof, 21 at the time, told the agents he was astonished to find the church parking lot not swarming with police when he exited a side door at 9:06 p.m. on June 17, 2015. He said he had saved one of eight magazines for his Glock semiautomatic handgun, loaded with hollow-point bullets bought at Walmart, so he could kill himself if confronted by the police.... A final scene from the security camera showed Mr. Roof exiting the church’s side door, holding the Glock at his right side and driving off in his black Hyundai Elantra."

"Armed with a .45 Glock semi-automatic handgun, he loaded 88 bullets into eight magazines for the attack. Eighty-eight is a symbolic number for neo-Nazis, standing for Heil Hitler because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet. Most of the bullets were fired into an 87-year-old parishioner, Susie Jackson, who received 11 shots to her body."

"“He executed them because he believes they are nothing but animals,” prosecutor Nathan Williams said in his closing argument, addressing a somber jury that had seen crime-scene photos of all the dead, including Susie Jackson, 87, the oldest victim, into whom Roof had emptied an entire 11-round magazine from his Glock .45-caliber pistol.... During the trial, prosecutors documented Roof’s meticulous planning in the seven months leading up to the killings. Data collected from his GPS showed that he had made at least six trips to Charleston, visiting historic plantations and studying the church. He videotaped himself on several occasions taking target practice with his Glock in the back yard of his home."

"JUNE 17, 2015 Dylann Roof, 21, killed nine people with a .45-caliber Glock pistol at a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. FEBRUARY 2015 Mr. Roof was charged with a misdemeanor for possessing Suboxone, a prescription drug frequently sold in illegal street transactions. APRIL 2015 He purchased a gun from a store in West Columbia, S.C. Mr. Roof should have been barred from buying a gun because he had admitted to possessing drugs, but the F.B.I. examiner conducting the required background check failed to obtain the police report from the February incident. JUNE 17, 2015 Mr. Roof joined a Bible study group at Emanuel A.M.E. Church and opened fire with the gun he bought in April."

"Examples of Mass Shootings in the United States Involving Glock Pistols Mass Shooting Incident Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church Charleston, South Carolina June 17, 2015 Shooter: Dylann Roof Casualties 9 dead Firearm(s) Glock .45 Model 41 pistol"

"A Bill To address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.... enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled... This Act may be cited as the ‘‘Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act’’."

"H.R. 40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act is a United States House of Representatives bill, first proposed by Rep. Conyers, John, Jr. (U.S. Representative for Michigan, now deceased) calling for the creation of Commission to study and submit a formal report to Congress and the American people with it's findings and recommendations on remedies and reparation proposals for African-Americans, as a result of"(1) the institution of slavery... which included the Federal and State governments which...supported the institution of slavery; (2) the de jure and de facto discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present...; (3) the lingering negative effects of the institution of slavery...; (4) the manner in which textual and digital instructional resources and technologies are being used to deny the inhumanity of slavery and the crime against humanity of people of African descent...; (5) the role of Northern complicity in the Southern based institution of slavery; (6) the direct benefits to societal institutions, public and private, including higher education, corporations, religious and associational; (7) and thus, recommend appropriate ways to educate the American public of the Commission’s findings;(8) and thus, recommend appropriate remedies in consideration of the Commission’s findings...""

"(a) Findings.—The Congress finds that— (1) approximately 4,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States and colonies that became the United States from 1619 to 1865; (2) the institution of slavery was constitutionally and statutorily sanctioned by the Government of the United States from 1789 through 1865; (3) the slavery that flourished in the United States constituted an immoral and inhumane deprivation of Africans’ life, liberty, African citizenship rights, and cultural heritage, and denied them the fruits of their own labor; (4) a preponderance of scholarly, legal, community evidentiary documentation and popular culture markers constitute the basis for inquiry into the on-going effects of the institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systemic structures of discrimination on living African-Americans and society in the United States; and (5) following the abolition of slavery the United States Government, at the Federal, State, and local level, continued to perpetuate, condone and often profit from practices that continued to brutalize and disadvantage African-Americans, including share cropping, convict leasing, Jim Crow, redlining, unequal education, and disproportionate treatment at the hands of the criminal justice system; and (6) as a result of the historic and continued discrimination, African-Americans continue to suffer debilitating economic, educational, and health hardships including but not limited to; having nearly 1,000,000 Black people incarcerated; an unemployment rate more than twice the current White unemployment rate; and an average of less than 1⁄16 of the wealth of White families, a disparity which has worsened, not improved over time."

"Purpose.—The purpose of this Act is to establish a commission to study and develop Reparation proposals for African-Americans as a result of— (1) the institution of slavery, including both the Trans-Atlantic and the domestic “trade” which existed from 1565 in colonial Florida and from 1619 through 1865 within the other colonies that became the United States, and which included the Federal and State governments which constitutionally and statutorily supported the institution of slavery; (2) the de jure and de facto discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present, including economic, political, educational, and social discrimination; (3) the lingering negative effects of the institution of slavery and the discrimination described in paragraphs (1) and (2) on living African-Americans and on society in the United States; (4) the manner in which textual and digital instructional resources and technologies are being used to deny the inhumanity of slavery and the crime against humanity of people of African descent in the United States; (5) the role of Northern complicity in the Southern based institution of slavery; (6) the direct benefits to societal institutions, public and private, including higher education, corporations, religious and associational; (7) and thus, recommend appropriate ways to educate the American public of the Commission’s findings; (8) and thus, recommend appropriate remedies in consideration of the Commission’s findings on the matters described in paragraphs (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), and (6); and (9) submit to the Congress the results of such examination, together with such recommendations."

"Years ago, during a meeting with The Record editorial board, I recall then-Mayor Cory Booker almost tearing up as he told stories of an elementary school in one of Newark’s poorest neighborhoods. The school lacked resources, he said, and was in physical disrepair due to neglect. He related how “it breaks my heart to walk into a classroom and see the children stand, put hands to their hearts and say the Pledge of Allegiance, say the words ‘liberty and justice for all’ and to know that it’s a lie.” It was his way of saying that despite strides, we still suffer the effects of a great racial divide, and from income inequality. That divide, that inequality, are still with us, and they were seared into Booker’s mind and heart again on Wednesday as he testified before a House subcommittee to speak in favor of reparations for slavery. “I say that I am brokenhearted and angry right now... (about) decades of living in a community where you see how deeply unfair this nation is still, to so many people who struggle, who work hard, who do everything right but who still find themselves, disproportionately, with lead in their water, Superfunds in their neighborhoods, schools that don’t serve their genius, and health care disparities that affect their body and their well-being.”"

"Booker, a Democrat and one of just three African Americans in the U.S. Senate... is a prime sponsor of the reparations bill introduced in that chamber. It would, among other things, “address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality and inhumanity of slavery in the United States” and “establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations.” ...The fact that there has been such an outcry already sort of makes Booker’s point about the need for the bill. The rush to condemn it is part of “the silence” Booker spoke of on Wednesday, part of a nation’s refusal to own up to its violent, racist past, or to its unjust present. No, I don’t know how any sort of “reparations program” would work, and neither does anyone else. I don’t know, for instance, whether I, a descendant of slave owners, would be moved to the front of the line to write a check. But that’s not really the point. The point is the reckoning, the recognition, on this 400th anniversary of the arrival of African slaves at the Jamestown colony in Virginia, that remnants of slavery continue to haunt our nation today. The injustices that still exist among our black population today, from health care disparity to inadequate schools to higher rates of unemployment, all date to our original sin of slavery. No doubt, there will be more to come on the reparations issue, more voices speaking loudly and rudely against even having the conversation. Booker is right, though: We must have the conversation."

"I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea. We’ve, you know, tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African-American president. I think we’re always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that. And I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it. First of all, it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate. We’ve had waves of immigrants, as well, who have come to the country and experienced dramatic discrimination of one kind or another. So, no, I don’t think reparations are a good idea."

"The cumulative damages inflicted on black Americans who were enslaved and their descendants of course include slavery, but they also encompass almost 100 years of Jim Crow legal segregation and persistent racism in the post-Civil Rights era continuing to the present. The latter is manifest in mass incarceration, police executions of unarmed blacks (de facto lynchings), discrimination in employment, and, significantly, the enormous racial wealth divide between black and white Americans. Monetary restitution has been a centerpiece of virtually all other cases of reparations, both at home and abroad. While some commentators are concerned that money is “not enough,” money is precisely what is required to eliminate the most glaring indicator of racial injustice, the racial wealth divide. Respect for black American citizenship will be signaled by monetary compensation. Payment of the debt is, as Charles Henry puts it, “long overdue.” H.R. 40 provides an opportunity to begin the process of fulfilling the long-standing national obligation."

"Members of the Project 21 black leadership network said that the legislative proposal to study giving reparations to descendants of slaves is a “sham,” calling the idea both unnecessary and divisive. The proposal in question is Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s (D-TX) bill HR 40, which would set up a commission to study reparations strategies. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties held a hearing on the bill on Wednesday... But Project 21 members said in a statement the black Americans have the same opportunities to live the American Dream as all Americans and that the proposal is a “crass political move to drum up black support and will only hurt race relations... Reparations is a sham" Congress should be reminding blacks that opportunities do exist for them and have existed for generations,” Project 21 member Emery McClendon said. “It’s up to individuals to discover these opportunities to succeed. Let’s flip the script from reparations to personal responsibility.”"

"Those who can't see the importance of Wednesday's congressional hearing and the H.R. 40 bill, usually argue that slavery was "so long ago." Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell thinks reparations are not a good idea, claiming "it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate," and claims "none of us currently living are responsible" for what happened 150 years ago. McConnell believes America made up for slavery by electing Barack Obama, and passing civil rights legislation -- though he sees no need to restore the Voting Rights Act, and calls efforts to expand voting rights a "half-baked, socialist proposal." Such arguments only belittle the issue, ignore history and the present, and are designed to obfuscate and change the subject. America always was -- and continues to be -- a divisive place, built on the enslavement of Africans and the genocide of native people."

"For the first time, most major Democratic presidential contenders are talking about whether the U.S. government should consider paying reparations to the descendants of African Americans who were enslaved and suffered from large-scale racial discrimination. At least three of these candidates... support the creation of a commission that would study the impact of slavery and the Jim Crow discrimination against black Americans that continued after emancipation. The commission would make recommendations about how to compensate black Americans for those injustices... A major justification for the government paying reparations directly to individuals or establishing other forms of compensation, such as investment in majority-black communities, lies in the harsh reality of the labor stolen from millions of enslaved people from 1619 to 1865. That justification extends to many more millions severely oppressed for the next century and a half – whether through racist segregation laws or informal discrimination authorities did nothing to stop... Since 1619, when the first enslaved Africans were taken to Jamestown, Virginia, the oppression of black people by whites has been embedded in America’s economic, political, educational and other institutions... Trillions... in wealth was effectively stolen from black Americans not just because of enslavement prior to 1776 but during the Jim Crow era through employment discrimination and decades of bureaucratic finagling that caused them to lose farmland... the total cost to black Americans over four centuries of slavery, Jim Crow laws and more contemporary discrimination...in the $10-$20 trillion range."

"Opponents of this reparations effort, which would require support from the university’s board to take effect, voiced two common arguments against it: Slavery happened too long ago and not all white Americans have slave-owning ancestors. Similar arguments are now commonplace. The assumption that those debts are owed by and to people now deceased ignores all the money, property and other wealth white Americans alive today inherited from their forebears, including slave owners and many others responsible for depriving blacks of economic and educational opportunities through discrimination. The latter included white overseers, sheriffs and merchants... Most whites can trace their roots back at least three generations, with many going back between four and 20 generations... White-implemented government home-ownership programs after World War II, including mortgage programs for veterans, discriminated on a large scale against blacks. These government programs enabled many millions of white families to move into the middle class. The children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of these whites have since inherited wealth due to the ensuing growth in the value of that housing... In contrast, black families usually endured housing discrimination after World War II. They were unable to obtain mortgages and were barred by restrictive covenants from buying homes in white areas where housing values rose....Today’s wealth gap between white and black Americans is substantially the result of government-supported housing and employment discrimination. The median net worth of black families is less than 15% of that of white families, according to the Federal Reserve."

"Legislation that would establish a commission to study the consequences and impacts of slavery and make recommendations for reparations proposals is likely to get a vote this year from the full Congress, Democratic lawmakers said... A spokesperson for Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who is the sponsor of the legislation, said she is "confident" the bill will receive a vote in the House during this Congress, though its future is uncertain at the moment. "In response to our current focus on Black inequality, H.R. 40 allows for the first constructive, scholarly conversation on race that is clearly needed in the U.S. today," Remmington Belford, a spokesperson for Jackson Lee, told CNN. "It offers full discussion on the analysis of economic, political, psychological, scientific, and sociological effects of slavery in the US."... The bill's next stop is a full committee hearing, followed by a vote in the House... A potential reexamining of the proposal comes as the United States is reeling from the recent deaths of several black Americans at the hands of the police, including Floyd, who died in Minneapolis last month after a white police officer knelt on his neck for more than eight minutes. Widespread protests across the country have called for codified change in how the law treats the black community."

"The bill would create a commission of 13 members who would compile a report of findings and recommendations on the issue and send it to Congress. Former Democratic Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, who served until 2017, had previously introduced legislation on reparations repeatedly over the span of multiple sessions of Congress.... Jackson Lee said in a press release that "the Commission aims to study the impact of slavery and continuing discrimination against African-Americans, resulting directly and indirectly from slavery to segregation to the desegregation process and the present day." The issue of reparations also gained steam through the 2020 Democratic primary, with several candidates endorsing some form of reparations. Several endorsed Jackson Lee's bill, including Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden."

"Four hundred years ago, ships set sail from the west coast of Africa and in the process, began one of mankind’s most inhumane practices: human bondage and slavery. For two centuries, human beings – full of hopes and fears, dreams and concerns, ambition and anguish – were transported onto ships like chattel, and the lives of many forever changed. The reverberations from this horrific series of acts – a transatlantic slave trade that touched the shores of a colony that came to be known as America, and later a democratic republic known as the United States of America – are unknown and worthy of exploration. Approximately 4,000,000 Africans and their descendants were enslaved in the United States and colonies that became the United States from 1619 to 1865."

"The institution of slavery was constitutionally and statutorily sanctioned by the Government of the United States from 1789 through 1865. American Slavery is our country’s original sin and its existence at the birth of our nation is a permanent scar on our country’s founding documents, and on the venerated authors of those documents, and it is a legacy that continued well into the last century. The framework for our country and the document to which we all take an oath describes African Americans as three-fifths a person. The infamous Dred Scott decision of the United States Supreme Court, issued just a few decades later, described slaves as private property, unworthy of citizenship. And, a civil war that produced the largest death toll of American fighters in any conflict in our history could not prevent the indignities of Jim Crow, the fire hose at lunch counters and the systemic and institutional discrimination that would follow for a century after the end of the Civil War."

"The mythology built around the Civil War—that victory by the North eradicated slavery and all of its vestiges throughout our nation—has obscured our discussions of the impact of chattel slavery and made it difficult to have a national dialogue on how to fully account for its place in American history and public policy. While it is nearly impossible to determine how the lives touched by slavery could have flourished in the absence of bondage, we have certain datum that permits us to examine how a subset of Americans – African Americans – have been affected by the callousness of involuntary servitude. We know that in almost every segment of society – education, healthcare, jobs and wealth – the inequities that persist in America are more acutely and disproportionately felt in Black America."

"Reparations are ultimately about respect and reconciliation — and the hope that one day, all Americans can walk together toward a more just future. We owe it to those who were ripped from their homes those many years ago an ocean away; we owe it to the millions of Americans- yes they were Americans – who were born into bondage, knew a life of servitude, and died anonymous deaths, as prisoners of this system. We owe it to the millions of descendants of these slaves, for they are the heirs to a society of inequities and indignities that naturally filled the vacuum after slavery was formally abolished 154 years ago. Today represents the first time in history that the House of Representatives will host a hearing on H.R. 40."

"It is perhaps fitting that the hearing occurs on the 19th of June, also known to many in this room, as Juneteenth – the day that, 154 years ago, General Gordon Granger rode into Galveston, Texas and announced the freedom of the last American slaves; belatedly freeing 250,000 slaves in Texas nearly two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Juneteenth was first celebrated in the Texas state capital in 1867 under the direction of the Freedmen's Bureau. Juneteenth was and is a living symbol of freedom for people who did not have it. Today, Juneteenth remains the oldest known celebration of slavery's demise. It commemorates freedom while acknowledging the sacrifices and contributions made by courageous African Americans towards making our great nation the more conscious and accepting country that it has become."

"And let me end as I began, noting that this year is the 400th commemoration of the 1619 arrival of the first captive Africans in English North America, at Point Comfort, Virginia. With those dates as bookends to today’s hearing, let us proceed with the cause of this morning with a full heart, with the knowledge that this work will take time and trust. Let us also do so with the spirit of reconciliation and understanding that this bill represents.”"

"Yesterday, when asked about reparations, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar reply: America should not be held liable for something that happened 150 years ago, since none of us currently alive are responsible... This rebuttal proffers a strange theory of governance, that American accounts are somehow bound by the lifetime of its generations. But well into this century, the United States was still paying out pensions to the heirs of Civil War soldiers. We honor treaties that date back some 200 years, despite no one being alive who signed those treaties... But we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach."

"As historian Ed Baptist has written, enslavement, quote, “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics” of America, so that by 1836 more than $600 million, or almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves. By the time the enslaved were emancipated, they comprised the largest single asset in America—$3 billion in 1860 dollars, more than all the other assets in the country combined. The method of cultivating this asset was neither gentle cajoling nor persuasion, but torture, rape and child trafficking. Enslavement reigned for 250 years on these shores. When it ended, this country could have extended its hallowed principles—life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness—to all, regardless of color. But America had other principles in mind. And so, for a century after the Civil War, black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror, a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority Leader McConnell. It is tempting to divorce this modern campaign of terror, of plunder, from enslavement. But the logic of enslavement, of white supremacy, respects no such borders, and the god of bondage was lustful and begat many heirs—coup d’états and convict leasing, vagrancy laws and debt peonage, redlining and racist GI bills, poll taxes and state-sponsored terrorism."

"We grant that Mr. McConnell was not alive for Appomattox. But he was alive for the electrocution of George Stinney. He was alive for the blinding of Isaac Woodard. He was alive to witness kleptocracy in his native Alabama and a regime premised on electoral theft. Majority Leader McConnell cited civil rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader. What they know, what this committee must know, is that while emancipation dead-bolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open. And that is the thing about Senator McConnell’s “something.” It was 150 years ago. And it was right now. The typical black family in this country has one-tenth the wealth of the typical white family. Black women die in childbirth at four times the rate of white women. And there is, of course, the shame of this land of the free boasting the largest prison population on the planet, of which the descendants of the enslaved make up the largest share."

"You know, the two great crimes in American history is obviously...the near destruction...of this country’s Native American population, the theft of their land, and on to work that land was brought in native Africans into this country, beginning in 1619. Those twin processes profoundly altered the shape of the world and made this country possible. Obviously, first of all, you know, the land on which America and Americans currently reside was the land of Native Americans, but the people brought in to break that land just transformed it."

"The profits derived from slavery are more extreme than I think are commonly acknowledged. As I said yesterday, in 1860, the combined worth of the 4 million enslaved black people in this country was some $3 billion, nearly $75 billion in today’s share of dollars. Cotton, in 1860, was this country’s largest export—not just its largest export, it was the majority of exports out of this country. So, from a financial perspective, just the economics of it, it’s absolutely impossible to imagine America without enslavement."

"The onset of the Civil War, the greatest preponderance, the greatest population per capita of millionaires and multimillionaires in this country was in the Mississippi River Valley. It wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t in Chicago, wasn’t in New York. The richest people in this country were slaveholders."

"Most of our earliest presidents were slaveholders. And the fact that they were presidents is not incidental to the fact that they—to their slaveholding. That was how they built their wealth. That was how Thomas Jefferson built his wealth. That was how George Washington built his wealth. Individual slaves were the equivalent of, say, owning a home today. They were people, but turned into objects of extreme wealth. So, just from the economic perspective, there’s that."

"“Wealthy African Americans” are not the equivalent of, quote-unquote, “wealthy white Americans”...The average African-American family in this country making $100,000... actually lives in the same kind of neighborhood that the average white family making $35,000 a year lives in. That is totally tied to the legacy of enslavement and Jim Crow and the input and the idea in the mind that white people and black people are somehow deserving of different things."

"If I injure you, the injury persists even after I actually commit the act. If I stab you, you may suffer complications long after that initial actual stabbing. If I shoot you, you may suffer complications long after that initial shooting. That’s the case with African Americans... that are still suffering from the after-effects of that."

"This whole thing about who should get a check, and should we cut checks, you know, I understand those questions. That’s great. Those people should support H.R. 40, though, because that’s what H.R. 40 does. It tries to get that figured out, and get that math figured out, and figure out the best way to do it. But if we don’t actually have a study, we can’t actually answer those questions. You can’t ask a doctor to make a diagnosis before there’s an actual examination."

"And in terms of poverty and race in this country, again, you know, one of the things that I really, really wanted to stress is, the level of poverty specifically that you see in the African-American community is not accidental. It’s not accidental. This is part of the process. The process of enslavement involves stealing something from someone. It involves taking something from someone."

"Jim Crow was theft. First and foremost, it was theft. If I tax you or if tell you you have to be loyal to this country and pledge fealty to its laws, but then I don’t give you the same degree of protection, I don’t give you the same access to resources that I give to another group of people, I have effectively stolen something from you. I have stolen your tax money. I have stolen your fealty."

"So, when the state of Mississippi, for instance, taxes black people and then builds one facility for education and another for—one facility for education for whites and then an inferior facility for blacks, that’s theft. That’s theft. If I build a public pool system and then tell you you can’t use that public pool system, that’s theft."

"And so, that is the long history of this country, that doesn’t end, again, conservatively, until 1968. And so, there are people who are very, very much alive who have experienced that, who are suffering the after-effects and effects of that. And that’s what, you know, as far as I’m concerned, the whole movement around reparations is about."

"Mitch McConnell... does not want to be responsible for enslavement that happened 150 years ago, but, yet and still, wants the right to operate his business or operate his career in a building that was built by enslaved people."

"But when you start talking to people about actually paying that back or actually some sort of evenness around that... a lot of discomfort comes up. I understand that... But...you can’t... be a fair-weather friend to your country."

"You can’t decide that your past only matters... when you’re being called to be responsible for what made it possible for that country to be called “land of the free” in the first place, to act like you don’t owe anybody anything or you’re not part of it, especially... when a lot of this happened in your own lifetime. It isn’t the past. It happened while you were alive..."

"I think the testimony was that one should not receive payment that would properly be due to the enslaved. But this country is, to this very day, receiving payment that was due to its enslavers. That’s the way inheritance works in this country..."

"If I assemble a mass of money, I have the right to pass that on to my kid. My kid has the right to do whatever and then pass it on to their kid. And so, there’s something fundamentally unjust if I have secured that money by taking it from one group, and then I pass that money on to my kid."

"This didn’t end with enslavement. Reparations isn’t just about enslavement. There was the 250 years of enslavement, that period of theft. After that, there was a hundred years of terror, that period of theft. And... I would argue... our present system of mass incarceration emerges right out of that... This is tremendous that we would recognize our ties to the past when it comes to certain things, but not other things."

"Our research points to a multigenerational legacy of white supremacy in asset building and wealth concentration — a history that includes the African slave trade, Jim Crow and systematic discrimination in wealth-building opportunities right on up to the present. That trend is getting worse, not better. Between 1983 and 2016, the median net worth for Black Americans actually went down by 50 percent. Paired with a growing Latin population that also lags far behind whites in household wealth, the U.S.’s overall median wealth trended downward over those decades, even as median white wealth increased.... A major reason for the growing wealth divide isn’t that white people “worked harder.” It’s that the government worked harder for them."

"The key point is that unpaid labor by millions of people of African heritage was a foundation of the social wealth in the United States. Immigrants with European heritage directly and indirectly benefited from this foundation of social wealth and white supremacy, even if they never had anything to do with slavery."

"While many whites were able to board an express train to middle-class wealth between 1945 and 1975, people of color were left waiting for a train that never showed up. As a result of government subsidies, white homeownership rates steadily rose to as high as 75 percent in 2005, while Black rates peaked at 46 percent the same year — a 30-point gap that persists to this day.Since then, subsequent generations of white families have been able to help their children buy homes and go to college through what sociologists call the “intergenerational transmission of advantage,” while Black families lacked the financial stability to do the same...."

"We have the method and the means to fund a reparations program. Only the political will is missing -Sen. Elizabeth Warren, for instance, has proposed a 2 percent annual tax on wealth over $50 million, with the rate rising to 3 percent on wealth over $1 billion. Such a proposal would generate an estimated $2.75 trillion over the next decade. -A progressive tax on inheritances over $10 million, meanwhile, would also generate substantial revenue, almost entirely from extremely wealthy families that have benefited from generations of white advantage in wealth building. -Second, we propose hefty penalties on wealthy individuals and corporations that hide their wealth offshore or in complicated trusts to avoid taxation. Part of the austerity many of our communities face is the result of the estimated 8 to 10 percent of all global wealth that’s now hidden offshore. A tax on wealth and stiffer penalties on tax dodging would have beneficial impacts on the larger economy for all workers, not just those who face racial exclusion. -A third source of financing would be to redesign existing wealth-building subsidies. The current U.S. tax code provides over $600 billion a year in tax subsidies — such as homeownership subsidies and retirement savings programs — that are skewed dramatically to the wealthiest households. Shifting these expenditures toward wealth-building programs for low-wealth people, particularly those of color, would have a monumental impact. In short, we have the method and the means to fund a reparations program. Only the political will is missing."

"In 1988, President Ronald Reagan formally apologized for the U.S. internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and, under the Civil Liberties Act, paid $20,000 in reparations each to over 800,000 victims. Over $1.1 billion was initially allocated, with additional appropriations later. At the international level, Germany has paid over $89 billion in reparations to victims of the Holocaust. German officials continue to meet with groups of survivors and their advocates to revisit guidelines and ensure that survivors receive the benefits."

"There’s no reason to believe a similarly viable program couldn’t be designed for Americans living with the ongoing effects of slavery, violence and discrimination. (Or, we should add, genocide. We believe there’s a similarly compelling case for reparations to America’s First Nations that deserves its own treatment.)"

"This scheme had no sooner been propagated, than the old and leading colored men of Philadelphia, Pa., with Richard Allen, James Forten, and others at their head, true to their trust and the cause of their brethren, summoned the colored people together, and then and there, in language and with voices pointed and loud, protested against the scheme as an outrage, having no other object in view, than the benefit of the slave-holding interests of the country"

"When white terrorists bomb a black church and kill five black children, that is an act of individual racism, widely deplored by most segments of the society. But when in that same city—Birmingham, Alabama—five hundred black babies die each year because of the lack of proper food, shelter and medical facilities, and thousands more are destroyed and maimed physically, emotionally and intellectually because of conditions of poverty and discrimination in the black community, that is a function of institutional racism."

"[L]eaving home is hard, and the of wealth makes it even harder. [...] Just a quick comparison of black and white neighborhoods is enough to illustrate the particular challenges that face black families as they reach for middle class, or try to keep their position. The key fact is this: Even after you adjust for income and education, black Americans are more likely than any other group to live in neighborhoods with substantial pockets of poverty."

"[B]lack Americans live with a level of poverty that is simply unknown to the vast majority of whites. It’s tempting to attribute this to the income disparity between blacks and whites. Since blacks are more likely to be poor, it stands to reason that they’re more likely to live in poor neighborhoods. But the fact of large-scale neighborhood poverty holds true for higher-income black Americans as well. Middle-class blacks are far more likely than middle-class whites to live in areas with significant amounts of poverty. Among today’s cohort of middle- and upper-class blacks, about half were raised in neighborhoods of at least 20 percent poverty. Only 1 percent of today’s middle- and upper-class whites can say the same. In short, if you took two children—one white, one black—and gave them parents with similar jobs, similar educations, and similar values, the black child would be much more likely to grow up in a neighborhood with higher poverty, worse schools, and more violence. This is an outright disaster for income mobility. Given their circumstances, blacks face a reversal of their gains over the last generation. Simply put, the persistence of poor neighborhoods is a fact of life for the large majority of blacks; it’s been transmitted from one generation to the next, and shows little sign of changing."

"For millions of more ordinary black Americans, [...] even with more income and more education, they’re stuck in segregated neighborhoods. Yes, there isn’t much mobility for anyone, but that fact is especially true for blacks. Indeed, when someone says that America has a “,” this is what they mean: Whether times are good or bad, blacks remain at the bottom."

"To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. As black Americans living in a small Kentucky town, the railroad tracks were a daily reminder of our marginality. Across those tracks were paved streets, stores we could not enter, restaurants we could not eat in, and people we could not look directly in the face. Across those tracks was a world we could work in as maids, as janitors, as prostitutes, as long as it was in a service capacity. We could enter that world but we could not live there. We had always to return to the margin, to cross the tracks, to shacks and abandoned houses on the edge of town. There were laws to ensure our return. To not return was to risk being punished. Living as we did-on the edge-we developed a particular way of seeing reality. We looked both from the outside in and and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as on the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and an ongoing private acknowledgment that we were a necessary, vital part of that whole. This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us an oppositional world view-a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity."

"The core problem within the ghetto is the vicious circle created by the lack of decent housing, decent jobs and adequate education. The failure of these three fundamental institutions to work has led to alienation of the ghetto from the rest of the urban area as well as to deep political rifts between the two communities. In America we judge by American standards, and by this yardstick we find that the black man lives in incredibly inadequate housing, shabby shelters that are dangerous to mental and physical health and to life itself. [...] and highway clearance programs have forced black people more and more into congested pockets of the inner city. Since suburban zoning laws have kept out low-income housing, and the Federal Government has failed to pass open-occupancy laws, black people are forced to stay in the deteriorating ghettos. Thus crowding increases, and slum conditions worsen. [...] Here we begin to understand the pervasive, cyclic implications of institutional racism. Barred from most housing, black people are forced to live in segregated neighborhoods and with this comes de facto segregated schooling, which means poor education, which leads in turn to ill-paying jobs."

"To truly promote confidence in these vaccines, we must start by acknowledging this history of mistreatment and exploitation of minorities by the medical community and the government. But then we need to explain and demonstrate all that has been done to correct and address these wrongs."

"Despite warnings from public health officials, new research suggests Black Lives Matter protests across the country have not led to a jump in coronavirus cases. ... A new study, published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, used data on protests from more than 300 of the largest US cities, and found no evidence that coronavirus cases grew in the weeks following the beginning of the protests."

"Republicans have racialized poverty, and Democrats have run from poverty. And we’re forcing them to deal with the reality. We are very political, but we’re not partisan... There is not some separation between Jesus and justice; to be Christian is to be concerned with what’s going on in the world. ... It's better to die having fought for justice than to live and stay on the sidelines and to watch injustice have it's way without a challenge."

"[One] example of narrative takeover is the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a life-affirming accountability movement to call attention to the violence being perpetrated against Black people. But rather than listening, learning, and believing the stories of injustice, systemic racism, and pain, groups of white people centered themselves with “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter.” There was never a narrative of “white lives and police lives don’t matter” in this movement. This was an attempt to, once again, decenter Black lives and take over the narrative."

"In order to have a legal arrest, you need probable cause to believe that the person committed a crime. ... There is nothing in the law that allows “proactive arrest.”.. It’s the power of the people, and people are in the streets—hundreds of thousands of people in the streets in US cities, and in cities around the world—in support of the Movement for Black Lives, and against police brutality.. ... We can’t rely on the legal system, but it’s a tool that we have to use. ... There is an ACLU lawsuit ... asking for an injunction against these federal agents targeting legal observers, and targeting journalists as well, because the last thing in the world that the Trump administration and his goons want are witnesses, are media that are witnessing what’s happening ... there are lawsuits being filed in support of the real power, and that is the power of the people."

"Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us. I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why. It offers a new vision for young black girls around the world that we deserve to be fought for, that we deserve to call on local governments to show up for us."

"We have to invest in black leadership. That's what I've learned the most in the last few years. ... I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody? And I also think leadership looks like everybody in this audience showing up for black lives. ... The movement for black lives isn't just for us, but it's for everybody."

"I was mostly thinking about building a mass movement that people can be a part of and feel an identity around. I was interested in giving folks like black, poor people who’ve been marginalized, brutalized, an opportunity to have more visibility. Before seven years ago, we could barely get the news to talk about police violence, let alone police death."

"I’m really proud of the work we’ve been able to do in the last seven years... What is clear is that Black Lives Matter shares a name with a much larger movement and there are literally hundreds of organizations that do impactful racial and gender justice work who make up the fabric of this broader movement.”"

"When someone like Roger Goodell says “Black lives matter,” even though he did not mention Colin Kaepernick, and even though he may have — he probably did not really mean it, what that means is that the NFL recognizes that it has to begin a new process, that there is a further expansion of popular consciousness."

"Racism is integrally linked to capitalism... it’s a mistake to assume that we can combat racism by leaving capitalism in place. ... The Industrial Revolution, which pivoted around the production of capital, was enabled by slave labor in the U.S... we have a long way to go before we can begin to talk about an economic system that is not based on exploitation and on the super-exploitation of Black people, Latinx people and other racialized populations."

"We now have the conceptual means to engage in discussions, popular discussions, about capitalism... The notion of the prison-industrial complex requires us to understand the globalization of capitalism. Anti-capitalist consciousness helps us to understand the predicament of immigrants, who are barred from the U.S. by the wall that has been created by the current occupant. These conditions have been created by global capitalism. And I think this is a period during which we need to begin that process of popular education, which will allow people to understand the interconnections of racism, heteropatriarchy, capitalism."

"Millions of dollars were raised for the Black Lives Matter Foundation, a nonprofit that is entirely unassociated with the Black Lives Matter movement. In the wake of police brutality protests across the United States, people have been opening their wallets in support of the Black Lives Matter movement — but some have inadvertently been sending their donations to a similarly titled, but entirely unaffiliated, organization. Companies including Apple, Google and Microsoft have reportedly raised more than $4 million for the Black Lives Matter Foundation — a registered nonprofit that is different to the Black Lives Matter Global Network... An estimated $4.35 million was raised for the foundation in the first weeks of June, though much of that was frozen before it could be disbursed.... Google confirmed to People that it learned last week that the foundation was not affiliated with the movement, and subsequently updated its employee-led internal giving campaign to redirect all donated money to the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation."

"We know that young people are the present and the future, but what inspires me are older people who are becoming transformed in the service of this movement. ... I'm inspired by seeing older people step into their own power and leadership and say, "I'm not passing a torch, I'm helping you light the fire.""

"Black people. I love you. I love us. Our lives matter. Black Lives Matter. We see black death all the time, and I don’t know what it was about this, but I know I went home and then I woke up in the middle of the night crying. And I picked up my phone and I started clickety-clacking, right? ... Patrisse and I, we started talking about building an organizing project around state violence."

"An 11-year-old boy is doing a small part to make a big change when it comes to social justice. Jack Powers recently started mowing lawns around his neighborhood to raise money, but the sixth-grader from Missouri isn't using the extra cash to buy the latest video game or gadget. Instead, he's donating it to the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been behind the nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd on May 25. “I just wanted to make a change and I didn't like how people were being treated,” Jack told KMOV. “I saw what happened to George Floyd and saw how people were being treated, and I decided to make a change,” he told the news station."

"What we are seeing now in America is about so much more than people just being sick of the police murdering innocent people. It is a generational and class revolt. ... Look at what the Congressional Black Caucus is doing. They are repeating the same kind of tired clichés about police reform we have heard for years. Most people participating in the George Floyd protests know that such reforms are useless. Empty symbolism. The mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel Bowser, paints "Black Lives Matter" in 35-foot-tall letters on a street near the White House. But at the same time, she's pushing for a $45 million increase in the police budget and the construction of a $500 million new jail. I don't think people are buying such a performance. I also don't believe that people are buying Pelosi's little kente-cloth, "take a knee in solidarity with Black Lives Matter" trick either."

"I'm more optimistic because I see the resistance in the streets, which wasn't there a few weeks and months ago. That's where hope lies. It lies in the streets. And I have got to acknowledge these people. They're mostly young, incredibly courageous, they are out there braving economic misery, arrests, indiscriminate, brutal and often lethal police violence and COVID-19, and they're fighting against injustice and the elites anyway. They're all heroes in my book."

"Black Lives Matter has meant so much everywhere, including in Haiti and Palestine, and it strengthens other movements for justice against murder by the state—the human rights defenders in Honduras and Thailand who are being assassinated by corporate agents for defending Indigenous and small farmers’ right to land, for example."

"I was struck again by the importance of language and of words that need to be spoken. Our best teachers, including Audre Lorde among others, have imparted this truth. In the last few months, weeks, and days, I have found myself saying #BlackLivesMatter out loud at various times. It's not that I don't already know that they do. I think that I am trying to speak the words into existence."

"Artists have turned boarded-up businesses into powerful Black Lives Matter art. After finishing a mural of George Floyd on Broadway in downtown Oakland, Matt Hunter started painting his second one when The Verge caught up with him. This time, he decided to paint a mural of Breonna Taylor. It took him about three days to finish this monochromatic piece of Taylor depicted as “a new monument for a new future,” he said. “I feel as though there is a cycle of things and we are at a boiling point of ignored pain.” ... Taylor is... surrounded by thousands of people behind her, which he says represent an unstoppable movement to create change and bring justice to all people. The Moon and Sun on each side of her are a reminder that the Earth keeps turning. “Things"

"Remove the word black and say 'lives matter'. ... Stop sending mothers back home empty. You can never replace a mother's child. If we want black lives matter, let's make it matter to us. That's the new call."

"The protests are colliding with... the country’s most devastating pandemic in modern history. “With being home and not being able to do as much, that might be amplifying something that is already sort of critical, something that’s already a powerful catalyst, and that is the video,” said Daniel Q. Gillion, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania... “If you aren’t moved by the George Floyd video, you have nothing in you,” he said. “And that catalyst can now be amplified by the fact that individuals probably have more time to engage in protest activity.”"

"Besides the spike in demonstrations on Juneteeth, the number of protests has fallen considerably over the last two weeks according to the Crowd Counting Consortium. But the amount of change that the protests have been able to produce in such a short period of time is significant. In Minneapolis, the City Council pledged to dismantle its police department. In New York, lawmakers repealed a law that kept police disciplinary records secret. Cities and states across the country passed new laws banning chokeholds. Mississippi lawmakers voted to retire their state flag, which prominently includes a Confederate battle emblem."

"Without gainsaying the reality and significance of generalized white support for the movement in the early 1960s, the number of whites who were active in a sustained way in the struggle were comparatively few, and certainly nothing like the percentages we have seen taking part in recent weeks. ... It looks, for all the world, like these protests are achieving what very few do: setting in motion a period of significant, sustained, and widespread social, political change. ... We appear to be experiencing a social change tipping point — that is as rare in society as it is potentially consequential."

"The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation has established a fund worth more than $12 million to aid organizations fighting institutional racism, in the wake of the George Floyd protests. On Wednesday, the foundation, which has been influential in the emergence of the broader Black Lives Matter movement, said it was setting aside $6 million in donations to support black-led grassroots organizing groups. Last week, it unveiled a separate $6.5 million fund for its network of affiliate chapters. Beginning July 1, affiliated chapters can apply for unrestricted funding of up to $500,000 in multi-year grants, the foundation announced. The foundation told the AP it has received more than 1.1 million individual donations at an average of $33 per gift since the death of Floyd, a black man who died May 25 pleading for air as a white Minneapolis police officer held a knee to his neck for nearly eight minutes. The surge of financial support adds to roughly $3.4 million in net assets the BLM Global Network had on hand last year, according to a 2019 financial statement of Thousand Currents, the fiscal sponsor which receives donations on the network’s behalf and then releases money to the group."

"Then, as now, getting arrested or jailed or associated with criminality in any fashion, whether in a hoodie or a suit and tie, was bound to upset the political establishment. When Black Lives Matter activists blocked traffic and engaged in other acts of mass civil disobedience, many white liberals and older black activists charged that King wouldn’t have approved of the type of disruption these protests caused. While the likes of King and Rosa Parks are now celebrated for their acts of defiance, their protests were no less controversial at the time, even within the civil-rights movement."

"An early objection to the Black Lives Matter movement was that, unlike the traditional civil-rights organizations, it was “leaderless.” This view reflects a certain sexism, overlooking the many black women who have spearheaded the movement since its inception. But yes, the movement’s leaders have made a deliberate effort to decentralize power. This is in no small part a response to the stark reality that past black leaders—King, Malcolm X, Fred Hampton—were targeted and killed, leaving their movements in turmoil. A report last summer from the FBI’s counterterrorism division alleged the rise of “black identity extremists,” a category previously unheard of. The report was reminiscent of the agency’s cointelpro program that undermined black activists, including King, in the 1960s."

"Across the nation, people from all walks of life have poured into the streets to protest the deaths of unarmed Black men and women at the hands of the police."

"The aim should be to reshape our society as a whole. We are not doing nearly enough to address the root causes of poverty, addiction, homelessness, and mental-health crises. Instead, we criminalize poverty through harsh fines and debt regulation; criminalize addiction through drug laws; criminalize homelessness by conducting sweeps of people sleeping in parks; and criminalize mental illness by turning prisons into de facto psychiatric hospitals. Why do we focus on these symptoms instead of the true diseases? ... The Black Lives Matter movement and the pandemic has taught us that we’re all in this together, opening up the opportunity to explore building a new, care-based reality. We need a vision of a future in which vital needs like housing, education, and healthcare are met, allowing people to live big, beautiful, fulfilled lives—with not a prison in sight."

"In the aftermath of the Ferguson protests, it was fashionable to speak of a "new civil-rights movement." But it is perhaps more illuminating to see Black Lives Matter as a new banner raised on the same field of battle, stained by the blood of generations who came before. The fighters are new, but the conflict is the same one that Frederick Douglass and George Ruby fought, one that goes far beyond policing. (p 302)"

"If black lives matter, then it should matter all the time. You should never let somebody get killed. That's somebody's son, That's somebody's brother; that's somebody's friend. So you should always keep that in mind."

"Civil-rights organizers Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi put those three words into our minds and hearts seven years ago, when they began to change the country. The sweeping calls for change we see today are not sudden, but the fruits of the labor of activists like them. Their work has given us room to demand more, because black lives don’t truly matter just because people simply say so. This year alone, a white father and son carried out the modern-day lynching of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery near Brunswick, Georgia. If black lives mattered by now, we wouldn’t have to say the name of Breonna Taylor, lost to a hail of police bullets in her own home in Louisville in March. Or chant the name of Floyd, killed for allegedly spending a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill at a corner grocery... Accountability after the fact used to be the most that I once hoped for, as a black man just living and trying to survive. Wishing for the cops not to target me indiscriminately felt almost like too much to ask. But I must be honest: If this era of Black Lives Matter activism has not resulted in the kinds of changes to America that would ensure my safety, then it has made me feel more secure in demanding those concessions from my country."

"In 2016 the Black Lives Matter movement has consolidated this sense of a leaderless movement with foot soldiers in every corner of the land. Some of them are indeed sitting in and marching and campaigning, but it's my sense that many more have taken the message and applied it in disparate ways to their daily practice. I see black hair, in its natural state-free of endpapers-springing out of all the scalps of my friends and students and myself. I see kids expanding the old strictures of the hip-hop aesthetic into Afro-punk and Afro-weird and black-girl-magic and every kind of hyphenated existence. And I see the walk. I see folks making a lot of a little."

"Antiblack racism is not only happening in the United States. It's actually happening all across the globe. And what we need now more than ever is a human rights movement that challenges systemic racism in every single context. ... We need this because the global reality is that black people are subject to all sorts of disparities in most of our most challenging issues of our day."

"I think about issues like climate change, and how six of the 10 worst impacted nations by climate change are actually on the continent of Africa... in Haiti is that they were actually facing a number of challenges that even preceded this hurricane. They were reeling from the earthquake, they were reeling from cholera that was brought in by UN peacekeepers and still hasn't been eradicated. This is unconscionable. And this would not happen if this nation didn't have a population that was black, and we have to be real about that."

"I absolutely think people are concerned with police brutality. Let me make that absolutely clear. We have been fighting and advocating to stop a war on black lives. And that is how we see it—this is a war on black life."

"One thing I just want to underscore is that the world is watching us. We see these rallies in solidarity emerging all across the globe. ... I think they have been not O.K. for so many years, and they are finally saying, “Hey, we are going to take it to the streets and say we are going to show up in solidarity with you.”"

"There [was] a lot of rage, a lot of pain, a lot of cynicism. But her (Garza's) post resonated with me, for a number of reasons. I think it being explicitly black, it being a message rooted in love, and it just felt very hopeful."

"When we first started Black Lives Matter, I always knew that this needed to be a global movement and that we needed more people to participate. The issues of police brutality, extrajudicial killings and anti-Black racism requires everybody to pay attention."

"We are finally achieving a mass consciousness. We're seeing a widespread awareness and commitment to anti-racism that we have long needed. People are now alert and active because the pandemic demonstrated how interconnected our lives are. We finally had time to sit at home and reflect on how our society functions and whether or not it's functioning well for all of us. The overwhelming consensus was that it is not, it is insufficient – in fact, it's been unsustainable for decades, if not generations."

"People have begun to engage in mutual aid and support for their neighbours. Even if people didn't have much, they were still looking out for each other. Through this, we began to see the ways in which new webs were being constructed. When you're sitting at home or living at a slower pace and you see that Black folks in your community are attacked, killed, murdered by vigilantes and by the police, you wake up, you rise to action, and you rise quickly."

"We are now in a moment where people have no excuses to deny the injustice that's happening in the middle of a global pandemic. Things feel different this time because we were able to tap into a sense of our own agency, our own power and our genuine love for each other."

"Voices on the left, voices on the right... What I’ve not heard is a unanimous commitment to atone for the sins of this country. ... It was an 18-year fight to (make) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. ... Systemic racism can have an ending. Police brutality can have an ending. Economic repression of Black and brown people can have an ending. ... A movement without action is a movement standing still. To those who say they care: Move more than your mouth. ... Black lives do matter. And this is not another digital, viral trend, moment or hashtag. ... Yes, all lives do matter, but they only matter when black lives matter too."

"High school students have organized protests in California, Maryland and Michigan. In one Texas suburb, three teenagers led hundreds of people in a march, and they say they aren’t done organizing. In early June, as outrage over racism and police brutality erupted nationwide, three teenagers from Katy, Texas, grew frustrated by a void of activism in their affluent Houston suburb. They banded together under the name Katy4Justice. Over four days, through text messages and video chats, they organized a protest at a neighborhood park, leading hundreds of people in a march through soccer fields and picnic areas in the summer heat... “Katy loves to think it’s progressive and stuff, but nothing ever happens,” said Erika Alvarez, 17, one of the three organizers, all of whom will start their senior year in the fall. Jeffrey Jin, 17, concurred. “It’s very all talk and no do... There’s a lot of white silence.”...The youth-led protest in Katy is representative of the way the nationwide demonstrations after George Floyd’s death have energized a diverse cohort of the youngest generation. In recent weeks, high school students have led protests in Greenville, Mich.; Laurel, Md.; and Berkeley, Calif. Several teenagers, including those in Katy, said that it was the first time they had organized any sort of demonstration — and that it would not be the last. In Katy, the students’ activism was years in the making, they said, shaped by their own experiences with racism."

"The flood of newcomers, vividly different from earlier migrants in faiths, tongues, and habits, aroused powerful anxieties about the capacity of American society to accommodate them. Some of that anxiety found virulent expression in a revived Ku Klux Klan, reborn in all its Reconstruction-era paraphernalia at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in 1915. Klan nightriders now rode cars, not horses, and they directed their venom as much at immigrant Jews and Catholics as at blacks. But the new Klan no less than the old represented a peculiarly American response to cultural upheaval. By the early 1920s the Klan claimed some five million members, and for a time it dominated the politics of Indiana and Oregon. The nativist sentiment that the Klan helped to nurture found statutory expression in 1924, when Congress choked the immigrant stream to a trickle, closing the era of virtually unlimited entry to the United States. The ethnic neighborhoods that had mushroomed in the preceding generation would grow no more through further inflows from abroad. America’s many ethnic communities now began to stabilize. Millions of immigrants awaited the day when they might become American at last."

"They were common folk, and their commonness radiated from them like heat from a stove….The wheelbarrow handle, it was plain, was more familiar to the men in that long line than the golf-stick, and the washtub had engaged the women far oftener than the lipstick. But what of it? The klan is not a club for snobs, it is a device for organizing inferiorities into a mystical superiority."

"The KKK took my baby away They took her away Away from me"

"The Chicago Fraternal Order of Police is the most rabid, racist body of criminal lawlessness by police in the land. It stands shoulder to shoulder with the Ku Klux Klan then and the Ku Klux Klan now."

"We must remember that the KKK was a white terrorist organization that intimidated and killed African Americans to prevent their participation in the democratic process and to keep them in what would become debt peonage. The KKK enforced racial control and white dominance through well-publicized violence. The Lost Cause and Margaret Mitchell would have us believe that the great threat to the South was the freedmen and the U.S. Army. Yet the four million recently freed ex-slaves suffered from violence far more. Thousands died trying to vote at the hands of white terror groups, not only the Klan, but also its many imitators. The Lost Cause myth propagated by Mitchell and bought by white southerners for a hundred years served as the ideological underpinning of a violently racist society."

"With Knowles' testimony, an Alabama jury convicted Henry Hays of first-degree murder and sentenced him to life in prison, but the judge, in a nearly unprecedented move, overruled the jury's verdict and sentenced him to die. On June 6, 1997, the state of Alabama executed Hays in Yellow Mama for the murder of Michael Donald. The first white person to die for murdering an African American in Alabama since 1913. Then the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the United Klans of America (UKA) for conspiracy in the murder of Michael Donald. An all-white jury found the UKA guilty and ordered them to pay $7 million to Donald's mother. The successful lawsuit bankrupted the UKA. The New York Times trumpeted, "The Woman Who Beat the Klan.""

"If Hindutva is Hinduism then the Ku Klux Klan is Christianity"

"SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Stetson Kennedy took a seat on the curb on Main Street in downtown Jacksonville, Florida. The air was warm, the crowd was festive, and the parade was about to begin. Crooking his neck for a better view, he immediately became engrossed in the spectacle. First came a row of men wearing white robes and hoods and mounted on great white stallions. Even the horses were bedecked with flowing saddle covers and ornamental hoods. When the riders pulled on the reins, the steeds rose up on their hind legs, whinnied, snorted, and furiously pawed the air. Following the riders were dozens of robed and hooded men marching four or five abreast. As Kennedy recalls, One of the mounted knights of the KKK bore a flaming fiery cross, while the other blew long, mournful blows on a bugle.” Kennedy was awestruck. This was his introduction to the Ku Klux Klan."

"Kennedy was born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1916. He grew up in the 14-room, white-columned house owned by his traditional southern family. The Kennedy’s boasted blood ties to Confederate war heroes and wealthy cotton planters and prided themselves on carrying on the southern way of life. Kennedy’s mother taught her children traditional values and manners and dutifully attended meetings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. His father ran a furniture store and served as chairman of the board of deacons at the First Baptist Church of Jacksonville. Insatiably curious, energetic and, and sensitive as a boy, Kennedy earned a reputation as the free spirit of the family. His grandmother used to offer him two cents to sit still for two minutes and almost never had to pay him the pennies. The oldest of five children, Kennedy spent much of his free time exploring the surrounding woods, creeks, orchards, and orange groves. He loved to write stories and poems about the birds, animals, trees and waterways that defined rural North Florida. In time he began to contemplate the lives of the people who lived on the ramshackle farms and in the small towns in the area. Sensing an injustice in the poverty that gripped the lives of so many, he began to feel a burning passion to do something about it. He was particularly disturbed by the prevailing view that “colored folk” were to be treated as subservient to white people. Although he couldn’t quite understand why, that pervasive racism got under his skin. It happened early,” Kenned would recall later in his life. “Whatever it was.” Still, he saw his family as “no more, no less, racist than the norm, par for the course, southern white.”"

"Shortly after attending that Ku Klux Klan parade, Kennedy began to see the truth about the men in hoods and robes. He had thought that the KKK was a club for grown-ups who got to dress up in Halloween costumes year-round until his mother told him that the organization actually kept the folks in “colored town” in line. But his real lesson occurred at the bedside of his family’s African-American housekeeper, whom Klansmen had beaten for the offense of talking back to a white streetcar operator who had shortchanged her. Hearing the woman describe the brutal attack, Kennedy realized that the men behind the masks were bullies who terrorized innocent black people. He began to detest the ingrained racism that infected the world around him and to feel out of step with those who accepted it. “I’ve always felt like an alien in the land of my birth,” he recalled later.]]"

"IN 1940 STETSON KENNEDY left his folklore-collecting job. He planned to concentrate more on his writing. He could use the information and insight gained from his childhood encounters with the poor, hi studies at the university, and his experience as a folklorist to expose deep-seated racism and the threat posed by the Ku Klux Klan. As a folklorist Kennedy knew that the Klan used its invented rituals, concocted language, and biased belief system to imbue otherwise weak men with a sense of mastery and power Kennedy knew the typical Klansman felt like a bigger man after taking part in mysterious rituals, speaking in a secret language, or attacking people judged to be inferior. Kennedy wanted to sweep away the mystique-to show the Klan as nothing more than a violent hate group selling a fantasy of the past. He wanted to expose the KKK’s false premises, bogus beliefs, secrets, and fake mysticism and to let ridicule, rejection, and scorn “melt the cultural glue” that held the club together. “The main idea was to make bigotry obnoxious.” He attacked the Klan with confidence and zeal. Naturally Kennedy was just a person who had no superpowers, but we has well aware of the power of words. His friend and frequent house guest Woodie Guthrie—the famed folksinger who wrote “This Land is Your Land” – often used a one-line answer to friends who asked, “Where’s Stet?” Guthrie would reply that Kennedy was making more ammo with his typewriter upstairs in the attic. Using that ammo, Kennedy embarked on a campaign to correct the historic and journalistic record of the KKK. He told himself to write as much as possible, focusing on exposes that revealed the real inner workings of the Klan. More newspaper articles. His pieces countered those of mainstream journalists who described KKK ceremonies with such terms as “mystic,” “eerie,” and “awesome.” More magazine articles. He criticized journalists who presented the KKK side of the story as a valid point of view in the contemporary political debate. More exposes. He criticized respected encyclopedias that described the secret order as a legitimate political organization comprised of white protestant men dedicated to protecting the white Christian race from the threat of negro uprising, Jewish dominance, and widespread immorality. He knew the Klan would fight back. After all, it had been silencing its critics for a long time."

"OVER THE YEARS historians have contended that the original Ku Klux Klan was a joke. Literally. Drawn mainly from the work of southern writers who were close to the secret society’s founders and often repeated to this day, the story goes like this: The original Klan began as a social club for a handful of men with time on their hands, a taste for the absurd, and a penchant for harmless mischief. In the spring of 1866, in the town of Pulaski, Tennessee, a half dozen men met at the office a prominent attorney to dream up a diversion from the doldrums of small-town-life. Just back from the Civil War with no immediate plans for the future, the former Confederate officers decided to form a social society much like the student fraternities gaining popularity on college campuses. The founders struggled to come up with a name until one man threw out the word “kuklos” –Greek for “circle” or “band.” His fellow brainstormers quickly added the word “clan” but started it with a K to harden the alliteration and to add a touch of mystery. After a bit of back and forth the founders had their name: Ku Klux Klan. They liked the sound of it. It felt like bones rattling in the closet. Building on the mysterious name, the “circle of brothers” added weird wardrobes, unusual rituals, mysterious code words, and absolute secrecy to the group. Members were required to wear handmade robes that flowed to the floor and high, pointed hoods that added two or three feet to their height. The officers were given titles drawn from mythology or just made up on the spot. The chief officer was the Grand Cyclops, his assistant was the Grand Magi, and the rank and file were Ghouls. After outgrowing their original meeting place, as local lore has it, the Klan moved to a more alluring venue: the ruins of an old farmhouse that had been decimated by a storm, engulfed with fallen trees, and rumored to be haunted. In strange midnight ceremonies the men donned their ghostly garb, recited their rambling incantations, pledged vows of secrecy, and indoctrinated new recruits. In time, the robed and hooded figures, masquerading as ghosts of Confederate soldiers returning from the battlefield, mounted horses and rode through neighboring farms and villages. The ghastly, ghostly figures told shocked onlookers that they had not had a drink since the Battle of Shiloh and had rode twice around the world since suppertime. Soon dozens of new dens had formed throughout the region, and sighting of hooded night riders were commonplace. Major newspapers speculated that this mysterious secret order must have a greater mission-for good or evil."

"BY THE BEGINNING OF 1867, with the movement spreading beyond the control of its founders, the first Klansmen invited all known dens to a secret convention in Nashville to elect a leader, to draft a constitution, and to set a course for the future. The convention elected former Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest as Grand Wizard (supreme leader) and designated the entire South as the territory of the new Invisible Empire. The empire was divided into reams that generally corresponded with states, dominions that corresponded with congressional districts, and dens that would serve as local chapters. Former military officers were bestowed with such titles as Grand Dragon, Grand titan, and Grant Giant, and the rank and file remained the Ghouls. The Klan constitution-or prescript-expressed allegiance to the U.S. government but also asserted the power to interpret and enforce the law. In effect this declaration made the KKK, the judge, jury, and executioner of its own version of law and order. KKK leaders also positioned the organization as the front line of opposition to Reconstruction, the federal effort to repair the damage caused by the Civil War. The South had just lost the war, and the vast majority of white Southerners were furious about the new Reconstruction Act of 1868, which mandated northern military occupation of much of the South, invalidated most of the region’s state governments, and decreed that the rights of newly freed slaves would be guaranteed-by force if necessary. The opponents of Reconstruction dubbed the northern intruders as carpetbaggers, their southern supporters as scalawags, and African Americans as inferiors. They vowed to resist what they saw as the unfair trampling of their rights. The KKK would become their army. In the weeks after the convention general Forrest’s old soldiers transformed themselves into terrorists, forming paramilitary units to wage a guerrilla war against carpetbaggers, scalawags, and Negroes. Cloaked in white robes and hoods and armed with rifles, whips and swords, the ex-Rebel troops took their places as the foot soldiers of the KKK. The Ghouls set out on raiding parties that targeted supporters of Reconstruction, white or black. They lashed white teachers at Negro schools with bullwhips and burned their schoolhouses to the ground. Freed slaves who spoke out for equality were dragged from their homes and beaten-even burned-in front of their children. Black men charged with crimes were broken out of jail and hanged in plain view without a trial. In remote areas raiders tarred and feathered their victims. Once the tar cooled it struck to the victim’s skin, and removing it left survivors scarred for life. Many newspapers characterized the raids as acts of self-defense on behalf of the entire white race. The apologists of the Klan recast its atrocities as heroics and spread fanciful myths about its origins and purpose. For example, most white Southerners believed that the club chose the name Ku Klux Klan not because of its mysterious sound but because it simulated the sound of cocking and discharging a firearm."

"By 1870 KKK atrocities had grown so extreme that editors of respected newspapers were denouncing the violence and national political leaders were demanding an end to it. In the South prominent citizens began dropping out of the organization-although common thugs filled their places and used the robes and hoods as cover for crimes ranging from chicken theft to bank robbery. Fearful of being prosecuted, General Forrest finally declared that the organization had been “perverted” and ordered his followers to stand down. He ordered that hoods and masks be burned, records be destroyed, and night-riding violence be halted. A few heeded the call. Most did not. In the end Congress launched a massive investigation, filling 11 volumes with evidence of an unprecedented reign of floggings, beatings, burnings, shootings, hangings, and torture over a four-year span. In 1872 Congress passé a law allowing Klansmen to be tried in federal court, and government troops moved in to mop up the diehards. By the mid-1880s the Klan was mostly gone-but so were the carpetbaggers and scalawags. The Reconstruction program, mired in scandal, steeped in controversy, and exhausted by struggle, was largely abandoned. The federal government let the South deal with its own problems. The old white ruling class regained power and restored white supremacy as a rule of law. Black people were essentially denied the vote, forced into servitude, and persecuted for even questioning the system. Historians generally glossed over the old KKK atrocities, while southern novelists romanticized them with elaborate tales of a valiant masked and hooded army that rode at night to save the downtrodden white race from the dual horrors of northern tyranny and black rule. As the nation moved toward a new century, the Klan remained much as it had started-shrouded in mystery."

"THE PRIME MOVER of the next rising of the KKK was William J. Simmons, the son of Civil War veteran from the Deep South. His father had ridden with the original night riders during Reconstruction. As a boy growing up on his family’s farm in the hamlet of Harpersville, Alabama, Simmons first heard the romanticize accounts of valiant, hooded night riders and saw the fear of the eyes of blacks servants and field hands who had felt their wrath. As a young man Simmons let the farm, served an undistinguished tour of duty in the Spanish-American War, and returned home to make his mark. He trained to be a minister and took to the preaching circuit, only to be drummed out of the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church for “ineffectiveness and moral failings.” Still searching for a life path Simmons moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and found work as a salesman and college lecturer before taking a job promoting fraternal organizations much like today’s Elks, Masons and Shriners. Rising to the rank of colonel in the Woodmen of the World, Simmons proudly told friends and associated that he was now a professional “fraternalist”-and he dreamed of resurrecting the fraternity of the KKK."

"After being injured in a car accident, Simmons spent a three-month recuperation period remaking the secret order as a modern association of white, native-born, protestant men. He saw nostalgia, romance, and dollar signs in the prospect and threw himself into the task. Simmons tracked down a copy of the original Klan Prescript and repackaged it as a 54-page, novel-size handbook entitled “The Kloran”. He embellished the standard white robe and redesigned the hood to be less showy and more menacing, down to two narrow slits for the eyes. He reworded the membership oath, revise the initiation ceremony, devised hand signs and code words, restored old titles, and devised new ones. He began concocting a language that emphasized the infamous K sound. The local meeting place became the Klavern the regional convention became the Klonvocation, and the art of being a Klansman became Klancraft. The new Klan would charge $10 for membership and $6.50 for a cheap robe and hood, and it would even offer option life insurance policies. Finally,, with the flair of an artist, the diminutive promoter added the piece de resistance-the final flourish. Borrowing a literary device from the pro-Klan novel “The Clansman”, he created a central role for the burning cross. The original Klan had not used the faming cross, but it would become the ever-resent fiery symbol of the new one. After lining up more than a dozen influential men to serve in the upper ranks, Simmons copyrighted his enhancements and secured an official charter from the state of Georgia. The new Invisible Empire of the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan was established as a benevolent, nonprofit, fraternal organization-at first more of a force uniting white protestant men than for attacking their perceived enemies With the pieces in place, the founder-now known as the Little Colonel-set out to dramatize the mystery of his restored empire."

"On the eve of Thanksgiving 1915, Simmons invited a group of his influential friends to a meeting at the Piedmont Hotel in Atlanta. Afterward, 16 believers climbed into a tour bus and set out an eight-mile drive to Stone Mountain a slab of pure granite that climbs 800 feet above the surrounding area. Brandishing flashlights, the expedition party made its way to a ledge near the summit. There, as a cold night wind whipped, the robed and hooded men built a makeshift altar from flagstones, draped it with an American flag, and decorated it with a Bible, a canteen of baptismal water, and a sword. Simmons and his followers erected a rag-covered wooden cross, doused it with kerosene, and set it ablaze. In the light of the ceremonial fire the Ku Klux Klan was called back from the dead. THE CEREMONY on Stone Mountain reawakened the sleeping giant. Now it was time to fire up the masses. Simmons had that figured out too. He planned the public announcement to coincide with the Atlanta premier of “The Birth of a Nation”, a two-hour silent-film spectacular set in the South during the tumultuous aftermath of the Civil War. Filmmaker D. W. Griffith had used state-of-the-art cinematic techniques to drive home his controversial message that white vigilantes has saved decent white families. Simmons reserved space for ads introducing “The Greatest Fraternal Organization on Earth” adjacent to the movie promotion in the “Atlanta Constitution”. Then he waited."

"On December 6, 1915,at 8.p.m.-two weeks after the Stone Mountain ritual-“The Birth of a Nation” debuted to a standing-room crowd at the majestic, red carpeted Atlanta Theater. The love scenes were presented in dramatic close ups. The epic battle scenes appear in sweeping panorama. A 30-piece orchestra performed a swelling musical score. The audience was spellbound. A graying Civil War veteran wiped a tear as the camera scanned the desolate smoldering wasteland of his defeated homeland. A middle-age woman cringed as a band of lustful, ravenous Negroes clawed at the door of a remote cabin in pursuit of an innocent, terrified white girl. A teenage boy slapped the back of a man in front of him as a bugle blast rose form the orchestra pit and a long line of hooded riders thundered onto the screen, their path illuminated by a burning cross. The entire audience cheered as the Ku Klux Klan rode to the rescue of white womanhood, white power, and white supremacy. Finally the crowd breathed a final sigh of relief as the robed avengers dispensed with the threat by castrating and lynching the black villain. And the show did not end with the final scene. As the audience filed out of the theater, a bonus scene awaited them on Peachtree Street. More than a hundred men in white robes and hoods stood in military-style formation, rifles raised into the air. Thanks to the Little Colonel, the Ku Klux Klan was back-and this was no movie."

"IN THE SPRING OF 1920 Simmons walked into the offices of the Southern Publicity Association in Atlanta. The leaders of this pioneering firm had built its reputation by devising successful publicity and fundraising programs for clients ranging from the Anti-Saloon League to the Red Cross. The firm’s inseparable male and female partners were also becoming known for their creativity, connections, and can-do spirit- even if their close personal relationship was raising eyebrows. Bessie Tyler provided the passion for the company. She stood close to six feet tall, swore like a sailor, and usually dressed in black, from her patent0leather pumps to her broad, flowing cape. Tyler knew how to make people sit up and take notice-and how to turn adversity into advantage. Her partner was Edward Young Clarke, the business brains of the outfit. Clarke was a spin doctor before the term existed, a master of deception who never let the truth get in the way of his client’s needs. Clarke knew how to turn negative publicity into positive headlines-and how to turn controversy into cash."

"After hearing out Simmons, Tyler and Clarke made a round of calls to newspaper and magazine editors across the country to test the waters. To their happy astonishment, most of the newsmen were more than open to running stories about the new Ku Klux Klan. Even better for the publicity mavens, the interest from the press was not limited of the South. Editors from the Northeast, Midwest, and West Coast asked for regular released about the revived Klan too. Tyler and Clarke were confident that a bold new message-coupled with an aggressive membership campaign-could drive growth nationwide. Their challenge was to make the job lucrative enough for themselves-particularly sine working for the Klan would mean the loss of their Jewish clientele. Over a two-week period in 1920, Tyler and Clarke worked out an astounding contract with Simmons. The public relations duo would get four of every five dollars in new membership fees plus profits from merchandise sales for the life of the campaign. Seeing dollar signs, Tyler and Clarke went to work. THE FIRST STEP was to refocus the Klan’s message for the modern world. It was the aftermath of World War I, and change was in the air. Immigrants were pouring into the country and taking good jobs at low wages. Women had won the ote and were demanding more influence in public affairs. Black men were mustering out of the military and pressing for equality in their own country. Morals were changing too, as the focus of American life shifted from the small town to the city. Young people flocked to nightclubs nd speakeasies, whiskey flowed like water, jazz played on the radio, and divorce became more of an option for unhappy couples. Many white men feared that their traditional place atop the social order-even their status as heads of their own households-was endangered. The Klan had to speak to those people and tap into their fear. So, to the well-known goal of stamping down blacks and Jews, Tyler and Clarke added new targets: Catholics, Asians, Mexicans, labor unionists, socialists, and greedy Wall Street tycoons. To the Klan’s historic opposition to racial integration and religious tolerance, they added the evils of dope, booze, sex, corruption, nightclubs, roadhouses, and violations of the Sabbath. Seeking to differentiate the Klan from other fraternal organizations, they positioned it as the most militant enforcer of morality and decency in communities across the country. Then they pushed the new message through the media. The PR team persuaded newsreel producers to make short, pro—Klan films for movie theaters. They hired a Chicago advertising agency to design newspaper ads and billboards and placed them coast-to-coast. They organized elaborate Klan ceremonies, speeches, and rallies that drew hundreds of new recruits and thousands of onlookers. Tyler coached Simmons to talk less about white brotherhood and more about black inferiority, Jewish greed, and the plans of the Roman Catholic Church to dominate America. Simmons delivered the expanded message in interviews with major newspapers and in crowded meeting halls full of potential members. At one event he stepped forward to deliver his message to a group of influential men who could serve in important roles in his organization. Standing behind a bare table in the front of the room, Simmons at first said nothing. Then he placed his Colt automatic on the table. Then he placed his revolver on the table. Then he placed his ammunition belt on the table. Then he plunged his bowie knife into the tabletop. Then he said, “Now let the Niggers, Catholics, [and] Jews…come on.” THE TACTICS PROVED a stunning success. A year into the campaign, more than 100,000 men had paid their ten-dollar Klektoken )initiation fee)-and all the taking were tax-free because the KKK was chartered as a charitable organization. Traveling promoters called Kleagles were offered a cut of the dues to sign up new members. Driven more by the money than the message, most Kleagles targeted any white protestant man willing to part with ten dollars. As one journalist put it, the prospect list included “the poor, the romantic, the short-witted, the bored, the vindictive the bigoted and the ambitious."

"As dues poured into Klan bank accounts, merchandise poured out of its warehouses. The new mandate was sell, sell, sell. The product line included more than 40 newsletters, bottles of initiation water, and a pocketknife-“a 100-percent knife for 100 percent Americans.” Sell more! For the romantic Klansman there was even a gift for the wife or girlfriend: a jewel-studded pendant in the form of a fiery cross. Sell more! The demand for robes and hoods became so great that a dedicated roe factory had to be set up in Atlanta to fill the orders. Sell more! Within a few short years of the Tyler-Clarke campaign, more than four million Americans had joined the KKK, and revenues topped $75 million. Despite the success, Simmons would soon be ousted in a contentious coup led by his number two man, Hiram Evans. In exchange for grudgingly turning the organization over to Evans, Simmons retired with a $146,500 buy out and a house dubbed Klan Krest. Now that the Klan had the muscle of a huge membership and vast income, Evans wanted to make the organization more than just a hate-mongering money machine. By staking out positions on political issues and placing Klansmen in government offices, the KKK could become apolitical powerhouse. In August 1925, 40,000 Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., as a show of strength during the Democratic National Convention. By then the KKK controlled dozens of mayors, judges, police chiefs, state legislators, congressmen, and senators."

"Surprisingly, the biggest growth of the KKK did not occur in the South. The smooth-talking Grand Dragon of the Realm of Indiana, David Curtis Stephenson, built membership in his state to more than 450,000, and the organization tapped him to recruit new followers in 20 other states. Stephenson increased the ranks to more than 300,000 in neighboring Ohio, where he owned a vacation home on Buckeye Lake in rural Licking Country. More than 75,000 people turned out to hear him speak at a KKK Konklave on the lake in 1923, and an equal came back for the 1925 gathering. The Klavern in Akron, Ohio, claimed 52,000 members, making it the largest local chapter in the country."

"By expanding the ranks of the Invisible Empire in the Midwest, Stephenson amassed a personal fortune of more than $3 million from his cut of dues and merchandise sales In short order he owned a lavish mansion outside Indianapolis, a yacht on Lake Michigan, a private railroad car, and an airplane. Backed by his own private police force-the Horse Thief Detective Association-Stephenson virtually took control of Indiana’s state government. “I am the law in Indiana,” he liked to brag. In his public speeches he defended Prohibition and the sanctity of womanhood. In private he was an alcoholic and a womanizer. BUT TH WEALTHY ORGANIZERS at the top had a problem. Rank-and-file members in cities and towns across the country were taking the vicious, antiblack, anti-Jewish, anti-Catholic rhetoric to heart. As had happened during the first rising of the Klan after the Civil War, violence was drawing negative attention to the organization. Klan raiding parties flogged black political candidates in North Carolina, harassed Jewish businessmen in New Jersey, attacked Catholics in Oregon, and used acid to burn the initials KKK into the foreheads of victims in Texas. And not all the victims were black, brown, Jewish, or Catholic. KKK members also targeted white protestant families for alleged immoral behavior or supposedly betraying their race or gender. In Alabama perpetrators flogged a white divorcee with two children for the crime of remarrying. In Oklahoma Ghouls lashed teenage girls for riding in cars with young men. When newspapers exposed the violence, public support began to wane. Political leaders condemned the attacks, and antimask laws went on the books to deter hooded gatherings. By the late 1920s Klan membership was falling as fast as it had risen But the kiss of death proved to be the hypocrisy of their leadership. Newspapers were having a field day with stories o the duplicity. After all, how could a fraternal organization that stood for law and order resort to vigilante violence? How could a handful of promoters become rich while the rank and file worked for nothing? How could people with questionable morals run a militant enforcer of strict morality? That question arose following news accounts of sexual escapades by Klan leaders. Even the intrepid Clarke and Tyler, the PR duo who had sparked the membership spike, made salacious headlines. The two were arrested-with alcohol on their breath and their clothes on the floor-in a suspected house of prostitution. The most infamous sex scandal involved the high-flying Grand Dragon in Indiana, David Curtis Stephenson, who had not responded well to a young woman’s rejection of his marriage proposal. Stephenson had his thugs kidnap the woman from her home and deliver her to his waiting train. As the train sped toward his hideaway in Chicago, Stephenson viciously beat, raped, and mauled her. Then his henchmen took her, near death, back home to Indianapolis. Two weeks later, the battered woman died from an overdose of pills, and Stephenson was charged with murder. In a highly publicized trial he was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. KKK membership went into a nose dive."

"As the anti-comic book crusaders railed against fictional characters a far more sinister force was stepping out of the shadows in the real world. The Ku Klux Klan was talking of revival and aligning itself with other racist hate groups. The sleeping giant was stirring again. FOLLOWING THEIR RISE to influence in the 1920s, the national Ku Klux Klan leadership had found themselves steeped in controversy with the federal government breathing down their necks. So the secret order of hooded vigilantes employed the approach it always turned to in times of trouble: It played possum. In the 1930s the national organization dissolves its charter, shut down the Imperial Palace, and told the world it was out of business. The KKK leaders hunkered down to operate in the shadows and keep the flame of hate and bigotry alive in the United States. While many Ku Klux Klan chapters did shut down, others continued operating as independent local groups still dedicated to white supremacy, Christian dominance, and rigid morality. While many continued to use the KKK name, language and garb proudly, others adopted new names to obscure their identities. As the White Cross Clan pressed its racist agenda in Oakland, California, other Klan front groups attacked minorities and preached hate in other cities. By maintaining only loose ties with national KKK leaders, these local groups avoided possible prosecution in federal court as well as the requirement to pay federal taxes. Like-minded local politicians often protected the newly named chapters. Even as the national press wrote the KKK’s obituary, local newspapers were writing about radical racist groups operating in their midst. Then, in the summer of 1940, a bizarre and frightening development took place. As Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime flexed its muscles far away in Europe, resurgent Ku Klux Klan factions began flirting with a new breed of Nazi hate groups in the United States. The Klan was cozying up to the German American Bund, an association led by Nazi sympathizers who praised Hitler, preached fascism, wore Nazi uniforms, and snapped off stiff-armed salutes to flags decorated with a swastika. The powerful and resilient New Jersey Klan led the negotiations with the Bund and arranged a joint rally at a Bund training camp outside Andover, New Jersey. On August 14, 1940, more than a thousand robed and hooded Klansmen and several hundred gray-shirted Bundsman assembled on the grounds of Camp Nordland for a day of anti-Semitic speeches and Negro bashing. As the Bundesfuhrer moved to center stage and proclaimed, “The principles of the Bund and the principles of the Klan are the same,” the KKK Grand Giant from New Jersey stepped forward and clasped the Bundsman’s hand in a show of unity. After the speeches a Klan wedding was held beneath a fiery cross, as if to symbolize a new union between the international and American forms of fascism. As the event reached a crescendo, hundreds of incensed citizens from nearby Andover decided they had had enough of the Nazis and the Klan in their own backyards. The mob gathered at the camp gate and screamed chants like “Burn Hitler on your cross.” The forces of hate were threatening to get out of control."

"THERE were many other important voices rising up against the Klan, and many of those voices emanated from the KKK stronghold of Atlanta. Taking on the KKK with the power of his pen, Ralph McGill, the crusading editor of the “Atlanta Journal-Constitution”, often wrote to his readers in the tone of a parent assuring his children that their fears and prejudices were unwarranted: There are not many Catholics in Georgia which is a pity in a way because they are almost invariably good Christians, good citizens and worthwhile members of the community., something which has not been possible to say because of all the members of the Ku Klux Klan klaverns in the state .. There are not many Jews in Georgia either but they, too, are good citizens. Their contribution is one of hard work and decency. There is no reason to have an organization formed to promote hate and antagonism to Catholics, Jews, foreign-born citizens or any minority groups…If you could get through all the mumbo jumbo business of the kleagels, Cyclops, nighthawks and al the claptrap, you would still find it to be silly, unchristian and dangerous to the peace and dignity of the people”. Assistant Attorney General Daniel Duke of Georgia also took on the Ku Klux Klan in Atlanta. The hard-charging prosecutor had sent a number of Klansmen to prison for violent attacks against blacks and accused moral backsliders in the 1930s and early 1940s, and he was determined to see the guilty parties serve out their sentences. Late in 1941 Georgia governor Eugene Talmadge suggested granting clemency to the convicted floggers. This triggered a showdown between the fiery prosecutor and the race-baiting governor, who had long pandered for votes from KKK leaders and their followers. At a public hearing on the proposed pardons, Duke held up two leather whips with KKK etched into the handles and waved them in Talmadge’s face while making the point that the Klan’s weapon of choice could stop a bull elephant. Unmoved by the argument, Talmadge stated that he was familiar with such whips because he had once used one on a black man. Talmadge would go on to curry votes from the Klan and Duke would stand against them for years to come."

"THE EVENTS OF MAY 9, 1946, in Atlanta were not fantasy. Late that night-a 300-foot-tall wooden cross burned on a granite butte near the top of Stone Mountain. The lames cast a glow over more than a thousand men clad in white robes and hoods. Distinguished by his flowing green robe, Ku Klux Klan Grand Dragon Samuel Green presides from a makeshift altar made of flagstones, draped with an American flag, and bedecked with an unsheathed sword, a canteen of water, an a Bible open to Romans 12: The Christian Life. As plumes of flame leaped into the night and a half moon rose in the distant sky, the Grand Dragon delivered a blistering call to arms in defense of white rule Bringing his racist rant to a crescendo, he cast his gaze on several dozen men kneeling before him in plain clothes. After leading the new recruits in the sacred oath of initiation, he declared them knight of the Ku Klux Klan. He also warned that betrayal of the organization’s secrets would result in the ultimate punishment: death at the hands of a brother. As the ceremony ended Green cried, “We are revived!” Grand Dragon Green was elated with the Stone Mountain coming-our party. More than 200 new recruits had been initiated that night, and more than a thousand spectators had trekked up the mountain to witness the event Major newspapers, national wire services, and a nationally circulated magazine had covered it, and most reporters had used adjectives like “eerie,” mysterious,” “awesome,” and “haunting” to describe the goings-on. In fact, the next issue of LIFE magazine featured a four-page photo spread under the headline “Ku Klux Klan Tries a Comeback. It Pledges Initiated in a Mystic Pageant on Georgia’s Stone Mountain. “Now millions of readers across the country had the message that Green wanted them to have: the LL was rising again. Green-a 54-year old physician with wire-frame spectacles and a small, bushy white moustache-planned to follow the public relations coup with a highly organized national membership drive that would attract legions of new followers to the reviving order. A longtime Klansman and dedicated follower of the late colonel William Simmons Doc Green planned to apply the historic philosophies, rituals, and methods of the Klan to the emerging social conditions of post-World War II America."

"In preparation for the revival, Green had done his homework. Traveling the country to test public sentiment, he had found reason to believe that millions of white protestant men from Connecticut to California, from Michigan to Mississippi, would respond to the call With black military veterans mustering out of the service and seeking equal rights in the country they had fought for, Green wanted to tap in to white fear. To avoid potential entanglements with the federal government, he named his organization the Association of Georgia Klans, and he accepted the role of Grand Dragon of the Georgia Realm (as opposed to Imperial Wizard of the entire empire) for the time being. At the same time, he began strengthening ties to KKK realms in Tennessee, Oregon, California, New Jersey, and many other states. After pulling together Klan groups across the country, he planned to reestablish Atlanta as the imperial capital and reign over the entire organization. There was evidence the revival was taking hold. In Mississippi, Hodding Carter, crusading editor of the Delta Democrat-Time”, warned that the Invisible Empire was “sloshing over like an overfull cesspool from its stronghold in Georgia.” What Green didn’t fully understand was that his organization had been badly compromised. The Georgia Department of Law had placed undercover agents inside Klavern No. I, and the FBI was watching and listening too."

"DESPITE KENEDY’S best efforts to infiltrate, however, the author and activist was only going to get so far inside the Klan He needed help. By the spring of 1946, Kennedy had the help he needed to forge a direct pipeline into the deepest secrets of the Atlanta Klan. As part of his services to the ANL and ADL, Kennedy worked as the handler for a top-secret, deeply embedded mole who was operating under the alias John Brown. “This worker is joining the Klan for me,” Kennedy wrote in one memo to his employers in early 1946. “I am certain that he can be relied on.” Brown was a former Klansman who had committed himself to lifting the cover off its violent actions and conspiracies. He still had the complete trust of the KKK leadership, and he used it to burrow deep into the inner sanctum o the infamous Nathan Bedford Forrest Klavern No. 1, which met every Monday night at a cavernous union hall at 1981/2 Whitehall street. Brown’s reports detailed KKK plans for the major revival that took place a year later on Stone Mountain, attacks on Negroes moving into white neighborhoods, and the involvement of Atlanta police officers in KKK violence. By Brown’s own count, 83 of the 200 men in Klavern No. 1 were Atlanta police officers, many of who regularly directed traffic and provided security at cross burnings. Brown’s reports were chilling. In a dispatch dated April 29, 1946, he reported that Grand Dragon Samuel Green was advised to “write a letter of appreciation to a policeman named ‘Itchy Trigger Finger’ Nash … in connection with the slaying of a Negro he has killed in his line of duty. It seems that Dr. GGreen would like to decorate these policemen who kill Negroes with the Klan.” Brown even infiltrated the paramilitary flog squad that carried out midnight whippings, beatings, and murders of selected targets. Or, as handler Kennedy reported to the ANL on May 6, 1946, “our informant is now a member of the Klan’s inner circle, and Klavalier Klub.” Kennedy went on to note, “”[O]ur informant has learned that Green is an honorary members and bears card No. 000 … Obviously the Klavalier lub is the Storm Trooper arm of the Klan and there is some effort to divorce the regular Klan officials from responsibility of its actions.” Brown even got inside the secret subunit of the Klavalier Klub that called itself the Ass Tearers and printed on its calling card the image of a corkscrew-its implement of choice for torturing and disemboweling its victims. The infiltrators’ reports painted a haunting picture of KKK conspiracies and violence, as well as the paranoid mentality that pervaded the Klavern. The reports detail hit lists targeting anti-Klan journalists and even plots to steal weapons caches from government stockpiles to use in an all-out onslaught against African Americans. Even the mundane matters described in the reports are eye-opening, from membership drives and publicity campaigns to ham dinners put on by the ladies’ auxiliary to raise money for their husbands’ work. The moles centered much of their attention on Grand Dragon Green and his top henchmen of the Associated Klans of Georgia. An overseer of Klavern No. 1, Green had virtually invited the scrutiny of investigators with his militant call for white protestant men across the country to rise up and take the antion back from the Negroes, Jews, Catholics, and liberals. While Green insisted the Klan was breaking no laws, the undercover operatives knew that beyond the violent raids that the KKK was varying out, Green and company were also acting as the central players in a resurgent national KKK movement, coordinating with Klaverns in other states and even supplying them with membership forms and propaganda pamphlets printed in Atlanta. If the Klan busters could prove that the Atlanta Klavern was acting as the center of a national program, they could push Georgia to revoke the organization’s state charter, thus leaving Green and company open to federal income tax debt and possible prosecution in federal court. And to top it all off, a kids’ radio show was about to lift the mask off the KKK for a generation of children."

"In time the Anti-Defamation League stepped forward to make sure its man on the scene-or behind the scene-got credit. The “ADL Bulletin” of February 1947 reported, “It is now revealed that Superman’s informant was Stetson Kennedy, brilliant young Southern liberal who had joined the Klan and the (neo Nazi) Columbians under the assumed name of John S. Perkins. Nowadays Kennedy is telling the whole ugly story of racism in the South and its dollar hungry peddlers, who charged him $10 for a moth-eaten, second hand Klan uniform.” Kennedy even held a press conference in full KKK garb at the ADL offices in New York. His antics apparently did not sit well with Grand Dragon Green. An April 7, 1947 report by an unnamed KKK informant claimed that Green “circulated a picture of Kennedy and said his ass is worth $1,000 per pound.” And in response to the rank and file’s criticism of “failing to provide floggings, crossburnings, etc in ’47,” the Grand Dragon promised “a hot year in ’48 if they could catch the spies.” In the years that followed, Kennedy and other infiltrators redoubled their efforts, and the negative press continued to flow. By 1948 the Klan had become a kicking dog for a host of enemies. The governor of Florida responded to a KKK parade by calling the marchers “hooded hoodlums and sheeted jerks.” And “Time” magazine reported that “a bigoted little obstetrician named Samuel Green’ was becoming desperate to “prove to everybody that his movement wasn’t on the skids.” “Time” also noted that Green was under withering attack from such powerful opponents as the Junior Chamber of Commerce and a local group of churchwomen. Despite a 1,500-guest birthday party for Samuel Green and despite Green’s claims (reported by infiltrators) that he had 5,000 requests from all over the country to open KKK chapters, the talk of revival turned out to be just that-talk. The secret order was riddled with infiltrators, hounded by investigators, buried in bad press, and out of step with the modern mainstream of America."

"During cross examination, Washington said there was a police car and barrier on Market Street preventing her from driving anywhere but down 4th Street."

"Washington described hearing a loud noise then noticing someone on top of her car."

"when I see someone with a Confederate flag or with Confederate flag attire on, I don’t take my eyes off of them. I just stare at them He needs to get out of office. If you’re talking about ‘Making America Great Again’ what are you doing? All you’re trying to do is bring back history and make America great in your own way, where you can give the white man the upper hand. That’s all you’re trying to do."

"Many slave owners looked at black women’s bodies as a source of free labor and often forced relationships or raped enslaved women to produce more children. Generally, enslaved women who bore children were considered more valuable than those who didn’t. At the same time, the backbreaking work expected of the women, the lack of medical care and healthy food, and abusive treatment often resulted in miscarriages, premature births, and stillbirths. Those losses led some southern whites to conclude that enslaved women knew secret ways to manage their fertility. Though the practice probably wasn’t as common as was assumed, some black women did use remedies such as cotton root or looked to a black midwife to end their pregnancies. In doing so, they were asserting some control over their own bodies-and perhaps hoping to avoid the heartbreak of having a child born into slavery or sold away from the family. But the birth rate for black women didn’t notably decline until after the end of the Civil War."

"Margaret Garner, who was born as an enslaved girl, almost certainly did not plan to kill her child when she grew up and became an enslaved mother. But she also couldn’t yet know that the physical, emotional and psychological violence of slavery, relentless and horrific, would one day conspire to force her maternal judgment in a moment already fraught with grave imperative."

"Herbal remedies to induce miscarriage were equally well known to enslaved women. Slaves often grew herbs and mixed their own medicine, derisively referred to as “negro remedies” by Southern whites. A common concern among slave-owners (who, as I mentioned in my last post, stood to gain from their slaves’ pregnancies) was that slave women were using cotton root as an abortifacient. Historian Sharla Fett writes that white doctors worried that enslaved women were using those old emmenagogues pennyroyal, tansy and rue to end pregnancies. Just as with white women, doctors were eager to control the use of slaves’ herbal remedies, particularly those used to regulate menstruation."

"Black women have been aborting themselves since the earliest days of slavery. Many slave women refusing to bring children into a world of interminable forced labor, where chains and floggings and sexual abuse for women were the everyday conditions of life. A doctor practicing in Georgia around the middle of the last century noticed that abortions and miscarriages were far more common among his slave patients than among the white women he treated. Why were self-imposed abortions and reluctant acts of infanticide such common occurrence during slavery? Not because Black women had discovered solutions to their predicament, but rather because they were desperate. Abortions and infanticides were acts of desperation, motivated not by the biological birth process but by the oppressive conditions of slavery. Most of these women, no doubt, would have expressed their deepest resentment had someone hailed their abortions as a stepping stone toward freedom."

"Legend has popularized the image of the Caribbean as a woman compelled to suckle a snake all night long. This image of a woman’s violated body is viewed as paradigmatic of a land and people exploited and ravaged by imperialist aggression. As a corporeal representation, the image recalls Hortense Spillers’s formulation of the New World as a “scene of “actual” mutilation, dismemberment and exile,” where the “seared divided, ripped-apartness” of the flesh serves as “primary narrative.” As legend has encoded it, however, this primary narrative is inscribed in the flesh of the woman’s body and takes the particular form of violated maternity This powerful image of the violated maternal figure has, not surprisingly, found a significant place in contemporary Caribbean and African American literature. The literary representation of the figure of the violated mother is enmeshed with two dominant and long-standing issues of this literature. Although they have long been of concern in Caribbean and African American literature, the slave mother and black motherhood have only recently appeared, in all their complexity, as focal points for the exploration of past history and self-expression. Not only does the issue of violated maternity force the painfully unspeakable and unspoken experience into avenues of objectification, insisting that the sexual abuse of black women, both slave and free, be included in discussion of slavery, but, as image, it can also become emblematic or representative of an entire people, as in the work of Edouard Glissant. As well, it can become the cornerstone for a critique of repressed desire, as in Maryse Conde’s “Moi, Tituba, sorciere . . . Noire de Sale” (1986; Eng. “I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem”). This critique resolves itself, turning absence into presence, through an alternative production/reproduction: that of writing or telling the female self into existence."

"Throughout Antillean oral culture,” writes Maryse Conde in “La parole des femmes” (Women’s Word; 1979), “the mother is glorified as the bearer of gifts and the dispenser of goods. We can easily say that this is also the case in literature written by both men and women.” This idealization of the mother, which Conde characterizes as an enduring feature of the folklore and literature of the Antilles, has given rise to a romanticized, if not exotic, portrayal of maternity. It is only recently, argues Conde, that feminist literature of the Antilles has responded to the model image of a nurturing, supportive, selfless mother and the reductionist conception of maternity as the definitive function of women. The response, Conde adds, is somewhat nuanced: although literary heroines continue to conceptualize the mother as a prominent figure, they themselves refuse maternity. Conde suggests that the ambivalence that accompanies the heroine’s refusal reflects both the persistent defining power of the images and a conscious or unconscious rejection of them (40-47). I would like to suggest that, in addition, the ambivalence is indicative of residual traces of violence against the slave mother, vestiges of the past that consciously or unconsciously shape present conceptions of social identity. Rooted in the violence colonization of black female sexuality, motherhood in slavery was an extremely complex and conflict-ridden experience, the repercussions of which are still felt today and manifest themselves as the literary heroine’s ambivalence."

"It is clear to see how deeply abortion bans are rooted in white supremacy and patriarchal strongholds when we look at the history of Black women in this country. The tradition of disregarding the humanity of Black people is part of more than 400 years of white supremacist systems in America. Although abortion was legal throughout the country until after the Civil War, there were different rules for enslaved Black women than for white women. Enslaved Black women were valuable property. They didn’t have the freedom to control their bodies, and slave owners prohibited them from having abortions. Under the law, white men owned Black women’s bodies. So, enslaved women who had access to emmenagogic herbs — plants used to stimulate menstruation — had to make remedies to induce their own abortions in secret. When slavery was abolished in 1865, the societal control over Black women’s bodies remained. Today, our white supremacist culture judges Black women for both having children and for having abortions — besetting them with blame for virtually any decision they make and any form of agency they take about their bodies."

"Southern slaves were "the happiest, and, in some sense the freest people in the world," wrote George Fitzhugh, Virginia proslavery defender. He claimed bondwomen did "little hard work" and were "protected from the despotism of their husbands by their masters." In her famous diary, Mary Chesnut noted that the female slaves "take life easily. Marrying is the amusement of their life." Many antebellum southerners thought the female slaves were sensuous and promiscuous and cited the "easy chastity" of the bondwomen. Since associations were made between promiscuity and reproduction, the desired increase of the slave population seemed to be evidence of the bondwoman's passion. A slaveowner in northern Mississippi told Fredrick Law Olmsted that slaves "breed faster than white folks, a 'mazin' sight, you know; they begin younger," and, he added, "they don't very often wait to be married." Bondwomen's perception of the slave experience is in marked contrast to the slaveowners'. In her remarkable autobiography, Linda Brent, a mulatto female slave, noted, "Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own." Female bondage was worse than male bondage because the female slave was both a woman and a slave in a patriarchial regime where males and females were unequal, whether white or black. Because they were slaves, African-American women were affected by the rule of the patriarch in more ways and to a greater degree than the white women in the Big House. The size of the food allotment, brutal whippings, slave sales, and numerous other variables influenced the bondwoman's view of the patriarchy. Yet because she was a woman, her view, like that of the white woman, was also gender related. According to Anne Firor Scott, the most widespread source of discontent among white women centered around their inability "to control their own fertility." On the other hand, the bondwoman's entire sex life was subject to the desires of her owner. This essay will, therefore, deal only with the bondwomen's perspective from the viewpoint of gender, using twentieth-century interviews with female ex-slaves who were at least twelve or thirteen years of age at the time of emancipation. Of the 514 women in this category, 205, or almost forty percent, made comments of this nature."

"Whereas some doubts have arisen whether children got by any Englishman upon a negro woman shall be slave of free. Be it therefore enacted and declared by this present grand assembly, that all children borne in this country shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother-“Partus Sequitur Ventrem”. And that if any Christian shall commit fornication with a negro man or woman, hee or shee soe offending shall pay double the fines imposed by the former act."

"Claudia Tate has observed that for female slaves "motherhood was an institution to which they had only biological claim". Enslaved women and their children could be separated at any time, and even if they belonged to the same owner, strict labor policies and plantation regulations severely limited the development of their relationships. Hortense J. Spillers concludes that because of this fundamental maternal outrage, and the concomitant banishment of the black father, "only the female stands in the flesh, both mother and mother-dispossessed. This problematizing of gender places her, in my view, out of the traditional symbolics of female gender". George Cunningham further argues, "Within the domain of slavery, gender or culturally derived notions of man- and womanhood do not exist". The predetermined violence of slavery disrupts conventional meanings attached to words such as "mother" and "womanhood." What is motherhood for a woman deprived of the ability to care for and protect her child? How are we to conceptualize maternal identity under conditions of enslavement? Furthermore, because procreation by bondwomen can be regarded as both a means of perpetuating slavery and an act of love and self-sacrifice, the sexuality of enslaved women and their relationship to their offspring must be understood as a complex negotiation involving individual agency, resistance, and power. Due to slavery's basic destabilization of blood relations, the black female subject demands new terms of radical self-determination. Spillers thus reminds her readers, "It is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject"."

"It is precisely through her flesh as both mother and slave woman that Harriet A. Jacobs in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) claims the insurgent ground of her social identity and formulates her resistance to human bondage. By emphasizing her narrator's maternal sentiments, Jacobs resists prevailing beliefs concerning black women's indifference to their children while also establishing an important association between her protagonist Linda Brent and domestic ideologies. Much like Harriet Beecher Stowe and other nineteenth-century writers of sentimental fiction, Jacobs describes "nurture as a quintessence of the maternal that crosses race and class boundaries" (Stephanie Smith 215). Relying upon an understanding of maternity as a form of innate attachment, Jacobs presents Linda's actions as largely determined by the effect they will have on her children and their eventual emancipation. Many female slaves were unable to keep their families together, yet by emphasizing the oppositional action inspired by maternal sentiment Jacobs presents motherhood as a force that resists slavery and its supporters. By fashioning a literary persona who is defined almost exclusively by her maternal identity, Jacobs rejects the materialist logic of human ownership. Maternal love is shown to offer a model of relations that opposes the economy of exchange and possession characterizing the antebellum system of human bondage. Converting her body and reproductive abilities from sites of exploitation to vehicles of resistance, Linda undermines the authority of the slave master and works to liberate her children. Works by Carla Peterson, Valerie Smith, and Claudia Tate have focused upon Jacobs's departure from the assumptions and expectations of the male slave narrative to articulate the experiences and concerns of bondwomen. By contrast, I explore forms of female bodily resistance as well as ideological strategies of literary representation. Rather than conflate Jacobs with the text's protagonist, as many previous critics have done, I analyze Linda as a literary figure deliberately constructed to perform certain political aims. As the embodiment of maternal love, she acts almost exclusively to improve the lives of her children. Although Linda strains credibility as a result of her overriding maternal sensibility, Jacobs's reliance upon the trope of motherhood capitalizes on the political import of prevailing beliefs in the sanctity and power of the mother and suggests that a woman's sexuality offers a vital means of resistance against patriarchal oppression."

"From the moment of its introduction into the Atlantic world, hereditary racial slavery depended on an understanding that enslaved women's reproductive lives would be tethered to the institution of slavery. At the same time, few colonial slave codes explicitly defined the status of these children. This essay explores English slave codes regarding reproduction under slavery alongside the experience of reproduction to suggest that legislative silences are not the final word on race and reproduction. The presumption that their children would also be enslaved produced a visceral understanding of early modern racial formations for enslaved women. Using a seventeenth-century Virginia slave code as its anchor, this essay explores the explicit and implicit consequences of slaveowners' efforts to control enslaved women's reproductive lives."

"Atlantic slavery rested upon a notion of heritability. It thus relied on a reproductive logic that was inseparable from the explanatory power of race. As a result, women and their experienced of enslavement shed critical light on what it meant to be enslaved or free in the early modern Atlantic world. Regardless of the rate of reproduction among the enslaved-which remained low in all early American slave societies-the ideological solidity of those slave societies needed reproducing women. Building a system of racial slavery on the notion of heritability did not require the presence of natural population growth among the enslaved, but it did require a clear understanding that enslaved women gave birth to enslaved children. Resituating heritability was key in the practice of an enslavement that systematically alienated the enslaved from their kind and their lineage. Enslaved people had to be understood as dispossessed, outside of the normal networks of family and community, to justify the practice of mass enslavement."

"The practices of abortion and infanticide seem worthy of at least a fleeting mention in most studies of slave women in the United States, yet few historians mention the use of contraception. Those who do, usually conclude that little is known about the subject, but that it is probably not particularly significant. This article will discuss the use of contraception among slaves and will concentrate, in particular, on the use of cotton roots as a form of birth-control. Evidence that the cotton root was used for this purpose is taken mainly from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) narratives, edited by George Rawick. George P. Rawick, ed., The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Vols. 2–41 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Publishing Company, 1972–1979). As yet, the author has come across only a few references to the use of cotton roots as a form of contraception in any other source. The WPA narratives are a controversial source, but, in sifting through every single interview, the multiple references to such an intimate practice were striking and demanded attention. This article forms part of a chapter from a thesis which looks at the work of slave women in the American South. Liese M. Perrin, “Slave Women and Work in the American South” (University of Birmingham: Ph.D. diss., 1999). A thorough reading of the WPA narratives reveals not only that slave women used contraception, but also that it may have been very effective. In the context of slave women and work, this is a significant discovery, as the evidence, which is detailed below, suggests that slave women not only understood that their childbearing capacity was seen in terms of producing extra capital, but that they were sufficiently opposed to this function to actually avoid conception. The use of contraception can be seen not only as a form of resistance, but also, more specifically, as a form of strike, since reproduction was an important work role for most slave women."

"It is clear to see how deeply abortion bans are rooted in white supremacy and patriarchal strongholds when we look at the history of Black women in this country. The tradition of disregarding the humanity of Black people is part of more than 400 years of white supremacist systems in America. Although abortion was legal throughout the country until after the Civil War, there were different rules for enslaved Black women than for white women. Enslaved Black women were valuable property. They didn’t have the freedom to control their bodies, and slave owners prohibited them from having abortions. Under the law, white men owned Black women’s bodies. So, enslaved women who had access to emmenagogic herbs — plants used to stimulate menstruation — had to make remedies to induce their own abortions in secret."

"This article examines antislavery authors’ attempts in the 1850s to fictionalize the Margaret Garner story of slave infanticide as a means of converting northern white readers to the antislavery cause. In their attempts to gain sympathy for an enslaved female protagonist who had murdered her own child, these authors confronted strong cultural beliefs about femininity, motherhood, and blackness. Almost uniformly, their strategy involved lightening the skin of the main character and presenting the killing of her child as a form of suicide. Nevertheless, the intense emotions surrounding the slavery issue by the mid‐1850s also led these authors to endow their fictional slave women with an aggressiveness that challenged contemporary social boundaries for women."

"The assassination of Caldwell is symbolic of the reign of terror that defeated Reconstruction, democracy, Black political participation, as well as human rights in Mississippi and the South in the mid-. Violence was central to the establishment of White domination, not only to seize power for White supremacists but also to instill fear and intimidation in the Black population and their allies. In a state with a Black majority, to secure White supremacy and to maintain Black labor, particularly rural workers, as a servile labor force, it was necessary to institutionalize fear and intimidation. Men like Caldwell represented hope for Black progress and resistance to White domination."

"During the 1870s, Black political participation was the primary motivation for White supremacist violence. Black political participation accounted for 83 percent of the recorded mob violence of the period. The federal government allowed its southern adversaries back into the union through the violence, terror, and disenfranchisement of people of African descent. The U.S. government and national Republican Party proved unreliable allies as valiant men like Caldwell were assassinated, Black political officials were deposed, and the Black masses were forced into agrarian peonage. With the Hayes-Tilden , any pretense of federal intervention in Mississippi and the former Confederacy was dropped for decades. A war was waged in the South to place emancipated Blacks, in the words of Du Bois, "back towards slavery." Terrorist violence was unleashed to secure the White planter elite in power and to perpetuate a system based on White supremacy. The specter of violence remained as a means of intimidation and social control. In the decades following Reconstruction, lynching became common in the state. Between 1882 and 1940, 534 Black people were lynched in Mississippi—the highest total in the United States during that period. The federal government ignored terrorism waged against Black people: "Congress and the president took no action to prevent lynching, and the federal government did not prosecute the perpetrators, even when the event was publicized at least a day in advance." With White supremacist violence as a major vehicle used to intimidate and suppress, within decades Blacks were excluded from representation and participation in electoral politics and apartheid was institutionalized in civil society."