The men and women listed here were not killed because they were poor indeed, some were killed because they were relatively rich.
Let this list also be a reminder to those who believe the “post-racial” talk and insist economics is everything.
#FLORIDA MAN APRIL 25 1955 FULL#
No one should forget that these are very dangerous people who are being called to with “buzzwords” and “dog whistles.” They are not just racist hoots, they are tribal calls that summon an energy so ugly at its core that it cannot be hidden by suits and Bibles and a stage full of children. Marines rolling grenades into residential homes in Iraq, killing peaceful people as a matter of course, the torturing at Abu Gharaib, the virulent threats against the president and his family, the attack on voting rights, the way prison, criminal justice and nonprofit industries are based on African-Americans as fodder, white supremacist groups, Tea Party literature with President Obama pictured as a monkey, Tea Party cartoons of the president with a bullet in his head, jokes about the president and his “monkey” children. When we see the pepper spraying of peaceful protesters, hear of U.S. If this administration were to change, do not think for a moment that this power would not be used. citizens stateside and holding them indefinitely without trial. Like the opposition to chattel slavery, opposing debt slavery is a dangerous thing to do, particularly now that there are signed documents allowing the imprisoning of U.S. But instead of the chattel slavery of Africans, their concern is an economic system that is a new and more universal form of slavery where individuals are bound to financial institutions by shackles of debt. The Occupy Movement, like the Abolitionists during slavery, are on the other side of the scale. Author Michelle Alexander writes of the New Jim Crow, a criminal justice system that is designed to capture and destroy the lives of black men and women.įor African-Americans, this list is a reminder of what we’ve gone through and a glimpse of the causes of the fog of post-traumatic racial stress we are enveloped in every day.
The record of white men wantonly raping African women during and after slavery can be seen in the browning of millions of black Africans and the creation of the wide-ranging hues we see in African-Americans today. The names of the African-Americans who were lynched and killed that we publish in this issue are only the tip of an iceberg of terror that was life in the hundred years after slavery. They are for the evil we saw loosed on the Jews on Krystallnacht, when the storm troopers came and on this continent with the slaughtering of the indigenous people and the enslaving of Africans to stretch this nation from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Let this list be a warning as to what the “buzz words” are for. When candidate Mitt Romney says, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” as he did recently on CNN, he is speaking to the heirs of those who went back to their Christian churches, state fairs and neat houses, and instilled in their youngsters the American values that allowed them to fully love Jesus and freely lynch African-Americans. These descendents of the lynchers are the people the “dog whistles” are for. What is foreboding about the politics we’re seeing today is that it’s tribal behavior that is being summoned with what are called “dog whistles” and “buzzwords” of the current campaign. This is a part of America’s legacy that is dangerous to forget because the tribal motivation to destroy nonmembers is still with us, and it is only a matter of points on a continuum between racism and tribal behavior, between “I don’t like black people” and “Let’s string him up.” The other side of those stories are the memories, traditions and beliefs of the descendents of the lynching parties and the picnic-goers who came out in crowds to see the lynching spectacle. And those persons now in their eighties and nineties can tell stories that their parents and grandparents told them about the lynchings and the terror and the days after slavery. It is acknowledged that legacies and attitudes toward life are carried on through families and down through the generations.