and public works, and advanced women’s rights. The new public schools, open to Black and white children, brought literacy to millions for whom it might otherwise not have been possible.
Of course, white reaction took the form of denigration of Black politicians, perhaps best seen in the propaganda film for white supremacy Birth of a Nation, which has the distinction of being the first motion picture to be shown in the White House. President Woodrow Wilson described the film as “like writing history with lightning.” “My only regret,” said Wilson, “is that it is all too terribly true.”
The beginning of the 20th century was marked by horrific racist mob attacks on Blacks from the rural South, who in many cases were newcomers to America’s major cities. Black scholar W.E.B. Du Bois called the period “Red Summer” for the sheer volume of Black blood shed.
An American Congress had indeed passed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, but they were blatantly ignored in dozens of states where the torture and terrorism of bullwhips, lynch rope, and arson were practiced with greater consistency than were the lofty promises of the amended Constitution. Yes, in theory the U.S. Constitution protected the rights of Black Americans to vote. But Southern states responded by producing a plethora of new laws to suppress Black voting, such as poll taxes, literacy tests, and grandfather clauses—laws that denied the right of voting to anyone whose grandfather hadn’t voted!
Have Black votes ever mattered?
Well, they certainly have seemed important enough to suppress and steal.
The naked denial of constitutional rights for perhaps a century lasted until the Civil Rights and Black Liberation movements demanded change.
Meanwhile, millions of Black people voted with their feet when they left the South for states in the North and West, including Pennsylvania, Illinois, Kansas, and California.
This exodus became known as the Great Migration, one of the biggest population shifts of the 20th century. Black Americans fled the ephemeral Southern comforts for the reasons people have emigrated since time immemorial: to escape the acute meanness of racial tyranny; to escape terrorist violence; to flee from economic exploitation; to seek lives of freedom and dignity; and to bless their children with hopes of better lives.
Historian James R. Grossman writes of the new period for Black life in America:
For the first time in American history, the nation’s basic industries offered production jobs to African Americans. From New York, Boston, and Philadelphia to Pittsburgh, Chicago, Detroit, and to a lesser extent, Los Angeles, factory gates opened.
Work in railroad yards, steel mills, food-processing plants, garment shops, and other industries paid wages far beyond what was available in the rural or urban South. But it was more than the money that attracted black Southerners north. These jobs also represented portals into the industrial economy. These opportunities promised a new basis for claims to full citizenship—a promise that a previous generation of black Southerners had envisioned in the possibility of landownership.5
For these Americans, the North was the Promised Land, and they did not see the thorns amidst the roses. They never dreamed that the new gleaming mega-cities would become traps as oppressive as the ramshackle huts and shacks they fled from back home.
They went North and West because their Black lives mattered.
But where once whites killed and terrorized from beneath a KKK hood, now they now did so openly from behind a little badge. And while it may seem like a leap to associate the historical white terrorism of the South with the impunity with which police kill in Black communities today, it is really not so great of a leap because both demonstrate a purpose of containment, repression, and the diminution of Black hope, Black aspirations, and Black life.
Indeed, the late Dr. Huey P. Newton, a cofounder of the Black Panther Party, in a 1967-era interview, likened the relations between police and Blacks in the United States as one of antagonism similar to that between the U.S. Army and the enemy population in Vietnam:
In America, Black people are treated very much as the Vietnamese people, or any other colonized people. . . for the brutalizing police in our community occupy our area, our community as a foreign troop occupies territory. And the police are . . . in our community not to promote our welfare, for our security or safety; they’re there to contain us, to brutalize us and murder us, because their orders are to do so. And just like the soldiers in Vietnam have their orders to destroy the Vietnamese people. The police in our community couldn’t possibly be there to protect our property, because we own no property. They couldn’t possibly be there to see that we receive due process of law, for the simple reason that the police themselves deny us the due process of law. And so it’s very apparent that they [are] only in our community, not for our security, but for the security of the business owners in the community, and only to see that the status quo is kept intact.6
Dr. Huey P. Newton was quite clear in revealing what mattered to police and the power structure they serve. Black lives did not matter to them in the mid-1960s, and they seem not to matter to them today. When Black men, women, and children gathered in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, to protest the police killing of Mike Brown, they were met by a phalanx of militarized forces, armed with weapons of war. What has really changed? Did things improve under Barack Obama? How do you think things are going to go under Donald Trump?
Have Black lives ever mattered?
HATE CRIMES
June 14, 1998
The barbaric torture and murder of James Byrd Jr. by three white men—Shawn A. Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and John W. King—in the tiny Texas town of Jasper has become a summertime feast for an insatiable American media, but it is a meal that consists largely of spectacle. On June 7, 1998, Berry, King, and Brewer offered Mr. Byrd a ride home. Instead, they shackled Mr. Byrd’s feet to a chain and dragged him behind their truck for miles.7
The vigor with which the latest race murder is being covered is strikingly contrasted with the lackluster coverage of a similar case from over a year ago in Virginia, where a young Black man, in the company of a few white drinking buddies, was beaten, burned, and as he took too long to die, decapitated with an ax.
Why is one story a national firestorm, and another a local curiosity? Why is one an unquestioned hate crime, and the other merely a case of “boys being boys,” or a bad mix of liquor and bad company?
This is so because the media said it was so, and because the local police told them this.
When is a hate crime a hate crime? When it is a crime of hate, or when the police say it is? And if the cops are to be the arbiters of what is, or isn’t, a hate crime, who will judge the cops without bias?
In late April 1998, New Jersey state troopers pumped over 11 shots into a van occupied by four Black and Hispanic students who were on their way to basketball tryouts at Central University in North Carolina, seriously wounding three of the four young men. Thanks to the infamous “racial profiling” program of the New Jersey State Police, the four never made it to tryouts that day because they were found guilty of the unwritten crime of DWB—Driving While Black. Despite a rain of lies alleging that the basketball players were speeding, attempted to run the cops down, and so on, it soon became clear that the boys had done nothing—nothing except exist. Ain’t each of the 11 bullet holes evidence of a hate crime?
In Chicago a man named Carl Hardiman was shot and wounded by a city cop for refusing to drop his “weapon”—a
