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cardest · 4 years ago

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New Orleans playlist

Hungry for some po boys? Feeling the Mardi Gras vibes for this weekend? This is the ultimate NOLA playlist, right here. Play the songs here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-iHPcxymC182dTlE-Gii6ZOO5ZrN1Z1T

Louisiana and New Orleans, all in the one awesome playlist. If there are songs I left out, let me know and I can add those. Or come meet me at Le Bon Temps Roulé and we’ll listen to this NOLA playlist together with drinks.

LOUISIANA & NEW ORLEANS

001 Bob James - Take Me To The Mardi Gras 002 Earl King - Ain’t no city like New Orleans 003 John Lee Hooker - goin’ to Louisiana 004 Crowbar - Wrath Of Time By Judgment 005 True Detective - Theme (The Handsome Family - Far From Any Road) 006 EyeHateGod - New Orleans Is The New Vietnam 007 The The Meters - Chicken Strut 008 Paul McCartney - Live And Let Die (from Live And Let Die) 009 The Rolling Stones - Brown Sugar 010 Lucinda Williams - Crescent City 011 King Hobo - New Or-Sa-Leans 012 Concrete Blonde - Bloodletting 013 Down - Underneath Everything 014 True Blood Theme Song (Jace Everett - Bad Things) 015 Corrosion of Conformity - Broken Man 016 The New Orleans Jazz Vipers - I Hope Your Comin' Back To New Orleans 017 Willy DeVille - Jump City 018 Left Side - Gold In New Orleans 017 Necrophagia - Reborn through Black Mass 018 Johnny Horton - The Battle Of New Orleans 019 Dr John - Litanie des Saints 020 Foo Fighters - In the Clear 021 Redbone - The Witch Queen Of New Orleans 022 Jucifer - Lautrichienne 023 Danzig - It's a long way back from hell 024 Harry Connick, Jr. - Oh, My Nola 025 The Gaturs - Gator Bait 026 Jon Bon Jovi - Queen Of New Orleans 027 Cyril Neville - Gossip 028 Carlos Santana - Black Magic Woman 029 Gentleman June Gardner - It's Gonna Rain 030 Eddy G. Giles - Soul Feeling (Part 1) 031 Tool - Swamp Song 032 Beasts of Bourbon - Psycho 033 Seratones - Gotta Get To Know Ya 034 Chuck Berry - You Never Can Tell 035 Grateful Dead - Mississippi Half-Step Uptown Toodleoo 036 Pale Misery - Hope is a Mistake 037 Exhorder - Homicide 038 King James & the Special Men - Special Man Boogie 039 Chuck Carbo - Can I Be Your Squeeze 040 Amebix - Axeman 041 Tomahawk - Captain Midnight 042 Waylon Jennings - Jambalaya 043 Heavy Lids - Deviate 044 Red Hot Chili Peppers - Apache Rose Peacock 045 Necrophagia - Rue Morgue Disciple 046 Johnny Cash - Big River 047 Albert King - Laundromat Blues 048 Meklit Feat Preservation Hall Horns - You Are My Luck 049 Le Winston Band - En haut de la montagne 050 Dr. john - I Thought I Heard New Orleans Say 051 Down - New Orleans is a dying whore 052 Samhain - To Walk The Night 053 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Green River 054 Southern Culture on the Skids - Voodoo Cadillac 055 Bonnie, Sheila - You Keep Me Hanging On 056 Warren Lee - Funky Bell 057 Elf - Annie New Orleans 058 Cannonball Adderley - New Orleans Strut 059 Doug Kershaw - Louisiana Man - New Orleans Version 060 Willy deVille - Voodoo Charm 061 The Animals - The House of the Rising Sun 062 Porgy Jones - The Dapp 063 Lost Bayou Ramblers - Sabine Turnaround 064 IDRIS MUHAMMAD - New Orleans 065 John Lee Hooker - Boogie Chillen No. 2 066 Hank 3 - Hillbilly Joker 067 Nine Inch Nails - Heresy 068 Talking Heads - Swamp 069 Irma Thomas - I'd Rather Go Blind 070 Mississippi Fred McDowell - I'm Going Down the River 071 Dee Dee Bridgewater - Big Chief 072 Dr. John - Creole Moon 073 Agents of Oblivion - Slave Riot 074 Steve Vai - Voodoo Acid 075 Saviours - Slave To The Hex 076 Kris Kristofferson - Casey's Last Ride 077 JJ Cale - Louisiana Women 078 Cher - Dark Lady of New Orleans 079 LE ROUX - Take A Ride On A Riverboat 080 The Melvins - A History Of Bad Men 081 Floodgate - Through My Days Into My Nights 082 Opprobium - voices from the grave 083 Quintron & Miss Pussycat - Swamp Buggy Badass 084 Child Bite - ancestral ooze 085 Sammi Smith - The City Of New Orleans 086 The Explosions - Garden Of Four Trees 087 Bobby Boyd - straight ahead 088 Bobby Charles - Street People 089 Wall of Voodoo - Far Side of Crazy 090 Rhiannon Giddens - Freedom Highway (feat. Bhi Bhiman) 091 Elton John - Honky Cat 092 Serge Gainsbourg - Bonnie and Clyde 093 Fats Domino - I'm Walking To New Orleans 094 Cruel Sea - Orleans Stomp 095 Down - On March The Saints 096 Danzig - Ju Ju Bone 097 The Neville Brothers ~ Voodoo 098 Megadeth - The Conjuring 099 Miles Davis - Miles runs the voodoo down 100 Elvis Presley - King Creole 101 Led Zeppelin - Royal Orleans 102 The Lime Spiders - Slave Girl 103 BIG BILL BROONZY -'Mississippi River Blues' 104 Kreeps - Bad Voodoo 105 Dirty Dozen Brass Band - Caravan 106 Kirk Windstein - Dream In Motion 107 Eletric Prunes - Kyrie Eleison - Mardi Gras 108 Merle Haggard - The Legend Of Bonnie And Clyde 109 Corrosion of Conformity - River of Stone 110 THE ADVENTURES OF HUCK FINN (MAIN TITLE) 111 Zigaboo Modeliste - Guns 112 ReBirth Brass Band - Let's Go Get 'Em 113 Inell Young - What Do You See In Her? 114 Jimi Hendrix - If 6 as 9 (Studio Version) Easy Rider Soundtrack 115 Deep Purple - Speed King 116 Exhorder - The Law 117 Crowbar - The Cemetery Angels 118 A Streetcar Named Desire OST - Main Title 119 WOORMS - Take His Fucking Leg 120 steely dan - pearl of the quarter 121 Tabby Thomas - Hoodoo Party 122 Black Label Society - Parade of the Dead 123 Dwight James & The Royals - Need Your Loving 124 Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter (2012) The Rampant Hunter (Soundtrack OST) 125 PanterA - The Great Southern Trendkill 126 Ween - WHO DAT? 127 Earl King - Street Parade 128 Ernie K-Doe - Here Come The Girls 129 Dejan's Olympia Brass Band ~ Mardi Gras In New Orleans 130 Body Count - KKK Bitch 131 Goatwhore - Apocalyptic Havoc 132 C.C. Adcock - Y'all d Think She Be Good To Me (from True Blood S01E01) 133 The Meters - Fire On The Bayou 134 Dr. John - I Walk On Guilded Splinters 135 Balfa Brothers - J'ai Passe Devant ta Porte 136 Ween - Voodoo Lady 137 King Diamond - 'LOA' House 138 Creedence Clearwater Revival - Born On The Bayou 139 Dax Riggs - See You All In Hell Or New Orleans 140 Professor Longhair - Go to the Mardi Gras 141 Dixie Witch - Shoot The Moon 142 Ramones - The KKK Took My Baby Away 143 Fats Waller - There's Going To Be The Devil To Pay 144 Mississippi Fred McDowell - When the Train Comes Along with Sidney Carter & Rose Hemphill 145 Treme Song (Main Title Version) 146 Tony Joe White - Even Trolls Love Rock and Roll 147 Nine Inch Nails - Sin 148 Exodus - Cajun Hell 149 NEIL DIAMOND - New Orleans 150 James Brown - Call Me Super Bad 151 Jimi Hendrix - Voodoo Child ( Slight Return ) 152 Allen Toussaint - Chokin Kind 153 Dash Rip Rock - Meet Me at the River 154 Hawg Jaw- 4 Lo 155 Hot 8 Brass Band - Keepin It Funky 156 Hank Williams III - Rebel Within 157 Dejan's Original Olympia Brass Band - Shake It And Break It 158 Jelly Roll Morton - Finger Buster 159 The Royal Pendletons - (Im a) Sore Loser 160 Little Bob & The Lollipops - Nobody But You 161 Gregg Allman - Floating Bridge (True Detective Soundtrack) 162 Michael Doucel with Beausoleil - Valse de Grand Meche 163 Dolly Parton - My Blue Ridge Mountain Boy 164 Othar Turner & the Afrossippi Allstars – Shimmy She Wobble 165 Jucifer - Fleur De Lis 166 Soilent Green - Leaves Of Three 167 Ides Of Gemini - Queen of New Orleans 168 Betty Harris - Trouble with My Lover 169 Lead Belly - Pick A Bale Of Cotton 170 Candyman Opening Theme 171 Goatwhore - When Steel and Bone Meet 172 Acid Bath - Bleed Me An Ocean 173 Pere Ubu - Louisiana Train Wreck 174 Walter -Wolfman- Washington - You Can Stay But the Noise Must Go 175 Alice in Chains - Hate To Feel 176 Body Count - Voodoo 177 Live and Let Die - Jazz Funeral 178 Smoky Babe - Cotton Field Blues 179 Professor Longhair - Big Chief Part 2 180 Lewis Boogie - Walk the Line 181 James Black - Theres a Storm in the Gulf 182 The Balfa Brothers - Parlez Nous A Boire 183 The Jambalaya Cajun Band - Bayou Teche Two Step 184 The Deacons - Fagged Out 185 Thou - The Changeling Prince 186 Black Sabbath - Voodoo 187 King Diamond - Louisiana Darkness 188 Doyle - Cemeterysexxx 189 KINGDOM OF SORROW - Grieve a Lifetime 190 Hank Williams III - Louisiana Stripes 191 FORMING THE VOID - On We Sail 192 BUCK BILOXI AND THE FUCKS - fuck you 193 Down in New Orleans - The Princess and the Frog Soundtrack 194 Trombone Shorty & James Andrews - oh Poo Pah Doo 195 Whitesnake - Ain't No Love In The Heart Of The City 196 The Dirty Dozen Brass band - Voodoo 197 Joe Simon - The Chokin' Kind 198 Down - Ghosts along the Mississippi 199 AEROSMITH - Voodoo Medicine Man 200 Nine Inch Nails - The Perfect Drug 201 The Byrds - [Sanctuary III] Ballad Of Easy Rider 202 The Iguauas - Boom Boom Boom 203 PJ Harvey - Down By The Water 204 Louis Armstrong - Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans 205 Dr John - Right Place Wrong Time 206 ESTHER ROSE - handyman 207 Lightnin Slim - It's Mighty Crazy 208 Slim Harpo - Blues Hangover 209 Irma Thomas - Ruler Of My Heart 210 WEATHER WARLOCK - Fukk the Plan-0 211 Superjoint Ritual - The Alcoholik (Use Once And Destroy) 212 Stressball - dust 213 Trampoline Team - Kill You On The Streetcar 214 Xander Harris - Where’s your Villain? 215 Dukes of Dixieland - When The Saints Go Marching In 216 Kid Congo & The Pink Monkey Birds - Su Su 217 Danzig - I'm the one 218 EyeHatteGod - Pigs 219 Hank Williams Jr - Amos Moses 220 The Cramps - Alligator Stomp 221 Crowbar - The Serpent Only Lies 222 Shrüm - drip 223 Thou - The Only Law 224 DR. JOHN - Babylon 225 Garth Brooks - Callin' Baton Rouge 226 Wild Magnolias - All On A Mardi Gras Day 227 NCIS New Orleans TV Show theme 228 Skull Duggery - Big Easy 229 Harry Connick Jr. - City beaneath the sea 230 Elvis Presley - Dixieland Rock 231 Tom Waits - I Wish I Was In New Orleans (In The Ninth Ward) 232 Neil Young - Everybody's Rockin 233 Philip H. Anselmo & The Illegals - Delinquent 234 CORROSION OF CONFORMITY - Wolf Named Crow 235 Widespread Panic - Fishwater 236 Lillian Boutté - Why Don't You Go Down to New Orleans 237 Bryan Ferry - Limbo 238 Scream - Mardi Gras 239 EyeHateGod - Shoplift 240 Better Than Ezra - good 241 Duke Ellington - Perdido (1960 Version) 242 Bob Dylan - Rambling, Gambling Willie 243 Big Bad Voodoo Daddy - sAve my soul 244 Le Roux - So Fired Up 245 Concrete Blonde - The Vampire song 246 Boozoo Chavis - Zydeco Mardi Gras 247 Idris Muhammad - Piece of mind 248 Les Hooper - Back in Blue Orleans 249 Doug Kershaw - Cajun stripper 250 DOWN - Witchtripper 251 Soilent Green - So hatred 252 Professional Longhair - Big chief 253 Willie Nelson - City Of New Orleans 254 Tom Waits - Whistlin' Past The Graveyard 255 Brian Fallon - sleepwalkers 256 Patsy - Count It On Down 257 Into the Moat - The Siege Of Orleans 258 Bruce Cockburn - Down To The Delta 259 Jello Biafra · the Raunch and Soul All-Stars - Fannie Mae 260 Exhorder - Asunder 261 Cane Hill - Too Far Gone 262 The Slackers - peculiar 263 Crowbar - A Breed Apart 264 COC - Wiseblood 265 Necrophagia - Embalmed Yet I Breathe 266 EYEHATEGOD - Fake What's Yours 333 Alan Vega - Bye Bye Bayou 666 DOWN - Stone the crow

I don’t beads by the way! Hit play here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-iHPcxymC182dTlE-Gii6ZOO5ZrN1Z1T

#new orleans #New Orleans playlist #NOLA #NOLA playlist #Louisiana #corrosion of conformity #Alan Vega #necrophagia #New Orleans songs #mardi gras #Mardi Gras songs #crowbar #eyehategod

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thenavajotourist-blog · 4 years ago

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Your Hero is Not Untouchable Pt 2

Your Hero is Not Untouchable

A Monuments Study: Dakota War of 1862 Memorials, Monuments and Markers

by Rye Purvis 7/3/2020

(T.C. Cannon, Kiowa, painting “Andrew Myrick - Let Em Eat Grass” 1970)

On December 26th, 1862 38 Dakota prisoners of war were executed in Mankato, Minnesota. This was to mark an ending (though not an end to the suffering of the Dakota peoples) to the Dakota War of 1862, a war that began just months earlier in the Fall of ’62. The 38 men were ordered to be executed under the order of Abraham Lincoln, after Lincoln’s examined 303 war trials conducted from September to November of ’62 in Minnesota:

“The trials of the Dakota prisoners were deficient in many ways, even by military standards; and the officers who oversaw them did not conduct them according to military law. The hundreds of trials commenced on 28 September 1862 and were completed on 3 November; some lasted less than 5 minutes. No one explained the proceedings to the defendants, nor were the Sioux represented by defense attorneys. "The Dakota were tried, not in a state or federal criminal court, but before a military commission. They were convicted, not for the crime of murder, but for killings committed in warfare. The official review was conducted, not by an appellate court, but by the President of the United States. Many wars took place between Americans and members of the Indian nations, but in no others did the United States apply criminal sanctions to punish those defeated in war." The trials were also conducted in an atmosphere of extreme racist hostility towards the defendants expressed by the citizenry, the elected officials of the state of Minnesota and by the men conducting the trials themselves. "By November 3, the last day of the trials, the Commission had tried 392 Dakota, with as many as 42 tried in a single day." Not surprisingly, given the socially explosive conditions under which the trials took place, by the 10th of November the verdicts were in, and it was announced to the nation and the world that 303 Sioux prisoners had been convicted of murder and rape by the military commission and sentenced to death.” 1

Lincoln reviewed all transcripts from the rushed trials and made his decision on the final execution in under a month. The public execution remains the largest mass execution in American history. Today a public park remains at the site of the execution, named “Reconciliation Park” and given the theme “Forgive Everyone Everything.” 2 Merriam-Webster’s lists its dictionary definition of reconciliation as “the act of causing two people or groups to become friendly again after an argument or disagreement.”

It Starts with Treaties

To provide context to the Dakota War of 1862 is to acknowledge a trail of once again broken treaties and a US hunger for land acquisition. Before colonial interactions, the Great Sioux Nation covered present-day northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. The ancestors of the Sioux “arrived in the Northwoods of central Minnesota and northwestern Wisconsin from the Central Mississippi River shortly before 800 AD.” 3 Under the Great Sioux Nation are three subdivision groups: The Lakota (Northern Lakota, Central Lakota and Southern Lakota), Western Dakota (Yankton, Yanktonai) and the Eastern Dakota (Santee, Sisseton). It wasn’t until the early 1800’s that the Dakota, of the Sioux Nation, signed a treaty with the US in order to establish US Military posts in Minnesota and open trading for the Dakota. Soon after, the 1825 Treaty of Prarie du Chien and the 1830 Fourth Treaty of Prarie du Chien were put into place to cede more land to the American government. Another 1858 Treaty established the Yankton Sioux Reservation for the Yankton Western Dakota peoples, a treaty that ultimately moved the band from “eleven and a half million acres” to a “475,000 acre reservation.”11 The US created the Territory of Minnesota in 1849, thus placing even more pressure on the Sioux to concede land. More treaties followed with the 1851 Treaty of Mendota and the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux. In both deals, 21 million acres were ceded to the US by the Sisseton and Wahpeton bands of the Dakota in exchange for $1,665,000. “However, the American government kept more than 80% of the funds with only the interest (5% for 50 years) being paid to the Dakota” 4

The US’s aim ultimately was to force the Sioux out of Minnesota. Minnesota, established as a state on May 11, 1858 had two temporary reservations set up along the Minnesota River, one for the Upper Sioux Agency and one for the Lower Sioux Agency. Relocation and displacement from land once used for hunting created even more tension with delayed treaty payments causing economic suffering and starvation. Treaties promised payments to the Sioux, payments that were used for foods but at that point but were often late due to the US’s focus on the Civil War. Trader store operators many times charged credit to the Upper and Lower Sioux Agency’s, collecting the annuity allotments directly from the government in return.

Let them eat grass

Having owned stores in both the Upper and Lower Sioux Agency at the time, trader Andrew J Myrick eventually refused to sell food on credit to the Dakota during the summer of 1862. That summer saw additional hardship with failed crops in the previous year on top of late federal payments. In response to his refusal to allot food, Myrick was quoted as “allegedly” saying “Let them eat grass” a quote that is oftentimes disputed. Around the same time as this disputed quote, on August 17, 1862 a few Santee men of the Whapeton band killed a white farmer and part of his family, thus starting the beginning of the Dakota War of 1862.

This is where we in the 21st century have to take a pause. Most of the written accounts of the start of the war or the “murderous violence” of the “Murdering Indians” 5 (a quote from Peter G Beidler’s “Murdering Indians”) were accounts from the side of the colonizers. When researching the Dakota War of 1862, perspectives from the Dakota are not common. At some point the basis for war warrants a question of American mythology. In researching about this white farmer debacle, the killing is in one instance described as coming from “an argument between two young Santee men over the courage to steal eggs from a white farmer became a dare to kill.”6 In another account, the story follows the same narrative about the farmer’s eggs: “Upon seeing some chicken eggs in a nest at the farm of a white settler, there was a disagreement whether or not to take the eggs. When one refused, his companion dared him to prove that he was not afraid of the white man's reaction.”7 I bring up the eggs incident not to stress on this sliver of historical mythology but to emphasize the instability of perspective in historical accounts. Anti-Indian perspectives and a notion of eradication of the “Indian” has been profound in the beginning in the colonization of the US. For a war to rest on the stolen eggs of a farmer, and the killing of 5 individuals doesn’t take into account the broken down persons that were driven to get to the point of having to steal eggs nor what exactly occurred between the farmer and the men.

After the incident, however it occurred, Mdewakanton Dakota leader Little Crow led a group against the American settlements waging war as a means to remove the white settlers. Little Crow as he is known in European mistranslations, name was actually Thaóyate Dúta meaning “His Red Nation”. He was instrumental in leading discussions in the treaties, providing a voice for his people, and leading Dakota in the Battle of Birch Coulee. In a letter to Henry Sibley, the first Governor of the US State of Minnesota, on September 7, 1862, Thaóyate described the context for the uprising:

“Dear Sir – For what reason we have commenced this war I will tell you. it is on account of Maj. Galbrait [sic] we made a treaty with the Government a big for what little we do get and then cant get it till our children was dieing with hunger – it is with the traders that commence Mr A[ndrew] J Myrick told the Indians that they would eat grass or their own dung. Then Mr [William] Forbes told the lower Sioux that [they] were not men [,] then [Louis] Robert he was working with his friends how to defraud us of our money, if the young braves have push the white men I have done this myself." 8

Famine, broken treaties, late payments from the government were but a few of the motivating factors for driving change. The killing of the five white settlers by the 5 Santee men prompted a motion of action led by then natural leader Thaóyate.

When the war neared an end, Thaóyate and other Dakota warriors escaped. It wasn’t until July 3 of 1863 that Thaóyate was shot by 2 settlers and mortally wounded. Upon his death, Thaóyate’s body was mutilated and his remains were withheld from both family and his tribe until 1971 when the Minnesota Historical Society returned his remains to Thaóyate’s grandson. A historical marker remains where Thaóyate’s life was taken:

“[The] marker, erected in 1929 at the spot where Chief Little Crow (who escaped the hanging) was shot, glorifies the chief’s killer: “Chief Little Crow, leader of the Sioux Indian outbreak in 1862, was shot and killed about 330 feet from this point by Nathan Lamson and his son Chauncey July 3, 1863.” The marker does not mention that Little Crow’s body was mutilated, that his scalp was donated to the Minnesota Historical Society and put on display at the State Capitol. He would not be buried until 1971.” 9

Marker of where Little Crow was shot (photo by Sheila Regan)

I just want to acknowledge, that there is a lot of information to unpack that occurred during the Dakota War of 1862, and I don’t want to pretend that this article can sum up every occurrence, battle or person involved. Author and non-Native Gary Clayton Anderson wrote “Through Dakota Eyes” in 1988, and though not perfect, it provides eyewitness accounts from various Dakota peoples perspectives that is worth noting. The Minnesota Historical Society, though known for its problematic history holding on to Thaóyate’s body, also provides more information on its website regarding oral traditions, resources, publications and more in regards to the Dakota War of 1862. I encourage those interested in diving deeper into information to seek out more while simultaneously questioning the source of the information.

Stolen Bodies

Before Thaóyate’s death, the 38 Dakota men were hung at Mankato under Lincoln’s orders. An additional 2 men by the name of Shakpe and Wakanozanzan who had been captured were also executed on November 11th, 1865 under the order of Andrew Johnson. But this mass execution was not the end of the US’s threat to eradicate the Sioux. After the mass execution, “277 male members of the Sioux tribe, 16 women and two children and one member of the Ho-Chunk tribe”1 were sent to a prison camp at Camp McClellan from April 25, 1863 to April 10, 1866. The prisoners who did not survive Camp McClellan were buried in unmarked graves, later dug up and their skulls used by scientists at the Putnam Museum in the late 1870’s. The 23 skulls were given to the Dakota tribe and not until 2005 was a proper memorial ceremony held for the Dakota prisoners.

In addition, 1600 Dakota women, children and old men were forced into internment camps at Pike Island. Wita Tanka, the Dakota name for Pike Island, is now part of Fort Snelling State Park.

“During this time, more than 1600 Dakota women, children and old men were held in an internment camp on Pike Island, near Fort Snelling, Minnesota. Living conditions and sanitation were poor, and infectious disease struck the camp, killing more than three hundred.[37] In April 1863, the U.S. Congress abolished the reservation, declared all previous treaties with the Dakota null and void, and undertook proceedings to expel the Dakota people entirely from Minnesota. To this end, a bounty of $25 per scalp was placed on any Dakota found free within the boundaries of the state.[38] The only exception to this legislation applied to 208 Mdewakanton, who had remained neutral or assisted white settlers in the conflict."1

Where does this leave us?

The year was 1990 and a 36-year old Cheyenne and Arapaho artist by the name of Hock E Aye VI Edgar Heap of Birds had just finished an installation along the Mississippi River in Downtown Minneapolis titled “Building Minnesota.” The installation featured 40 white metal signs containing the names of the 38 men executed under the order of Abraham Lincoln, and the 2 men executed under the order of Andrew Johnson. Heap of Birds explained, “‘Not everyone loved the piece. Heap of Birds says that he received criticism because of the negative portrayal of Abraham Lincoln. ‘They thought it was a betrayal,’”9 Beyond that, the installation came to be known as a space for healing, mourning, for acknowledgement of the lost men, and a place for community to gather.

(One of the 38+2 Signs by Edgar Heap of Birds, photo from Met Museum)

Two monuments were placed up in 1987 and in 2012 at Reconciliation Park in Monkato, MN. The ‘87 monument named “Winter Warrior” features a Dakota warrior figure made by a local artist and the 2012 monument features a large scroll with poems, prayers, and the list of all the men killed on that dark day of 1862.

Beyond that, Minnesota boasts a plethora of statues, monuments and memorials under the umbrella of the Dakota War of 1862. Fort Ridgely State Park located near Fairfax MN hosts a number of monuments, Wood Lake State Monument, Camp Release State Monument, Defenders State Monument are a few of the myriad of locations dedicated to the Americans who fought, lost their lives as well as civilian causality acknowledgement.

Located in Morton, MN, the Birch Coulee monument was erected in 1894. Close to this monument a granite obelisk was erected five years later titled the “Loyal Indian Monument,” to honor the 6 Dakota “who saved the lives of whites during the U.S. Dakota War.” This monument stood out to me, not so much for its bland appearance, but the unusual circumstance to highlight six “loyal” Native lives amongst the many lost who were seen as disloyal.

Seth Eastman, a descendant of Little Thunder (one of the 38 men executed in Mankato) shared how “one public school at the border of Minnesota, where a man dressed as Abraham Lincoln talked to the students and answered their questions [and one] of my nephews asked the question, ‘Why did you hang the 38?’ This man went on to tell him, ‘Oh, I only hung the bad Indians. The ones that killed and raped.’ Telling kids this, that we’re bad, it’s the same as how we’ve been portrayed in the media. That struck my core.””

He continued:

“Minnesota has its own memorials for the Dakota War, but some of the older ones especially are quite problematic. These markers paint the settlers who fought the Dakota as brave victims who defended themselves, without discussion of the broken treaties and ill treatment the Dakota endured which prompted the war; neither is there any mention of the mass execution, internment, and forced removal that followed.”9

Director and Founder of Smooth Feather productions Silas Hagerty released the documentary Dakota 38 in 2012. The documentary highlights a yearly journey where riders from across the world meet in Lower Brule, South Dakota to take a 330-mile journey to Mankato as part of a commemoration and ceremony of remembrance for the 38 lost in 1862. The film also delves into bits of history on the attempts the US took to remove the Dakota peoples from Minnesota. Jim Miller, a direct descendant of Little Horse (one of the 38 men) started the annual ride in 2005 as “a way to promote reconciliation between American Indians and non-Native people. Other goals of the Memorial Ride include: provide healing from historical trauma; remember and honor the 38 + 2 who were hanged; bring awareness of Dakota history and to promote youth rides and healing.”10

(Dakota Riders Ceremonial ride to Mankota, Photo by Sarah Penman)

The memorials and monuments are in abundance in regards to the Dakota War. But who’s perspective is acknowledged? Through work such as Edgar Heap of Birds in his 1990′s installation, to the 2012 larger public scroll monument in Mankato’s “Reconciliation Park” there have been steps taken by both Native and non-natives to explore what this reconciliation looks like.

Of the two Dakota men captured and ordered to be executed under then US president Andrew Johnson on November 11, 1865, Wakanozanzan of the Mdeqakanton Dakota Sioux Nation’s final words were:

“I am a common human being. Some day, the people will come from the heart and look at each other as common human beings. When they do that, come from the heart, this country will be a good place.”12

This article is dedicated to the 38+2.

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Images Sources Andrew Myrick – Let Em Eat Grass 1970 TC Cannon, Google Arts & Culture https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/andrew-myrick-let-em-eat-grass-t-c-cannon-kiowa-and-caddo-southern-plains-indian-museum/uwGyR0PTzacQkA

Met Museum photo of Edgar Heap of Birds artwork https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/653721

Mankota riders https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/dakota-382-wokiksuye-memorial-riders-commemorate-1862-hangings-ordered-lincoln/

Sources

1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dakota_War_of_1862 2 https://www.mankatolife.com/attractions/reconciliation-park/ 3 Gibbon, Guy The Sioux: The Dakota and the Lakota Nations https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Sioux.html?id=s3gndFhmj9gC 4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sioux 5 Beidler, Peter G. “Murdering Indians” October 17, 2013 https://books.google.com/books?id=4RRzAQAAQBAJ&dq=santee+men+murdered+white+farmer 6 History of the Santee Sioux Tribe in Nebraska http://www.santeedakota.org/santee_history_ii.htm 7 https://www.usdakotawar.org/history/acton-incident 8 Little Crow’s Letter https://www.usdakotawar.org/history/taoyateduta-little-crow 9 Regan, Sheila June 16, 2017 “In Minnesota, Listening to Native Perspective on Memorializing the Dakota War” Hyperallergic https://hyperallergic.com/385682/in-minnesota-listening-to-native-perspectives-on-memorializing-the-dakota-war/ 10 https://nativenewsonline.net/currents/dakota-382-wokiksuye-memorial-riders-commemorate-1862-hangings-ordered-lincoln/

11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankton_Sioux_Tribe

12 https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/64427183/wakan_ozanzan-medicine_bottle

Monuments Depicting Victims of the Dakota Uprising http://www.dakotavictims1862.com/monuments/index.html Morton, MN Monuments https://sites.google.com/site/mnvhlc/home/renville-county/morton-monuments

More information regarding Dakota War of 1862 Holocaust and Genocide Studies: Native American University of Minnesota https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/native-american

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blackfreethinkers · 5 years ago

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Is a color-blind political system possible under our Constitution? If it is, the Supreme Court’s evisceration of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 did little to help matters. While black people in America today are not experiencing 1950s levels of voter suppression, efforts to keep them and other citizens from participating in elections began within 24 hours of the Shelby County v. Holder ruling and have only increased since then.

In Shelby County’s oral argument, Justice Antonin Scalia cautioned, “Whenever a society adopts racial entitlements, it is very difficult to get them out through the normal political processes.” Ironically enough, there is some truth to an otherwise frighteningly numb claim. American elections have an acute history of racial entitlements—only they don’t privilege black Americans.

For centuries, white votes have gotten undue weight, as a result of innovations such as poll taxes and voter-ID laws and outright violence to discourage racial minorities from voting. (The point was obvious to anyone paying attention: As William F. Buckley argued in his essay “Why the South Must Prevail,” white Americans are “entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail, politically and culturally,” anywhere they are outnumbered because they are part of “the advanced race.”) But America’s institutions boosted white political power in less obvious ways, too, and the nation’s oldest structural racial entitlement program is one of its most consequential: the Electoral College.

Commentators today tend to downplay the extent to which race and slavery contributed to the Framers’ creation of the Electoral College, in effect whitewashing history: Of the considerations that factored into the Framers’ calculus, race and slavery were perhaps the foremost.

Of course, the Framers had a number of other reasons to engineer the Electoral College. Fearful that the president might fall victim to a host of civic vices—that he could become susceptible to corruption or cronyism, sow disunity, or exercise overreach—the men sought to constrain executive power consistent with constitutional principles such as federalism and checks and balances. The delegates to the Philadelphia convention had scant conception of the American presidency—the duties, powers, and limits of the office. But they did have a handful of ideas about the method for selecting the chief executive. When the idea of a popular vote was raised, they griped openly that it could result in too much democracy. With few objections, they quickly dispensed with the notion that the people might choose their leader.

But delegates from the slaveholding South had another rationale for opposing the direct election method, and they had no qualms about articulating it: Doing so would be to their disadvantage. Even James Madison, who professed a theoretical commitment to popular democracy, succumbed to the realities of the situation. The future president acknowledged that “the people at large was in his opinion the fittest” to select the chief executive. And yet, in the same breath, he captured the sentiment of the South in the most “diplomatic” terms:

There was one difficulty however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of the Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to fewest objections.

Behind Madison’s statement were the stark facts: The populations in the North and South were approximately equal, but roughly one-third of those living in the South were held in bondage. Because of its considerable, nonvoting slave population, that region would have less clout under a popular-vote system. The ultimate solution was an indirect method of choosing the president, one that could leverage the three-fifths compromise, the Faustian bargain they’d already made to determine how congressional seats would be apportioned. With about 93 percent of the country’s slaves toiling in just five southern states, that region was the undoubted beneficiary of the compromise, increasing the size of the South’s congressional delegation by 42 percent. When the time came to agree on a system for choosing the president, it was all too easy for the delegates to resort to the three-fifths compromise as the foundation. The peculiar system that emerged was the Electoral College.

Right from the get-go, the Electoral College has produced no shortage of lessons about the impact of racial entitlement in selecting the president. History buffs and Hamilton fans are aware that in its first major failure, the Electoral College produced a tie between Thomas Jefferson and his putative running mate, Aaron Burr. What’s less known about the election of 1800 is the way the Electoral College succeeded, which is to say that it operated as one might have expected, based on its embrace of the three-fifths compromise. The South’s baked-in advantages—the bonus electoral votes it received for maintaining slaves, all while not allowing those slaves to vote—made the difference in the election outcome. It gave the slaveholder Jefferson an edge over his opponent, the incumbent president and abolitionist John Adams. To quote Yale Law’s Akhil Reed Amar, the third president “metaphorically rode into the executive mansion on the backs of slaves.” That election continued an almost uninterrupted trend of southern slaveholders and their doughfaced sympathizers winning the White House that lasted until Abraham Lincoln’s victory in 1860.

In 1803, the Twelfth Amendment modified the Electoral College to prevent another Jefferson-Burr–type debacle. Six decades later, the Thirteenth Amendment outlawed slavery, thus ridding the South of its windfall electors. Nevertheless, the shoddy system continued to cleave the American democratic ideal along racial lines. In the 1876 presidential election, the Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but some electoral votes were in dispute, including those in—wait for it—Florida. An ad hoc commission of lawmakers and Supreme Court justices was empaneled to resolve the matter. Ultimately, they awarded the contested electoral votes to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, who had lost the popular vote. As a part of the agreement, known as the Compromise of 1877, the federal government removed the troops that were stationed in the South after the Civil War to maintain order and protect black voters.

The deal at once marked the end of the brief Reconstruction era, the redemption of the old South, and the birth of the Jim Crow regime. The decision to remove soldiers from the South led to the restoration of white supremacy in voting through the systematic disenfranchisement of black people, virtually accomplishing over the next eight decades what slavery had accomplished in the country’s first eight decades. And so the Electoral College’s misfire in 1876 helped ensure that Reconstruction would not remove the original stain of slavery so much as smear it onto the other parts of the Constitution’s fabric, and countenance the racialized patchwork democracy that endured until the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

What’s clear is that, more than two centuries after it was designed to empower southern whites, the Electoral College continues to do just that. The current system has a distinct, adverse impact on black voters, diluting their political power. Because the concentration of black people is highest in the South, their preferred presidential candidate is virtually assured to lose their home states’ electoral votes. Despite black voting patterns to the contrary, five of the six states whose populations are 25 percent or more black have been reliably red in recent presidential elections. Three of those states have not voted for a Democrat in more than four decades. Under the Electoral College, black votes are submerged. It’s the precise reason for the success of the southern strategy. It’s precisely how, as Buckley might say, the South has prevailed.

Among the Electoral College’s supporters, the favorite rationalization is that without the advantage, politicians might disregard a large swath of the country’s voters, particularly those in small or geographically inconvenient states. Even if the claim were true, it’s hardly conceivable that switching to a popular-vote system would lead candidates to ignore more voters than they do under the current one. Three-quarters of Americans live in states where most of the major parties’ presidential candidates do not campaign.

More important, this “voters will be ignored” rationale is morally indefensible. Awarding a numerical few voting “enhancements” to decide for the many amounts to a tyranny of the minority. Under any other circumstances, we would call an electoral system that weights some votes more than others a farce—which the Supreme Court, more or less, did in a series of landmark cases. Can you imagine a world in which the votes of black people were weighted more heavily because presidential candidates would otherwise ignore them, or, for that matter, any other reason? No. That would be a racial entitlement. What’s easier to imagine is the racial burdens the Electoral College continues to wreak on them.

Critics of the Electoral College are right to denounce it for handing victory to the loser of the popular vote twice in the past two decades. They are also correct to point out that it distorts our politics, including by encouraging presidential campaigns to concentrate their efforts in a few states that are not representative of the country at large. But the disempowerment of black voters needs to be added to that list of concerns, because it is core to what the Electoral College is and what it always has been.

The race-consciousness establishment—and retention—of the Electoral College has supported an entitlement program that our 21st-century democracy cannot justify. If people truly want ours to be a race-blind politics, they can start by plucking that strange, low-hanging fruit from the Constitution.

#ideas

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cloudwomensquarterly · 6 years ago

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Two Poems by Cathy Arellano -Fugitive Slave Act and Immigration, a found poem based on “The Long Struggle for America’s Soul” by Andrew Delbanco* and Alfie, What’s It All About?

Fugitive Slave Act and Immigration, a found poem based on “The Long Struggle for America’s Soul” by Andrew Delbanco*

southern border separation children parents president’s denigration nonwhite migrants denying birthright citizenship pledge federal troops caravan frantic refugees

not first time president threatened return them to horrors fled African-Americans not human property no different cattle sheep

South Carolina “Act to Prevent Runaways” 1683 hundred years later Georgia nightly slave patrol

Philadelphia 1787 problem new nation slaves running freedom

Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 Constitution founding fathers stop them

“right to recover our slaves” stating easier than carrying out just as “Build the Wall!” easier than building

obliged to return runaways

obliged to return stray livestock stolen cash

but boundary slavery freedom porous

slave owners cut off shoes collected at night runaways resisting killed with impunity only witness killer himself

most fugitives never far tendons cut faces branded kept on trying

just as in our time immigrants keep coming 1840s fugitive slave problem gravest of all questions calls for secession congress tried to solve August 1850 Fugitive Slave Act

president signed law law without mercy denied most basic right habeas corpus right to challenge detention forbade own defense trial by jury disallowed exonerating evidence criminalized sheltering fugitive required local authorities assist recovering lost human property

free Black people in North even never been enslaved lives infused with terror of being deported

in South deepened despair already desperate

1851 free Black people organize resistance

Norfolk, Va. slave catchers seized young man Shadrach with his waiter’s apron still on Black crowd gathered Court Square rushed courtroom hustled whisked from Boston to Cambridge to Canada

Lancaster County, Pa. slave owner tried force return shot killed by Black man

Syracuse biracial crowd attacked police station clubs axes battering ram Canada

Milwaukee Joshua Glover escaped held until twenty men large timber bumb bumb bumb down door out Glover

1850 more than three million Black people legally enslaved within country’s borders

politicians racist

chief justice United States Blacks have no rights White man bound to respect

Boston New Bedford Syracuse Cincinnati Rochester “sanctuary cities”

Black people feared law enforcement

congress courts collapsed

fugitive slaves 19th century undocumented immigrants today non-persons

Who is isn’t human?

Declaration of Independence “all men created equal “unalienable rights” “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness”

1854 Abraham Lincoln readopt the Declaration

postwar constitutional amendments guarantee citizenship right to vote

former slaves naturalized immigrants

The New Deal tried The Civil Rights Movement tried dismantle Jim Crow

age of trump rights constricted rescinded

self-evident truth

all people life liberty pursuit of happiness long way from settled

Note: I have adjusted some capitalization, removed most punctuation, changed Delbanco’s “illegal” and replaced with “undocumented” before “immigrant(s)”. Words are in same order as article.

Alfie, What’s It All About?

every Saturday during our walk up and down the coolest street in town we stopped at the American Music Store (they changed their name to Música Latina when us Latinos finally reached a critical and commercial mass)

this was Mom’s spot she only bought one LP or a couple 45s each time but “each time” times “every Saturday” equals stacks and stacks of Stax fingers ready to snap on yellow background Motown road maps guiding the way with its red star

and the rest of our housemates Capitol, Atlantic, RCA, Buddha Tamla, Scepter, Capitol, Philips crashing in the Livingroom behind to the left of right of in front of her stereo

one Saturday when we were 6 and 7 years old Mom made a payment on our inheritance her magic her balm her joy

You girls, pick a record my older sister and I knew this was a moment like when someone else’s Mom teaches them to bake cookies Mom was offering us something precious

it was sweet not like later when Mom let my sister smoke in front of her when she was 15

it wasn’t mine or my sister’s birthday I hadn’t ever dreamed this moment would arrive but I was ready we both were

My sister turned around ran to the back of the store dug in a white bin flipped through grabbed her catch clutched it in her arms ran back to us at the counter showed us her treasure

The Three Little Pigs

I couldn’t read very well but I recognized the pigs and wolf on the cover behind the counter Enrique turned to me for my order I didn’t run just said

Alfie

he looked at Mom then back at me by Dionne Warwick?

huh?

Yes, that one Mom told him

we returned the next Saturday and the next and the next Mom bought us many more 45s not as many as she bought herself but enough to begin our own stacks

my sister started buying classic Oldies “Angel Baby” and “Sitting in the Park” I bought Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” for the until then unheard of price of $4.99 and later AC/DC’s “You Shook Me All Night Long”

when she died in 1984 after a month in the hospital when we were 18 and 19 Mom had amassed so many records and we had to move so fast and were so lost in the chaos we threw them away

I wish I had all her records back I’d play them for my partner our son

no, I’d trade hers, mine, my sister’s, all the 45s, LPs, and CDs in the world for one more moment with her

The broken-hearted lesbian love poems in Cathy Arellano’s I LOVE MY WOMEN, SOMETIMES THEY LOVE ME are suitable for anyone who has loved, been loved, or been left. I LOVE MY WOMEN was released in Fall 2017 from Kórima Press. In 2016, Kórima published SALVATION ON MISSION STREET, Arellano’s family memoir in poems and stories set in San Francisco from the 1960s to the 2000s. SALVATION won the 2017 Golden Crown Literary Society’s Debut Author Award.

#Cathy Arellano #Poetry #I Love My Women #Salvation on Mission Street #CWQJ Winter 2019

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patriotsnet · 3 years ago

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Who Were The Republicans In The Civil War

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/who-were-the-republicans-in-the-civil-war/

Who Were The Republicans In The Civil War

Gop Overthrown During Great Depression

What if Civil War broke out between Republicans and Democrats?

The pro-business policies of the decade seemed to produce an unprecedented prosperityuntil the Wall Street Crash of 1929 heralded the Great Depression. Although the party did very well in large cities and among ethnic Catholics in presidential elections of 19201924, it was unable to hold those gains in 1928. By 1932, the citiesfor the first time everhad become Democratic strongholds.

Hoover was by nature an activist and attempted to do what he could to alleviate the widespread suffering caused by the Depression, but his strict adherence to what he believed were Republican principles precluded him from establishing relief directly from the federal government. The Depression cost Hoover the presidency with the 1932 landslide election of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition controlled American politics for most of the next three decades, excepting the presidency of Republican Dwight Eisenhower 19531961. The Democrats made major gains in the 1930 midterm elections, giving them congressional parity for the first time since Wilson’s presidency.

Election Of Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln was born into relative poverty in Kentucky in 1809. His father worked a small farm. In his youth, Lincoln held down a variety of jobs before moving to Illinois and becoming a lawyer.

Lincoln sarted to get involved in local politics. Lincolns political views came to the fore after the Kansas Nebraska Act where he spoke out against the spread of slavery.

1860 was the presidential election year. In the spring the two main parties, the Democrats and the Republicans chose their candidates.

Abraham Lincoln . The Republicans held their convention in Chicago. Lincoln was chosen with overwhelming support.

Stephen Douglas . The Democratic Party was split. Northern Democrats wished for further compromise over slavery. Douglas was chosen as their candidate.

John Breckinridge . The Southern Democrats wanted no compromise on slavery. They wished to see slavery guaranteed and were trying to take over the party. They left the Democrat Convention in Baltimore and selected their own candidate John Breckinridge.

John Bell . The Constitutional Union Party was trying to prevent the country dividing over the issue of slavery.

The election campaign of 1860 was unusual. Lincoln only campaigned in the North and Breckinridge in the South. Stephen Douglas exhausted himself by campaigning in all the states.

The result was that Lincoln became President. He won all 17 states in the North but none in the South. The country was now more divided than ever.

Opinionheres What Getting Rid Of Mississippis Confederate Flag Means And Doesnt

In the summer of 1864, for example, the war was going poorly, and Republicans feared that a public sick of defeat would toss Lincoln out of office. Then Gen. William T. Sherman won a resounding victory at Atlanta in September. Lincolnâs landslide re-election in 1864 seemed to many at the time and since then to be the result of that military success.

But by analyzing House elections in 1864, Kalmoe uncovered a different story. In the 1860s, congressional contests were held over the course of the entire year, rather than on the same day as the presidential contest. If Republicans were in trouble before September, House GOP candidates should have been crushed by Democratic challengers. But instead, Kalmoe found, Republican vote share changed little over time. Lincoln was on his way to win before Atlanta. Republican partisans supported the president even though the war was going poorly, as they did when the war was going well.

In the Civil War era, partisanship had a strong effect on how people interpreted good or bad news.

Republican refusal to abandon Trump seems ominous. Trumpâs disastrous response to a national health crisis has led to tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths. If his voters arenât moved by that, how can we hold government accountable to the people at all? Partisanship seems to be a recipe for denial, dysfunction and death.

Read Also: Did Republicans Cut Funding For Benghazi

Read Also: Dems For Trump

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96thdayofrage · 3 years ago

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If you’re looking for the patron saint of institutional racism in the United States, Roger B. Taney is your man.

That a bust of Chief Justice Taney in the U.S. Capitol should be removed, as the House voted last week to do, is beyond reasonable debate. It is the lowest hanging fruit in our nation’s efforts to reckon more honestly with its past.

The only wonder is that 120 House Republicans voted against the measure. The question is not what’s to be done about Taney, but what’s to be done about them. And what’s to be done about the Republicans in the Senate who are sure to vote against the measure, too.

They have declared where they stand: Against any reconsideration of our nation’s past that might annoy their most racist supporters in the next Republican primary. And in favor of — the perfect metaphor — continued white washing.

Chicago knows institutional racism

If you live in Chicago and know the worst of our city’s own history, you can only marvel at such willful blindness.

To argue that institutional racism is a fiction — or that removing the bust of somebody like Taney is an “erasing” of history — looks like a farce to those of us who grew up and live in a city where whole neighborhoods once were red-lined by mortgage companies so Black folks couldn’t live there, where mobile classrooms called “Willis wagons” were installed to keep Black children from having to be bused to white schools, and where an expressway, the Dan Ryan, was strategically located to create a wall between Black and white neighborhoods.

Listen, we know. There’s also a lot of over-the-top “wokeness” going around. There are calls for corrective actions, such as taking down statues of Abe Lincoln, that ignore historical context and go too far. There is plenty of room all around, that is to say, for a more nuanced debate about our nation’s history and how its failings play out to this day.

But Justice Taney? To oppose the removal of his bust from a place of honor in the Capitol, on any grounds, is to declare you really don’t give a damn about truth, racial healing and reconciliation.

Taney was the author of the infamous Dred Scott decision, often called the worst legal decision in the Supreme Court’s history. The court held in 1857 that Scott, as a Black man, was not an American citizen and therefore had no right to sue. The court also ruled that legislation restricting slavery in certain territories was unconstitutional.

Taney reviled in his own time

To those who argue that Taney was simply a man of his times and should not be judged by the standards of today, we would point out that he was reviled by many in his own day. Even this business of the bust is nothing new.

When a senator from Illinois in 1865, shortly after Taney’s death, proposed that a bust of the chief justice be put on display in the Capitol, he was mocked.

A senator from New Hampshire said Taney was nothing but a “traitor” who sought to place the nation “forever by judicial authority under the iron rule of the slave-masters.”

A senator from Massachusetts warned that “the name of Taney is to be hooted down the page of history. Judgment is beginning now.”

It would not be until 1874 that Congress passed a bill to honor Taney with a bust, creating a new monument to white supremacy just as Reconstruction was being dismantled in the South and Jim Crow was kicking in.

Removing the bust of Taney now is not about “erasing history.” It’s about getting history right.

A willful blindness

A willful blindness to the obvious, largely on the part of those who have made a cult of Donald Trump and those who fear that cult, threatens to destroy our country.

It has people believing, or pretending to believe, that the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump, that former Vice President Mike Pence had the authority to hand the election to Trump, that COVID-19 vaccines are a threat to freedom, and that left-wing activists were behind the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

It has people believing that the threat of global warming is not real, that Dr. Anthony Fauci conspired to cover up the actual origins of the coronavirus, that wind turbines cause cancer, and that Biden is senile and Vice President Kamala Harris is secretly pulling the strings.

And it has people believing a brush-stroked children’s version of our nation’s complicated history, one in which the Founding Fathers were beyond reproach, slavery was unfortunate but its legacy dead and gone, and racism is largely a matter of individual prejudices, not something woven into laws and institutions.

As a person, Taney was a racist. As a jurist, he was a chief architect of institutional racism. His bust should be removed.

That there is a willful blindness to this obvious fact, as to so many others, should distress us all.

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dipulb3 · 4 years ago

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People are calling for museums to be abolished. Can whitewashed American history be rewritten?

New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/people-are-calling-for-museums-to-be-abolished-can-whitewashed-american-history-be-rewritten/

People are calling for museums to be abolished. Can whitewashed American history be rewritten?

Written by Brian Boucher, Appradab

After years of resisting calls for its removal, New York’s American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) has asked the city to dislodge from its front steps an equestrian monument to Theodore Roosevelt, the twenty-sixth US president, which depicts him charging forward, and towering over two mostly nude figures, one Black and one Indigenous.

In a statement dated June 2020 sent to museum staff, posted on the museum’s website, Ellen Futter, president of the institution’s board, said, “As we strive to advance our institution’s, our City’s, and our country’s passionate quest for racial justice, we believe that removing the statue will be a symbol of progress and of our commitment to build and sustain an inclusive and equitable Museum community and broader society.” (After the announcement President Donald Trump tweeted, “Ridiculous, don’t do it!”)

Might this concession be a harbinger of other changes ahead for American museums? How can institutions whose leadership is often overwhelmingly White rethink their staffing, collections and exhibitions, much less move toward more truly equitable governance? Or, some ask, should museums continue to exist in anything like their current form?

The controversial statue of former President Theodore Roosevelt outside of the Museum of Natural History, featuring a Black man and a Indigenous man at his sides Credit: Spencer Platt/Getty Images North America/Getty Images

The Natural History Museum’s statement places the monument’s removal in the context of “the ever-widening movement for racial justice that has emerged after the killing of George Floyd,” a Black man who was killed by four police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, one of whom knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. After a video of Floyd’s killing went viral, tens of thousands took to the streets in protest in the US and around the world, even in the midst of a pandemic, to demand accountability for police brutality and to call for the defunding, or even the abolition of local police forces, among other demands.

The presence of an Indigenous figure in the Roosevelt monument, and the museum itself, have a very personal meaning for Wendy Red Star, an artist and member of the Crow tribe. She created a project, “The 1880 Crow Peace Delegation,” about a group of Crow chiefs who traveled to Washington, DC, that year to try to negotiate a peace treaty. In researching for the project, she found that the remains of one of those chiefs, Pretty Eagle, had been stolen from a burial site and later sold to the AMNH. The tribe was able to repatriate the remains in the 1990s.

“It wasn’t until I did this project that I learned about that,” Red Star said in a phone interview. “The Roosevelt monument was the first thing I thought of. To me, it’s a really direct connection to how my people have been presented at the museum — along with the dinosaur bones as part of the natural world. It’s always been such a surreal experience to see my community’s objects on display and watch people observing them as if these were peoples of the past.”

Just as government, law enforcement, and all forms of authority are being questioned in this moment of upheaval, museums worldwide have come in for intense scrutiny, and the situation on the ground is changing very fast. Earlier this month, dozens of current and former staffers of multiple cultural institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art as well as institutions nationwide, published an open letter accusing the institutions of unfair treatment of employees of color and saying that “your covert and overt white supremacy that has benefited the institution, through the unrecognized dedication and hard labor of Black/Brown employees, with the expectation that we remain complacent with the status quo, is over.”

Apsáalooke Feminist #4, 2016, by Wendy Red Star Credit: Courtesy Wendy Red Star

Within days, staffers at the Guggenheim and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art openly accused the institutions’ leadership of racism. In an emailed statement to Appradab, Richard Armstrong, director of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Foundation, said the institution was prepared to address these concerns:

“As a society, we are confronting sustained injustices never resolved, and feel today the pain and anger of previous moments of turmoil. The Guggenheim addresses the shared need of great reform, and long overdue equality, and want to reaffirm that we are dedicated to doing our part.

“In this period of self-reflection and reckoning, we will engage in dialogue with our staff and review all processes and procedures to lead to positive change,” he continued. “We are expediting our ongoing … efforts to produce an action plan for demonstrable progress.”

The Metropolitan Museum declined to comment. The Museum of Modern Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art did not respond to requests for comment.

Museums have also been critiqued for issuing anodyne statements that failed to mention Floyd or the Black Lives Matter movement. The Getty Museum, in Los Angeles, posted an unspecific call for “equity and fairness” on Instagram, and later apologized; the director of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art privately apologized to Black artist Glenn Ligon for using a work of his from the museum’s holdings on social media without his permission, according to the New York Times.

Decolonize This Place protesting outside the American Museum of Natural History Credit: Andres Rodriguez/Decolonize This Place

The AMNH’s statement does not mention the groups that have for several years organized protests calling for the Roosevelt monument’s removal. In a phone interview, Decolonize This Place (DTP) organizer Amin Husain pointed out that removal of the monument was just one of three demands that Decolonize had placed on the museum, which include internally renaming Columbus Day as Indigenous People’s Day and rethinking the museum’s displays.

“Many of the museum’s galleries contain Indigenous remains and objects,” he said. “Those things need to be sent back to the people they were taken from, and the exhibitions must be completely overhauled in consultation with, and with the active participation of, the relevant stakeholders.”

While many U.S. museums have made moves toward what the field calls “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” fellow DTP organizer Marz Saffore called for much greater change. “It’s critical that we move past identity politics,” she said. “It’s not enough to hire an Indigenous curator. It’s not enough to have one Black person on your board. Museums as we know them have to be abolished. I don’t want my voice to be added to museums that are often trophy cases for Imperialism.”

Institutions like the AMNH will continue to be sites for debate, some of which may echo heated arguments among historians and activists on how to handle monuments to objectionable historical figures. This includes leaders of the Confederate Army in the US Civilw War, which were erected by Confederate sympathizers oftentimes decades after the war, with a conscious white supremacist purpose.

Some ask whether these monuments could, rather than being destroyed or removed, be altered by, for example, adding contextualizing information. In an interview with National Public Radio on Tuesday about the Roosevelt monument, historian Manisha Sinha suggested that this tribute to Roosevelt’s efforts toward nature conservation could still stand, if the subjugated Black and Indigenous figures were simply removed. (DTP pointed out in an emailed statement that the land Roosevelt “conserved” was stolen from Indigenous people, so they would hardly find that an acceptable solution.)

By contrast, Abraham Lincoln scholar Harold Holzer, former public affairs czar for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and author of books including “Lincoln and the Power of the Press: The War for Public Opinion” (2014), wrote an editorial this month for the New York Daily News saying that while he had earlier asked whether Confederate monuments could be altered, he’d concluded that they must be removed. “I was not only wrong,” he wrote; “I was insensitive.”

Michael Diaz-Griffith, executive director of the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation, has written a pamphlet on how to be an anti-racist preservationist Credit: Michael Diaz Griffith

Michael Diaz-Griffith, executive director of the New York-based Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation, which supports the Soane Museum in London, is author of “The Anti-Racist Preservationist’s Guide to Confederate Monuments: Their Past and a Future Without Them,” a pamphlet that succinctly explains how such monuments have a foundation in white supremacy, and outlines why they should be struck from the public realm. “In the case of the Confederates there’s no public legacy to detach from their wrongdoing,” Diaz-Griffith said over the phone.”The Confederacy was an immoral enterprise.”

Diaz-Griffith envisions a future, sooner or later, free of tributes to any such contentious figures.

“I think that all named buildings, all named places, will end up being reevaluated,” he said. “Who should they be named after? Do we continue to focus on those who were recognized in their own times, or do we shift our attention to those who fought for justice but weren’t publicly honored when they were alive? Since all people are fallible, it may be a good idea to erect monuments to principles, like justice, rather than to individuals.”

US museums, dependent as they are on the largesse of wealthy individuals and families, are far from a future in which controversial donors, who, for instance, hold views that run counter to science, nonetheless have galleries or other features named for them. The AMNH itself was under scrutiny for taking money from Rebekah Mercer, a major donor to the Republican party, whose leader Donald Trump has repeatedly denied the existence of climate change during his time in office. Mercer left the board when her term ended in 2019. Meanwhile in 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art named the revamped plaza on Fifth Avenue for donor David H. Koch, likewise a Republican donor, who is notable for funding efforts to undercut climate change science.

But the activists who had called for the removal of the Roosevelt monument have more foundational questions in mind than who funds such cultural organizations. Representing the group NYC Stands with Standing Rock, Sandy Grande, using the Lenape people’s name for Manhattan, said in a phone interview, “We should underscore that the city (Mannahatta) wouldn’t exist without the land and labor of Black and Indigenous peoples. This is Lenape land and the Mohawk and Seneca peoples built much of the city. In addition to Black people’s labor, their settlement at Seneca Village was destroyed.”

“So,” she said, “the removal of the monument has been a long time coming, not just for the museum but for the city itself, and we will continue to press for change.”

Makeba Clay, the Phillips Collection’s first chief diversity officer Credit: Rhiannon Newman/Courtesy Makeba Clay

“This is an historic moment — a pause and reflect moment for individuals and institutions,” said Makeba Clay, the chief diversity officer at the Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, over email. “The systemic and unrelenting injustices against members of the Black community have existed for hundreds of years and continue to exist all around us, including in our museums. We know we have work to do and that means being actively anti-racist — not passively non-racist.”

Clay was the inaugural appointee to her role, which she took on in 2018 and her message is that it’s not enough to “amplify” voices and messages, art institutions must take action. “We are looking at our staff and board, both overwhelmingly white, and actively examining our hiring and recruitment processes to promote greater diversity,” she said. “We recently held a town hall, which uncovered stark differences between staff of color and white staff.”

Clay also said that art does not exist outside struggle. That while it can be used for “constructive discourse, building empathy and creating community,” art also “can confront current issues and topics that aren’t neutral.”

Adding: “What appears like radical action is exactly what museums need to pursue to prove that they have a valuable role to play in this national discourse.”

Top image: Fall, from the series Four Seasons, 2006, by Wendy Red Star.

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dccomicsnews · 7 years ago

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WGN Passed On a 'Scalped' Television Series

WGN Passed On a ‘Scalped’ Television Series

WGN recently passed on Warner Bros.’s live-action Scalped television series. The pilot was filmed this passed spring with Alex Meraz as Dashiell “Dash” Bad Horse, Lily Gladstone as Carol Red Crow, and Gil Birmingham as Chief Lincoln Red Crow. Bilall Fallah and Adil El Arbi directed the pilot. This is what the writer had to say: I got to visit the set while they were filming the pilot, and got to…

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diversityinfilmtv · 8 years ago

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Could SCALPED Get An All Native Cast?

Scalped is a 60-issue Vertigo comic series penned by Jason Aaron and R.M. Guéra. Scalped focuses on the Oglala Lakota inhabitants of a fictional Prairie Rose Indian Reservation and is described as a modern day crime noir drama. Taking inspiration from the Native American activist Leonard Peltier, who killed two FBI agents in 1975, there is much anticipating of the upcoming pilot developed by Doug Jung and Geoff Johns for WGN America.

With such an intriguing comic book in the making, we are all looking forward to the release of the television adaptation on WGN America. WGN America is a television network looking to compete with the likes of HBO and AMC, and with such an amazing story under their belt, they can potentially reach that level. However, a bigger topic arises in the minds of many fans; will Scalped host a diverse cast?

Scalped’s story explores immensely deep topics of power, family, loyalty, spirituality, coupled with Native American cultural nuances. A diverse cast would keep true to the comic and preserve its originality.

Movies and television series have portrayed culturally unique stories from a white protagonist’s experience for far too many times. The passion and emotions behind such narratives strike a profoundly sensitive nerve, which can only be adequately communicated and portrayed by a Native American cast. Undertaking a crime drama like Scalped and doing it authentically could be a tough task. However, with a majority First Nations cast, coupled with a diverse production team, this gritty drama could attract loyal fans and entice a whole new audience.

There have been some speculation regarding potential casting choices and I’m vigorously hoping that WGN America adheres to the culturally unique narrative of Scalped. Incorporating a diverse cast will open the doors to many Native American actors, who often do not get to see themselves on screen.

Moviepilot, ifanboy, and 8bitsoul have all listed their cast selection with actors such as Michael Spears potentially playing Dashiell Bad Horse, Russell Means playing Chief Lincoln Red Crow, and Irene Bedard playing Gina Bad Horse to name a few. Could WGN America effectively translate the complex and gritty nuances from the graphic pages? Will DC Entertainment, and WGN America cast appropriately and forgo whitewashing this predominately Native American tale? With the pilot order already on the way, we can only wait and hope to see the outcome.

#scalped #first nations #native american

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sun-cheyne · 8 years ago

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Gil Birmingham (Hell or High Water, Twilight films), Irene Bedard (The New World, Smoke Signals) and Chaske Spence (Sneaky Pete, Banshee) join previously announced Alex Meraz and Lily Gladstone in the project, which features a predominantly Native American cast.

Written by Doug Jung (Banshee) based on the DC graphic novel series written by Jason Aaron and illustrated by R.M. Guéra, Scalped is a modern-day crime story set in the world of a Native American reservation. The hourlong drama explores power, loyalty and spirituality in a community led by the ambitious Chief Lincoln Red Crow (Birmingham) as he reckons with Dashiell Bad Horse (Meraz), who has returned home after years away from the reservation. The Native American casting is the first for a television series in recent history. Adil El Arbi & Bilall Fallah will direct. Warner Horizon Scripted Television produces.

Birmingham’s Chief Lincoln Red Crow is the controversial Chief of the Prairie Rose Reservation. Formerly an idealistic activist, Red Crow orchestrates the opening of the casino on the “Rez,” believing it to be the key to his tribe’s future and redemption for his own dark past. But the casino proves to be a Pandora’s box, with Red Crow struggling to keep it the Rez’s salvation and not its demise.

Bedard is Gina Bad Horse, a legendary activist and the public face of opposition to Red Crow and his casino. Her efforts and ways of helping her people stand in stark opposition to Red Crow, despite their intimate and secretive past together. In the face of Red Crow’s success with the casino, Gina begins to realize that defeating him requires adopting his dark tactics.

Spencer will portray Sheriff Falls Down. The local sheriff with a deep investment in the Rez and its people, his wry easy manner obscures an edge and keen intelligence. There is no love lost between Sheriff Falls Down and Chief Red Crow — but there is a mutual respect.

Native American filmmaker Sterlin Harjo (Mekko) will serve as a producer and joins executive producer Len Goldstein (Powerless, Roadies) on the creative team led by executive producer/writer Jung (Star Trek Beyond, Big Love).

Spencer recently wrapped a lead in feature Woman Walks Ahead opposite Jessica Chastain and a recurring role on Amazon’s Sneaky Pete. He’s repped by Abrams Artists Agency and Michael Mahan at Peikoff Mahan.

#Scalped #DC #Verigo #comics #NDN #Native news #Indigenous #Native American #tv #WGN #entertainment

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dcwomenofcolor · 8 years ago

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Based on the western crime comics that were published by DC’s Vertigo imprint in 2007, “Scalped” is described as a modern-day crime story set in the world of a Native American reservation. The project explores power, loyalty, and spirituality in a community led by the ambitious Chief Lincoln Red Crow as he reckons with Dashiell Bad Horse, who has returned home after years away from the reservation.

Gladstone will play Carol Red Crow, the estranged daughter of Chief Red Crow. The former “Rez Princess”, tragic circumstances set her against her father and down a self-destructive spiral meant to punish him as much as herself. Fiercely independent and intelligent, Carol gradually comes to discover the influence she can play on the Rez’s future.

#carol red crow #lily gladstone #scalped #live action #vertigo

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accras · 8 years ago

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A modern-day crime story set in the world of a Native American reservation, Scalped explores power, loyalty and spirituality in a community led by the ambitious Chief Lincoln Red Crow as he reckons with Dashiell Bad Horse (Meraz), who has returned home after years away from the reservation. The Native American casting will be a first for a television series in recent history.

Meraz’s Dashiell was exiled from the Rez by his mother at age 13 and returns home after 15 years as a criminal with a mysterious agenda. His return sets him on a violent path of self-discovery about his place on the Rez and on a collision course with both his estranged mother and Red Crow.

Meraz, of the Purepecha (Tarasco) First Nation of Michoacan, Mexico, most recently was seen in Warner Bros’ Suicide Squad for director David Ayer.

#alex meraz #scalped #native americans #representation matters

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auburnfamilynews · 5 years ago

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Derick E. Hingle-USA TODAY Sports

Auburn ain’t on, but we’ll be watching everyone else get knocked off.

We’re spending the bye week licking our wounds, and thankfully we don’t have to take part in some of the big games this weekend. It seems like Auburn’s been the focal most every weekend so far this year, and it’s nice to sit back for once.

Relax, and watch Florida lose.

Florida @ LSU (-13.5) (O/U 55)

I’m excited for this one. This is a matchup of one of the best pass offenses in the country and one of the best pass defenses in the country. Is Joe Burrow really for real? Can Florida do it on the road? I think this one really comes down to the less glamorous matchup. I like LSU’s defense a lot better than I like Florida’s offense with the game in Baton Rouge. I still think the number is a little too big though. LSU 30, Florida 20 - James Jones

Why in the Wide World of Sports did CBS not pick this game. Even if Auburn doesn’t Gus it’s self last week, this is still far and away the game of the week in the conference? Oh well, have fun with that. This should be a fantastic game. LSU has an insane offense and a suspect defense while Florida is good enough on offense and not bad at all on defense. I think LSU wins and covers but it won’t be until late in the ballgame. Tigas 38-20 - Drew Mac

It’s a primetime game in Baton Rouge so you know Death Valley will be rocking! The Gators come into this one on a extreme high after beating Auburn last Saturday in the Swamp. LSU’s offense will face by far their toughest test to date in Florida’s defense who frustrated Bo Nix all afternoon last week. LSU has scored 42 or more points in all 5 games so far this year but in some games, their defense has been questionable (how do you give up 38 points to Vanderbilt!!!!) I honestly haven’t watched a ton of LSU this year so I’m looking forward to getting a chance to watch this game to see what Auburn’s going to face in a few weeks. I like LSU to win but I’m gonna take the Gators to cover. LSU 34 Florida 24 - Will McLaughlin

Despite these two schools seemingly despising playing each other annually, I think this may be the most fun rivalry in the SEC for bystanders. This will be an interesting game to watch for Auburn fans specifically, too. If Florida plays LSU close, it may make us feel better about a lackluster performance last week. If LSU blows Florida out of the bayou and the Gators #7 ranking looks a little fraudulent? We may not be as happy. I think LSU is going to win this game, but I’m not quite ready to give them two touchdowns even at home. LSU wins but doesn’t quite pull away, 31-20 - Ryan Sterritt

The biggie. Florida just notched a huge win over Auburn. LSU’s offense vs Florida’s defense. Death Valley, prime time. I reckon 90k liquored up Tigah fans may impact the result. LSU 35, Florida 21 - Josh Dub

I’m looking forward to this one. Can LSU’s scoring juggernaut of an offense be slowed down? Can Florida’s offense hit a few big plays on another defense? No part of me thinks Florida can get this done on the road. Give me the home Tigers in victory. LSU 34 Florida 20 - Josh Black

I still don’t know what to think about LSU at this point. This will give us a good idea of what we are really up against in a few weeks. I still don’t rate Florida very highly so I don’t think they can go into red stick and win, but this is definitely one to watch. LSU 33, Florida 17 - AU Chief

LSU is terrifying to me. Florida was the best defense auburn has played so far. I think Florida is really good and has an incredibly talented roster. That said, LSU is going to win this game because they are at home and that offense is humming. LSU 38, UF 20 - Son of Crow

A Florida win might put some wind back into some Auburn fans’ sails this weekend. I mean if that Gator team Auburn SHOULDA beat goes on the road & knocks off an undefeated LSU team, well then that’s one hell of a quality loss!

But here’s the thing... I still don’t think Florida is that great. Kyle Trask now gets to experience what Bo Nix did last week & it wouldn’t shock me if his performance takes quite the dip as well. The only thing that gives me pause is that UF’s defense has the pieces to stop LSU’s offense. They got an elite secondary & an outstanding pass rushing defensive line. LSU hasn’t really showed the propensity to line up & run at folks which is where I think the Gators weakness is up front. So UF winning an ugly affair would not at all surprise me. However, I just don’t see it happening. I think Trask throws 2 picks, LSU’s offense starts slow but connects on some big plays & Ed O’s squad pulls away late. LSU 38 UF 21 - AU Nerd

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I actually think Florida winning here would be a good thing for Auburn, but Kyle Trask is going to get a taste of what the Auburn offense dealt with last week. There won’t be a wilder atmosphere this season in college football until the Iron Bowl in Auburn. LSU 30, Florida 24 - Jack Condon

Texas vs Oklahoma (-10.5) (O/U 71)

A Texas pass defense that struggled against LSU gets tested again. I think this one will be high flying. Oklahoma’s defense has improved, but they’re still not an elite unit. Texas’s best chance is to hold onto the ball and try to keep Jalen Hurts off of the field. I think they do it enough to cover and hit the under, but it won’t be enough to beat 10 and the hook. Oklahoma 34, Texas 24 - James Jones

This one will also be fun, but if I may ask, where did all the talk about this being the best rivalry in college football come from? Sure its at a fair that deep fries everything insight but this does not a good football rivalry make. While it is definitely in my top 5 and on my list to go to and take in (along with some deep fried oreos and whatever hell else those people want to feed me) it is a solid 5 behind the Iron Bowl, Army/Navy, Michigan-tOSU, and the Egg Bowl before them. Anywho, for this game, in classic Big 12, or however many they have, fashion, neither team has a defense to really speak of while points come in bunches for both. Therefore lets go with the over and a Sooners win to cover! Sooners 48-35 - Drew Mac

Jalen Hurts has played in the Iron Bowl and so the Red River Rivalry is just another game for him. He has played his tail off so far this year and now he gets a crack at a big time school from his home state. Texas has talked a whole lot this week and I’m afraid that’s gonna come back and bite them. Throw in the fact Texas pulled the upset in this matchup last year and Lincoln Riley will surely have his team ready for this one. Sorry Texas, you aren’t back. Oklahoma 48 Texas 27 - Will McLaughlin

Another top ten matchup means another team in front of Auburn loses! Red River along with LSU/Florida makes for a decent Saturday of football, but my feeling here is the opposite of what I said before. Jalen Hurts and the Sooners are going to poor points on Texas, who right now have the #66 defense in the country. Texas will try to make a run here after half time, but it won’t be enough. 41-31 Horns Down - Ryan Sterritt

The Red River Rivalry isn’t even as competitive as a game between second biggest rivals in the state of Alabama. Lincoln Riley cruises. HORNS DOWN, FLAG ME TOM HERMAN. Oklahoma 45, Texas 31 - Josh Dub

For Texas to win this game, they are going to have to call more runs with the quarterback and Jalen Hurts is going to have to turn it over a few times. I think one of those happens. Oklahoma 45 Texas 31 - Josh Black

Repeat after me: Texas is not back. Not that it would matter, even if they were the Horns would still lose this one. The University of Oklahoma 45, Texas 24 - AU Chief

Whoaaaa Nellie from the state fair of Texas itself! Big Tex will be overseeing the affair from his perch at the world’s largest state fair, and I think he will see a great one. Texas looks like a really good team and Jalen hurts has Oklahoma motoring along. Did you know the corn dog was invented at the Texas state fair? Even though LSU has never played there! I like mine with mustard and ketchup. OU 41, UT 35 - Son of Crow

Texas players are downright offended that a QB who has started in the hardest division in college football and has played in multiple championship games might not be overwhelmed by the intensity of the Red River Shootout. I mean the disrespect!!!

They might instead be focused on some of the massive holes in their own team, namely the lack of a consistent rushing attack outside of the QB and a defense that gives up big plays. The Longhorns pulled off the upset last season because they were able to punch the Sooners in the mouth out the gate then hang on for dear life. I don’t see that happening this time around. It’s entertaining early but Sooners keeps landing haymakers offensively and that proves the difference. OK 45 TX 35 - AU Nerd

Texas’ defense is really bad, like, people just stop living watching them play. Oklahoma’s offense is exceptional and Jalen Hurts is an actual good quarterback and I openly wish that he’d chosen to come play at Auburn. The Sooners are hitting 40, it just depends on how long it takes. I say right as the third quarter dies. Oklahoma 50, Texas 28 - Jack Condon

Alabama (-16.5) @ Texas A&M (O/U 61)

SP+ and Bud Elliot both like A&M to cover the number in this one. It’s a huge spread for a road favorite, and Alabama has shown some vulnerability on defense. Unfortunately, I think most of that vulnerability involves the QB run game, and I just don’t see Kellen Mond being willing to make those plays. Alabama 42, Texas A&M 21 - James Jones

YAWN! I feel bad for my buddy who will be at the game, not pulling outwardly for an A&M win while at the same time holding in the laughter of exactly what Alabama is doing to Texas A&M in front of their fans. Stay strong brother...it will be over soon enough. Bama covers 52-24 - Drew Mac

Gary loves him some Alabama doesn’t he? I’m guessing CBS didn’t to feature Florida and/or LSU in back to back weeks and so we get this game in the 2:30 window this week. Gross. Alabama 51 Texas A&M 17 - Will McLaughlin

Yeah, so remember when Texas A&M was going to make a run this year? Losses to Clemson and Auburn (respectable) and a near miss vs Arkansas (not respectable) has killed that momentum. The Aggies aren’t a bad team, but they’re not on the same level as the top teams this year. Alabama is going to take it to them in Kyle Field, too, dropping Jimbo to 3-3 before the schedule lightens up for a month or so. Kellen Mond is going to be far and away the best quarterback Bama’s played yet, and he’ll make a few plays here, but it won’t be enough to keep up. Bama takes it 48-28 - Ryan Sterritt

This game won’t be close. Tua will throw for a thousand yards or probably more like 325. I can’t believe CBS decided to pick this game over Florida/LSU. Alabama 56, Texas A&M 24 - Josh Dub

Before I give a mediocre level of analysis for how this most likely awful game will go, I just want to go on the record as saying that I hope this game is hotter than the sun. A&M can’t run the ball. I wouldn’t sweat the giant spread. Bama covers. Alabama 52 Texas A&M 17 - Josh Black

There is just no way Saban is losing to Jimbo. I’m not even sure they let them score more than a couple of touchdowns. Alabama 52, Texas A&M 17 - AU Chief

The thing to do with a corn dog is to sit down and eat it. I know that sounds weird, because the whole thing is about mobility, but if you’ve got a drink in one hand and a corn dog in the other it makes it difficult to do anything else—-like order a fried pop tart at the Texas state fair. Alabama 45, Aggy 21 - Son of Crow

The Crimson Broadcasting Station made the smart pick for their brand in choosing this game this week. Nothing brings redneck eyeballs like violence on TV. I think Aggies end up holding up better than folks expect thanks to that stout DL and Kellen Mond’s tendency to play better at home. But Jimbo’s insistence on sticking to 12 and 21 personnel sets instead of going 4 wide all day will sink the Aggies again. Tua will throw some 5-10 yard slants/bubble screen that go for 60+ per usual. Aggies though put some points on the board to continue the questions about this Tide defense. Bama 48 A&M 28 - AU Nerd

I heard a radio commercial with Johnny Manziel talking about insurance or something. Rock bottom. No way up today. Bama can do what it wants on offense against all but about three teams. A&M ain’t one of those teams. Bama 52, A&M 21 - Jack Condon

Penn State (-3.5) @ Iowa (O/U 41)

Whew, that’s a total line only Tommy Tuberville could love. If you run out the math, Vegas predicts something like Penn State winning 23-20 or 21-17. I think Penn State has shown enough that they can get to their number. I’m just not sure Iowa gets to theirs. I really don’t like that this pushed to 3 and a hook instead of 3 or under, but here we go. Penn State 23, Iowa 17 - James Jones

Now we get in to some power football stuff here. I had Iowa last week and they let me down...NOT AGAIN HAWKEYES! This time I will go with the deep blue Lions for the W and the cover in a defensive yawner. Nits cover 17-12 - Drew Mac

This matchup lost some luster with Iowa putting up a measly 3 points last week in Ann Arbor. I’m sure I’ll regret this but I think the Hawkeyes not only cover, but get the big win at home. Iowa 19 Penn State 16 - Will McLaughlin

After last week’s 10-3 barn-burner of a loss to Michigan, and O/U of 41 even feels generous. I’m mostly curious about this game for Penn State, though. They’ve been blowing people’s brakes off so far this year, but they’re firmly in the “AIN’T PLAYED NOBODY” camp, and they’re probably the quietest top 10 team so far this season. I’m leaning taking Penn State here, but I really don’t know enough about them to be confident. 28-17 PSU - Ryan Sterritt

The total is 41? Seems way too high. Penn State is flying under the radar right now. An Ohio State and Wisconsin are hogging all the attention, but James Franklin doesn’t mind. Penn State 17, Iowa 10 - Josh Dub

Do offenses go to die in Iowa City? Aside from Michigan’s, we shall see. Penn State has outscored their last two opponents 94-7 after a close call with Pitt. Iowa is one of those weird places to play in the B1G, so this will be close. Penn State 21 Iowa 13 - Josh Black

So I just finished this movie, Mid ‘90s, and it is fantastic. Its the best movie I have seen this year and I cannot recommend it enough, especially if you grew up in the 90s or like skateboarding or good music. It gets a 5/5 from your boy Chief. Available for free if you subscribe to Amazon Prime. Watch it instead of this game. Penn State 28, Iowa 22 - AU Chief

The fried pop tart is delicious and probably my favorite state fair food. I take that back, I just remembered a guy made a fried thanksgiving dinner one time and that was out of bounds good (guy fieri voice). Penn state 21, Iowa 14 - Son of Crow

The sneaky team to watch in the Big 10 this year is Penn State. Not sure people realize how much talent is on this roster. Per 247 Team Talent Rankings, Nittany Lions have the 10th most talented roster in CFB sitting ahead of Auburn thanks to James Franklin’s strong recruiting. At the same time, it’s REALLY hard to trust Franklin to not frick something up along the way. Playing in Kinnick Stadium is not for the faint at heart and this just kinda feels like one of those Hawkeye night game spectaculars. I think Penn State is the better team but I am gonna take the Hawkeyes at home in another thriller where no one scores any points. Iowa 20 Penn State 17 - AU Nerd

Do you know how much of either of these teams that I’ve watched this year? None. But Big Ten football has regressed to a sludgy goo. I did hear that Penn State might not be bad, so I’m actually taking the over in this one. PSU 28, Iowa 16 - Jack Condon

Hawaii @ Boise State (-12.5) (O/U 60)

I’m very happy this one will occur mostly after Florida/LSU is done. Hawaii just plays a fun brand of football, and Boise State has been leaning on their defense most of this season. I think the Broncos force Hawaii into their game early, but we get fireworks late to hit the over. Solid back door cover potential here. Boise State 37, Hawaii 31 - James Jones

YES!!!! MOUNTIAN WEST AFTER DARK!! On paper, this is a heck of a ballgame as the Rainbow Warriors pull in to Boise with a 4-1, a loss to Washington the only blemish on a not too bad record. I mean they have a 2-1 Pac-12 mark this season (wins over Zona and Oregon State with the loss to Wash.). Meanwhile Boise is 5-0 including poundings of their last 3 and solid wins over FSU and Marshall to boot. I think the Broncos get the win but I don’t think they cover in what could be the showstealer game of the weekend! Rainbow Warriors and the points but Boise 38-31 - Drew Mac

Ryan Sterritt’s Hawaii Rainbow Warriors make their way to the blue turf this weekend to take on Boise this weekend. I haven’t watched a second of Boise football since their win in Tallahassee Week 1 but I see they continue to roll along. Sorry Ryan, but I’ve got to take Boise here. Boise State 41 Hawaii 27 - WIll McLaughlin

Now THIS is a football game you can drink to. Boise is on pace to be the cream of the G5 crop again this year, but Hawai’i possibly poses the largest stumbling block on their schedule. Nick Rolovich has turned the Bows into a really fun, likable program, and this would be a signature win for him here in year 4 at his alma mater. Unfortunately, I just don’t quite think they pull it off. Boise stomps out the upset late, 35-31 - Ryan Sterritt

Finally, a real game! I think I’ve picked against the murder Smurfs once already and it didn’t go well. I shan’t make that mistake again. Boise State 28, Hawaii 17 - Josh Dub

This should be a super fun game that is most likely going to be dictated by Boise State. They ain’t losing at home. Boise State 41 Hawaii 28 - Josh Black

This is a perfect nightcap for a day of watching college football (with maybe a movie thrown in). Hawaii is always fun to watch, as is Boise more often than not. I don’t think I have any real commentary to add to this one, and I think my 2 week old just peed on me while sleeping so I guess it’s time to give a score. Boise State 34, Hawaii 28 - AU Chief

It’s basically a turkey meatball, wrapped in dressing and mashed sweet potatoes then deep fried. Then you dip it in cranberry sauce. You guys, it’s incredible. Y’all should all go to the state fair some October in your life, because it is a food journey like no place on earth. Boise 50, Hawai’i 10 - Son of Crow

This game should be fun to watch. The Broncos have their own stud true freshman QB while Hawaii brings a darkhorse NFL prospect at QB in Cole McDonald. Both teams will put some points on the board and given Hawaii’s schedule to date, they won’t be scared of the moment. But the Murder Smurphs at home on the blue turf proves too much. Broncos 38 Hawaii 28 - AU Nerd

Boise = Uncle Rico. Hawaii = Napoleon. Take the steak, Rainbows. Boise blue turfs its way to a win in a game that most people will read about tomorrow. Boise 44, Hawaii 37 - Jack Condon

from College and Magnolia - All Posts https://www.collegeandmagnolia.com/2019/10/12/20910058/staff-picks-college-football-week-7

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bountyofbeads · 5 years ago

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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/07/22/kicked-off-the-land

This article makes a strong case for reparations. Two brothers spent years in jail for a civil contempt CHARGE for trying to protect their property. THEY WERE NEVER CHARED WITH A CRIME.

Kicked Off the Land

Why so many black families are losing their property.

By Lizzie Presser | Published July 15, 2019 | New Yorker Magazine | Posted July 19, 2019 | Listen 👂 to article on website.

This article is a collaboration between The New Yorker and ProPublica.

In the spring of 2011, the brothers Melvin Davis and Licurtis Reels were the talk of Carteret County, on the central coast of North Carolina. Some people said that the brothers were righteous; others thought that they had lost their minds. That March, Melvin and Licurtis stood in court and refused to leave the land that they had lived on all their lives, a portion of which had, without their knowledge or consent, been sold to developers years before. The brothers were among dozens of Reels family members who considered the land theirs, but Melvin and Licurtis had a particular stake in it. Melvin, who was sixty-four, with loose black curls combed into a ponytail, ran a club there and lived in an apartment above it. He’d established a career shrimping in the river that bordered the land, and his sense of self was tied to the water. Licurtis, who was fifty-three, had spent years building a house near the river’s edge, just steps from his mother’s.

Their great-grandfather had bought the land a hundred years earlier, when he was a generation removed from slavery. The property—sixty-five marshy acres that ran along Silver Dollar Road, from the woods to the river’s sandy shore—was racked by storms. Some called it the bottom, or the end of the world. Melvin and Licurtis’s grandfather Mitchell Reels was a deacon; he farmed watermelons, beets, and peas, and raised chickens and hogs. Churches held tent revivals on the waterfront, and kids played in the river, a prime spot for catching red-tailed shrimp and crabs bigger than shoes. During the later years of racial-segregation laws, the land was home to the only beach in the county that welcomed black families. “It’s our own little black country club,” Melvin and Licurtis’s sister Mamie liked to say. In 1970, when Mitchell died, he had one final wish. “Whatever you do,” he told his family on the night that he passed away, “don’t let the white man have the land.”

Mitchell didn’t trust the courts, so he didn’t leave a will. Instead, he let the land become heirs’ property, a form of ownership in which descendants inherit an interest, like holding stock in a company. The practice began during Reconstruction, when many African-Americans didn’t have access to the legal system, and it continued through the Jim Crow era, when black communities were suspicious of white Southern courts. In the United States today, seventy-six per cent of African-Americans do not have a will, more than twice the percentage of white Americans.

Many assume that not having a will keeps land in the family. In reality, it jeopardizes ownership. David Dietrich, a former co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Property Preservation Task Force, has called heirs’ property “the worst problem you never heard of.” The U.S. Department of Agriculture has recognized it as “the leading cause of Black involuntary land loss.” Heirs’ property is estimated to make up more than a third of Southern black-owned land—3.5 million acres, worth more than twenty-eight billion dollars. These landowners are vulnerable to laws and loopholes that allow speculators and developers to acquire their property. Black families watch as their land is auctioned on courthouse steps or forced into a sale against their will.

Between 1910 and 1997, African-Americans lost about ninety per cent of their farmland. This problem is a major contributor to America’s racial wealth gap; the median wealth among black families is about a tenth that of white families. Now, as reparations have become a subject of national debate, the issue of black land loss is receiving renewed attention. A group of economists and statisticians recently calculated that, since 1910, black families have been stripped of hundreds of billions of dollars because of lost land. Nathan Rosenberg, a lawyer and a researcher in the group, told me, “If you want to understand wealth and inequality in this country, you have to understand black land loss.”

By the time of Melvin and Licurtis’s hearing in 2011, they had spent decades fighting to keep the waterfront on Silver Dollar Road. They’d been warned that they would go to jail if they didn’t comply with a court order to stay off the land, and they felt betrayed by the laws that had allowed it to be taken from them. They had been baptized in that water. “You going to go there, take my dreams from me like that?” Licurtis asked on the stand. “How about it was you?”

They expected to argue their case in court that day. Instead, the judge ordered them sent to jail, for civil contempt. Hearing the ruling, Melvin handed his eighty-three-year-old mother, Gertrude, his flip phone and his gold watch. As the eldest son, he had promised relatives that he would assume responsibility for the family. “I can take it,” he said. Licurtis looked at the floor and shook his head. He had thought he’d be home by the afternoon; he’d even left his house unlocked. The bailiff, who had never booked anyone in civil superior court, had only one set of handcuffs. She put a cuff on each brother’s wrist, and led them out the back door. The brothers hadn’t been charged with a crime or given a jury trial. Still, they believed so strongly in their right to the property that they spent the next eight years fighting the case from jail, becoming two of the longest-serving inmates for civil contempt in U.S. history.

Land was an ideological priority for black families after the Civil War, when nearly four million people were freed from slavery. On January 12, 1865, just before emancipation, the Union Army general William Tecumseh Sherman met with twenty black ministers in Savannah, Georgia, and asked them what they needed. “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land,” their spokesperson, the Reverend Garrison Frazier, told Sherman. Freedom, he said, was “placing us where we could reap the fruit of our own labor.” Sherman issued a special field order declaring that four hundred thousand acres formerly held by Confederates be given to African-Americans—what came to be known as the promise of “forty acres and a mule.” The following year, Congress passed the Southern Homestead Act, opening up an additional forty-six million acres of public land for Union supporters and freed people.

The promises never materialized. In 1876, near the end of Reconstruction, only about five per cent of black families in the Deep South owned land. But a new group of black landowners soon established themselves. Many had experience in the fields, and they began buying farms, often in places with arid or swampy soil, especially along the coast. By 1920, African-Americans, who made up ten per cent of the population, represented fourteen per cent of farm owners in the South.

A white-supremacist backlash spread across the South. At the end of the nineteenth century, members of a movement who called themselves Whitecaps, led by poor white farmers, accosted black landowners at night, whipping them or threatening murder if they didn’t abandon their homes. In Lincoln County, Mississippi, Whitecaps killed a man named Henry List, and more than fifty African-Americans fled the town in a single day. Over two months in 1912, violent white mobs in Forsyth County, Georgia, drove out almost the entire black population—more than a thousand people. Ray Winbush, the director of the Institute for Urban Research, at Morgan State University, told me, “There is this idea that most blacks were lynched because they did something untoward to a young woman. That’s not true. Most black men were lynched between 1890 and 1920 because whites wanted their land.”

By the second half of the twentieth century, a new form of dispossession had emerged, officially sanctioned by the courts and targeting heirs’-property owners without clear titles. These landowners are exposed in a variety of ways. They don’t qualify for certain Department of Agriculture loans to purchase livestock or cover the cost of planting. Individual heirs can’t use their land as collateral with banks and other institutions, and so are denied private financing and federal home-improvement loans. They generally aren’t eligible for disaster relief. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina laid bare the extent of the problem in New Orleans, where twenty-five thousand families who applied for rebuilding grants had heirs’ property. One Louisiana real-estate attorney estimated that up to a hundred and sixty-five million dollars of recovery funds were never claimed because of title issues.

Heirs are rarely aware of the tenuous nature of their ownership. Even when they are, clearing a title is often an unaffordable and complex process, which requires tracking down every living heir, and there are few lawyers who specialize in the field. Nonprofits often pick up the slack. The Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation, in South Carolina, has cleared more than two hundred titles in the past decade, almost all of them for African-American families, protecting land valued at nearly fourteen million dollars. Josh Walden, the center’s chief operating officer, told me that it had mapped out a hundred thousand acres of heirs’ property in South Carolina. He said that investors hoping to build golf courses or hotels can target these plots. “We had to be really mindful that we didn’t share those maps with anyone, because otherwise they’d be a shopping catalogue,” he told me. “And it’s not as if it dries up. New heirs’ property is being created every day.”

Through interviews and courthouse records, I analyzed more than three dozen cases from recent years in which heirs’-property owners lost land—land that, for many of them, was not only their sole asset but also a critical part of their heritage and their sense of home. The problem has been especially acute in Carteret County. Beaufort, the county seat, was once the site of a major refugee camp for freed people. Black families eventually built homes near where the tents had stood. But in the nineteen-seventies the town became a tourist destination, with upscale restaurants, boutiques, and docks for yachts. Real-estate values surged, and out-of-town speculators flooded the county. David Cecelski, a historian of the North Carolina coast, told me, “You can’t talk to an African-American family who owned land in those counties and not find a story where they feel like land was taken from them against their will, through legal trickery.”

Beaufort is a quaint town, lined with coastal cottages and Colonial homes. When I arrived, last fall, I drove twenty miles to Silver Dollar Road, where Melvin and Licurtis’s family lives in dozens of trailers and wood-panelled houses, scattered under pine and gum trees.

Melvin and Licurtis’s mother, Gertrude, greeted me at her house and led me into her living room, where porcelain angels lined one wall. Gertrude is tough and quiet, her high voice muffled by tobacco that she packs into her cheek. People call her Mrs. Big Shit. “It’s because I didn’t pay them no mind,” she told me. The last of Mitchell Reels’s children to remain on the property, she is the family matriarch. Grandchildren, nieces, and nephews let themselves into her house to pick up mail or take out her trash. Around dinnertime on the day I was there, the trickle of visitors turned into a crowd. Gertrude went into the kitchen, coated fish fillets with cornmeal, and fried them for everyone.

Her daughter Mamie told me that Melvin and Licurtis had revelled in the land as kids, playing among the inky eels and conch shells. In the evenings, the brothers would sit on the porch with their cousins, a rag burning to keep the mosquitoes away. On weekends, a pastor strode down the dirt street, robed in white, his congregants singing “Wade in the Water.” Licurtis was a shy, humble kid who liked working in the cornfields. Melvin was his opposite. “When the school bus showed up, when he come home, the crowd would come with him and stay all night,” Gertrude said. When Melvin was nine, he built a boat from pine planks and began tugging it along the shore. A neighbor offered to teach him how to shrimp, and, in the summer, Melvin dropped nets off the man’s trawler. He left school in the tenth grade; his catch was bringing in around a thousand dollars a week. He developed a taste for sleek cars, big jewelry, and women, and started buying his siblings Chuck Taylors and Timberlands.

Gertrude was the administrator of the estate. She’d left school in the eighth grade and wasn’t accustomed to navigating the judicial system, but after Mitchell’s death she secured a court ruling declaring that the land belonged to his heirs. The judgment read, “The surviving eleven (11) children or descendants of children of Mitchell Reels are the owners of the lands exclusive of any other claim of any one.”

In 1978, Gertrude’s uncle Shedrick Reels tried to carve out for himself the most valuable slice of land, on the river. He used a legal doctrine called adverse possession, which required him to prove that he had occupied the waterfront for years, continuously and publicly, against the owners’ wishes. Shedrick, who went by Shade and worked as a tire salesman in New Jersey, hadn’t lived on Silver Dollar Road in twenty-seven years. But he claimed that “tenants” had stood in for him—he had built a house on the waterfront in 1950, and relatives had rented it or run it as a club at various times since. Some figured that it was Shade’s land. He also produced a deed that his father, Elijah, had given him in 1950, even though Mitchell, another of Elijah’s sons, had owned the land at the time.

Shade made his argument through an obscure law called the Torrens Act. Under Torrens, Shade didn’t have to abide by the formal rules of a court. Instead, he could simply prove adverse possession to a lawyer, whom the court appointed, and whom he paid. The Torrens Act has long had a bad reputation, especially in Carteret. “It’s a legal way to steal land,” Theodore Barnes, a land broker there, told me. The law was intended to help clear up muddled titles, but, in 1932, a law professor at the University of North Carolina found that it had been co-opted by big business. One lawyer said that people saw it as a scheme “whereby rich men could seize the lands of the poor.” Even Shade’s lawyer, Nelson Taylor, acknowledged that it was abused; he told me that his own grandfather had lost a fifty-acre plot to Torrens. “First time he knew anything about it was when somebody told him that he didn’t own it anymore,” Taylor said. “That was happening more often than it ever should have.”

Mitchell’s kids and grandkids were puzzled that Shade’s maneuver was legal—they had Mitchell’s deed and a court order declaring that the land was theirs. And they had all grown up on that waterfront. “How can they take this land from us and we on it?” Melvin said. “We been there all our days.” Gertrude’s brother Calvin, who handled legal matters for the family, hired Claud Wheatly III, the son of one of the most powerful lawyers in town, to represent the siblings at a Torrens hearing about the claim. Gertrude, Melvin, and his cousin Ralphele Reels, the only surviving heirs who attended the hearing, said that they left confident that the waterfront hadn’t gone to Shade. “No one in the family thought at the end of the day that it was his land and we were going to walk away from it forever,” Ralphele told me.

Wheatly told me a different story. In his memory, the Torrens hearing was chaotic, but the heirs agreed to give Shade, who has since died, the waterfront. When I pressed Wheatly, he conceded that not all the heirs liked the outcome, but he said that Calvin had consented. “I would have been upset if Calvin had not notified them, because I generally don’t get involved in those things without having a family representative in charge,” he told me. He said that he never had a written agreement with Calvin—just a conversation. (Calvin died shortly after the hearing.) The lawyer examining Shade’s case granted him the waterfront, and Wheatly signed off on the decision. The Reels family, though it didn’t yet know it, had lost the rights to the land on the shoreline.

Licurtis had set up a trailer near the river a couple of years earlier, in 1977. He was working as a brick mason and often hosted men from the neighborhood for Budweiser and beans in the evenings. Melvin had become the center of a local economy on the shore. He taught the men how to work the water, and he paid the women to prepare his catch, pressing the soft crevice above the shrimps’ eyes and popping off their heads. He had a son, Little Melvin, and in the summers his nephews and cousins came to the beach, too. One morning, he took eight of them out on the water and then announced that he’d made a mistake: only four were allowed on the boat. He threw them overboard one by one. “We’re thinking, We’re gonna drown,” one cousin told me. “And he jumps off the boat with us and teaches us how to swim.”

In 1982, Melvin and Gertrude received a trespassing notice from Shade. They took it to a lawyer, who informed them that Shade now legally owned a little more than thirteen acres of the sixty-five-acre plot. The family was stunned, and suspicious of the claim’s validity. Many of the tenants listed to prove Shade’s continuous possession were vague or unrecognizable, like “Mitchell Reels’ boy,” or “Julian Leonard,” whom Gertrude had never heard of. (She had a sister named Julia and a brother named Leonard but no memory of either one living on the waterfront.) The lawyer who granted the land to Shade had also never reported the original court ruling that Gertrude had won, as he should have done.

Shade’s ownership would be almost impossible to overturn. There’s a one-year window to appeal a Torrens decision in North Carolina, and the family had missed it by two years. Soon afterward, Shade sold the land to developers.

The Reelses knew that if condos or a marina were built on the waterfront the remaining fifty acres of Silver Dollar Road could be taxed not as small homes on swampy fields but as a high-end resort. If they fell behind on the higher taxes, the county could auction off their property. “It would break our family right up,” Melvin told me. “You leave here, you got no more freedom.”

This kind of tax sale has a long history in the dispossession of heirs’-property owners. In 1992, the N.A.A.C.P. accused local officials of intentionally inflating taxes to push out black families on Daufuskie, a South Carolina sea island that has become one of the hottest real-estate markets on the Atlantic coast. Property taxes had gone up as much as seven hundred per cent in a single decade. “It is clear that the county has pursued a pattern of conduct that disproportionately displaces or evicts African-Americans from Daufuskie, thereby segregating the island and the county as a whole,” the N.A.A.C.P. wrote to county officials. Nearby Hilton Head, which as recently as two decades ago comprised several thousand acres of heirs’ property, now, by one estimate, has a mere two hundred such acres left. Investors fly into the county each October to bid on tax-delinquent properties in a local gymnasium.

In the upscale town of Summerville, South Carolina, I met Wendy Reed, who, in 2012, was late paying $83.81 in taxes on the lot she had lived on for nearly four decades. A former state politician named Thomas Limehouse, who owned a luxury hotel nearby, bought Reed’s property at a tax sale for two thousand dollars, about an eighth of its value. Reed had a year to redeem her property, but, when she tried to pay her debt, officials told her that she couldn’t get the land back, because she wasn’t officially listed as her grandmother’s heir; she’d have to go through probate court. Here she faced another obstacle: heirs in South Carolina have ten years to probate an estate after the death of the owner, and Reed’s grandmother had died thirty years before. Tax clerks in the county estimate that each year they send about a quarter of the people who try to redeem delinquent property to probate court because they aren’t listed on the deed or named by the court as an heir. Limehouse told me, “To not probate the estate and not pay the taxes shouldn’t be a reason for special dispensation. When you let things go, you can’t blame the county.” Reed has been fighting the case in court since 2014. “I’m still not leaving,” she told me. “You’ll have to pack my stuff and put me off.”

For years, the conflict on Silver Dollar Road was dormant, and Melvin continued expanding his businesses. Each week, Gertrude packed two-pound bags of shrimp to sell at the farmers’ market, along with petunias and gardenias from her yard. Melvin was also remodelling a night club, Fantasy Island, on the shore. He’d decked it out with disco lights and painted it white, he said, so that “on the water it would shine like gold.”

The majority of the property remained in the family, including the land on which Gertrude’s house stood. But Licurtis had been building a home in place of his trailer on the contested waterfront. “It was the most pretty spot,” he told me. “I’d walk to the water, and look at my yard, and see how beautiful it was.” He’d collected the signatures of other heirs to prove that he had permission, and registered a deed.

When real-estate agents or speculators came to the shore, Melvin tried to scare them away. A developer told me that once, when he showed the property to potential buyers, “Melvin had a roof rack behind his pickup, jumped out, snatched a gun out.” It wasn’t the only time that Melvin took out his rifle. “You show people that you got to protect yourself,” he told me. “Any fool who wouldn’t do that would be crazy.” His instinct had always been to confront a crisis head on. When hurricanes came through and most people sought higher ground, he’d go out to his trawler and steer it into the storm.

The Reels family began to believe that there was a conspiracy against them. They watched Jet Skis crawl slowly past in the river and shiny S.U.V.s drive down Silver Dollar Road; they suspected that people were scouting the property. Melvin said that he received phone calls from mysterious men issuing threats. “I thought people were out to get me,” he said. Gertrude remembers that, one day at the farmers’ market, a white customer sneered that she was the only thing standing in the way of development.

In 1986, Billie Dean Brown, a partner at a real-estate investment company called Adams Creek Associates, had bought Shade’s waterfront plot sight unseen to divide and sell. Brown was attracted to the strength of the Torrens title, which he knew was effectively incontrovertible. When he discovered that Melvin and Licurtis lived on the property, he wasn’t troubled. Brown was known among colleagues as Little Caesar—a small man who finished any job he started. In the early two-thousands, he hired a lawyer: Claud Wheatly III. The man once tasked with protecting the Reels family’s land was now being paid to evict them from it. Melvin and Licurtis saw Wheatly’s involvement as a clear conflict of interest. Their lawyers tried to disqualify Wheatly, arguing that he was breaching confidentiality and switching sides, but the judge denied the motions.

Earlier this year, I met Wheatly in his office, a few blocks from the county courthouse. Tall and imposing, he has a ruddy face and a teal-blue stare. We sat under the head of a stuffed warthog, and he chewed tobacco as we spoke. He told me that he had no confidential information about the Reelses, and that he’d never represented Melvin and Licurtis; he’d represented their mother and her siblings. “Melvin won’t own one square inch until his mother dies,” he said.

In 2004, Wheatly got a court order prohibiting the brothers from going on the waterfront property. The Reels family began a series of appeals and filings asking for the decree to be set aside, but judge after judge ruled that the family had waited too long to contest the Torrens decision.

Licurtis didn’t talk about the case, and tried to hide his stress. But, Mamie told me, “you could see him wearing it.” Occasionally, she would catch a glimpse of him pacing the road early in the morning. When he first understood that he could face time in jail for remaining in his house, he tried removing the supports underneath it, thinking that he could hire someone to wrench the foundation from the mud and move it elsewhere. Gertrude wouldn’t allow him to go through with it. “You’re not going with the house nowhere,” she told him. “That’s yours.”

At 4 a.m. on a spring day in 2007, Melvin was asleep in his apartment above the club when he heard a boom, like a crash of thunder. He went to the shore and found that his trawler, named Nancy J., was sinking. Yellow plastic gloves, canned beans, and wooden crab boxes floated in the water. There was a large hole in the hull, and Melvin realized that the boom had been an explosion. He filed a report with the sheriff’s office, but it never confirmed whether an explosive was used or whether it was an accident, and no charges were filed. Melvin began to wake with a start at night, pull out his flashlight, and scan the fields for intruders.

By the time of the brothers’ hearing in 2011, Melvin had lost so much weight that Licurtis joked that he could store water in the caverns by his collarbones. The family had come to accept that the dispute wasn’t going away. If the brothers had to go to jail, they would. Even after the judge in the hearing found them guilty of civil contempt, Melvin said, “I ain’t backing down.” Licurtis called home later that day. “It’ll be all right,” he told Gertrude. “We’ll be home soon.”

One of the most pernicious legal mechanisms used to dispossess heirs’-property owners is called a partition action. In the course of generations, heirs tend to disperse and lose any connection to the land. Speculators can buy off the interest of a single heir, and just one heir or speculator, no matter how minute his share, can force the sale of an entire plot through the courts. Andrew Kahrl, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at the University of Virginia, told me that even small financial incentives can have the effect of turning relatives against one another, and developers exploit these divisions. “You need to have some willing participation from black families—driven by the desire to profit off their land holdings,” Kahrl said. “But it does boil down to greed and abuse of power and the way in which Americans’ history of racial inequality can be used to the advantage of developers.” As the Reels family grew over time, the threat of a partition sale mounted; if one heir decided to sell, the whole property would likely go to auction at a price that none of them could pay.

When courts originally gained the authority to order a partition sale, around the time of the Civil War, the Wisconsin Supreme Court called it “an extraordinary and dangerous power” that should be used sparingly. In the past several decades, many courts have favored such sales, arguing that the value of a property in its entirety is greater than the value of it in pieces. But the sales are often speedy and poorly advertised, and tend to fetch below-market prices.

On the coast of North Carolina, I met Billy Freeman, who grew up working in the parking lot of his uncle’s beachside dance hall, Monte Carlo by the Sea. His family, which once owned thousands of acres, ran the largest black beach in the state, with juke joints and crab shacks, an amusement park, and a three-story hotel. But, over the decades, developers acquired interests from other heirs, and, in 2008, one firm petitioned the court for a sale of the whole property. Freeman attempted to fight the partition for years. “I didn’t want to lose the land, but I felt like everybody else had sold,” he told me. In 2016, the beach, which covered a hundred and seventy acres, was sold to the development firm for $1.4 million. On neighboring beaches, that sum could buy a tiny fraction of a parcel so large. Freeman got only thirty thousand dollars.

The lost property isn’t just money; it’s also identity. In one case that I examined, the mining company PCS Phosphate forced the sale of a forty-acre plot, which contained a family cemetery, against the wishes of several heirs, whose ancestors had been enslaved on the property. (A spokesperson for the company told me that it is a “law-abiding corporate citizen.”)

Some speculators use questionable tactics to acquire property. When Jessica Wiggins’s uncle called her to say that a man was trying to buy his interest in their family’s land, she didn’t believe him; he had dementia. Then, in 2015, she learned that a company called Aldonia Farms had purchased the interests of four heirs, including her uncle, and had filed a partition action. “What got me was we had no knowledge of this person,” Wiggins told me, of the man who ran Aldonia. (Jonathan S. Phillips, who now runs Aldonia Farms, told me that he wasn’t with the company at the time of the purchase, and that he’s confident no one would have taken advantage of the uncle’s dementia.) Wiggins was devastated; the eighteen acres of woods and farmland that held her great-grandmother’s house was the place that she had felt safest as a child. The remaining heirs still owned sixty-one per cent of the property, but there was little that they could do to prevent a sale. When I visited the land with Wiggins, her great-grandmother’s house had been cleared, and Aldonia Farms had erected a gate. Phillips told me, “Our intention was not to keep them out but to be good stewards of the property and keep it from being littered on and vandalized.”

Last fall, Wiggins and her relatives gathered for the auction of the property on the courthouse steps in the town of Windsor. A bronze statue of a Confederate soldier stood behind them. Wiggins’s cousin Danita Pugh walked up to Aldonia Farms’ lawyer and pulled her deed out of an envelope. “You’re telling me that they’re going to auction it off after showing you a deed?” she said. “I’m going to come out and say it. The white man takes the land from the black.”

Hundreds of partition actions are filed in North Carolina every year. Carteret County, which has a population of seventy thousand, has one of the highest per-capita rates in the state. I read through every Carteret partition case concerning heirs’ property from the past decade, and found that forty-two per cent of the cases involved black families, despite the fact that only six per cent of Carteret’s population is black. Heirs not only regularly lose their land; they are also required to pay the legal fees of those who bring the partition cases. In 2008, Janice Dyer, a research associate at Auburn University, published a study of these actions in Macon County, Alabama. She told me that the lack of secure ownership locks black families out of the wealth in their property. “The Southeast has these amazing natural resources: timber, land, great fishing,” she said. “If somebody could snap their fingers and clear up all these titles, how much richer would the region be?”

Thomas W. Mitchell, a property-law professor at Texas A. & M. University School of Law, has drafted legislation aimed at reforming this system, which has now passed in fourteen states. He told me that heirs’-property owners, particularly those who are African-American, tend to be “land rich and cash poor,” making it difficult for them to keep the land in a sale. “They don’t have the resources to make competitive bids, and they can’t even use their heirs’ property as collateral to get a loan to participate in the bidding more effectively,” he said. His law, the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act, gives family members the first option to buy, sends most sales to the open market, and mandates that courts, in their decisions to order sales, weigh non-economic factors, such as the consequences of eviction and whether the property has historic value. North Carolina is one of eight states in the South that has held out against these reforms. The state also hasn’t repealed the Torrens Act. It is one of fewer than a dozen states where the law is still on the books.

Last year, Congress passed the Agricultural Improvement Act, which, among other things, allows heirs’-property owners to apply for Department of Agriculture programs using nontraditional paperwork, such as a written agreement between heirs. “The alternative documentation is really, really important as a precedent,” Lorette Picciano, the executive director of Rural Coalition, a group that advocated for the reform, told me. “The next thing we need to do is make sure this happens with fema, and flood insurance, and housing programs.” The bill also includes a lending program for heirs’-property owners, which will make it easier for them to clear titles and develop succession plans. But no federal funding has been allocated for these loans.

The first time I met Melvin and Licurtis in the Carteret jail, Melvin filled the entire frame of the visiting-room window. He is a forceful presence, and prone to exaggeration. His hair, neatly combed, was streaked with silver. He didn’t blink as he spoke. Licurtis had been given a diagnosis of diabetes, and leaned against a stool for support. He still acted like a younger brother, never interrupting Melvin or challenging his memory. He told me that, at night, he dreamed of the shore, of storms blowing through his house. “The water rising,” Licurtis said. “And I couldn’t do nothing about it.” He was worried about his mother. “If they took this land from my mama at her age, and she’d been farming it all her life, you know that would kill her,” he told me.

The brothers were seen as local heroes for resisting the court order. “They want to break your spirits,” their niece Kim Duhon wrote to them. “God had you both picked out for this.” Even strangers wrote. “When I was a kid, it used to sadden me that white folks had Radio Island, Atlantic Beach, Sea Gate and other places to swim, but we didn’t!” one letter from a local woman read. She wrote that, when she was finally taken to Silver Dollar Road, “I remember seeing nothing but my own kind (Blk Folks!).”

In North Carolina, civil contempt is most commonly used to force defendants to pay child support. When the ruling requires a defendant to pay money other than child support, a new hearing is held every ninety days. After the first ninety days had passed, Melvin asked a friend in jail to write a letter on his behalf. (Melvin couldn’t read well, and he needed help writing.) “I’ve spent 91 days on a 90 day sentence and I don’t understand why,” the letter read. “Please explain this to me! So I can go home, back to work. Sincerely, Melvin Davis.” The brothers learned that although Billie Dean Brown’s lawyer had asked for ninety days, the court had decided that there would be no time restriction on their case, and that they could be jailed until they presented evidence that they had removed their homes. They continued to hold out. Brown wasn’t demolishing their buildings while they were incarcerated, and so they believed that they still had a shot at convincing the courts that the land was theirs. That fall, Brown told the Charlotte Observer, “I made up my mind, I will die and burn in hell before I walk away from this thing.” When I reached Brown recently, he told me that he was in an impossible position. “We’ve had several offers from buyers, but once they learned of the situation they withdrew,” he said.

Three months turned into six, and a year turned into several. Jail began to take a toll on the brothers. The facility was designed for short stays, with no time outside, and nowhere to exercise. They couldn’t be transferred to a prison, because they hadn’t been convicted of a crime. Early on, Melvin mediated fights between inmates and persuaded them to sneak in hair ties for him. But over time he stopped taking care of his appearance and became withdrawn. He ranted about the stolen land, though he couldn’t quite nail down who the enemy was: Shade or Wheatly or Brown, the sheriffs or the courts or the county. The brothers slept head to head in neighboring beds. “Melvin would say crazy things,” Licurtis told me. “Lay on down and go to sleep, wake up, and say the same thing again. It wore me down.” Melvin is proud and guarded, but he told me that the case had broken him. “I’m not ashamed to own it,” he said. “This has messed my mind up.”

Without the brothers, Silver Dollar Road lost its pulse. Mamie kept her blinds down; she couldn’t stand to see the deserted waterfront. At night, she studied her brothers’ case, thumbing through the court files and printing out the definitions of words that she didn’t understand, like “rescind” and “contempt.” She filled a binder with relatives’ obituaries, so that once her brothers got out they would have a record of who had passed away. When Claud Wheatly’s father died, she added his obituary. “I kept him for history,” she told me.

Gertrude didn’t have the spirit to farm. Most days, she sat in a tangerine armchair by her window, cracking peanuts or watching the shore like a guard. This winter, we looked out in silence as Brown’s caretaker drove through the property. Melvin and Licurtis wouldn’t allow Gertrude to visit them in jail. Licurtis said that “it hurt so bad” to see her leave.

Other members of the family—Melvin and Licurtis’s brother Billy, their nephew Roderick, and their cousin Shawn—kept trying to shrimp, but the river suddenly seemed barren. “It might sound crazy, but it was like the good Lord put a curse on this little creek, where ain’t nobody gonna catch no shrimp until they’re released,” Roderick told me. Billy added, “It didn’t feel right no more with Melvin and them not there, because we all looked out for one another. Some mornings, you didn’t even want to go.”

Sheriff’s deputies came to the property a few times a week, and they wouldn’t allow the men to dock their boats on the pier. One by one, the men lost hope and sold their trawlers. Shawn took a job at Best Buy, cleaning the store for eleven dollars and fifty cents an hour, and eventually moved to Newport, thirty miles southwest, where it was easier to make rent. Billy got paid to fix roofs but soon defaulted on the mortgage for his house on Silver Dollar Road. “One day you good, and the next day you can’t believe it,” he told me.

Roderick kept being charged with trespassing, for walking on the waterfront, and he was racking up thousands of dollars in legal fees. He’d recently renovated his boat—putting in an aluminum gas tank, large spotlights, and West Marine speakers—but, without a place to dock, he saw no way to hold on to it. He found work cutting grass and posted his boat on Craigslist. A white man responded. They met at the shore, and, as the man paid, Roderick began to cry. He walked up Silver Dollar Road with his back to the river. He told me, “I just didn’t want to see my boat leave.”

The Reels brothers were locked in a hopeless clash with the law. One judge who heard their case likened them to the Black Knight in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” who attempts to guard his forest against King Arthur. “Even after King Arthur has cut off both of the Black Knight’s arms and legs, he still insists that he will continue to fight and that no one may pass—although he cannot do anything,” the judge wrote, in an appeals-court dissent.

In February, nearly eight years after Melvin and Licurtis went to jail, they stood before a judge in Carteret to request their release. They were now seventy-two and sixty-one, but they remained defiant. Licurtis said that he would go back on the property “just as soon as I walk out of here.” Melvin said, “I believe that land is mine.” They had hired a new lawyer, who argued that it would cost almost fifty thousand dollars to tear down the brothers’ homes. Melvin had less than four thousand in the bank; Licurtis had nothing. The judge announced that he was releasing them. He warned them, however, that if they returned to their homes they’d “be right back in jail.” He told them, “The jailhouse keys are in your pockets.”

An hour later, the brothers emerged from the sheriff’s department. Melvin surveyed the parking lot, which was crowded with friends and relatives. “About time!” he said, laughing and exchanging hugs. “You stuck with me.” When he spotted Little Melvin, who was now thirty-nine, he extended his arm for a handshake. Little Melvin pulled it closer and buried his face in his father’s shoulder, sobbing.

When Licurtis came out, he folded over, as if his breath had been pulled out of him. Mamie wrapped her arms around his neck, led him to her car, and drove him home. When they reached Silver Dollar Road, she honked the horn all the way down the street. “Back on Silver Dollar Road,” Licurtis said, pines flickering by his window. “Mm-mm-mm-mm-mm.”

Melvin spent his first afternoon shopping for silk shirts and brown leather shoes and a cell phone that talked to him. Old acquaintances stopped him—a man who thanked him for his advice about hauling dirt, a d.j. who used to spin at Fantasy Island. While in jail, Melvin had been keeping up with his girlfriends, and eleven women called looking for him.

Melvin told me that he’d held on for his family, and for himself, too. But away from the others his weariness showed. He acknowledged that he was worried about what would happen, his voice almost a whisper. “They can’t keep on doing this. There’s got to be an ending somewhere,” he said.

A few days later, Gertrude threw her sons a party, and generations of relatives came. The family squeezed together on her armchairs, eating chili and biscuits and lemon pie. Mamie gave a speech. “We gotta get this water back,” she said, stretching her arms wide. “We gotta unite. A chain’s only as strong as the links in it.” The room answered, “That’s right.” The brothers, who were staying with their mother, kept saying, “Once we get this land stuff sorted out . . .” Relatives who had left talked about coming back, buying boats and go-karts for their kids. It was less a plan than a fantasy—an illusion that their sense of justice could overturn the decision of the law.

The brothers hadn’t stepped onto the waterfront since they’d been back. The tract was a hundred feet away but out of reach. Fantasy Island was a shell, the plot around it overgrown. Still, Melvin seemed convinced that he would restore it. “Put me some palm trees in the sand and build some picnic tables,” he said.

After the party wound down, I sat with Licurtis on his mother’s porch as he gazed at his house, which was moldy and gutted, its frame just visible in the purple dusk. He reminisced about the house’s wood-burning heater, the radio that he’d always left playing. He said that he planned to build a second story and raise the house to protect it from floods. He wanted a wraparound deck and big windows. “I’ll pour them walls solid all the way around,” he said. “We’ll bloom again. Ain’t going to be long.” ♦

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