#Rosewood 1923

[blindmanspuff]

Black Star Line Turns to Oveja Negra for Next Line - Cigar News

Black Star Line Turns to Oveja Negra for Next Line - #Cigar News #cigars

Black Star Line Cigars chosen James Brown and Oveja Negra to partner for their next release: Rosewood 1923. Previously, Black Star Line has had lines made at Aganorsa Leaf and El Titan de Bronze. I have always wanted to work with Oveja Negra. I am a huge fan of their cigars and actually James was one of the first people I reached out to when I was looking to enter the cigar industry. I ended up…

[ausetkmt]

Nine miles before Florida State Road 24 dead-ends in the Gulf of Mexico, a cast aluminum historical marker stands next to a white two-story home – all that is left of Rosewood, a once-thriving, predominantly Black town terrorized and razed to the ground by a racist mob 100 years ago this month.

But thanks to decades of persistence by descendants of victims of the massacre, the memory of Rosewood burns more brightly today than the fires that ravaged it in January 1923, when white rioters, drawn by the unverified account of a white woman who claimed she had been beaten and assaulted by a Black drifter, set the town aflame in a murderous rampage.

Remains of Sarah Carrier’s house in Rosewood, Florida, in a photo first published in Literary Digest magazine on Jan. 20, 1923. At least six people were killed after white rioters set the town ablaze. (Credit: Bettman via Getty Images)

For almost 60 years the massacre, which left at least six murdered while the rest, including dozens of children, escaped in the middle of the night, running through swamps, hiding in the woods and leaping onto train cars, was all but erased from historical memory. No law enforcement agency investigated, and no one was ever charged with crimes.

The erasure mirrored that of racial violence across the U.S., where lynchings and mob attacks in Chicago, Tulsa, Omaha, and in small towns and large cities across the country were, and in many cases continue to be, left unremarked and unremembered save by communities of survivors.

In recent decades Rosewood has made itself the exception. In the 1990s, descendants, working with a law firm that signed on to help them pro bono, pushed the Florida Legislature to commission a study on the history of Rosewood, so historians could verify survivors’ accounts. They marshaled a media campaign to raise awareness of the massacre and to overcome the fears of Black lawmakers that the issue was too divisive. They lobbied conservative state lawmakers by focusing not on racial justice but property rights.

The efforts paid off.

In 1994, after years of legal struggles, the Florida Legislature passed a bill awarding $2.1 million in compensation to survivors of the massacre and their descendants. It was a fraction of what descendants had sought but remains to this day the only government reparations ever paid to victims of anti-Black racial violence in the U.S.

Four years later, Florida passed a law allowing descendants of Rosewood victims to attend Florida colleges and universities tuition-free. More than 300 have done so to date. In 2004, then-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush traveled to Rosewood to dedicate the Florida Heritage Landmark historical marker, memorializing those who died and whose lives were forever impacted by the massacre.

Rosewood descendants and hundreds of other people will gather next week at the weeklong Remembering Rosewood Centennial Commemoration – co-sponsored by the Southern Poverty Law Center – first for a wreath-laying ceremony in what was once the prosperous town and then for a series of events at the University of Florida Fredric G. Levin College of Law in Gainesville, about 50 miles away.

Attendees will celebrate their success at confronting white supremacy and reclaiming history. But they will also mourn what was lost when Rosewood was destroyed, decry the limits of what justice descendants have attained, and condemn both the resurgent white nationalism in this country as well as the deepening pushback in Florida and elsewhere by right-wing politicians and policymakers against an honest reckoning with history.

“We are deeply honored to partner with the descendants of Rosewood to bring this painful history to light – and to radically imagine a future where all people are free from the grip of white supremacy,” said Margaret Huang, president and CEO of the SPLC. “This kind of truth-telling is necessary to end the centuries of oppression and anti-Black racism that continue to haunt communities today. It is through this shared learning and reflection that we, as a nation, can begin to heal and ensure equity and justice for all.”

‘Candid telling of history’

The commemoration has been organized by the nonprofit Descendants of Rosewood Foundation and is co-sponsored by – in addition to the SPLC – the University of Florida and Holland & Knight, the law firm that represented the descendants in their legal battle. Other sponsors include Florida State University, Visit Gainesville, Martin Luther King Jr. Commission of Florida, the Miami Center for Racial Justice and Onyx Magazine.

The keynote speaker at the commemoration will be prominent racial justice attorney Ben Crump, who has represented families in the Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and Flint, Michigan, civil rights cases. The events also include the opening of the Rosewood Traveling Museum at the university, screenings of both the feature film Rosewood – directed by John Singleton – and a separate documentary, as well as several panel discussions featuring descendants, filmmakers, historians, legal scholars and civil and human rights activists.

In an irony emblematic of how much work remains to ensure equity and justice for all, the commemoration takes place just months after a new law took effect in Florida that aims to restrict schools and workplaces from teaching about the United States’ legacy of racism. Last year, the SPLC filed an amicus brief in a federal lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the law, HB 7. Commonly called the Stop WOKE Act, it is already having a chilling effect on the teaching of history in Florida.

The Florida Board of Education’s specifications for 2022-23 social studies materials have interpreted HB 7 expansively, prohibiting “social justice” and “culturally responsive teaching.” Scholars tracking the implementation of the law warn that in classrooms across the state the teaching of the history of Rosewood; of the 1920 Election Day massacre in the town of Ocoee, near Orlando; and of the lynchings and other racial violence strewn throughout Florida history may be silenced.

Katheryn Russell-Brown, a law professor and director of the Race and Crime Center for Justice at the Levin College of Law, as well as an SPLC board member, said HB 7 demonstrates “how progress happens. Yes, we achieved reparations for Rosewood, but now here comes the rollback. We’re not in the place we were in 1923, but we are still not where we want to be. It’s an ongoing fight. The times change. The goalposts change, but the fight is still there.”

For the SPLC, the opportunity to amplify the work of Rosewood survivors by joining with partner organizations to co-sponsor the commemorative events is “symbolic of our entire fight for racial justice in the South, especially in places like Florida where the pushback is so intense against a candid telling of history,” SPLC Chief Legal Officer Derwyn Bunton said.

Rosewood is “one of a thousand stories where communities of color or just vulnerable, targeted communities had to endure an insane injustice,” Bunton said. “But the children, the grandchildren, the great-grandchildren of those families that were forced into that swamp never let it go. They came together with advocates and communities to seek justice. And that is something that increasingly is at the center of what SPLC is doing, partnering with other nonprofits and organizations to bring about change in the South.”

‘He won’t talk about it’

For some who survived the massacre, the trauma was just too painful to share, even with their families. Jonathan Barry-Blocker was 13 years old in 1997 when his father came into his room and sat down on his bed. There was a movie coming out, Barry-Blocker’s father told him. You should know, he said, because people may be calling us. What his dad shared that day for the first time was that Barry-Blocker’s grandfather, the Rev. Ernest Blocker, was a Rosewood survivor.

“He won’t talk about it,” Barry-Blocker recalls his father warning. “So, you can never ask him questions.”

James Davidson, left, and Edward Gonzalez-Tennant document Rosewood’s African American cemetery in a 2012 photo. Gonzalez-Tennant, who has studied the 1923 Rosewood massacre for decades, says that “there’s a direct connection in terms of understanding this sort of violence and connecting it to what is happening today.” (Courtesy of Edward Gonzalez-Tennant)

Barry-Blocker, now a visiting professor at the Levin College of Law and a former staff attorney with the SPLC, said what he has been able to uncover about how his family history was shaped by Rosewood is unsatisfying. He knows his grandmother’s family moved from Georgia to Rosewood to work in a Black-owned turpentine business that was one of the economic pillars of the town. He knows from county and U.S. census records that his great-grandparents married and then rented their home, near a post office, on the outskirts of Rosewood. He knows his great-grandfather operated an informal store in the town, which had several churches, a Masonic lodge, a school and tidy, two-story Black-owned homes, many with pianos and other ephemera of middle-class lives.

Lastly, Barry-Blocker knows his family fled everything in a panic, in the middle of the night. Somehow, his great-grandparents were separated. And his great-grandmother and the children – his grandfather among them – ended up on a train to Gainesville.

When he started to understand his family history, “I was so angry,” Barry-Blocker said. “The thoughts in my head were: Was my grandfather one of the children screaming amid the violence? Did they have to jump onto that train? Were they in that swamp? And what could have been? Rosewood was a pretty wealthy Black town for the turn of the century. Could my family have built some homeownership, land holdings? Could they have gone to college sooner? After Rosewood, they had to start all over. They had to start from the bottom in a sense, in a place where they had no footing. … What would have accrued to them until now, but for the attack on Rosewood?”

Despite his anger and his questions, Barry-Blocker said he followed his father’s advice. He never asked his grandfather, who lived to his 90s, about the massacre.

“I’ll never know what made them flee, what they went through. I’m still trying to figure stuff out,” Barry-Blocker said. “That’s the rough part.”

As descendants like Barry-Blocker search for answers on their own, historians, anthropologists and archaeologists are also working to shed light on the history of Rosewood and places like it. Edward Gonzalez-Tennant, an assistant professor of anthropology at The University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, spent years studying Rosewood, first as a graduate student and then as an assistant professor in Florida. Using computer mapping and 3D modeling techniques, he combed through thousands of property deeds, conducted excavations and went through a broad range of other sources to re-create as closely as possible what Rosewood looked like before it was destroyed. The virtual world he created is publicly available.

“Obviously doing work like this, a lot of people are upset by it. That’s the past, they say. Why open old wounds?�� Gonzalez-Tennant said. “But I think there’s a direct connection in terms of understanding this sort of violence and connecting it to what is happening today. It’s like putting the voices of people who were silenced back into the narrative. Then we can see how we are silencing these communities today.”

‘The blood land’

Indications of how much understanding is still needed are rife in and around Rosewood.

On Sept. 6, 2022, prominent Black psychologist Marvin Dunn, who more than a decade ago purchased five acres in the unincorporated area of Levy County where Rosewood once stood, was victim of an assault near the property. Dunn told police the driver of a pickup truck made several dangerous passes at him and his group gathered on the side of a public roadway. The driver screamed a racial epithet at them. The Levy County Sheriff’s Office later arrested David Allen Emanuel, 61, and charged him with aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, according to media reports from September.

In a 2013 photo, historian Marvin Dunn leads a tour of the site of the Rosewood massacre for students of Eastside High School in nearby Gainesville, Florida. Over a decade ago, Dunn purchased a parcel located where Rosewood once stood. (Credit: Douglas Dunn)

And as for that historical marker dedicated by then-Florida Gov. Bush? It is still there. But it is pocked with bullet holes from vandals. 

“Levy County and Rosewood in particular has an element of racism that is dangerous and easily provoked, and that has been clarified by what happened to me on Sept. 6,” Dunn said. “There have always been folks out there who don’t want any Black people coming back to Rosewood.”

That hasn’t stopped Dunn. The author of several books on Rosewood and on Black history, he bought the property with a partner after he discovered on the land the remains of railway tracks likely used by people escaping the massacre. 

It is, Dunn believes, just the second purchase by a Black person of land in Rosewood since the town was burned to the ground. A Black family had owned land in Rosewood in recent decades, Dunn said, but left in 2003.

In the years since, Dunn has worked cooperatively with many white local property owners to uncover relics of Rosewood. His land, now a private park, will be the scene of the wreath-laying ceremony on Jan. 8 that will kick off the centennial commemoration. He has raised more than $50,000 in donations to help clear the land.

“There is an importance in owning what I call the blood land, the land where these things happened, for the sake of keeping history alive,” Dunn said. “The best way to remember these experiences is to go to where the blood was shed.”

Picture at top: Attendees of a 2020 service to remember the victims of the 1923 Rosewood massacre gather at a historical marker erected in their honor. Next week, the Remembering Rosewood Centennial Commemoration will include a series of events held in the once-thriving Florida town as well as in nearby Gainesville. (Credit: Zack Wittman for The Washington Post via Getty Images)

[usauthoritarianism]

Summary copied from the source follows 

The Rosewood Massacre was an attack on the predominantly African American town of Rosewood, Florida, in 1923 by large groups of white aggressors. The town was entirely destroyed by the end of the violence, and the residents were driven out permanently. The story was mostly forgotten until the 1980s, when it was revived and brought to public attention.

[murfpersonalblog]

IWTV S2 Ep7 Musings - Sam Reid's Autumn Brown Interview & White Privilege

(Omg I don't watch Autumn Brown, so I had no idea Sam said all this until the transcript excerpts were posted here. 🤦Usually I love what Sam has to say, but this ain't it, chief.)

The problem with this whole take of Sam's is that Lestat is NOT the one on Trial--LOUIS is. The implications of spinning Come To Me makes Louis look MORE guilty, so that LOU'S DEATH IS JUSTIFIED & DESERVED. IDK if Sam is being deliberately obtuse here (seeing the situation with rose colored blinders to just look at Loustat's tragic love; Lestat's romanticism & hurt feelings cuz that's his character & his focus); or if he's deliberately skirting around a much more important & sensitive issue that, as a white man, he may or may not be aware that he's unequipped to handle--esp. since we know AMC put the lid on interviewers talking with the actors about RACE; and esp. since Jacob speaks very candidly about Louis' blackness when he's asked stupid questions.

Cuz the optics of a white person lying that a black man on trial had raped/molested/SA'd them are way too effing obvious--at least for Bipoc audiences--for Sam to boil it down to "a horrifically mean trick for Lestat to come out and say;" and then gloss it over with Lestat stupidly WANTING Louis to AGREE with the lie that makes him look like a sexual predator; and come away with "it’s very shocking for Lestat in that moment to be smacked in the face with ‘I didn’t want you. I always hated you."

Sure, EVERYONE understands & is in agreement about Loustat's "mutual yearning." But their mutual yearning has no bearings whatsoever on the proceedings happening on that stage. Lestat & Louis certainly AREN'T being mutually sentenced for vampiric crimes, and on pain on DEATH. This Trial is not about proving Louis' romantic/unrequited UST, it's about proving that he's guilty of breaking the Great Laws & proving that Lestat's life/wellbeing was in mortal danger from Louis--not just during Mardi Gras, but the entire time!

Lestat LITERALLY said "Louis ACCOSTED me."

The "pleasure house's" location (at the FairPlay) strengthens the implications of being "accosted" with being sexually harassed--esp. since Les & Santiago first start off with Louis' history as a "troubled, disreputable, cold, violent" pimp. Les said that everywhere he went, he was "being HUNTED" by Louis--like prey to a predator.

So if getting mad at Lou for being angry & hurt is all Lest takes away from Lou's reaction against having Come to Me weaponized to make Lou look like a rapist--then by god Les truly had no business being in an interracial relationship & raising a Black child. 😒

Les is so seated in his white privilege (and too busy screwing his white wench Antoinette down in Algiers) that he somehow missed the entire 1921 Tulsa Massacre, and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre, and the 1931-32 Scottsboro Boys case; to not read a effing newspaper or hear about all these Black men being lynched for raping white girls (who LIED on them) during Jim Crow!

Like, we talk about Tulsa & Rosewood wrt the Storyville race riot in 1x3, but I've yet to see anybody talk about how both of those massacres were started cuz white folk wanted to lynch innocent Black men accused of raping white people who lied on them & gaslit the whole country into believing them just cuz white = honest/innocent/good and black = liar/guilty/evil.

How DARE a Black man on Trial by a bloodthirsty predominately white lynch mob be furious that he's being lied on by a charismatic AF white man brought in to testify AGAINST him--

--who's explicitly presented as "THE VICTIM;" the first & ONLY witness whose words were to be trusted (Claudia's diary/words were only used to CONDEMN them, entirely removed from their context as a CHILD who felt unwanted & unloved by the father she was constantly trying to GET AWAY FROM, but who forcibly brought her BACK)--while Lou's context is stripped from him as the spouse who only killed Les for the sake of his DAUGHTER'S freedom. Lou never wanted to leave Les & NOLA; and he freaked TF out after he slit Les' throat & chokeslammed Claudia for tryna burn him--Claudia's diaries even exonerate Lou, PISSED at him for NOT wanting Les dead & for being "dead weight" thirsting after Les the whole time they were in Romania, 5 years later! All Lou wanted was to COME TO LES. Lou swam the nasty AF Mississippi River cuz LES WROTE A EFFING SONG NAMED COME TO ME that Lou STILL has the recording of IN HIS VOICE.

For a closeted gay Black man desperate to keep up appearances & be respected in society, Louis sacrificed EVERYTHING to be with Lestat--his loyalty to Paul (ie: God: x x) and his self respect/dignity/reputation most crucially, only to have that sacrifice (ie: love) ripped to shreds & sullied during the Trial--LESTAT BETRAYED LOUIS, not the other way around, WTF. Esp. cuz YES, Louis DID want Les to come to him the whole time. Even at the TRIAL, Jacob said all Louis was happy to see Les again.

Until Les opened his effing mouth & started spewing BS!

Lou LOVES Les, and trusted & confided in him as a gay closeted man tryna AVOID Les (esp. after being spooked by his gay crisis spooked him when they slept together)--only to be SPAT ON when Les tells all of Paris that he's nothing but a pervert who accosted/hunted/lusted after a man/vampire who made it seem that 1) LES didn't want LOU, and 2) that Les's safety/wellbeing was in danger--when HE'S the gay VAMPIRE wearing Oscar Wilde's chrysanthemum to dinner & baiting/luring Louis to HIS house with Lily waiting on the balcony in her effing underwear!

Remember: Lestat did this whole Come to Me spiel for the audience BEFORE his whole Gay Pride speech. The soldier yelled the F-slur after Les finished their Church Vows; and the whole crowd LAUGHED. This was NOT an audience who thought POSITIVELY about two guys being in a relationship--

--"the love that DARE NOT speak its name," even in gay mecca 1940s Paris (at the time the age of consent was 15 for straight couples but 21 for gay ones), where guys had to meet under the cover of night; hidden in the shadows even while in a public park/in plain sight--just like the vampires themselves.

The audience DGAF about Lestat's romanticism & Loustat's tragic gothic romance. They care about sexual deviancy--despite charismatic AF Santiago having said the very first night that the whole premise of the Theatre was to flip social mores upside-down--the bloodthirsty audience still wasn't effing buying gay sex! 💀

So not only is Les petitioning to a group of homophobes to see him as a victim, but he's are also throwing Louis, as a Black man, under the bus to a predominately white crowd as the villain--

--and yet people get mad at Louis for badmouthing Les in 1973 SanFran, and (LESS-SO) in Dubai??? When NEITHER time was Les being sentenced to death--but the vampires are still tryna kill LOUIS, even though it's DANIEL'S book and HE'S the vampire on national TV!

Again: LOUIS gets punished while these white men walk scott free. Louis gets dropped from the effing stratosphere with ALL his bones broken but his pain is dismissed as "a hard fall, nothing more;" while Louis put Les in the dump with a bunch of rats so Les could heal & NOT be burned alive, saving Les' effing life when Claudia would've GRILLED his arse, and yet Louis' found guilty!?

And again: Louis was actively being gaslit on stage, his brain LITERALLY being scrambled under the Mind Gift of the coven, while Claudia's literally over his right shoulder saying one thing, while Lestat's the devil on the left saying the total opposite. He's conscious, but he's barely more cognizant than Madeleine! But HE'S the liar?!

And again: Lestat's pain & hurt feelings gets centered, when it's LOUIS' ankles that are slashed to the bone so he can't walk or escape the lynchers ready to stone him & his daughter(s); HIS mind fogged whenever he tries to speak up & defend himself--with no one to help him but the very same dude lying his arse off to assassinate Louis' character and twist their story to excuse why he cheated (acting like he never said he wanted "VARIETY" way back in 1x3) & why Louis deserves to have lynchers in the crowd yelling "Shame on you!" as if there weren't TWO parties in this MUTUAL yearning.

I can't.

But again: Imma throw Sam a bone, cuz we know AMC's been weird about interviewers sidestepping actual substantial convos about race--and AFAIK Sam's never really said anything about Louis' blackness & how Lestat responds/dismisses it anyway, so. 🙄😒 Maybe it's for the best that Sam stays in his white lane--but it's still racially tone deaf AF that Loustat's race & contemporaneous IRL events that directly match the show aren't even up for frikkin discussion.

[lboogie1906]

On January 1-7, 1923, a massacre was carried out in the small, predominantly African American town of Rosewood. The massacre was instigated by the rumor that a white woman, Fanny Taylor, had been sexually assaulted by an African American man in her home. A group of white men, believing this rapist to be an escaped convict named Jesse Hunter who was hiding in Rosewood, assembled to capture this man.

In the winter of 1922, a white school teacher from Perry had been murdered, and on New Year’s Eve in 1922, there was a Ku Klux Klan rally held in Gainesville.

In response to the allegation by Taylor, white men began to search for Jesse Hunter along with Aaron Carrier and Sam Carter, who were believed to be accomplices. Carrier was captured and incarcerated while Carter was lynched. The white mob suspected Aaron Carrier’s cousin Sylvester, a Rosewood resident, of harboring Jesse Hunter.

On January 4, 1923, a group of twenty-to-thirty white men approached the Carrier home and shot the family dog. When Sylvester’s mother Sarah came to the porch to confront the mob, killed her. Sylvester defended his home, killing two men and wounding four in the ensuing battle before he was killed. The remaining survivors fled to the swamps for refuge.

The next day the white mob burned the Carrier home before joining with a group of 200 men from surrounding towns. The mob attacked the town, slaughtering animals and burning buildings. An official report claims six African Americans and two whites were killed. Other accounts suggest a larger total. Only two buildings remained standing, a house and the town general store.

Many of the African American residents of Rosewood who fled into the swamps were evacuated on January 6 by two local train conductors. Many others were hidden by the owner of the general store. Other African American residents fled to Gainesville and northern cities. Rosewood became deserted.

No one was charged with any of the Rosewood murders. In 1994, as the result of new evidence and renewed interest in the event, the Florida Legislature passed the Rosewood Bill which entitled the nine survivors to $150,000 each in compensation. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[shibainu2006]

Black History! The burning of Rosewood/Rosewood massacre

LET'S TALK ABOUT IT, SHALL WE?

Rosewood was a town settled by both black and white people in 1845.

It became predominantly black by the 1920's and was very successful for its time.

On January 1st, 1923, a white woman named Fannie Taylor was heard screaming near a neighbor's home.

The neighbor found her covered in bruises, and she decided to claim that a black man had come into her home and assaulted her.

The incident was reported to Sheriff Robert Ellias Walker.

Fannie said she wasn't raped, but that didn't stop her husband James Taylor from going off and gathering white people in neighboring counties up to 500 Ku Klux Klan members who were in Gainesville for a rally.

They decided it would be an amazing idea to find black men

Of course, the sites I'm reading from refuse to give me info on what they'd do to the black men they found, but I can be certain it was violent.

From my knowledge and newly learned knowledge, the mob started their massacre on January 4th, 1923, and it went on until January 7th, 1923.

White mobs burned down homes, shot dozens of African Americans, and left nothing but ashes.

No, the town was not rebuilt.

People say there are an estimated 6 black people who died, but witnesses who survived and lived to this century beg to differ.

More people died than that.

It's honestly disappointing how many people DON'T know about this event.

The government even tried to hide it after it happened. Which is pathetic. I hope the government read that.

@killersweetie

@vtoriacore @vtoriacore-rbs

@moonsforher

[penwrythe]

Also, I really don't want to distract from Palestine or any current ongoing genocides, but the reason why I care about this so much is that we have this happened before so many times in history. Enough is enough.

Please look up the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the 1923 Massacre in Rosewood, Florida. Look up Black lynchings and mob riots in both the North and the South during the periods leading up to these massacres.

[itsbansheebitch]

"The second main target of recent criticism — the mention of 'violence perpetrated against and by African Americans' — occurs in a section of the standards focused on Black communities since Reconstruction. It cites the 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre, the 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, the 1920 Ocoee massacre, the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre." - Tampa Bay Times

WOW that sure is a lot of massacres! I wonder why someone would resist that! Sure is a MYSTERY.

Seriously, what's next, "Hitler wasn't sooooo bad" "Unit 731 was finnneeee actually" "School shootings build characteeerrrr" ????? As someone who had a teacher who not so low-key supported slavery in 6th grade in Tennessee, this shit make me SEETHE

When are people going to figure out that CTR is just accurate history? When are we going to be taught about Heartbreak Day in school? We aren't even taught about Unit 731 in school, which was happening at the SAME TIME as WW2???? I learned about Unit 731 THIS YEAR. I am OUT OF HIGH SCHOOL

[cyarsk52-20]

Rosewood, FL circa 1923. An entire rural, predominantly Black town was leveled on New Year's Day by a yt mob because a WW claimed that she was beaten and r*ped by a Black man in the town (likely to cover for spousal abuse gone "too far").

Tulsa, Oklahoma circa 1921...what was known as "Black Wall Street" saw 35 blocks and 300 deaths as a yt Mob burned and looted the town BEFORE an investigation could even happen into the supposed r*pe of Sarah Page...a WW.

Atlanta Race Riot 1906... An intense gubernatorial race, where BOTH candidates added fuel to a racist fire, culminated in thousands of yt folks terrorizing Black businesses, homes, and colleges. Part of the reason? The NOMINESS claimed that WW were being r*ped...

Some of the WW actually denied it. (Though they DID enjoy hanging out at "Black" saloons) In this case, it was STILL WW...they were just used as pawns to stop the progress that had been made by Black folks...especially in the Peachtree area where they competed with white folks.

Washington D.C. 1919...4 days of violence against Black businesses and individuals perpetrated by a yt men, a majority were in the military, over rumors of a WW being r*ped by a Black man. They randomly beat Black folks on the street...and police refused to help.

Race Riot of Nebrask...Roughly 10,000 yt folks from South Omaha burned down the courthouse to force a Black prisoner, accused of r*pe, to be turned over to them for "justice". They lynched him, then attacked neighborhoods and stores.

Ellisville, Mississippi...1919...a woman claims she was r*ped by a BM. Yt Mob hunts the BM "suspect" down, shot him, captured him, and HEALED him. Just to turn around and batch him from prison to lynch him.

They dragged him to a field, cut off all of his fingers, and shot him 2000 times...with 10,000 yt onlookers...where vendors sold trinkets and photos

In conclusion: if your a black man and you’re in the woods and you need to feel safe and your two options are a white woman or a bear, choose the bear, because ain’t no bear finna lie and say that you raped them

[somerunner]

I read the standards and that’s not really part of it

/End ID]

[Image ID: A screenshot from the proposed standards.

SS.68.AA.2.3

Examine the various duties and trades performed by slaves (e.g., agricultural

 work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing,

 transportation).

Benchmark Clarifications:

Clarification 1: Instruction includes how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.

/End ID]

[Image ID: Another screenshot from the proposed standards.

SS.912.AA.3.6

Describe the emergence, growth, destruction and rebuilding of black communities during Reconstruction and beyond.

Benchmark Clarifications:

Clarification 1: Instruction includes the ramifications of prejudice, racism and stereotyping on individual freedoms (e.g., the Civil Rights Cases, Black Codes, Jim Crow Laws, lynchings, Columbian Exposition of 1893).

Clarification 2: Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, D.C. Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre.

Clarification 3: Instruction includes communities such as: Lincolnville (FL), Tullahassee (OK), Eatonville (FL).

/End ID]

I’m not familiar with legislative language, so I’m not at all able to tell whether the overall vibe of the standards does a ton of whitewashing of the awful past of slavery and racist violence in the USA, so my opinion won’t be the most accurate.

With that disclaimer out of the way, I gotta agree with @lmazo here. It’s something in the standards which can be unfortunately spun into something “good” when teaching, but that’s not how the standards themselves are written.

I didn’t read about the specific riots and massacres listed in Clarification 2 of SS.912.AA.3.6 (second standards screenshot) and I will after this post, but it seems to me that the article is misleading. Obviously it’s bad to say “violent acts perpetrated against and by African Americans” in the same breath, even if “against” is first, because it masks how much more violence was done to African Americans than was done by them. Hint: it’s a lot, lot more, by an absolutely ridiculous margin.

Obviously it’s bad to say that. But the article says that the standards say that African Americans did violence at the Ocoee Massacre, which is not the case. It listed riots and massacres together (which, massacres are worse and the so-called “riots” may not have been even violent, but I haven’t read about them yet) after saying “violent acts perpetrated against and by African Americans.” So “against” would be referring almost entirely to the massacres, and “by” would be referring almost entirely to the riots.

There is a problem with that “almost entirely” there, which is due to “against and by” being in the same sentence with oppositely-sided events, which is what allows teachers to whitewash history. They can equate the levels of violence, and say that African Americans were also committing violent acts during the events that they were getting massacred in.

But the article seems to take that “almost entirely” and turn it into “actually, very little” and say “in fact, this word refers to the opposite group that you would think it refers to when reading the standards.”

Once again, I think these standards are not great and have a big potential for racist misuse, and that I personally could have misinterpreted what I read. Additionally, it is common (and often necessary) for news outlets to use hyperbole in order to catch the attention of the public and inspire action.

The article wasn’t accurate in its interpretation of the standards, but the second half of the article (right after the header “Whitewashing History”) is actually something I would say is 100% accurate and that I agree with. State Senator Geraldine Thompson, called the standards incomplete and in need of additional work; former state politician Dwight Bullard said it was problematic for no African Americans to be on the board approving standards for education about African American history.

Anyway. Thanks for reading all that. I’m probably wrong about a fair bit of stuff, so I’m going to go read up on the mentioned standards sometime in the next few hours.

FL Board of Education approves African American history standards; critics call them ‘incomplete’

Students at Florida public schools will now learn that Black people benefitted from slavery because it taught them skills. This change is part of the African American history standards the State Board of Education approved at a Wednesday meeting.

The description of slavery as beneficial is not the only grievance parents, teachers, education advocates and politicians had with the new standards. People speaking at the Wednesday meeting generally called out the diluting and omissions of history. For example, instruction at the elementary school level is largely limited to identifying famous Black people, and high school teachers will talk about the “acts of violence perpetrated by African Americans” at the 1920 Ocoee Massacre, in which a white mob killed at least 30 Black people.

“Please table this rule and revise it to make sure that my history our history is being told factually and completely, and please do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial because I guarantee you it most certainly was not,” said Kevin Parker, a community member.

[chiveraccs]

Black Star Line - Rosewood 1923

En la eterna búsqueda de los nombres más tétricos que ilustren una fumada de alta fortaleza, Black Star Line se apuntó con el nombre Rosewood, refiriéndose a la Masacre de Rosewood ocurrida en 1923, que marcó uno de los primeros disturbios raciales de Estados Unidos. Para hacer este cigarro, BSL contactó a una fábrica con la que siempre habían querido trabajar: Oveja Negra, más conocida por ser…

[ausetkmt]

The 1921 destruction in Tulsa wasn't the first or the last race massacre that leveled homes, usurped land or destroyed livelihoods for Black Americans.

One of the first was in 1863 – sparked by a draft law. One of the last happened in 1923 in Rosewood, Florida. Whatever the precipitating event, the desire was generally the same: to destroy Black upward mobility.

Below, is a database of recorded massacres (defined for the purposes of this project as one or more mob attacks on a Black community that resulted in the aggregate loss of lives, homes, land and livelihoods).

The attacks frequently drove residents away from a community for good. In other instances, Black residents hid in swamps and woods for days to escape death. Others tried to rebuild their town's former glory, but failed with little to no assistance from the surrounding community or government.

One of the most frequently used justifications for an attack? The rumor that an African American male had assaulted a white female. Usually the rumor was unfounded. Frequently it was sparked by an erroneous news report.

This list is by no means, complete. Attacks were frequently denied and not documented by authorities. This is a living, breathing document culled from numerous news reports, historical sites and encyclopedias among other online resources.

I also reached out to every city listed in this database to find out whether reparative actions are currently being taken (of any kind), and if the city's history includes reparations of any sort. The information that I received, along with other information found through searches, is included under the "Reparations history" section.

When more information becomes available, it will be added.

In rare instances, the aftermath of a massacre, and the help given, was meticulously documented. White merchants in New York, for example, raised $40,000 for Black victims of the 1863 attack. The committee's notes were archived in the Library of Congress, and made available through the HathiTrust Digital Library. See them here.

Keeping the public informed about this nation's too frequently ignored history of massacres also depends on you.

Is your family or community history missing from this list? Send us your story along with documentation. Reach me at erivers@usatoday.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Nearly two dozen massacres in US history. Reparations? Rarely.

[1001framesofmind]

There's babies in there!

The Rosewood massacre is considered a stain on the history of Florida and its racial struggles. In the first week of January 1923, an unruly white mob in Levy County decided to take a revenge on African-American community there on the basis of a false assumption that a "niggar" had raped a white woman.

🎞film: Rosewood (1997) 🎬director: John Singleton 🟣🟣🟣🟣⚪️

[lenbryant]

(LONG POST) Column: The story behind that Florida school curriculum that whitewashed slavery keeps getting worse

By Michael Hiltzik, LATimes Business Columnist  

(Photo) Marker commemorating the Rosewood massacre of 1923: Can Florida escape its racist past? (Historical Marker Database)

If there’s a bet that you will almost always win, it’s that no matter how crass and dishonest a right-wing claim may seem to be, the reality will be worse.

That’s the case with Florida’s effort to whitewash the truth about slavery via a set of standards for teaching African American history imposed on the state’s public school teachers and students.

The curriculum, you may recall, was condemned for a provision that the curriculum cover “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” 

"Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome" — Sign posted until 1959 at the town line of Ocoee, Florida, site of a 1920 racial massacre

Another provision seemed to blame “Africans’ resistance to slavery” for the tightening of slave codes in the South that outlawed teaching slaves to read and write. 

A section referring to “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans” goes on to list five race riots and massacres from American history, every one of which was started by whites. 

More on that in a moment. As the indispensable Charles P. Pierce put it, the Florida standards “look as though they were devised by Strom Thurmond on some very good mushrooms.”

I reported last week on this reprehensible project, which was publicly presented as the product of a work group of the state’s African American History Task Force. 

Two members of the task force, William B. Allen and Frances Presley Rice, responded to the scathing reaction to the curriculum from Democrats and Republicans with a defensive statement purportedly on behalf of the entire work group. 

“Some slaves developed highly specialized trades from which they benefitted [sic],” the statement read. “This is factual and well documented.” 

As I reported, however, of the 16 individuals Allen and Rice mentioned to support their assertion, nine never were slaves, seven were identified by the wrong trade and 13 or 14 did not learn their skills while enslaved. One, Betty Washington Lewis, whom Allen and Rice identified as a “shoemaker,” was white: She was George Washington’s younger sister and a slave owner.

Now it turns out that Allen and Rice were not speaking for the work group, but for themselves. Thanks to reporting by NBC News, we know that most of the work group’s 13 members opposed the language suggesting that slaves benefited from their enslavement.

NBC quoted several members anonymously as stating that two members pushed the provision — Allen and Rice. Members “questioned ‘how there could be a benefit to slavery,’” one work group member told NBC. 

Others said that the work group met intermittently over the internet and did not collaborate with the state’s African American History Task Force, which was created in 1994 to oversee the curriculum for African American studies in Florida’s K-12 schools. 

The work group’s standards were approved unanimously on July 19 by the state board of education, every member of which was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is running a natural experiment to see whether bigotry and racism can carry someone to the presidency. 

We’ve recently learned more about Allen and Rice. Allen, as I reported earlier, is a retired professor of political science at Michigan State University. (The university removed his bio page from its website sometime in the last few days, but here’s an archived version.)

Allen served as chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights under George H.W. Bush, but angered civil rights activists and members of the commission itself for taking a stand against legal protections for gay people. 

At a 1989 conference in Anaheim sponsored by anti-gay Christian fundamentalists, Allen delivered a talk titled, “Blacks? Animals? Homosexuals? What is a Minority?”

Its theme was that treating gays and Black people as distinct minorities would relegate them to animal status. Allen said, “My title is as innocent as a title can be,” a position that prefigured his current defense of the Florida slavery standards as no big deal. 

He’s listed as a fellow of the Claremont Institute, which has been funded by a galaxy of right-wing foundations. The institute lists among its senior fellows John Eastman, who is one of the four attorneys identified as “co-conspirators” in the federal indictment of former President Trump for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election, handed up Tuesday. Eastman is also the target of a California State Bar proceeding aimed at his disbarment for his alleged role in that effort.

As for Rice, she’s chair of the Sarasota-based National Black Republican Assn., which appears to have shared its business address with her home address. She identifies herself as “Dr. Frances Presley Rice,” but she doesn’t appear to have a medical degree or PhD; she does hold a juris doctor degree, but that’s just a law degree and doesn’t customarily bestow the “Dr.” designation on its holders.

Rice has conducted a years-long campaign to associate today’s Democratic Party with the Democrats of the 19th century, a pro-slavery party that shares none of its positions on Blacks or slavery with the Democrats of modern times. 

The normalization of Florida’s slavery whitewash has been abetted by a supine press. On July 27, for example, Steve Inskeep, the host of NPR’s Morning Edition, conducted a servile interview in which he sat meekly by as Allen spewed unalloyed hogwash. 

When Allen suggested that Black journalist Ida B. Wells had drawn “inspiration” from the slavery experience, Inskeep — had he been even minimally prepared — could have pointed out that the Mississippi-born Wells was 5½ months old when the Emancipation Proclamation took effect on Jan. 1, 1863, and 3½ years old when the 13th Amendment abolished slavery. 

Nor did Inskeep challenge Allen about the list of 16 supposed slaves that he and Rice issued in defense of their curriculum. The list had been out for a full week before the NPR interview. Inskeep didn’t mention it at all.

When Allen asserted that he was not the author of the curriculum, nor were any other members of the work group, the proper follow-up would have been: “Who wrote it, then?” Inskeep kept mum. 

The Washington Post, meanwhile, tried to shoehorn Florida’s whitewashing of slavery into a “both-sides-do-it” framework. 

The Post article suggests that the Florida curriculum and President Biden’s July 25 proclamation of a national monument dedicated to Emmett Till, a Black teenager tortured and lynched by a white mob in Mississippi in 1955 for purportedly offending a white woman, are two sides of a “roiling debate” over Black history.

Of course that’s absurd. Most Americans, and most Democrats, don’t see slavery as a topic worthy of reconsideration. That’s all on the Republican side, especially in Florida. 

DeSantis and his stooges are pretending that the truth about America’s racist past should be suppressed for fear of making white children feel bad. It’s nothing but a play for the most bigoted members of the GOP base.

That brings us back to Florida’s curriculum. Provisions other than the one about the benefits of slavery aren’t getting the attention they deserve. 

Take the part about “acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.” This standard is illustrated in the text by references to race riots in Atlanta in 1906 and Washington, D.C., in 1919, and massacres in Ocoee, Fla. (1920); Tulsa (1921); and Rosewood, Fla. (1923) — rampages by white mobs lasting a day or more.

In what sense do these point to violence perpetrated by Black people? Pierce conjectures that they “might distressingly be referring to attempts by the victims of those bloody episodes to fight back.” 

The Ocoee massacre occurred when the town’s Black residents attempted to vote. When a squadron of Klansmen hunted down a Black leader in his home, his daughter tried to prevent them from taking him by brandishing a rifle, which went off, slightly wounding a white member of the gang.

“A volley of gunfire erupted in both directions,” according to an account on the Florida History blog. In the aftermath, nearly 60 Black residents were dead, their community was razed to the ground, and those who survived were driven from the town, never to return. Until 1959, a sign at the town line read, “Dogs and Negroes Not Welcome.”

Is Ocoee supposed to be an example of “violence perpetrated ... by African Americans”? Nothing would speak more eloquently to the true nature of the Florida standards for teaching Black history.

[newsbeatblogger]

Florida's Black History Revisionism: The DeSantis Perspective

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Board of Education have agreed that slavery was more beneficial than damaging to pupils in public schools.

The shift is part of a new African American history standard released on Wednesday, in which schools would teach students that slavery assisted certain Black individuals in developing important abilities. The state teachers’ union termed the decision “a step backward.”

Florida’s new standards

The Florida Department of Education published a paper on the 2023 social studies standards that details how slaves learned skills that might be exploited for personal advantage. The new standards include teaching about racial crimes committed by African-Americans.

“Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, DC, Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre,” the language said.

A big step backwards

The Florida Education Association, a statewide teachers’ union with over 150,000 members, has opposed the new limits. They characterized it as a disservice to the state’s students and a huge step backward for Florida, which has mandated an African American history curriculum since 1994.

To Know more visit the link.

[larrensmith]

Florida to Teach Schools that Slavery Had Benefits

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the Florida Board of Education have agreed to teach public school children that slavery was more beneficial than it was bad.

The shift is part of a new African American history standard revealed on Wednesday, in which schools would teach students that slavery assisted certain Black individuals in learning critical skills. The decision was blasted by the state teachers’ union as “a step backward.”

Florida’s new standards

The Florida Department of Education published a report on the 2023 social studies standards that explains how slaves developed abilities that might be utilized for personal advantage. The new standards also educate about how African-Americans were the perpetrators of racial injustices.

“Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to 1906 Atlanta Race Riot, 1919 Washington, DC, Race Riot, 1920 Ocoee Massacre, 1921 Tulsa Massacre and the 1923 Rosewood Massacre,” the language said.