#Virginia schools renamed

[filosofablogger]

Feeling Snarky ... Gee, I Wonder Why?

I think tonight’s a good night for some snarky snippets … got some steam building up that needs an outlet! One step forward … oops, no wait, turn around and go back.  Four years ago in 2020, largely in response to the murder of George Floyd, the BlackLivesMatter movement, and the awareness that racism is still very much alive and well, Shenandoah County in Virginia renamed two of the schools in…

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Dean Obeidallah at The Dean's Report:

The push and pull between white supremacist rule and a multi-cultural United States is nothing new. But on Friday we saw a first in our nation’s history: A school board voted to restore the name of three Confederate generals to their public schools.  That’s right, in 2024, the right is naming schools after people who fought and killed to preserve both chattel slavery and white supremacy. This is just the latest salvo in the GOP’s campaign to move America backwards to before the Civil Rights movement.

This jaw-dropping event happened on Friday, when the Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia voted 5-1 to reinstate the names Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School to honor Confederate Generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby. This vote to celebrate the traitors who killed US soldiers in the hope of maintaining the barbarism known as chattel slavery was led by the conservative group Coalition for Better Schools. Now the school board will spend an estimated six figures in tax dollars to send a message that this area of Virginia is a place where white supremacy rules. This action is all part of the right’s response to the racial reckoning that was kicked off in the United States after the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed. In fact, the names of these Virginia schools were changed in that very period.   But this is not simply a “reinstatement” of Confederate names. Rather this is a manifestation of the white right’s desperate efforts to maintain control in the face of changing America. After all, this is exactly what white supremacists did in the past when they felt challenged.

As a reminder, the greatest number of Confederate statutes were erected in the early 1900’s spearheaded by United Daughters of the Confederacy as Jim Crow laws were being enacted across the South.  These racist laws and the Confederate memorials were part of a scheme to both celebrate and preserve white supremacy. The next spike in Confederate monuments came from 1940’s to 1960’s. Why then nearly 100 years after the Civil War? Simple, these statutes were built in reaction to the Civil Rights movement to send a message that white power still ruled that area. It’s no coincidence that in 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag and in 1962, South Carolina placed the Confederate battle flag atop its capitol building. 

When it comes to schools being named after traitors who took up arms against the United States of America to fight for the Confederacy, want to guess when the biggest wave of that occurred? Was it shortly after The Civil War? Nope, it was following the landmark US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 which ruled that segregated public schools were unconstitutional.  Between that 1954 court decision and 1970, our nation saw the largest spike in schools being after those who fought to defend slavery. In fact, the schools at issue in Virginia were opened in that time frame, with Stonewall Jackson high school opening in 1960. That’s right. The naming of these Virginia schools was part of the backlash to the Civil Rights movement and Brown v. Board of Education. The white officials in that area of Virginia at the time wanted to ensure that people knew white power still reigned supreme.

Dean Obeidallah gets to the point as usual. The renaming of a pair of schools in Shenandoah County, Virginia by reinstating the name of the pre-2020 names of the schools named after three treasonous Confederates (Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Turner Ashby) is a middle finger to common sense and a win for white supremacist values.

[bluedalahorse]

self indulgent post with visuals for my Young Royals future fic

I took a walk all over the city today, something I haven’t done in a while. With all the things going on, it was nice to move my body and get out and about. It was sort of dreary and drizzly and cool, but since it’s been so hot these past few days, it was a nice change.

As I walked through one part of the city, it occurred to me that part of my path intersected with my fanfic plans. One of my future headcanons is that both August and Nils go to Georgetown for university. I realized I was walking on a path that was probably one of August’s jogging routes. I decided I’d take some photos and post them here with some captions, in case anyone finds it interesting.

This is so far from show-related I am not tagging it or making it rebloggable. But I hope you enjoy all the same!

This is the House of Sweden, which also houses the Swedish and Icelandic embassies. They run a lot of cool cultural exhibitions, and sometimes there are rooftop concerts and Christmas markets and things. I believe some of the actual Swedish royal kids did summer internships here, so this is where I imagine August doing his own summer internship. He also has a colleague working for the Icelandic embassy who becomes Nils’s boyfriend.

Just around the corner from the embassy is a boating center. A lot of the private schools in the area row here. I imagine August would find some familiarity in a sight like this!

Speaking of being around water… here’s a cool shot of the C & O canal. Caution: there are Canada Geese lurking in this area. I will throw a bone to all the August haters out there and headcanon that one morning while jogging he gets chased by Canada Geese.

Here’s a few of the Kennedy Center on the Potomac. If Wille and Simon ever came to DC, they could see a play, opera, or concert here.

Look at Virginia across the Potomac! We love our siblings in Virginia. (It’s prettier at night.)

At this point if August glances back over his shoulder, he can see the towers of Georgetown in the distance. He’s a long way from campus, but he probably won’t regret running that far. Probably.

Eventually he’d get to a walkway that takes him to a sculpture garden attached to the Kennedy Center. (Do you think he’d look at this horse and think about Sara? Absolutely.)

On his way back up the hill, August would catch sight of Saudi Arabia’s embassy. He probably would have also seen Thailand and Ukraine’s embassies during his morning run, but I didn’t get a picture of those because they’re earlier on his route and I didn’t have the idea in my head to take photos yet. (Interesting fact: the DC government renamed the street in front of the Saudi Arabian embassy Jamal Khashoggi Way.)

Final image! This is a little bit off August’s jogging path, but it’s the EU Delegation Building. Currently they’re advertising the EU Open House, where all the EU embassies open their doors to the public and offer free food and swag (and basically aggressively promote their countries so you can think about going on vacation there.) Since August is an intern at the House of Sweden, he would probably have to shake so many hands that day and do so much PR as part of his job. Or he would have to hand out so much swag. (When I volunteered at the Finnish embassy I had to hand out food samples and came home smelling like rye bread and herring.)

I hope you enjoyed my little tour of this tiny part of DC! It was good to be out and about.

[allycat75]

Important events that actually took place on September 9th and were in no way a figment of a sad, delusional man and his advisors' imagination in order to continue a nefarious and daft lie.

1543- Mary Stuart, at 9 months old, is crowned Queen of Scots

1675- New England colonies declare war on Wampanoag Indians

1753- 1st steam engine arrives in North American colonies

1776- Congress officially renames the country as the United States of America (from the United Colonies)

1817- Alexander Twilight, probably first African American to graduate from a US college, receives BA degree at Middlebury College

1836- Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his influential essay "Nature" in the US, outlining his beliefs in transcendentalism

1850- California becomes a state

1880- President Rutherford B. Hayes visits San Francisco

1888- Easter Island / Rapa Nui in the Pacific is annexed by Chile

1892- Edward Emerson Barnard at Lick Observatory discovers Amalthea, Jupiter's 5th moon

1904- Boston Herald again refers to NY baseball club as Yankees, when it reports "Yankees take 2," Yankee name not official till 1913

1908- Orville Wright makes 1st 1-hr airplane flight, Fort Myer, Virginia

1908- Russia annexes part of Poland

1911- 1st European post delivered by air (Hendon to Windsor, England)

1921- Guatemala, Honduras and San Salvador agree to Central American Union

1922- Turkish troops take the Greek-held Anatolian city of Smyrna during the Greco-Turkish War

1926- National Broadcasting Company created by Radio Corporation of America

1936- New York Yankees beat Cleveland Indians, 12-9 at League Park to clinch AL pennant on the earliest date in history

1939- Nazi army reaches Warsaw

1942- Compulsory work for women, children and old males in Batavia

1944- Allied forces liberate Luxembourg

1945- 1st "bug" in a computer program discovered by Grace Hopper, a moth was removed with tweezers from a relay & taped into the log

1950- 1st use of TV laugh track by "The Hank McCune Show" in the US

1951- 1st broadcast of soap opera "Love of Life" on CBS-TV

1955- Don Zimmer, hits 4,000th Dodger home run

1956- Elvis Presley appears on "The Ed Sullivan Show" for the 1st time

1957- US President Eisenhower signs 1st civil rights bill since Reconstruction

1960- Pakistan ends India's run of 6 consecutive Olympic field hockey gold medals with a 1-0 win over their sub-continent rivals at the Rome Games

1963- Alabama Governor George Wallace served a federal injunction to stop orders of state police to bar black students from enrolling in white schools

1965- LA Dodgers future Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Sandy Koufax throws his 4th career no-hitter and first perfect game in a 1-0 win over the Chicago Cubs at Dodger Stadium

1966- The National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act signed into law by U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, 1st federal safety standards for vehicles and roads

1967- 1st successful Test flight of a Saturn V

1969- The Official Languages Act comes into force in Canada - making English and French the country's official languages (replaced 1988 by new Official Languages Act)

1971- Apple Records releases John Lennon's second solo studio album, "Imagine" in US; it tops the charts in US, UK, Australia, and 3 other countries

1972- West German equestrian rider Liselott Linsenhoff follows her dressage teams gold in Mexico City with the individual dressage title at her home Olympics in Munich

1975- Paul McCartney & Wings begin their "Wings Over The World" tour in Southampton, England; 65 concerts in Europe, Australia, Canada, and United States, runs through October of 1976

1978- Ayatollah Khomeini calls for an uprising in the Iranian army

1979- 31st Emmy Awards: "Taxi"; "Lou Grant"; Ron Leibman & Ruth Gordon win

1983- Radio Shack announces their color computer 2 (Coco2)

1985- President Reagan orders sanctions against South Africa, targeting apartheid

1987- Larry Bird of the Celtics begins an NBA free throw streak of 59

1987- Gary Hart admits on "Nightline" to cheating on his wife

1990- George H. W. Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev meet in Helsinki & urge Iraq to leave Kuwait

1990- Liberia president Samuel K Doe is captured by Mr Johnson's forces

1991- Mike Tyson indicted for rape of Desiree Washington

1993- Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization exchange letters of mutual recognition

2010- A court in the Philippines orders Imelda Marcos to repay the government almost $280,000 for funds taken from the National Food Authority by Ferdinand Marcos in 1983

2012- Armenia wins the 40th FIDE Chess Olympiad

2015- Apple unveils the iPad Pro and iPhone 6S in San Francisco

2015- Queen Elizabeth II becomes Great Britain's longest-reigning monarch at 63 years and seven months, beating the previous record set by her great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria

2017- Egyptian archaeologists announce the discovery of a 3,500-year-old tomb of a goldsmith and his family in Draa Abul-Naga, Egypt

2018- CBS chief Les Moonves departs the company after six more women make allegations of sexual abuse in "The New Yorker"

2019- Poet John Milton's own copy of Shakespeare's First Folio of 1623 has survived with his annotations according to scholar Jason Scott-Warren in Philadelphia library, could be world's most important modern literary discovery

2020- San Francisco Bay area blanketed by dark orange skies and smoke due to California wildfires

2021- Tom Brady becomes first player in NFL history to start 300 regular season games as he guides Tampa Bay Buccaneers to an opening day 31-29 win at home to Dallas Cowboys

ALL of these are more important than something that never happened on this day.

[petervintonjr]

Another MIT alum! Meet Carolyn Beatrice Parker, the first Black woman to earn a postgraduate degree in Physics. Born in 1917 Florida, Carolyn was one of six siblings who all attained some form of advanced science degree --to include mathematics and chemistry. Her father, Julius A. Parker, was himself a physician and was the second Black American to attain a Ph.D in business from Harvard. Encouraged by such an unusually dedicated family, Carolyn herself graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Fisk University in 1937, and then earned her Master's in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1941. To fund her graduate studies, she taught physics and mathematics at a number of schools and universities in Florida and then in Virginia, but her career path would take an unusual detour once the United States entered World War II.

Between 1943 to 1947, Carolyn was recruited to the Dayton Project, one of the divisions of the Manhattan Project. Based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and spearheaded by the Monsanto Chemical Company, the Dayton Project is perhaps most famous for cracking the Enigma code, but the bulk of the project was primarily focused on extracting and developing polonium as the neutron initiator (detonator) for an atomic explosion. Parker's background in electronic testing and infrared spectroscopy made her an ideal fit despite the twin disadvantages of race and gender --while there were other women on the project, Carolyn was the only Black woman. According to her family the work was so top-secret that Parker couldn't discuss it with anyone --and in fact the details of her work remained classified until the late 1960's.

After the war Carolyn took a job as an Assistant Professor at her alma mater Fisk University, and then in 1952 she worked as a physicist attached to the geophysics research division at the Air Force Cambridge Research Center (Cambridge, Massachusetts). In 1953 Carolyn earned her second Master's in physics at MIT --the first Black woman to earn a postgraduate degree from that institution. [Abstract: Range distribution of 122 Mev (pi⁺) and (pi⁻) mesons in brass, Thesis (M.S.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Physics, 1953]

Parker then completed and submitted her coursework for her Ph.D. --sadly she never got the opportunity to defend her doctoral dissertation as she was diagnosed with leukemia. Sustained exposure to polonium excretion during her time on the Dayton Project was almost certainly the root cause, and while workers on the Dayton Project had submitted to weekly tests for radiation exposure, the process was inexact --anecdotally one colleague wrote about Parker's "unruly hair," which may have become contaminated, as the head coverings at Dayton had been designed for the short, finer hair of white men. Parker died in 1966 at the age of 48 and her achievements were largely forgotten by history, until very recently.

In August of 2020, an elementary school in her hometown of Gainesville, Florida that had originally been named for a Confederate general, was formally (and unanimously) renamed by the Alachua County School Board as Beatrice Parker Elementary School.

[jellogram]

Guys I'm fucking crying I need help. I have always said the mandela effect is stupid but I am experiencing it right now and I'm losing my mind.

I don't remember the capital of South Carolina being Columbia. Now, I have never been anywhere near South Carolina, so I know that doesn't seem weird, but keep in mind that I have been a geography nerd forever and currently work for a travel company. I used to read maps for fun.

I got 100% on the state capitals quiz in fifth grade and have a physical trophy to prove it, so I definitely knew this at some point. I used to take geography quizzes on sporcle. I have written about South Carolina for work. And yet I have never heard of Columbia, and it's giving me brain zaps.

I don't know what I thought the capital was, but definitely not Columbia. I thought it might be Charleston but that doesn't sound quite right and there's a Charleston that is the capital of West Virginia, so that's probably why I thought that.

"Columbia, South Carolina" doesn't sound right to me like all the other capitals do. I'm weirded out enough that I set google to the years 2002-2010 to see if it was something else when I was in school learning capitals, and sure enough, they all say Columbia. An hour ago I would have bet $10,000 that this was not the capital.

I know the logical explanation of "you're just fucking stupid" is way more likely than "something weird is afoot" but am I actually insane for real??? I checked all the other state capitals and they all look familiar. Just this one seems so wildly out of place to me that I thought for sure they had changed it recently or renamed the city or something.

Someone help me. Why is this killing me. Is there some explanation to why I wouldn't know this? Does anyone else remember it being something else?? Do I need to quit my job!?!? Am I simply fucking stupid???

[lboogie1906]

Nannie Helen Burroughs (May 2, 1879 - May 20, 1961) was born in Orange, Virginia to John and Jennie Burroughs. She attended school in DC and moved to Kentucky where she attended Eckstein-Norton University and received an honorary MA.

She sought a teaching position in DC, but she did not receive it, she moved to Philadelphia and became associate editor of The Christian Banner, a Baptist newspaper. She returned to DC where, despite receiving a high rating on the civil service exam, she was refused a position in the public school system. She took a series of temporary jobs including office building janitor and bookkeeper for a small manufacturing firm, hoping to become a teacher in DC. She accepted a position in Louisville as secretary of the Foreign Mission Board of the National Baptist Convention.

She began planning the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls in DC. The school opened in 1909 with her as its first president. She adopted the motto “We specialize in the wholly impossible” for the school, which taught courses at the high school and junior college levels. She led her small faculty in training students through a curriculum that emphasized both vocational and professional skills. Her students were to become self-sufficient wage earners and “expert homemakers.”

She believed that industrial and classical education were compatible. She became an early advocate of African American history, requiring each of her students to pass that course before graduation. She was a demanding principal.

She never married. She devoted her life to the National Trade and Professional School for Women and Girls and remained its principal until her death. Three years later the institution she founded was renamed the Nannie Burroughs School. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence #deltasigmatheta

[reasoningdaily]

The portraits of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, and Frederick Douglass hang on the walls of the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture on September 24, 2016, in Washington, DC

In August 1619, the first ship with “20 and odd” enslaved Africans arrived on the shores of Virginia. Four hundred years later, we look back at this moment as the start of an enduring relationship between the founding of the United States and the unconscionable exploitation of the enslaved.

In a sweeping project published by the New York Times Magazine in August 2019 exploring the legacy of slavery, Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote, “[The enslaved] and their descendants transformed the lands to which they’d been brought into some of the most successful colonies in the British Empire. ... But it would be historically inaccurate to reduce the contributions of black people to the vast material wealth created by our bondage. Black Americans have also been, and continue to be, foundational to the idea of American freedom.”

Yet centuries later, the lasting impact of slavery continues to be minimized and myths continue to flourish. For instance, there’s the erasure of the many slave revolts and rebellions that happened throughout the nation, perpetuating the lie that the enslaved were docile or satisfied with their conditions. There’s also the persistent idea that black labor exploitation is over, when mass incarceration still keeps millions of black Americans behind bars and often working for “wages” that amount to less than $1 an hour. Then there’s the idea that our understanding of slavery is accurate based on what we learned in history textbooks, when in reality, misinformation continues to be taught in our public schools about slavery’s legacy.

To unpack what often gets mistold or misunderstood, we asked five historians to debunk the biggest myths about slavery. Here’s what they said, in their own words.

1) The myth that slaves never rebelled

Miseducation surrounding slavery in the US has led to an elaborate mythology of half truths and missing information. One key piece of missing history concerns slave revolts: Few history books or popular media portrayals of the trans-Atlantic slave trade discuss the many slave rebellions that occurred throughout America’s early history.

C.L.R. James’s A History of Pan African Revolt describes many small rebellions such as the Stono Plantation insurgence of September 1739 in the South Carolina colony, where a small group of enslaved Africans first killed two guards. Others joined them as they moved to nearby plantations, setting them afire and killing about two dozen enslavers, especially violent overseers. Nat Turner’s August 1831 uprising in Southampton, Virginia, where some 55 to 65 enslavers were killed and their plantations burned, serves as another example.

 A country road follows the trail of Nat Turner’s 1831 slave rebellion in rural southeastern Virginia, June 5, 2010. On either side, farms were burned and slavers murdered as Nat Turner and his followers marched toward the town of Jerusalem, now renamed Courtland. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images 

Enslaved Africans resisted and rebelled against individual slave holders and the system of slavery as a whole. Some slipped away secretly to learn to read. Many simply escaped. Others joined the abolitionist movements, wrote books, and gave lectures to the public about their experiences in captivity. And others led or participated in open combat against their captors.

Omitting or minimizing these stories of rebellion helps hide the violent and traumatic experiences enslaved Africans endured at the hands of enslavers, which prompted such revolts. If we are unaware of resistance, it is easier for us to believe the enslaved were happy, docile, or that their conditions were not inhumane. It then becomes easier to dismiss economic and epigenetic legacies of the transatlantic slave system.

Dale Allender is an associate professor at California State University, Sacramento.

2) The myth that house slaves had it better than field slaves

While physical labor in the fields was excruciating for the enslaved — clearing land, planting, and harvesting that often destroyed their bodies — that didn’t negate the physical and emotional violence enslaved women, and sometimes men and children, suffered at the hands of enslavers in their homes.

In fact, rape of black women by white enslavers was so prevalent that a 2016 study revealed 16.7 percent of African Americans’ ancestors can be traced back to Europe. One of the study’s authors concludes that the first African Americans to leave the South were those genetically related to the men who raped their mothers, grandmothers, and/or great-grandmothers. These were the enslaved African Americans within the closest proximity to and who spent the longest durations with white men: the ones who toiled in the houses of slave owners.

 An unidentified woman poses with a book in her hands, circa 1850. The original caption identifies her only as a “freed slave.” Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images 

A 2015 study determined that 50 percent of rape survivors develop PTSD. It is hard to imagine that enslaved and freedom-seeking African American survivors of rape — female, male, old, young, no matter their physical or mental abilities — did not experience further anxiety, fear, and shame associated with a condition they could not control in a situation out of control. Those African Americans with the most European ancestry, those tormented mentally, physically, emotionally, and genetically in the house, knew they had to get out. In fact, they fled the farthest — Southern whites are more closely related to blacks now living in the North than the South.

Jason Allen is a public historian and dialogue facilitator working at nonprofits, hospitals, and businesses in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

3) The myth that abolition was the end of racism

A common myth about American slavery is that when it ended, white supremacy or racism in America also ended.

Recently, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell offered a familiar variant of this myth when he said he opposed reparations “for something that happened 150 years ago.” To the Kentucky Republican, a descendant of enslavers, slavery simply was, and then it just wasn’t, as though the battlefield had leveled the playing field when it came to race.

But the truth is that long after the Civil War, white Americans continue to carry the same set of white supremacist beliefs that governed their thoughts and actions during slavery and into the post-emancipation era.

In the South, especially, whites retained an enslaver’s mentality. They embraced sharecropping and convict leasing to control black labor in late 19th century, enacted Jim Crow laws to regulate black behavior in the early 20th century, and use racial terror to police the color line to this day.

 In this undated photo, two men use segregated drinking fountains in the American South. Getty Images 

In the North, whites also rejected racial equality. After emancipation, they refused to make abandoned and confiscated land available to freedmen because they believed that African Americans would not work without white supervision. And when African Americans began fleeing Dixie during the Great Migration, white Northerners instituted their own brand of Jim Crow, segregating neighborhoods and refusing to hire black workers on a nondiscriminatory basis.

Slavery’s legacy is white supremacy. The ideology, which rationalized bondage for 250 years, has justified the discriminatory treatment of African Americans for the 150 years since the war ended. The belief that black people are less than white people has made segregated schools acceptable, mass incarceration possible, and police violence permissible.

This makes the myth that slavery had no lasting impact extremely consequential — denying the persistence and existence of white supremacy obscures the root causes of the problems that continue to plague African Americans. As a result, policymakers fixate on fixing black people instead of trying to undo the discriminatory systems and structures that have resulted in separate and unequal education, voter suppression, health disparities, and a wealth gap.

Something did “happen” 150 years ago: Slavery ended. But the institution’s influence on American racism and its continued impact on African Americans is still felt today.

Hasan Kwame Jeffries is an associate professor at Ohio State University.

4) The myth that history class taught us everything we needed to know about slavery

Many of us first learned about slavery in our middle or high school history classes, but some of us learned much earlier — in elementary school, through children’s books, or even Black History Month curriculum and programs. Unfortunately, we don’t always learn the entire story.

Most of us only learned partial truths about slavery in the United States. After the Civil War and Reconstruction, many in the North and South wanted to put an end to continuing tensions. But this wasn’t done just through the Compromise of 1877, when the federal government pulled the last troops out of the South; it was also done by suppressing the rights of black Americans and elevating the so-called “Lost Cause” of the enslavers.

 The Tennessee-based group ��New Confederate State of America” held a protest in support of retaining a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee located on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, September 16, 2017. Win McNamee/Getty Images 

The Lost Cause is a distorted version of Civil War history. In the decades after the war, a number of Southern historians began to write that slaveholders were noble and had the right to secede from the Union when the North wished to interfere with their way of life. Due to efforts by a group of Southern socialites known as the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Lost Cause ideology influenced history textbooks as well as books for children and adults. The accomplishments of black Americans involved in the abolition movement, such as Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Maria W. Stewart, Henry Highland Garnet, and William Still, were downplayed. Union generals like Ulysses S. Grant were denigrated, as were anti-racist whites from John Brown to William Lloyd Garrison. Generations later, there are still many people around the country who believe the Civil War was about states’ rights and that slaves who had good masters were treated well.

Even an accurate historical curriculum emphasizes progress, triumph, and optimism for the country as a whole, without taking into account how slavery continues to affect black Americans and influence present-day domestic policy from urban planning to health care. It does not emphasize that 12 of the first 18 presidents were enslavers, that enslaved Africans from particular cultures were prized for their skills from rice cultivation to metallurgy, and that enslaved people used every tool at their disposal to resist bondage and seek freedom. From slavery to Jim Crow to civil rights to the first black president, the black American story is forced into the story of the unassailable American dream — even when the truth is more complicated.

Given what we learn about slavery, when we learn it, and how, it is clear that everyone still has much more to learn. Teaching Tolerance and Teaching for Change are two organizations that have been wrestling with how we introduce this topic to our young. And what they’re learning is that the way forward is to unlearn.

Ebony Elizabeth Thomas is an associate professor at the University of Pennsylvania.

5) The myth that slavery doesn’t exist today

One of the greatest myths about slavery is that it ended. In fact, it evolved into its modern form: mass incarceration.

The United States has the highest prison population in the world. More than 2.2 million Americans are incarcerated; 4.5 million are on probation or parole. African Americans make up roughly 13 percent of the general population. But black men, women, and youth have outsize representation in the criminal justice system, where they make up 34 percent of the 6.8 million people who are under its control. Their labor is used to produce goods and services for businesses that profit from prison labor.

 Prisoners at the Ferguson Unit, a large prison along the Trinity River in Texas, actively work the farm the prison runs, which includes planting and harvesting an annual cotton crop, 1997. The prison is located on a former cotton slave plantation. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images 

For those of us who study the early history of mass incarceration in America, these statistics are not surprising. From the late 1860s through the 1920s, over 90 percent of the prison and jail populations of the South were black. Thousands of incarcerated men, women, and children were hired out by the state to private factories and farms for a fee. From sunup to sundown, they worked under the watchful eye of brutal “whipping bosses” who flogged, mauled, and murdered them. They earned nothing for their toil. Today, labor exploitation, the denial of human dignity and the right to citizenship, family separation, and violent punishment define our criminal justice system in ways that mirror slavery.

Hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people work. According to a 2017 report published by the Prison Policy Initiative, “the average of the minimum daily wages paid to incarcerated workers for non-industry prison jobs is now 86 cents.” Those assigned to work for state-owned businesses (correctional industries) earn between 33 cents and $1.41 per hour. In 2018, incarcerated Americans held a nationwide strike to end “prison slavery.” In a list of demands, striking individuals called for “all persons imprisoned in any place of detention under United States jurisdiction” to be “paid the prevailing wage in their state or territory for their labor.”

This is a year to remember slavery’s origins. It is also an opportunity to critique its legacies. Let’s not get so caught up in our efforts to commemorate slavery’s beginning that we fail to advocate for its end.

Talitha LeFlouria is the Lisa Smith Discovery Associate Professor at the University of Virginia.

Correction: An earlier version misstated the range of presidents who were enslavers. It was 12 of the first 18 presidents, not 12 of the first 16.

[black-paraphernalia]

       DR VERNON JOHNS

Born: April 22, 1892, Darlington Heights, VA 

Died: June 11, 1965, Washington, D.C.

Dr. Vernon Johns was an American minister based in the South and a pioneer in the civil rights movement. He is best known as the pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Father of six children

Education: The University of Chicago, Oberlin College, Boydton Academic and Bible Institute

12 Things about Vernon Johns, a Devoted Preacher, and Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement;

The Man Who Laid the GroundWork 

for

 Martin Luther King Jr.

Johns was born in Darlington Heights, Prince Edward County, Virginia. Three of his grandparents had been enslaved. His paternal grandfather was hanged for killing his master.

In 1915, Johns graduated from Virginia Theological Seminary and College.

While at Oberlin, Johns was highly respected by both his classmates and the faculty; he was chosen to give the annual student oration. After graduating from Oberlin in 1918, he attended the University of Chicago’s graduate school of theology.

In 1926, he was the first African American to have his work published in Best Sermons of the Year.

In 1929–33 Johns served as president of Lynchburg’s Virginia Theological Seminary and College. He was unable to stabilize the school’s finances and was forced to resign. He returned to his family farm for several years.

On one occasion, he paid his fare on a bus in Montgomery, and was directed to the back in the custom of segregated seating. He refused to sit there and demanded, and got, his money back.

He persuaded black women to bring charges in court against their white rapists, and he helped the women with their cases. No one was convicted, but just getting the white men into court was an achievement.

In 1947 Johns found his way to the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. In spite of his eccentricities, its black-elite congregation liked his preaching and his leadership. Within two years, however, he started to speak out about racial issues and to castigate his congregation for ignoring them.

He sometimes ruffled feathers among his upper- and middle-class congregation by selling his farm produce outside the church building.

Following his departure from Dexter, Johns continued to speak at churches and colleges throughout the United States. At King’s request, he returned to Dexter as guest preacher for its 79th anniversary service.

A television film, Road to Freedom: The Vernon Johns Story (1994), written by Leslie Lee and Kevin Arkadie, was based on an unpublished biography by Henry W. Powell of The Vernon Johns Society.

David Anderson Elementary School in Petersburg, Virginia, was renamed as Vernon Johns Middle School. In 2009 was adapted as the junior high school for the city school system

SOURCE BY: Carla D. Wilson Laskey -  Using words to inspire, motivate, and encourage us all to positively impact the world for the greater good of all! https://linktr.ee/CarlaDee

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[ausetkmt]

AL.com: Alabama bank slammed for Robert E. Lee, MLK holiday sign: ‘Pull your money out’

Alabama and Mississippi are the only two states in the union to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert E. Lee on the same day. Every year, notices reminding bank customers, teachers and post office visitors of the joint holiday on the third Monday in January draw confusion.

This year, Alabama celebrates the holiday Monday, January 16, 2023.

More recently, a photo of an Alabama-based bank commemorating the Confederate general alongside King has gone viral online.

“This office will be closed Monday, January 16 in observance of Robert E. Lee and Martin Luther King, Jr.,” a flyer read outside of a CB&S Bank, according to a photo posted to Reddit Wednesday.

CB&S Bank is headquartered in Russellville and serves dozens of locations across Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee. It is unclear when and at which location the photo was taken, and efforts by AL.com to reach CEO Mike Ross were not immediately successful.

“If you live in Alabama you should pull your money out of [CB&S Bank] immediately,” Brock Boone, a civil rights attorney, said in a tweet Wednesday evening. “Unless you think Black Americans should be slaves.”

Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday is recognized nationally on the third Monday of January. For decades, Alabama has officially observed the birthday of Lee, a Confederate general born on Jan. 19, 1807 in Virginia, alongside the slain civil rights leader.

Read more: Renaming of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis schools will be first to test Alabama monuments law

Only Alabama and Mississippi combine a holiday honoring Lee and King, though Alabama lists Lee’s name second to King’s in its most recent calendar. Other states, including Florida and Tennessee, set aside a day for Lee but do not combine it with the King holiday and state offices remain open.

Previous efforts to end the joint holiday, including a 2020 bill that would give Lee his own day in October, have failed in the Alabama Legislature. Southern states began celebrating days honoring Lee and other Confederate leaders in the late 1800s.

“Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert E. Lee were two men with totally different agendas, beliefs and goals,” Sen. Vivian Figures, the author of the bill, told AL.com at the time. “To separate them as individual holidays is the right thing to do.”

Read more: Alabama lawmaker wants to separate King, Robert E. Lee holidays

Alabama also recognizes Confederate Memorial Day on April 24 and Jefferson Davis’ Birthday on June 5. Rosa Parks Day, on December 1, is commemoration on.

Juneteenth, a federal holiday recognizing the end of slavery, was recognized statewide in 2022. The legislature must still decide if it will become a permanent state holiday.

[yay855]

In the United States, by the 1960s, desegregation was legally mandatory for all schools. Instead of complying with the new federal law, Virginia shut down all of its public schools for nearly a decade to prevent it. My middle school was named after the Senator who spearheaded the shutdown until 2015, when they renamed it after years of people complaining.

Free public pools were a thing for years and years, and they were all closed down by the 1960s to prevent black people from using them.

Even today, you have politicians desperately trying to shut down public education and other resources rather than allow white children and black children to exist near each other. Racists and white supremacists do not care about improving their own quality of life, literally the only metric they care about is still being better off than minorities. They will destroy something from everyone to stop other people they don't like from playing with it, like a misbehaving toddler.

THIS RIGHT HERE

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 10.9 (before 1920)

768 – Carloman I and Charlemagne are crowned kings of the Franks. 1238 – James I of Aragon founds the Kingdom of Valencia. 1410 – The first known mention of the Prague astronomical clock. 1446 – The Hangul alphabet is published in Korea. 1594 – Troops of the Portuguese Empire are defeated on Sri Lanka, bringing an end to the Campaign of Danture. 1604 – Kepler's Supernova is the most recent supernova to be observed within the Milky Way. 1635 – Roger Williams is banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony after religious and policy disagreements. 1701 – The Collegiate School of Connecticut (later renamed Yale University) is chartered in Old Saybrook. 1708 – Peter the Great defeats the Swedes at the Battle of Lesnaya. 1740 – Dutch colonists and Javanese natives begin a massacre of the ethnic Chinese population in Batavia, eventually killing at least 10,000. 1760 – Seven Years' War: Russian and Austrian troops briefly occupy Berlin. 1790 – A severe earthquake in northern Algeria causes severe damage and a tsunami in the Mediterranean Sea and kills three thousand. 1799 – HMS Lutine sinks with the loss of 240 men and a cargo worth £1,200,000. 1804 – Hobart, capital of Tasmania, is founded. 1806 – Prussia begins the War of the Fourth Coalition against France. 1812 – War of 1812: In a naval engagement on Lake Erie, American forces capture two British ships: HMS Detroit and HMS Caledonia. 1820 – Guayaquil declares independence from Spain. 1825 – Restauration arrives in New York Harbor from Norway, the first organized immigration from Norway to the United States. 1831 – Ioannis Kapodistrias, the first head of state of independent Greece, is assassinated. 1834 – Opening of the Dublin and Kingstown Railway, the first public railway on the island of Ireland. 1847 – Slavery is abolished in the Swedish colony of Saint Barthélemy. 1861 – American Civil War: Union troops repel a Confederate attempt to capture Fort Pickens at the Battle of Santa Rosa Island. 1864 – American Civil War: Union cavalrymen defeat Confederate forces at Toms Brook, Virginia. 1873 – A meeting at the U.S. Naval Academy establishes the U.S. Naval Institute. 1874 – The Universal Postal Union is created by the Treaty of Bern. 1900 – The Cook Islands become a territory of the United Kingdom. 1911 – An accidental bomb explosion triggers the Wuchang Uprising against the Qing dynasty, beginning the Xinhai Revolution. 1913 – The steamship SS Volturno catches fire in the mid-Atlantic. 1914 – World War I: The Siege of Antwerp comes to an end. 1918 – The Finnish Parliament offers to Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse the throne of a short-lived Kingdom of Finland. 1919 – The Cincinnati Reds win the World Series, resulting in the Black Sox Scandal.

[forestkodama]

I commute 60 miles every work day on Route/Rt 17. I wouldn't say that all East Coasters use "highway" interchangeably, especially if you live in an interstate corridor. But many if not most people will casually refer to the number of the interstate/highway without the prefix, i.e. Interstate or I95 just becomes 95, Route 1 just becomes 1.

Highways also get local names. The name of Rt 1 was called Jefferson Davis Highway throughout Virginia until very recently, when the state finally let it be renamed. However, they allowed the new names to be made by the counties/cities that the highway runs through. So Rt 1 now has dozens of names in Virginia, and they often reflect local political values, i.e. Emancipation Highway becomes Patriot Highway once you cross from Fredericksburg City into Spotsylvania County.

At least for the interstates I've been on in the East and Midwest, if an exit has no entrance associated with it, there is usually a sign that says as much (No Return Entrance or somesuch). I find they are more common in the East than Midwest, where there are fewer space restrictions to building ramps. Especially in Appalachia, exits may exist without entrances; mountains can make it hard.

Turnpikes exist in weird places. Modern ones are usually just called toll roads, and are nearly all automatic except for maybe one or two in the array. I grew up on a turnpike corridor in Kansas. My grandmother would commute to Wichita. Back in the day there were people working every entrance and exit booth. When I attended a private elementary school for a short while in Wichita, my grandmother would take me. Because this is the rural Midwest, everyone assumes instant friendliness, so we knew the booth workers and the booth workers knew us. We would bake them cookies on the holidays; once they bought me a painting kit as a gift. We would miss their faces when they moved on to other jobs, and then the positions were eliminated altogether in favor of automation. But yeah, depending on the year, interacting with turnpike toll workers would have been an expected thing.

Writing fanfic as a non-US citizen like

[dankusner]

VIRGINIA Confederate names restored

4 years later, board votes 5-1 for change, citing due process lack

A Virginia school board voted Friday to restore the names of Confederate military leaders to a high school and an elementary school, four years after the names were removed amid nationwide protests calling for a reckoning over racial injustice.

In a reversal experts believe was the first of its kind, Shenandoah County’s school board voted 5-1 to rename Mountain View High School as Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary as Ashby Lee Elementary.

Friday’s vote reversed a decision by the school board in 2020 when school systems across Virginia and the South were removing Confederate names from schools and other public locations in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which maintains a database of more than 2,000 Confederate memorials nationwide, is not aware of another case of a school system restoring a Confederate name that was removed, said senior research analyst Rivka Maizlish.

Overall, the trend toward removal of Confederate names and memorials has continued, even if it has slowed somewhat since 2020, she said, noting that the Army renamed nine installations named for Confederate leaders, and removed a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.

In Virginia, local governments had been banned from removing Confederate memorials and statues until the law was changed in 2020, though the statute did not apply to school names.

On Friday, school board members who voted to restore the Confederate names said the previous board ignored popular sentiment and due process when the names were stripped.

During several hours of public comment, county residents spoke up on both sides of the issue.

Beth Ogle, a longtime resident with children in the school system, said restoring the Confederate names is “a statement to the world that you do not value the dignity and respect of your minority students, faculty and staff.”

Kenny Wakeman, a lifelong county resident, said the Stonewall Jackson name “stood proudly for 60 years until 2020,” when he said the “actions of a rogue police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota,” prompted a move to change the name, a reference to the killing of George Floyd that propelled nationwide protests and debate over racial injustice.

Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was a Confederate general from Virginia who gained fame at the First Battle of Bull Run near Manassas in 1861.

Ashby Lee is named for both Gen. Robert E. Lee, a Virginia native, and for Turner Ashby, a Confederate cavalry officer who was killed in battle in 1862 near Harrisonburg, Va.