#white lies about american enslavement of Black people

[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.

[emmafreakecreations]

When ever I think about Rhys saying "Both sides did bad things." It just reminds me so much of Americans who like to wave away that the confederates in the Civil War were fighting to keep slavery and/or spew The Lost cause Mythology.

For those of you who are not American or maybe never learned this but the Lost Cause mythology is basically lies and rewriting of history that confederates did themselves starting soon after the end of the war to mask their true intentions of the war. Things like, "it was all about slave rights and taxes! The north was being aggressive; during Sherman's march they burned, pillaged, and raped! Slavery wasn't actually that bad and if anything black people needed it!" All of it lies. The real reason they succeeded from the Union was slavery; they wanted to keep slavery and expand it into future states. They wanted to keep it so bad they written it into the confederacy constitution. The fight over slavery started very soon after the revolution ended and then built and built with every compromise on which new states would be free states and which would be slave, the rise in abolitionism, and more laws making it harder for slaves to escape. It exploded when Lincoln was elected President. He wasn't even inaugurated and states had already succeeded. The founding fathers didn't do anything about it because a) some owned slaves b) they believed it would die out because it was expensive, it became super profitable once the cotton gin was invented.

And while the Union initially wasn't fighting for the end of slavery but to keep the union, it only turned to ending slavery because Lincoln recognized as the only way to keep the US together and the Union soldiers who marched through the South who had never been there before saw how awful slavery was and wanted to end it. Yes General Sherman lead a campaign in the South and burned things but the things he burned (from my understanding) were the plantations and a few cities. Slaves who had escaped followed the union army as they moved through the south. I even learned that some point some union soldiers killed the dogs of a plantation that the owner used to hunt down escaped slaves and let his slaves beat him. I'm not going to deny that there probably was stealing and rape happening but there was also reports of confederates stealing too.

The point I'm trying to make is that while the Union wasn't perfect you also can't ignore the fact that the other side was fighting for slavery. That's why it feels similar, both Rhys and some people say, "that side did bad things too." while completely ignoring the fact the other side was fighting to keep the right of enslaving human beings and keeping them like cattle. And in the case of the humans of ACOTAR they were fighting for their freedom as some black union soldiers were fighting for theirs and the rest who were still enslaved.

Feel free to correct me on my facts about the Civil War, it's really only in recent years that historians are trying to fight against the years of lies the Lost Cause created in the American public's conscience. Like it is so pervasive that in the 21st century media has 3 vampire characters that fought on the side of the confederacy and paint them as not that bad. Vampire Diaries in a later season had an episode explaining that Damon didn't want to fight in the confederacy he only did it because his dad forced him. And the only one who questions and confronts Bill in True Blood is Tera and her white friend tells her to stop being rude. Abraham Lincoln vampire hunter is the only one I have seen making wealthy plantation owners vampires and the bad guys. If you want know more about the American Civil war check out Atun-Shei Films and his series called checkmate, Lincolnists on YouTube. He goes through a lot of misconceptions and lies about the civil war while being very honest, down to earth, level headed, and not show favor towards the union or confederacy because he does also talk about each of their faults.

[frithwontdie]

that slave kidnappers home meme is not even accurate its literally all lies.

How is it literally all lies, exactly? If you're gonna tell me a meme I posted is not true, then you should explain what's inaccurate about it, instead of saying it's just lies and leave it at that.

The meme points out how some pro-blacks say they were kidnapped by the white man from the homeland in Africa. But yet their slave ancestors took up the surnames of slave owners the "so called" kidnappers and refuse to leave. Where's the lie?

First of all, blacks were kidnapped by others black africans. Sold to Arabs merchants and jews. Which in turn sold to the whites in the new world (also to Amerindians, free blacks and jews in the new world).

Second: Most enslaved blacks did not have surnames. Only given to slaves. Some freed blacks never change their surnames. Some after being freed some had to pick one on the spot, when joining the military. Choosing the surname of a former slave owner appears to have been a common practice. Though not a universal practice, but still a common practice.

p. 68:

Despite historians' tendency to point toward the opposite, many former slaves assumed the surname of their last master. The WPA narratives are full of examples like that of Clayton Holbert, who explained: “We didn’t have a name. The slaves were always known by the master’s last name, and after we were, freed we just took the last name of our masters and used it."

P. 59:

Some freed people took the name of an original owner or an owner from their distant past to recognize ties to family members also owned by them.

Another example from Voices of Emancipation: Excerpt from the Deposition of William Ballinger, Oct. 10, 1901 "When I was first brought here as a boy my first master was Jesse Ballinger and I took the name of Ballinger then and have never changed it."

Third: when the ACS (American Colonized Society) tried to relocate free blacks to Liberia. Between 1820 - 1864 only 11,000 Blacks emigrated from America to Liberia. Which out of a population of 4,441,830 free and recently emancipated slaves. That would be 0.24% of blacks relocated.

So basically, America was such an unbearable hell for black people at that time. That literally 99.76% of blacks literally refused to leave it and go to a country all to themselves. Hmmm...

[scottguy]

Sigh...help me to get *yet another* mutually exclusive set of paranoid right-wing conspiracy theories straight...

The LEGAL.. invited Hatian immigrants that "took all the jobs" (that Springfield couldn't fill otherwise) now have a great income because they're smart, sophisticated, and clever enough to be employed skilled factory labor and "replace" whites.

But... those SAME Hatians are ALSO so primitive, so backward, and so hungry (despite earning a lot of money) that they will lower themselves to eat "the dogs" and "the cats" when they could afford to eat filet mignon or at least pork, chicken, and hamburger?

Please make up your mind.

Do you hate them because they're SO NORMAL that they hold jobs and you resent it? Or do you hate them because they are so low-functioning, beastly, and inhuman that they couldn't possibly hold a job?

You can't have it both ways!

People are just people. But racists think, "only white people are moral."

Oh yeah?

White German people sat idely by while Germany murdered six million Jews! White Americans enslaved, murdered, beat, and separated black family members while treating them like cattle.

So, BEFORE you IMPLY how awful brown people ....

look in the fucking mirror and consider the utter inhumanity of Caucasians in recent history.

White people have NO high moral ground regarding their history of moral purity and behavior. We white people have a lot to atone for before we DARE to cast aspersions on other ethnicities for being "inhuman." We white people have set the bar impossibly low what constitutes "civilized" behavior.

Think about THAT REALITY before you believe LIES about decent people who NEVER HURT ANYONE just because those people have a naturally darker and better tan than you.

[realjaysumlin]

Confronting Indigenous enslavement, one story at a time | Brown University

The Black Indigenous People who were transported to other parts of the world is something that no one ever talks about because the liars of history who invented races to cover up the truth about Black Indigenous People globally being transported to other places such as Native Americans.

Turtle Rock is now called America which is something that most everyone believes. Christopher Columbus abducted innocent Native People from Turtle Rock to bring back to Spain based on his own admission in his journal.

Nothing upsets me more than Black Indigenous People globally repeating the many lies told by the invaders of our lands. Black Indigenous People are natives and Indigenous people of earth however are being replaced by colorism to separate our people as if we are not the same people who migrated out of Africa long before slavery occurred.

Why do we believe in what people say about who we are when they steal our lands and our identity? We would be better off not listening and believing from people who have a great reason to lie about everything that happened in our lives.

What makes these people believe that they are better than all humans who are not considered as being white? Even these people didn't treat people who came from the same regions as they did but this symbol of whiteness kept being an evolving door for humans who had light skin.

The divide and conquer rules only exist if the people allow this sinister and wicked plot to work by keeping the narrative of their oppressors to reign, to kill it, is to reject this ideology and focus on the people who are guilty of causing harm to all humanity.

European supremacy must be stopped before it wipes out the entire human race and these people will benefit only a short period of time before they become extinct themselves due to the lack of diversity.

Please remember these people are not the original modern day species of humans only dark skin humans are and our sun is the best indicator for this irrefutable reality, due to them needing sun protection.

If you are the original people? Why do you need protection from the sun's deadly UV-RADIATIONS? Our human species originated in Africa and there are no other species living on earth today.

The Black Aboriginals People globally have traces of Neanderthals DNA and other parts of other species of humans who died out as well. Aboriginals still have traces of having large brow bones over their eyes which the shit white people call ugly and none humans; but yet embracing the idea that they are neanderthals as if neanderthals never died out.

Facial features and other parts of the human anatomy such as skin colors are associated with melanin and frolic acids with other chemicals that make us humans and adaptation or mutation due to photosynthesis.

[ausetkmt]

https://x.com/AfricanArchives/status/1701984154777182241?t=SxHWO2u10UP8NxoHZY8kBw&s=09

The story and journey of the Black people in America’s history can never be told with a joyful face. There is always sorrow and sadness in the mix. The treatment of Black people in America after slavery can be said to be just as gruesome as the atrocities of slavery.

After slavery, Black people started to organize themselves into productive and prosperous communities. They built schools, owned businesses and even had a middle and sometimes upper class. This was a problem, as their white neighbors who were once masters of black slaves, found themselves in a competition of dominance with their former slaves.

This caused great resentment and envy among the white people, and oftentimes, this resentment led to confrontations and violence against the black community. Below are some of the successful Black communities that were burnt down and destroyed by White people

Atlanta Race Riot of 1906

After the American civil war had been fought and ended, former African enslaved people began venturing into politics, setting up their own business and getting recognition as a social class. This led to increased tensions between Black wage-workers and the white elites.

These tensions led to hate and ill-feelings from the whites, as the Blacks acquired more civil rights. This included the right to vote. It was hard for racist Americans who had killed and subjugated blacks for hundreds of years to accept that the blacks would have equal rights as they do. It seemed like their ‘world of hate’ was crashing on them.

In 1906, the gubernatorial election between M. Hoke Smith and Clark Howell brought the existing tensions to a boiling point. Both candidates were competing for Democratic nominations and were searching for ways to deprive African-America voters of voting.

Both men felt that the population of black voters could throw the election to the other candidate. Both men were influential in the press, and they used their positions in the Atlanta Journal and Atlanta Constitution respectively to incite white voters against Black people. They spread the fear that if whites allowed Blacks to vote, they may not be able to sustain the current social order which subjugated blacks.

To further reinforce the tensions, papers such as the Atlanta Georgian and Atlanta News started to publish stories on how white women were raped and molested by Black men. These allegations which were solely lies were reported multiple times by white people.

Atlanta Newspaper, on September 22, 1906, reported four alleged assaults on local white women. This caused outraged amongst the white people, and soon about 10,000 while men and boys gathered. They went into town beating, stabbing and killing Blacks. The estimated number of Blacks who died from that onslaught was around 40, but personal accounts by blacks put it at way above that number. In self-defense, only two white people were killed.

Greenwood , Tulsa, Oklahoma “Black Wall Street” (May 31 – June 1, 1921)

During the oil boom of the 1910s, the area of northeast Oklahoma around Tulsa flourished, including the Greenwood neighborhood, which came to be known as “the Black Wall Street.” The area was home to several lawyers, realtors, doctors, and prominent black Businessmen, many of them multimillionaires.

Greenwood boasted a variety of thriving businesses such as grocery stores, clothing stores, barbershops, banks, hotels, cafes, movie theaters, two newspapers, and many contemporary homes. Greenwood residents enjoyed many luxuries that their white neighbors did not, including indoor plumbing and a remarkable school system. The dollar circulated 36 to 100 times, sometimes taking a year for currency to leave the community.

The neighborhood was destroyed during a riot that broke out after a group men from Greenwood attempted to protect a young Black man from a lynch mob. On the night of May 31, 1921, a  mob called for the lynching of Dick Rowland, a Black man who shined shoes, after reports spread that on the previous day he had assaulted Sarah Page, a white woman, in the elevator she operated in a downtown building.

In the early morning hours of June 1, 1921, Black Tulsa was looted, firebombed from the air and burned down by white rioters. The governor declared martial law, and National Guard troops arrived in Tulsa. Guardsmen assisted firemen in putting out fires, removed abducted African-Americans from the hands of white vigilantes, and imprisoned all Black Tulsans, not already confined, into a prison camp at the Convention Hall and the Fairgrounds, some for as long as eight days.

In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, over 800 people were treated for injuries and estimated 300 deaths occurred.

Chicago Race Riots:

During World War I, a great number of Blacks migrated from the rural South to the cities of the North. This caused great tensions, and the tensions reached its peak in the “Red Summer” of 1919. The tensions led to violent racial abuse of Black people, which were also called riots, to remove the heinous nature and intents of the events.

During the war, the city’s railway companies, meatpacking houses and steel mills needed people to work in them. And since a good number of the white folks had gone to fight, the black people who moved down from the South occupied the job positions. The population of black people in Chicago rose from 44,000 in 1910 to 235,000 at about 1930. After the war ended in 1918, thousands of white servicemen came home to find their positions at their jobs occupied by the blacks.

These caused more tensions in the city. And on 27 July 1919, a young African-American boy was stoned and drowned by white youths in Lake Michigan. His offense was challenging the unofficial segregation of the beaches in Chicago.

After his death, the police refused to make arrests of those who killed him. That caused one week of race rioting between white and blacks in Chicago. But as usual Black neighbourhoods were badly hit, since they had no law to protect them.

On the 13th of August, after the riots, 15 whites and 23 Blacks had died, with over 500 people injured. Among the damages done to the Black community was the loss of over 1,000 homes, that were burnt down by white rioters. Even the then-President Wilson blamed the white people for the riots calling them the “aggressor” in the riots and uprising.

The Rosewood Massacre of 1923

Rosewood was a calm and progressive self-sufficient town in Florida. Just like some other African-American neighborhoods at the time in America. The population of Rosewood was mainly Blacks, with their people farming, worked for local businesses, which included a sawmill in a nearby town of Sumner, which was mainly a white town.

By 1920, the Black community of Rosewood boasted of a baseball team, a large Masonic Hall, a school, three churches, a turpentine mill, a sugarcane mill, and two general stores. One of the stores was owned by blacks while the other was owned by whites. The Rosewood community had a couple of homes, which ranged from two dozen plank two-story homes to other small houses.

Trouble came knocking when the white people falsely accused a black man of beating and raping a white woman in Sumner. White men matched out from other nearby towns and lynched a Black resident of Rosewood. The Black residents, been surrounded by a white mob, chose to defend themselves.

Several hundreds of white people attacked the black community and burnt down almost all the structures, businesses, and homes in Rosewood. Those who survived the onslaught hid in the nearby swamps for many days, before being evacuated by train and cars to other bigger towns. It was recorded that six black people were killed. The authorities and law enforcement knew about the violence, but no arrests were made. The Blacks left and never returned.

Washington DC race Riots

Washington DC, after the war, with about 75% white population was a very racial sensitive place to live in. There were low accommodation and jobs. But even with the tight economic situation, the black community thrived. Their community was then the largest and most prosperous in America at the time.

They had a remarkable upper class which consisted of ministers, lawyers, teachers, and businessmen, all living and working around the LeDroit Park neighborhood, near Howard University.

By the “Red Summer” the progress of the Black community brought so much envy from the unemployed white folk. The whites were not happy with the influx of Black people into neighborhoods that were previously segregated. Such neighborhoods were Capitol Hill, Foggy Bottom, and the old downtown.

As usual, a false report of a black man raping a white woman was spread, and in July of 1919, a large group of white men in military uniforms attacked the Black community and for four days there was violence in the town. The riot was intense and the white mob randomly beat black people and pulled them off streetcars. The riots and molesting of black people continued without police intervention, and so the Blacks decided to retaliate and defend themselves.

American troops had to move in to restore the peace – they did that by closing stores and theaters to discourage gatherings. After the violence ended, 10 whites and 5 Blacks died, including two police officers. Around 150 people were injured. It was recorded that this was the first time the white casualties outnumbered the blacks.

Knoxville, Tennessee Race Riots of 1919

Just like others before it, the Knoxville riot was inspired by another rumor that a Black man murdered a white woman. A mob of about 5000 men stormed the county jail where the Black man was supposedly held. In the process. they released 16 white prisoners, with some of them being suspected murderers.

After the white mob looted the jail and the sheriff’s home, they attacked the businesses belonging to black people in the area.

The other race riots across America that summer had made the Black residents prepared. They armed themselves and put a barricade at the intersection of Vine and central to protect their community and businesses.

The chaos was out of hand, and two platoons from the Tennessee National Guard 4th Infantry tried to stop it, but it was not possible. The white mob could not be contained – they broke into gun stores and stole firearms, with which they marched towards the Black business area. When they arrived, they opened fire on the Black people, while the Black people returned fire in defense.

The gunshots also hit the Tennessee National Guards. The national Guards then pointed two machine guns and shot without caution into the neighborhood, and dispersed the rioters. Gunfire continued for a few more hours. Out-gunned by the white mob and National guard, the Black people who defended their businesses retreated.

After the entire incident, eyewitnesses said that a great number of dead people were buried in mass graves, and others dumped in the Tennessee River. But the Newspaper lied and said that only two people had died.

The New York City Draft Riot of 1863

This was a four-day violent riot that happened during the civil war. It was caused because workers were not happy with the first federally mandated conscription laws.

The movement of the emancipated Black people from the deep South caused a swell in a number of people who were willing to the jobs of striking white people. Most of the black people were used as strike-breakers during that period.

This led to fears and hate from the white people, eventually resulted in the white mob turning their rage on black people. They were envious of black business, homes, and their growing political, social and economic power.

This led to an organized opposition protest on the 31st of July, 1863, all across New York. The protest went out of controlled and the white mob attacked the city’s elites and the Black residents.

The riot lasted for four days and was stopped by the police with the help of the 7th New York Regiment. There were varying estimates of people who died in the riots. It was reported by historians that around 115 people lost their lives, including over 12 Black men, who were tortured and beaten to death.

The rioters burnt down hundreds of buildings that were worth millions of dollars. Another 50 buildings belonging to black people were burnt to the ground, including the Colored Orphan Asylum, where more than 230 Black children lived.

The East St Louis Massacre of 1917

There was a great influx of Black people into St. Louis in the spring of 1917. Every week, an average of 2000 Blacks came in, and a good number was employed at the Aluminum Ore Company and also the American Steel Company which was in East St. Louis.

In May of that year, over 3,000 white men formed a mob and started to attack Black people and burn their buildings. The governor of Illinois got the National Guard to stop the rioting – this reduced the tensions for a few weeks.

White men, driving a car through a Black neighborhood, on July 1, opened fire into houses, stores, and a church. The Black people organized resistance to defend themselves, and in the process shot two police officers who were driving by in the same type of car.

The killing of the white detectives angered the white people and they formed a mob that spent two days hunting down black people and destroying their properties. The National Guard was sent in again, but this time, they joined the white mob in killing Black people.

There were various reports of the casualties by various news agencies and papers. But it estimated that over 200 Black people lost their lives, while 6,000 of the Black people of East St. Louis were left homeless after their houses were burnt.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Points to the Sunshine State for teaching kids that slavery was an unpaid internship that helped build useful skills. [The Daily Don]

* * * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

July 22, 2023

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

JUL 23, 2023

The Florida Board of Education approved new state social studies standards on Wednesday, including standards for African American history, civics and government, American history, and economics. Critics immediately called out the middle school instruction in African American history that includes “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.” (p. 6). They noted that describing enslavement as offering personal benefits to enslaved people is outrageous.

But that specific piece of instruction in the 216-page document is only a part of a much larger political project. 

Taken as a whole, the Florida social studies curriculum describes a world in which the white male Founders of the United States embraced ideals of liberty and equality—ideals it falsely attributes primarily to Christianity rather than the Enlightenment—and indicates the country’s leaders never faltered from those ideals. Students will, the guidelines say, learn “how the principles contained in foundational documents contributed to the expansion of civil rights and liberties over time” (p. 148) and “analyze how liberty and economic freedom generate broad-based opportunity and prosperity in the United States” (p. 154).

The new guidelines reject the idea that human enslavement belied American principles; to the contrary, they note, enslavement was common around the globe, and they credit white abolitionists in the United States with ending it (although in reality the U.S. was actually a late holdout). Florida students should learn to base the history of U.S. enslavement in “Afro-Eurasian trade routes” and should be instructed in “how slavery was utilized in Asian, European, and African cultures,” as well as how European explorers discovered “systematic slave trading in Africa.” Then the students move on to compare “indentured servants of European and African extraction” (p. 70) before learning about overwhelmingly white abolitionist movements to end the system.

In this account, once slavery arrived in the U.S., it was much like any other kind of service work: slaves performed “various duties and trades…(agricultural work, painting, carpentry, tailoring, domestic service, blacksmithing, transportation).” (p. 6) (This is where the sentence about personal benefit comes in.) And in the end, it was white reformers who ended it.

This information lies by omission and lack of context. The idea of Black Americans who “developed skills” thanks to enslavement, for example, erases at the most basic level that the history of cattle farming, river navigation, rice and indigo cultivation, southern architecture, music, and so on in this country depended on the skills and traditions of African people.

Lack of context papers over that while African tribes did practice enslavement, for example, it was an entirely different system from the hereditary and unequal one that developed in the U.S. Black enslavement was not the same as indentured servitude except perhaps in the earliest years of the Chesapeake settlements when both were brutal—historians argue about this— and Indigenous enslavement was distinct from servitude from the very beginning of European contact. Some enslaved Americans did in fact work in the trades, but far more worked in the fields (and suggesting that enslavement was a sort of training program is, indeed, outrageous). And not just white abolitionists but also Black abolitionists and revolutionaries helped to end enslavement.

Taken together, this curriculum presents human enslavement as simply one of a number of labor systems, a system that does not, in this telling, involve racism or violence.

Indeed, racism is presented only as “the ramifications of prejudice, racism, and stereotyping on individual freedoms.” This is the language of right-wing protesters who say acknowledging white violence against others hurts their children, and racial violence is presented here as coming from both Black and white Americans, a trope straight out of accounts of white supremacists during Reconstruction (p. 17). To the degree Black Americans faced racial restrictions in that era, Chinese Americans and Japanese Americans did, too (pp. 117–118).

It’s hard to see how the extraordinary violence of Reconstruction, especially, fits into this whitewashed version of U.S. history, but the answer is that it doesn’t. In a single entry an instructor is called to: “Explain and evaluate the policies, practices, and consequences of Reconstruction (presidential and congressional reconstruction, Johnson's impeachment, Civil Rights Act of 1866, the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, opposition of Southern whites to Reconstruction, accomplishments and failures of Radical Reconstruction, presidential election of 1876, end of Reconstruction, rise of Jim Crow laws, rise of Ku Klux Klan)” (p. 104). 

That’s quite a tall order. 

But that’s not the end of Reconstruction in the curriculum. Another unit calls for students to “distinguish the freedoms guaranteed to African Americans and other groups with the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution…. Assess how Jim Crow Laws influenced life for African Americans and other racial/ethnic minority groups…. Compare the effects of the Black Codes…on freed people, and analyze the sharecropping system and debt peonage as practiced in the United States…. Review the Native American experience”  (pp. 116–117).

Apparently, Reconstruction was not a period that singled out the Black population, and in any case, Reconstruction was quick and successful. White Floridians promptly extended rights to Black people: another learning outcome calls for students to “explain how the 1868 Florida Constitution conformed with the Reconstruction Era amendments to the U.S. Constitution (e.g., citizenship, equal protection, suffrage)” (p. 109).

All in all, racism didn’t matter to U.S. history, apparently, because “different groups of people ([for example] African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, women) had their civil rights expanded through legislative action…executive action…and the courts.” 

The use of passive voice in that passage identifies how the standards replace our dynamic and powerful history with political fantasy. In this telling, centuries of civil rights demands and ceaseless activism of committed people disappear. Marginalized Americans did not work to expand their own rights; those rights “were expanded.” The actors, presumably the white men who changed oppressive laws, are offstage. 

And that is the fundamental story of this curriculum: nonwhite Americans and women “contribute” to a country established and controlled by white men, but they do not shape it themselves. 

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[frostyreturns]

Frosty Ruins The Neighborhood

One of the benefits from unplugging from most pop culture is hearing about all the dumb shit people are watching that I've never seen. Eventually you get to a point where a show you've never even heard of has five seasons by the time it reaches your awareness. Every new show gets one of two reactions from me "no I haven't seen it" or "what the hell is that?" This show falls into the latter category.

Sometimes it's interesting though to dive into the middle of a show that's totally escaped your notice. I've not experienced an ounce of the shows marketting, I've not seen so much as a second of a commercial for it, I've not seen a clip of it online and I have not even come across a gif or image set of it on social media. This means my impression of it is completely my own.

My first impression is that it's going to be a terrible sitcom. Sitcoms can be bad in a good way and there are some sitcoms that are bad that I'll still enjoy as something mindless you put on in the background while I do other shit. But then there are bad sitcoms that hurt to watch. Right off the bat I notice two actors from different tv comedies, one is the blonde chick from two broke girls…which is a bad sign because that show was fucking terrible. However I also notice the extremely jewish gay but not really gay dude from New Girl which was the good kind of bad tv comedy.

A minute into the show I think I understand the premise of the show I think it's a reaction to percieved tokenism. I think they wanted to make a black show with token white people. It's the racial equivalent of the female ghostbusters, ignore all the positive black representation on tv and get mad about a fake problem and solve it by doing the thing you accuse others of doing. No wonder they picked the bland basic white chick from 2 broke girls and the persnickety magoo dude from new girl.

And like female ghostbusters it's full of horseshit libtard socjus political propaganda pretending that it's funny and entertaining. It delves very quickly into complete and utter cringe with lines like "set your alarm it's time for me to get woke." And of course like any show that follows this formula the men are also all dumb or jerks or dumb jerks.

The point of the episode I'm reviewing seems to be to create a strawman justification of regressive racial politics being pushed onto kids. They act like all they're doing is teaching kids about history and telling the truth…and any resitance to racial politics in schools is just trying to deny history…when in the real world these "diversity" classes are full of lies hatred and insane cultist marxist ideas designed to breed social conflict and societal upheaval.

The characters say things like "I just think its important for kids to get the whole picture." when what they meant to say was "I just want to ignore all of human history except for what a small number of people of a certain group did at a certain point in one specific place so I can paint one race as being victims and another as being perpetrators so that the murderous pedophiles who wrote this curriculum can turn people of different races against each other so none of us notice that it's always just the government committing atrocities and trying to rule all of us like tyrants."

For some reason I don't think teaching kids that slavery means 'that time when white people enslaved black people' is "giving them the whole picture." Treating slavery like it's this thing that happened once in American history rather than something that every group of people has engaged in and been victim to is retarded and evil. Evil because it's being done specifically for the racist and malevolent purpose of demonizing white people. Nevermind that the word slavery is named after slavic (white people) because of how those people were viewed. The retards who wrote this will say things like "it wasn't that long ago" to try to place collective blame on white people but will ignore slavery happening today…currently in Africa.

The other angle the propaganda here takes is one not everyone might notice. They pretend these kind of divisive racial politics is a new thing…it's a new curriculum that they are fighting to add and that most except a few are in favour of. In reality they've been teaching this shit virtually forever and almost everyone hates it. It's just gotten progressively worse and boomers and gen x have been mostly unaware of how batshit insane the stuff being taught to their kids in public schools is. It's insane as someone who's been out of the system for a long time watching tv shows like this pretend like this is a new thing being introduced when I had to listen to it daily. They don't want anyone to make the connection between how retarded people have become and the things they've been teaching. By pretending it's new they can act like the consequences are an unknown but we've been seeing the consequences for a long time and they're very real…and they're fucking intentional.

The other thing about jumping into a comedy like this in the middle is you really notice whenever it lacks comedy. Shows like this rely on character gimmicks and self referencing to generate the appearance of funny. I keep hearing the laugh track going…and genuinely have no idea why what was said was supposed to be a joke. The dialogue is stilted unnatural, the acting is terrible, the characters are wooden and pointless and everything just seems so empty and soulless. I'm really starting to believe that conspiracy about everything being written by AI. Sitcoms have always kind of been like that…but there's just something so alien about the way this show is put together. Like it was written by someone who's watched a lot of tv but has never talked to a person before. I think every character in the show would fail a turing test.

This hurt to watch, everybody who was involved in it should be ashamed and embarassed. If you like this show you have a cultural gutter palate. I refuse to believe that anyone watches this earnestly. I will believe that there are men who enjoy getting kicked in the balls, that makes more sense to me than there being a single viewer for this show. Once again I'm proved right that you should never watch anything made after 2017 if you want to have a good time.

F- late stage cancer

[rockislandadultreads]

Black History Month: Fiction Recommendations

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

Gifty is a fifth-year candidate in neuroscience at Stanford School of Medicine studying reward-seeking behavior in mice and the neural circuits of depression and addiction. Her brother, Nana, was a gifted high school athlete who died of a heroin overdose after a knee injury left him hooked on OxyContin. Her suicidal mother is living in her bed. Gifty is determined to discover the scientific basis for the suffering she sees all around her.

But even as she turns to the hard sciences to unlock the mystery of her family's loss, she finds herself hungering for her childhood faith and grappling with the evangelical church in which she was raised, whose promise of salvation remains as tantalizing as it is elusive. Transcendent Kingdom is a deeply moving portrait of a family of Ghanaian immigrants ravaged by depression and addiction and grief--a novel about faith, science, religion, love. Exquisitely written, emotionally searing, this is an exceptionally powerful follow-up to Gyasi's phenomenal debut.

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Young Hiram Walker was born into bondage. When his mother was sold away, Hiram was robbed of all memory of her - but was gifted with a mysterious power. Years later, when Hiram almost drowns in a river, that same power saves his life. This brush with death births an urgency in Hiram and a daring scheme: to escape from the only home he’s ever known.

So begins an unexpected journey that takes Hiram from the corrupt grandeur of Virginia’s proud plantations to desperate guerrilla cells in the wilderness, from the coffin of the Deep South to dangerously idealistic movements in the North. Even as he’s enlisted in the underground war between slavers and the enslaved, Hiram’s resolve to rescue the family he left behind endures.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

The Vignes twin sisters will always be identical. But after growing up together in a small, southern black community and running away at age sixteen, it's not just the shape of their daily lives that is different as adults, it's everything: their families, their communities, their racial identities. Many years later, one sister lives with her black daughter in the same southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her white husband knows nothing of her past. Still, even separated by so many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen to the next generation, when their own daughters' storylines intersect?

Weaving together multiple strands and generations of this family, from the Deep South to California, from the 1950s to the 1990s, Brit Bennett produces a story that is at once a riveting, emotional family story and a brilliant exploration of the American history of passing. Looking well beyond issues of race, The Vanishing Half considers the lasting influence of the past as it shapes a person's decisions, desires, and expectations, and explores some of the multiple reasons and realms in which people sometimes feel pulled to live as something other than their origins.

The Prophets by Robert Jones, Jr. 

Isaiah was Samuel's and Samuel was Isaiah's. That was the way it was since the beginning, and the way it was to be until the end. In the barn they tended to the animals, but also to each other, transforming the hollowed-out shed into a place of human refuge, a source of intimacy and hope in a world ruled by vicious masters. But when an older man - a fellow slave - seeks to gain favor by preaching the master's gospel on the plantation, the enslaved begin to turn on their own. Isaiah and Samuel's love, which was once so simple, is seen as sinful and a clear danger to the plantation's harmony.

[lyledebeast]

Three Tokens

The point has been made many times that The Patriot misrepresents several populations that played key roles in the American Revolution.  To be honest, it misrepresents all populations involved.  The British did not make a habit of targeting civilians (at least no more than the Patriots did), and wealthy South Carolina landowners farmed their lands using slave labor.  Apart from these outright lies, though, there is a more insidious misrepresentation involved with three populations not centered by the movie: the French, American Loyalists, and enslaved Black Americans.  Each of these groups is represented by one character that is written specifically to present the Patriot cause in a favorable light, or at least deflect criticism away from it.

Major Villeneuve 

When we first meet him, Villeneuve has it in for Benjamin Martin.  “It is such an honor to meet the hero of Fort Wilderness” he sneers in reference to Martin’s brutal executions of French soldiers during the French and Indian War.  It is entirely believable that French soldiers could have held on to such animosities; the war in which they had fought the Americans as enemies only ended thirteen years prior to the start of the American Revolution.  Villeneuve’s dialogue with Martin becomes suspicious as he shifts from anger at Martin’s past war crimes to anger with Martin for forbidding his execution of surrendering British soldiers.  The British had sunk the ship on which his wife and children were passengers.  Just as the French and their Cherokee allies had murdered and raped Colonial civilians just prior to the Fort Wilderness incident.  Villeneuve’s judgement of Martin is superseded by his hypocrisy. This becomes a theme wherein characters’ personal experiences are presented as more important than their political beliefs, particularly when those beliefs are critical of Patriot ideas and practices.

James Wilkins

To get the pesky historical facts out of the way first, the idea of using one man to represent Loyalism in a colony characterized by particularly fierce fighting between Loyalists and Patriots is laughable. The audience is given no explanation for why Wilkins would join the Green Dragoons (historically, a Loyalist regiment formed in New York, though apparently not the in the movie given Tavington’s “another Colonial?” comment). Wilkins is the single American Loyalist present in the movie after the Charlestown assembly of 1776, and we are told that he had been part of a Loyalist militia prior to joining the dragoons.  What happened to the other Loyalists at the assembly?  What happened to the militia? 🤷‍♀️

We do learn that Wilkins’ Loyalism has a motivation, sort of.  It is not revenge, which motivates every single other non-British White man in the movie in spite of South Carolinian Loyalists having ample cause to seek vengeance against Patriots.  To Mr. Howard at the assembly he cites the lack of an American nation, and to Tavington he says “Those who make a stand against England deserve to die a traitor’s death.” Frankly, this sounds like the straw man reasoning a Patriot polemist would ascribe to Loyalists, and I suppose that is exactly what it is.  He is not loyal to cultural and/political institution of which he is part but to a country across an ocean from his home.  Okay, Wilkins.  The movie does provide us with a Loyalist perspective; it just happens to be one completely divorced from accurate historical context. 

Occam

I’ll confess to falling down a rabbit hole of research about Black Americans’ involvement in the American Revolution for this section, and it was eye-opening.  I knew that more Black people supported the British than the Patriots, but I had no idea how enormous the disparity was. The number of enslaved people who took up the Continental Army’s offer of freedom at the end of military service was dwarfed by the numbers of those who directly aided the British or took the chaos of war as an opportunity to escape the plantations.  Both of these larger groups are erased in The Patriot. Of the enslaved characters, Occam is the only one to speak, and some on Charlotte’s plantation die for their silence about her whereabouts.  The longest speech from a free Black character exists to inform the audience and Tavington that he is free and is almost completely ignored by Tavington.

All this means that Occam is the only character to actually articulate a Black experience of the American Revolution, but he prefers to express himself through his actions.  These include staring into middle distance while pensive music plays every time the topic of freedom is raised, risking his life to save the one militia man who treats him as poorly as his enslaver did, fighting for the militia that enslaver gave him to even after he is free, and helping his comrades surprise Benjamin Martin by building him a new house after the war ends.  It is hard to imagine that he is going to surprise him again with a bill for his services.  In short, Occam celebrates his liberation from slavery by doing volitionally the exact same things he would have been compelled to do as a slave.  Freedom, baby!

As egregiously limited as each of these characters are as representations of their respective groups, each contains a grain of truth.  There was some held over mistrust between French and American veterans of the previous war.  There were Loyalists who partook in atrocities against Patriot civilians.  There were Black people, both enslaved and free, who aided the Patriot cause.  However, by presenting only one person from each of these populations, the filmmakers use these characters’ individual choices to downplay or silence those populations’ justified grievances with Patriots.  There is, however, one South Carolina population from the American Revolution era that is not represented by so much as a single token: the Cherokees.  We know they were there; people keep referencing Martin’s victory over them.  The tomahawk prominently featured from the opening shot of the movie to Martin’s final fight with Tavington is a trophy from Martin’s Indian fighting days.  But the only Cherokee people who appear are the scouts in one blink-and-you-miss-it shot after they deliver the single survivor of Martin’s massacre in the woods to the British camp.  That they appear at all begs the question: why is Tavington not using their help to find the militia?  They likely know about the mission; their ancestors were there long before the Spanish built it.  For once, the movie is accurate; Banastre Tarleton did not receive Cherokee aid either.  This was not because the Cherokees chose to forgive and forget with regards to the previous war, as Villeneuve ultimately does, but because they had been driven from the colony by Patriot atrocities that might even have raised Colonel Tavington’s eyebrows.

[reasoningdaily]

Florida's controversial new African American history standards have stirred up strong reactions among political leaders, even leading to splinters within the Republican party in Florida.

On July 19, the Florida Board of Education unanimously approved a new social studies standard for African American history. In doing so, the board pushed pushed through criticism of the standards. Some critics said the curriculum downplays Florida's role in the historic oppression of Black people and others said the standards blame the African-American community for some of the crime they suffered, Ana Goñi-Lessan of the Tallahassee Democrat reported.

Vice President Kamala Harris slammed the new standards at an speech in Jacksonville days after it passed, prompting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to challenge her to a debate in a letter Monday. Harris fervently rejected his invitation Tuesday while speaking in Orlando, Florida at the African Methodist Episcopal 20th Women's Missionary Society Quadrennial Convention.

"I'm here in Florida, and I will tell you there is no roundtable, no lecture, no invitation we will accept to debate an undeniable fact. There were no were redeeming qualities of slavery," she passionately told the crowd.

Here is what to know about Florida's new education standards that led to the Harris and DeSantis feud:

What is in the new Florida African American history curriculum?

Florida is required by state law to include history, culture, and experience of the African American community in K-12 curriculums. The same statute also created the African American History Task Force that reviews the standards for the curriculum. Despite it's nearly 20-year history, this is the first time that the state has created separate standards for the subject, chancellor of public schools Paul Burns told the Tallahassee Democrat.

Here are some controversial parts of the new curriculum standards:

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

"Instruction includes acts of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans but is not limited to ...1920 Ocoee Massacre" (The Orange County Regional History Center called the Ocoee Massacre the "largest incident of voting-day violence in United States history." A white mob lynched a Black man after he attempted to vote and then went on to kill an unknown number of other African American citizens and burn down their homes.)

The curriculum does not include Florida's role in upholding slavery and segregation by seceding from the Union during the Civil War or by passing a resolution that opposed the Supreme Court's decision, Brown v. Board of Education, according to Genesis Robinson, political director for advocacy group Equal Ground, and other critics according to the Tallahassee Democrat.

Critics also say that the new curriculum does not use person-first language by using the term "slave" instead of "enslaved people."

Kamala Harris: 'They want to replace history with lies.'

Vice President Harris spoke at the Ritz Theatre and Museum in Jacksonville, Florida two days after the new African American history standards were passed by the FBOE.

She criticized the new standards for indicating that enslaved people benefited from slavery and victims of violence were also perpetrators.

"Adults know what slavery really involved. It involved rape. It involved torture. It involved taking a baby from their mother. It involved some of the worse examples of depriving people of humanity in our world," Harris said. "So in the context of that, how is it that someone could suggest that in amidst of these atrocities, that there was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?"

She called the revised history curriculum "propaganda," that intended to mislead children.

"They want to replace history with lies," she told the packed room in a historically Black neighborhood in Jacksonville. "They insult us in an attempt to gaslight us, and we will not have it."

Ron DeSantis, Byron Donalds and William B. Allen react

On Monday, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis penned a letter to Harris defending the state's policy and inviting her to Florida to debate the issue. "You have instead attempted to score cheap political points and label Florida parents 'extremists.' It's past time to set the record straight," the letter states.

The letter also mentions William B. Allen, a conservative politician who sits on Florida’s African American History Standards Workgroup, which spearheaded writing the new standards. Allen criticized Harris for promoting false criticisms of the curriculum. "It was never said that slavery was beneficial to Africans,” he said in an interview posted by ABC News. Allen also went on to say, "It is the case that Africans proved resourceful, resilient, and adaptive, and were able to develop skills and aptitudes which served to their benefit, both while enslaved and after enslaved."

As reported by the Tallahassee Democrat, Florida GOP Congressman Byron Donalds, a prominent Black supporter for Donald Trump, supported the majority of the curriculum. He still found himself in a Republican fire storm for criticizing the part of the standard that suggests enslaved people benefited from slavery.

[huseyintr24]

Demonization as a Weapon in the Anti-Cult Information War

Studying the destructive actions of anti-cultists, I am truly shocked by the scale of their activities in Austria and around the world. The information available to me clearly indicates that under the guise of fighting "sects", forces are operating that are pursuing goals of enslaving all of humanity.

One striking example is the activities of the organization FECRIS (Federation of European Centres of Research and Information on Cults) and its Austrian branch - the Society for Combating the Dangers of Sects and Cults (GSK). In May 2005, they organized an international conference in Vienna, which received funding from the French government.

Anti-cultists' Action Patterns:

It is important to note that anti-cultists never give the organizations or people they criticize the opportunity to speak out and express their point of view. That is, anti-cultists present information one-sidedly, based on rumors, suspicions, but not on facts. Descriptions of such groups abound in generalizations that have no factual basis, which calls into question the objectivity and impartiality of the proposed analysis.

Also, the actions and statements of anti-cultists often seem serious. Their opinions are used and spread by the media, while the corresponding religious communities are often not given a chance to express their point of view. This is one of the main reasons why the general public has a negative opinion about religious communities that do not belong to the main religions, which excites hostility towards religious minorities in society and leads to their discrimination.

Anti-cultists rely on the testimony of former members and apostates without verifying them. This approach leads to bias and creates a false picture of religious groups. Moreover, the right to freedom of religion, which is guaranteed by the European Convention on Human Rights, is not taken into account.

Here is a concrete example:

The publication of journalist Günther Zoeyner "Poison for the Brain and Murder of the Soul. The Shadow Economy of Sects and Other Faith Markets" (2009). It baselessly accuses members of small religious groups, which has led to discrimination and professional difficulties. This publication is biased, not based on facts and names some members of small religious groups. As a result, after the publication of this article, these people faced difficulties in career advancement because they belonged to groups that were labeled "sects".

Respected Egon Cholakian analytical video report,, a professor of American intelligence, emphasizes that anti-cultists are pawns in the game of shadow forces: “Another classic method of information distortion, which can affect your perception and create a completely opposite image in your mind about a target organization or individual, is “selective use of information taken out of context”. For example, when phrases, words, and reactions of a person are intentionally taken out of the initial meaning-forming context and deliberately interpreted in a completely absurd way. Such manipulation of information so radically distorts perception that white turns black and black turns white.”

At the heart of all information attacks by the shadow side, lies one fundamental element - lies, the more absurd they are, the more effective. This is not just delusion or distortion of facts, it is deliberate lies about the activities of organizations, disliked political or social figures who become targets of such attacks. The main tool used in these operations is demonization.

We must be aware and critical of the information provided by anti-cultists. Each of us is in danger of becoming a victim of their destructive activities. Don't let yourself be manipulated, take care of yourself.

Support the article by applauding, liking, reposting and commenting

#AntiCult #FreedomOfReligion #Democracy #HumanRights #Disinformation #FreedomOfSpeech #Truth #Justice #Accountability

[imspardagus]

Orwell that ends well?

An opinion piece

In the past few months we have seen apologists for Zionism telling us that you can’t accuse the Jewish people of genocide because they have already been the victims of one.

In recent years, we have had the unseemly fight between trans people who, perhaps misled into thinking that gender is the same thing as sex (a category error encouraged by, but sadly no longer limited to, stupid, squeamish, partially educated Americans) appear to think that there is no difference between feeling you are a woman and being a woman and women who, perhaps misled into thinking that being a man or a woman is entirely about the erroneous binary question “which of only two sexes you must belong to biologically”, appear to believe that unless you have suffered all the physical and mental afflictions of being a woman and have all, and only, the working parts to match you are not a woman (a category error steeped in long and unforgivable victimisation, but horribly close to the espousing of victimhood as a way of life) .

We have had black people saying that only white people can be racist (which is racist) and white people saying that they are being discriminated against because their age-old white privilege is under challenge (which is not just racist but stupid).

We have had people who have prospered from their ancestors’ enslavement claim to be entitled to financial reparation for this appropriated suffering and we have had people who have benefitted from their ancestors’ exploitation of slaves claiming that we should not be so indiscreet as to amend the narrative to mention where their handed-down wealth came from.

We have had billionaires impose censorship in the name of free speech and libertarians determined to lock up anyone who dissents from their selfish world view.

Over in the States, we have self-identifying “Christians” espousing a lecherous, lying, cheating petty mobster as the New Messiah, convincing themselves along the way that this most indefatigable elitist is on their side against “the elite”; that this unrelenting underminer of decency to serve his whiny self-interest is with them against “the deep state”.

Here we have the man who presided over the highest level of taxation the country has known since World War II warning that the opposition is the “party of high taxation: a near billionaire who has pandered to the worst xenophobes and corrupt parasites using our money to do so asserting that he is “on your side”.

Now we have the sponsors of the “Enhanced Games” insisting that words such as “doping” and “cheating” are “discriminatory” – presumably against dopeheads and cheats.

As examples of “words meaning what I want them to mean” (Humpty Dumpty), this is all pretty impressive stuff. As examples of George Orwell’s Newspeak (sometimes misquoted as “doublespeak”) it is rather more disturbing, not to say insidious.

Back in the 1980s, I recall a Wages Inspector’s report on a hotel owner down on Dartmoor. The owner had been persistently underpaying his staff and falsifying his accounts to disguise the fact. Inteviewed, he descended into such a fog-bound trench of lies, prevarications and deceptions that the Inspector, an experienced hand at dealing with dishonesty, was moved to record –

“After some time in Mr L***’s company, one is forced to conclude that the truth and he are strangers.”

A turn of phrase that has stuck with me ever since. When that sick political joke, Boris Johnson, lied his way into being Prime Minister I thought of it. When that sad cabbage, Liz Truss, took over I thought of it again. When the Roland Rat of politics, Rishi Sunak said he would be different – honest and decent – I was tempted to believe him. Then he started lying through his rodent teeth. And I thought of it again.

It didn’t start as recently as that, of course. Back in 1971, John Lennon was already snarling

“I’ve had enough of reading things

By neurotic, psychotic pig-headed politicians

All I want is the truth, just gimme some truth”

(“Gimme some truth” on the Imagine album)

But little did we know then that the downward spiral had hardly begun its journey. Even in the Eighties, it seemed as if it was mostly business spivs and advertising executives who, to serve their own ends, were prepared to lie without a moment’s regret. The limits of their engagement with politics then seemed mostly to be corruption at a local level (now, of course, many of them are the nation’s politicians). Generally, however, in the higher public realm, until Robert Armstrong sanctioned Ministerial dissembling (in his words, “being economical with the truth”), people expected public servants to display a degree of commitment to integrity and truthfulness.

Heavens, I remember a time when a Minister would resign if it turned out that someone in their department had got something wrong, even when they had been unaware of the error. Then, all of a sudden, in the Nineties, it became okay for the same Ministers to blame their departments for things their departments in fact had warned them against saying; and from that time onwards truth was, as they say, elsewhere. Nobody expected it any more.

This was the fertile ground into which the unholy Devil’s spawn, Trump, Farage, Johnson and their kind planted their moronic, satanic seed. And boy did it take, like Japanese knotweed in an untended garden. In their version of reality, truth now became “fake news” and their lies became truth. Whatever served the interest of their moment was asserted as unassailably so. Whatever dared to challenge that immediate self-interest, be it science or demonstrable fact, was dismissed as the fabrication of the wrong kind of people, “dissolutes”, “activists”, “the wokerati”, “lefty liberals”: all dreamt-up entities, modern Golems if you like, supposedly with an axe to grind against decency or against that most specious of political commodities, the “will of the people”, set up like coconuts at a fair to scare the populace .

And sadly it worked. People are not good with the truth. That’s at the heart of this problem. Which is to say that we all want to believe we can tell the truth from a lie, but, actually, we can’t. If there is one lesson to come out of the TV show “The Traitors” – and if there is more than one lesson, I must have missed it – it is that those who most believe in their ability to discern dishonesty are the worst at it. And again this is nothing new. Any conjuror will tell you how much easier it is to dupe a man who thinks he is smart because he will do the work of deceiving himself for you. His ego will insist.

No, people would rather accept something that plays to their already formed prejudices than allow the thought that they may be wrong. And at that point they are on the hook. Mark Twain remarked that

“It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.”

Give them a spade and they will continue digging.

And this is what we have seen. I have already mentioned the millions of poor people in America who contrive to believe that Trump is something like the second coming of Jesus, rather than the two-bit crook and profane narcissist that all the evidence, even from his own pretty little pursed lips, reveals.

Remember that it is only 60 years since John Lennon (again) only had to suggest that “We are bigger than Jesus now” – an entirely justifiable, if undiplomatic, claim - and the God-bothering hoardes of the US proceeded to burn all the Beatles’ merchandise in protest (good result for the merchandisers). Whereas today, people (probably the sons and daughters of the same bigots) would rather tear up the US Constitution than admit that Trump is a philandering, posturing, lying, third-rate gang boss hell-bent on surviving his own iniquity, and profiting into the bargain.

Those who care about the truth, mostly scientists and a few writers, know firstly that their acquaintance with it is necessarily accidental and, secondly, that they can all to easily be misled into thinking they have found it by their own assumptions about what it is. This is why, perhaps, truth is now on the backfoot in an age of too readily available “opinion” masquerading as fact. The honesty of such people leads to uncertainty and their uncertainty, which should, if we were rational, be held up as a thing in their favour, becomes a stick to beat them with in the hands of those whose own certainty is born of blind ignorance feeding arrogance.

This is why we do not have a meritocracy in human society. Intelligence brings doubt. Ignorance fosters certainty. Who is going to vote for acknowledged doubt over proclaimed certainty? Who is going to say, “Well, if I am going to be led by someone I’d rather it was by the guy who admits he doesn’t know?”

Gore Vidal, himself a hugely intelligent man, nonetheless managed to fool himself into saying (and presumably believing),

“You’d have to be mad to want to be President. And who in the world is going to vote for a madman?”

The answer, it would appear, is just about anybody. They voted for Hitler, they voted for Orban, they voted for Erdogan, they voted for Modi, they voted for Trump, they voted for Johnson. Maybe Trump and Johnson are not your conventionally qualified “madmen” but their utter contempt for the mores of normal life, their weddedness to their own depraved dysfunctional appetites would, by any objective standards, entitle them to stand among the deranged. And indicate that the truth means next to nothing to them when ranged against the world of self-fulfilment that they need to believe in.

Our problem with reality is not helped, of course, by our current fixation with the virtual world (not just computers but TV and films, too) and AI. We are people disposed to accept the simplistic, the expedient, sooner than admit that nuance exists and makes life complicated. We have among us people who seem to believe that if you die you just get taken back a level and start again. We have among us people who believe that killing people is just a way to enhance your rating. We have people who do not understand how much accommodation is required to engage in the actual world with real people. We have people who believe that their unevidenced belief is the actual equivalent of, if not actually superior to, the hard-won opinion of an expert. We have people who think it’s okay to lie to get your way as long as you apologise before the credits roll. That, when you think about it, has been the message of Disney for decades. “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less. The question is which is to be master - that is all.”

So is there any way back? There is no reason why there should be. Time and the Universe are pretty well indifferent to our survival or how we make our end. It would be comforting to look back at the Tudors, the Stuarts, colonialism, slavery, the First and Second World Wars, The Cold War, and to conclude “we survived all that”. But actually there’s another narrative playing out: a narrative of forgetfulness. A narrative in which, after only a few years the lessons learned about how to be better, kinder, more thoughtful people become inconvenient and eventually have to be re-learned, the hard way.

That is what it feels like just now. Bigotry, intolerance, self-interest, stupidity (masquerading as conspiratorial “wisdom”) seem to be winning again. We have forgotten how hard it was to put them in their place not so long ago and how much better it became when we did.

We are reaching out in search of “solutions” towards people who, for their own selfish purposes, want to persuade us that kindness is weakness, that tolerance is submission, that hatred of difference is strength, and that nothing and no-one can be trusted, except, of course, them. It is understandable, just irredeemably undesirable and wrong. What will it take for us to see that what they are offering is fool’s gold and that, as Robert Graves suggested,

“Every citizen needs to preserve his sense of smell.”

What will it take for us to realise that not just cream, but also scum rises to the top of the barrel and that we must know how to distinguish between the two?

What will it take for us to see that there is no guarantee that all‘s well that ends well, that it is down to us to ensure that outcome?

[theivorybilledwoodpecker]

@disclaymore

Lol, no. I can tell you didn't do well in history.

Abortion has been around for millenia. Condoms have been around since at least the 15th century. Various forms if contraception have been used for as long as humans have been on the planet because surprise, surprise, not everyone wants to get pregnant.

As for Margaret Sanger, yes, she was a racist cunt. So your theory is no woman or other person with a uterus should ever be allowed to have bodily autonomy because a racist woman once supported birth control?

Bull, fucking, shit!

By your logic, since most of America's Founding Fathers owned slaves, men shouldn't have any of the rights listed in the Bill of Rights.

Now it's interesting you mention Black women, because it either shows how uneducated you are about the history...or shows that you side with the racists.

Black women, and really all women of color, have always had their bodily autonomy violated:

When enslaved people were brought over on ships, chained up and crowded as close together as possible, they were often forced to make the voyage naked.

Enslaved women could not say no to white people who raped them. They had no say in pregnancy either. As a matter of fact, women were often bought specifically so they could be forcibly impregnated and their children either used as other forced labor on the plantation or sold to someone else.

Women of color of any race were fetishized. Asian women were almost always barred from entering the U.S. because there was an assumption they were all sex workers. Those who did get into America were often harrassed and sometimes even assaulted. Native American women were often forced into prostitution by white captors.

But, you see, that wasn't enough for the government. The government created a plan. They would commit genocide.

With Native Americans, they kidnapped kids and put them in schools or with white families. They would cut the kids' hair, beat them for speaking their native tongues, and even rape them.

Native American women, African American women, Hispanic American women, and other women of color were forcibly sterilized at a massive scale. Sometimes doctors lied and said it was reversible. Sometimes doctors told them that if they didn't go through with it, the women would have their children taken away. Other times they wouldn't even be told the procedure had taken place. They even did it to children, you ignorant ass! This went into the late 1900s.

Now, you post here and you say that all that wasn't enough trauma. You say that because Margaret Sanger was racist, women of color should never be allowed bodily autonomy.

Oh, and if you force them to give birth to a girl, I you'll care so much about her that you'd force her to give birth to?

Well, I say go fuck yourself. I hope that you and every single forced birther go through what you force on others.

One year on from Dobbs, please remember the victims of abortion bans in America. These are just the ones that made it to the news:

Marlena Stell

Amanda Zurawski

Mylissa Farmer

The 10-year-old from Ohio

The 16-year-old from Florida

The 15-year-old from Florida

Nancy Davis

Elizabeth Weller

Anya Cook

Kelly Shannon

Jessica Bernardo

Kierstan Hogan

Taylor Edwards

Kylie Beaton

Gabriella Gonzalez

Samantha Casiano

Lauren Van Vleet

Austin Dennard

Lauren Miller

Jaci Statton

Kristina Cruickshank

Tara George

Kailee DeSpain

Deborah Dorbert

Mayron Hollis

Kristen Anya

Heather Maberry

Melissa Novak

Kayla Smith

Lauren Christensen

Beth Long

Anabely Lopes

Christina Zielke

Kaitlyn Joshua

Lauren Hall

Carmen Broesder

Jill Hartle

Brittany Vidrine

Jane Doe from Massachusetts, who had an ectopic pregnancy rupture because a pregnancy crisis center told her it was viable

The Jane Doe had an ectopic pregnancy rupture after an anti-abortion pregnancy center told her she had a normal pregnancy

Emily Doe, whose fetus had lungs that wouldn’t develop and had no kidneys. The pregnancy had the potential to endanger her health…but it wasn’t endangering it yet. So she had to flee Missouri for an abortion.

Victoria Doe from Louisiana, who had to go to Oregon

When we do win back our right to bodily autonomy, forced birthers will forget these people. Some have absolutely no idea who these people are. But when you tell them you hope what they force on others gets forced on them, they gasp and say you're evil. Because they recognize that what they force on others is wrong, and they think they deserve better than their victims.

If you think the "abortion debate" is merely a difference of opinion, you haven't been payinh attention.

[realjaysumlin]

I'm so tired of hearing the repeated falsehood of people who call themselves white explaining their racist ideologies in regards to our Black Indigenous People History even though there's irrefutable evidence to prove that the ideas of scientific racism is a dangerous myth.

The perpetuation of behavior projections and deflection will always be linked to whiteness when it comes to blaming Black people for their heinous acts of genocide against innocent individuals by Christian colonizers.

We often hear the same false narratives about Black Africans selling other enslaved Black Africans, as if colonization and slavery were exclusive to the African continent. These lies are told to evade responsibility for the atrocities committed against Black Indigenous People worldwide.

Genocidal acts against Black Indigenous People globally are often downplayed, with the use of scientific racist ideologies to suggest that humans are a separate species. This is done to create the illusion that Native Americans, Aboriginals, Filipinos, Malaysians, and others are distinct peoples, despite all originating from the same African migration 60,000 to 50,000 years ago.

Many individuals lack scientific literacy and believe in the impossibility of different species producing viable offspring. The suppression of Black Indigenous People's history stems from the unfounded belief in their inferiority to whiteness, perpetuated by racist scientific ideologies.

Racist beliefs serve to boost individuals' self-esteem at the expense of dehumanizing innocent people who have made significant contributions to world history but are not given the recognition they deserve.

This is the dumbest and most stupid post by a man who truly believes that what he's saying is true even though everything he's saying is completely unaware that everything from his post is inaccurate and filled with racial prejudice and dehumanization of Black Indigenous People.

[ausetkmt]

ATHENS, Ala. — Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was born about 40 miles from his great-great-grandfathers’ Alabama cotton farms, worked by slaves a 100 years before.

Like so many long-standing Southern white families, McConnell's forebearers built their wealth with free slave labor and cheap land. Two of his great-great-grandfathers owned more than a dozen slaves, census records reviewed by the USA TODAY Network show.

The Kentucky Republican has known of his family's slave-owning past since at least 1994, when he wrote a letter to a Limestone County judge requesting information about his great-great-grandfather James McConnell, a slave owner, and the settlement of his ancestor's estate.

But his 2016 memoir, “The Long Game,” contains no mention that the "colorful McConnells” he wrote about owned slaves, NBC reported. 

As a child during segregation, McConnell lived on the white side of Athens, where black residents were only allowed to visit for work and were typically paid very low wages.

While Kentucky's senior senator has consistently condemned slavery and racism throughout his long political career, his vocal opposition to slavery reparations in any form has fueled the growing national debate about whether African Americans deserve restitution for enduring centuries of economic exploitation.

"I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago when none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea,” McConnell said in June. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We’ve elected an African American president.”

Mitch McConnell:We paid for 'sin of slavery' by electing Obama

McConnell’s remarks, which made national headlines, came the day before a rare congressional hearing in which Democratic leaders and celebrities sought support for a bill that would establish a committee to “study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations.”

McConnell did not respond this week to a USA TODAY Network request for additional comment about why he opposes reparations despite the lasting economic damages African Americans suffered from slavery and segregation. 

Records about the McConnell family shed light on the history of the region that residents say is still shaped by the legacy of slavery.

The senator’s family history could be a case study in the way many whites built lasting wealth in part by exploiting the labor of enslaved African Americans.

The enduring legacy of that history lies in the balance sheets, supporters of reparations contend. On average, black Americans own roughly one-tenth of the amount of wealth that white families do, according to Federal Reserve statistics.

David Malone, whose family has roots as deep as the McConnell family in the Limestone County area of northern Alabama, believes reparations are a good idea.

Malone's great-grandparents were slaves, and he remembers his grandparents, who were sharecroppers, telling him how white farm owners kept them poor and in debt.

"I know it would be almost impossible to pay everybody related to slaves," Malone said. "When you think of how many people’s lives were lost working for nothing for 400 years, I would agree it should be done. But how it should be done I don’t know."

'Alabama Fever' drew McConnell's forebearers

In northern Alabama, the McConnell family’s slave-owning history is a common one among longtime white families.

His maternal and paternal great-great-grandparents, James McConnell and Richard H. Daley, moved from North Carolina and Virginia during the “Alabama Fever” years in the early and mid-1800s, census records show.

They were farmers and may have brought slaves with them when they moved, as many white families did.

It was a boom period for the cotton industry, fueled by the revolutionary invention of the cotton gin in 1793, and Alabama had plenty of cheap, fertile land.

In 1838, James McConnell, Mitch McConnell’s paternal great-great-grandfather, bought more than 600 acres, according to Limestone County property records.

The lush land was near the Tennessee River in the northwesternmost corner of Alabama, on the Tennessee state line.

"In that time, the Tennessee River was raging, and there was fertile land that you could pretty much buy for nothing,” said James Walker, a local historian and retired teacher whose ancestors were slaves and sharecroppers in the area. "Alabama became a state in 1819, and the Civil War started in 1861. So, for 40 years or so, slavery was big in Limestone County. Slaves outnumbered the whites."

In 1850, about 17,000 people lived in Limestone County, Alabama, and 8,500 were slaves, said county archivist Rebekah Davis.

"There were a few very wealthy planter families that came here from Virginia and the Carolinas who owned a very large number of slaves," Davis said. "There’s still a lot of black Malones in this county because there was a white Malone who owned lots and lots of slaves. It’s still the most common black name in Limestone County."

Davis, part of a group working to preserve the only black school in Limestone County for decades after the Civil War, said economic disparities persist, but she doesn’t support paying reparations for the decisions of people who lived more than 100 years ago.

In some cases, descendants of slaves have prospered, she noted. The Bridgeforth family of Limestone County is one of America’s most successful black farming families.

"They did have to start one foot behind, and the black section of town is economically depressed," Davis said. "But I don’t think you can equitably say: ‘Your ancestor was worth this much.'"

Opinion:McConnell is clueless when it comes to slavery and how it still affects us

The McConnell family slaves

After NBC News reported earlier this week that McConnell's great-great-grandfathers had owned 14 slaves, he responded by pointing out that President Barack Obama’s ancestors also were slave owners.

"You know, once again I find myself in the same position as President Obama," he said. "We both oppose reparations, and both are the descendants of slaveholders."

A USA TODAY Network review of census documents and local property and accounting records show that slave ownership was passed down through generations and persisted in the McConnell family through the Civil War.

Richard Daley, McConnell’s maternal great-great-grandfather, reported owning five young female slaves in the 1850 U.S. Census Slave Schedule.

But he said that four "mulatto," or mixed race, slaves — ages 20, 18, 4 and 2 — were escaped fugitives. One 22-year-old black woman remained at his farm, the document shows.

In the 1860 census, Daley reported owning another five slaves — a 30-year-old "mulatto" female, an 11-year-old "mulatto" female and two "mulatto" boys ages 7 and 10 or 12.

They also escaped, according to the document, but one 39-year-old black female slave remained.

The names of slaves and receipts of sale transactions are difficult to trace. Slaves either moved with families from other states into Alabama or were purchased at auctions in Montgomery.

Josiah and Jane Daley, the parents of Richard Daley, also owned slaves, according to Limestone County Chancery Court records from the mid-1800s. A property dispute mentions their two female slaves, 10-year-old Nancy and 20-year-old Eliza.

James McConnell, whose farm was next to Daley’s, had four female "mulatto" slaves ages 25, 4, 3 and 1 who all escaped, according to the 1860 census.

But, after the Civil War broke out, James McConnell had numerous slaves, according to his accounts the USA TODAY Network reviewed.

Read more:Sen. Mitch McConnell's family owned 14 slaves in Alabama

$4 for boots; $1,500 for slaves

Mitch McConnell requested some of those records in 1994, nine years after he was first elected to the U.S. Senate.

"I have been researching my family history and would appreciate your assistance,” he wrote in a letter to the Limestone County Archives. “I would like information relating to the settlement of the estate of James McConnell.”

The file the senator requested documented James McConnell’s purchases and sales, administered by his son, Andrew. It served as his will and included a list of heirs to receive payments upon his death.

In 1860, James McConnell paid $4 for boots, $1.40 for “lady shoes,” $3 for two bushels of wheat, 75 cents for a long-handle shovel, and $3 for “1 fine hat,” records show.

The accounts also included slave sales during and after the Civil War.

On April 15, 1863, the ledger noted: "To amount received on sale of slaves Confederate state money $1,500."

At the time, the area was occupied by Union Army troops, which included two local black infantry regiments.

After the war, in March 1867, James McConnell recorded: “To amount received of Elledge by way of compromise of the balance of the amount due on sale of slaves $235.”

Diverging fortunes for blacks and whites 

Mitch McConnell’s family’s prominence is still apparent in Athens, where he lived until the third grade when his family moved for better opportunities.

But there are clear indications that success and equality have come much more slowly for African Americans in Athens.

There is only one black-owned business downtown: The Sweetest Thing Tea Room. 

Black obituaries and funeral notices only recently began being added to the county archives, where white families have long had their loved ones' information recorded.

"Slavery still affects the fortunes of African Americans. On one side of town, there are immaculate lawns and houses with two-car garages," said Walker, the local historian. "On the other side of town, you’ve got rundown shacks and terrible lawns."

Walker remembers segregated water fountains, restrooms and movie theaters.

“It was terrible,” he said. “I never went in the white restroom, but, in the colored restroom, there was paper on the floor, and it was never clean.”

Walker’s great-grandfather escaped slavery and became a soldier before establishing his own farm. But the family struggled, and after graduating from Morehouse College, Walker faced a choice of farming cotton or going into the military.

He joined the Army in the Vietnam War and retired about two decades later as a lieutenant colonel. He went on to teach African American history.

"The Jewish people received reparations from the Holocaust, and Japanese people received money for their internment during World War II,” said Walker, who supports reparations. "This country is built primarily on the backs of African Americans. And the primary difference between African Americans and European Americans today is economics.”

Meanwhile, Mitch McConnell’s former home with its large windows, porch and white picket fence stands on a tree-lined street near the town square.

A neighbor across the street remembered playing with water guns with McConnell as children, according to an Athens News Courier article.

Richard Martin, who is white and about the age as the 77-year-old Kentucky senator, remembers segregation differently. His family also has deep roots in Limestone County.

“When I was a little boy, we had a little club and initiation was you had to drink out of a black fountain,” Martin said. “We thought it was something, that we were tough.

"I was the little white boy who had everything. We had African American folks working for us. But segregation cheated me, too."

Martin said he didn’t make any black friends until he joined the Army, and he wishes it had happened earlier.

Martin opposes the idea of reparations. But he serves on the board working to preserve the former all-black Trinity High School, which was founded by a missionary in 1865 and provided the rare opportunity for black children to get an education. It’s now a community and event center.

‘Watch him, don’t trust him’

Nowadays, race relations are mostly cordial in Limestone County but for a few rare blowups.

Cotton is still a popular crop to farm in the area, but technology has replaced the need for most human labor.

In April, a brawl erupted at Athens High School after a parent started a "Black Lives Matter" chant on campus. When police responded, a fight broke out. A video showed officers hitting several students.

The incident prompted gossip around town for a few days, locals said. But they viewed it as an outlier.

Limestone County Probate Judge Charles Woodroof, who holds the title McConnell’s great-uncle once had, shares a similar family history. His family moved from Virginia to farm the cheap land in the 1800s, and they owned slaves.

But to Woodroof, reparations are an archaic idea.

"I vaguely remember a couple of situations where there might have been two water fountains," Woodroof said. "I know from being in this position and being an attorney here that a lot of people have been highly successful — both African Americans and whites.

"We’re so many generations beyond that. It was part of our history, and we learned it in school. But I don’t experience it.”

But for many descendants of slaves in the area, reparations would bring some long-overdue economic justice, they say.

“It would mean that somebody has finally agreed that we deserve something, and I would give it to my grandkids,” said Malone, whose relatives were slaves and sharecroppers.

"My grandmother never taught me to hate. But she was treated so bad by the white man. So, she told me: ‘Watch him. Don’t trust him, because if there’s something you’ve got that he wants, he will beat you out of it.'"

Opinion:This is how reparations could work, but we're not holding our breath