tag:theconversation.com,2011:/au/topics/racial-violence-15604/articlesRacial violence – The Conversation2022-05-15T16:52:10Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1830982022-05-15T16:52:10Z2022-05-15T16:52:10ZMore mass shootings are happening at grocery stores – 13% of shooters are motivated by racial hatred, criminologists find<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/463131/original/file-20220515-35526-n9i0ha.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C191%2C4928%2C3083&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Racial hatred is a factor in 13% of mass shootings at grocery stores.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/buffalo-police-on-scene-at-a-tops-friendly-market-on-may-14-news-photo/1240669163?adppopup=true">John Normile/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>An apparently <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/14/us/buffalo-ny-supermarket-multiple-shooting/index.html">racially motivated</a> attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, resulted in 10 deaths on May 14, 2022, with the teenage suspect allegedly targeting Black shoppers in a prominently African American neighborhood.</p>
<p>Mass public shootings in which four or more people are killed have become <a href="https://nij.ojp.gov/topics/articles/public-mass-shootings-database-amasses-details-half-century-us-mass-shootings">more frequent, and deadly</a>, in the last decade. And the tragedy in Buffalo is the latest in a recent trend of mass public shootings taking place in retail establishments.</p>
<p><iframe id="LRXUH" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/LRXUH/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>We <a href="https://www.hamline.edu/faculty-staff/jillian-peterson/">are criminologists</a> <a href="https://www.metrostate.edu/about/directory/james-densley">who study</a> the <a href="https://www.theviolenceproject.org/">life histories of public mass shooters</a> in the United States. Since 2017, we have conducted <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Violence-Project-Stop-Shooting-Epidemic-ebook/dp/B08WJV7W3P">dozens of interviews</a> with incarcerated perpetrators and people who knew them. We also built a <a href="https://www.theviolenceproject.org/mass-shooter-database/">comprehensive database</a> of mass public shootings using public data, with the shooters coded on over 200 different variables, including location and racial profile.</p>
<h2>What do we know about supermarket mass shootings?</h2>
<p>Only one shooting in our database prior to 2019 took place at a supermarket. In 1999, a 23-year-old white male with a history of criminal violence <a href="https://thenevadaindependent.com/article/drugs-abuse-and-a-zest-to-kill-zane-floyds-path-to-nevada-death-row-limbo">killed four people at a supermarket in Las Vegas</a>. However, there has been a raft of mass shootings at American supermarkets since.</p>
<p>The Buffalo shooting on May 14, 2022, is similar to an August 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. On that occasion, the 21-year-old white suspect posted <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/03/us/patrick-crusius-el-paso-shooter-manifesto.html">a racist rant on social media</a> before allegedly driving some distance to intentionally target racial and ethnic minority shoppers. He has been charged with killing 23 people.</p>
<p>Another shooting in 2019 took place at a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/12/11/jersey-city-shootout/">Kosher grocery store in Jersey City, New Jersey</a>. Two perpetrators, a man and woman, both Black and around the age of 50 with a criminal and violent history, murdered four people before being killed in a shootout with police. Social media posts and a note left behind indicated an antisemitic motive.</p>
<p>Then in March 2021, a 21-year-old man of Middle Eastern descent with a history of paranoid and anti-social behavior entered a King Soopers in Boulder, Colorado, and <a href="https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/boulder-shooting/boulder-king-soopers-shooting-one-year/73-cc012646-e3b8-4972-a28f-953915c3d322">shot dead 10 people</a>. Six months later, in September 2021, a 29-year-old Asian man killed one person and injured 13 others at a Kroger supermarket in Tennessee. The perpetrator, who worked at the store, was asked to leave his job that morning. He died by suicide before the police arrived on the scene.</p>
<h2>No one profile of a retail shooter</h2>
<p>Mass shootings are <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2019/08/06/748767807/mass-shootings-can-be-contagious-research-shows">socially contagious</a>. Perpetrators study other perpetrators and learn from each other, which may explain the rise in supermarket shootings in the past few years. However, the data shows there is no one profile of a supermarket mass shooter.</p>
<p>Racial hatred is a feature of about 10% of all mass public shootings in our database. Our analysis suggests that when it comes to retail shooters, around 13% are driven by racism – so slightly above the average for all mass shooting events.</p>
<p>Some grocery stores by their nature may be frequented predominantly by one racial group – for example, Asian markets that cater to local Asian communities.</p>
<p>But racial hatred appears to be just one of many motivations cited by retail shooters. Our data points to a range of factors, including the suspect’s own economic issues (16%), confrontation with employees or shoppers (22%), or psychosis (31%). But the most common motivation among retail shooters is unknown (34%).</p>
<p>Like the Buffalo shooter, 22% of perpetrators of retail mass shootings left behind something to be found, a “manifesto” or video to share their grievances with the world. And nearly half of them leaked their plans ahead of time, typically on social media.</p>
<p>The lack of a consistent profile doesn’t leave us helpless. <a href="https://www.startribune.com/two-minnesota-professors-have-devoted-their-careers-to-researching-mass-shooters/600123369/">Our research</a> suggests many strategies to prevent mass shootings – from <a href="https://www.npr.org/2022/05/02/1095489487/trigger-points-mark-follman-how-to-stop-mass-shootings">behavioral threat assessment</a> to restricting <a href="https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/policy-solutions-public-mass-shootings.pdf">access to firearms</a> for high-risk people. And the way to stop the social contagion of mass shootings is to stop providing perpetrators with the <a href="http://www.doi.org/10.1177/0002764217730854">fame and notoriety</a> they seek.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/183098/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jillian Peterson receives funding from the National Institute of Justice</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>James Densley receives funding from the National Institute of Justice</span></em></p>A suspect apparently motivated by a white supremacist agenda shot dead 10 shoppers. Analysis shows that mass shootings – and those at grocery stores – are on the rise.Jillian Peterson, Professor of Criminal Justice, Hamline University James Densley, Professor of Criminal Justice, Metropolitan State University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1724932021-11-24T19:46:39Z2021-11-24T19:46:39ZJury finds 3 Georgia men guilty of Ahmaud Arbery murder: 3 essential reads<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/433772/original/file-20211124-23-1q6b1yi.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=9%2C0%2C3169%2C1496&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Murderers who will face maximum sentence of life in prison.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/AhmaudArbery-GeorgiaTrial/290fc5913b704f019be708b84e278c24/photo?Query=Arbery&mediaType=photo&sortBy=arrivaldatetime:desc&dateRange=Anytime&totalCount=852&currentItemNo=0">Pool/AP</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>It took jurors around 11 hours of deliberations to arrive at <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/11/24/ahmaud-arbery-trial-verdict/">guilty verdicts in the trial</a> of three men accused in the killing of Ahmaud Arbery.</p>
<p>Shortly after 1:30 p.m. on Nov. 24, 2021, before a courtroom that included members of Arbery’s family, all the three defendants – Greg McMichael, Travis McMichael and William Bryan – were found guilty of counts including murder. They each now face a maximum sentence of life in prison.</p>
<p>Arbery, a 25-year-old Black man, <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52623151">was killed on Feb. 23, 2020</a>, after being pursued through the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2020/05/08/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-what-we-know-satilla-shores-community/3096389001/">predominantly white suburban neighborhood of Satilla Shores</a>, near Brunswick in Georgia.</p>
<p>For many, the manner of his death raised questions over the role race played in the killing, evoking a U.S. in which gangs of white men killed Black men and boys with impunity. But race <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/19/us/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-race.html">played a backseat role</a> in the trial, only being brought up in the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/22/us/arbery-murder-trial-prosecutor-closing-arguments.html">prosecutor’s closing argument</a>. Instead, the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/05/us/jury-race-makeup-ahmaud-arbery-case/index.html">near all-white jury</a> – 11 of the 12 jurors were white – were invited to focus more on whether the defendants were <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/live-updates/ahmaud-arbery-murder-trial-closing-arguments-day-1/">justified in trying to apprehend</a> Arbery as he jogged down the road.</p>
<p>The Conversation’s authors have explored how race and law intertwine in the following stories related to Arbery’s murder.</p>
<h2>1. The use and abuse of citizen’s arrest</h2>
<p>In the course of a two-week trial, jurors heard evidence from <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/georgia-jury-set-begin-deliberations-ahmaud-arbery-killing-2021-11-23/">more than two dozen witnesses</a>. At the heart of the defense was a claim that the three men accused were <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/11/05/us/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-trial">protected by the state’s citizen’s arrest</a> law.</p>
<p>Superior Court Judge Timothy Walmsley <a href="https://www.reuters.com/world/us/georgia-jury-resume-deliberations-arbery-murder-trial-2021-11-24/">made a point of explaining</a> the law in his final instructions before the jury retired to consider its verdict. He told them citizen’s arrests can be made only if a crime has taken place in the presence of the person making the arrest, “or within his immediate knowledge.”</p>
<p>The verdict in the case suggests jurors sided with the prosecution’s view that the citizen’s arrest defense did not hold water.</p>
<p>Following the death of Arbery, Georgia weakened <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/05/11/995835333/in-ahmaud-arberys-name-georgia-repeals-citizens-arrest-law">its 150-year-old citizen’s arrest law</a>. But as Seth Stoughton, <a href="https://sc.edu/study/colleges_schools/law/faculty_and_staff/directory/stoughton_seth.php">professor of law at University of South Carolina</a>, explains, many states retain similar legislation. In fact, citizen’s arrest laws have been around for centuries – but they have often been open to abuse. Such laws can be “badly misused by those who believe their higher social status gives them authority over someone they perceive as having lower status.”</p>
<p>“Frequently, this falls along racial lines,” Stoughton adds.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/trial-of-ahmaud-arberys-accused-killers-will-scrutinize-the-use-and-abuse-of-outdated-citizens-arrest-laws-170046">Trial of Ahmaud Arbery’s accused killers will scrutinize the use – and abuse – of ‘outdated’ citizen’s arrest laws</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>2. Criminalizing Black joggers</h2>
<p>Lawyers for the three defendants claimed in the trial that the accused men were within their right to conduct a citizen’s arrest because <a href="https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-11-22/jury-hears-closing-arguments-in-ahmaud-arbery-murder-trial">they believed Arbery had committed a burglary</a> despite there being no evidence to suggest that the 25-year-old had stolen anything.</p>
<p><a href="https://socy.umd.edu/facultyprofile/ray/rashawn">Sociologist Rashawn Ray</a> focused on the <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-killing-of-ahmaud-arbery-highlights-the-danger-of-jogging-while-black-138085">setting and circumstances surrounding the shooting</a> – that the victim was a Black man jogging in a white suburban neighborhood.</p>
<p>In Ray’s <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2017.03.008">study of race and physical exercise</a>, he found that Black men living in white neighborhoods were far less likely to go for a run in the areas surrounding their home than were white men, white women and Black women. The reason? “Black men are often criminalized in public spaces – that means they are perceived as potential threats and predators,” Ray writes.</p>
<p>Black joggers interviewed as part of Ray’s research reported having the police called on them, seeing neighbors cross the street as they approached and shutting screen doors as they passed.</p>
<p>“For Black men, this means that negative perceptions about their propensity to commit crime, emotional stability, aggressiveness and strength can be used as justification for others to enact physical force upon them,” Ray concludes.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-killing-of-ahmaud-arbery-highlights-the-danger-of-jogging-while-black-138085">The killing of Ahmaud Arbery highlights the danger of jogging while Black</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<h2>3. Cellphone footage: Evidence or exploitation?</h2>
<p>During the trial, jurors were shown the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59180744">graphic footage depicting the last moments</a> of Arbery’s life. For some, it may not have been the first time they were seeing the grainy images.</p>
<p>Such videos have emerged in several recent deaths of Black men at the hands of police officers – or, in Arbery’s case, citizens.</p>
<p>To <a href="https://annenberg.usc.edu/faculty/allissa-v-richardson">Allissa Richardson</a> at USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the images that circulate are the modern-day equivalent of the grotesque photographs that accompanied the lynchings of the Jim Crow era.</p>
<p>Just as these images from the past serve a purpose today – to educate America about race relations in the U.S. – so too can the video images shot on bystanders’ cellphones. For example, they can be used as evidence in court.</p>
<p>But Richardson <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-cellphone-videos-of-black-peoples-deaths-should-be-considered-sacred-like-lynching-photographs-139252">cautions that casual viewing</a> of Black people dying online and on TV can become exploitative.</p>
<p>“Likening the fatal footage of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd to lynching photographs invites us to treat them more thoughtfully. We can respect these images. We can handle them with care. In the quiet, final frames, we can share their last moments with them, if we choose to. We do not let them die alone.”</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/why-cellphone-videos-of-black-peoples-deaths-should-be-considered-sacred-like-lynching-photographs-139252">Why cellphone videos of Black people's deaths should be considered sacred, like lynching photographs</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>[<em><a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/politics-weekly-74/?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=politics-important">Get The Conversation’s most important politics headlines, in our Politics Weekly newsletter</a>.</em>]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/172493/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Experts help explain the context around the murder trial and convictions of Greg McMichael, Travis McMichael and William Bryan.Matt Williams, Senior International EditorLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1634132021-06-30T12:11:37Z2021-06-30T12:11:37ZWhen a Black boxing champion beat the ‘Great White Hope,’ all hell broke loose<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408713/original/file-20210628-15-12h7z86.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=40%2C0%2C4514%2C2642&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Black heavyweight champion Jack Johnson, right, beat James Jeffries in 1910, sparking racial violence.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85066387/1910-07-06/ed-1/seq-9/">George Haley, San Francisco Call, via University of California, Riverside, via Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>An audacious Black heavyweight champion was slated to defend his title against a white boxer in Reno, Nevada, on July 4, 1910. It was billed as “the fight of the century.”</p>
<p>The fight was seen as a referendum on racial superiority – and all hell was about to break loose in the racially divided United States.</p>
<p>Jack Johnson, the Black man, decisively beat James Jeffries, nicknamed “the Great White Hope.” Johnson’s triumph ignited <a href="https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-across-america-3730b8bf9c98">bloody confrontations and violence</a> between Blacks and whites throughout the country, leaving perhaps two dozen dead, almost all of them Black, and hundreds injured and arrested. </p>
<p>“No event yielded such widespread racial violence until the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., fifty-eight years later,” Geoffrey C. Ward wrote in his biography of Johnson, “<a href="https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2004/11/18/the-man-with-the-golden-smile/">Unforgiveable Blackness</a>.”</p>
<p>Johnson’s victory, in the manliest of sports, contradicted claims of racial supremacy by whites and demonstrated that Blacks were no longer willing to acquiesce to white dominance. Whites were not willing to give up their power. The story has a familiar ring today, as America remains a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/05/what-do-do-about-race-big-divider-american-politics/">country deeply divided by race</a>.</p>
<p>I began my book, “<a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803276802/">From Jack Johnson to LeBron James: Sports, Media, and the Color Line</a>,” with Johnson because the consequences of the fight’s aftermath would affect race relations in sports, and America, for decades.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Illustrations showing troops preparing to leave and marching out of a town center" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=365&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408928/original/file-20210629-15-i3ve54.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=459&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Federal troops leave New Orleans in April 1877, as Reconstruction ends.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/item/93505869/">A.J. Bennett in Frank Leslie's illustrated newspaper, via Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A backdrop of racial hostility</h2>
<p>Born in 1878 in Galveston, Texas, Johnson grew up as the Jim Crow era in American history was getting started. The previous year, Rutherford B. Hayes became president <a href="https://www.history.com/topics/us-presidents/compromise-of-1877">after promising three former Confederate states</a> – South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana – that he would withdraw federal troops, who had protected the measure of racial equality Blacks were beginning to achieve.</p>
<p>As federal forces left, whites disenfranchised Black voters and passed segregation laws, which were enforced by legal and illegal means, including <a href="https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/insurgency-refocuses-need-for-history-of-white-mob-violence-to-be-taught-in-classroom/2021/01">police brutality and lynching</a>. <a href="https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9780803210769/">Journalists</a>, too, sought to maintain social order by preserving myths about white supremacy.</p>
<p>Johnson’s boxing career challenged those myths. He dispatched one white fighter after another and taunted both the fighter and the crowd. He was brash and arrogant and made no attempt to show any deference to whites. He sped through towns in flashy cars, wore expensive clothes, spent his time with gamblers and prostitutes, and dated white women, which Black sociologist and commentator W.E.B. Du Bois considered “<a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/fight-jack-johnson-1878-1946/">unnecessarily alienating acts</a>.”</p>
<h2>Setting up a racial battle</h2>
<p>Johnson won the heavyweight title by easily defeating the defending champion Tommy Burns in 1908. Novelist Jack London, writing in the New York Herald, wrote about Johnson’s “hopeless slaughter” of Burns and, like other journalists, called on former champion James Jeffries to come out of retirement and “<a href="https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-across-america-3730b8bf9c98">wipe that smile from Johnson’s face</a>.”</p>
<p>Jeffries announced to the world that he would “<a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128245468">reclaim the heavyweight championship for the white race</a>.” He became the “<a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=128245468">Great White Hope</a>.”</p>
<p>The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper, said Jeffries and Johnson would “settle the mooted question of supremacy.” The Daily News in Omaha, Nebraska, reported that a Jeffries victory would restore <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=L07wCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT10&lpg=PT10&dq=Johnson+would+settle+the+mooted+question+of+supremacy&source=bl&ots=Irf6RpfNOu&sig=ACfU3U0YUdyayxVqHeqRW_6mouIHYoLeSg&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiFu4ej4LXxAhXPKs0KHeMMAFYQ6AEwA3oECAkQAw#v=onepage&q=Johnson%20would%20settle%20the%20mooted%20question%20of%20supremacy&f=false">superiority to the white race</a>. </p>
<p>Before the fight, there were signs whites feared a Jeffries loss – and that this loss would not be restricted to the boxing ring but would have ramifications for all of society. </p>
<p>The New York Times warned, “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=L07wCgAAQBAJ&pg=PT10&lpg=PT10&dq=%22If+the+black+man+wins,+the+New+York+Times+editorialized,+%22thousands+and+thousands%22&source=bl&ots=Irf6RwhTIv&sig=ACfU3U03XhwVDEzCZVB9yIX_6RR0mjJUnw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjk_sfB7rfxAhVBpZ4KHcN7CBEQ6AEwAHoECAQQAw#v=onepage&q=%22If%20the%20black%20man%20wins%2C%20the%20New%20York%20Times%20editorialized%2C%20%22thousands%20and%20thousands%22&f=false">If the black man wins</a>, thousands and thousands of his ignorant brothers will misinterpret his victory.” The message was clear: If Jeffries won, white superiority would be proved – but if he lost, whites would still be superior. </p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/BnMJL36_oCs?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Footage of the Johnson-Jeffries fight.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Seeking to retain power</h2>
<p>After Johnson easily defeated Jeffries, the Los Angeles Times reinforced white supremacy, telling Blacks: “<a href="https://www.usprisonculture.com/blog/2012/10/07/a-word-to-the-black-man-a-reminder/">Do not point your nose too high</a>. Do not swell your chest too much. Do not boast too loudly. Do not get puffed up. … Your place in the world is just what is was. You are on no higher place, deserve no new consideration, and will get none.” Nearly a century later, <a href="https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-jan-14-ed-johnson14-story.html">the newspaper</a> apologized for that 1910 editorial.</p>
<p>In response to the violence, <a href="https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-across-america-3730b8bf9c98">many cities forbade a film</a> of the fight to be shown in theaters. In 1912, Congress, citing the same motion picture, passed the Sims Act, <a href="https://reason.com/2018/05/25/jack-johnson-fight-films/">banning the transport of fight</a> films over state lines.</p>
<p>In doing so, it kept Blacks and whites from seeing Johnson beat a white man. Historian Jeffrey Sammons says, “in many ways, Johnson represented the ‘bad n—–’ that whites were so willing to parade as an example of why <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/fight-jack-johnson-1878-1946/">blacks must be kept in ‘their place.</a>’”</p>
<h2>An outpouring of violence</h2>
<p>No white boxer could defeat Johnson in the ring, so white America worked to defeat him outside the ring. Johnson was <a href="https://www.history.com/news/white-slave-mann-act-jack-johnson-pardon">arrested in 1912</a> and charged <a href="https://www.pbs.org/kenburns/unforgivable-blackness/mann-act/">with violating the Mann Act</a>, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines “for the purpose of prostitution or debauchery, or for any other immoral purpose.” He served <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/sports/jack-johnson-pardon-trump.html">10 months in federal prison</a>. </p>
<p>But he was much more than one man. “No longer the respectful darky asking, hat in hand, for massa’s permission, Johnson was seen as the prototype of the independent black who acted as he pleased and accepted no bar to his conduct,” Randy Roberts wrote in “<a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Papa-Jack/Randy-Roberts/9780029269008">Papa Jack</a>,” his biography of Johnson. “As such, Johnson was transformed into a racial symbol that threatened America’s social order.”</p>
<p>Whites responded to Johnson’s triumph by using violence to keep Blacks in their place by any and all means. When Black construction workers celebrated Johnson’s victory near the town of Uvalda, Georgia, whites began shooting. As the Blacks tried to escape into the woods, the whites hunted them down, killing three and injuring five, <a href="https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Papa-Jack/Randy-Roberts/9780029269008">Roberts wrote</a>. </p>
<p>Such scenes were <a href="https://www.upi.com/Archives/1910/07/05/Race-riots-in-dozen-cities-follow-Johnson-fight-victory/8746818371120/">repeated throughout the country</a>, according to local media reports. </p>
<p>When a Black man in Houston expressed his joy over the fight’s outcome, a white man “slashed his throat from ear to ear.” Another Black man in Wheeling, West Virginia, who was driving an expensive car, just like Johnson was known for, was dragged from his car by a mob and lynched. A white mob in New York City set fire to a Black tenement and then blocked the doorway to <a href="https://timeline.com/when-a-black-fighter-won-the-fight-of-the-century-race-riots-erupted-across-america-3730b8bf9c98">keep the occupants from escaping</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="A newspaper front page showing news of the fight result and ensuing violence" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=313&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/408933/original/file-20210629-28-18jepxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=393&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Leavenworth Times in Kansas on July 5, 1910, published news of Johnson’s win and racial violence across the nation.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://hchm.org/floats-of-every-description-the-fight-of-the-century-july-4-1910/">Leavenworth Times via Harvey County Historical Museum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The sports world responds</h2>
<p>Johnson’s punishment served as a cautionary tale for Blacks during the Jim Crow era. Black athletes, however talented, whether it was sprinter Jesse Owens or boxer <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/fight-black-boxers-and-idea-great-white-hope/">Joe Louis</a>, were warned they had to be the “right type” of Black person, one who knew his place and did not challenge the racial status quo. </p>
<p>In those sports where Blacks were not banned and instead begrudgingly allowed to compete with and against whites, there were violent attacks on Black athletes. <a href="https://theundefeated.com/features/jack-trice-life-and-football-career-were-tragically-cut-short/">Jack Trice</a>, an Iowa State football player, died of injuries from the attack he suffered in a game against the University of Minnesota in 1923. </p>
<p>The end of professional baseball’s color line in 1946 line was possible only because Jackie Robinson promised he would <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2021/02/17/jackie-robinson-spring-training-story-75-years-ago/4488581001/">not respond to racist epithets</a> and physical abuse so that he would be acceptable to white America.</p>
<p>In the 1960s, white America taught Muhammad Ali, whom many considered the “wrong type” of Black athlete, the lesson it had once taught Jack Johnson. Ali, a brash Muslim who refused to defer to the demands of white supremacy, <a href="https://www.si.com/boxing/2020/04/28/this-day-sports-history-muhammad-ali-refuses-induction-army-stripped-title">was convicted of draft evasion</a> for refusing to be inducted into the armed services. He was stripped of his heavyweight title and sentenced to prison. </p>
<p>Other Black athletes, like sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, baseball player <a href="https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/09/07/curt-flood-fought-for-free-agency-and-against-racism-but-who-remembers/">Curt Flood</a> and football player <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/2021/02/09/black-history-tommie-smith-colin-kaepernick-athlete-activism/6484313002/">Colin Kaepernick</a>, all found themselves punished and ostracized for challenging white supremacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/163413/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Lamb does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Johnson’s victory, in the manliest of sports, contradicted claims of racial supremacy by whites and demonstrated that Blacks were no longer willing to acquiesce to white dominance.Chris Lamb, Professor of Journalism, Indiana UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1575662021-04-08T12:02:44Z2021-04-08T12:02:44ZWhite supremacy is the root of all race-related violence in the US<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/393413/original/file-20210405-21-1lxd79b.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=43%2C0%2C4820%2C3210&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">As fears of anti-Asian violence grow, police seek to be more visible to deter attacks.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/AsianAmericanWomanAssaulted/60ae76c2abdb41eaa98618403dcb2a44/photo">AP Photo/Kathy Willens</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Amid the <a href="https://theconversation.com/asian-americans-top-target-for-threats-and-harassment-during-pandemic-158011">disturbing rise in attacks</a> on <a href="https://secureservercdn.net/104.238.69.231/a1w.90d.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/210312-Stop-AAPI-Hate-National-Report-.pdf">Asian Americans since March 2020</a> is a troubling category of these assaults: Black people are also attacking Asian Americans.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.npr.org/transcripts/980437156">White people are the main perpetrators</a> of anti-Asian racism. But in February 2021, a Black person pushed an <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/16/us/san-francisco-vicha-ratanapakdee-asian-american-attacks/index.html">elderly Asian man to the ground in San Francisco</a>; the man later died from his injuries. In another video, from New York City on March 29, 2021, a Black person pushes and beats an Asian American woman on the sidewalk in front of a doorway while <a href="https://www.npr.org/2021/03/30/982745950/attack-on-asian-woman-in-manhattan-as-bystanders-watched-to-be-probed-as-hate-cr">onlookers observe the attack, then close their door</a> on the woman without intervening or providing aid.</p>
<p>As the current president of the <a href="https://aaastudies.org/">Association for Asian American Studies</a> and as an ethnic studies and critical race studies professor who specializes in Asian American culture, I wanted to address the climate of anti-Asian racism I was seeing at the start of the pandemic. So in April 2020, I created a PowerPoint slide deck <a href="https://www.colorado.edu/asmagazine/2020/04/08/anti-asian-racism-and-covid-19">about anti-Asian racism</a> that my employer, the University of Colorado Boulder, turned into a website. That led to approximately 50 <a href="https://www.ama-assn.org/delivering-care/population-care/2020-teachable-moment-fight-against-anti-asian-anti-black-racism">interviews</a>, <a href="https://mediaspace.msu.edu/media/t/1_g3b8449m">workshops</a>, <a href="https://youtu.be/6SmOUn9kchg">talks</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qtow61RfumQ">panel presentations</a> that I’ve done on anti-Asian racism, specifically in the time of COVID-19.</p>
<p>The point I’ve made through all of those experiences is that <a href="https://twitter.com/DrJenHo/status/1376976442320293890">anti-Asian racism has the same source as anti-Black racism</a>: white supremacy. So when a Black person attacks an Asian person, the encounter is fueled perhaps by racism, but very specifically by white supremacy. White supremacy does not require a white person to perpetuate it. </p>
<h2>It’s not just white people</h2>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/white-supremacists-who-stormed-us-capitol-are-only-the-most-visible-product-of-racism-152295">White supremacy is an ideology</a>, a pattern of values and beliefs that are ingrained in nearly every system and institution in the U.S. It is a belief that <a href="http://doi.org/10.1002/j.2167-4086.2006.tb00035.x">to be white is to be human</a> and invested with inalienable universal rights and <a href="https://theundefeated.com/features/why-are-some-whites-blind-to-the-humanity-of-black-folks/">that to be not-white means you are less than human</a> – a disposable object for others to abuse and misuse.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://theconversation.com/two-stereotypes-that-diminish-the-humanity-of-the-atlanta-shooting-victims-and-all-asian-americans-157762">dehumanization of Asian people by U.S. society</a> is driven by white supremacy and not by any Black person who may or may not hate Asians. </p>
<p>During the pandemic, <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/coronavirus-fears-show-how-model-minority-asian-americans-become-yellow-ncna1151671">“yellow peril” rhetoric</a> that blamed China for COVID-19 led to a <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/asian-american-hate-crimes-up-150-percent-us/">150% rise in anti-Asian harassment</a> incidents reported to police in 2020. In particular, East Asian Americans or anyone who appeared to be of East Asian heritage or descent became targets for the misplaced anger of people blaming Chinese people or those they thought looked Chinese, even if they were of other ethnic backgrounds, like Japanese, Taiwanese, Korean, Burmese, Thai or Filipino. </p>
<h2>A fear of disease</h2>
<p>White supremacy as the root of racism can be seen in the <a href="https://www.dallasnews.com/news/crime/2020/04/01/fbi-says-texas-stabbing-that-targeted-asian-american-family-was-hate-crime-fueled-by-coronavirus-fears/">Latino man in Texas stabbing a Burmese family</a> in March 2020, claiming he did so because they were Chinese and bringing the coronavirus into the U.S. Though the suspect may have mental health problems, his belief that this family posed a threat is driven by the <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/19/coronavirus-outbreak-trump-blames-china-for-virus-again.html">white supremacist ideas of Chinese people being to blame for COVID-19</a>. </p>
<p>This same rhetoric of blaming anyone perceived to be Chinese for COVID-19 and attacking them has been found in countless reports of harassment, including one by a <a href="https://www.cpr.org/2021/03/19/anti-asian-hatred-has-a-long-history-in-the-u-s-and-in-colorado/">Vietnamese American woman who was spat at</a> by a white man as she tried to enter a grocery store in March 2021. Four days later, <a href="https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9375963/Asian-woman-76-leaves-man-bloodied-stretcher-attacked-San-Fransisco-street.html">video footage showed a 76-year-old Chinese woman</a> who was punched in the face by a 39-year-old white man, on the same day that <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/19/atlanta-spa-shootings-victims-named">a white man killed eight people, including six Asian women</a>, in Atlanta.</p>
<p>[<em>Get the best of The Conversation, every weekend.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters/weekly-highlights-61?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=weeklybest">Sign up for our weekly newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>Stories of individual harassment and violence perpetrated against Asian Americans by white assailants don’t always get the same attention as the viral videos of Black aggression toward Asians.</p>
<p><a href="https://www.vox.com/22321234/black-asian-american-tensions-solidarity-history">But underlying all these incidents is white supremacy</a>, just as white supremacy is responsible for Minneapolis police officer <a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52861726">Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd’s neck</a> for over eight minutes: White supremacy made Floyd into a Black male threat rather than a human being.</p>
<p>Understanding the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/18/politics/white-supremacy-racism-asian-americans/index.html">depth and reach of this ideology of racism</a> can be challenging, but doing so brings each person, and the nation as a whole, closer to addressing systemic inequity. It’s not Black people whom Asian Americans need to fear. It’s white supremacy.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/157566/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jennifer Ho is affiliated with the Association for Asian American Studies.</span></em></p>White people are the main perpetrators of anti-Asian racism and violence, but white supremacy is still the problem when Blacks and Latinos attack Asians.Jennifer Ho, Professor of Asian American Studies, University of Colorado BoulderLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1550812021-02-23T13:29:06Z2021-02-23T13:29:06ZHow Black cartographers put racism on the map of America<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385359/original/file-20210219-13-1glotvj.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C2%2C1630%2C1101&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An early 20th-century NAACP map showing lynchings between 1909 and 1918. The maps were sent to politicians and newspapers in an effort to spur legislation protecting Black Americans.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.loc.gov/static/classroom-materials/naacp-a-century-in-the-fight-for-freedom/documents/lynching.pdf">Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>How can maps fight racism and inequality?</p>
<p>The work of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-a-shootout-between-black-panthers-and-law-enforcement-50-years-ago-matters-today-153632">Black Panther Party</a>, a 1960s- and 1970s-era Black political group featured in a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2021/feb/01/judas-and-the-black-messiah-review-electric-black-panthers-drama">new movie</a> and a <a href="https://crosscut.com/2020/02/new-documentary-gives-voice-women-seattles-black-panther-party">documentary</a>, helps illustrate how cartography – the practice of making and using maps – can illuminate injustice. </p>
<p>As these films show, the Black Panthers focused on African American empowerment and <a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/black-panther-party-challenging-police-and-promoting-social-change#">community survival</a>, running a diverse array of programming that ranged from <a href="https://www.history.com/news/free-school-breakfast-black-panther-party">free school breakfasts</a> to armed self-defense. </p>
<p>Cartography is a less documented aspect of the Panthers’ activism, but the group used maps to <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8306.2006.00501.x">reimagine the cities where African Americans lived and struggled</a>.</p>
<p>In 1971 the Panthers collected 15,000 signatures on a petition to create new <a href="http://www.cielodrive.com/archive/berkeley-to-vote-on-splitting-police-department-radical-groups-support-plan/">police districts in Berkeley, California</a> – districts that would be governed by local citizen commissions and require officers to live in the neighborhoods they served. The proposal made it onto the ballot but was defeated. </p>
<p>In a similar effort to make law enforcement more responsive to communities of color, the Panthers in the late 1960s also created a map proposing to divide up <a href="https://www.foundsf.org/index.php?title=Black_Panthers">police districts</a> within San Francisco, largely along racial lines. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385155/original/file-20210218-20-108v3xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black-and-white drawing of San Francisco with designated districts around certain neighborhoods" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385155/original/file-20210218-20-108v3xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385155/original/file-20210218-20-108v3xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385155/original/file-20210218-20-108v3xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385155/original/file-20210218-20-108v3xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=561&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385155/original/file-20210218-20-108v3xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385155/original/file-20210218-20-108v3xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385155/original/file-20210218-20-108v3xf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=705&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Black Panthers’ proposed police districts for the city of San Francisco, created in 1966 or 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.foundsf.org/images/b/bf/Panthpol.jpg">Ccarolson/FoundSF</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The Black Panthers are just one chapter in a long history of “counter-mapping” by African Americans, which our <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2021.01.022">research in geography</a> explores. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2018/mar/06/counter-mapping-cartography-that-lets-the-powerless-speak">Counter-mapping</a> refers to how groups normally excluded from political decision-making deploy maps and other geographic data to communicate complex information about inequality in an easy-to-understand visual format. </p>
<h2>The power of maps</h2>
<p>Maps are <a href="https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/723">not ideologically neutral</a> location guides. Mapmakers choose what to include and exclude, and how to display information to users.</p>
<p>These decisions can have far-reaching consequences. When the Home Owners Loan Corporation in the 1930s set out to map the risk associated for banks loaning money to individuals for homes in different neighborhoods, for example, they rated minority neighborhoods as high risk and color-coded them as red. </p>
<p>The result, known as “<a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/10/19/498536077/interactive-redlining-map-zooms-in-on-americas-history-of-discrimination">redlining</a>,” contributed to housing discrimination for three decades, until federal law banned such maps in 1968. Redlining’s legacy is still evident in many American cities’ <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2018/03/28/redlining-was-banned-50-years-ago-its-still-hurting-minorities-today/">patterns of segregation</a>.</p>
<p>Colonial explorers charting their journeys and city planners and developers pursuing urban renewal, too, have used cartography to represent the world in ways that further their own priorities. Often, the resulting maps exclude, misrepresent or <a href="https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1036">harm minority groups</a>. Academics and government officials do this, too. </p>
<p>Counter-maps produce an alternative public understanding of the facts by highlighting the experiences of oppressed people. </p>
<p>Black people aren’t the only marginalized group to do this. <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-amazonian-forest-peoples-are-counter-mapping-their-ancestral-lands-84474">Indigenous communities</a>, <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Women-and-Cartography-in-the-Progressive-Era/Dando/p/book/9780367245306">women</a>, <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-story-maps-redraw-the-world-using-peoples-real-life-experiences-98051">refugees and LGBTQ communities</a> have also redrawn maps to account for their existence and rights. </p>
<p>But Black Americans were among the earliest purveyors of counter-mapping, deploying this alternative cartography to serve a variety of needs a century ago.</p>
<h2>Black counter-mapping</h2>
<p>Mapping is part of the <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/demonic-grounds">broader Black creative tradition and political struggle</a>. </p>
<p>Over the centuries, African Americans developed “<a href="https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37569-0_4">way-finding</a>” aids, including a <a href="https://theconversation.com/green-book-highlights-the-problems-of-driving-while-black-both-then-and-now-111561">Jim Crow-era travel guide</a>, to help them navigate a racially hostile landscape and created visual works that affirmed the value of <a href="https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12679">Black life</a>. </p>
<p>The Black sociologist and civil rights leader <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/first-time-together-and-color-book-displays-web-du-bois-visionary-infographics-180970826/">W.E.B. Du Bois</a> produced maps for the 1900 Paris Exposition to inform international society about the gains African Americans had made in income, education and land ownership since slavery and in face of continuing racism. </p>
<p>Similarly, in 1946, Friendship Press cartographer and illustrator Louise Jefferson published a <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-03-25/the-women-cartographers-who-mapped-art-and-science-in-the-20th-century">pictorial map</a> celebrating the contributions of African Americans – from famous writers and athletes to unnamed Black workers – in building the United States.</p>
<p>In the early 20th century, anti-lynching crusaders at the NAACP and Tuskegee Institute stirred public outcry by producing <a href="https://archive.org/details/thirtyyearsoflyn00nati">statistical reports</a> that informed <a href="https://www.loc.gov/resource/g3701e.ct002012/">original hand-drawn maps</a> showing the location and frequency of African Americans murdered by white lynch mobs. </p>
<p>One map, published in 1922 in the NAACP’s magazine “<a href="https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/workers/civil-rights/crisis/0200-crisis-v23n04-w136.pdf">Crisis</a>,” placed dots on a standard map to document 3,456 lynchings over 32 years. The Southeast had the largest concentration. But the “blots of shame,” as mapmaker Madeline Allison called them, spanned the country from east to west and well into the north. </p>
<p>These visualizations, along with the underlying data, <a href="https://rowman.com/ISBN/9780742552739/African-Americans-Confront-Lynching-Strategies-of-Resistance-from-the-Civil-War-to-the-Civil-Rights-Era">were sent</a> to allied organizations like the citizen-led <a href="https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/commission-interracial-cooperation#">Commission on Interracial Cooperation</a>, to newspapers nationwide and to elected officials of all parties and regions. The activists hoped to spur Congress to pass federal anti-lynching legislation – something that remains to this day <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/05/us/politics/rand-paul-anti-lynching-bill-senate.html">unfinished business</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385157/original/file-20210218-14-12brl7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Black-and-white image of Rustin at a desk holding a big map and smiling, with papers all over this desk" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385157/original/file-20210218-14-12brl7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385157/original/file-20210218-14-12brl7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385157/original/file-20210218-14-12brl7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385157/original/file-20210218-14-12brl7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=452&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385157/original/file-20210218-14-12brl7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385157/original/file-20210218-14-12brl7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385157/original/file-20210218-14-12brl7j.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=568&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Civil rights activist Bayard Rustin organizing the 1963 March on Washington, an example of how existing maps can also be used in politically disruptive ways.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2013/08/15/ap630824099_custom-9bf942d77b3591a797f1676f5279c69cd12f7e27-s1500-c85.jpg">AP Photo</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Much anti-lynching cartography was inspired by the famed activist and reporter <a href="https://www.vox.com/2015/7/16/8979771/ida-b-wells-lynching-data">Ida B. Wells</a>, who in the early 1880s made some of the first tabulations of the prevalence and geographic distribution of racial terror. Her work refuted prevailing white claims that lynched Black men had sexually assaulted white women. </p>
<h2>Modern maps</h2>
<p>The precariousness of Black life – and the exclusion of Black stories from American history – remains an unresolved issue today.</p>
<p>Working alone and with white allies, Black activists and scholars continue using cartography to tell a fuller <a href="https://www.blackinappalachia.org/bristol">story about the United States</a>, to <a href="https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/chicago-folded-map-project">challenge racial segregation</a> and to <a href="https://www.racialviolencearchive.com/research.html">combat violence</a>. </p>
<p>Today, the maps they create are often digital. </p>
<p>For example, the Equal Justice Initiative, the Alabama-based legal defense group run by Bryan Stevenson, has produced a modern map of <a href="https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore">historical lynching</a>. It’s an interactive update of the anti-lynching cartography made 100 years ago – although a full reconstruction of lynching terror remains impossible because of incomplete data and the veil of silence that persists around these murders.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385153/original/file-20210218-18-139x4y4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Red-tinged map of the US with a plot point in Illionois highlighted to show that there were 56 murders there between 1877 and 1950" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385153/original/file-20210218-18-139x4y4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/385153/original/file-20210218-18-139x4y4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385153/original/file-20210218-18-139x4y4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385153/original/file-20210218-18-139x4y4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=291&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385153/original/file-20210218-18-139x4y4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385153/original/file-20210218-18-139x4y4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/385153/original/file-20210218-18-139x4y4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=366&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Equal Justice Initiative’s map tells stories of people who were lynched.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/explore">Screenshot, Equal Justice Initiative</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Another modern mapping project, called Mapping Police Violence, was launched by <a href="https://www.orlandoweekly.com/orlando/how-an-orlando-data-scientist-is-helping-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-make-the-case-against-police-violence/Content?oid=2478826">data activists</a> after Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. <a href="https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/">It tracks</a> police use of force using a time-series animated map. Deaths and injuries flash across the screen and accumulate on the map of the United States, visually communicating the national scale and urgency of this problem.</p>
<p>Counter-mapping operates on the theory that communities and governments cannot fix problems that they do not understand. When Black counter-mapping exposes the how-and-where of racism, in accessible visual form, that information gains new power to spur social change.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/155081/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Derek H. Alderman receives funding from National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities. </span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joshua F.J. Inwood receives funding from the National Science Foundation. </span></em></p>Mapping is one way African Americans fight for equality and help each other navigate a racially hostile landscape.Derek H. Alderman, Professor of Geography, University of TennesseeJoshua F.J. Inwood, Associate Professor of Geography and Senior Research Associate in the Rock Ethics Institute, Penn StateLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1533692021-01-19T19:53:48Z2021-01-19T19:53:48ZPolice, soldiers bring lethal skill to militia campaigns against US government<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379078/original/file-20210115-23-j8apf2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=51%2C0%2C5760%2C3750&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Militia members associated with the Three Percenters movement conducting a military drill in Flovilla, Ga., in 2016, days after Trump's election. After his 2020 defeat, Three Percenters were involved in the Jan. 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/members-of-the-georgia-security-forces-are-seen-during-news-photo/623578082?adppopup=true">Mohammed Elshamy/Anadolu Agency/Getty Image</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Thousands of police and soldiers – people professionally trained in the use of violence and familiar with military protocols – are part of an extremist effort to undermine the U.S. government and subvert the democratic process. </p>
<p>According to an investigative report published in the Atlantic in November into a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/right-wing-militias-civil-war/616473/">leaked database kept by the Oath Keepers</a> – one of several <a href="https://theconversation.com/symbols-of-white-supremacy-flew-proudly-at-the-capitol-riot-5-essential-reads-153055">far-right and white supremacist militias</a> that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 – 10% of Oath Keepers are current police officers or military members. Another significant portion of the group’s membership is retired military and <a href="https://theconversation.com/capitol-siege-raises-questions-over-extent-of-white-supremacist-infiltration-of-us-police-153145">law enforcement personnel</a>.</p>
<p>The hate group – founded by a former Army paratrooper after Barack Obama’s 2008 election – claimed “an improbable 30,000 members who were said to be mostly current and former military, law enforcement and emergency first responders” in 2016, according to the <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/oath-keepers">Southern Poverty Law Center</a>. </p>
<p>The Three Percenters, another militia present at the Capitol on Jan. 6, also draws a <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/capitol-riot-militias.html">substantial portion of its members from law enforcement, both military and civilian</a>. Larry Brock, a pro-Trump rioter <a href="https://www.cbsnews.com/news/larry-brock-arrested-capitol-riots-intended-take-hostages/">arrested</a> with <a href="https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/press-release/file/1352026/download">zip-tie handcuffs, allegedly for taking hostages</a>, is a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/prosecutor-capitol-rioter-aimed-to-take-hostages/2021/01/14/f06e589a-56c9-11eb-acc5-92d2819a1ccb_story.html">posted content from the Three Percenters online</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.adl.org/education/resources/backgrounders/militia-movement">militia movement</a> is a militarized stream of the American far-right. Its members promote an ideology that undermines the authority and legitimacy of the federal government and stockpile weapons.</p>
<p>When <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/11/us/politics/veterans-trump-protests-militias.html">militia members have a professional background with the military or police</a>, it enhances the ability of these groups to execute sophisticated and successful operations. It also helps them convey a patriotic image that obscures the security threat they present.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379070/original/file-20210115-23-1lcprea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Man in camouflage, a bulletproof vest and sunglasses stands guard with hands folded" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379070/original/file-20210115-23-1lcprea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379070/original/file-20210115-23-1lcprea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379070/original/file-20210115-23-1lcprea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379070/original/file-20210115-23-1lcprea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=450&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379070/original/file-20210115-23-1lcprea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379070/original/file-20210115-23-1lcprea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379070/original/file-20210115-23-1lcprea.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=565&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A member of the Oath Keepers at a rally to overturn the 2020 election results at the U.S. Supreme Court on Jan. 5, 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/member-of-the-right-wing-group-oath-keepers-stands-guard-news-photo/1294712646?adppopup=true">Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Longstanding ties</h2>
<p>The day before the Biden inauguration, in late afternoon, 12 National Guardsmen deployed to Washington, D.C. were removed from that duty after an investigation uncovered <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/19/national-guard-members-removed-inauguration-460426">problems in their past; two had apparent ties to right-wing militias</a>.</p>
<p>Far-right elements have always had some presence in <a href="https://www.vox.com/michael-brown-shooting-ferguson-mo/2014/8/19/6031759/ferguson-history-riots-police-brutality-civil-rights">U.S. security forces</a>. </p>
<p>Throughout the 20th century, many <a href="https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/watchmen">local police departments were heavily populated with Ku Klux Klan members</a>. The connections between terror groups and law enforcement enabled discrimination and violence against African Americans, Jews and other minorities. </p>
<p>In 1923, all the Black residents of Blandford, Indiana were forced out of town to an unknown location following accusations that an African American man assaulted a young girl. The unlawful “deportation” was conducted and organized by the local sheriff, a Klansman, <a href="https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/watchmen">with the assistance of local Klan chapters</a>.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379092/original/file-20210115-13-qkcf30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Head shot of a balding white man with a goatee against a blue background" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379092/original/file-20210115-13-qkcf30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379092/original/file-20210115-13-qkcf30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379092/original/file-20210115-13-qkcf30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379092/original/file-20210115-13-qkcf30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=857&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379092/original/file-20210115-13-qkcf30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379092/original/file-20210115-13-qkcf30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379092/original/file-20210115-13-qkcf30.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1077&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Wade Michael Page, the U.S. Army veteran who killed six Sikh worshipers in 2014.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/in-this-handout-photo-provided-by-the-johnson-county-news-photo/484960729?adppopup=true">FBI via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many U.S. military bases have also had <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/individual/frazier-glenn-miller">cells of neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups</a> throughout the 20th century.</p>
<p>In 1995, three paratroopers from Fort Bragg, in North Carolina, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1995/12/11/soldiers-in-white-supremacist-uniforms/0d5d01b9-5f4d-478a-a598-73c7646a8711/">were arrested and charged</a> in the killing of a Black couple in Fayetteville. <a href="https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-05-13-9705130165-story.html">Two were sentenced to life in prison</a> for the murders. The Army initiated an investigation at the base, which was known for being a hub of the National Alliance, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/group/national-alliance">then the country’s most influential American neo-Nazi group</a>. </p>
<p>The Army identified and discharged 19 paratroopers for participating in hate activities. <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/2012/sikh-temple-killer-wade-michael-page-radicalized-army">One went on</a> to kill <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2012/08/06/us/wisconsin-temple-shooting/index.html">six worshipers in a Sikh temple</a> in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in August 2012. He died in a police shootout.</p>
<h2>Growing convergence</h2>
<p>Concerns about the penetration of <a href="https://www.politico.com/news/2021/01/11/military-right-wing-extremism-457861">far-right elements into the military and law enforcement have become acute in the last decade</a> with the emergence of militias like the <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/politics/oath-keepers-capitol-riot-charges/index.html">Oath Keepers</a>, which was founded on the principle of recruiting police and military. Oath Keepers <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/right-wing-militias-civil-war/616473/">pledge to disobey orders on the job which they deem contradict the Constitution</a>. </p>
<p>The militias’ success secretly infiltrating police departments contributed to the emergence of new far-right associations that openly recruit law enforcement, like the <a href="https://cspoa.org">Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers of America</a>. </p>
<p>Founded in 2011 by former Arizona sheriff Richard Mack, the group promotes the notion – contrary to the Constitution – that the federal government authorities should be subordinated to local law enforcement. It has more than 500 sheriffs nationwide. <a href="https://www.politicalresearch.org/2019/06/10/how-a-right-wing-network-mobilized-sheriffs-departments">Just over half are currently in office</a>. </p>
<p>The Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers of America has <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/true-crime/wp/2016/04/28/national-group-of-sheriffs-opposed-to-federal-government-overreach-gains-size-momentum/">pushed its members not to enforce gun control laws</a> and pandemic-related <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jul/31/us-sheriffs-mask-orders-covid-19-blm">mask regulations</a> that they believe infringe on civil liberties.</p>
<h2>Skilled insurrectionists</h2>
<p>When members of far-right groups are also <a href="https://theconversation.com/capitol-siege-raises-questions-over-extent-of-white-supremacist-infiltration-of-us-police-153145">professionals sworn to protect the nation or their communities</a>, it makes those groups seem more legitimate. </p>
<p>Authorities may be less likely to treat them as domestic security threats, a categorization that would limit their access to firearms and <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-uncomfortable-questions-facing-capitol-police-over-the-security-breach-by-maga-mob-152857">sensitive locations</a>. </p>
<p>Yet military and police members actually make American militias more effective, according to <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xBQYKHwAAAAJ&hl=en">my research on the violent practices of the American far-right</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379077/original/file-20210115-13-1jzeywx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=23%2C15%2C5185%2C3803&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="Glasses-wearing man in military fatigues poses with an American flag in front of a large crowd" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379077/original/file-20210115-13-1jzeywx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=23%2C15%2C5185%2C3803&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/379077/original/file-20210115-13-1jzeywx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379077/original/file-20210115-13-1jzeywx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379077/original/file-20210115-13-1jzeywx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379077/original/file-20210115-13-1jzeywx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379077/original/file-20210115-13-1jzeywx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/379077/original/file-20210115-13-1jzeywx.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Texas Militia member at the pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., Jan. 6, 2021.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/trump-supporters-near-the-us-capitol-following-a-quot-stop-news-photo/1230475969?adppopup=true">Selcuk Acar/NurPhoto via Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A data set I manage with my team at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and used for my <a href="http://cup.columbia.edu/book/american-zealots/9780231167116">recent book on right-wing terror</a> shows that militia attacks are more lethal than those of other far-right groups. The perpetrators are experienced with weapons and ammunition, and have at least some military training. </p>
<p>Attacks by other far-right groups are, in large measure, <a href="https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/binaries/content/assets/customsites/perspectives-on-terrorism/2018/issue-6/a4-sweeney-perliger.pdf">initiated by people with limited operational experience, who act spontaneously</a>. </p>
<p>Militias are also more likely to attack secured, high-value targets like <a href="https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/2021/01/07/carr-policy-insight-series-deciphering-the-second-wave-of-the-american-militia-movement/">government facilities</a>. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, is a prime example. He was a Gulf War veteran <a href="https://www.news9.com/story/5f80fb1f1f327834b9461b18/michigan-militia-group-had-ties-to-timothy-mcveigh">associated with the Michigan Militia</a> whose bomb killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995. </p>
<p>The penetration of far-right militants into the ranks of police and the military seems to be driving an increase in direct attacks on police and military targets. </p>
<p>Between 1990 and 2000, 13% of U.S. of militia attacks and plots were aimed at military or police installations or personnel, our data set shows. The proportion <a href="https://www.radicalrightanalysis.com/2021/01/07/carr-policy-insight-series-deciphering-the-second-wave-of-the-american-militia-movement/">jumped to 40%</a> by 2017. </p>
<p>And with their training in surveillance, intelligence collection and public safety, the dangerous activities of militias are generally harder for federal agencies to monitor and counter. </p>
<p>When militias recruit professionals, they are better at waging their radical crusade.</p>
<p><em>This story was updated to reflect developing news about security at Biden’s inauguration and corrected to accurately locate Fayetteville in North Carolina.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/153369/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Arie Perliger receives funding from the U.S. Department of Justice and U.S. Department of Defense.</span></em></p>A leaked database shows at least 10% of the far-right Oath Keepers militia is active police or military – people professionally trained in using weapons and conducting sophisticated operations.Arie Perliger, Director of Security Studies and Professor of Criminology and Justice Studies, UMass LowellLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1392522020-05-28T19:14:56Z2020-05-28T19:14:56ZWhy cellphone videos of Black people’s deaths should be considered sacred, like lynching photographs<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338302/original/file-20200528-51509-12xe660.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=18%2C0%2C6164%2C4124&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Ahmaud Arbery's best friend, right, and his sister speak at a memorial event for Arbery on May 9, 2020.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/akeem-baker-best-friend-to-ahmaud-arbery-and-jasmine-arbery-news-photo/1212435890">Sean Rayford/Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>As <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/article/ahmaud-arbery-shooting-georgia.html">Ahmaud Arbery</a> fell to the ground, the sound of the gunshot that took his life echoed loudly throughout his Georgia neighborhood. </p>
<p>I rewound the video of his killing. Each time I viewed it, I was drawn first to the young black jogger’s seemingly carefree stride, which was halted by two white men in a white pickup truck. </p>
<p>Then I peered at Gregory McMichael, 64, and his son Travis, 34, who confronted Arbery in their suburban community. </p>
<p>I knew that the McMichaels told authorities that they suspected Arbery of robbing a nearby home in the neighborhood. They were performing a citizen’s arrest, they said. </p>
<p>The video shows Arbery jogging down the street and the McMichaels blocking his path with their vehicle. First, a scuffle. Then, gunshots at point-blank range <a href="https://gbi.georgia.gov/press-releases/2020-05-21/ahmaud-arbery-murder-investigation">from Travis McMichael’s weapon</a>.</p>
<p>My eyes traveled to the towering trees onscreen, which might have been the last things that Arbery saw. How many of those same trees, I wondered, had witnessed similar lynchings? And how many of those lynchings had been photographed, to offer a final blow of humiliation to the dying?</p>
<h2>A series of modern lynchings</h2>
<p>It may be jarring to see that word – <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/society/ahmaud-arbery-lynching/">lynching</a> – used to describe Arbery’s Feb. 23, 2020, killing. But many black people have shared with me that his death – followed in rapid succession by <a href="https://www.vox.com/2020/5/13/21257457/breonna-taylor-louisville-shooting-ahmaud-arbery-justiceforbre">Breonna Taylor</a>’s and now <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-death-of-george-floyd-in-context">George Floyd</a>’s officer-involved murders – hearkens back to a long tradition of killing black people without repercussion.</p>
<p>Perhaps even more <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/24/magazine/racisms-psychological-toll.html?_r=0">traumatizing</a> is the ease with which some of these deaths can be viewed online. In my new book, “<a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/bearing-witness-while-black-9780190935535">Bearing Witness While Black: African Americans, Smartphones and the New Protest #Journalism</a>,” I call for Americans to stop viewing footage of black people dying so casually. </p>
<p>Instead, cellphone videos of vigilante violence and fatal police encounters should be viewed like lynching photographs – with solemn reserve and careful circulation. To understand this shift in viewing context, I believe it is useful to explore how people became so comfortable viewing black people’s dying moments in the first place. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338309/original/file-20200528-51449-4tbgaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338309/original/file-20200528-51449-4tbgaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/338309/original/file-20200528-51449-4tbgaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338309/original/file-20200528-51449-4tbgaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338309/original/file-20200528-51449-4tbgaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=396&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338309/original/file-20200528-51449-4tbgaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338309/original/file-20200528-51449-4tbgaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/338309/original/file-20200528-51449-4tbgaq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=498&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Police confront protesters in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s death while in police custody on May 25, 2020.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/police-officers-stand-in-a-line-while-facing-protesters-news-photo/1215628250">Stephen Maturen/Getty Images</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Images of black people’s deaths pervasive</h2>
<p>Every major era of domestic terror against African Americans – slavery, lynching and police brutality – has an accompanying iconic photograph. </p>
<p>The most familiar image of slavery is the <a href="https://www.history.com/news/whipped-peter-slavery-photo-scourged-back-real-story-civil-war">1863 picture</a> of “Whipped Peter,” whose back bears an intricate cross-section of scars. </p>
<p>Famous images of lynchings include the <a href="https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=129025516">1930 photograph</a> of the mob who murdered Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana. A wild-eyed white man appears at the bottom of the frame, pointing upward to the black men’s hanged bodies. The image inspired Abel Meeropol to write the poem “<a href="https://www.biography.com/news/billie-holiday-strange-fruit">Strange Fruit</a>,” which was later turned into a song that blues singer Billie Holiday sang around the world. </p>
<p>Twenty-five years later, the 1955 photos of <a href="http://100photos.time.com/photos/emmett-till-david-jackson">Emmett Till’s</a> maimed body became a new generation’s cultural touchstone. The 14-year-old black boy was beaten, shot and thrown into a local river by white men after a white woman accused him of whistling at her. She later admitted that she lied.</p>
<p>Throughout the 1900s, and until today, police brutality against black people has been immortalized by the media too. Americans have watched government officials <a href="https://www.loc.gov/item/2014645234/">open firehoses</a> on young civil rights protesters, unleash <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Story-Birmingham-Rights-Movement-Photographs/dp/1464404178">German shepherds</a> and wield <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2015/03/06/390943835/photographer-helped-expose-brutality-of-selmas-bloody-sunday">billy clubs</a> against peaceful marchers, and shoot and tase today’s black men, women and children – first on the televised evening news, and, eventually, on cellphones that could distribute the footage online. </p>
<p>When I conducted the interviews for my book, many black people told me that they carry this historical reel of violence against their ancestors in their heads. That’s why, for them, watching modern versions of these hate crimes is too painful to bear. </p>
<p>Still, there are other groups of black people who believe that the videos do serve a purpose, to educate the masses about race relations in the U.S. I believe these tragic videos can serve both purposes, but it will take effort. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337712/original/file-20200526-106815-f764c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337712/original/file-20200526-106815-f764c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/337712/original/file-20200526-106815-f764c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337712/original/file-20200526-106815-f764c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337712/original/file-20200526-106815-f764c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=804&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337712/original/file-20200526-106815-f764c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337712/original/file-20200526-106815-f764c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/337712/original/file-20200526-106815-f764c8.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1010&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">In 1922 the NAACP ran a series of full-page ads in The New York Times calling attention to lynchings.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/6786">New York Times, Nov. 23, 1922/American Social History Project</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Reviving the ‘shadow archive’</h2>
<p>In the early 1900s, when the news of a lynching was fresh, some of the nation’s first civil rights organizations circulated any available images of the lynching widely, to raise awareness of the atrocity. They did this by publishing the images in black magazines and newspapers.</p>
<p>After that image reached peak circulation, it was typically removed from public view and placed into a “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=teHcibtMYBUC&oi=fnd&pg=PA299&dq=%22shadow+archive%22&ots=fZ5BpYeU7c&sig=_d5TztNJTaujBDFtait_T-Hh7dM#v=onepage&q=%22shadow%20archive%22&f=false">shadow archive</a>,” within a newsroom, library or museum. Reducing the circulation of the image was intended to make the public’s gaze more somber and respectful.</p>
<p>The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, known popularly as the NAACP, often used this technique. In 1916, for example, the group published a horrific photograph of Jesse Washington, a 17-year-old boy who was hanged and burned in Waco, Texas, in its flagship magazine, “<a href="https://theundefeated.com/features/the-waco-horror/">The Crisis</a>.” </p>
<p>Memberships in the civil rights organization skyrocketed as a result. Blacks and whites wanted to know how to help. The NAACP used the money to push for anti-lynching legislation. It purchased a series of costly <a href="https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/lynching-america-ca-1926">full-page ads</a> in The New York Times to lobby leading politicians. </p>
<p>Though the NAACP endures today, neither its website nor its Instagram page bears casual images of lynching victims. Even when the organization issued a <a href="https://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-issues-statement-murder-ahmaud-arbery/">statement about the Arbery killing</a>, it refrained from reposting the chilling video within its missive. That restraint shows a degree of respect that not all news outlets and social media users have used.</p>
<h2>A curious double standard</h2>
<p>Critics of the shadow archive may argue that once a photograph reaches the internet, it is very difficult to pull back from future news reports. </p>
<p>This is, however, simply not true. </p>
<p>Images of white people’s deaths are <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/16/21021005/google-youtube-moderators-ptsd-accenture-violent-disturbing-content-interviews-video">removed from news coverage all the time</a>. </p>
<p>It is difficult to find online, for example, imagery from any of the numerous mass shootings that have affected scores of white victims. Those murdered in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting of 2012, or at the Las Vegas music festival of 2017, are most often remembered in <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/14/us/sandy-hook-newtown-shooting-victims-profiles/index.html">endearing portraits instead</a>. </p>
<p>In my view, cellphone videos of black people being killed should be given this same consideration. Just as past generations of activists used these images briefly – and only in the context of social justice efforts – so, too, should today’s imagery retreat from view quickly. </p>
<p>The suspects in Arbery’s killing have been arrested. The Minneapolis police officers involved in Floyd’s death have been fired and placed under investigation. The videos of their deaths have served the purpose of attracting public outrage. </p>
<p>To me, airing the tragic footage on TV, in auto-play videos on websites and social media is no longer serving its <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/this-was-supposed-to-go-away-the-battle-to-shape-how-the-world-viewed-ahmaud-arberys-killing/2020/05/22/089916b8-98f6-11ea-89fd-28fb313d1886_story.html">social justice purpose</a>, and is now simply exploitative. </p>
<p>Likening the fatal footage of Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd to lynching photographs invites us to treat them more thoughtfully. We can respect these images. We can handle them with care. In the quiet, final frames, we can share their last moments with them, if we choose to. We do not let them die alone. We do not let them disappear into the hush of knowing trees.</p>
<p>[<em>Insight, in your inbox each day.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=insight">You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter</a>.]</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/139252/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Allissa V. Richardson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The US has a centuries-old tradition of killing black people without repercussion – and of publicly viewing the violence. Spreading those images can disrespect the dead and traumatize viewers.Allissa V. Richardson, Assistant Professor of Journalism, USC Annenberg School for Communication and JournalismLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1113472019-02-27T11:42:13Z2019-02-27T11:42:13Z3 things schools should teach about America’s history of white supremacy<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260360/original/file-20190222-195873-v27x48.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A Ku Klux Klan parade in Washington, D.C., in 1926.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/ku-klux-klan-parading-washington-dc-252134155?src=hMui8zKhpCME0D-m_td4Dw-1-0">Everett Historical from www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When it comes to how deeply embedded racism is in American society, blacks and whites have sharply different views. </p>
<p>For instance, 70 percent of whites believe that <a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/06/27/on-views-of-race-and-inequality-blacks-and-whites-are-worlds-apart/">individual discrimination is a bigger problem</a> than discrimination built into the nation’s laws and institutions. Only 48 percent of blacks believe that is true.</p>
<p>Many blacks and whites also fail to see eye to eye regarding the use of blackface, which dominated the news cycle during the early part of 2019 due to a series of <a href="https://www.npr.org/2019/02/13/692517756/blackface-didnt-end-in-the-1980s">scandals</a> that involve the <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2019/02/06/virginia-governor-under-fire-ralph-northam-signs-amazon-bill/2787188002/">highest elected leaders</a> in Virginia, where I teach.</p>
<p>The donning of blackface happens throughout the country, particularly on <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2019/02/ralph-northam-college-campus-blackface/582373/">college campuses</a>. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2019/02/07/poll-only-58-percent-of-americans-oppose-blackface/?utm_term=.9f67cb89ffe7">Recent polls</a> indicate that 42 percent of white American adults either think blackface is acceptable or are uncertain as to whether it is.</p>
<p>One of the most recent blackface scandals has involved Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, whose yearbook page from medical school features someone in blackface standing alongside another person dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe. Northam has denied being either person. The more Northam has tried to defend his past actions, the clearer it has become to me how little he appears to know about fundamental aspects of American history, such as slavery. For instance, Northam referred to Virginia’s earliest slaves as <a href="https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/429335-gayle-king-corrects-northam-for-referring-to-slaves-as-indentured">“indentured servants”</a>. His ignorance has led to <a href="https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/northam-race-interview-792495/">greater scrutiny</a> of how he <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/jameshcarr/2019/02/04/ignorance-shines-through-virginia-governor-northams-blackface-apology/#77080293c961">managed to ascend</a> to the highest leadership position in a <a href="https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/va">racially diverse</a> state with such a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/02/12/white-privilege-america-blissful-ignorance-ralph-northam/?utm_term=.55030b3af86f">profound history of racism and white supremacy</a>.</p>
<h2>Ignorance is pervasive</h2>
<p>The reality is Gov. Northam is not alone. Most Americans are largely <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2018/02/03/dont-know-much-about-history-a-disturbing-new-report-on-how-poorly-schools-teach-american-slavery/">uninformed</a> of our nation’s history of white supremacy and racial terror.</p>
<p>As a scholar who <a href="https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=cGqRQJQAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao">researches racial discrimination</a>, I believe much of this ignorance is due to negligence in our education system. For example, a recent <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20180131/teaching-hard-history">study</a> found that only 8 percent of high school seniors knew that slavery was the central cause of the Civil War. There are ample opportunities to include much more about white supremacy, racial discrimination and racial violence into school curricula. Here are three things that I believe should be incorporated into all social studies curricula today: </p>
<p><strong>1. The Civil War was fought over slavery and one of its offshoots – the convict-lease system – did not end until the 1940s</strong></p>
<p>The Civil War was fought over the South’s <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/06/what-this-cruel-war-was-over/396482/">desire</a> to maintain the institution of slavery in order to continue to <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths-about-why-the-south-seceded/2011/01/03/ABHr6jD_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.a994e1f7edeb">profit</a> from it. It is not possible to separate the Confederacy from a <a href="https://www.nps.gov/shil/learn/historyculture/upload/slavery-brochure.pdf">pro-slavery agenda</a> and curriculums across the nation must be clear about this fact.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260270/original/file-20190221-195873-1q7mqxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260270/original/file-20190221-195873-1q7mqxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260270/original/file-20190221-195873-1q7mqxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260270/original/file-20190221-195873-1q7mqxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260270/original/file-20190221-195873-1q7mqxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=293&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260270/original/file-20190221-195873-1q7mqxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260270/original/file-20190221-195873-1q7mqxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260270/original/file-20190221-195873-1q7mqxo.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=369&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Confederate treasury note from the Civil War Era shows how reliant the South’s economy was on slave labor.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/photo-confederate-treasury-note-civil-war-724637?src=_mSiPy-DZhy3VEI6PWf8nA-1-9">Scott Rothstein from www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>After the end of the Civil War, southern whites sought to keep slavery through other means. Following a brief post-Civil War period known as <a href="https://www.britannica.com/event/Reconstruction-United-States-history">Reconstruction</a>, white southerners created <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/black-code">new laws</a> that gave them legal authority to arrest blacks over the most minor offenses, such as not being able to prove they had a job. </p>
<p>While imprisoned under these laws, blacks were then leased to corporations and farms where they were <a href="https://theconversation.com/exploiting-black-labor-after-the-abolition-of-slavery-72482">forced to work without pay</a> under extremely harsh conditions. This “<a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/One_Dies_Get_Another.html?id=im68YsXbvZ0C">convict leasing</a>” was, as many have argued, <a href="https://bento.cdn.pbs.org/hostedbento-prod/filer_public/SBAN/Images/Classrooms/Slavery%20by%20Another%20Name%20History%20Background_Final.pdf">slavery by another name</a> and it persisted until the 1940s.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260266/original/file-20190221-195886-4q0i0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260266/original/file-20190221-195886-4q0i0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260266/original/file-20190221-195886-4q0i0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260266/original/file-20190221-195886-4q0i0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260266/original/file-20190221-195886-4q0i0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=433&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260266/original/file-20190221-195886-4q0i0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260266/original/file-20190221-195886-4q0i0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260266/original/file-20190221-195886-4q0i0c.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=544&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Southern jails made money leasing convicts for forced labor in the Jim Crow South. Circa 1903.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/juvenile-convicts-work-fields-southern-chain-242820772?src=xYwpssnS1VWWLIK83BS1lg-1-1">Everett Historical / www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>2. The Jim Crow era was violent</strong></p>
<p>While students may be taught about segregation and laws preventing blacks from voting, they <a href="https://www.chronicle.com/article/How-Scholars-Sustained-White/243053">often are not taught</a> about the extreme violence whites enacted upon blacks throughout the Jim Crow era, which took place from 1877 through the 1950s. <a href="https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/">Mob violence and lynchings</a> were frequent occurrences – and not just in the South – throughout the Jim Crow era. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260272/original/file-20190221-195892-1n1so6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260272/original/file-20190221-195892-1n1so6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/260272/original/file-20190221-195892-1n1so6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260272/original/file-20190221-195892-1n1so6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260272/original/file-20190221-195892-1n1so6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=437&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260272/original/file-20190221-195892-1n1so6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260272/original/file-20190221-195892-1n1so6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/260272/original/file-20190221-195892-1n1so6g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=549&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The body of Rubin Stacy, 32, hangs from a tree in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, as neighbors visit the site July 19, 1935. White lynchings of blacks were common during the era.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.apimages.com/metadata/Index/Associated-Press-Domestic-News-Florida-United-S-/520d573545e5da11af9f0014c2589dfb/35/0">AP</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Racial terror was used as a means for whites to <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/white-rage-9781632864123/">maintain power and prevent blacks from gaining equality</a>. Notably, <a href="https://www.tolerance.org/magazine/teaching-americas-national-crime">many whites</a> – not just white supremacist groups like the Klu Klux Klan – engaged in this violence. Moreover, the torture and murder of blacks was not associated with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-memorial-us-south-montgomery-alabama">any consequences</a>.</p>
<p>During this same time, white society created <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/video/racist-images-and-messages-in-jim-crow-era/">negative stereotypes about blacks</a> as a way to dehumanize blacks and justify the violence whites enacted upon them. These negative stereotypes included that blacks were ignorant, lazy, cowardly, criminal and hypersexual. </p>
<p><a href="https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/blackface-birth-american-stereotype">Blackface minstrelsy</a> refers to whites darkening their skin and dressing in tattered clothing to perform the negative stereotypes as part of entertainment. This imagery and entertainment served to solidify negative stereotypes about blacks in society. Many of these negative stereotypes persist today.</p>
<p><strong>3. Racial inequality was preserved through housing discrimination and segregation</strong></p>
<p>During the early 1900s, a number of policies were put into place in our country’s most important institutions to further segregate and oppress blacks. For example, in the 1930s, the federal government, banks and the real estate industry <a href="https://www.npr.org/2017/05/03/526655831/a-forgotten-history-of-how-the-u-s-government-segregated-america">worked together</a> to prevent blacks from becoming homeowners and to create racially segregated neighborhoods. </p>
<p>This process, known as redlining, served to <a href="https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-federal-government-intentionally-racially-segregated-american-cities-180963494/">concentrate</a> whites in middle-class suburbs and blacks in impoverished urban centers. Racial segregation in housing has consequences for everything from <a href="https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/">education</a> to <a href="https://inequality.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/media/_media/pdf/Reference%20Media/Kain_1992_Transportation.pdf">employment</a>. Moreover, because public school funding relies so heavily on <a href="https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-schools-have-a-money-problem">local taxes</a>, housing segregation affects the quality of <a href="https://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2014/03/26/26rothstein_ep.h33.html">schools</a> students attend. </p>
<p>All of this means that even after the removal of discriminatory housing policies and school segregation laws in the 1950s and 1960s, the <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/03/school-segregation-is-not-a-myth/555614/">consequences</a> of this intentional segregation in housing persist in the form of highly segregated and unequal schools. All students should learn this history to ensure that they do not wrongly conclude that current racial disparities are based on individual shortcomings – or worse, black inferiority – as opposed to systematic oppression.</p>
<p>Americans live in a starkly unequal society where <a href="https://www.kff.org/disparities-policy/report/key-facts-on-health-and-health-care-by-race-and-ethnicity/">health</a> and <a href="https://opportunityinsights.org/race/">economic</a> outcomes are largely influenced by race. We cannot begin to meaningfully address this inequality as a society if we do not properly understand its origins. The <a href="http://time.com/5013943/john-kelly-civil-war-textbooks/">white supremacists</a> responsible for sanitizing our history lessons understood this. Their intent was clearly to keep the country ignorant of its racist past in order to stymie racial equality. To change the tide, we must incorporate a more accurate depiction of our country’s racist history in our K-12 curricula.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/111347/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Noelle Hurd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Schools do a poor job of teaching about America’s legacy of white supremacy, and the blackface scandal of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam is proof, a scholar who researches racial discrimination says.Noelle Hurd, Scully Family Discovery Associate Professor in Psychology, University of VirginiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1069882018-11-20T11:34:21Z2018-11-20T11:34:21ZFear, more than hate, feeds online bigotry and real-world violence<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246013/original/file-20181116-194497-p8hl57.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">When online information causes fear, it can spark hatred and violence.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/cyber-bulling-concept-fingers-screen-blame-1061278154">UVgreen/Shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>When a U.S. senator asked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, “<a href="https://www.usatoday.com/videos/tech/2018/04/10/sasse-zuckerberg-define-hate-speech/33717315/">Can you define hate speech?</a>” it was arguably the most important question that social networks face: how to identify extremism inside their communities.</p>
<p>Hate crimes in the 21st century follow a familiar pattern in which an online tirade escalates into violent actions. Before opening fire in the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, the accused gunman had vented over far-right social network <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/pittsburgh-synagogue-shooter-spewed-his-hate-on-gab-the-alt-rights-favorite-social-network">Gab</a> about Honduran migrants traveling toward the U.S. border, and the alleged Jewish conspiracy behind it all. Then he declared, “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/us/gab-robert-bowers-pittsburgh-synagogue-shootings.html">I can’t sit by and watch my people get slaughtered. Screw your optics, I’m going in</a>.” The pattern of extremists <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/watch-santa-barbara-shooter-elliot-rodgers-chilling-youtube-video">unloading their intolerance</a> online has been a disturbing feature of some <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2016/06/12/us/orlando-shooter-omar-mateen/index.html">recent hate crimes</a>. But most online hate isn’t that flagrant, or as easy to spot. </p>
<p>As I found in my 2017 study on <a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9783319514239">extremism in social networks and political blogs</a>, rather than overt bigotry, most online hate looks a lot like fear. It’s not expressed in racial slurs or calls for confrontation, but rather in unfounded allegations of Hispanic invaders pouring into the country, black-on-white crime or Sharia law infiltrating American cities. Hysterical narratives such as these have become the preferred vehicle for today’s extremists – and may be more effective at provoking real-world violence than stereotypical hate speech.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246027/original/file-20181116-194506-5q7eh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246027/original/file-20181116-194506-5q7eh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/246027/original/file-20181116-194506-5q7eh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=214&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246027/original/file-20181116-194506-5q7eh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=214&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246027/original/file-20181116-194506-5q7eh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=214&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246027/original/file-20181116-194506-5q7eh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246027/original/file-20181116-194506-5q7eh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/246027/original/file-20181116-194506-5q7eh.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=268&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Spreading fear on Facebook.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Screenshot from Facebook by The Conversation</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">CC BY-ND</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>The ease of spreading fear</h2>
<p>On Twitter, a popular meme traveling around recently depicts the “<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20181115180807/https://twitter.com/LyndaAtchison/status/855268368475013124">Islamic Terrorist Network</a>” spread across a map of the United States, while a Facebook account called “America Under Attack” shares an article with its 17,000 followers about the “Angry Young Men and Gangbangers” <a href="https://theconversation.com/dozens-of-migrants-disappear-in-mexico-as-central-american-caravan-pushes-northward-106287">marching toward the border</a>. And <a href="https://www.thewrap.com/far-right-social-network-gab-back-online-after-finding-new-host/">on Gab</a>, countless profiles talk of Jewish plans to sabotage American culture, sovereignty and the president. </p>
<p>While not overtly antagonistic, these notes play well to an audience that has found in social media a place where they can express their intolerance openly, as long as they color within the lines. They can avoid the exposure that <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/20150125/speak-responding-everyday-bigotry">traditional hate speech</a> attracts. Whereas the white nationalist gathering in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/13/us/far-right-groups-blaze-into-national-view-in-charlottesville.html">Charlottesville</a> was high-profile and revealing, social networks can be anonymous and discreet, and therefore liberating for the undeclared racist. That presents a stark challenge to platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.</p>
<h2>Fighting hate</h2>
<p>Of course this is not just a challenge for social media companies. The public at large is facing the complex question of how to respond to inflammatory and prejudiced narratives that are stoking racial fears and subsequent hostility. However, social networks have the unique capacity to turn down the volume on intolerance if they determine that a user has in fact breached their terms of service. For instance, in April 2018, <a href="https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/vbxqea/richard-spencer-kicked-off-facebook">Facebook removed two pages</a> associated with white nationalist Richard Spencer. A few months later, Twitter suspended several accounts associated with the far-right group The Proud Boys for violating its policy “<a href="http://fortune.com/2018/08/11/twitter-suspends-proud-boys/">prohibiting violent extremist groups</a>.” </p>
<p>Still, some critics argue that the networks are not moving fast enough. There is <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/hate-speech-tied-to-suspect-in-synagogue-massacre-rekindles-calls-for-regulating-social-media/2018/10/29/38235396-dbd1-11e8-b732-3c72cbf131f2_story.html">mounting pressure</a> for these websites to police the extremism that has flourished in their spaces, or else <a href="https://theconversation.com/regulate-social-media-platforms-before-its-too-late-86984">become policed themselves</a>. A recent Huffpost/YouGov survey revealed that two-thirds of Americans wanted social networks to prevent users from posting “<a href="https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/social-media-harassment-fake-news-poll-alex-jones_us_5b7b1c53e4b0a5b1febdf30a">hate speech or racist content</a>.”</p>
<p><iframe id="T32JA" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/T32JA/2/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p>In response, Facebook has stepped up its anti-extremism efforts, reporting in May that it had removed “<a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/enforcement-numbers/">2.5 million pieces of hate speech</a>,” over a third of which was identified using artificial intelligence, the rest by human monitors or flagged by users. But even as <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/mark-zuckerberg/a-blueprint-for-content-governance-and-enforcement/10156443129621634/">Zuckerberg promised more action</a> in November 2018, the company acknowledged that teaching its technology to identify hate speech is extremely difficult because of all the <a href="https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/05/removing-content-using-ai/">contexts and nuances</a> that can drastically alter these meanings.</p>
<p>Moreover, public consensus about what actually constitutes hate speech is ambiguous at best. The libertarian Cato Institute found <a href="https://www.cato.org/blog/82-say-its-hard-ban-hate-speech-because-people-cant-agree-what-speech-hateful">broad disagreement among Americans</a> about the kind of speech that should qualify as hate, or offensive speech, or fair criticism. And so, these discrepancies raise the obvious question: How can an algorithm identify hate speech if we humans can barely define it ourselves? </p>
<p><iframe id="vdGnm" class="tc-infographic-datawrapper" src="https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/vdGnm/1/" height="400px" width="100%" style="border: none" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<h2>Fear lights the fuse</h2>
<p>The ambiguity of what constitutes hate speech is providing ample cover for modern extremists to infuse cultural anxieties into popular networks. That presents perhaps the clearest danger: Priming people’s racial paranoia can also be extremely powerful at spurring hostility. </p>
<p>The late communication scholar George Gerbner found that, contrary to popular belief, heavy exposure to media violence did not make people more violent. Rather, it made them <a href="http://web.asc.upenn.edu/gerbner/Asset.aspx?assetID=412">more fearful of others doing violence to them</a>, which often leads to corrosive distrust and cultural resentment. That’s precisely what today’s racists are tapping into, and what social networks must learn to spot.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/wtRw-QKb034?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Why do so many people watch violent TV and never commit a violent act?</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The posts that speak of Jewish plots to destroy America, or black-on-white crime, are not directly calling for violence, but they are amplifying <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/28/us/gab-robert-bowers-pittsburgh-synagogue-shootings.html">prejudiced views</a> that can <a href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/10/508363607/what-happened-when-dylann-roof-asked-google-for-information-about-race">inflame followers to act</a>. That’s precisely what happened in advance of the deadly assaults at a historic black church in Charleston in 2015, and the Pittsburgh synagogue last month. </p>
<p>For social networks, the challenge is two-fold. They must first decide whether to continue hosting non-violent racists like Richard Spencer, who has called for “peaceful ethnic cleansing,” and <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/richard-spencer-david-duke-twitter-895539">remains active on Twitter</a>. Or for that matter, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, who recently compared Jews to termites, and continues to post to <a href="https://dailycaller.com/2018/10/18/facebook-twitter-farrakhan-hate/">his Facebook page</a>. </p>
<p>When Twitter and Facebook let these profiles remain active, the companies lend the credibility of their online communities to these provocateurs of racism or anti-Semitism. But they also signal that their definitions of hate may be too narrow.</p>
<p>The most dangerous hate speech is apparently no longer broadcast with ethnic slurs or delusional rhetoric about white supremacy. Rather, it’s all over social media, in plain sight, carrying hashtags like #WhiteGenocide, #BlackCrimes, #MigrantInvasion and #AmericaUnderAttack. They create an illusion of imminent threat that radicals thrive on, and to which the violence-inclined among them have responded.</p>
<p><em>This article has been updated to correct the political characterization of the Cato Institute.</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/106988/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Adam G. Klein does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Hysterical narratives promoting fear among some Americans may be more effective at sparking violence than hate speech is. Social media companies are expected to guard against both.Adam G. Klein, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies, Pace University Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/950292018-04-24T10:51:04Z2018-04-24T10:51:04ZLynching memorial shows women were victims, too<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216029/original/file-20180423-94149-1bh28jy.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">National Memorial for Peace and Justice.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Brynn Anderson</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>A memorial to victims of lynching in the U.S. is now open in <a href="http://digital.archives.alabama.gov/cdm/ref/collection/voices/id/2516">Alabama</a>.</p>
<p>The <a href="https://eji.org/national-lynching-memorial">National Memorial for Peace and Justice</a> is a six-acre site that overlooks Montgomery, the state capital. It uses sculpture, art and design to give visitors a sense of the terror of lynching as they walk through a memorial square with 800 six-foot steel columns that symbolize the victims. The names of thousands of victims are engraved on columns – one for each county in the United States where a lynching took place. In Alabama alone, a reported total of 275 lynchings took place between 1871 and 1920.</p>
<p>U.S. history books and documentaries that tell the story of lynching in the U.S. have focused on black male victims, to the exclusion of women. But women, too, were lynched – and many raped beforehand. In my book “<a href="https://www.palgrave.com/us/book/9780230112704">Gender and Lynching</a>,” I sought to tell the stories of these women and why they have been left out. </p>
<p>Between 1880 and 1930, close to 200 women were murdered by lynch mobs in the American South, according to historian <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674061859">Crystal Feimster</a>.</p>
<p>Will this new memorial give these murdered women their due in how the U.S. remembers and feels about our troubling history? </p>
<h2>Enforcing white supremacy through terror</h2>
<p>In a recent report, <a href="https://eji.org/reports/lynching-in-america">Lynching in America</a>, researchers documented 4,075 lynchings of African-Americans that were committed by southern whites in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia between 1877 and 1950.</p>
<p>Lynching differed from ordinary murder or assault. It was celebrated by members of the Ku Klux Klan as a spectacular event and drew large crowds of people who tortured victims, burned them alive and dismembered them. Lynching was a form of <a href="https://lynchinginamerica.eji.org/report/">domestic terrorism</a> that inflicted harm onto individuals and upon an entire race of people, with the purpose of instilling fear. It served to give dramatic warning that the ironclad system of white supremacy was not to be challenged by word, deed or even thought. </p>
<p>The conventional approach to teaching the history of Jim Crow and lynching has focused almost exclusively on the black male victim. However, such an approach often simplifies and distorts a much more complex history. </p>
<p>Not all victims were African-American men, and although allegations of African-American men raping white women were common, such allegations were not the leading motive for the lynchings. We know from the pioneering work of anti-lynching crusader <a href="https://www.nwhm.org/education-resources/biographies/ida-b-wells-barnett">Ida B. Wells-Barnett</a> that African-American men, women and children were lynched for a range of alleged crimes and social infractions. </p>
<p>The book “<a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/102257/trouble-in-mind-by-leon-f-litwack/9780375702631/">Trouble in Mind</a>,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Leon Litwack, provides a detailed account of the many accusations of petty theft, labor disputes, arson and murder that led to these lynchings.</p>
<p>This fact requires a richer, more nuanced understanding of discrimination that is critical of racism and sexism at the same time. Martyrs such as Laura Nelson and Mary Turner experienced racial and sexual violence at the hands of vigilante lynch mobs because of their race and gender.</p>
<h2>Laura Nelson and Mary Turner</h2>
<p>In May 1911, Laura Nelson was lynched in Okemah, Oklahoma. </p>
<p>Nelson allegedly shot a sheriff to protect her son. The officer had been searching her cabin for stolen goods as part of a meat-pilfering investigation. A mob seized Nelson along with her son, who was only 14 years old, and lynched them both. However, Nelson was first raped by several men. The bodies of Laura and her son were hung from a bridge for hundreds of people to see.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216014/original/file-20180423-94115-1b421wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216014/original/file-20180423-94115-1b421wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216014/original/file-20180423-94115-1b421wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216014/original/file-20180423-94115-1b421wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216014/original/file-20180423-94115-1b421wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=854&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216014/original/file-20180423-94115-1b421wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216014/original/file-20180423-94115-1b421wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216014/original/file-20180423-94115-1b421wq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1074&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Laura Nelson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Laura_Nelson_high_res.jpg">G.H. Farnum</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The violent murder of African-Americans was so accepted at the time that a postcard was made of Nelson’s lynching by George Henry Farnum, a photographer. Brooklyn-based artist <a href="http://site.kimmayhorn.com/">Kim Mayhorn</a> created in 1998 a multimedia installation that memorialized Nelson’s death. There’s an empty dress in Mayhorn’s installation that resembles the postcard of her lynching. The disembodied dress represents the void in the historical record and Mayhorn’s effort to redress the absence of Nelson. </p>
<p>The title of Mayhorn’s installation, “A Woman Was Lynched the Other Day,” refers to <a href="https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/odyssey/archive/06/0610002r.jpg">a banner</a> the New York NAACP would unfurl from their Fifth Avenue office when news of another lynching surfaced. With white letters inscribed on a black background, it declared “A MAN WAS LYNCHED YESTERDAY” and became a rallying cry for justice. </p>
<p>Seven years later, in May 1918, <a href="http://www.maryturner.org/">Mary Turner</a> was eight months pregnant when a mob of several hundred men and women murdered her in Valdosta, Georgia. The Associated Press reported that she had made “unwise remarks” and “flew into a rage” about the lynching of her husband, insisting that she would press charges against the men responsible. </p>
<p>Her death has since been recognized by local residents, students and faculty at <a href="https://www.valdosta.edu/about/news/releases/2018/02/vsu-presents-mary-turner-and-the-lynching-rampage-art-exhibit-feb.-15-march-31.php">Valdosta State University</a>, first with a public ceremony that placed a cross at the lynching site and second with a historical <a href="http://www.valdostadailytimes.com/news/local_news/remembering-a-dark-page-of-history/article_9ed9cbab-3059-520d-a7b0-e20af458556a.html">marker in 2010</a>.</p>
<p>Nelson and Turner have often been depicted as tragic characters or “collateral victims” who supported and defended the males in their lives. </p>
<p>Such deaths, however, were not incidental. They were essential to maintain white supremacy, as a form of punishment for defying the social order.</p>
<p>Though women represent a minority of lynching victims, their stories challenge previous attempts to justify lynching as necessary to protect white women from black male rapists. </p>
<p>Understanding lynching and the motives behind it requires including the stories of African-American women who were robbed of dignity, respect and bodily integrity by a weapon of terror. The violence against them was used to maintain a caste system that assigned inferior roles to African-American women and men alike. </p>
<h2>Redefining the ‘civil rights movement’</h2>
<p>By including women in the historical narrative of lynching, the new memorial in Alabama reveals a more complete understanding of this devastating social practice. This memorial brings African-American women like Nelson and Turner to the fore as victims, and the weight of visual evidence on display at the memorial challenges the silence surrounding their deaths. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://eji.org/">Equal Justice Initiative</a> assists scholars, teachers and ordinary people in recognizing the roots of the civil rights movement that began long before the years 1954-68.</p>
<p>The monument sheds light in an unprecedented and innovative way on the reasons and circumstances surrounding the death and torture of countless victims, including women and children, who suffered at the hands of vigilante mobs. By unearthing the soil and pinpointing the counties where such cruel and inhumane acts were committed, the monument sends a powerful message and conveys to its audience a desire for deeper understanding.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95029/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Evelyn M. Simien does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Although fewer black women were lynched in the US than men, their stories have been marginalized. Will a new memorial in Alabama help make their sacrifices known?Evelyn M. Simien, Professor of Political Science and Africana Studies, University of ConnecticutLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/927952018-03-30T16:30:18Z2018-03-30T16:30:18ZMartin Luther King Jr. had a much more radical message than a dream of racial brotherhood<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212711/original/file-20180329-189827-l3ylbh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses marchers during his 'I Have a Dream' speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Martin Luther King Jr. has come to be revered as a hero who led a nonviolent struggle to reform and redeem the United States. His birthday is celebrated as a national holiday. Tributes are paid to him on his death anniversary each April, and his legacy is honored in multiple ways. </p>
<p>But from my perspective as a <a href="http://paulharvey.org/about">historian of religion and civil rights</a>, the true radicalism of his thought remains underappreciated. The “civil saint” portrayed nowadays was, by the end of his life, a social and economic radical, who argued forcefully for the necessity of economic justice in the pursuit of racial equality. </p>
<p>Three particular works from 1957 to 1967 illustrate how King’s political thought evolved from a hopeful reformer to a radical critic. </p>
<h2>King’s support for white moderates</h2>
<p>For much of the 1950s, King believed that white southern ministers could provide moral leadership. He thought the white racists of the South could be countered by the ministers who took a stand for equality. At the time, his concern with economic justice was a secondary theme in his addresses and political advocacy. </p>
<p><a href="http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol04Scans/184_1957_The%20Role%20of%20the%20Church.pdf">Speaking at Vanderbilt University in 1957</a>, he professed his belief that “there is in the white South more open-minded moderates than appears on the surface.” He urged them to lead the region through its necessary transition to equal treatment for black citizens. He reassured all that the aim of the movement was not to “defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding.”</p>
<p>King had hope for this vision. He had worked with white liberals such as <a href="https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/myles-horton-1">Myles Horton</a>, the leader of a center in Tennessee for training labor and civil rights organizers. King had developed friendships and crucial alliances with white supporters in other parts of the country as well. His vision was for the fulfillment of basic American ideals of liberty and equality. </p>
<h2>Letter from Birmingham Jail</h2>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212712/original/file-20180329-189830-1cycrcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212712/original/file-20180329-189830-1cycrcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212712/original/file-20180329-189830-1cycrcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212712/original/file-20180329-189830-1cycrcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=407&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212712/original/file-20180329-189830-1cycrcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212712/original/file-20180329-189830-1cycrcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212712/original/file-20180329-189830-1cycrcv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=512&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A handwritten copy of ‘Letter From a Birmingham Jail.’</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Richard Drew, file</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>By the early 1960s, at the peak of the civil rights movement, King’s views had evolved significantly. In early 1963, King came to Birmingham to lead a campaign for civil rights in a city known for its history of racial violence. </p>
<p>During the Birmingham campaign, in April 1963, he issued a masterful public letter explaining the motivations behind his crusade. It stands in striking contrast with his hopeful 1957 sermon. </p>
<p>His “<a href="https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html">Letter From a Birmingham Jail</a>” responded to a newspaper advertisement from eight local clergymen urging King to allow the city government to enact gradual changes. </p>
<p>In a stark change from his earlier views, King devastatingly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2018/01/15/martin-luther-king-jr-s-scathing-critique-of-white-moderates-from-the-birmingham-jail/?utm_term=.21b80fcd96ad">targeted white moderates</a> willing to settle for “order” over justice. In an oppressive environment, the avoidance of conflict might appear to be “order,” but in fact supported the denial of basic citizenship rights, he noted.</p>
<p>“We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive,” King wrote. He argued how oppressors never voluntarily gave up freedom to the oppressed – it always had to be demanded by “extremists for justice.” </p>
<p>He wrote how he was “gravely disappointed with the white moderate … who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” They were, he said, a greater enemy to racial justice than were members of the white supremacist groups such as the Ku Klux Klan and other white racist radicals. </p>
<h2>Call for economic justice</h2>
<p>By 1967, King’s philosophy emphasized economic justice as essential to equality. And he made clear connections between American violence abroad in Vietnam and American social inequality at home. </p>
<p>Exactly one year before his assassination in Memphis, King stood at one of the best-known pulpits in the nation, at <a href="https://www.trcnyc.org/history/">Riverside Church in New York</a>. There, he explained how he had come to connect the struggle for civil rights with the fight for economic justice and the early protests against the Vietnam War. </p>
<p><a href="http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_beyond_vietnam/">He proclaimed:</a></p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Now it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read ‘Vietnam.’ It can never be saved so long as it destroys the hopes of men the world over.”</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212710/original/file-20180329-189821-fwse6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/212710/original/file-20180329-189821-fwse6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212710/original/file-20180329-189821-fwse6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212710/original/file-20180329-189821-fwse6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=440&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212710/original/file-20180329-189821-fwse6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212710/original/file-20180329-189821-fwse6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/212710/original/file-20180329-189821-fwse6h.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=553&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">U.S. President Lyndon B. Johnson, right, talks with civil rights leaders at the White House in Washington, Jan. 18, 1964.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>He angered crucial allies. King and President Lyndon Johnson, for example, had been allies in achieving significant legislative victories in 1964 and 1965. Johnson’s “Great Society” launched a series of initiatives to address issues of poverty at home. But beginning in 1965, after the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/johngardner/chapters/4c.html">Johnson administration</a> increased the number of U.S. troops deployed in Vietnam, King’s vision grew radical. </p>
<p>King continued with a searching analysis of what linked poverty and violence both at home and abroad. While he had spoken out before about the effects of colonialism, he now made the connection unmistakably clear. He said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor in America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>King concluded with the famous words on <a href="https://www.carnegiefoundation.org/blog/the-fierce-urgency-of-now/">“the fierce urgency of now,”</a> by which he emphasized the immediacy of the connection between economic injustice and racial inequality. </p>
<h2>The radical King</h2>
<p>King’s <a href="https://www.archives.gov/files/press/exhibits/dream-speech.pdf">“I Have a Dream,”</a> speech at the March on Washington in August 1963 serves as the touchstone for the annual King holiday. But King’s dream ultimately evolved into a call for a fundamental redistribution of economic power and resources. It’s why he was in Memphis, <a href="http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_memphis_sanitation_workers_strike_1968/">supporting a strike by garbage workers</a>, when he was assassinated in April 1968. </p>
<p>He remained, to the end, the <a href="http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_nonviolent_resistance/">prophet of nonviolent resistance</a>. But these three key moments in King’s life show his evolution over a decade. </p>
<p>This remembering matters more than ever today. Many states are either passing or considering measures that would make it <a href="https://blog.oup.com/2016/12/religion-second-redemption">harder for many Americans</a> to exercise their fundamental right to vote. It would roll back the huge gains in rates of political participation by racial minorities made possible by the Voting Rights Act of 1965. At the same time, there is a <a href="https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/reports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-inequality/">persistent wealth gap</a> between blacks and whites.</p>
<p>Only sustained government attention can address these issues – the point King was stressing later in his life.</p>
<p>King’s philosophy stood not just for “opportunity,” but for positive measures toward economic equality and political power. Ignoring this understanding betrays the “dream” that is ritually invoked each year.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/92795/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Paul Harvey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>King Jr., remembered today mainly for his non violent resistance, was a radical reformer who called for a fundamental redistribution of economic power and resources .Paul Harvey, Professor of American History, University of Colorado Colorado SpringsLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/830042017-08-30T08:06:55Z2017-08-30T08:06:55ZWhite supremacists are on the march, but the Ku Klux Klan is history<p>When Donald Trump repeatedly equated the far-right activists who marched in Charlottesville, Virginia with the anti-fascist counter-protesters, the media’s reaction was swift and clear. The next covers of both the New Yorker and The Economist featured cartoons of Trump and a Ku Klux Klan hood. In one, the president guides a ship of state with a sail shaped like a hood; in the other, he shouts into a megaphone designed to look like the infamous white headpiece. </p>
<p>To many commentators, the Klan costume is now the perfect visual sleight with which to decry Trump’s cack-handed false equivalence. After all, hoods and burning crosses are the most potent icons of American white supremacy, an easy shorthand for racism and bigotry. But despite the scenes of extrovert white supremacists on the march with burning torches in Charlottesville, something important has changed: today, there is essentially no such thing as “the Klan”. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"898270023537508353"}"></div></p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"898129991799631872"}"></div></p>
<p>Its brand began to evaporate as long ago as 1944, when the Internal Revenue Service <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/29/us/29kennedy.html">turned up an unpayable debt</a> stemming from the organisation’s lucrative glory days in the 1920s. The debt was never repaid, meaning that those who would use the name today must settle it, which – thanks to compound interest – now stretches into the tens of millions.</p>
<p>The upshot is that today there are many different, equally horrible organisations designed to spread hate, all using the word “Klan”, but unable to call themselves simply the Ku Klux Klan. The Southern Poverty Law Centre, which tracks hate groups across the US, <a href="https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/ideology/ku-klux-klan">currently counts 130 such groups</a>. They total some 5,000 to 8,000 members. Few have more than regional appeal; very few have statewide reach, and none are national. </p>
<p>Some groups share their anti-Semitic vitriol with neo-Nazi organisations, drawing on modern paganism, usually based around the <a href="https://thinkprogress.org/the-new-religion-of-choice-for-white-supremacists-8af2a69a3440/">neo-Norse</a> mythologies. Some are <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QCuaQSZkGkQC&pg=PA31&lpg=PA31&dq=%22race+war%22+survivalists&source=bl&ots=kdLtaiecah&sig=2LHpJKzkSOEDz3URgPq-PZuWGnc&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjT2qfN3fzVAhWLC8AKHdajCyUQ6AEIRzAH#v=onepage&q=%22race%20war%22%20survivalists&f=false">militia-survivalists</a> preparing for the Wagnerian denouement of US civilisation in a “race war”. Still others focus on what they call the “White Holocaust” of abortion, which they claim disproportionately targets Caucasian babies, or adhere to “traditional” white supremacy grounded in extreme white Anglo-Saxon protestant ideals.</p>
<h2>The bad old days</h2>
<p>Frightening though this may sound, this is far from a return to the KKK’s 1920s heyday. Back then, it was a true mass movement, <a href="https://priceonomics.com/when-the-kkk-was-a-pyramid-scheme/">pyramid-selling membership</a> to millions of people in every state in the US and some of Canada; it even harboured ambitions of establishing “Klaverns” worldwide. Nor are we seeing a return to the Klans’ ultra-violent backlashes against civil rights in the 1870s or 1950s, when they commanded considerable, if localised, support.</p>
<p>The media should be careful about labelling far right groups or activists as “the Klan” just because they have associated views. This gives the oxygen of publicity to the ideological remnants of a group that hasn’t really existed for 70 years. </p>
<p>This was a different matter when the Klan was in full force. In 1921, the New York World famously ran 21 anti-Klan front-page articles, exposing the group’s awful activities day after day with large-point headlines – “Ku Klux Made Jews and Negroes Target for Racial Hatreds”, “Bitter Anti-Catholic Propaganda Peddled by Officials of Klan”. </p>
<p>These headlines spurred a full investigation by a House of Representatives committee, where the founder of the Klan, “Imperial Wizard” <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40578787">William Joseph Simmons</a>, successfully defended the order against claims of corruption, violence and bigotry. In a widely reported and memorable phrase, he <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=7JrlCQAAQBAJ&pg=PT152&lpg=PT152&dq=%E2%80%9Cinnocent+as+the+breath+of+an+angel%E2%80%9D+klan&source=bl&ots=peEMdyXcSo&sig=W2Sncv-_Zey03ipXZ3cBeZymT3Q&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj0qbaryvzVAhXKLMAKHU4SDP8Q6AEIODAE#v=onepage&q=%E2%80%9Cinnocent%20as%20the%20breath%20of%20an%20angel%E2%80%9D%20klan&f=false">argued</a> his Klan was as “innocent as the breath of an angel”.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/smwUMYccb7o?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>Thankfully, few if any believe such claptrap today. But that’s no reason for complacency. It should shock us that the Klans and their allies feel confident enough to take part in a public rally on the scale of Charlottesville, and that they feel others in the US might support them. Nevertheless, they almost certainly don’t have popular backing and there will not be a return to the dark days when the KKK enjoyed mass national membership, or regional sympathy. </p>
<p>Today, as always in the past, the Klans’ grab-bag ideology of hatreds and grievances contains the seeds of its own destruction. Publicity has the power to show “Klansmen” for what they really are: a collection of sad, dysfunctional, bigots who both celebrate their social exclusion and plot the downfall of those who exclude them. </p>
<p>History shows us they will never be able to unite under one banner, at least not for very long. But it would be a tragedy if a lack of historical context in the coverage of current events gives the wrong impression, helping Klansmen to achieve any form of unity.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/83004/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kristofer Allerfeldt receives funding from ESRC </span></em></p>Far from the millions-strong mass movement of years gone by, today’s ‘Klan’ is really just a smattering of assorted local hate groups.Kristofer Allerfeldt, Senior Lecturer in History, University of ExeterLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/815832017-07-27T02:01:22Z2017-07-27T02:01:22ZGeorge Romero’s zombies will make Americans reflect on racial violence long after his death<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179844/original/file-20170726-29425-a9c4no.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Annual 2010 zombie march in Madrid, an homage to George A. Romero.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Paul White</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>“What’s your zombie apocalypse survival plan?” </p>
<p>The question invites the liveliest discussions of the semester. I teach a course on social movements in fiction and film at West Virginia University, where I also conduct research on <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/politics-and-gender/article/racializing-gender-public-opinion-at-the-intersection/E97F06AF207D264FDE550A864A0EEB1E">race</a> and <a href="https://t.co/tMn93l5VQU">gender</a> politics in the United States. </p>
<p>George Romero’s first film, “Night of the Living Dead,” is on the syllabus. The film was groundbreaking in its use of horror as political critique. Half a century later, Romero’s films are still in conversation with racial politics in the United States, and Romero’s recent death calls for reflection on his legacy as a filmmaker. </p>
<h2>Disquieted times</h2>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180242/original/file-20170728-17792-1r05vqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180242/original/file-20170728-17792-1r05vqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180242/original/file-20170728-17792-1r05vqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180242/original/file-20170728-17792-1r05vqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180242/original/file-20170728-17792-1r05vqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=581&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180242/original/file-20170728-17792-1r05vqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180242/original/file-20170728-17792-1r05vqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180242/original/file-20170728-17792-1r05vqr.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Newark, N.J. Rioting erupted in the predominantly black area of Newark’s central ward in July 1967.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, an English professor and <a href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/monster-theory">monster theorist</a> at George Washington University, <a href="https://www.academia.edu/3999660/Undead_A_Zombie_Oriented_Ontology_">notes</a> that “Like all monsters, zombies are metaphors for that which disquiets their generative times.”</p>
<p>Romero shot “Night of the Living Dead” in 1967, when Americans’ attention was focused on powerful televised images of race riots in cities like Newark and Detroit, and on the Vietnam War, the likes of which were <a href="http://yearofthelivingdead.com/">new to broadcast news</a>. Romero reimagined scores of bleeding faces, twisted in rage or vacant from trauma, as the zombie hoard. He filtered public anger and anxieties through the hoard, reflecting what many viewed as liberals’ rage and disappointment over a lack of real social change and others saw as conservatives’ fear over disruptions in race relations and traditional family structures. This is the utility of the zombie as a political metaphor – it’s flexible; there is room enough for all our fears.</p>
<p>In “Night of the Living Dead,” an unlikely cross-section of people are cornered in a farmhouse by a zombie hoard. They struggle with each other and against the zombies to survive the night. At the end of the film, black protagonist Ben Huss is the sole survivor. He emerges from the basement at daybreak, only to be mistaken for a zombie and shot by an all-white militia. The militiamen congratulate each other and remark that Huss is “another one for the fire.” They never realize their terrible error. Perhaps they are inclined to see Huss as a threat to begin with, because he is black.</p>
<p>At the start of Romero’s next film, “Dawn of the Dead,” in which another unlikely bunch faces off against zombies in a shopping mall, police surround a public housing building. One officer remarks on the unfairness of putting blacks and Hispanics in these “big-ass fancy hotels” and proceeds to shoot residents indiscriminately, not distinguishing between the living and the undead. </p>
<p>The officers are shooting to restore the “natural order” in which the dead stay dead. But their actions also restore the prevailing social order and the institutions that create and reinforce racial inequality.</p>
<h2>Zombie revival</h2>
<p>In my class, I connect these scenes of dehumanization to contemporary racial politics, using them as a springboard for conversations about racially motivated police violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. These discussions focus on the zombie as a dehumanized creature.</p>
<p>In returning from the dead, zombies lose their human essence – their agency, critical reasoning capacities, empathy and language. As Cohen <a href="https://www.academia.edu/3999660/Undead_A_Zombie_Oriented_Ontology_">writes,</a> “Zombies are a collective, a swarm. They do not own individualizing stories. They do not have personalities. They eat. They kill. They shamble. They suffer and they cause suffering. They are dirty, stinking, and poorly dressed. They are indifferent to their own decay.” Zombies retain a human form, but lose their individuality and are dehumanized in their reanimation.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180243/original/file-20170728-17792-1hkbp4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180243/original/file-20170728-17792-1hkbp4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/180243/original/file-20170728-17792-1hkbp4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180243/original/file-20170728-17792-1hkbp4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180243/original/file-20170728-17792-1hkbp4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=435&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180243/original/file-20170728-17792-1hkbp4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180243/original/file-20170728-17792-1hkbp4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/180243/original/file-20170728-17792-1hkbp4l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=547&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Film director George A. Romero in Mexico City in 2011.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Marco Ugarte</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Minority victims of police shootings are often portrayed in the media as dangerous, animalistic and even monstrous – meaning they too are <a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2014/08/11/339592009/people-wonder-if-they-gunned-me-down-what-photo-would-media-use">stripped of their basic humanity</a>. <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1207/s15327957pspr1003_4">Social psychologists</a> argue that perceptions of humanity are a critical part of social cognition – the way we process or think about other people and social settings. When we see people or groups as less than human, predictable consequences arise. Romero’s films tune us in to our own potential for dehumanization.</p>
<h2>Zombie psychology</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115045?journalCode=psych">Dehumanization</a> relaxes our moral restrictions on doing harm to others and ultimately facilitates <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022103112002284">violence</a> against them. When people see members of a group as an undifferentiated “hoard,” they’re susceptible to the same error as the militiamen in “Night of the Living Dead.” When they couple dehumanization with hatred, resentment or fear, they become like the resentful police officer in “Dawn of the Dead.” Dehumanization of black Americans underpins the violence perpetrated against them in Romero’s films and in America today.</p>
<p>Dehumanization isn’t confined to police violence. <a href="http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167216675334">New research</a> shows that dehumanization of Muslims and Hispanics underlies support for restrictive immigration policies and a border wall. It also undercuts support for aid to refugees. </p>
<p>In my own research, I show that political candidates are often dehumanized in <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/10/31/here-are-3-insights-into-why-some-people-think-trump-is-a-monster/?utm_term=.1a8eea6a8fbb">political discourse</a> and <a href="https://qdr.syr.edu/discover/browse/QDR:10079">campaign imagery</a>. This work suggests that monsters plague our elections and governance processes more broadly.</p>
<p>Romero will be best remembered for giving the zombie a place in mainstream American culture, but he also gave us a warning about human psychology and critical insights into racial politics in the U.S. For this reason, his work will continue to have a revered place on my syllabus.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81583/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erin C. Cassese does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Romero’s ‘Night of the Living Dead’ and ‘Dawn of the Dead’ will be remembered among the first films to use horror as a form of political critique.Erin C. Cassese, Associate Professor of Political Science, West Virginia UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/814272017-07-26T01:55:29Z2017-07-26T01:55:29Z100 years ago African-Americans marched down 5th Avenue to declare that black lives matter<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179312/original/file-20170722-28515-16wxxmn.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Silent protest parade in New York against the East St. Louis riots, 1917.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/95517074/">Library of Congress</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>Editor’s Note: This article was published on July 25, 2017.</em></p>
<p>The only sounds were those of muffled drums, the shuffling of feet and the gentle sobs of some of the estimated 20,000 onlookers. The women and children wore all white. The men dressed in black. </p>
<p>On the afternoon of Saturday, July 28, 1917, nearly 10,000 African-Americans marched down Fifth Avenue, in silence, to protest racial violence and white supremacy in the United States.</p>
<p>New York City, and the nation, had never before witnessed such a remarkable scene. </p>
<p>The “Silent Protest Parade,” as it came to be known, was the first mass African-American demonstration of its kind and marked a watershed moment in the history of the civil rights movement. As I have written in my book <a href="https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469609850/torchbearers-of-democracy/">“Torchbearers of Democracy</a>,” African-Americans during the World War I era challenged racism both abroad and at home. In taking to the streets to dramatize the brutal treatment of black people, the participants of the “Silent Protest Parade” indicted the United States as an unjust nation. </p>
<p>This charge remains true today.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179691/original/file-20170725-2133-1td69y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179691/original/file-20170725-2133-1td69y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179691/original/file-20170725-2133-1td69y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179691/original/file-20170725-2133-1td69y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179691/original/file-20170725-2133-1td69y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179691/original/file-20170725-2133-1td69y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179691/original/file-20170725-2133-1td69y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179691/original/file-20170725-2133-1td69y0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Several thousand people attended a Seattle rally to call attention to minority rights and police brutality in April 2017.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AP Photo/Ted S. Warren</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>One hundred years later, as black people continue to insist that “Black Lives Matter,” the “Silent Protest Parade” offers a vivid reminder about the power of courageous leadership, grassroots mobilization, direct action and their collective necessity in the fight to end racial oppression in our current troubled times. </p>
<h2>Racial violence and the East St. Louis Riot</h2>
<p>One of the great accomplishments of the Black Lives Matter movement has been to demonstrate the continuum of racist violence against black people throughout American history and also the history of <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-making-of-black-lives-matter-9780190601348?cc=us&lang=en&">resistance against it</a>. But as we continue to grapple with the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/20/us/police-shooting-castile-trial-video.html?_r=0">hyper-visibility of black death</a>, it is perhaps easy to forget just how truly horrific racial violence against black people was a century ago. </p>
<p>Prior to the “Silent Protest Parade,” <a href="https://archive.org/details/thirtyyearsoflyn00nati">mob violence and the lynching</a> of African-Americans had grown even more gruesome. In Waco, a mob of 10,000 white Texans attended the May 15, 1916, lynching of a black farmer, <a href="http://www.tamupress.com/product/First-Waco-Horror,1483.aspx">Jesse Washington</a>. One year later, on May 22, 1917, a black woodcutter, <a href="https://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/memphis-burning/Content?oid=4438125">Ell Persons</a>, died at the hands of over 5,000 vengeance-seeking whites in Memphis. Both men were burned and mutilated, their charred body parts distributed and displayed as souvenirs.</p>
<hr>
<p>
<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/a-short-history-of-black-women-and-police-violence-139937">A short history of black women and police violence</a>
</strong>
</em>
</p>
<hr>
<p>Even by these grisly standards, <a href="http://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/57mbk5qp9780252009518.html">East St. Louis</a> later that same summer was shocking. Simmering labor tensions between white and black workers exploded on the evening of July 2, 1917.</p>
<p>For 24 hours, white mobs indiscriminately stabbed, shot and lynched anyone with black skin. Men, women, children, the elderly, the disabled – no one was spared. Homes were torched and occupants shot down as they attempted to flee. White militia men stood idly by as the carnage unfolded. Some actively participated. The death toll likely ran as high as 200 people.</p>
<p>The city’s surviving 6,000 black residents became refugees. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179539/original/file-20170724-11166-omtn8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179539/original/file-20170724-11166-omtn8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179539/original/file-20170724-11166-omtn8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179539/original/file-20170724-11166-omtn8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179539/original/file-20170724-11166-omtn8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=747&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179539/original/file-20170724-11166-omtn8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179539/original/file-20170724-11166-omtn8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179539/original/file-20170724-11166-omtn8e.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=939&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ida B. Wells.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/93505758/">Library of Congress</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>East St. Louis was an <a href="http://www.ohioswallow.com/book/American+Pogrom">American pogrom</a>. The fearless African-American anti-lynching activist <a href="https://www.harpercollins.com/9780061972942">Ida B. Wells</a> traveled to the still smoldering city on July 4 and <a href="http://gildedage.lib.niu.edu/islandora/object/niu-gildedage%3A24051">collected firsthand accounts</a> of the aftermath. She described what she saw as an “awful orgy of human butchery.” </p>
<p>The devastation of East St. Louis was compounded by the fact that America was at war. <a href="https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wilson's_War_Message_to_Congress">On April 2</a>, President Woodrow Wilson had thrown the United States into the maelstrom of World War I. He did so by asserting <a href="https://theconversation.com/1917-woodrow-wilsons-call-to-war-pulled-america-onto-a-global-stage-75022">America’s singularly unique place on the global stage</a> and his goal to make the world “safe for democracy.” In the eyes of black people, East St. Louis exposed the hypocrisy of Wilson’s vision and America itself. </p>
<h2>The NAACP takes action</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://www.naacp.org/">National Association for the Advancement of Colored People</a> quickly responded to the massacre. Founded in 1909, the NAACP had yet to establish itself as a truly representative <a href="http://thenewpress.com/books/lift-every-voice">organization for African-Americans across the country</a>. With the exception of <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781466841512">W.E.B. Du Bois</a>, one of the NAACP’s co-founders and editor of The Crisis magazine, the national leadership was all white. Branches were overwhelmingly located in the North, despite the majority of African-Americans residing below the Mason-Dixon line. As a result, the NAACP had largely failed to respond with a sense of urgency to the everyday horrors endured by the masses of black folk. </p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179628/original/file-20170725-31338-oegjci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/179628/original/file-20170725-31338-oegjci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179628/original/file-20170725-31338-oegjci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179628/original/file-20170725-31338-oegjci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=777&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179628/original/file-20170725-31338-oegjci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179628/original/file-20170725-31338-oegjci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/179628/original/file-20170725-31338-oegjci.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=976&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">James Weldon Johnson.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:James_Weldon_Johnson.jpg">Twentieth Century Negro Literature</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><a href="http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/321968/along-this-way-by-james-weldon-johnson/9780143105176/">James Weldon Johnson</a> changed things. Lawyer, diplomat, novelist, poet and songwriter, Johnson was a true African-American renaissance man. In 1916, Johnson joined the NAACP as a field secretary and made an immediate impact. In addition to growing the organization’s southern membership, Johnson recognized the importance of expanding the influence of the NAACP’s existing branches beyond the black elite.</p>
<p>Johnson raised the idea of a silent protest march at an executive committee meeting of the NAACP Harlem branch shortly after the East St. Louis riot. Johnson also insisted that the protest include the city’s entire black community. Planning quickly got underway, spearheaded by Johnson and local black clergymen. </p>
<h2>A historic day</h2>
<p>By noon on July 28, several thousand African-Americans had begun to assemble at 59th Street. Crowds gathered along Fifth Avenue. Anxious New York City police officers lined the streets, aware of what was about to take place but, with clubs at the ready, prepared for trouble.</p>
<p>At approximately 1 p.m., the protest parade commenced. Four men carrying drums began to slowly, solemnly play. A group of black clergymen and NAACP officials made up the front line. W.E.B. Du Bois, who had recently returned from conducting an <a href="http://library.brown.edu/pdfs/1292426769648500.pdf">NAACP investigation in East St. Louis</a>, and James Weldon Johnson marched side by side. </p>
<p>The parade was a stunning spectacle. At the front, women and children wearing all-white gowns symbolized the innocence of African-Americans in the face of the nation’s guilt. The men, bringing up the rear and dressed in dark suits, conveyed both a mournful dignity and stern determination to stand up for their rights as citizens.</p>
<p>They carried signs and banners shaming America for its treatment of black people. Some read, “Your hands are full of blood,” “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” “Mothers, do lynchers go to heaven?” Others highlighted the wartime context and the hollowness of America’s ideals: “We have fought for the liberty of white Americans in six wars; our reward was East St. Louis,” “Patriotism and loyalty presuppose protection and liberty,” “Make America safe for Democracy.”</p>
<p>Throughout the parade, the marchers remained silent. The New York Times <a href="https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1917/07/29/96262006.html?pageNumber=12">described the protest</a> as “one of the most quiet and orderly demonstrations ever witnessed.” The silence was finally broken with cheers when the parade concluded at Madison Square. </p>
<h2>Legacy of the Silent Protest Parade</h2>
<p>The “Silent Protest Parade” marked the beginning of a new epoch in the long black freedom struggle. While adhering to a certain <a href="http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674769786">politics of respectability</a>, a strategy employed by African-Americans that focused on countering racist stereotypes through dignified appearance and behavior, the protest, within its context, constituted a radical claiming of the public sphere and a powerful affirmation of black humanity. It declared that a “New Negro” had arrived and launched a black public protest tradition that would be seen in the parades of the <a href="http://lsupress.org/books/detail/the-world-of-marcus-garvey/">Universal Negro Improvement Association</a>, the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matter marches of today. </p>
<p>[<em>Context on today’s headlines, each day.</em> <a href="https://theconversation.com/us/newsletters?utm_source=TCUS&utm_medium=inline-link&utm_campaign=newsletter-text&utm_content=context">You can get it with The Conversation’s email newsletter</a>.]</p>
<p>The “Silent Protest Parade” reminds us that the fight against racist violence and the killing of black people remains just as relevant now as it did 100 years ago. Black death, whether at the hands of a <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/us/alton-sterling-doj-death-investigation/index.html">Baton Rouge police officer</a> or <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/charleston-church-shooter-i-would-like-to-make-it-crystal-clear-i-do-not-regret-what-i-did/2017/01/04/05b0061e-d1da-11e6-a783-cd3fa950f2fd_story.html">white supremacist in Charleston</a>, is a specter that continues to haunt this nation. The expendability of black bodies is American tradition, and history speaks to the long endurance of this violent legacy.</p>
<p>But history also offers inspiration, purpose and vision. </p>
<p>Ida B. Wells, James Weldon Johnson and other freedom fighters of their generation should serve as models for activists today. That the “Silent Protest Parade” attracted black people from all walks of life and backgrounds attests to the need for organizations like the NAACP, following its recent national convention, to remember and embrace its origins. And, in building and sustaining the current movement, we can take lessons from past struggles and work strategically and creatively to apply them to the present. </p>
<p>Because, at their core, the demands of black people in 2017 remain the same as one of the signs raised to the sky on that July afternoon in 1917: </p>
<p>“Give me a chance to live.”</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/81427/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chad Williams does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Thousands marched in silence against racial violence after a riot left hundreds of blacks dead and thousands homeless. The demands of black people in 2017 remain the same as they did in 1917.Chad Williams, Associate Professor of African and Afro-American Studies, Brandeis UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/680292016-11-03T00:17:50Z2016-11-03T00:17:50ZDylann Roof, Michael Slager on trial: Five essential reads on Charleston<p><em>Editor’s note: The following is a roundup of archival stories related to race and violence.</em></p>
<p>Two white men are going on trial this month for shootings that happened in Charleston, South Carolina during 2015.</p>
<p>Michael Slager, a white former police officer, faces a murder charge for killing 50-year-old Walter Scott, a black man who was unarmed. Slager fired eight shots as Scott ran away.</p>
<p>Dylann Roof, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, faces 33 federal charges, including a federal hate crime for massacring nine black churchgoers at an AME church. He is eligible for the death penalty.</p>
<p>As the trials bring back memories of those horrifying events, we look at highlights from The Conversation’s archive.</p>
<h2>A dark past, present</h2>
<p>Parallels between the two shootings and South Carolina’s history of racial violence quickly rose to the surface.</p>
<p><a href="https://theconversation.com/the-massacre-at-mother-emanuel-the-past-still-lives-with-us-43597">The past is still with us</a>, writes A.D. Carson, a Ph.D. student at Clemson University.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“In 1876, State Senator Simon Coker – who was in Charleston investigating violence against blacks – was seized by a mob and shot in the head as he kneeled in a last prayer. One of the perpetrators of that atrocious event was none other than the eventual governor and senator, Benjamin Tillman, who made his disdain for black people known…”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>A statue of Tillman still stands on the grounds of the South Carolina State House in Columbia. Remembering, not honoring, this dark past is important to stop the past from repeating itself, Carson writes.</p>
<h2>A place of hate, hope</h2>
<p>It also was <a href="https://theconversation.com/emanuel-ame-has-long-been-a-target-for-hate-as-well-as-place-of-hope-43601">not the first time</a> the Emanuel AME church was the target of racial violence, writes Sandra Barnes, a religion scholar at Vanderbilt University. </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Here are just a few examples of the assaults that took place on Emanuel AME and other churches over the years: white raids; black church services being made illegal in Charleston between 1834 and 1865; the burning of Emanuel AME after the slave rebellion lead by Denmark Vessey; the police harassment of civil rights protesters at Emanuel AME in the 1960s.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Roof’s attack was one of many – part of systemic violence embedded in the state’s history.</p>
<h2>All oppression is connected</h2>
<p>Before opening fire, Roof said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Not only are his words deeply racist, they are saturated with a form of sexism that reaches back to a <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-lethal-gentleman-the-benevolent-sexism-behind-dylann-roofs-racism-43534">colonial mentality of entitlement</a>, writes Lisa Wade, a sociologist at Occidental College.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“It’s most clearly articulated in the history of lynching, in which black men were violently murdered routinely by white mobs using the excuse that they had raped a white woman. Roof is the modern equivalent of this white mob.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A vulnerable father</h2>
<p>South Carolina also has struggled with an issue related to Walter Scott’s death – child support. Reports from the Scott case suggest he ran from Officer Slager because he was afraid of being jailed for not paying child support.</p>
<p>In 2011, a case went to the Supreme Court in which a South Carolina man served one year in prison when he failed to pay child support. Incarcerating poor men often makes <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-crisis-revealed-by-the-killing-of-walter-scott-how-were-failing-vulnerable-fathers-40610">a difficult situation much worse</a>, writes Ronald Mincy, professor of Social Policy at Columbia University.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The fear of incarceration bears indirect responsibility for Scott’s death. And Walter Scott was not alone in feeling this fear. At present, there are approximately 9 million nonresident fathers (that is to say, fathers who do not live in the same household as their child or children) of whom over half are economically vulnerable.”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A movement grows</h2>
<p>After a video of Scott’s death was released, members of the #BlackLivesMatter movement called for more citizen oversight of policing. <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-ferguson-and-blacklivesmatter-taught-us-not-to-look-away-45815">This call to bear witness</a> has served as a form of resistance to oppression since the Jim Crow era, writes Nicholas Mirzoeff, professor at New York University.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The #BlackLivesMatter movement that began after the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012 insists not just that we sneak a sidelong glance, but that we pay full attention to the repeated deaths of African Americans. This looking is not a gaze, because it does not claim power over the victims. Rather, it creates the digital form of what Martin Luther King Jr called ‘the beloved community.’”</p>
</blockquote><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68029/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
Two major trials in the killings of black victims in South Carolina start this week. Learn about the state’s past and present struggle with racial violence in this roundup.Danielle Douez, Associate Editor, Politics + SocietyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/621052016-07-13T02:16:31Z2016-07-13T02:16:31ZHow apps and other online tools are challenging racist attacks<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/130169/original/image-20160712-9289-zgug4n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Online and offline activism are merging, as recognised by this protest against the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://twitter.com/THESOURCE/status/500653210114490368/photo/1">Twitter</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In the aftermath of <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/brexit">Brexit in the UK</a> and the <a href="https://theconversation.com/defiant-hanson-will-test-a-coalition-government-61985">success of Pauline Hanson</a> in the Australian Senate elections, racism seems to be a more present threat than ever. </p>
<p>As First Nations people and people of colour in Australia well know, racial violence never went away. But, for others, recent events may serve as a needed reminder that racist attacks and abuses of police power also happen outside the US. </p>
<p>The Brexit fallout has included <a href="http://mashable.com/2016/06/27/facebook-brexit-incidents-hate-crime-london-britain/#ufAyyr7biOqL">a sharp rise in racist attacks</a> on people of colour and migrants, including eastern Europeans. Anti-racists in the UK have quickly responded. The <a href="http://www.istreetwatch.co.uk/">iStreetWatch</a> website now allows users to report and map racist incidents across the UK. </p>
<p>People are increasingly using online spaces and digital tools such as anti-racism apps to strategise, challenge racist views and strengthen anti-racist solidarity. </p>
<p>The post-Brexit Twitter handle <a href="https://twitter.com/postrefracism">@PostRefRacism</a> has nearly 10,000 followers. It encourages users “to document the increase in racism in the UK following the vote for Brexit”.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"748111885388636160"}"></div></p>
<p>But as <a href="https://twitter.com/prerefracism">@PreRefRacism</a> observes, far from being new, racism has merely become more visible to white people since Brexit.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"748289789053509633"}"></div></p>
<h2>Defining, discussing and countering racism</h2>
<p>Activists and scholars have always argued race is a complex formation that needs to be set in historical context. However, the popular view is racism is a matter of bad attitudes that anyone can hold.</p>
<p>In online discussions, reductive approaches to racism can be challenged in real time. It is due to the prominence of many black feminists on Twitter, for example, that the term <a href="http://everydayfeminism.com/2015/01/why-our-feminism-must-be-intersectional/">intersectionality</a> has become more widely understood.</p>
<p>Social media provide an important space in which racism is being defined, discussed and countered. These are <a href="http://www.sl.nsw.gov.au/events/scholarly-musings-indigenous-activism-and-social-media-spaces">key sites</a> for observing how discussions of race take shape.</p>
<p>However, as media scholar Gavan Titley notes, this has also led to racism becoming “<a href="https://raster.fi/2016/02/17/the-debatability-of-racism-networked-participative-media-and-postracialism/">debatable</a>” – to the detriment of a clear delineation of what racism is and is not. </p>
<p>While “cyber-racism” is important to challenge, the persistence of street violence and the intertwining of “offline” and “online” worlds call for new methods for opposing racism in public. </p>
<p>Mobile apps for anti-racism interventions and education have been around for a number of years and several more are in development. As <a href="http://www.uws.edu.au/ics/research/projects/anti-racism_apps">our research on apps</a> in Australia, the UK and France has shown, they have diverse functions: to report racist incidents; to educate; and as news sources for racialised communities. </p>
<p>The “phone in your pocket”, with its built-in geolocative and image-capturing capabilities, can be a powerful anti-racism tool, enabling immediate reactions to racist events. As with the recent <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36732908">police shooting of Philando Castile</a>, mobile video live-streamed online can generate almost immediate widespread condemnation and reaction.</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"751074188786630657"}"></div></p>
<h2>Tracking Islamophobic abuse</h2>
<p>The Australian <a href="http://islamophobiawatch.com.au/">Islamophobia Watch</a> is a reporting app modelled on one developed by the French anti-Islamophobia association, the <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectif_contre_l%27islamophobie_en_France">CCIF</a>. The app was launched in reaction to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/mosques-muslims-and-myths-overcoming-fear-in-our-suburbs-31822">2014 police raids on Muslim homes</a> and subsequent <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/national/dozens-of-antimuslim-attacks-as-islamic-leaders-warn-of-community-fear-20141009-113tmk.html">attacks on Muslim people in public</a>, women in particular. </p>
<p>Like iStreet Watch, the app allows users to report incidents of Islamophobic abuse. A <a href="http://islamophobiawatch.com.au/map/main">map is created</a> to visualise these incidents by category such as physical or verbal aggression, discrimination and vandalism. This representation of racial violence is itself a primary purpose of these apps.</p>
<p>The CCIF spokespeople in Paris told us that, in addition to enabling the reporting of racist events, the app-generated data draw attention to the existence of Islamophobia as a category of racism, which is highly contested in France. By cataloguing abusive events, CCIF makes the point that Islamophobia cannot go ignored. </p>
<p>The app includes a feed that provides an alternative news source for an embattled community. Against a backdrop of increased state-sanctioned Islamophobia – bans on hijabs and burqas, the imposition of pork on school canteen menus and heightened policing of Muslims in a hyper-securitised landscape – the resource generates community solidarity. </p>
<p>In this way, users may experience the app as a more concrete response to racism than fleeting online hashtag campaigns.</p>
<h2>What are the risks of these apps?</h2>
<p>Our research will now turn to the US and Canada where app development has focused on <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/shootings-police-race-america-1.3670654">police violence against the black community</a>. Tools such as the <a href="http://www.nyclu.org/app">NYCLU Stop and Frisk app</a> allow users to film police violence, report incidents and alert users when others are being stopped and frisked in their area. </p>
<p>While such apps purport to put the power in the hands of those on the receiving end, the rise of formalised digital platforms that capture and store data and evidence of racism also raises legitimate concerns: </p>
<ul>
<li><p>As our research shows, the conduit between the reporting of incidents, the police and the courts necessarily appeals to the same systems in which institutionalised racism so often plays out. </p></li>
<li><p>Despite the apps we studied providing confidential and anonymised reporting, the real and perceived risks of the technology being used (in the wrong hands) to profile and literally locate and track individual reporters and activists is a genuine concern. This may act as a barrier to take-up and use. </p></li>
<li><p>The ease with which incidents can be filmed and uploaded online, while certainly raising awareness, runs the risk of causing people to switch off. </p></li>
</ul>
<p>Digital technology can have the dual effect of informing about and banalising racism. As comic <a href="https://twitter.com/harikondabolu">Hari Kondabolu</a> tweeted following the US police <a href="https://theconversation.com/how-a-live-streamed-police-killing-revealed-the-power-of-representation-62238">shootings on successive days</a> of two black men, Alton Sterling and Philando Castile:</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"751135764436713472"}"></div></p>
<p>As more apps are developed, more questions will emerge. What is clear is that these will be a main player in the fight against racism as it morphs and spreads into online and mobile-mediated everyday spaces.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/62105/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Racial abuse and violence and the intertwining of ‘offline’ and ‘online’ worlds call for new methods for opposing racism in public.Alana Lentin, Associate Professor in Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney UniversityJustine Humphry, Lecturer in Cultural and Social Analysis, Western Sydney UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/461402015-12-10T19:14:08Z2015-12-10T19:14:08ZFriday essay: a response to the Cronulla riots, ten years on<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105194/original/image-20151210-7467-bketzw.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The cultural context in which class, ethnic and racial tensions explode into open violence must be analysed honestly. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Paul Miller</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>In mid-December 2005, politicians of all persuasions branded the violent clashes that had just occurred on Sydney’s southern suburbs as “<a href="https://dro.deakin.edu.au/eserv/DU:30043760/halafoff-unaustralianvalues-2006.pdf">un-Australian</a>”. Whether the term was being applied to the racist white thugs who attacked Lebanese beach-goers or to the Chardonnay sippers who defended the “new Australians” right to be there was sometimes not clear.</p>
<p>“Un-Australian” was a <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2005/03/14/1110649126449.html">zeitgeisty linguistic shield</a> a decade ago, successfully wielded by then Prime Minister Howard to fend off accusations that his government insidiously bred divisiveness and enmity among the populace. </p>
<p>(Ousted former Prime Minister Tony Abbott recently tried the same tactics with “<a href="http://www.smh.com.au/comment/tony-abbotts-team-australia-entrenches-inequality-20140821-106sdk.html">Team Australia</a>” but found the nation’s love of a sporting metaphor had hit a sticky wicket.)</p>
<p>Following the Cronulla riots, Howard looked us straight in the eye and <a href="http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/pm-refuses-to-use-racist-tag/2005/12/12/1134235985480.html">told us</a> that, “I do not accept there is underlying racism in this country”. Howard insisted that people would not “make judgements about Australia on incidents that occur over a period of a few days”. Cronulla was simply an isolated spot fire, a matter of law and temporarily disturbed order.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105191/original/image-20151210-7422-l7fn6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105191/original/image-20151210-7422-l7fn6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105191/original/image-20151210-7422-l7fn6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105191/original/image-20151210-7422-l7fn6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105191/original/image-20151210-7422-l7fn6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=390&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105191/original/image-20151210-7422-l7fn6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105191/original/image-20151210-7422-l7fn6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105191/original/image-20151210-7422-l7fn6l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=490&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former Australian Prime Minister John Howard holds a press conference in Sydney, following the 2005 Cronulla riots.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Dean Lewins</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Since 2005, the emergence of the <a href="http://www.reclaim-australia.com/">Reclaim Australia</a> movement and <a href="https://www.partyforfreedom.org.au/">The Party for Freedom</a> (tagline: “Sydney is fun: Cronulla is a riot”), among other outbursts of brute bigotry and unalloyed stupidity, suggests otherwise. </p>
<p>But, of course, violent civilian conflict is not a recent trend. You don’t have to dig very deep into Australia’s past to reveal multiple episodes of riotous behaviour. Some might say that the peasants have always been revolting.</p>
<p>In fact, Australia’s key foundation stories have a narrative arc based on the slow simmering of social tension and anxiety culminating in an explosive release of group hostility. Similarly, some of our most iconic spaces are written over by the language and logic of territorialism, resistance and cruelty.</p>
<p>These events and places are not footnotes to our history; not graffiti on a pristine landscape of harmonious national growth and development. The frontier violence that lies at the dark heart of our colonial beginnings is the first clue that Australians have always drawn lines in the sand with blood.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105184/original/image-20151210-7447-qiww5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105184/original/image-20151210-7447-qiww5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105184/original/image-20151210-7447-qiww5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105184/original/image-20151210-7447-qiww5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105184/original/image-20151210-7447-qiww5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105184/original/image-20151210-7447-qiww5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105184/original/image-20151210-7447-qiww5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105184/original/image-20151210-7447-qiww5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Chairman of the Party for Freedom Nicholas Folkes (centre) is confronted by Shayne Hunter (left) as he arrives at the Supreme Court in Sydney, Friday, Dec 4, 2015.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Joel Carrett</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Perhaps the armed defence of homeland from an invading force is not strictly riotous behaviour. (The Australian War Memorial <a href="http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/queensland/australian-war-memorial-should-recognise-revised-aboriginal-death-toll-researcher-20140716-ztqr6.html">doesn’t think it’s military behaviour either</a>, for the record.) It is certainly unlikely that any redcoat or man in blue read the Riot Act before condemning Indigenous Australians to massacre.</p>
<p>But there are plenty of bona fides riots. In March 1804 at Castle Hill, 300 convicts rioted against their captors in the <a href="http://monumentaustralia.org.au/australian_monument/display/22941">Vinegar Hill uprising</a>, otherwise known as the Irish Convict Rebellion. Troops killed nine insurgents and the ringleaders were hanged.</p>
<p>In June 1861 at <a href="http://www.sbs.com.au/gold/story.php?storyid=56">Lambing Flat, NSW</a>, 3,000 miners attacked a Chinese camp on the diggings after months of mass protest meetings “for the purpose of taking into consideration whether [the district] is an European gold-field or a Chinese territory”. Tents were burned and the Chinese diggers fled for their lives. The NSW government considered the issue finally settled and restricted Chinese immigration.</p>
<p>The early-closing legislation that ushered in Australia’s infamous “<a href="http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/the-6-oclock-swill-wed-not-have-a-bar-of-it-now-20140111-30ns3.html">six o’clock swill</a>” had its origins during the first world war, as a response to a riot among soldiers. </p>
<p>The Liverpool Riot of 1916, otherwise known as the <a href="http://www.sydneyoutsider.com.au/SydneyOutsider/battle-of-central-station/">Battle of Central Station</a>, saw 15,000 returned Australian soldiers (otherwise known as Anzacs) rampage drunkenly through the streets of Sydney. The soldiers looted shops, commandeered pubs and smashed the windows of stores with foreign sounding names. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105192/original/image-20151210-7431-ynwr73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105192/original/image-20151210-7431-ynwr73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105192/original/image-20151210-7431-ynwr73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105192/original/image-20151210-7431-ynwr73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105192/original/image-20151210-7431-ynwr73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=352&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105192/original/image-20151210-7431-ynwr73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105192/original/image-20151210-7431-ynwr73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105192/original/image-20151210-7431-ynwr73.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=442&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Kalgoorlie after the race riots in 1934.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1934, on Australia Day no less, simmering undercurrents in the Western Australian mining districts erupted in open conflict after a bar room brawl. The <a href="http://museum.wa.gov.au/explore/wa-goldfields/getting-gold/ethnic-riots">Kalgoorlie Boulder race riots</a>, as the episode is conventionally known, began after a young, popular local footballer was knocked down and killed by an Italian barman at the Italian-owned Home from Home Hotel. </p>
<p>What followed, in apparent revenge for a mate’s death, was three days of riotous destruction and looting of hotels, shops and businesses belonging to the Italian and Slav communities. Witnesses reported that the mob “just got out of hand”. At the core of the conflagration lurked the politics of envy (imported European miners earned better wages than their local co-workers) and sensitivity to cultural difference. </p>
<p>One bystander reported that,“our women had to step out of the way when an Italian man walked down the street”. (The Cronulla rioters would use similar logic, claiming to be protecting clean Aussie sheilas from the Lebanese men who said “filthy things” to them at the beach.)</p>
<p>Burning down pubs is so common to the history of Australian political expression that it can almost be called a national pastime. Our most emblematic act of rebellion, the <a href="http://www.australia.gov.au/about-australia/australian-story/eureka-stockade">Eureka Stockade</a>, also has its antecedents in the mob attack on a hotel. </p>
<p>In October 1854, a popular young miner was killed by a blow to the head outside Bentley’s Eureka Hotel, on the predominantly Irish-Catholic Eureka lead. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105185/original/image-20151210-7431-kpx6f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105185/original/image-20151210-7431-kpx6f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105185/original/image-20151210-7431-kpx6f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105185/original/image-20151210-7431-kpx6f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105185/original/image-20151210-7431-kpx6f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=432&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105185/original/image-20151210-7431-kpx6f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105185/original/image-20151210-7431-kpx6f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105185/original/image-20151210-7431-kpx6f0.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=543&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Battle of the Eureka Stockade (1834). JB Henderson. Watercolour.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">J. B. Henderson – State Library of NSW. Wikimedia Commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The people suspected Bentley, the newly wealthy and well-connected, Irish-Protestant ex-convict publican. When local authorities exonerated Bentley, 5,000 miners converged on the hotel and burnt it to the ground. A subsequent parliamentary inquiry into “the Ballarat riots” found that the incendiary mob included men and women, frustrated at the arbitrary exercise of local justice and the dying hope that the newly appointed Governor Hotham would address miners’ hatred of the iniquitous license fee and lack of access to farming land. </p>
<p>Two months later, Hotham’s law-and-order response to the escalating grievances of the Ballarat population ended in carnage.</p>
<p>In 2004, in the same week as the 150th anniversary of the Eureka rebellion was being commemorated, residents of Palm Island rioted after the death in custody of a <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-09-30/palm-island-riot-footage-shown-to-court-in-class-action-trial/6818074">young Aboriginal man</a>, with chilling echoes of the Redfern riots only ten months earlier. </p>
<p>Both incidents highlighted the “two tribes” mentality that existed between local residents and police in these areas. Informed commentators pointed to the underlying social problems of poverty, unemployment and alcoholism in both communities, problems that successive administrations repeatedly failed to address despite warning signs that intense aggravation was mounting. Blind Freddy, they said, could see it coming.</p>
<p>Riots are not like tsunamis. They do not rise out of nowhere, capriciously assailing all who stand in their way. Riots conform more to the laws of physics than acts of God: pour another teaspoon of liquid into a bowl that has reached its maximum surface tension and the bowl will overflow, no matter whether the last spoonful contained any more bitter medicine than the critical mass below.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105195/original/image-20151210-7422-1pdq6bd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105195/original/image-20151210-7422-1pdq6bd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/105195/original/image-20151210-7422-1pdq6bd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105195/original/image-20151210-7422-1pdq6bd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105195/original/image-20151210-7422-1pdq6bd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=438&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105195/original/image-20151210-7422-1pdq6bd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105195/original/image-20151210-7422-1pdq6bd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/105195/original/image-20151210-7422-1pdq6bd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=550&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A man is chased by an angry crowd at Cronulla beach in Sydney, Sunday, Dec. 11, 2005.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">AAP Image/Paul Miller</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We might not be able to predict exactly when grievance will spill over into riot, but there are some striking parallels in the episodes here briefly recounted. </p>
<p>Young men. Alcohol. Revenge. Contest over shared terrain, whether between autocrats and democrats, insiders and outsiders, gaolers and inmates. A liminal space – the goldfields, the beach, an island – seemingly ungoverned by the rules of everyday life. The oppressive heat of an Australian summer. The peculiar allure and entertainment of mob activity. A sense of entitlement unfulfilled: golden opportunities, the lucky country, we were here first. </p>
<p>Of course, there are points of difference too. Miners at Eureka were responding to the myriad economic and social cleavages wrought by the rapid change of a gold rush, where convicts would be overnight kings. Residents of Cronulla – the “insular peninsula” – demonstrate a resistance to change, defending their long-held monoculture against a feared invader.</p>
<p>Either way, the lesson is that governments would do better to listen to the word on the street, and act with due diligence and a duty of care to all its citizens, rather than to resort to meaningless jingoism and finger-wagging. </p>
<p>The cultural context in which class, ethnic and racial tensions explode into open violence must be analysed honestly and intelligently, alert to (and alarmed by) the gap between rhetoric and reality, between expectation and delivery.</p>
<p>Australia was never <em>terra nullius</em>. Its streets were never lined with enough gold for all. Boys do not have to be boys.</p>
<p>And clearly, not everyone is relaxed and comfortable, or even optimistic and agile, in our sunny suburbs.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46140/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Clare Wright receives funding from the Australian Research Council.</span></em></p>Australia’s key foundation stories have a narrative arc based on the slow simmering of social tension and anxiety culminating in an explosive release of group hostility. Was Cronulla any different?Clare Wright, Associate Professor in History, La Trobe UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/399712015-04-09T15:56:28Z2015-04-09T15:56:28ZWe must decry all police violence, not just what’s caught on video<p>The US has been rocked once again by another sickening incident of police violence. On April 4, Michael Slager, a police officer in North Charleston, South Carolina, pulled over Walter Scott, a black man, for <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-cop-shoots-black-man-timeline/index.html">what Slager described</a> as “a minor infraction on his vehicle, a brake light being out.”</p>
<p>According to the police’s official report of what happened, Scott resisted arrest, <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/07/us/south-carolina-officer-charged-murder/">stealing the officer’s</a> taser and leading Slager to <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3031802/Chilling-police-dispatch-audio-reveals-officer-Michael-Slager-told-colleagues-moments-shooting-unarmed-Walter-Scott-five-times.html">fear for his life</a>.</p>
<p>It was not until a <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/video/us/100000003615939/video-shows-fatal-police-shooting.html">video</a> was sent to the New York Times that what really happened emerged. The footage clearly shows a brief altercation after which Scott flees and Slager takes aim and shoots him six times in the back. </p>
<p>Having seen the video, Slager’s police chief Eddie Driggers <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/08/us/south-carolina-cop-shoots-black-man-timeline/index.html">admitted</a> he was “sickened by what I saw, and I have not watched it since”.</p>
<p>This was not an isolated incident. Slager himself was <a href="http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/walter-scott-shooting/michael-slager-n337691">previously accused in 2013</a> of unlawfully using his taser against a suspect, though he was later exonerated. The North Charleston police department also has a <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/04/08/it_wasnt_just_walter_scott_the_north_charleston_police_department_has_a_shocking_record_of_abuse_allegations/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow">long record of abuse allegations</a>.</p>
<p>The crucial point, though, is that it was not until the incident was caught on tape that the force was held accountable for its actions. </p>
<h2>Common practice</h2>
<p>This is just the latest of several high-profile cases over the past year that have captured the nation’s attention and highlighted problems of racism and the undue aggression seemingly <a href="https://theconversation.com/ferguson-is-not-a-special-case-34655">rife</a> within American law enforcement.</p>
<p>But the North Charleston case also reveals just how easily those in power are willing to use deception to cover up their use of force.</p>
<p>Despite this troubling history, the officer’s official account was quickly accepted by the local media. They <a href="http://fair.org/blog-entries/media-were-already-running-with-police-fantasy-when-video-exploded-it/">took as fact</a> that there was a physical altercation between Slager and Scott and that the officer was simply defending himself against a violent suspect resisting arrest. Until the video shot by a bystander emerged, Slager was <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/04/07/3644189/everything-police-said-walter-scotts-death-video-showed-really-happened/">well on his way</a> to avoiding any charges.</p>
<p>This conforms to several other <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/vegas-police-officer-wearing-body-camera-facing-battery-205644396.html">recent incidents</a> where video has been used to disprove official police accounts defending their use of force against citizens, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/feb/12/pasco-washington-fatal-police-shooting-antonio-zambrano-montes">including a Washington man</a> who was similarly shot in the back by police while trying to run away.</p>
<h2>Stop believing</h2>
<p>In the past, such deceitful practices were considered common practice for many police officers. According <a href="http://www.salon.com/2015/04/08/fox_legal_analyst_planting_weapons_used_to_be_standard_operating_procedure_for_cops/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=socialflow">to one legal analysis</a>, planting weapons was once simply “standard operating procedure” for cops.</p>
<p>Cases such as the North Charleston incident prove this is still an urgent concern. Awareness is growing, and changes being made: the mayor of North Charleston has promised, for instance, to have all his police officers wear <a href="http://www.npr.org/2015/04/08/398341969/more-body-cameras-are-on-the-way-for-north-charleston-police">body cameras</a>. Nationally, a recent <a href="http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/eric-holder-racial-bias-ferguson-policing">Department of Justice report</a> has demanded a comprehensive response to the culture of racism and undue violence that prevails in so many police departments across the country.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, Americans’ trust in the police has declined heavily over the past three decades – though the confidence gap between white and black Americans is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/09/police-killing-videos-white-black-people-trust?CMP=fb_gu">as wide as ever</a>.</p>
<p>But what really needs to change is the commonplace assumption that the police are to be believed until proven otherwise. </p>
<p>The evidence that has been assembled since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson paints a picture of a full-blown national law enforcement crisis, and the implicit trust placed in the police hides the increasingly authoritarian reality of how law is enforced on America’s streets. </p>
<p>The role of American police is <a href="https://theconversation.com/ferguson-shooting-shows-need-for-lighter-policing-not-heavier-38750">rapidly changing</a>. They are now asked less to protect citizens and more to participate in a militarised War on Drugs; they are also de facto tax collectors, tasked with collecting fines to make up for chronic budget shortfalls after decades of cuts to public funding.</p>
<p>Ironically, it is often exactly the same right-wing figures who cry foul at the encroaching threat of domestic authoritarianism who <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/03/the-conservative-ambivalence-about-abuses-in-ferguson-department-of-justice-michael-brown/387196/">let the police off the hook</a> – or even defend them.</p>
<p>The ultimate lesson of the North Charleston case is that we have to stop blindly believing the “official stories” told by the police. As long as we trust their accounts as a matter of course, acts such as these will continue with impunity. We have to question official accounts of violence at all levels – and not just after they’ve been caught red-handed on tape.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/39971/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Bloom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>We still blindly accept the police accounts of their behaviour. Why?Peter Bloom, Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Department of People and Organisation, The Open UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/388182015-03-26T10:29:30Z2015-03-26T10:29:30ZShades of segregated past in today’s campus troubles<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75702/original/image-20150323-17709-iqq6uf.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Many of today's campus troubles have their roots in a racial past of American universities </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml">Book image via www.shutterstock.com</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Demands to rename <a href="http://www.sciway.net/sc-photos/pickens-county/tillman-hall.html">Tillman Hall at Clemson University</a>, the circulation of a <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/03/08/frat-racist-sae-oklahoma_n_6828212.html">video</a> showing a racist chant at the University of Oklahoma and the discovery of a <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2015/03/21/3637251/fraternity-suspended-notebook-detailing-rape-lynching/">fraternity pledge book</a> discussing lynching at North Carolina State University demonstrate how persistent racial issues are on college campuses. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tillman-Reconstruction-Supremacy-Morrison-Southern/dp/0807825301/ref=tmm_hrd_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1427037879">Benjamin Tillman</a> was a post-Civil War politician, racial demagogue and participant in racial violence, who was critical to Clemson University’s founding in the late-nineteenth century. </p>
<p>Tillman was not the only one. The University of North Carolina trustees are considering a request this week to <a href="http://abc11.com/education/students-demanding-rename-of-unc-building-named-for-kkk-leader/501011/">rename Saunders Hall</a>. The building was named in 1922 for William Saunders, a leader of the North Carolina Ku Klux Klan. </p>
<p>Buildings named after participants in racial violence and songs celebrating the segregation as well as the lynching of black people are not merely offensive. They recall the violence used to maintain all-white institutions for much of this country’s history.</p>
<p>In fact, colleges and universities historically have supported hierarchies of race and other forms of difference from their founding in the colonial era through the civil rights struggles of the late-20th century.</p>
<p>As a co-founder and director of the <a href="http://shared.web.emory.edu/emory/news/releases/2010/02/transforming-community-project-creates-agents-of-change.html#.VQOV4kivLvk">Transforming Community Project</a>, I used the history of race at Emory University to help members of the university community understand the meaning of equity for the institution today. </p>
<p>In 2011, I co-organized, “Slavery and the University: Histories and Legacies,” the first <a href="http://shared.web.emory.edu/emory/news/releases/2011/01/slavery-and-the-university-focus-of-emory-conference.html#.VQOViEivLvk">conference</a> on the history of slavery and racial discrimination at institutions of higher education. Scholars and administrators from across the United States shared the troubled past of slavery and segregation of a majority of colleges and universities. </p>
<h2>American universities were connected to slave trade</h2>
<p>Today many see the goals of higher education institutions as providing access to all seeking upward economic, political and social mobility, regardless of race, class, gender and religion. But it was not always so. </p>
<p>Colleges and universities built curricula and performed research that supported the enslavement of Africans.
Money from <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/09/17/223420533/how-slavery-shaped-americas-oldest-and-most-elite-colleges">the African slave trade and slavery</a> financed institutions of higher education.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75703/original/image-20150323-17696-esium4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75703/original/image-20150323-17696-esium4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75703/original/image-20150323-17696-esium4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75703/original/image-20150323-17696-esium4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75703/original/image-20150323-17696-esium4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75703/original/image-20150323-17696-esium4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75703/original/image-20150323-17696-esium4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Many American colleges used or owned slave labor in the past.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml">Hand image via www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Many college campuses used or owned enslaved blacks, who erected and maintained the buildings and grounds, and served the faculty, students and administrators. At many schools, students, faculty and administrators brought their slaves with them to campus. </p>
<p>One might imagine that this was true only in the South. But the most prestigious educational institutions in the North – <a href="http://www.harvardandslavery.com/">Harvard</a>, <a href="http://registrar.princeton.edu/course-offerings/course_details.xml?courseid=012214&term=1142">Princeton</a>, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/opinion/23mon3.html?_r=0">Brown</a>, and others – were intimately connected to the slave trade and slavery.</p>
<p>Most students, who came to these schools from all over the United States, were supporters of slavery, and some were wealthy slave owners themselves.</p>
<h2>Scholars believed in racial inferiority</h2>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ebony-Ivy-Troubled-Americas-Universities/dp/1608194027/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427307593&sr=1-1&keywords=craig+wilder">University scholars</a> of the time argued that the racial inferiority of people of African descent justified their enslavement; and that enslavement would bring blacks closer to Christian salvation. </p>
<p>Faculty and students also argued for the centrality of slavery to the nation’s economic success. <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ebony-Ivy-Troubled-Americas-Universities/dp/1596916818/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=1-1&qid=1427308580">Coursework</a> in history, religion and other subjects supported the moral and political correctness of slavery. </p>
<p>The influence of college graduates reached beyond North America into slave-holding societies in the Caribbean and South America. Graduates took up positions among the slave-holding elite as plantation owners and politicians. Others became ministers or educators who upheld slavery through preaching and teaching. </p>
<p>Those who spoke against slavery on college campuses were few, and faculty spoke out against slavery at the threat of losing their jobs. In the United States before the Civil War, only anti-slavery colleges such as <a href="http://www.ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Oberlin_College">Oberlin College in Ohio</a> were consistent in their opposition to slavery and racism. </p>
<p>Following the Civil War, historically white colleges North and South diverged only slightly in their willingness to admit non-white students. These schools also limited or prevented the enrollment of other groups, such as non-Protestant Christians or Jews. </p>
<h2>Quota systems were used by universities in the north</h2>
<p>In the south, legal segregation prevented black students from attending colleges and universities. In northern schools, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Student-Diversity-Big-Three-Princeton/dp/1412814618/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_img_6">quota systems</a> limited the number of blacks who could attend.</p>
<p>In both North and South, schools limited the enrollment of non-Protestant Christians, such as Catholics; and Jews, among other groups. These practices reinforced racial and religious hierarchies until the late-twentieth century. </p>
<p>The threat or use of violence was central to maintaining racial and religious segregation in all parts of society. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75704/original/image-20150323-17699-b50in1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/75704/original/image-20150323-17699-b50in1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75704/original/image-20150323-17699-b50in1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75704/original/image-20150323-17699-b50in1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=457&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75704/original/image-20150323-17699-b50in1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75704/original/image-20150323-17699-b50in1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/75704/original/image-20150323-17699-b50in1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=574&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ku Klux Klan members were also active on American college campuses.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/cat.mhtml">Ku Klux Klan image via www.shutterstock.com</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1924, Ku Klux Klan members (including the city’s mayor and police chief) <a href="http://catholicgators.org/our-founder">kidnapped and castrated a Catholic priest</a> serving the small group of Catholic students there. They believed that the priest was converting Protestant students to Catholicism. </p>
<p>When Tillman supported the founding of Clemson University in 1889, he had already established himself as in favor of upholding racial segregation by violence. There was no question that the university would be for whites only.</p>
<h2>Court cases and funding threats forced desegregation</h2>
<p>State schools established for whites maintained racially exclusionary practices towards blacks until forced to integrate by Supreme Court rulings <a href="http://www.oyez.org/cases/1940-1949/1949/1949_44">Sweatt v. Painter</a> in 1950 and <a href="http://www.oyez.org/cases/1950-1959/1952/1952_1/">Brown v. Board of Education</a> in 1954.</p>
<p>Pressure from national professional organizations who threatened to withhold accreditation, as well as from the federal government and foundations who threatened to withhold grant funding from segregated institutions, forced most <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Desegregating-Private-Higher-Education-South/dp/0807154474/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=">private institutions to desegregate in the early 1960s. </a></p>
<p>However, it was not until the 1970s that segregation for non-whites and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Student-Diversity-Big-Three-Princeton/dp/1412814618/ref=pd_rhf_se_p_img_6">quotas</a> for non-Christian students in universities were completely abolished. </p>
<p>Southern institutions fought desegregation through a series of law suits. And the first African Americans students to attend these schools suffered acute harassment. </p>
<p>At <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2240973">the University of Texas</a> for instance, in 1950, the Supreme Court ruling in Sweatt v. Painter forced the law school to admit <a href="http://ddce.utexas.edu/sweattsymposium/2013/03/15/legacy-of-heman-sweatt/">Heman Sweatt</a>, its first black student. </p>
<p>During Sweatt’s first semester on campus, someone burned a cross at the law school and inscribed KKK (Ku Klux Klan) on the steps of the law building. Most faculty members and students at the law school did not support Sweatt. He ended up leaving after two years without a law degree. </p>
<p>In 1954, as part of its continuing resistance to desegregation, the University of Texas named a new dorm for <a href="http://deadconfederates.com/2010/07/12/william-stewart-simkins-the-klan-and-the-law-school/">William Stewart Simkins</a>, one of the law school’s first professors. </p>
<p>Simkins, a native of the same South Carolina county as Benjamin Tillman, was also a founder of the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/harrymoore/terror/k.html">Florida Ku Klux Klan</a>. Both Simkins and Tillman boasted of using violence to enforce racial segregation. </p>
<p>Honoring Simkins in 1954 symbolically reinforced the school’s commitment to segregation. Similar actions occurred throughout the south and included the reclamation of the Confederate flag by southerners and lynching of civil rights activists as part of a “<a href="http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25349">massive resistance</a>” to desegregation. </p>
<h2>Significant progress on campuses</h2>
<p>The events occurring on campuses today echo these troubled times, and reveal the continuing unease that some have with diverse campuses. But significant progress has been made in the 65 years since Heman Sweatt attempted his law degree at University of Texas. </p>
<p>The vast majority of higher education institutions recognize that serving a diverse campus community is of intrinsic value to the educational enterprise and to the nation at large. </p>
<p>As a result, many schools are struggling to align their campuses with these changes by renaming buildings and limiting racist behavior. </p>
<p>In 2010, the University of Texas <a href="https://tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fsi12">renamed</a> Simkins Hall to Creekside. At the University of Oklahoma, following the circulation of a video in which members of the local chapter of <a href="http://www.sae.net/page.aspx?pid=756">Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE)</a>, the only national fraternity founded in the South, sing of excluding from their fraternity, and hanging, “niggers,” the national fraternity leadership <a href="http://www.sae.net/home/pages/news/news---media-statements---fraternity-leadership-closes-chapter-at-university-of-oklahoma">closed the chapter</a>. </p>
<p>The Pi Kappa Phi chapter at North Carolina State has been suspended as university and national fraternity officials investigate <a href="http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/pi-kappa-phi-nc-state-notebook">the pledge book</a> that contains references to lynching and rape.</p>
<p>The landscape of US higher education today would be completely unrecognizable to Benjamin Tillman and William Stewart Simkins. </p>
<p>This is a profound achievement.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/38818/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Leslie M. Harris received funding from the Ford Foundation's Difficult Dialogues Initiative, 2007-2011. She is a founding member of the Board of Directors of the Difficult Dialogues National Resource Center.</span></em></p>At the root of today’s racial troubles on campuses is the past, when most American universities were intimately connected to slave trade and slavery. Harvard, Princeton, Brown were no exception.Leslie M Harris, Associate Professor of History and African American Studies, Emory UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.