Policing in US Was Built on Racism & Should Be Put on Trial

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“Open Season”: Heather Heyer’s Mother Slams New Laws Giving Immunity to Drivers Who Hit Protesters
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
APRIL 26, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/4/26/ ... k_immunity

GUESTS
Susan Bro: mother of Heather Heyer and president and board chair of the Heather Heyer Foundation.
Nick Robinson: senior legal adviser at the International Center for Not-for-Profit Law.

Many of the anti-protest laws pushed by Republicans include measures that provide civil or criminal immunity to drivers who hit demonstrators with their vehicles. A pending Oklahoma measure would offer both. “It’s declaring open season,” says Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was killed in 2017 when a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville. “Since when do we allow the public to become judge, jury and executioner? Because that’s what this amounts to: Let’s go hunt protesters.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, I want to bring into this conversation right now Susan Bro, whose daughter Heather Heyer was tragically killed in 2017 when a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, the one where all those white supremacists marched chanting “You will not replace us,” “Jews will not replace us.” Well, Susan Bro is the president and board chair of the Heather Heyer Foundation. She’s joining us from Ruckersville, Virginia.

Welcome back to Democracy Now!, Susan. It’s so good to have you back —

SUSAN BRO: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: — unfortunately, under these circumstances, talking about granting immunity to drivers, sometimes just civil, other times civil and criminal immunity to drivers who plow into crowds or run over protesters — well, presumably, like your daughter Heather. Can you respond to this, Susan?

SUSAN BRO: Well, it’s declaring open season. It’s a hunting license, is what it basically is. And as I’ve said on other shows, what’s next? Baseball bats? Guns? You know, what kind of weapons of mass destruction are they willing to allow?

This is blatantly a violation of First Amendment rights of people to protest. I would almost go so far as to say people who get jailed for protesting peacefully, especially, are political prisoners. If you’ve got people facing felony charges, they’re mandatory overnight, without bail, held until trial, and then looking at five to 15 years for protesting, that sounds almost like political prisoners, really.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you take us back to 2017, to this time of the protest, when your daughter Heather decided to go out? She didn’t often go outside and get involved with protests, but this time she did. Can you talk about why she did? And then, what happened to her? I hate to take you through this, but it’s so important for people to —

SUSAN BRO: I go through it every single day.

AMY GOODMAN: It’s so important, now that it’s being raised again all over the country to defend the motorists who do this. Now, in this case, the killer was charged with murder, the white supremacist who plowed into the crowd. But tell us what happened, why Heather decided to go outside.

SUSAN BRO: She had seen footage of the tiki torch march the night before. Her friends were there and had live-streamed it. She saw that, and she said, “I have to go. I have to go stand in support.”

Now, she was a lover, not a fighter. She was not interested in being involved in any of the violence or the face-to-face clashes. She and a great many other people were on the opposite side of the downtown pedestrian mall and stayed away from the violence and were actually returning to the downtown mall, because the rally had been disbanded. People had left. She had actually stopped in the parking lot and tried to engage one of the young women in conversation on the way back, and the young woman just kept saying, “No comment. No comment.” And they were relaxed. They were chanting. They were singing. It was a jubilant mood, from the videos that I’ve seen.

And he sat at the top of the hill with no one around him. He obviously had a way to get back out of there, even though the way forward had been barricaded on one side, because he quickly exited once he attacked the crowd. Thirty-five people were injured. And yeah, I originally said, under the new laws, this would not have applied, but after hearing further definition, I don’t know. They maybe would have tried to apply this law to him.

AMY GOODMAN: You have that famous photograph of the moment of impact, with the protesters, some of them, hurled into the air.

SUSAN BRO: Heather’s friends were hurled into the air. The young gentleman whose shoe was seen dangling from the front bumper of the car as he retreats was Heather’s friend.

AMY GOODMAN: Marcus Martin.

SUSAN BRO: He was — Marcus Martin. He was two people behind her. He reached and moved Marissa out of the way. He said to me —

AMY GOODMAN: His fiancée.

SUSAN BRO: — he’s cried over and over that he could not get to Heather. And I’ve just said, “Marcus, you can’t help that.” I have a photograph of the split second before he hits Heather. I have seen footage of him hitting Heather, but my brain will not absorb it, even now. And to say that that is not criminal, that that is not an offense — since when do we allow the public to become judge, jury and executioner? Because that’s what this amounts to: Let’s go hunt protesters.

AMY GOODMAN: Susan, what do you think is driving this?

SUSAN BRO: Politics.

AMY GOODMAN: And let me bring Nick Robinson back into this conversation. The fact that so many dozens of bills are being introduced at once, a number in many states — and when we’re talking about these motorists, we also are talking about police officers. I mean, there have been about a hundred motorists running over protesters in the last months, but if you can talk about, in several cases, police having used their cars as weapons against protesters, like in Detroit in June, an officer driving his police SUV through a crowd, sending protesters flying? Two New York police officers did likewise at a Black Lives Matter protest, May in 2020. Nick?

NICK ROBINSON: Yeah, no, that’s exactly right. And we’ve also seen police circulating on social media pictures of drivers hitting protesters, seemingly encouraging drivers to run into protesters or to hit protesters with their car. And this is — you know, it’s just criminal. And we not only see this as a problem, but we see a number of bills being introduced that would strengthen “stand your ground” laws and apply them anytime that people can show that there’s a, quote-unquote, “riot” occurring. So, this applies in the Florida bill that just passed, or in Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi. So, again, the ability to use deadly force against protesters, and, you know, this part of a larger movement by politicians that are introducing these bills, that are trying to paint all protesters as rioters, and particularly all Black Lives Matter protesters as rioters.

SUSAN BRO: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: And how do they make the distinction between Black Lives Matter protesters and insurrectionists, like the domestic terrorists in Washington, D.C., overrunning the Capitol, beating police officers, for example? How do they make that distinction so they don’t hold them accountable?

NICK ROBINSON: Yeah, so, I think there are — the assumption here is these are kind of “back the blue” bills often. So they’re often passed with a whole number of provisions that would do things like stop the defunding of local police departments, and so they’re seen as supporting the police. And so, I think they view them as being applied by the police in a certain type of way, right? This is incredibly subjective standards about what’s a, quote-unquote, “riot.” And so, when you have that standard, the real concern is that if you have police that seem to be having certain ideological predilections, that they’ll be applied in one way against certain kinds of protesters and in a different way against other kinds of protesters.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to give Susan the last word. Susan Bro, what do you say to the mothers of this country? What do you say to people who want to go out in the streets, like Heather did as she protested fascism and white supremacy three years ago?

SUSAN BRO: Well, obviously, the protests then were not enough. I guess we need more. But we’re going have to be strategic. I think there’s going have to be a lot of legal work done. But, unfortunately, the courts are packed conservatively right now. I don’t know how this is going to go.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, again, our condolences. I want to thank you, Susan Bro, for joining us today, mother of Heather Heyer, president of the Heather Heyer Foundation. Her daughter was run over by a white supremacist at the white supremacist march that took place over the weekend at the University of Virginia in the streets of Charlottesville. And Nick Robinson, International Center for Not-for-Profit Law, speaking to us from Washington, D.C.

When we come back, President Biden acknowledges the Armenian genocide. Stay with us.

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“America on Fire”: Historian Elizabeth Hinton on George Floyd, Policing & Black Rebellion
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
MAY 26, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/26/ ... ca_on_fire

GUESTS
Elizabeth Hinton: associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and a professor of law at Yale Law School.
LINKS
Elizabeth Hinton on Twitter
"America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s"
"From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in America"

Protests and vigils were held across the U.S. to mark one year since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd’s death sparked a national uprising and global movement against systemic racism and police brutality. Elizabeth Hinton, an associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and a professor of law at Yale Law School, connects the Black Lives Matter protests to a long history of Black rebellion against police violence in her new book “America on Fire” and notes that the U.S. has had previous opportunities to address systemic racism and state violence, but change remains elusive. “Every time inequality and police violence is evaluated, all of these structural solutions are always suggested, and yet they’re never taken up,” Hinton says.

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Protests and vigils were held across the country and the world Tuesday to mark one year since the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Floyd’s death sparked a national uprising and global movement to end racism and police brutality.

On Tuesday, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris met with family members of the Floyd family. Biden reiterated his support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which is still being negotiated by senators. Civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump joined the Floyd family in Washington and urged passage of the legislation.

BENJAMIN CRUMP: Their blood is on this legislation, so we’re going to continue — with this family and this legal team, to continue to press, to say, “Yeah, we have to respect the spilled blood that’s on this legislation. It must be meaningful, and we can do this together.” This is an American issue. This isn’t a police issue or civil rights issue. We have to look at this as a national issue that we have avoided dealing with.

AMY GOODMAN: Here in New York, the Reverend Al Sharpton paid tribute to George Floyd Tuesday.

REV. AL SHARPTON: George Floyd should not just go down in history as a martyr. He should go down in history as the turning point of how we deal with policing in the United States.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined now by the historian Elizabeth Hinton. She’s an associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and professor of law at Yale Law School. Her new book is America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. She’s also author of From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.

Professor Hinton, welcome to Democracy Now! It’s great to have you with us. Why don’t we start off by this significant week, the first anniversary of the police murder of George Floyd, not only the story of the murder, but the story of the unprecedented rebellion that ensued for the next year?

ELIZABETH HINTON: Well, so, what we witnessed last summer was what some have called the largest mass mobilization in United States history. And let me point out that most of the protests last summer were nonviolent. It was only after police came to nonviolent protests and peaceful vigils, and with tear gas and riot sticks and batons, that some protesters responded to that police violence with violence, which is a familiar pattern that we see from rebellions stemming from the 1960s. But the vast majority of what we saw last summer were nonviolent, peaceful protests, Americans and people around the world standing up to racial injustice and saying, “We want a different kind of governance. We want to build a different kind of society. And we don’t want to continue to have to bury people of color at the hands of police officers.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Hinton, I wanted to ask you. Your book tries to put what is happening now in the historical context, because, obviously, many of the young people who are participating in these protests don’t know a lot of the history. And what I think struck me was that you went not only into the period of the 1960s and '70s, which was crucial, but even further back, pointing to some of the civil disturbances and rebellions that had occurred in prior decades. I've always been particularly struck by the impact of world wars, both World War I and World War II, on racial unrest in the United States and how the returning soldiers often then were not as willing to — Black and Latino soldiers were not as willing to accept injustice. Could you talk about the early teens of the 20th century and this historic conflict between Black communities and the white establishment?

ELIZABETH HINTON: Right, that’s such an important part of our history that I think we fail to recognize. And that’s that for most of the 20th century, the majority of collective violence was inflicted by white mobs against communities of color, and especially Black communities, very much in the context of migrations stimulated by, as you said, Juan, the First and Second World Wars.

So, you know, beginning in Springfield in 1908, but then also in East St. Louis in 1917, basically, white residents in East St. Louis attacked Black wartime factory workers in one of the bloodiest race riots of the 20th century, forcing Black families to choose between being shot to death or burned alive, and then, of course, the Red Summer of 1919, as you mentioned, with returning GIs, who had fought for democracy abroad, returning GIs of color, wanting to stake a claim for citizenship and saying, “OK, we fought for democracy abroad. Now let’s realize democracy at home.” When faced with continued segregation and white vigilante terror and violence, we saw the outbreak not only of racial strife in the streets of American cities like Chicago and Washington, D.C., but also the continued attacks by white vigilante forces on Black communities. And then, of course, we’re coming up next week on the 100-year commemoration of the Tulsa massacre, where thousands of white men, who were deputized by the county government, destroyed, completely destroyed, the thriving Greenwood community in Tulsa.

And these examples of white vigilante terror — and, let me also emphasize, deeply entwined with law enforcement. I mean, law enforcement was complacent in many of these episodes, in many of these massacres and attacks on Black communities, turned a blind eye, or actively participated in the violence. And then, of course, during and after World War II, the kind of — the race riots that we saw after World War I, literally street fights between Black and white residents, in places like Detroit, where federal troops had to be called, persisted. And I think what’s really important about this back history and this history of white collective violence is that it was only in the 1960s, when Black people rose up against repressive and exploitative institutions, that these incidents of collective violence became labeled as criminal and as riots.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to stick with, for one minute, Tulsa. We’re going to have Stanley Nelson, the great filmmaker, on, on Friday, because he has a documentary that’s going to air on Sunday, on the centennial of the Tulsa massacre. But last week, three survivors of one of the worst racial terror attacks in U.S. history testified to Congress in favor of reparations ahead of the 100th anniversary. Over two days, beginning May 31st, as you described, 1921, racist white mobs basically burned down Greenwood, the thriving African American business district in Tulsa known as “Black Wall Street.” This is 107-year-old Viola Fletcher, the oldest living survivor, testifying before Congress.

VIOLA FLETCHER: I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not. And other survivors do not. And our descendants do not.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that was 107-year-old Viola Fletcher, the oldest living survivor of the Tulsa massacre, where something like, it’s believed, 300 African Americans were killed. Even people in Tulsa, even African Americans, talk about how is it possible that they did not know this history, not to mention people throughout the United States over this last 100 years that this wasn’t taught, Professor Hinton.

ELIZABETH HINTON: Yeah, I think there are many aspects of, one, the extent to which white supremacist terror has — the impact of white supremacist terror in Black communities, and also state-sanctioned violence. I mean, I think that’s one of the things that I attempted to do in this book, America on Fire. Based on new data, we now know that, you know, in the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination, violent political rebellion to the presence of police and the expansion of American police forces and the militarization of police in targeted low-income communities of color was responded to by political violence on — mostly perpetuated by young African Americans. And this was the most widely adopted form a protest after the civil rights movement. So, it’s a story both of continued white supremacist terror that gets hidden, but also of Black resistance to that terror and to police violence, that we have yet to reckon with.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Hinton, one of the, I think, most interesting observations in your book was the — to me, was that most people associate the federal government’s involvement on the war on crime as coming during the Nixon years, but you show how it was really under President Johnson that the real expansion of the federal support for local law enforcement — you note, in one section of your book, that in 1964 there was only $10 million in federal funds given to local police, but by 1970 it was over $300 million — an enormous increase just in the late 1960s under President Johnson’s Safe [Streets] Act. Could you talk about that and the impact that that had on local police forces?

ELIZABETH HINTON: Right. And just to give listeners a sense of what that $300-$400 million dollars translates to today, it’s several billion dollars that was being invested in the expansion of American policing and courts and the prison systems, at the height of the civil rights movement and progressive social change in the 1960s.

And I think this is a really important aspect of our domestic policy and the kind of origins or the shortcomings even of liberal social policy, is that, you know, during the Johnson administration, there were kind of two approaches to dealing with both the threat of Black rebellion but also poverty and racial inequality in the U.S. And one of those, of course, was the War on Poverty Community Action Programs, remedial education, job training programs. And the other was programs that were intended to manage the material effects of poverty and inequality, as they appeared through violence and crime and the threat of rebellion, and that is, of course, the war on crime. And in the end, the war on crime won out. And the story of the Black rebellions themselves, as I see it, are residents’ responses to, again, the expansion of policing in their communities that accompanied this unprecedented federal intervention in local police forces for the first time in U.S. history, beginning with the Johnson administration in the mid-1960s.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Another aspect of your book, I think, that — and while you do focus and say that it was largely Black rebellions that occurred throughout the ’60s and ’70s, you do note several key rebellions that occurred in the Latino community. You talk about the Roosevelt Park rebellion in 1971 in Albuquerque, and also in Hoboken and Jersey City. But there was a string of rebellions that occurred in the Puerto Rican and Mexican communities: ’66 in Perth Amboy; ’69 in Passaic, in Hartford, Connecticut; in the Division Street riots in 1966 in Chicago; the Humboldt Park riots in Chicago in 1977. So, there were quite a few other communities of color that also rose up during this period, as well.

ELIZABETH HINTON: Yeah, and that’s also another kind of hidden aspect, I think, of our history of both racial oppression and resistance. And in many of those communities, like Hartford and Jersey City, you know, these were thoroughly multiracial rebellions, where Black and predominantly Puerto Rican residents rose up against police violence together. And, you know, by my count, from that — what I call the crucible period, after that major piece of federal legislation, the Safe Streets Act — so, from June 1968 through 1972 — there were about 2,000 rebellions in segregated Black communities and about 200 in Puerto Rican and Mexican American communities.

And I think, you know, this just underscores the extent to which the policing strategies, that policymakers and officials at all levels of a government embraced for the war on crime, really targeted youth of color in Latinx and Black communities. And as part of that targeting and those strategies, people in these communities were subjected to not only increased patrol and surveillance, but the increased police violence and brutality that accompanies that. And in the context of other shared socioeconomic conditions in communities of color — that is, mass unemployment, so lack of decent jobs, failing public schools and substandard housing, run by either absent public housing authorities or exploitative slum landlords — many of these communities that were overpoliced and underprotected became powder kegs, with a shared set of grievances related to the overall racial inequality in the country at the time.

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to go to Attorney General William Barr, not under Trump, but in a 1992 appearance on Face the Nation, when he was attorney general in the administration of George H.W. Bush. Barr blamed gangs for the uprising in Los Angeles after a jury acquitted four white police officers in the brutal beating of Rodney King.

ATTORNEY GENERAL WILLIAM BARR: We’re investigating all the violence, the arson that was involved in the riots. Our preliminary information is that there was significant involvement of gang members at the inception of the violence, also involvement in the spreading of the violence and the arson.

AMY GOODMAN: I remember at that time, you know, the descriptions of those who were rising up being arsonists and vandals and gang members. Martin Luther King famously talked about a riot being the language of the unheard. Also, Juan, you were covering the L.A., what were called “riots.” Elizabeth Hinton, if you can talk about the language used to describe this — I mean, you use the word “rebellion” — and what it means when they’re called “riots,” when people are called “vandals” and “arsonists,” but the police are not called “murderers”?

ELIZABETH HINTON: Right. And so, you know, this goes back to this crucial moment in the '60s where, beginning with Harlem in ’64, Lyndon Johnson labeled this political violence as a “riot,” basically ignoring the underlying socioeconomic grievances, that were shared with the mainstream civil rights movement, that drove people to resort to political violence in the first place. And in labeling them riots and criminal, and ignoring the demands for job and better housing and better policing and protection from white vigilante terror, and full political and economic inclusion in American society, that drove the rebellions themselves, and calling them criminal, then the only solution becomes not what residents themselves want, but the police. And so, this is partly why terminology is so important. And also, you know, many of the people who participated in these instances of collective violence understood themselves as rising up, as rebelling, not as rioting, not as something that was criminal. And we've really got to get out of this criminal framework through which we understand these forms of political violence.

I think the other — that Barr quote is so illustrative and also gets to one of the points that Juan just raised, which is that the L.A. rebellion in 1992 was also thoroughly multiracial. And in addition to targeting gangs, so-called gangs, the federal government also, with the support and help of what was called INS at the time, also blamed, quote-unquote, “illegal aliens” for the violence. And so, the rebellion provided law enforcement authorities an opportunity to target two groups that had — that they had long been the subject of both national security and law enforcement attention. And again, you know, policymakers ignored the kind of larger grievances behind the rebellion, both the injustice that was the acquittal of the four officers for the brutal beating of Rodney King, kind of the first viral video of police violence, but also rampant inequality, unemployment and problems of violence and crime in many communities of color in Los Angeles that were not being adequately addressed, that were not being addressed with robust social programs but were being managed by a heavy-handed, militarized police that was literally rounding up people of color and arresting them en masse, beginning really in the 1980s.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Professor Hinton, I wanted to ask you about the lessons for activists today in terms of the response of the establishment, of those in power, to these rebellions. Whether it was in the 1940s or in the 1960s or even now, there is a period of time when the system, because — is taken aback by the mass upsurge and then agrees to certain reforms. In the case of the Rodney King situation, there was a second federal trial of the officers, that sort of sought to calm the public, and as we’ve seen with the Derek Chauvin trial now after George Floyd. But the promises of systemic change rarely occur. And what happens is, the system almost seems to wait until the movement subsides, and then goes back to its old way of doing things.

ELIZABETH HINTON: Yeah, that’s actually a great way to kind of understand the currents and tendencies of history. But I think, you know — and this stems from my previous comment about some of the missed opportunities in L.A. You know, we have to go back to that critical moment in the late 1960s with the Kerner Commission. Johnson’s own National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders basically called for exactly what you’re talking about, that kind of structural change. They said to the Johnson administration and the nation that if we wanted to — if we’re serious about preventing rebellion in the future, we needed a massive investment in low-income communities of color, and not in the form of policing and surveillance and prisons, which is what ended up happening, but in a robust job creation program that — made possible by the mobilization of both the public and private sector, a complete overhaul of urban public schools and a complete transformation of public housing, and the continued support of community action programs that would empower the grassroots to address problems in their community on their own terms with funding from the federal government.

And, you know, unfortunately, time and time again, every time inequality and police violence is evaluated, all of these structural solutions are always suggested, and yet they’re never taken up, as you said. We know what needs to be done. If we’re serious about addressing the problem of police violence in this country and addressing the larger issue of racial inequality, of which police violence is a symptom, then we have to move beyond police reform. We have to support and bring about that kind of systemic transformation that the Kerner Commission suggested more than 50 years ago. We can only imagine what the United States might look like today had policymakers invested in those kinds of robust social programs rather than in policing and prisons. I would be certain that George Floyd would still be with us today.

AMY GOODMAN: Professor Hinton, the significance of Kristen Clarke, first African American woman, sworn in last night by the first African American vice president, to be head of the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice? And the significance of this division when it comes to reining in police?

ELIZABETH HINTON: Yeah. So, you know, I think, like Al Sharpton said, we are really facing a turning point in American policing. And the provisions of the George Floyd [Justice in Policing] Act are just a baby step. If we’re serious about public safety, we’re going to have to look beyond the police. Yes, we need to put police violence in check, but we also need to change the conditions that lead to the kind of deadly encounters that we’ve seen all too often throughout our history and, due to the bodycams and the fact that we all have cameras in our pockets now, frequently on our screens.

AMY GOODMAN: Finally, I wanted to ask you about the backlash growing after the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill denied tenure to the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, best known for producing The 1619 Project with The New York Times, that interactive project which reexamines the legacy of slavery. You signed one of the many letters of protest, as an academic yourself, that she was denied tenure. Can you talk about the significance of her work and why this is so important to you, in this last 30 seconds?

ELIZABETH HINTON: Yeah. I mean, I think it relates to this larger — you know, we have to — this structural transformation that we need urgently in the United States is going to be a matter of changing hearts and minds, and political education and reckoning with our history, and reckoning with it and placing at the center of the narratives that we tell about our history — we opened this segment talking about hidden histories — but with the centrality of racial oppression to political and economic development in the United States. And until we begin to confront this history head on, instead of trying to suppress and hide it, I fear that we won’t be able to build the kind of support to bring about the changes that are necessary to put the nation on a different path, one that doesn’t continue to exacerbate the racial inequities that have defined this country historically.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you so much for being with us. And congratulations on your new book, Elizabeth Hinton, associate professor of history and African American studies at Yale University and professor of law at Yale Law School. Her new book, America on Fire: The Untold History of Police Violence and Black Rebellion Since the 1960s. Her previous book, From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.

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“Exterminate All the Brutes”: Filmmaker Raoul Peck Explores Colonialism & Origins of White Supremacy
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
MAY 31, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/31/ ... aker_raoul

GUESTS
Raoul Peck: acclaimed Haitian filmmaker and a political activist.
LINKS
"Exterminate All the Brutes"
Watch 2018 DN Interview with Raoul Peck

A new four-part documentary series, “Exterminate All the Brutes,” delves deeply into the legacy of European colonialism from the Americas to Africa. It has been described as an unflinching narrative of genocide and exploitation, beginning with the colonizing of Indigenous land that is now called the United States. The documentary series seeks to counter “the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse, that we have been subject to all of these years,” says director and Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck. “We have the means to tell the real story, and that’s exactly what I decided to do,” Peck says. “Everything is on the table, has been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere. … We lost the wider perspective.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: Republican lawmakers are continuing their attack on schools for teaching students about the true history of the United States, from the genocide of Native Americans to the legacy of slavery. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell recently criticized the Department of Education for promoting what he described as revisionist history, including The New York Times 1619 Project, which reexamined the pivotal role slavery played in the founding of the United States. In his letter, Mitch McConnell wrote, quote, “Americans never decided our children should be taught that our country is inherently evil,” unquote.

Well, today we begin our show looking at an epic new television series that delves deeply into a history Mitch McConnell would prefer not be taught: the legacy of European colonialism, from the Americas to Africa. This is a trailer for Exterminate All the Brutes, the new series directed by the Haitian-born filmmaker Raoul Peck.

RAOUL PECK: There is something we need to talk about, three words that summarize the whole history of humanity: civilization, colonization, extermination. This is the origin of the ideology of white supremacy. This is me in the middle, and I just want to understand: Why do I bring myself into this story? Because I am an immigrant from a [bleep] hole country. Neutrality is not an option. It’s time to own up to a basic truth, a story of survival and violence. We know now what their task truly is: Exterminate All the Brutes.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s the trailer for the epic HBO documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes, which is available on HBO and HBO Max. Time magazine said the series, quote, “may well be the most politically radical and intellectually challenging work of nonfiction ever made for television.”

Well, Democracy Now!’s Nermeen Sheikh and I recently interviewed Raoul Peck, the Haitian filmmaker who directed Exterminate All the Brutes. He joined us from Paris, France. His past films include I Am Not Your Negro, about James Baldwin, Lumumba, about the Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, and The Young Karl Marx. I asked Raoul Peck to talk about how he went from making a film about James Baldwin to creating Exterminate All the Brutes.

RAOUL PECK: Basically, after I Am Not Your Negro, I went throughout the world with the film. I was fortunate to be able to see how the film was received in many different places. And one of the common threads through that was the type of reaction that you just mentioned, like Senate Leader Mitch McConnell. You know, this denial is somehow a sign that they feel that they are entrenched now, they are attacked. There is great fear about some sort of civilization going overboard.

And for me, it’s a symbol that the type of lies, the type of propaganda, the type of abuse that we have been subject to for during all these years. I am old enough to have heard many other people, like Rick Santorum, Mitch McConnell and many others throughout the years. The only difference now is that we have the means to counter them. We have the means to tell the real story.

And that’s exactly what I decided to do, to, once for all, put everything on the table without any semblance of holding back my punches. Everything is on the table, have been on the table for a long time, except that it was in little bits everywhere, because science, sociology, anthropology, etc., politics, have been cut up in little pieces, so we lost the wider perspective. And the film does exactly that, to bring us to the core story, to have the whole matrix of the last 700 years of basically Eurocentric ideology and narrative.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Raoul Peck, in providing this broader historical context, you trace the origins of contemporary modern forms of biological racism to the Spanish Inquisition and the so-called purity of blood statutes — that is, limpieza de sangre —

RAOUL PECK: Exactly.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: — that was a means of distinguishing old Christians from conversos — that is, Jews but also Moors — from the pure blood of Christians. These laws, you say, are the antecedents of the ideology of white supremacy. For the first time in the world, the idea of race based on blood was enshrined into law. So, how should we understand the continuities between the purity of blood statutes and the forms of racist violence we witness today? Because the entire argument of this truly magnificent work is that the past is not really past. It is, as you say, the past has a future that we can’t anticipate.

RAOUL PECK: Well, the thing is that we are accustomed to not see history as a continuity, as you say. And we came from a very specific history. And we are not some sort of tribalist tribe that came out of nowhere. Today’s civilization is basically embedded in the capitalistic societies. And that story started around the 10th and 11th century with the first accumulation of riches, accompanied by killing and exiling of Jews, killing Muslims, trying to go all the way to Jerusalem. And those first Crusades were able to create a lot of — or not create, to basically extract a lot of riches that allows the monarchy to be able to finance trips to discovering new roads to the East.

And the accident, which it was, of the so-called discovery of the new continent was not something they planned. And when it happened, they basically created a totally new concept, which is the concept of discovery. And from that day on, you know, you could just go somewhere, put a flag, deploy military flags and say, “This is mine,” no matter who was on that land before.

And I remind you that at the time of Columbus, there were basically 100 million people on both continents in America. So, you can imagine what it meant. Within a hundred years, more than 90% of them were totally annihilated. So, it’s a very specific moment in the history of the modern world. For the U.S., it seems like it’s the beginning of a new world, but it’s not. It’s a continuity of a lot of action that have been the source of European civilization, basically.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s go to a clip from Exterminate All the Brutes, where you explain settler colonialism.

RAOUL PECK: From the beginning, the extension of the United States from sea to shining sea was the intention and design of the country’s founders. Free land was a magnet that attracted European settlers. This particular form of colonialism is called settler colonialism. But as a system, it requires violence. It requires the elimination of the Natives and their replacement by European settlers.

AMY GOODMAN: And this is another clip from your series, Exterminate All the Brutes. In this dramatized scene, a white man, played by the actor Josh Hartnett, engages in a standoff with a Native American woman leader.

GEN. THOMAS SIDNEY JESUP: [played by Josh Hartnett] I do not want to spill Seminole blood, kill Seminole children, Seminole women. Give us back the American property you stole from our good fellowman planters and settlers, and I will let you move to the Injun territory the U.S. government has provided for your people.

ABBY OSCEOLA: [played by Caisa Ankarsparre] You call human beings your property?

GEN. THOMAS SIDNEY JESUP: They’re slaves.

ABBY OSCEOLA: You steal land. You steal life. You steal humans. What kind of species are you?

AMY GOODMAN: So, we were listening to Abby Osceola, or the woman who plays her, of the Seminole Nation. You say her story goes deep into the history of this continent. Talk about who she is and why you choose to center her and the Seminole Nation in the first part of your series, including their solidarity with enslaved Africans.

RAOUL PECK: Well, the whole vision of the film is based in changing totally the point of view of who is telling the story. And in particular, because this story not only center from Europe but also center in the bottom or in the middle of the United States of America, I had to start the film from that particular point of view of this woman who is the head of her tribe, of her nation.

And basically, you know, the Seminole have been one of the rare tribes who were never really — who did not really obey to the enforcement of leaving their territories. And they were called the Invisible Tribe for a reason. So, it was important for me to start it from a point of resistance, from a point of an individual, of a woman. And watching this invader basically telling her to leave her land and to deliver the slaves that were — and, of course, you know, that’s a story that is not really well known, that a lot of slaves who escaped were welcomed by Seminoles and other tribes. And I wanted to start with that symbolic moment of resistance and also of solidarity, and from there, deploy the whole rest of the story.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Well, Raoul, that is in one of the forms of continuity that you point to. The story of Native Americans is absolutely critical. And the erasure of this genocidal history, in particular in the United States, is evidenced, as you show, in the perverse use of Native American names and designations for military weapons, from Black Hawk to Apache, as well as military operations, the most recent and proximate of which was the May 2011 operation named Geronimo to assassinate Osama bin Laden. So, could you talk a little bit more about that, the way in which Native American history has been distorted, if not entirely erased, and the uses to which it’s been put in contemporary U.S. politics?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s clear that — and you see that throughout the film through different type of device or type of stories, level of stories in the film, is how everything is somehow connected. You know, the history of the Native American, which is, for me, the core story, whether it has been pushed out and erased sometimes or told the wrong way, it’s like a phantom. It’s already there. You can’t get rid of it. There are so many skeletons in those boxes, that they come up. And they are more and more coming out.

And it’s ironic that the very powerful U.S. Army, who was basically at its core created not only to fight the British at the beginning, but after independence was basically used to kill Indians and to keep slaves, Black slaves, on the plantations. So, basically, the U.S. Army, at the beginning, was the militia, you know? So, this story continues. It’s basically a story of 200 years, which is — in the whole history of humankind is nothing. So, as long — you can try to repress that story, but it’s coming out there. You know, as long as there will be Native American or there will be Black life, they will continue to tell that story. There is no escape from it.

And that’s why what I was saying at the beginning — you know, when you see people like Rick Santorum saying that, “Well, when we came, there was nobody on this land” — what did you do with the 100 million people? You have to explain that. So, it’s really — it becomes more and more absurd that Republican leadership at that level are capable of such ignorance. You know, it’s mind-bending. So, for me, it’s just the logic of the whole story. And that’s what we try to explain and to tell in this story of Exterminate All the Brutes. And I really — my objective is really to make sure that that kind of ignorance cannot be voiced anymore.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: Raoul, another possible form of repression, another idea that has been repressed, is something that Sven Lindqvist, in his extraordinary book Exterminate All the Brutes, from which your film substantially draws, he shows how closely intertwined the idea of progress is with racism and even genocide. What alternatives do you see to this ideology, and where do you see it, if at all, taking shape?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s a very complicated question to answer. And I don’t really go by that way in assessing what the future will be or what are the solution. I think any solution will first have to start with the real story. We need to sit down around the same table and agree on the diagnostic. We have to agree on the genocide. We have to agree in the whole line of history that’s been going on for more than 700 years. Otherwise, there is no conversation possible. So, I am not, and we are not, if I can speak for many others, it’s not about revenge. It’s not about — you know, it’s about let’s see the world as it is and let’s name all the things that happened and bring us to what the world is today. That’s what it is about. It’s not about showing how culprit you are or not. It’s about acknowledging the past and the present, because they are strongly connected.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Raoul Peck, the acclaimed Haitian-born filmmaker, who then grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as well as the United States. He is the director of the new HBO four-part documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. We continue our conversation after break.

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AMY GOODMAN: “American Dream” by J.S. Ondara, one of the songs featured in the series Exterminate All the Brutes. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Nermeen Shaikh. If you want to get our daily email digest of news, headlines, stories and alerts, send the word “democracynow” — one word, without a space — to 66866. Text the word “democracynow” — one word, without a space — to 66866.

We are continuing now with our conversation with Raoul Peck, the Haitian-born director of the new HBO four-part documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. I want to go to another clip, from the second episode in the series, where Raoul Peck — he is the narrator of this series — explains what happened after Columbus arrived in what is now Haiti, where Raoul Peck was born.

RAOUL PECK: Instead of the bustling ports of the East Indies, Columbus came upon a tropical paradise populated by the Taíno people, what is now Haiti. Then, from the Iberian Peninsula came merchants, mercenaries, criminals and peasants. They seized the land and property of Indigenous peoples and declared the territories to be extensions of the Spanish and Portuguese states. These acts were confirmed by the monarchies and endorsed by the papal authority of the Roman Catholic Church. That’s more or less the official story. And through that official story, a new vision of the world was created: the doctrine of discovery.

AMY GOODMAN: That’s a clip from Exterminate All the Brutes, the 18th century, known as the Age of Revolutions. But we often associate this time with the American Revolution or the French Revolution, not the Haitian Revolution, which was led by Black slaves, the first country in the Western Hemisphere to be born of a slave uprising — you say, Raoul Peck, the only revolution that materialized the idea of enlightenment, freedom, fraternity and equality for all. You know, Haiti becomes a republic, and the U.S. Congress would not recognize it for decades, fearful that the fact that Haiti was born of a slave uprising would inspire the enslaved people of the United States to rise up, as well. Can you talk about the erasure of the Haitian Revolution, your own country, Haiti, its significance for you, and how the U.S. dealt with Haiti all of these years?

RAOUL PECK: Well, you know, the best words for this is what Michel-Rolph Trouillot have written about silencing the past. It was key for the U.S. and all the other European powers to silence the Haitian Revolution, because it was, in their eyes, worse than Cuba in the ’50s. We were under a strict embargo, because all of them had economy that still relied on slavery. And Haiti was the worst example they could have. And Haiti was also beating them in terms of their own ideology of enlightenment, because Haiti, the first constitution of Haiti, basically stated that any man or woman or person who set foot on the island is a free person. And none of the other revolutions dared go so far, because they were totally involved in slavery and were profiting from it. So there was no way that the Haitian Revolution could be accepted.

So, when people say that America is the first democratic country in the Western Hemisphere, it’s not. It’s Haiti. And the story continue until today. You know, we have a history of being attacked, of being invaded, of many of our leaders come to power with the acceptance of the U.S. government. And it continue until today. Basically, the last two presidents we had came into power thanks to the support of the U.S. government. So, we have, unfortunately, a long story of abuse from the United States and also of resistance, because one thing that we can say is that the Haitian people were always — whether it take 30 years, five years or two years, they always make sure that they can get rid of those corrupt leaders.

NERMEEN SHAIKH: I want to ask about one of the critical issues, Raoul, that you raise in the last part of the film, a critical question. You talk about your own experience living in Berlin, where you lived for 15 years and were also a film student, where you made a film on a Nazi torture compound. You say when you were there that you thought a lot about how a country that’s produced some of humanity’s best philosophers, scientists and artists also operated one of the most devastating, scientifically run and engineered killing machines. Now, many people have reflected on this question and the seeming contradiction in this fact by concluding that the Holocaust was some kind of historical aberration. In other words, that it stands very much outside the history of the Enlightenment and the ideas of humanism and universalism on which it apparently stands. But your film seems to suggest — even as this is raised as a question, your film suggests that other conclusions could be drawn. Could you talk a little bit about that?

RAOUL PECK: Well, it’s nothing new. In fact, there are many scholars that have worked on that specific question for the last 50, 60 years. And, of course, there is resistance to say that the Holocaust was a very special moment in the life of Western civilization. But it’s not. It’s a continuity of a wheel of genocide, a wheel of eliminate people that are deemed inferior. The structure of genocide are always the same.

You know, the person who invented the word “genocide,” Raphael Lemkin, in 1943 — we went to the New York Public Library, and in that library, in his file, there is a list of something around 42 previous genocides before the Holocaust. And he include in it, of course, the genocide against the Native American people. So, trying to make any type of genocide special, I think, is a really not correct way of seeing the history of humankind. They all copied from each other.

They are all, of course, specific. You know, you can’t directly compare the genocide in Rwanda with the genocide in Cambodia and with the Holocaust. They have different ideological reason. They have different historical reason. They have different people involved. But as the structure, as the system of genocide, they all obey the same pattern of first pinning down a special category of person, of people, and then start saying that we are superior to them, and they are insect. And as soon as you come to the point where they are animals or they are savages or they are insect, you are allowed to kill them. And that’s the excuse that was always needed for every imperialist, for every conqueror, in order to eliminate whoever was in the land they wanted to conquer. So, it’s similar. It has been similar throughout the history of humankind. And it became more specific within the concept of the capitalistic society, because then it was also linked to profit. It was also linked to make bigger territories in order to exploit large communities. So, I have had that discussion many years ago, back ago, including in Germany.

But today, I think we should move past that, what I would call the confrontation between who got the biggest pain. Do we put slavery confronted to the Holocaust or the Rwandis’ pain? You know, it’s not about that. We are all from the same human family. It’s not about who has suffered more. I think we have to acknowledge every piece of history that happened on this planet, and we have to give responses to them. And we have to explain why they happened, because it’s the only way that eventually we can prevent them to happen again and again.

AMY GOODMAN: And we want to talk more about that after this last clip from the series Exterminate All the Brutes.

RAOUL PECK: Trading human beings, what sick mind thought of this first? Brought by force and pushed to death — slavery, or the trade, as they they referred to it euphemistically, a state-sponsored genocide. What does this say about the civilized world?

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you could talk more about what this does say, and going back to the beginning, talking about genocide, the term coined by Raphael Lemkin, colonization, as well as civilization, and how you find hope today in the discussions, if this is all acknowledged, though you’re saying just acknowledging this is not enough?

RAOUL PECK: Yes, of course. But acknowledging it is a big step. And that’s what I wanted to say before, is that even for me as a filmmaker, telling that story, it took a lot of thinking in order to tell a story where for the first time you tell the story of the genocide of Native Americans, and then you tell the story of slavery, and then you tell also one of the major extermination story, which is the Holocaust. And for the first time, I think, at least on film, you can see the connections between them.

And for me, it’s a huge step. You know, it’s taking all those atrocity in a different context. And for me, it can only be the beginning of a wider conversation, instead of each part keeping their own malheur, keeping their own death, their own pain, and sometimes being used against each other, you know? And that’s a divide that has been used for many, many years. And for me, the film is also a step to break that separate narrative. There is not many different stories. There is one historical knowledge. And we need to access it.

And to your question, that’s the leitmotif in the series, you know? We already know enough. The problem is, what do we do with that knowledge? Because everything I say in the film, everything that Sven Lindqvist tells the story about, or Michel-Rolph Trouillot, or Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, those are fact. Those are highly competent scholars who spent their life documenting the horror. And my use of their work, with them, was exactly that, to force the conversation to a more sovereign type of discussion and to push aside the blurring of history, push aside the ignorance that still reign in the discussion.

And, you know, I am not going to name them again, the two politicians I named, but I think a population are more and more interested in learning where they come from. You know, there is a reason why everybody now wants to have their DNA analyzed, because there is some sort of feeling of connection, you know? And it’s our job, as filmmakers, and you, as journalists, as well, to lay that in plain sight. And then we can say, “OK, what do we do with this?” You know?

NERMEEN SHAIKH: That’s exactly — we just have a minute. What do we do with this? Your film begins and ends with the same line that Sven Lindqvist says again and again: “It’s not knowledge that we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw the conclusions.” How does your film and the work of these other authors enable that courage?

RAOUL PECK: You know, I was primarily educated by Jesuits. And one thing is, maybe from that, that I believed in the notion of knowledge. I believe in the notion of learning the truth. And the film, for me, is the first step. And my wish is that every school, every university is able to watch the film and have discussion around it, because you cannot go further if you don’t know your own history, whatever the side you are on. But you need to know. And it’s not about accusing you of anything. It’s about facing your reality, because you can’t understand what’s going on. You can’t understand why policemen are still killing Black kids and Black men and Black women in this country, if you don’t know where it comes from. You know?

And it’s unfortunate. You know, we are in a time where we have huge instruments for communication and huge instrument for learning. You can go on the internet and learn about everything. But we lack a very condensed matrix of those histories that we have been built by. And each one of us needs to do our homework; otherwise, I don’t see any nonviolent outcome out of this.

AMY GOODMAN: Raoul Peck, the acclaimed Haitian-born filmmaker, director of the new HBO four-part documentary series Exterminate All the Brutes. Visit democracynow.org to watch our 2018 interview with Raoul about his films The Young Marx and I Am Not Your Negro about James Baldwin.

When we come back, The Man Who Lived Underground. We go to Portugal to speak with Julia Wright about how she unearthed an unpublished novel about racist police violence written by her father, the legendary African American writer Richard Wright, who wrote Native Son and Black Boy. Stay with us.

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Richard Wright’s Novel About Racist Police Violence Was Rejected in 1941; It Has Just Been Published
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
MAY 31, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/31/ ... ist_police

GUESTS
Julia Wright: daughter of the literary giant Richard Wright and executor of his estate.
LINKS
"The Man Who Lived Underground"

Nearly 80 years ago, Richard Wright became one of the most famous Black writers in the United States with the publication of “Native Son.” The novel’s searing critique of systemic racism made it a best-seller and inspired a generation of Black writers. In 1941, Wright wrote a new novel titled “The Man Who Lived Underground,” but publishers refused to release it, in part because the book was filled with graphic descriptions of police brutality by white officers against a Black man. His manuscript was largely forgotten until his daughter Julia Wright unearthed it at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University. “The Man Who Lived Underground” was not published in the 1940s because white publishers did not want to highlight “white supremacist police violence upon a Black man because it was too close to home,” says Julia Wright. “It’s a bit like lifting the stone and not wanting the worms, the racist worms underneath, to be seen.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: “Old Man River,” sung by Paul Robeson, who had his passport revoked by the U.S. government. He was blacklisted in this country and was a friend of the great writer Richard Wright. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

Over 80 years ago, Richard Wright became one of the most famous Black writers in the United States with the publication of his novel Native Son. It sold over 200,000 copies in the first three weeks and inspired a generation of Black writers. Amiri Baraka once said, quote, “Wright was one of the people who made me conscious of the need to struggle.”

In 1941, Richard Wright wrote a follow-up novel titled The Man Who Lived Underground. It’s centered on a Black man who is forced to live in a city sewer system after being brutalized by white police officers who tortured him until he falsely admitted to murdering a white couple. But publishers rejected Wright’s book. Portions of the book were turned into a short story of the same name, but the full novel, including the graphic descriptions of police brutality, went unpublished — until now.

Richard Wright once said of the novel, quote, “I have never written anything in my life that stemmed more from sheer inspiration or executed any piece of writing in a deeper feeling of imaginative freedom, or expressed myself in a way that flowed more naturally from my own personal background, reading, experiences and feelings,” he said.

But Wright’s manuscript was largely forgotten, until his daughter, Julia Wright, unearthed it at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Beinecke Library, and she worked with the Library of America to have the book finally published, nearly 80 years after it was written and 60 years after Richard Wright died at the age of 52 in Paris, France, where he had taken his family to live since 1946.

I recently spoke to Richard Wright’s daughter Julia. She joined us from Portugal. Julia Wright is a longtime anti-death penalty activist and supporter of Mumia Abu-Jamal, has visited him many times in prison. She’s writing a memoir about her father, Richard Wright. She is the executor of his estate. I began by asking Julia to talk about the significance of what she found and how she finally had it published.

JULIA WRIGHT: Thank you, Amy, for having me back on the show.

Yes, it was a very exciting discovery. I was living in Paris at the end of the '90s and during the early years of 2000, and I was learning the ropes of the estate with my mother Ellen. I was also freelancing as a journalist there. And the time came, after my mother's death, to publish another work by my father.

So, since I would travel to the United States to visit death row and visit death row prisoners there, like Mumia Abu-Jamal, whose human rights were being so systematically violated, I would take the plane, land in the United States, go through cities like New York or Philly, Philadelphia, and go to death row. But on my way to death row, I would encounter another type of death sentence. And that is the shootings of unarmed Black and Brown people in our streets, also of vulnerable minorities like mentally challenged people. And I remember being absolutely shocked, for instance, by what happened to James Byrd down in Texas, who was dragged behind a white — I believe there were three of them, three white supremacists’ van, until he was dismembered, alive, while he was still alive. I remember Abner Louima in New York and his sodomization. I remember in those years —

AMY GOODMAN: By police.

JULIA WRIGHT: — as I was going to death row — yes, absolutely, by the police, always by the police. And also I remember Amadou Diallo, shot by the police 40 times, not because he was the one suspected of rape — it was somebody else — but he was a convenient Black target.

So, when I got to Yale and to Beinecke and — I have this memory of entering this very plush, comfortable, air-conditioned library in July of 2010 to look for a manuscript to publish. And I saw the long version of The Man Who Lived Underground. It leapt out at me as — I don’t know what to say. A time bomb? A time machine? Something that had to be published yesterday. I was so driven about it that I took it back to Paris and approached Library of America by — well, in those days, it was still fax. And that’s how the idea began.

AMY GOODMAN: And talk about — talk about the book. Talk about the descriptions of police violence. Talk about the man who went underground, who lived in the sewer system. Again, it was published as a short story but not as a book, because the publishers didn’t want those graphic descriptions.

JULIA WRIGHT: The publishers, who were white — it was controlled, white-controlled — did not want those descriptions of white supremacist police violence upon a Black man, because it was too close to home. As one editor who rejected the long version of the manuscript said, it is “too unbearable,” quote-unquote, “too untenable, too uncomfortable.” It’s a bit like, you know, lifting the stone and not wanting the worms, the racist worms underneath, to be seen.

Very interestingly, Kevin Powell, a New York writer, very promising writer, commented on the long version the other day: What if those first 50 pages on police brutality had been accepted back in the day? All the discourse around that narrative that would have taken place all those years ago would perhaps have changed something. But it didn’t.

AMY GOODMAN: I’m looking at a quote from The Man Who Lived Underground, your father’s book. He says, “Outside of time and space, he looked down upon the earth and saw that each fleeting day was a day of dying, that men died slowly with each passing moment as much as they did in war, that human grief and sorrow were utterly insufficient to this vast, dreary spectacle.” And I’m thinking about the time we live in, Julia, right now, as you look across the Atlantic at your country, the United States, what happened to George Floyd last year, the police murder of George Floyd, and then the trial. Your thoughts?

JULIA WRIGHT: My thoughts about the video that was taken by Darnella Frazier, such a young girl, fearlessly, even while she was being threatened, is a central, fundamental thing to our culture, because, as Benjamin Crump said, as she did it, she recaptured part of our narrative that escaped us. And that narrative is the narrative of our death, because that goes back to slavery. It goes back to the lynchings. It goes back to Black Boy chapter two, when Richard, aged 8 or 9, realizes that the grown-ups who were whispering above him are whispering about the lynching of his uncle, Silas Hoskins. And he doesn’t understand. He wonders where the body is. He wonders why there are no flowers, why there’s no funeral. And he says to his mother, “Why didn’t we do anything about it?” And those words reverberate through all these decades and seem to have reached Darnella as she filmed George Floyd’s last moments. She did something about it. She filmed his last moments. She gave us a new narrative.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Julia Wright, the daughter of the literary giant Richard Wright, so famous for his books Native Son and Black Boy. In 1951, Richard Wright actually starred in a film version of Native Son. He played the main character, Bigger Thomas. This is just a clip from the trailer.

BIGGER THOMAS: [played by Richard Wright] All my life I heard of Black men being killed because of white girls. And there I was.

BESSIE MEARS: [played by Gloria Madison] Darling, give up. It might make it easier.

BIGGER THOMAS: I felt free and wasn’t scared no more. I was back home again. And there was my father the white folks had killed when I was a kid.

MAX: [played by Don Dean] How can I help you now?

BIGGER THOMAS: You don’t have to help me, Mr. Max. Go home. Now you can hate me like the others.

AMY GOODMAN: Again, that is Richard Wright playing Bigger Thomas in the film version of his book, the blockbuster best-seller at the time, Native Son, and then his kind of literary biography, Black Boy. Julia, especially for the younger generation, if you could give us a thumbnail biography of your father, of where your father grew up, how he moved north, how he wrote these books, and ultimately — I don’t know if you’d describe it as fleed, but fled the United States with you and your mother — right? — fled New York, fled the racism, as James Baldwin would do later, and ended up in Paris?

JULIA WRIGHT: Difficult. Because I’m so close to what he did, I don’t have that bird’s-eye view that I would like to have. But I would say that maybe he would prefer the word “expatriate” to “exile,” and he would prefer the word “escape” to “flight,” because they’re more active words, and he thought of himself as more endowed with agency as time went on. Everything he did was to gain more freedom in his ability to create. You showed a clip of the film he invested so much of his energy into — writing, co-writing the script, being part producer of, acting Bigger. And in the end, that film was censored, because it came out during McCarthyism. That was one of the reasons why he could not stay and create freely in a land where the pages he wrote about police brutality would be dismembered from his book, a bit in the way James Byrd would be dismembered. I mean, I use the word a bit violently, but, in a way, it is the same thing. He needed freedom, in all senses, in all meanings of the term. And so he went where he felt he could find it.

AMY GOODMAN: I mean, if you could talk about what he experienced here; also the HUAC hearings, watching Paul Robeson being destroyed by the U.S. government, this enormous talent, this giant figure, them taking his passport, the anti-communist fervor of the time; not wanting the FBI to come to try to get him to spy on his colleagues; his relationships with James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison and Paul Robeson; the significance of this period?

JULIA WRIGHT: It was the Cold War. And culture, academics, writers were used in the Cold War against one another. It was a terrible cloak-and-dagger period, but it was to the death, to the death of creativity, but also to the death of life. It was terrible. I remember my father’s best friend, Ollie Harrington, who was a member of the CPUSA and the creator of Bootsie, the cartoon —

AMY GOODMAN: The Communist Party U.S.A.

JULIA WRIGHT: Yes, yes, yes. And he was the creator of Bootsie, a very famous cartoon. And he was my father’s best friend to the end. My father used to tell Ollie, “Ollie, the apartment is bugged. It’s bugged.” And Ollie used to laugh at my father. This was in Paris, at the end, during his [inaudible] here.

AMY GOODMAN: Julia, we just have 20 seconds.

JULIA WRIGHT: And Ollie would laugh and say, “No. No way. You’re being paranoid, Richard.” But Richard insisted, so Ollie brought technicians in. And they found bugs. So —

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to — we have to leave it there, but people can pick up this latest book of the great literary giant Richard Wright. Thank you so much to his daughter, Julia Wright. The Man Who Lived Underground, just published. I’m Amy Goodman. Thanks for joining us.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non

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U.S. Marks 100th Anniversary of Tulsa Race Massacre, When White Mob Destroyed “Black Wall Street”
by Amy Goodman
Democracy Now
MAY 28, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/5/28/ ... nniversary

GUESTS
Stanley Nelson: award-winning documentary filmmaker.
LINKS
Stanley Nelson on Twitter
"Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre"

Memorial Day marks the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence in U.S. history, when the thriving African American neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma — known as “Black Wall Street” — was burned to the ground by a white mob. An estimated 300 African Americans were killed and over 1,000 injured. Whites in Tulsa actively suppressed the truth, and African Americans were intimidated into silence. But efforts to restore the horrific event to its rightful place in U.S. history are having an impact. Survivors testified last week before Congress, calling for reparations. President Biden is set to visit Tulsa on Tuesday. We speak with documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, whose new film premiering this weekend explores how Black residents sought out freedom in Oklahoma and built a thriving community in Greenwood, and how it was all destroyed over two days of horrific violence. Nelson notes many African Americans migrated westward after the Civil War “to start a new life” with dignity. “Greenwood was one of over 100 African American communities in the West,” he says. “Greenwood was the biggest and the baddest of those communities.”

Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: “Mother Africa” by jazz saxophonist Hal Singer and Jef Gilson. Singer was one of the last remaining survivors of the Tulsa race massacre. He died in August at the age of 100. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The Quarantine Report. I’m Amy Goodman.

This Monday, Memorial Day, marks the hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre, one of the single greatest acts of racist terror in U.S. history. In 1921, the thriving African American neighborhood of Greenwood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, was known as “Black Wall Street” for its concentration of successful Black-owned businesses, before it was burned to the ground by a white mob.

The violence grew from a confrontation at the Tulsa courthouse where whites had gathered to abduct and lynch a jailed Black man who had been wrongfully accused of assaulting a white woman. Black residents of Greenwood arrived to stop the lynching. Gunshots erupted, after which the white mob set upon Greenwood for 18 hours of mass murder, arson and looting that would become known as the 1921 Tulsa race massacre.

An estimated 300 African Americans were killed, over a thousand injured. Ten thousand were left homeless as the racist mob, some of them deputized and armed by Tulsa law enforcement, along with members of the Ku Klux Klan, terrorized the Black population. Airplanes were used to drop dynamite and crude incendiary bombs on Greenwood, ultimately burning over 35 city blocks. Over 1,200 homes were destroyed, along with countless businesses. The actual number of dead will never be known, as bodies were tossed into mass graves or thrown in the river.

Last week, a House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing to address the ongoing impacts of the Tulsa massacre. Three African American survivors testified in favor of reparations: Viola Fletcher; her younger brother, Hughes Van Ellis, who’s 100 years old; and 105-year-old Lessie Benningfield Randle. This is part of their testimony, beginning with Viola Fletcher.

VIOLA FLETCHER: I’m a survivor of the Tulsa race massacre. Two weeks ago, I celebrated my 107th birthday. Today I am visiting Washington, D.C., for the first time in my life. I’m here seeking justice, and I’m asking my country to acknowledge what happened in Tulsa in 1921. …

The night of the massacre, I was awakened by my family. My parents and five siblings were there. I was told we had to leave, and that was it. I will never forget the violence of the white mob when we left our home. I still see Black men being shot, Black bodies lying in the street. I still smell smoke and see fire. I still see Black businesses being burned. I still hear airplanes flying overhead. I hear the screams. I have lived through the massacre every day. Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not. And other survivors do not. And our descendants do not.

HUGHES VAN ELLIS: We live with it every day, and the thought of what Greenwood was and what it could have been. We aren’t just black-and-white pictures on a screen. We are flesh and blood. I was there when it happened. I’m still here.

LESSIE BENNINGFIELD RANDLE: It seems like justice in America is always so slow or not possible for Black people.

AMY GOODMAN: Three African American survivors of the Tulsa race massacre, making history as they testified before Congress just ahead of the centennial of the race massacre this Monday. The Department of Homeland Security has said events commemorating the massacre could be a target for white supremacists. President Joe Biden still plans to travel to Tulsa on Tuesday.

This Sunday, a documentary by award-winning filmmaker Stanley Nelson premieres on the History Channel. This is the trailer for Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre.

JAMES S. HIRSCH: The destruction was so complete. The suffering was so biblical. The betrayal was so profound.

UNIDENTIFIED: Black communities deserve the opportunity to confront the past.

UNIDENTIFIED: Our city has been stuck since then. We’ve never recovered.

DAMARIO SOLOMON-SIMMONS: Tulsa was the best place in the nation for African Americans.

MICHELE MITCHELL: We have everything, from hotels, theaters.

SCOTT ELLSWORTH: Doctors, lawyers.

MICHELE MITCHELL: People referred to it as “Black Wall Street.”

UNIDENTIFIED: Showing Black people that a new world was possible.

HANNIBAL JOHNSON: The Tribune published a story titled “Nabbed Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.” It was a false narrative to keep Black people in their place, to reinforce white supremacy.

SCOTT ELLSWORTH: All across Tulsa, angry whites are now organizing.

JAMES S. HIRSCH: They get their guns. They get their torches.

SCOTT ELLSWORTH: At that point, they start moving towards Greenwood.

JAMES S. HIRSCH: All hell broke loose.

ELDORIS McCONDICHIE: The white folks are killing the colored folks.

UNIDENTIFIED: Firing into homes.

UNIDENTIFIED: Bombs dropping from the air.

UNIDENTIFIED: It was just an all-out massacre.

REV. ROBERT TURNER: Not one of those men who participated in the race massacre were ever brought to justice.

SCOTT ELLSWORTH: The Tulsa Tribune refused to write anything about the massacre for more than 50 years. Victims were being buried in unmarked graves across the city. The reason we understand the history of the massacre is that certain survivors decided to talk about it.

GEORGE MONROE: My mother saw four men coming toward our house, and all of them had torches.

BRENDA ALFORD: We will be looking for the remains of those who were lost so tragically.

UNIDENTIFIED: This is so beautiful, and sad at the same time.

UNIDENTIFIED: We need to do something about what happened in Tulsa.

DAMARIO SOLOMON-SIMMONS: There cannot be any justice ’til there is proper respect, restitution and repair.

AMY GOODMAN: The trailer for Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre. The executive producer of the film, NBA star Russell Westbrook, who played for the Oklahoma City Thunder for over a decade.

We’re joined now by one of the documentary’s directors, Stanley Nelson. His previous films include Freedom Summer, Freedom Riders, The Murder of Emmett Till.

Stanley, welcome back to Democracy Now! It’s an honor to have you with us again. Lay this out. I mean, this is a story that, as we can see throughout this film, and of course from our own education, was so suppressed for so many decades. Go back in time. Talk to us about Black Wall Street and why so many African Americans came to Oklahoma.

STANLEY NELSON: Yeah, I think one of the things that’s so fascinating about the story is that African Americans, in the decades after the Civil War, migrated west. You know, we think of that famous saying, “Go west, young man.” Well, African Americans went west. You know, when we think about Americans in covered wagons, we don’t think about — usually think about African Americans, but African Americans went west, in covered wagons, on horseback, on foot, to try to start a new life and try to start a life where they could live with dignity and peace.

And they did that. And they did that in Greenwood. And Greenwood was one of over a hundred African American communities in the West, some small, some a little larger, but Greenwood was the biggest and the baddest of those communities. It was a very, very successful community that had businesses, you know, a skating rink, movie theaters, grocery stores, lawyers, doctors, everything. It was really a self-contained community. And that may have been one of the problems with their white neighbors.

AMY GOODMAN: Yeah, I was so struck by the history, where you talked about African Americans coming north from the oppression of the Deep South, and actually a number of them — and they called it Indian Country, going to Oklahoma — a number concerned about Oklahoma becoming a state, that it would reinforce the racist laws of the rest of the United States.

STANLEY NELSON: Yeah, one of the things that’s so fascinating is that Oklahoma was a territory, and so it was kind of free. You know, it was the home of the Land Rush, and Black people took part in that. And there was a move to make Oklahoma kind of a home, a Black state for African Americans. But once Oklahoma became a state, then the racist Jim Crow laws took effect, and Black people, that had kind of been free in Oklahoma, were then persecuted.

AMY GOODMAN: This is another clip from your documentary, Tulsa Burning, that features several historians and descendants describing Greenwood’s history as the Black Wall Street.

HANNIBAL JOHNSON: Greenwood was a community of necessity. It was a segregated enclave. Black folks couldn’t ply their trades or purchase goods and services in the larger white economy, so they created their own economy. That economy became successful because Black folks did business with one another and kept dollars largely in the Black community.

MICHELE MITCHELL: What happens in Greenwood is that segregation, which is not necessarily desired, segregation actually enables Black businesses to thrive, Black professionals to thrive.

UNIDENTIFIED: It was a district where, in fact, money, dollars, could turn over five or six times.

KARLOS HILL: In Greenwood, you could — as a Black person, you could advance. And you had a number of individuals in the community that were prospering.

WILHELMINA GUESS HOWELL: “My uncle, he was a physician. His name was Andrew Jackson, lived up on Detroit Street in the 500 block, sort of a hill right up that street. Detroit in those days had the nicest houses. The Negroes did. The principal of the school lived up there. We had dentists up there. We had wonderful doctors. And my uncle, I told you, his name was Dr. Jackson.”

JOHN W. ROGERS JR.: My great-grandfather’s name was J.B. Stradford. He grew up in Kentucky. His parents were slaves. And he was able to get a law degree, go to Oberlin College and really start his entrepreneurial career in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Stradford Hotel was one of the largest Black-owned hotels in the United States. It was a beautiful building. And leaders from throughout the country, when they came through the Midwest, would often stay at the Stradford Hotel.

MICHELE MITCHELL: You have Black entertainers that are playing there, jazz being a really important scene. We think about jazz in Kansas, in Kansas City. It’s also important in Greenwood.

KARLOS HILL: Because of the success of Greenwood, Booker T. Washington coined the phrase, Greenwood as the “Black Wall Street” or the “Negro Wall Street” of America.

AMY GOODMAN: A clip from Tulsa Burning, that’s going to air on History Channel on Sunday. Stanley Nelson, talk about why you chose to take on this subject, to add to your remarkable opus of work.

STANLEY NELSON: Yeah, I mean, I think it’s more reasons than one. One, it’s an incredible American story that needs to be known — you know, the building of Black Wall Street, the building of Greenwood, and also the devastation and destruction. But also, it was really challenging, because we’re telling two stories at once. So we’re also telling the story of 2020, 2021, as Greenwood searches for the remains of African Americans who were buried in mass graves, unmarked. And we didn’t know what we would find or what they would find. And so, we’re telling the story of 1921, of Greenwood, and also 2021 in Greenwood.

AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, 2020, because when Trump went on the 99th anniversary of Tulsa, so much was raised. I want to go to another clip from your documentary, Tulsa Burning, of Reverend Robert Turner of the Vernon AME Church on Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, the only surviving structure from before the massacre.

REV. ROBERT TURNER: When I came to pastor Vernon Church in Tulsa, I knew nothing about the history of this church. One of my trustees gave me a tour. And when I saw the cornerstone outside — and the cornerstone is still there — it reads, “Basement erected 1919.” I said, “Is that the same one we have?” He said, “Yes, that’s the same basement that you just walked through.” “So, it survived the 1921 race massacre.” He was like, “Yes.” I was like, “Do you know what this is?” He was like, “What?” I said, “We have something left. Right? All is not lost.”

AMY GOODMAN: And nearly 100 years after the Tulsa race massacre, a team of scholars is working to uncover the unmarked graves, that Stanley Nelson just referred to, of victims, with hopes of identifying some of their bodies. In this clip of Tulsa Burning, we hear from Brenda Nails Alford, a descendant of James and Henry Nails, who owned businesses in Black Wall Street.

BRENDA NAILS ALFORD: I always knew that my grandmother had to hide in a church for some reason, but I never knew what that meant. Family members would come to town. My great-uncles would come to town. And maybe we’d be driving around, and we would pass Oaklawn Cemetery. Someone in the car would always say, “You know they’re still over there,” the victims of the race massacre. And everybody in the car would agree. And I always had a little thing about that cemetery, growing up as a kid, because I was like, “What’s over there?” And I would find out so many, many years later that the family member and community members were there.

REV. ROBERT TURNER: But in 1921, the people who were killed, people who lost lives, loved ones, they never had the benefit of having a funeral. That touches me at the core — and it should, any conscious human being — the fact that we just dumped bodies of human beings, of patriots, of veterans, of teachers, of husbands, of wives, children in mass graves. Nobody ever had a chance to say goodbye.

AMY GOODMAN: That last voice, Reverend Robert Turner of Tulsa’s Vernon AME Church. Stanley Nelson, what most surprised you as you did this research?

STANLEY NELSON: I think one of the things that was so surprising is that there’s film footage of the building of Tulsa. You know, the people were so prosperous and so proud of what they were building that in 1920, early in 1921, they made movies and took pictures of their homes and their businesses. And that’s really rare. And there’s also still pictures and movies of the destruction, so that we see it. And so, you know, as a filmmaker, it was a gift, because it’s really a window into what happened. And that really surprised me, because you don’t often find film footage of just African American communities, you know, being themselves, from the early ’20s.

AMY GOODMAN: This is another clip from Tulsa Burning. It features Brenda Nails Alford, descendant of James and Henry Nails.

KARLOS HILL: This is not just a story of victimization. It’s also a story of resistance. It’s also a story of courage and resilience. And that can’t be forgotten.

BRENDA NAILS ALFORD: My grandfather, he was a very proud, college-educated shoemaker, who did everything he was, quote-unquote, “supposed to do.” He got his education. He worked hard. He started the businesses. And still that wasn’t enough. And so, in this day and time, my question is: When is it enough? When are we enough as a people? They did everything that they could do. They wanted to be successful. These were proud, upstanding members of our community, who simply wanted a piece of the American dream — and truly received a nightmare.

HANNIBAL JOHNSON: At the end of this experience, no white person was convicted of an offense related to killing people or destroying the property in the Greenwood District. None. And that is not surprising. And really, you know, when you think about the context, it’s not surprising at all.

AMY GOODMAN: That last voice, historian Hannibal Johnson. And finally, this clip from Tulsa Burning about the aftermath of the deadly attack.

SCOTT ELLSWORTH: They’re being led away at gunpoint to these so-called internment centers around town, the fairgrounds, the municipal auditorium, the baseball park.

HANNIBAL JOHNSON: To get out of these centers, people generally had to have a green identification card, countersigned by a white person that was willing to vouch for them.

SCOTT ELLSWORTH: So, here you are. You’ve been illegally arrested by white civilians. You have no idea what’s happened to your loved ones if you’ve been separated from them. If that was your uncle, your brother, your son, your father, you’re going to never know what happened to them.

KARLOS HILL: We have to acknowledge that the destruction to the community was intentional. It was conscious. It was systematic.

HANNIBAL JOHNSON: When the dust settled, somewhere between 100 and 300 people were killed. At least 1,250 homes in the Black community were destroyed.

MICHELE MITCHELL: Thirty-five square blocks, 36 square blocks, 40 square blocks, just obliterated.

SCOTT ELLSWORTH: You could see the iron, you know, metal bed stands where there used to be homes.

KARLOS HILL: Two million dollars in Black wealth went up in flames. Right? That was never recouped.

SCOTT ELLSWORTH: And for people who didn’t know what happened to their loved ones, identified as well as unidentified, African American massacre victims were being buried in unmarked graves across the city.

AMY GOODMAN: Yet another clip from Tulsa Burning. Stanley Nelson, as we wrap up, the issue of reparations, 100 years later?

STANLEY NELSON: Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things the film does, and does so well, is it makes you think about reparations. You know, it’s such a fraught word. But I think that you understand what people mean and why people ask for reparations, once you see the film and know the story of Tulsa, which is a real representation of the problems that Black communities suffered through.

AMY GOODMAN: And you certainly help us do this in this remarkable documentary. Stanley Nelson, the award-winning director of the new documentary Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre, premieres Sunday at 8 p.m. Eastern on the History Channel.

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Jovenel Moïse Dead: Haitian President Assassinated, Plunging Country into New Political Crisis
by Amy Goodman
DemocracyNow
JULY 07, 2021
https://www.democracynow.org/2021/7/7/h ... assination

-- Hillary: The New York Times Will Never Tell Us This, by F. William Engdahl

-- Memorandum Re Background on Teneo and Foundation Activities, by Douglas Jay Band

GUESTS
Dahoud Andre: longtime Haitian community activist and member of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti.
Kim Ives: editor of Haiti Liberté.
LINKS
Kim Ives on Twitter

Haiti is reeling from a new crisis after President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in an attack on his home in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince early Wednesday. In a statement, Haitian Prime Minister Claude Joseph said “a group of unidentified individuals” attacked the private residence of the president, killing him and injuring the first lady. Moïse, who had led Haiti since 2017, was accused of orchestrating a coup to stay in power beyond February 7, when his term officially ended. For months Haitians have staged large protests against Moïse demanding he leave office, but Moïse clung to power with support from the Biden administration, which backed his claims that his term should end next year. Dahoud Andre, a longtime Haitian community activist and member of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti, says rumors are flying about who could be behind the killing. “As of now, we have no clue where this assassination came from,” Andre says, adding that “the Haitian people loathed Jovenel Moïse” and describing him as a “tool” of the United States. We also speak with Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberté, who says the assailants appear to have been well resourced in their attack. “Clearly this was a fairly sophisticated operation,” Ives says.

Transcript
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show with breaking news. Haitian President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated early today after an attack on his home in the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Moïse’s wife was also shot in the attack; she has been hospitalized. In a statement, the Haitian prime minister, Claude Joseph, said, quote, “A group of unidentified individuals, some of them speaking Spanish, attacked the private residence of the president of the republic and thus fatally wounded the head of state,” unquote.

Moïse had led Haiti since 2017. Earlier this year, critics of Moïse accused of him of orchestrating a coup to stay in power beyond February 7th, when his term officially ended. For months Haitians have staged large protests against Moïse demanding he leave office. But Moïse clung to power with support from the Biden administration, which backed Moïse’s claim that his term should end next year. Human rights groups report — had accused Moïse of sanctioning attacks against civilians in impoverished neighborhoods of Port-au-Prince, the capital, with targeted assassinations and threats against government critics carried out with impunity.

We’re joined now, dealing with this breaking news, by two guests. Dahoud Andre is a longtime Haitian community activist and member of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti. And Kim Ives is with us, the editor of Haiti Liberté.

We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Let’s begin with Dahoud Andre. Can you tell us what you have heard? Who is responsible for this assassination? And then give us what has been happening — talk about what has been happening in Haiti.

DAHOUD ANDRE: Well, thank you very much, Amy and Juan, for inviting us to speak about what’s happening in Haiti.

We got the call — a call about 5:30 this morning to say that radio in Haiti had reported that, overnight, Jovenel Moïse had been assassinated. I should say that right now, as of now, we have no clue where this assassination came from — certainly not the street gangs, such as the G9; Jimmy “Barbecue” Cherizier, who has been going around recently, after years of demonstrating with an American flag behind his back, and right now purporting to be fighting for a revolution to liberate the Haitian people, so we know it did not come from there.

We know that it could have come from the oligarchy, such people as Reginald Boulos, maybe, you know, Dimitri Vorbe, that at present it appears that Jovenel Moïse has some difficulty with them, because we can imagine that it would take a lot of money to do — and resources, to do an operation such as this.

But a lot of people that I’ve spoken to this morning are saying it’s probably the U.S. government, again, not just affirming their domination over Haiti right now, but maybe to mask the shame of their defeat and running away from Afghanistan in the middle of the night.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Kim Ives, I wanted to get your perspective on this. Clearly, there was a popular opposition and questions, deep questions, about any kind of legitimacy for Jovenel Moïse. So, was this potentially a falling out among the elites, or was there foreign involvement, as well, other than the possible mercenaries themselves being hired from abroad?

KIM IVES: Well, it definitely seems there was foreign involvement. My sources in Haiti this morning tell me that the assailants, the killers, arrived in nine brand-new Nissan patrol pickups. They had a complete understanding of the household of Jovenel Moïse, so apparently they had some inside information. They knew what they were doing. They pretended to be the DEA. So, clearly, this was a fairly sophisticated operation.

Was it Boulos? Was it one of the other members of the bourgeoisie who have had problems with Jovenel? It’s difficult to know. It seems he was also recently in Turkey making some deals, and the Colombians may have not been happy about that. That’s one of the rumors going around. So, we have to wait and see who was behind it.

But definitely, on the street, things have been very hot. The revolutionary forces of the G9 Family and Allies have basically been also calling for Jovenel to go. So I don’t think there’s anybody that is going to be unhappy with this outcome. It was a time when he was very isolated, even within his own circles.

AMY GOODMAN: And the fact that they were speaking Spanish?

KIM IVES: Yeah, and that’s the big question. Yeah, I’m trying to find out why they think it was Colombians involved. I don’t know if it’s an accent question. I haven’t gotten an answer back. But I believe that, you know, it was definitely some fairly sophisticated mercenary operation involved.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Dahoud, I wanted to ask you, in terms of — for those listeners and viewers of Democracy Now! who have not been closely following what’s been going on in Haiti in recent years, could you talk about the connections of Moïse to the previous president and the involvement of the Clintons in the continuing, persistent political crises that have occurred in Haiti in recent years?

DAHOUD ANDRE: Yeah. I want to point out first that this is exactly three years since the major uprisings that happened in the country in 2018, July 6, 7th, when the IMF had demanded that Haiti, the government of Haiti, raise fuel prices. And some of these prices were doubled. And the puppet government that Jovenel Moïse headed, they did this in the middle of a soccer game between Brazil and Belgium. And the idea was that Brazil would win and that it would be euphoria, and the people wouldn’t mind. They wouldn’t notice. They wouldn’t be — they would be celebrating Brazil’s victory. And fate had it that Brazil lost shamefully. And immediately after the game ended, uprisings all over the country. So, it’s important to note this date, this anniversary, and that Jovenel Moïse would be killed on this anniversary.

But also, I want to point out what Kim Ives is calling the revolutionary forces of the G9 and Jimmy Cherizier, these are criminals. These are people that are responsible for killing, massacres in poor neighborhoods in the country. These are people — and a lot of people find it amazing, unbelievable, that Kim Ives and his newspaper, Haiti Liberté, would be defending, trying to make people believe that these are revolutionaries — these are the people who are throwing 78-year-old elderly folks off of buildings, burning them alive — that these are the people who are going to save us.

The audience should understand, yes, Martelly was handpicked by the Clintons as a puppet, as someone who would do their bidding and join the campaign. It was obvious that the Clintons, Bill Clinton, who was running the CIRH to supposedly rebuild Haiti “back better” — same slogan that Joe Biden used in his recent campaign — that they would find that this is the person who would be — a degenerate, someone — I know that this program has done much about Martelly, so I don’t want to even go there. But what is important is that Martelly handpicked Jovenel Moïse.

And Jovenel Moïse, who was a crook, an indicted, fake entrepreneur, was put in directly by the U.S. government again. And in that position, he was a reliable puppet to, first, Donald Trump, to the point that he betrayed Haiti’s historic relationship with Venezuela in recognizing Juan Guaidó as legitimate head of Venezuela. And Jovenel Moïse had the nerve to say that with the most recent legislative elections in Venezuela, he would not recognize them because there was not enough popular participation. And this is someone who, by their own numbers, got about 500,000 votes in a country of 12 million people.

So, I need to say that the Haitian people loathed Jovenel Moïse and Martelly, the PHTK government, because they are the tools of the United States, to impose the will of the United States on the people. And they arm these street gangs. They finance these massacres in the poor neighborhoods, that are supportive of, I should say, President Aristide, the Lavalas government. And they just felt — and this was Martelly’s position — he clearly said, so long as the heavyweights — meaning the United States, the U.N., the OAS, the Core Group — supported him and Jovenel Moïse, nothing could happen to them. And this is what we have seen: the support, the unequivocal support, of the United States to the PHTK government, who was killing the Haitian people and stealing the resources of the country.

AMY GOODMAN: I want to get Kim Ives’ response to this clip. One of Haiti’s most powerful gang leaders warned this week he was launching a revolution against the country’s business and political elites. This is Jimmy Cherizier, who Dahoud just referred to, a.k.a. “Barbecue,” a former police officer who heads the so-called G9 federation of nine gangs formed last year.

JIMMY CHERIZIER: [translated] I’m telling people to keep looking for what belongs to them by right. It is your money which is in the banks, stores, supermarkets and dealerships. So go and get what is rightfully yours. Continue looking for what belongs to us, because it is ours.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us who “Barbecue” Jimmy Cherizier is, Kim Ives, and respond to Dahoud’s criticism of your paper, Haiti Liberté?

KIM IVES: Yes, I can. Haiti Liberté, of which, by the way, I’m just the English-language section editor, has been following, with very great interest, the emergence of the G9. Unlike Dahoud Andre, I have met with Jimmy Cherizier and a number of the organizations on the ground in Haiti.

The massacres that he’s describing are really the product, principally, of an outfit called the RNDDH, the Haitian Network for the Defense of Human Rights in Haiti, headed by a guy called Pierre Espérance, who also issued fallacious reports against the Aristide government after the 2004 coup d’état. He has basically waged some kind of holy war against Jimmy Cherizier, who, according to Cherizier, he asked to bump off, to rub out a rival human rights group head.

So, Jimmy Cherizier was a stellar policeman who was basically radicalized by his betrayal by the Haitian police leadership, who hung him out to dry after an operation went badly in Grande Ravine in 2017. And he was dealing with some of the leading lights of the opposition — Reginald Boulos, previously mentioned, a guy called Youri Latortue, who is also an alleged former death squad leader and was called “the poster-boy for political corruption” by the U.S. Embassy itself in the WikiLeaks cables that we released a decade ago. So he soured on them, too, and he saw that both the government of Jovenel Moïse and the opposition, the bourgeois opposition, with which Dahoud is aligned, were rotten. And he said, “We need a revolution, because the people need schools. They need clinics. They need sanitation.”

He took me around the neighborhoods of Delmas 4, Delmas 2, Delmas 6, where he grew up. He’s a street — the son of a poor street vendor. And he showed me how people had to do their toilet in a plastic bag and throw it in a canal. And he said, you know, “People can’t live like this.” So he has been calling for a revolution against the system in Haiti and is being radicalized really by the day and by these events.

So, the portrayal of him in the mainstream press, you know, by the AP, The Washington Post, is he’s this gang leader. He’s the bogeyman. But the reality is, on the ground, that this is an uprising really of Haiti’s lumpenproletariat, which has been crushed over the past decades. And Jovenel Moïse was no different than Martelly. And the people, the masses in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, now some 3 million, 4 million people, have had enough and are rising up.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dahoud, your response on the issue of Kim saying that you are representing more of the bourgeois opposition?

DAHOUD ANDRE: Kim Ives is a joke, and it’s sad that your program is giving him this platform to, again, push this garbage that Jimmy Cherizier, who — and this is not the RNDDH who’s saying that Cherizier, that Barbecue, is an assassin, a criminal, like someone who is responsible for all of these massacres, and despite the denunciations of the people of La Saline, of all of these poor neighborhoods in Bel Air, who themselves they say that it is Jimmy Cherizier. This is RNDDH. This is Fondasyon Je Klere. This is the CARDH and the people in the streets and any radio station in the country that you turn on. And people who are massacred are speaking directly about who they saw came with guns, with gasoline and fire to burn down their homes.

So, now to say that Dahoud Andre is aligned with the bourgeoisie opposition, [laughs]. There is a former ally of Kim Ives and his newspaper, Haiti Liberté, that he owns. But Kim is a white man, an American. And so, he cannot come to this program or anywhere else and say that he is the owner, the puppet master of this newspaper, so he’s pretending that he is just — but I’m sure that Amy Goodman, Juan González and everyone else who knows about this newspaper knows who owns this newspaper and knows that this is just another wannabe white savior for the people.

And it’s beautiful, the song that you started this segment with, Amy, because this is a song called “Ki Sa Pou-N Fe?” “What Is to Be Done?” as you said. And the song, if you continued to play it, it would say it’s a revolution. And who’s going to make this revolution? The Haitian people. It is not our neighbors. It is not wannabe white saviors, like Kim Ives, who are going to liberate the Haitian people.

I want to speak a little bit about, like, this thing, the Jovenel Moïse. This is what this is about. And I should say, if I knew that I was going to be put in this program together with Kim Ives, I wouldn’t even come on. And you should go to Haiti. You’ve been to Haiti, Amy, Juan. And go speak to someone like Oxygène David, who worked for years with Kim Ives. Go speak to Mario Joseph, who was close collaborator of Kim Ives, who are both denouncing him and his newspaper in Haiti for pushing this garbage that a scum like Jimmy Cherizier, who are — he is not going to Pétion-Ville, to Thomassin, to kill the rich people, to steal from them. The people he has massacred for the government. And this is why for three years the Jovenel government has never executed their warrants against Cherizier, because he is in their pocket. He is someone who’s working for them. And find his previous messages on social media, where he has, this same Jimmy Cherizier, an American flag behind his back to show the world who he stands with. And now that he has some little trouble with his people —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dahoud, Dahoud, if we can — Dahoud, if we can, we have only a couple of more minutes —

DAHOUD ANDRE: — he’s pretending that he’s leading revolution. Yeah, the —

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Dahoud, we have only a couple more minutes to go. I wanted to get —

DAHOUD ANDRE: OK.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: I wanted to get Kim Ives in for — to respond, briefly, Kim. And also, if you could mention, talk about how the Biden administration has been dealing with Haiti since it’s come into office?

KIM IVES: Yes. Well, just to finish with Dahoud, he’s had a longtime bugaboo with Haiti Liberté. I imagined he might explode on the show if coupled with me. His belief that I’m the owner of Haiti Liberté is as unfounded as his rumors that he’s saying about the G9 and Jimmy Cherizier or my relationship with Oxygène David and Mario Joseph, who I have only recently spoken to, as well. So, this is, you know, just typical.

But as for the Biden administration, the administration has, according to my sources in Haiti, been totally supporting Jovenel up until now. But Helen La Lime, who heads the BINUH, which is the U.N. office in Haiti, has been very much on the fence, really, about whether to go over to the bourgeois opposition and use them for a transition. Well, obviously, that probably is going to happen now, because the president no longer is living. But so, the Biden administration has been having this slightly contradictory sort of message, where on the one hand they say, you know, “We’re going to support Jovenel, and he can be in office until February 7th, 2022,” but at the same time they’re saying, “We’re alarmed by authoritarianism and the decrees that he’s passing.”

So, right now we’ll see which way they go. Will they move over to the opposition, which basically is headed by this fellow Youri Latortue, who we have done WikiLeaks articles on, on Haiti Liberté — people can check those out — a decade ago? And I expect that, you know, they may try to find some sort of compromise candidate, somebody with a slight Lavalas color, a slight progressive color, to be the figurehead of this transitional government. But I don’t think they’ll be able to go forward with the remnants of the crew that Jovenel had working with him now. They just appointed a new prime minister on Monday, a guy called Dr. Ariel Henry, who is an old, basically, collaborator of the U.S. in Haiti. He sat on the Council of the Wise, which facilitated the transfer to the de facto government after the coup d’état against Aristide on February 29th, 2004. And so, he was basically named on Monday, but I see that it’s Claude Joseph, the interim prime minister, who is doing all the talking after this assassination of Jovenel.

AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’re going to leave it there. And, of course, these are just the first few hours after the assassination of the Haitian president, and we will continue to cover what develops since, from this time. Kim Ives, editor of Haiti Liberté, and Dahoud Andre, longtime Haitian community activist and member of the Committee to Mobilize Against Dictatorship in Haiti.

Next up, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones has rejected the tenure offer from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill after major controversy. She’s joining the faculty of Howard University, after a prominent right-wing donor at UNC opposed giving her tenure. Stay with us.

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“The Second Amendment Is Not Intended for Black People”: Tracing the racist history of gun governance.
by Dahlia Lithwick
Slate
AUG 03, 2021 2:27 PM

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On a recent episode of Slate’s legal podcast Amicus, host Dahlia Lithwick spoke with historian Carol Anderson, professor and chair of African American studies at Emory University, about her new book, The Second. Anderson’s work explores how the Constitution’s Second Amendment was not only crafted to suppress Black Americans, but was continually enforced throughout the centuries in a racist manner, leading to everything from the terrorizing of Reconstruction-era Black Americans to the police killings of even legally armed Black people today. A portion of the conversation, which has been edited and condensed for clarity, has been transcribed below.

Dahlia Lithwick: I wonder if you could start by talking about what led you to this exploration of the connection between slavery, the founding, and guns.

Carol Anderson: It began in 2016 with the killing of Philando Castile. In Minnesota, you have a Black man who was pulled over by the police. The officer asked to see his ID. Castile, following NRA guidelines, alerts the officer that he has a license to carry a weapon with him but he says he’s reaching for his ID. The police officer begins shooting and kills Philando Castile. We see the film of it. It is horrific.

We have a Black man killed simply for having a gun—not for brandishing it, not for threatening anyone, simply for having a license to carry a gun. The National Rifle Association, that protector of the Second Amendment, goes virtually silent. And I thought, how is the NRA silent on this, particularly when it was calling federal law enforcement jackbooted government thugs at Ruby Ridge and at Waco? On this, they’re like virtually silent. Journalists began asking, “Well, don’t African Americans have Second Amendment rights?” And I thought to myself, that’s a great question, and that’s what led me on to this hunt.

In the epilogue to your book, you put in Trevor Noah’s quote from when he looks at a whole host of incidents in which police officers talk down a white man with a gun: They persuade him to disarm and they arrest him. Noah makes the argument that “the Second Amendment is not intended for Black people.” I think the argument is saying that the Second Amendment is in fact working exactly the way it was intended to work with respect to Black folks, and that is as a tool of persistence, subordination, and destruction. I just want to be super clear that you’re not saying the Second Amendment is broken, that it was conceived to do a thing that it doesn’t do. You’re saying the Second Amendment does precisely the thing it was crafted to do.

Exactly. You nailed it.

Going right back to the Colonial era, how much were guns and gun ownership really at the heart of the plantation owners who were attempting to keep control over situations in which they were simply outnumbered?

Guns were central to that, as the militia was central to that. There was this massive fear of slave uprisings and revolts, of Black people fighting for their freedom and willing to do whatever it took to be free. With each rumored uprising, you see the rise of a legal infrastructure in terms of laws banning the enslaved from gun possession, as well as the rise of slave patrols and the militia in order to curtail and control Black people.

The slave patrol was a smaller unit that did the kind of regular routine, going through the slave cabins, looking for contraband, looking for weapons, looking for books, looking for anything that sparked of somebody believing they could be free. The militia was there to backstop the slave patrols so that, if the uprising was too large, more than the slave patrol could handle, the militia could come in.

The numbers that you lay out show that 50 percent of all wealth holders in the 13 Colonies in 1774 owned guns. That number soared if you were looking just at the South: 81 percent of slave-owning states had firearms, and plantations with the largest numbers of enslaved people were 4.3 times more likely to have guns than those with few or no slaves. At the point of the birth of the Second Amendment, already it was absolutely clear that guns were in some sense as essential to continuing slaveholding way of life as were the crops themselves. Guns were just that braided into it.

"With each rumored uprising, you see the rise of laws banning the enslaved from gun possession, as well as the rise of slave patrols and the militia in order to curtail and control Black people."

— Carol Anderson

Absolutely braided into it. You see it, for instance, in the 1739 Stono Rebellion in South Carolina. In Stono, you had a group of Black men who were laborers building a road day after day after day, and they began figuring out what the routine and rotation of the guards were. They began figuring out where the weapons were kept. On a Sunday, they struck and killed two of the guards who were manning the arms, and they took those and began this quest toward Spanish Florida, because Florida had no slavery, and they wanted to be free.

They demonstrated that they were willing to kill or be killed in the process of getting free. On that Sunday morning, Stono’s white folks were in church and the alarm bell rang. They grabbed their guns as part of their work as the militia and went after these rebellious folk, hunting them down to kill them, to make an example of them. White men having guns was the expectation by law. Black folks being banned from having access to guns was the expectation by law.

After Stono, you have the 1740 Negro Act. That Negro Act defined the African-descended people as slaves, absolute slaves, for those here and those not yet born. It defined what they could do and what they could not do. They could not be literate. They could not have access to guns, and they could not walk about freely. They had to be subjugated, controlled by whites.

I want to talk for a minute about what you describe as a three-part move for subjugating slaves from Colonial time on into the framing of the Second Amendment and the way we talk about Second Amendment rights. You’ve talked a about the militias denying the enslaved the right to have arms and then of the right of self-defense. And that, I think, is what you would say filters into the way we still frame these questions today.

Absolutely. One of the things I’m tracking historically is how this plays out over time and whether the legal status of black people changes that dynamic. As we move from enslaved to denizen—which was that in-between space between a slave and citizen—to emancipated and freed people to Jim Crow to post–civil rights African Americans, does that change? The answer is no. You don’t see any significant change in the ways that access to weapons, and the surveilling, and the right to self-defense, plays out for Black people in the United States. It was Virginia that actually developed that three-pronged mechanism of control, and we see how well that has worked over time. When I looked at the individual right to bear arms, when I looked at the right to a well-regulated militia, and when I looked at the right to self-defense all over time, I’m seeing that those do not apply to Black Americans—in fact, each of those have been used against African Americans because it is the quality of anti-Blackness, to define African Americans as a threat, as dangerous, as criminal, as people who need to be subjugated and controlled.

Even if you are unarmed, you’re still a threat. How many times have we in this current day heard of a Black person being gunned down simply because they had a cellphone and somebody felt threatened because they thought it was a gun? Or seeing a Black person like Jonathan Ferrell in North Carolina, who had been in a car accident and was happy to see the police because he thought help was on the way, and the police gunned him down? They said, We were afraid. He was dangerous. He was threatening. We see that somebody like Philando Castile—who has a licensed gun—is a threat and he’s gunned down. It doesn’t matter whether you have a gun or you don’t. Your Blackness is the threat, and it is the default threat in this society. This is also why “stand your ground” laws have such a strong racial bias, because it says wherever you have a right to be. So if I’m at the grocery store, if I’m in a parking lot, if I’m in a park, and I perceive a threat, I have the right to use lethal force. Well, when Black is the default threat in American society, that perception of threat puts the crosshairs on Black people. When you look at the U.S. Civil Rights Commission Report on “stand your ground,” we see that for white people who kill Black people using “stand your ground,” they are 10 times more likely to walk with justifiable homicide than are Black people who kill white people. We also see that white people who kill Black people under “stand your ground” are 281 percent more likely to walk than white people who kill white people. Because when Black Americans are the victims in these killings, it becomes much more justifiable because of the default threat.

There was this essential moment at the Constitutional Convention: You’ve got 25 of the 55 delegates who are slave owners, including George Washington, and the Second Amendment is a grand bargain. It was not in and of itself this lodestar of freedom. It was a deal. I wonder if you can walk us through what that deal was and why the question of what they were going to do about slavery baked into the very framing of the Second Amendment?

At the Ratification Convention in Virginia, the Constitution has been drafted, ratification is happening, and then it stalls. Virginia is one of the big holdouts. James Madison runs down back home to Virginia to try to push this thing through. He runs up against Patrick Henry and George Mason, who are apoplectic because Madison has put control of the militia in the federal Constitution, under federal control. They’re like, You know the North detests slavery. If we have a slave revolt, how can we count on them to get the militia to come down here and protect us, to put the slave revolt down? We will be left defenseless. Madison is quaking in his boots because his arguments aren’t working. He’s already like, Look, slavery is protected. You already got the three-fifths clause. You already got 20 extra years on the Atlantic Slave Trade. You already got the Fugitive Slave Clause. But what they wanted was a bill of rights that would protect them. And they said, If we don’t get it, we’re going to push for a new Constitutional Convention. What Madison was afraid of was that this would hurl the U.S. back to the unworkable Articles of Confederation. He runs to that first Congress, and he was obsessed with drafting these amendments.

When you think about it, in these amendments, you get freedom of the press, freedom of speech, the right not to be illegally searched and seized, the right to a speedy and fair trial, the right not to have cruel and unusual punishment—and then you have the right to a well-regulated militia for the security of the state? This thing is such an outlier in this Bill of Rights. And this outlier is because this is the bribe to Patrick Henry, to George Mason, to the Southern slaveholders: This is how you contain federal control, by making sure that the states have control of the militia and so they will not be left vulnerable to “the abolitionist whims,” as Patrick Henry saw it, of those in Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. Now the control of the militia will be in the hands of the enslavers.

I think one of the things you’re saying is that the more widespread white people’s ability to arm oneself to the teeth became, the more unarmed Black people who cannot have arms were put in these untenable lose-lose situations.

Absolutely, you see the asymmetry in access to firepower. There was an 1841 riot in Cincinnati, where white people were coming to basically burn down and kill the Black community. They were moving toward the neighborhood, but Black folks had guns and they shot back. The rioters were just like, “What just happened here? They have the audacity to shoot at us simply because we were trying to kill them?”

They came back with a cannon, the vintage mass murder machine. Then the police finally move in, but what they is they disarm the Black community, thinking that disarming Black folks will calm white folks down, that the rioters will now be pleased that Black people don’t have their guns. Instead, the slaughter happened, because it was so clear that the police were on white people’s side, and that there would be no consequences for their killings of Black people.

We see that asymmetry again happening after the Civil War: in Colfax, Louisiana, where there is an election and white supremacists because Republicans won. These Democrats—who are the white supremacist party at the time—then were going to attack the seat of democracy in Colfax, Louisiana, and oust those who won the election. The Black militia was called upon to protect this bastion of democracy, but they were outgunned. They didn’t have enough ammunition, and they were overwhelmed by the number of white fighters. It was a slaughter. About a hundred Black people were killed, many of them after they had surrendered, because white attackers had set the courthouse on fire where the Black militia had taken up to protect themselves.

This case goes all the way up to the Supreme Court as a look at the constitutionality of the Third Enforcement Act, which was the act to deal with the domestic terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. The court ruled that that piece of legislation only applied to state action, not to private action. Basically, the slaughter—that domestic terrorism by these private groups—was fine. And then we had the Hamburg massacre shortly thereafter, which again showed the disparity, the asymmetry, in access to weaponry. President Ulysses S. Grant was beside himself. He said, “What these states all have in common is not Christianity, is not civilization. It is the right to kill Negroes.” I remembered thinking, “Wow!”