Showing posts with label history. Show all posts
Showing posts with label history. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Mapping Slavery

Insightful New York Times essay by Susan Schulten on the role of maps in the American Civil War. Quoting from essay:
 

The 1860 Census was the last time the federal government took a count of the South’s vast slave population. Several months later, the United States Coast Survey—arguably the most important scientific agency in the nation at the time—issued two maps of slavery that drew on the Census data, the first of Virginia and the second of Southern states as a whole. Though many Americans knew that dependence on slave labor varied throughout the South, these maps uniquely captured the complexity of the institution and struck a chord with a public hungry for information about the rebellion. 


Also dig:





Monday, February 22, 2010

Lies My Teacher Told Me

12/16/2010- Update at bottom of post. GI

Frances Cress Welsing (and before her Nelly Fuller) identifies education as one of the "nine areas of people activity" wherein the struggle against white supremacy must be engaged. 


In the excerpt below, Historian James Loewen, author Lies My Teacher Told Me and Sundown Towns, explains how racism/white supremacy is promoted and perpetuated by high school and university text books. 


He describes, for example, one of African America's earliest forays into the Democratic Party, formerly the party of southern slave holders, then led by President Woodrow Wilson (1913-1921). Wilson is represented as a "progressive" icon in text books. But the books never mention that Wilson was a white supremacist and Ku Klux Klan sympathizer. Loewan points out that Wilson helped shape the racial climate that directly led to a brutal period of so-called "race riots." "Race riots" were in fact brutal assaults on black people by white supremacists:


[Wilson] was surely the most racist president since before the Civil War ended slavery. He was of course a white Southerner, and when he came to power, which was with the aid of considerable black votes who were trying the Democratic Party and trying its claims for progressivism, he proceeded to segregate Washington, D.C. He segregated the federal cafeterias, federal work places. If two people, one white and one black, had been sorting mail together, they now had to be in separate rooms or have a screen between them. He also stopped blacks from various political appointments that had been routinely given them since the days of Lincoln and Grant. It's no coincidence that late in his term the signals that he was giving off about race relations penetrated the nation, and we had a wave of race riots from about 1917 through at least 1920.

I mentioned in "Lies My Teacher Told Me" possibly the first example of bombing civilians by aircraft, certainly the first example in United States history, came about in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when there was a race riot against the black community in Tulsa, and it even included flying a bi-plane, probably, airplane above the black community and dropping dynamite into it, killing more than 70 people. So these were race riots that actually far outdo the riots that we hear so much about in terms of the Rodney King riot in Los Angeles or the Watts riot.

[excerpt source]


Watch the interview of James Loewen on Booknotes.

tags: education, history, racism, white supremacy


Below are some further observations on Wilson from by Facebook homies.
  • He also helped to pass the Federal Reserve Act bill which essentially allowed the fed. gov't to rob the public by taxing their income.
  • He also introduced segregated facilities on civil service jobs.
  • Sam Greenlee When he was President at Princeton; he blocked a full academic scholarship for Paul Robeson; and ordered the segregation of government facilities.
  • All history teachers should be required to read this book. Wilson held a KKK induction ceremony WITHIN the White House.
  • http://www.wingtv.net/tavistock.html Several Paragraphs down will explain Wilson's involvement in the Tavistock institute (brainwashing institute) and the Fed. Reserve Act.
  • He also endorsed the film Birth of a Nation.
  • He viewed the film as historical truth.
  • page 272 of link below. it was screened in the East Room at the White House. Not surprisingly the biographer spins it and says Wilson was "trapped" into watching the movie, LOL
http://books.google.com/books?id=lxoOdaCDbpEC&lpg=PA272&dq=birth+of+...a+nation+wilson+white+house&pg=PA272#v=onepage&q=birth%20of%20a%20nation%20wilson%20white%20house&f=false