Provoked Thoughts, Black American History Enhanced
The Creator of The Blackman Read Aloud Hour Project
Menu
Feb. 17, 2021

The Correct Handling of a Revolution by Huey P. Newton

There are three ways one can learn: through study, observation, and experience. Since the Black community is composed basically of activists, observation of or participation in activity are the principle ways the community learns. To learn by studying is good, but to learn by experience is better. Because the Black community is not a reading community it is very important that the vanguard group be essentially activists. Without this knowledge of the Black community a Black revolution in racist America is impossible.

Feb. 16, 2021

TRAUMA AND THE LEGACY OF LYNCHING

Black History Month
Salute To Equal Justice Initiative's Report
Lynching In America
Chapter 6
TRAUMA AND THE LEGACY OF LYNCHING

The level and type of violence that characterized lynching went beyond “ordinary modes of execution and punishment,” as historian Leon F. Litwack explains. “The story of a lynching [] is more than the simple fact of a Black man or woman hanged by the neck. It is the story of slow, methodical, sadistic, often highly inventive forms of torture and mutilation.” Whether the victims were family members, friends, classmates, acquaintances, or strangers, African Americans who witnessed or heard about a lynching survived a deeply traumatic event and suffered a complex psychological harm.

Feb. 16, 2021

Who Pays For Claude Neal's Atrocious Final Moments America?

On October 19, 1934, Claude Neal, a twenty-three-year-old Black farmhand, was arrested for the murder of Lola Cannady, a young white woman whose body had been discovered just hours before. Five days later, six white men seized Neal from an Alabama jail where he had been moved for safekeeping and returned him to Jackson County, where they killed him in the woods before presenting his corpse to the Cannady family and a gathered mob. The corpse was castrated, the fingers and toes amputated, the skin burned with hot irons; the mob then drove over it with cars, shot it at least eighteen times, and hung it from a tree on the courthouse lawn, where they again shot at it and took pieces of skin as souvenirs. When the sheriff cut the body down and refused to rehang it, an angry mob rioted, burning the homes of Mr. Neal’s family members and threatening Black residents with violence until they fled. The murder and subsequent attacks were widely reported in local and national newspapers, and it is a well-known twentieth century example of an especially gruesome lynching.
Equal Justice Initiative
Chapter 6

Feb. 15, 2021

CONFRONTING LYNCHING

Black History Month
CONFRONTING LYNCHING
Chapter 5
Lynching In America

After the rate of lynchings abated, the central feature of the era of racial terror—violence against Black Americans—took new forms. The social forces and racial animus that made lynching a frequent occurrence and constant threat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained deeply rooted in American culture, and violent intimidation continued to be used to preserve social control and white supremacy. African Americans in the South faced violence, threats, and intimidation in myriad areas of daily life, with no protection from the justice system.
Black Southerners who survived the lynching era remained subject to the established legal system of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow.
As organized resistance to this racial caste system began to swell in the early 1950s, Black demonstrators were met with violent opposition from white police officers and community members.
Black activists protesting racial segregation and disenfranchisement through boycotts, sit-ins, voter registration drives, and mass marches consistently faced physical attacks, riots, and bombings from whites.

Equal Justice Initiative

Feb. 15, 2021

Who Pays America? Who Pay?

Black History Month
A Nation Sworn To Injustice
Black Citizens Living Without Rights

By the start of the twentieth century, national leaders had learned to profitably employ popular white supremacist views and pro-lynching rhetoric.
In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that “the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by Black men, of the hideous crime of rape.”

“Let [the Black man] keep his hands off white women,” the Memphis Avalanche-Appeal editorialized, “and lynching will soon die out.”
“[If] it requires lynching to protect woman’s dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts,” white women’s rights activist Rebecca Felton wrote in the Atlanta Journal in 1898, “then I say lynch a thousand a week if necessary.”

NewerOverviewOlder