Monthly Archives: August 2007

August 26, 2007 · 9:26 AM

TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION: 8-26-2007

Police: 10 Witness rape, do nothing

Minnesota Police Say Video Shows Neighbors Ignored Woman’s Cries for More Than an Hour

From WCCO.com News:

Police: Man Rapes Woman as Bystander Look On

(AP) St. Paul A 25-year-old man was charged Thursday for allegedly raping and beating a woman in an apartment hallway — an incident apparently witnessed by as many as 10 people who did nothing.

Rage Ibrahim was charged with several counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for the attack early Tuesday. According to the criminal complaint, police responded to a call of drunken behavior in an apartment hallway, where they found both Ibrahim and a woman lying unconscious. The woman’s clothing had been pulled up, she had fresh scratches on her face and blood on her thigh.

Ibrahim says he is innocent and that the incident was a misunderstanding, according to Omar Jamal, the executive director of the Somali Justice Advocacy Center who spoke on Ibrahim’s behalf.

“I’m so upset because of the situation I’m in,” Ibrahim told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, as he headed to the county jail on Thursday to turn himself in. “I’ve got a mom, I’ve got a sister. I wouldn’t rape anyone.”

Police obtained surveillance video from the hallway, which showed the assault starting as early as 1:20 a.m. Police weren’t dispatched to the scene until almost 90 minutes later, when someone finally called to report drunken behavior in the hallway.

Police spokesman Tom Walsh said the video footage clearly showed five to 10 people, both men and women, looking out their apartment doors or starting to walk down the hallway before retreating as the assault occurred.

“It shows one person looking out of her door probably three times,” Walsh said. “It shows another person walking up, observing what’s going on, then turning and putting up the hood of his sweatshirt.”

The 26-year-old victim knocked on a door at one point, yelling for the occupants to call police. A man inside that apartment told police he didn’t open the door or look out, but said he did call police — although they have no record of his call, according to court documents.

The complaint said the video shows Ibrahim hitting the woman several times before sexually assaulting her. It said the woman was visiting the apartment of a friend, where she met Ibrahim; after drinking for several hours, she told police Ibrahim tried to stop her from leaving, and began to assault her.

Ibrahim denied to police that he tried to rape the woman, saying if he wanted to do so he would have done it in the apartment, according to the complaint.

Walsh said police were upset by the behavior of the bystanders. “It’s not what we expect of responsible citizens,” he said.

“If you’re not comfortable, if you don’t feel capable of intervening, that’s fine,” Walsh said. “But not calling is not understandable.”

Minnesota has a Good Samaritan law that makes it a petty misdemeanor not to give reasonable help to a person in danger of “grave physical harm.”

Walsh said it’s unlikely police would pursue charges against witnesses in this case because the burden of proof is so high — authorities would have to show that witnesses knew the woman was in extreme danger.

Jamal said Ibrahim went into the hallway after the woman because he thought she was too drunk to drive. They struggled over car keys, and “he is saying there was a huge misunderstanding,” Jamal said, adding that the police report does not show “the truth of what happened that night.”

“He did not rape her,” Jamal said.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

“Ibrahim says he is innocent and that the incident was a misunderstanding,…….”

Misunderstanding—when she has injuries to her body, which show that it was any but a misunderstanding.

“Ibrahim denied to police that he tried to rape the woman, saying if he wanted to do so he would have done it in the apartment, according to the complaint.”

Okay, rape outside the apt—bad. Rape inside the apt—good. Wow, unbelievable.

As for those “witnesses” who were too sorry to at least call the police—-I imagine they all must have horrible nightmares.

That poor woman, I hope she has survived and overcome this terrible ordeal.

And the attacks against black women continue.

LEST WE FORGET

Today is International Day For the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition. STAMP, the Slave Trade Arts Memorial Project, on Columbus Day, 10th October 2005 announced the official unveiling and dedication of ‘CAPTURED AFRICANS‘ a memorial for the victims of the Transatlantic Slave Trade on the quayside in Lancaster, close to the Millennium Bridge.

The memorial was conceived and developed by Manchester-based artist Kevin Dalton-Johnson as the culmination of an extensive education outreach program involving over 300 children around the district working with ten supporting artists. Its realization was made possible with the Millennium Commission Lottery funding.

Earlier that year, in Bristol, a resident asked where in that city he could pour his libation and honour his ancestors. Unlike other places that have shied away from moments of history that they are least proud of, Lancaster now has a sensitive marker to the loss of life and liberty of so many African people. Kevin Dalton-Johnson’s ‘CAPTURED AFRICANS’ offers a place to pause and think, a place for quiet reflection on the human cost of this history. The dedication of the memorial was followed by the launching of a willow boat of offerings of atonement and remembrance into the River Lune. The formal ceremony closed with a drumming performance by young people involved with the project.

The night of 22 to 23 August 1791, in Santo Domingo (today Haiti and the Dominican Republic) saw the beginning of the uprising that would play a crucial role in the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition is intended to inscribe the tragedy of the transatlantic slave trade (and to be honest, there really was no “trade” about it at all; if anything, it was a business form of mass genocide), in the memory of all peoples. In accordance with the goals of the intercultural project “The Slave Route”, it should offer an opportunity for collective consideration of the historic causes, the methods and the consequences of this mass human tragedy, and for an analysis of the interactions to which it has given rise between Africa, Europe, the Americas and the Caribbean, to recognize the considerable contributions of the enslaved Africans who were forcibly kidnapped from their ancestral homelands and to celebrate the exceptional cultural diversity that resulted from this contact.

International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition was first celebrated in a number of countries in particular in Haiti (August 23, 1998) and Goree in Senegal (August 23 1999). Cultural events and debates as well were organized. The year 2001 saw the participation of the Mulhouse Textile Museum in France in the form of a workshop for fabrics called “Indiennes de Traite” (a type of calico) which served as a currency for the exchange of slaves in the 17TH and 18TH Centuries.

“Captured Africans”, Kevin Dalton Johnson’s, quayside work, Lancaster UK

LINKS:

http://www.hrea.org/feature-events/abolition-slavetrade-day.php

http://www.blackhistory4schools.com/articles/2007%20E%20Bulletin%20Oct%2005.pdf

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mariandouglas/99238369/

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August 20, 2007 · 11:50 PM

THE WOMEN OF GEE’S BEND

THE HISTORY

They are the descendants of slaves.

Unknown just a few years ago, they are celebrities now. Dozens of women from a poor, isolated, almost-forgotten black American community whose quilting, now recognized as a remarkable artistic achievement, has propelled them to national acclaim. A very impoverished community in Alabama, Gee’s Bend lies at the edge of the Black Belt in Wilcox County, about 30 miles southwest of Selma.

They are the women of Gee’s Bend, famous for their beautiful, modernistic, abstract quilts. I was fortunate enough to meet them at the premiere of their quilt show at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, in 2002. In addition to viewing their outstanding quilts, I was able to see them, hug them, and be treated to soul-stirring renditions of their gospel singing. I was blown away by their presence, their humility, their tranquility in all the fuss that we admirers gave them. (Even got to see Jane Fonda.)

Gee’s Bend is named after a planter, Joseph Gee, who was the first white man to stake a claim there in the early 1800s. The Gee family sold the plantation to Mark Pettway in 1845. Most of the approximately 750 people who live in Gee’s Bend today are descendants of slaves on the former Pettway plantation. The majority of residents bear the surnames of the white people who once owned their forebears — Pettway, Young, Bendolph.

Isolated geographically, the women in the community created quilts from whatever materials were available, in patterns of their own imaginative design. Over the past few years, Gee’s Bend has been in the spotlight with a touring exhibit of quilts. The artisans behind the quilts, women from Gee’s Bend, have won critical acclaim from New York to Houston.

Annie Pettway Bendolph carrying water in Gee’s Bend, Alabama – April 1937. (Photographed by Arthur Rothstein).

The women of Gee’s Bend still gather each weekday morning to stitch the abstract patterns that first caught the eye of the art world — a quilting tradition that resonates deeply with aspects of modernist abstraction. Practically everyone in Gee’s Bend is descended from slaves; the quiltmakers are part of an unbroken tradition of generations of quilters there; their quilts were pieced together from scraps of fertilizer sacks, shirttails, worn-out overalls, tobacco pouches, and stuffed with the cotton they’d picked in the fields. Somehow, incredibly, the hurried work of their hands turned into hundreds of bold, abstract, idiosyncratic, and joyous quilts that critics have compared to the work of Matisse, Mondrian, and Rothko.

Now their quilts have hung in major museums around the country, including New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art; The New York Times called them ”some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced.” They’ve gone to Washington, and Houston, even Kazakhstan and Armenia. A host of retail products is on the market, inspired by their work.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend have even made it on to US postage stamps.

But, it has not been an easy road for the women of Gee’s Bend.

Stories — of racial politics, of poverty, of hard times, of faith — are close to the surface, and spoken of frequently, especially now that outsiders are interested and ask.

There’s the story of the ferry, for one. Decades ago there was a ferry that went from Gee’s Bend to the white town of Camden, on the far side of the Alabama River, so that Benders could buy their groceries and borrow money.

But in 1965, the service was cut off when the people of Gee’s Bend crossed over to vote and participated in civil-rights marches. After that they had to drive the 56 miles around the river to Camden, assuming they had a car, which few did.

Arlonzia Pettway’s quilt stories reach back the furthest. Ms. Pettway is one of four women who meet several mornings a week at a senior center to make quilts, and also to sing — sacred hymns and spirituals that were improvised decades ago on plantations and got passed along.

They make the quilts much the same way they always have, except now they stuff the insides with batting from Wal-Mart in Selma, not cotton from the gin mill. Quilters make their own designs, and hand-stitch the layers together, stretching the quilt over a large rectangle of wood supported by two crude sawhorses. With well-used nails, one of the women hammers the edges of the quilt into the wood to hold it tight.

A tall, regal-looking woman born in 1923, Arlonzia Pettway has a story that seems so sorrowful even Mary Lee Bendolph has said, ”When she first started telling me that, I thought she was wrong.” (1)

Ms. Pettway said quilting started in her family with her great grandmother Dinah, who was born in Africa and was captured at 14 — she was lured onto a slave ship, which was decorated with red ribbons and red lights because ”they thought African people liked the color red.” The ship landed in Mobile in 1859.

”She was told she was bought for a price. She cost one dime,” Ms. Pettway said. ”One ten-cents.” (1)

Ms. Pettway was 7 when her great grandmother died, but she remembers Dinah’s stories about making quilts in secret from torn-up old clothes, crouching in ditches with tree brush over her. ”They was in slavery,” says Ms. Pettway. ”They worked all day, then they’d go under the pile of brushes, and set the log down to sit on and make a quilt. The slave masters didn’t allow them to piece a quilt. They didn’t want them to do nothing, they didn’t want them to learn how to write, they didn’t want them to have no beautiful quilts, they didn’t want them to have no correct language. That’s what she told me.” (1)

Everyone seems to agree: Life changed in Gee’s Bend because of Annie Mae Young’s quilt, the one made out of torn-up pieces of denim work pants.

Mary Lee Bendolph experiences the world differently, too. ”I go places I used to couldn’t go,” she says.

”Everything just opened up for us, even Camden,” her daughter Essie adds, speaking of the town across the river where years ago her mother watched the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. brazenly drink from the ”whites only” fountain in the courthouse. (1)

In 1998, a man named Bill Arnett happened to see a photograph of it in a book about black American quilters published in 1996; the quilt — with a vividly colored center medallion made of strips of corduroy — was unceremoniously draped over a woodpile where Ms. Young, standing in the foreground, was airing it out. For 20 years, he’d traveled around the South scouting art made by unknown black American visual artists. In 1996, he started working on a two-volume set of books on the subject, ”Souls Grown Deep.” It was published by Tinwood Books, which Arnett cofounded with Jane Fonda, a financial partner.

The quilt was unlike anything Arnett had ever seen, and he lost no time tracking Ms. Young down. ”I had no idea when I went to see Annie Mae’s quilt that it would open up what it did,” he says. (1)

It opened up a world of women who had been making quilts most of their lives and ”didn’t think anyone in the world would appreciate what they were doing,” says Arnett, who now works with his four sons on Atlanta-based Tinwood ventures, including organizing quilt exhibitions and trips and overseeing retail projects. Ms. Young introduced him to other Gee’s Bend women, who showed him their own quilts, hauling them out of storage rooms and bedrooms where they’d kept them between the springs and mattresses to make their beds softer.

The more quilts he saw, the more quilters he met, and he began to understand the significance of the fact that quiltmaking in Gee’s Bend had remained more or less intact over nearly two centuries with just a few mutations. ”It became obvious that we’d stumbled upon one of the great art-producing communities that I’m aware of,” Arnett says.

Debbie Elliott, NPR

A quilt by Lucy Marie Mingo.

At first, he thought he would write a book about the quilts, but the plan got more ambitious after he consulted Jane Livingstone and John Beardsley, art historians who had written for his ”Souls Grown Deep” books. Beardsley, a senior lecturer at Harvard Design School, recalls being dazzled by them. ”They were thematically distinct, they were geographically distinct, they had a kind of coherence, and the quilts were just plain amazing,” he says.

Eventually Livingstone and Beardsley curated the show, which appeared first at Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts in 2002 and has been to eight US cities. The exhibition continues to draw huge crowds, including an uncommon mix of black American and white visitors, and ”people with berets and black sweaters,” says Paul Arnett, coauthor, with his father Bill, of two books about Gee’s Bend.

Even more unexpected is that the success of the show has inspired a renaissance of quiltmaking in Gee’s Bend. When Bill Arnett first visited Gee’s Bend, it was a dying art. Only five or six women were still making quilts, and few were making more than two or three a year.

”I can tell you a lot of the people in Gee’s Bend was slowly dying and had nothing in their life to look forward to,” says Rubin Bendolph, a Huntsville engineer who grew up in Gee’s Bend. He’s the son of Mary Lee and the sister of Essie Bendolph Pettway, another quiltmaker.

”Quilting got reenergized, after so many of the women saw the way they were being received,” says another of Bill’s sons, Matt Arnett, who acts as a liaison for the Atlanta-based Tinwood organization between the Gee’s Bend community and the art world. Currently, the Gee’s Bend Quilters Collective, consisting of about 50 quilters, is marketing the women’s quilts on their website, for an average price of $3,000. Meanwhile, the exhibition has fueled a veritable Gee’s Bend industry — rugs, bedding, stationery. Half of the money from the sale of quilts sold by the collective goes to the quilter who made it; the other half is divided among its members. The quilters also receive royalties from the licensed products.

All of this has helped improve the material life of many of the quilters. Loretta Pettway and Arlonzia Pettway have added on to their homes. Mary Lee Bendolph has renovated a guest house next to hers, where she puts up visitors. The Ye Shall Know the Truth Baptist Church is called by some ”the church that quilts built,” because of all the money that quilters contributed to erect it.

Not that Gee’s Bend is thriving economically. Quiltmaking hasn’t created jobs. While some of the quilters may not need to buy their groceries on credit anymore, their grandchildren are still bused 100 miles round trip to the middle school and high school because the school in Gee’s Bend was closed when desegregation came. There are still no health-care services to speak of in Gee’s Bend; you have to drive more than 50 miles to a dentist or doctor or pharmacy. The Gee’s Bend women go around the country and are treated like movie stars, and then they come back and kind of fade into the woodwork.

Something has changed for the women, though.

”The quilts have made a difference in the way I see myself getting up in the world,” says Arlonzia Pettway. (1)

She woke up one morning in February and for the first time in her life wrote a poem. It begins:

ARLONZIA PETTAWAY’S POEM

The Path
Never make a path somebody else made.
First you make your own path.
Great Grandmama Dinah walked this path
With her quilt pieces and her thimble and a needle in her hand.
But she never reached the intersection.
She passed on.

Grandmama Sally, her daughter,
Stepped in her footsteps.
Travelled the path so many miles
With her quilt pieces and her thimble and a needle in her hand.
But she never reached the intersection.
She passed on.

Missouri Pettway, my mama,
She stepped into the same path,
Travelled the path so many miles
With her quilt pieces and her thimble and a needle in her hand.
But she never reached the intersection.
She passed on.

Who am I? I’m Arlonzia Pettway, her daughter.
I stepped into the path.
And Mary Lee Bendolph, Nettie Young, Annie Mae Young, Lucy Mingo
And other quilters of Gee’s Bend
We stepped on the path
We’ve travelled the path
Travelled, travelled, travelled the path.

We heard a noise,
We were near the intersection
We heard the cars a-roaring
Cars going north, south, east, and west.
No one asked us
“Where are you going?” or “Who are you?”

I looked again. I saw the Arnetts coming.
They came to us and said, “Where are you going?” and “What are you looking
for?”
I said, “We’re looking for the house of joy and the house of peace and the house of love.”
They said to us, “Follow us as we follow God, and we’ll take you there.” So they did.
They took us to the house of joy, the house of peace, and the house of love.
And we are very happy for them.

– Arlonzia Pettway, February, 2005

The women of Gee’s Bend go to places they have never been to, places they probably never could have gone to, especially in the past. So much has opened up for these ladies, so much of the hated past they have triumphed over, but, still so much more they want to do in the precious time they have left in their lives. Many of the women through the years were close to giving upon continuing their unique quilting, but, with the interests of new-comers to the world of Gee’s Bend, and with the revival of the continuance of quilt-making of the younger generation of Gee’s Bend, Alabama, there is hope that this beautiful type of quilts will not die out with the passing of the older women who made these quilts so famous. There is even talk of bringing tourists to Gee’s Bend.

Mary Lee Bendolph moves fast these days, with a sense of urgency, because there is so much to do.

Soon it’s time for noonday prayer at the church, and that evening there’s a meeting she’s invited to, with some other quilters — in Camden — to talk with people from the business community about ways to bring tourists into Wilcox County.

Quite a long journey from a little unknown community in Alabama, a group of women who thought they were only just making quilts for comfort, for warmth, for their families, for their eyes only.

The Women of Gee’s Bend work on a quilt during the 2005 ONB Magic City Art Connection in Birmingham, Alabama’s Linn Park.

The Women of Gee’s Bend have even been put on U.S. commemorative postage stamps, commissioned for sale on August 26, 2006, issued at the American Philatelic Society’s (APS) annual convention and philatelic exhibition. These stamps are the sixth in the American Treasures Series, and feature the beautiful ingenuity, style, flair, and improvisational technique of the Gee’s Bend quilters.

The Stamps

Gee's Bend Quilt Stamps Quilts of Gee’s Bend Stamps

Top row, left
“Housetop” variation by Mary Lee Bendolph (1935- ); 1998.
Cotton, corduroy, twill, assorted polyesters.
72 x 76 inches

Top row, right
“Chinese Coins” variation by Arlonzia Pettway (1923- ); circa 1965.
Corduroy, denim, cotton twill.
88 x 73 inches

Second row, left
“Roman Stripes” variation (local name: “Crazy” quilt) by Loretta
Pettway (1942- ); 1970.
Cotton twill, denim, cotton/polyester blend, synthetic knit.
86 x 70 inches

Second row, right
Medallion with checkerboard center by Patty Ann Williams (1898-1972); 1960s.
Cotton (corduroy and twill) and polyester knit.
84 x 71 inches

Third row, left
“Housetop”-four-block “Half-Log Cabin” variation by Lottie Mooney (1908-1992);
circa 1940.
Cotton and rayon.
88 x 73 inches

Third row, right
Bars and string-pieced columns by Jessie T. Pettway (1929- ); circa 1950.
Cotton.
95 x 76 inches

Fourth row, left
“Nine Patch” by Ruth P. Mosely (1928- ); circa 1955.
Cotton and corduroy.
93 x 77 inches

Fourth row, right
Medallion by Loretta Pettway (1942- ); circa 1960.
Synthetic knit and cotton sacking material.
87 x 70 inches

Fifth row, left
“Pig in a Pen” medallion by Minnie Sue Coleman (1926- ); circa 1970.
Polyester knit and double knit.
61 x 82 inches

Fifth row, right
Blocks and strips by Annie Mae Young (1928- ); circa 1970.
Cotton, polyester, synthetic blends.
83 x 80 inches

APPROPRIATION AND COMMODIFICATION

As much as they have received recognition for their artful, modernistic quilts, the women of Gee’s Bend have not been without their trials and tribulations. As to be expected, the appropriation of any rural type of art is to be expected, especially in the case of the owners of the artwork not receiving the royalties they are due for their work. Granted, none of this is terribly surprising, given the longtime American propensity to convert meaningful cultural experiences into meaningful retail ones, be they Renoir paperweights or Gauguin magnets. But you have to wonder has this form of appropriation gone too far, especially in the case of the women of Gee’s Bend concerning their quilts. Given the history of the quilts — made by impoverished descendents of slaves — is there something a bit incongruous about the profitability factor here? When does healthy entrepreneurship become exploitation? Especially when the women themselves are claiming fraud by those using the images of their quilts in merchandise that is sold in many stores around the country, and the women are not receiving just compensation for the commercial use of their quilts in products that may wind up in the form of mass-produced bedspreads, cups, plates—or even the ubiquitous umbrella? People who use the images and likenesses of these quilts must be sensitive to the authentic, uncompromised genuiness of these quilts, and not to be lost in all of this in no way should these ladies be denied any royalties or monetary compensation for the use of their quilts in any mass-produced merchandise. The following articles attest to the fact that not all people have the women of Gee’s Bend’s best interests at heart:

“Gee’s Bend Quilt Show Promoters Sued”

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

BEN RAINES

The Press-Register

MOBILE – Lucinda Pettway Franklin has filed suit against the Arnett family, promoters of the nationally recognized Gee’s Bend quilt shows, charging that the Arnetts stole the two oldest quilts known to come from Gee’s Bend.

The quilts, more than 100 years old, were made by Franklin’s great-grandmother, Sally Pettway, from worn-out slave clothes and bits of fine fabric cast off from Pettway’s masters while she was still a slave.

The Gee’s Bend quilts, produced by generations of women living in that isolated Black Belt community in central Alabama, captured the imagination of the art world when they were first shown in 2002, seducing viewers with eye-popping colors and a dancing geometry akin to the work of modern painting masters.

Matt Arnett, who Franklin said took the quilts from her home, declined to comment for this story when reached by telephone and referred questions to Gary Coulter, one of the family’s lawyers.

Coulter, already representing the Arnetts in two other suits filed by Gee’s Bend quilters in recent weeks, described the three complaints as “frivolous” and refused to say whether the Arnetts still had possession of Franklin’s quilts.

“We think we can completely justify all actions the Arnetts have taken, and there will be no liability by the Arnetts for anything they have done,” Coulter said.

The suit was filed last week in federal court in Mobile and will likely be heard in Selma.

The Arnetts promoted quilt exhibits and signed lucrative licensing agreements that allowed numerous companies to use the quilt images on everything from TV trays and desk lamps to ladies’ socks and credit cards.

The family members are familiar figures in the world of exclusive art galleries, and have been accused by various Alabama folk artists, art dealers and museum officials of taking financial advantage of the artists they represent.

Franklin, who grew up in Gee’s Bend and is now an insurance agent in Mobile, is related to many of the quilters whose work was celebrated in the first museum shows and books about the quilts. She seeks the return of her quilts and “punitive damages for the conversion of priceless pieces of art.”

Franklin said Matt Arnett came to her home in Mobile and asked to borrow the quilts for one month so they could be photographed and included in a book about quilts. She remembered he became very excited when he saw the quilts for the first time.

That was two years ago. Since that time, Franklin said, Arnett has told her the quilts were destroyed in a fire, accidentally thrown away, ruined in a flood, lost or on his desk ready to be mailed to her.

The quilts are thought to be worth as much as $100,000 apiece.

“Gee’s Bend Quilts Delivered to Lawyers”

Thursday, June 28, 2007

MICHAEL HUEBNER

News staff writer

Three quilts sought in a lawsuit against three Atlanta art collectors were delivered to lawyers for a Gee’s Bend quilter Wednesday in Birmingham.

The action follows a suit filed last Thursday by Lucinda Pettway Franklin of Mobile, who said in the suit that William, Paul and Matt Arnett refused to return the quilts.

“They sent what appears to be three quilts, accompanied by a letter,” said Kira Fonteneau, who represents Franklin. “We do not know at this point whether they are the quilts in question, so we will have our client identify them. We also are not sure whether they have been damaged. We need to make sure that what has been given to her is exactly what she gave to them and in the same quality that it was when she turned it over.”

The suit, filed in Mobile’s Federal Court, also names Atlanta-based Tinwood Ventures as a defendant. It says that two of the quilts were made by Franklin’s great-grandmother, Sally Miller, and that they are more than 100 years old, are “priceless” and “far exceed the sum of $75,000 each.”

The defendants’ attorneys – Greg Hawley of Birmingham and Gary Coulter from Athens, Ga. – countered that three appraisals from Georgia and California show the quilts were made in the 1950s and 1960s and worth $100-$450. Sally Miller died in 1943.

In a prepared statement, Hawley and Coulter said they contacted Franklin in April about returning the quilts.

“Unfortunately, last Thursday, on the same day Matt Arnett e-mailed Ms. Franklin to arrange a weekend meeting to return the quilts, Ms. Franklin had already filed her lawsuit,” Coulter said.

Hawley called Franklin’s suit “sensational and outrageous.”

“The allegations are about their age, their creation and their value. We hope the court can quickly put an end to it.”

Franklin lent the quilts to Matt Arnett in 2004, according to documents provided by Hawley and Coulter. They said Arnett photographed the quilts and took them to Atlanta for appraisal and safekeeping.

Hawley said that Franklin’s lawsuit has undermined the integrity of Gee’s Bend quilts, which have been shown in galleries and museums nationwide, pictured on U.S. postage stamps and featured in an Emmy-winning PBS documentary.

“The ultimate losers are the women of Gee’s Bend who create these quilts,” Hawley said. “When the integrity is called into question, art galleries are less likely to represent the women and their quilts. The value of these art forms could decline and the demand for them diminish.”

Mary McCarthy of Gee’s Bend, who was with Matt Arnett when Franklin lent him the quilts, believes the lawsuit is frivolous.

“I’ve lived there 17 years,” McCarthy said. “These people are like my second mothers and grandmothers. … It saddens me.”

Two other lawsuits against the Arnetts and Tinwood Ventures are pending. One was filed by quilter Annie Mae Young for falsely claming intellectual property rights. The other, by quilter Loretta Pettway, claims “gross exploitation.”

It is one thing to bring to people’s knowledge the beauty of these wonderful quilts and all the life-long work these ladies have put into them. But, the appropriation of these ladies work and the greed that can and has happened to them is just another story of the usurping of black people’s work and the richies of others who stand to gain more in the end. Many of these quilts are more than 150-200 years old, made from the cast-off patches of the clothes of many ex-enslaved relatives of the women of Gee’s Bend. The court case is still pending, and I wish these lovely ladies Godspeed in their receiving justice. Too much has been taken from black America, and with what is happening to the Women of Gee’s Bend, this is just another form of callous disregard for the history and cultural gifts that have been time and time again stolen from black America.

LINKS:

http://www.quiltsofgeesbend.com/quiltmakers/

http://www.npr.com/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4184856

http://www.mfah.org/main.asp?target=ehibition&par1=1&par2=1&par3=240

REFERENCES:

1. “With These Hands: Stitches of History”, by Linda Matchan, Globe Staff, 2005.

2. “Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts”, by William Arnett, Paul Arnett and Jane Livingston, Tinwood Books, 2002.

Gee’s Bend: The Women and Their Quilts by John Beardsley, William Arnett, Paul Arnett, and Jane Livingston (Hardcover – Aug 2002)

(4)

3. “The Quilts of Gee’s Bend: Masterpieces From a Lost Place”, by William Arnett, Alvia Wardlaw, Jane Livingston and John Beardsley, Tinwood Books, 2002.

The Quilts of Gee’s Bend: Masterpieces from a Lost Place by William Arnett, Alvia Wardlaw, Jane Livingston, and John Beardsley (Hardcover – Sep 23, 2002)

(24)

**************************************************************************

Here is an update on the quilt lawsuit:

In 2007 two members of the Gee’s Bend quilting community filed lawsuits in US Federal Court in Selma, Alabama. The suit filed by Annie Mae Young alleged that Tinwood Ventures and art dealers William, Matt, and Paul Arnett falsely claim to own the intellectual property rights to quilts made in Gee’s Bend before 1984, including her work. They also improperly used her name and image to promote sales, the lawsuit alleges. The suit filed by Loretta Pettway, claims “gross exploitation” at the hands of the Arnetts and Tinwood Ventures. Both suits also list as defendants Kathy Ireland Worldwide who have licensed the designs from some of the famous quilts from Tinwood and the Arnetts for use in Kathy Ireland products.

Kathy Ireland Worldwide defends their handling of the Gee’s Bend quilter’s royalties in a statement on their website:

Our agreement assures us that the quilter’s representatives are the proper place to send all quilt related earnings. This week a careful review of our files indicates that Kathy Ireland Worldwide has paid more to these representatives than our company has earned from the quilts project.

Other members of the quilters group are unhappy with the lawsuits and felt they are an attempt of some members to go out out on their own.

The lawsuit was settled out of court in August 2008.

SOURCE: Johnson, Bob (08-25-2008). “Suits brought by rural Alabama quilters resolved“, Associated Press

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August 19, 2007 · 2:02 PM

HURRICANES

A hurricane is a tropical cyclone, which in meteorological terms, is a storm system with a closed circulation around a center of low pressure that is fueled when moist air rises, condenses and releases heat. Producing very high winds and torrential rain, hurricanes can be catastrophic for living populations. However, hurricanes also play an important role in relieving sustained droughts and maintaining equilibrium in the environment.Hurricanes often begin as tropical storms, strengthening according to water temperature. Strong wind damage and water damage from flooding and storm surge from hurricanes can wreak havoc on regions all over the world.

Hurricanes are feared very much at this time of year, as hurricane season begins on June 1 and lasts officially until November 30, which is the height of the hurricane season.

The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is a scale classifying most Western Hemisphere tropical cyclones that exceed the intensities of “tropical depressions” and “tropical storms”, and thereby become hurricanes. The categories into which the scale divides hurricanes are distinguished by the intensities of their respective sustained winds. The classifications are intended primarily for use in measuring the potential damage and flooding a hurricane will cause upon landfall. The Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale is used only to describe hurricanes forming in the Atlantic Ocean and northern Pacific Ocean east of the International Date Line. Other areas label their tropical cyclones as “cyclones” and “typhoons”, and use their own classification scales.

The five categories are, in order of increasing intensity:

Category 1	Sustained winds	33–42 m/s	74–95 mph	64–82 kt	119–153 km/h
	Storm surge	4–5 ft		1.2–1.5 m
	Central pressure	28.94 inHg		980 mbar
	Potential damage	No real damage to building structures. Damage primarily to unanchored mobile homes, shrubbery, and trees. Also, some coastal flooding and minor pier damage
	Example storms	Bess (1974) – Jerry (1989) – Ismael (1995) – Danny (1997) – Gaston (2004)
Category 2	Sustained winds	43–49 m/s	96–110 mph	83–95 kt	154–177 km/h
	Storm surge	6–8 ft		1.8–2.4 m
	Central pressure	28.50–28.91 inHg		965–979 mbar
	Potential damage	Some roofing material, door, and window damage. Considerable damage to vegetation, mobile homes, etc. Flooding damages piers and small craft in unprotected anchorages may break their moorings.
	Example storms	Carol (1954) – Diana (1990) – Erin (1995) – Marty (2003) – Juan (2003)
Category 3	Sustained winds	50–58 m/s	111–130 mph	96–113 kt	178–209 km/h
	Storm surge	9–12 ft		2.7–3.7 m
	Central pressure	27.91–28.47 inHg		945–964 mbar
	Potential damage	Some structural damage to small residences and utility buildings, with a minor amount of curtainwall failures. Mobile homes are destroyed. Flooding near the coast destroys smaller structures with larger structures damaged by floating debris. Terrain may be flooded well inland.
	Example storms	Alma (1966) – Alicia (1983) – Roxanne (1995) – Fran (1996) – Isidore (2002)
Category 4	Sustained winds	59–69 m/s	131–155 mph	114–135 kt	210–249 km/h
	Storm surge	13–18 ft		4.0–5.5 m
	Central pressure	27.17–27.88 inHg		920–944 mbar
	Potential damage	More extensive curtainwall failures with some complete roof structure failure on small residences. Major erosion of beach areas. Terrain may be flooded well inland.
	Example storms	“Galveston” (1900) – Hazel (1954) – Iniki (1992) – Iris (2001) – Charley (2004)
Category 5	Sustained winds	≥70 m/s	≥156 mph	≥136 kt	≥250 km/h
	Storm surge	≥19 ft		≥5.5 m
	Central pressure	<27.17 inHg		<920 mbar
	Potential damage	Complete roof failure on many residences and industrial buildings. Some complete building failures with small utility buildings blown over or away. Flooding causes major damage to lower floors of all structures near the shoreline. Massive evacuation of residential areas may be required.
	Example storms	“Labor Day” (1935) – “Mexico” (1959) – Camille (1969) – Gilbert (1988) – Andrew (1992)

The U.S. National Hurricane Center classifies hurricanes of Category 3 and above as major hurricanes. The definition of sustained winds recommended by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and used by most weather agencies is that of a 10-minute average at a height of 10 m (33 ft) . The U.S. weather service defines sustained winds based on 1-minute average speed, also measured 10 m (33 ft) above the surface. Central pressure values are approximate. Intensity of example hurricanes is from both the time of landfall and the maximum intensity.

As many people know, hurricanes begin their formation off the west coast of Africa.

Now, many scientists are studying why this meteorological phenomenon occurs:

US Scientists to Track Birth of Hurricanes Off West Africa
Washington 27 July 2006

It is hurricane season again in the tropical Atlantic Ocean, and residents of the Caribbean and the U.S. and Mexican coastal areas are on guard. Many of the tropical storms that batter these regions originate off West Africa’s coast. U.S. government and university scientists are starting a study of how they intensify so they can improve forecasts to avoid the death and devastation hurricanes cause.

Hurricane Wilma, Oct. 21, 2005 (NOAA photo)

The U.S. agency responsible for ocean and atmosphere matters, NOAA, says thunderstorms off West Africa account for 60 percent of all hurricanes in the tropical Atlantic and 85 percent of the biggest ones.

One such weather disturbance gave rise to Hurricane Katrina, which devastated New Orleans and a large swath of the U.S. Gulf Coast a year ago.

But that does not mean that most of these so-called African atmospheric waves intensify to hurricanes. There are 60 to 70 of these distrubances each year, but only about half a dozen begin spinning enough to grow into tropical cyclones.

Scientists like Jeffrey Halverson of the University of Maryland want to know why more do not.

“About 10 percent of these waves change their character from being long traveling lines of thunderstorms. They begin acquiring some rotation. That’s the big mystery, why so very few of those waves actually start picking up some spin. We don’t really know where that spin comes from. That’s part of the big question we’re out to answer as they come off Africa.”

The hurricane research director at NOAA, Jason Dunion, says two factors seem to suppress cyclone development, cold sea surface temperatures off West Africa and dry air and dust blowing from the Sahara Desert. But Dunion says if a storm survives to reach warmer waters and it begins spinning, it can merge with other such vortices into a larger one, a prerequisite for a twisting, churning hurricane.

“How do those come together? There certainly are some things we know, but there are a lot of mysteries out there. Some of it is because we just haven’t observed it all that much,” he said.

That will change with the research mission Dunion’s agency is jointly undertaking through August with the U.S. space agency NASA and academics like Halverson. From their base on the Cape Verde islands off West Africa, they will take moisture, temperature, wind speed and other readings about storms from several U.S. satellites, an aircraft that flies through storms, weather balloons, and ground stations.

Dunion says the ability to track the path of emerging hurricanes has improved greatly in recent years, but the science of monitoring their growth and intensity is lagging far behind.

Jeff Halverson says this is a vital need.

“Better understanding the physics that generate these storms will extend the time of skillful forecasts, and thus save lives and property,” he said.

The U.S. hurricane researchers will share data with European and African scientists who are working to understand the influence of the West African monsoon on regional and global weather.”

(From News/Voice of America)

This is fine that scientists are putting more serious study ito the understanding of hurricanes, because hurricanes are a serious part of life, especially for those of us who live in their pathway.

But, another thought should also be considered on the subject of hurricanes.

Has anyone ever asked themselves why do hurricanes originate off the coast of Africa?

I have my reasons as to why, and I consider it a form of retribution from the continent of Africa itself, and from the millions of lost black souls savagely torn away from their homelands, put on filthy slave ships, and carried across the Atlantic Ocean to live lives of a living nightmare as human chattel slavery.

When European slavers kidnapped black Africans and marched many of them from the interior down to the slave coasts to be packed onboard, black people went through what is called The Door of No Return in the House of Slaves, the final exit point of the enslaves from Africa. It is on Goree Island, off the coast of Senegal in West Africa, where, black women and men were herded like so many animals, crowded into filthy, unsanitary holding pens. Frightened beyond belief, with nowhere to use the bathroom, the floor on which they stood built up with up to two feet and more from human excrement due to the future slaves having nowhere to relive themselves. Vomit as well would have been prevalent because of stomach-turning nausea and terror. Tears that would have been shed from the certain knowledge that HERE for the last time they would stand on African soil, would have washed the walls and floors of this reminder of man’s inhumanity to woman, man and children. Human beings were chained and shackled. As many as 30 men would sit in an 8-square-foot cell with only a small slit of window facing outward. Once a day, they were fed and allowed to attend to their needs, but still the house was overrun with disease. They were naked, except for a piece of cloth around their waists. They were put in a long narrow cell used for them to lie on the floor, one against the other. The children were separated from their mothers. Their mothers were across the courtyard, likely unable to hear their children cry. The rebellious Africans were locked up in an oppressive, small cubicle under the stairs; while seawater was sipped through the holes to step up dehydration.

GOREE ISLAND

Above their heads, in the dealer’s apartments, balls and festivities were going on. But even more poignant and heart wrenching than the cells and the chains was the small “door of no return” through which every man, woman and child walked to the slave boat, catching a last glimpse of their homeland.

Young Black Professional Guide to the Door of No Return

Tour group walking back into Cape Coast Castle through the Door of No Return

Here, for the last time, they would go through this narrow, stooped door to leave behind the only world they had ever known, to be beaten, stripped of their native clothing, searched and fingered viciously like so many cattle, poked, pried, and degraded from the disease-ridden hands of Europeans opening up the African’s mouths to examine their teeth and the private areas of both women and men, fondled and disrespected by slavers who had nothing but cruel regard for their human cargo.

The red-washed walls of the House of Slaves, in which The Door of No Return is located, was one of many places on the island that kept slaves both for domestic use and to sell to visiting ships.

The female enslaved quarters was the most brutal area. Along with the “Door of no return” there was a place where enslaved women were forced to stand if they refused to have sexual relations with the masters. Those women who refused, had large, heavy cannon balls thrown at them for their refusal.

Above the Slave holding pens, an area of residence for slavers to attend church mass and worship was maintained, while waiting below them in slave pens the enslaved black Africans suffered while waiting to be boarded onto slave ships waiting to cross the ocean. Slave owners praising, worshipping, clapping hands, singing hymns, while their fellow human beings below were being degraded, burned with branding irons, raped in front of each other while slave owner after owner took turns. Slave owners above who sang praises to “God’s goodness” for whites, all the while shackles and manacles were being put on the enslaved before they were put on board the slave ships. Slave owners who left the church happy in anticipation of the money they would make from the human suffering of innocent, defenseless human beings.

Once on the slave ships, the horrors started. Every enslaved on board was branded with a hot iron, men on the right cheek, women on the left buttock. Cat-o-nine-tails were used for punishment against enslaved who resisted torture or who were too independent. Male slaves were stowed below decks in spoon fashion, “‘tween decks”, shackeled together with only inches of space between them. Chained for the entire 3 month voyage, sickened from vomit and shit, many died from flux and dysentery. The deck, that is, the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. There was also no adequate ventilation, not to mention little or no sanitation. Although some captains would have their crew periodically clean the “tween decks” with hot vinegar, most chose rather to leave them alone, resulting in their atrociously unclean condition. In addition to disease and suffocation below deck, it would not be uncommon to find the body of a slave completely covered by lice.

Diagram of a slave ship from the Atlantic slave trade. From an Abstract of Evidence delivered before a select committtee of the House of Commons in 1790 and 1791

Cross section of decks, “tight packing” of slaves, storage areas. This ship sailed from La Rochelle in 1784, picked up about 500 Africans from north of the Congo River, and sold its slaves in Saint Domingue.

Brookes slave ship plan/poster.

Fonte (source): Notices of Brazil, Walsh, 1831 from http://serqueira.com.br/mapas/navnegro.htm

Many died along the voyage due to epidemics of disease, which spread like wildfire in the tightly packed ‘tween decks. On board the slavers there were numerous outbreaks of the dreaded smallpox, as well as ophthalmia, a highly contagious disease which quickly resulted in complete blindness. These terrible ailments could rapidly afflict an entire cargo of slaves, as well as the crew, and wipe out entire ships in a matter of days.Above decks, enslaved women who were pregnant when they were put on board, gave birth in the scorching hot sun. Enslaved women were raped continously. Enslaved black women moving freely about on slave ships were frequent targets for white male crew who physically abused and tormented them. Women were beaten severly for crying. Many enslaved women were pregnant prior to their capture and they were forced to endure pregnancy without any care given to them, care they would have received among their own people in Africa. The threat of rape was a constant daily reminder for the enslaved women. Another inhuman practice of the crews of the slave ships was that of “bedwarming”. In this custom a member of the crew, or sometimes even the captain, would take an enslave women out from the ‘tween decks during the night. The woman would be taken back to either the captain’s chamber or the crew’s living quarters and be beaten and physically forced to have sexual relations with the crew member. Many an enslaved black woman arrived on American soil already pregnant from the mass rapes done by the sadistic white rapist slavers on the ship.

Black people who were too sick to make the complete voyage to the New World, were thrown overboard, many while still alive. This act of barbarity on the part of the slavers gave true meaning to the phrase, “swimming with the sharks”. Sharks learned to follow the trail of death from the bodies of the enslaved thrown overboard. Millions of black lives were tossed into the sea, because the brutish slavers wanted to cut their losses from possible mass death from contagion on the ships, but, even in these acts of depravity, they still were able to recoup their losses from the banks and financial institutions of the time which insured any loss of “property” while the ship was still out to sea.

Many enslaves refused to eat, and many starved to death. To force the enslaves to eat, the captian had crew members put an object called speculum oris into the enslaves mouth. The speculum oris was a wooden instrument, which looked much like a pair of dividers, and was forced into the enslave’s mouth. Then a thumb screw would be turned, causing the legs of the speculum oris to open like a pair of pliers. Once the enslave’s jaws were forced open food would be crammed down the throat, often causing intense gagging and vomiting.

All the enslaves were forced to sleep without covering on bare wooden floors, which were often constructed of unplaned boards. In a stormy passage the skin over their elbows might be worn away to the bare bones.

Mnay enslaved fought back and rebelled agaisnt the slavers, but, many were killed.

Countless lives were destroyed during the Middle Passage. Countless lives were destroyed by white brutality and disease. Countless lives were devoured by the sharks that learned to follow these ships of living death.

Bones walking across the waters.

Souls of the bodies that were murdered at sea, called out for justice.

And the hurricanes still come forth, forming and beginning their birth from the areas where so many black Africans were forcibly torn away from their motherland.

The organization known as UNESCO has put Goree Island on its World Heritage List ever since 1978, and now observes, on every August 23RD, an “International Day for the Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolition”.

The hurricanes that occur off the west coast of Africa send forth their own form of retribution and justice against a part of the world which participated in the greatest form of mass inhumane brutality the world has ever seen, the African Diaspora. The creation and institution of human chattel slavery based on the race of the human beings who would be kept in bondage for more than 400 years.

Hurricanes.

Their power is immense, and a force to be reckoned with and respected.

But, the next time you hear of a hurricane forming off the west coast of Africa, ask yourself, is this Africa’s rage at the theft of so many millions of her children? Is this Africa’s anger at this part of the world where so many black Africans were sold and forced into a traumatic experience of the most utter degradation?

When you feel the full force of gale winds picking up, when you see the huge trees bending and swaying from the strong winds of the hurricane, when you see the destruction left behind by category 3, -4, -5 hurricanes that have passed over, keep in mind that Africa still mourns for her lost children. Africa still has her own way to wreak vengeance on a hemisphere that has taken countless lives via slavery, and is still taking countless black lives even today.

Africa has her way of letting this hemisphere know how she feels about the cruelty done to her children.

Hurricane season is starting to pick up.

Africa stills cries for all her lost children taken across the Atlantic ocean through the Middle Passage.

Hurricanes are Africa ‘s punishment for all the cruel and hateful wrongs done to her children, during slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, and on up into the present-day.

LINKS:

http://www.livescience.com/environmental/hurricane_formation.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saffir-Simpson_Scale

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina

http://webworld.unesco.org/goree/en/index.shtml

http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/cp/vol-01/no-04/finley/index.shtml

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August 17, 2007 · 8:45 PM

SLAIN CIVIL RIGHTS WORKER’S MOTHER DIES

Associated Press

NEW YORK –

“Carolyn Goodman, the mother of one of three civil rights workers killed by the Ku Klux Klan in the “Mississippi Burning” case, died Friday. She was 91.

Goodman, who lived to see a Klan leader convicted in her son’s death two years ago, died at her Manhattan home, her son Jonathan said.

Goodman’s son Andrew was killed on June 21, 1964, in central Mississippi’s Neshoba County, along with fellow civil rights workers Michael Schwerner and James Chaney.

Chaney, a black Mississippian, and Schwerner and Goodman, white New Yorkers, had been looking into the torching of a black church and helping to register black voters during what was known as Freedom Summer. They were abducted, shot to death and buried in an earthen dam.

The slayings shocked the nation, helped spur passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 and were dramatized in the 1988 movie “Mississippi Burning.”

Chaney’s mother, Fannie Lee Chaney, died May 22.

Both women testified in the 2005 trial of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, who was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to three consecutive 20-year prison terms.

After the verdict, she said the real heroes were those who stood up to the hate groups.

“I know a lot of people in Mississippi who have risked their lives,” she said at the time. “I would say those are the most important people in my life. All the people who have stood up and the victims of the Klan.”

In her testimony, Goodman told jurors about how her son wanted to go to Mississippi to help register black voters.

On June 21, 1964, she said, he sent his parents a postcard from Meridian. Several people in the courtroom wiped tears from their eyes as Goodman read a copy of the postcard aloud:

“This is a wonderful town and the weather is fine. I wish you were here. People here are wonderful.”

She told jurors she had hazy memories of being in Mississippi after her son was killed. “I remember the red soil and I remember he was buried here,” she said. “It was all so horrible and terrible.”

Killen was the only person to ever face state murder charges in the case. Nineteen men, including Killen, were indicted on federal charges. Seven were convicted of violating the victims’ civil rights. None served more than six years. Killen’s federal case ended with a hung jury after one juror said she couldn’t convict a preacher.

Carolyn Goodman was a psychologist who founded a program to help mothers leaving mental hospitals learn parenting skills. She set up the Andrew Goodman Foundation in 1966 to carry on her son’s legacy.

Survivors include her sons Jonathan and David.”

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August 17, 2007 · 5:13 PM

THE MYTH OF THE BLACK MATRIARCHY

In 1965, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote his report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action” http://www.dol.gov/oasam/programs/history/webid-meynihan.htm , which attempted to address the inhumane effects of slavery on the black family. Forty-two years later, the insidous effects of this so-called report still paints a picture of the black family as being headed by some all-powerfull Black Female Matriarch with the black family as a matriarch-controlled tangle of pathology. That black women have had no power whatsoever in this country to wield over anyone was lost on so many people who read this report and came to the conclusion that all the ills that affected the black race had to have stemmed from some dominant, subjugating power that black women never had.

It would be in the best interests of all black people, especially black women, to read this report again if they read it in past years, and if they have not, to definately read it. Come away with whatever conclusions that you may, but, it is not black women who have created the system that has attacked and tried to destroy the black family. It is not black women who control the outside forces that have wreaked so much havoc and destruction on the black family.

Here is my assessment of the Moynihan report, and some of the excerpts that to this day, still echo of a report that sought more to lie about the ravaging effects of systemic institutionalized racism and sought to put the blame of black people’s condition on the backs, and shoulders, of black American women:

“Keeping the Negro “in his place” can be translated as keeping the Negro male in his place: the female was not a threat to anyone.”

Wow. The black woman was never a threat to anyone. Hmm. Must be me, or I know my black history better than anyone out there.

The black woman was always a threat to the white slaver/segregationist establishment. Black women fought against the institution of slavery, fought against white women during the suffragette movement, fought against lynchings, fought against inhumane labor conditions, fought against mass gang rapes committed by white men against black women and girls, fought for black men to receive the right to vote with the 15TH Amendment, fought against the segregation of the armed forces during WWI and WWII.

During Reconstruction, black women viewed black men getting the right to vote not as an individual right for black men only, but, as a collective right for the entire black community. Black women also gave armed defense support of political meetings and polling places. Black women’s presence at polling places was a sign of the need for collective protection. And there were many black women across the South who like the black women of Charleston, South Carolina during Reconstruction, who were seen carrying axes or hatchets in their hands hanging down at their sides, their aprons or dresses half-concealing the weapons to defend their male relatives right to vote in elections. (1)

I guess that’s just those lazy, pathetic black women; they’ve never fought against ANYTHING in this country, in this world, so that’s why they are so NON-THREATENING.That’s why the white man wanted to keep anti-miscegenation laws on the books because he hated the valiant effort that black women did to fight against the continued degradation of black women and girls.

The white man (and woman) feared the lazy non-threatening black woman because she refused to lay down and allow the white man to create and proliferate the controlling images of lasciviousness and moral laxity against black women, that the white men used against black women and girls.

That black woman, hmm, hmm, hmm. So, non-threatening.

“When Jim Crow made its appearance towards the end of the 19th century, it may be speculated that it was the Negro male who was most humiliated thereby; the male was more likely to use public facilities, which rapidly became segregated once the process began, and just as important, segregation, and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than to the female personality.”

Wow, more new revelations to me.

So, let me get this straight:ONLY BLACK MEN SUFFERED UNDER SLAVERY AND SEGREGATION.Not those worthless ol’ black women. Sure, that’s right. Black women did not suffer from humiliation, from segregated public facilities (since they too had to use public facilities when they left the house to go across town via mass PUBLIC transportation, you know those things called trolley cars, buses, etc. to get to their “Miss White Missus wage-slave-domestic jobs), black women did not suffer the humiliation of “Colored Only Waiting Room” PUBLIC RESTROOMS which unlike White Men’s Restrooms and White Ladies Restrooms, were meant to be used by BOTH BLACK MEN AND BLACK WOMEN as if those black men and women were animals not fit to have their own separate public toilets. Black women did not suffer from not being addressed as, “Mrs.”, “Miss”, or “Ma’am”. Black woman did not suffer from being physically debased and from continuous rape and sexual coercion by white men AND white boys. Black women did not suffer from being called bitch, whore, slut, gal, nigger wench or black bitch. No, black women managed to avoid such hateful degradations.”segregation, and the submissiveness it exacts, is surely more destructive to the male than to the female personality.”Yes, that’s those black females, nothing harms them. Oh, I forgot, black females are not human. They are considered more sub-human than black men. Yeah, I forgot that. Must always remember that black women having to suffer from BOTH SEXISM AND RACISM really don’t have any validity in this country in the eyes of white men, white women OR many black men.Black women. The “slaves of slaves”.Bad enough that the white man and woman have tried to destroy black women and girls. Just as bad when black men buy into the lie of the myth of the “Black Matriarchy”.Facing facts anyone with humanity and intelligence knows that there is no historical record of any such thing as a matriarchy among black women. Let alone a matrifocal or matrilineal society among black American women.Merriam-Webster‘s definition of a matriarchy: 2. a system of social organization in which descent AND INHERITANCE are traced through the female line. Now, where do black women show where they have a system of passing down any inheritance to their daughters? True matriarchies do not exist, except in extremely rare conditions, somewhere in the world. Now, true patriarchies, those most definitely exist.Just because some white man said that black women have a system of matriarchy (they do not) never made those slanderous lies true.Moynihan was just as ignorant and sexist as any man looking from the outside in on the black family at the time this so-called statement was issued.So, the “case for national action” was no longer to concentrate on the EXTERNAL MACHINERY OF RACISM AND DISCRIMINATION, but on the internal problems of the black family, which resulted from the vestiges of slavery and segregation, and rampant racism when affirmative action was white.—as if the two (racism and discrimination against the black family) were unrelated.”A fundamental fact of Negro American family life is the often reversed roles of husband and wife”, Moynihan noted, stating that the black wife was “dominant”, supposedly just bringing the poor black man down, when it was the continued effects of racism and discrimination that were harming BOTH BLACK MEN AND WOMEN that was having such vicious effects on the black family.What hould have been questioned was why MEN, rather than WOMEN, seemed less able to fulfill family obligations under the pressure of racism and discrimination? Why is it that with the hell of a history that black women had in this black-race hating country, why is it that black women did not fold and crumble with all the abominations they suffered? Why is it that black women wouldn’t take nothing for their journey; wouldn’t give up nor give in with all they had to prevail against?Why?

Guess what Moynihan concluded:

Black men, obviously being more HUMAN than black women, suffered more and unlike the mule-of-the-world-superhuman-black-woman-who-has-no-human-feelings, he, the black man, was more devastated than any black woman could ever be.

The reason for this had to do, or so Moynihan concluded, with the inherent nature of the male species: “The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, IS TO STRUT,” was Moynihan’s “scientific” conclusion.

Wow. Strutting men. Yep, that sure gets your children fed. That sure gets your children educated so they can go on to college. Yep. Strutting gets all the black communities problems solved. That’s as insidious as saying that a woman primping in front of the mirror gets her children prepared for a life of confronting and challenging racism in this racist society. Wow, whatever people do, please don’t take away the poor males rights to strut; must not let that happen. It would be a horrible and dreadful day, since facing up to the rigors of life’s challenges are what make us into MEN or WOMEN.

In response to the so-called matriarchy slanderous lie hurled at black women, what black women and men had was a NON-TRADITIONAL FAMILY/NON-WHITE PATRIARCHAL FAMILY SYSTEM. A family of communalism, where everyone pitches in and supports the family, not one certain person (husband, wife) shouldering the whole load by themselves. And could you blame them? Survival among formerly enslaved black men and women was very much dependent on the work and contributions of EVERY household member for black men to even think of dismissing the contribution of black women’s work, however meager or low-paying, which would have been stupid, not to mention, suicidal. After slavery was abolished, freedom made black women and men more dependent on each other. The white man took away job opportunities from the black man, allowing him only menial jobs that paid practically nothing. The black woman he allowed the most menial and lower-paying jobs possible: domestic, maid, cook, etc. What was the black woman supposed to do? Allow her family to starve because the white man wanted to continue his attack and destruction on the black family? So, I guess those black men who were real men who stayed at home and tended to the children, those black men who cared for their children while their black wives WORKED LOW-PAYING JOBS, WHILE THEIR BLACK WIVES WORKED TWO OR MORE JOBS to help make ends meet, those were some real sorry black men, eh? Those black men who worked more than one job to add income to the family, those black men who stayed with their families and did not desert them because those black men did not have high-faluting jobs, those black men who knew their true manhood meant staying with your family through hell and high water—-I guess in many people’s eyes those were not real black men.

Probably because those black men did not believe in strutting. Probably because those black men believed in staying with their families and taking care of them, no matter what it looked like to the outside world looking in on something they could never understand.In any case, many black people at the time this report came out challenged the use of the term matriarchy, WHICH IMPLIES FEMALE DOMINANCE AND MALE SUBORDINATION WITHIN THE FAMILY. I hardly consider those black men who worked at the jobs they did, stayed with their families and cared for them as being dominated and subordinated.Only a dead inside fool would believe such a thing of a black matriarchy among black women and the black family. In fact, what was considered a matriarchy was in reality something else.

“Whereas the majority of white families are equalitarian, the largest percentage of Negro families are dominated by the wife.”

If anything, white families had nothing resembling an egalitarian relationship. White men forbade their white wives to work, except mainly in secretarial/office-clerical jobs, when and if the white wife did work. White men did not take up the duties of the home when the wife had to work. The black wife worked not because she wanted to, but because she had to. Unlike the white wife, the black wife’s meager wages were pooled with her black husband’s meager wages in order for them both to stay above sinking and drowning in an economy that had stacked the deck against the black family centuries ago. Unlike the white wife, the black wife did not have her husband’s money to fall back on. White women then, as now, could depend on their white husband’s salaries to live and thrive; not so for black women. Even today, many black women work at minimum wage jobs and have to work two jobs just to survive, but, not thrive, the way many white women are still able to do.

Even if a white wife works part-time in the 21ST Century, she is not only paid more than the black woman, she has her husband’s higher-paying salary to keep the white family afloat. Because of the deprivation caused when affirmative action was white (rampant segregation in union jobs in the South, states rights to keep the choicest employment in the hands of white men, whether or not the white man was qualified for the job or not), served to hinder the economical advancement of the black man, the black woman and the black family.

“Historically, in the matriarchal Negro society, mothers made sure that if one of their children had a chance for higher education the daughter was the one to pursue it.”

Black families knew for decades and generations that employment for black women would be allowed rather than employment for black males, from the racist white society. Even though many of the jobs that black women have had in the past, and even now in the present century, still pay low wages. Black families then as now, knew that if they were to educate one of the children it would fall on the shoulders of the daughter. Yes, many black women obtained domestic, maid, cook jobs, and only in the middle to late 1960s did black women begin to make inroads into higher paying jobs and careers. Make no mistake, black women who did go to college mainly ended up in secretarial and teaching jobs, just the type of jobs that were being vacated by white women in the late 1950s to early 1960s. Since white society refused to allow black men gainful employment (stevedore, longshoreman, construction work, etc.) that they were only so happy to give only to white men, this economic violence hurt the black family terribly both economically, with the wage gap and the wealth gap. And those diaparities of economic violence are still affecting the black family detrimentally in the 21ST Century.

Despite black male economic instability, Joyce Ladner at the time wrote: “It could indeed be argued that much of the ‘strength’ of the Black woman comes as a result of the sustained support she receives through her male partner.” (2) Black men helping around the house, with the children, between jobs—something no high-and-mighty white man would be caught dead doing.

Even in slavery, Angela Davis asserted, that the black woman “was in no sense an authoritarian figure [and she still is not]….On the contrary, she herself had just been forced to leave behind the shadowy realm of female passivity in order to assume her rightful place BESIDE the insurgent male.” (3)

Got that, Moynihan? The black woman stood by the black man and did not stab him in the back, nor use him, nor abandon him. The black woman was never allowed to revel in her humanity, her femininity—–HER WOMANHOOD. The white man sought so hard to destroy all of that in her but he could not, and for the black woman not bowing and bending to the sadistic mistreatment of the white man, the white man has never been able to forgive the black woman for her standing strong against the white race in all the perverse cruelties they could dish out to the black race. The white race has never been able to forgive black women for surviving the vicious sexual barbarisms of slavery and segregation. The white race has never let up on their relentless crusade to destroy the black woman, and they never will. They will always go the distance to fight against the vile horrible black woman who just won’t lay down and fall before the feet of Massa and Missus, nor let Massa and Missus have the last word on black people’s survival. Black women stood by the black race through all kinds of psychotic white racist mistreatment.

Guess that’s those ol’ non-threatening matriarchal black women for you.

That the black woman made decisions that affected the family, did not mean she was a matriarch, but that it was because men often deferred to her greater knowledge about certain things, especially the bureaucratic structure with which many families had to deal. You must remember that black women were the bridge between the black community and the white community. Black women had to work as domestics in white households, something that would have been unthinkable with a black man working as a domestic in a white household. And because of the type of work the black women was forced into, she was able to become more knowledgeable about the white world in ways the black man could not.

The black woman was around the white man, the white woman and the white children in a way the black man could never be, since black women worked for the white family and saw up close the real world of white families.

Sorta flies into the face of the lie that the black man was more exposed to the daily humiliations of segregated public places and aspects of life than the black woman.

That Moynihan’s report was written to drive a wedge between black men and women also shows up the continued use of the old divide and conquer concept—-if you can’t kill them all, then work on pitting them both against each other. Keep them so busy fighting amongst themselves, that they will lose sight of what is really harming them—white supremacy that creates and perpetuates disparities of economical, educational, legal, financial, political, residential and social violence.

The tenacity of black women is something to be very proud of, not something to be hated, disparaged and vilified.

Keep in mind, that while white women were making flags and doing bits and pieces of some social work, black women have participated in the total black liberation struggle. Furthermore, their assertiveness was part and parcel of a history that had deprived black men of their ability to protect and provide for the family since slavery.

But, if that assertiveness had been translated into power and dominance, then why did Robert Staples, a black sociologist, state that black women earned an annual wage of $2,372 in 1960 compared to $3,410 for white women AND $3,789 for black men? (4)

Writer Albert Murray also criticized Moynihan’s lie/report thesis: “Moynihan’s figures provide for more evidence of a MALE EXPLOITATION of females, than of females henpecking males. . . .Negro family instability might more accurately be defined as a cycle of illegitimacy, matriarchy and female victimization by gallivanting males who refuse to or cannot assume the conventional [based on the white patriarchal family structure] domestic responsibilities of husbands and fathers.” (5)

Though I would have to question why would any black person want to model their lives on the white race. With all the destruction that the white race has done to every race on this planet, emulating white people should be the last thing on the minds of black people. What had worked for black families was something that whites had disparaged for generations. Only when they saw that this non-traditional concept could help white families, then they sought to appropriate and commodify it to suit their white families.

Moynihan himself was shocked that so many people tore apart his report. He stated that this report concerned only a small segment of the black population, and not the entire race as a whole. Oh, really?

Then why did this so-called report become part and parcel a representation of the entire black race?

Moynihan suffered from a stupid misunderstanding of the black family and the shouldered responsibilities that black women were forced to deal with at that time. And guess what Moynihan’s suggestion was for resolving the problems that plagued the black family?

Yep, you guessed it.

Moynihan concluded that black family stability could only be achieved if black men could “strut”, even, if need be, at the expense of black women. This was his program for eradicating black poverty.He believed, with further analysis of the report, “that jobs had primacy and the government should not rest until every able-bodied Negro man was working EVEN IF THIS MEANT THAT SOME WOMEN’S JOBS HAD TO BE REDESIGNED TO ENABLE MEN TO FULFILL THEM.” (4)[Emphasis mine.]Never mind that black women earned less than black men [still true], that college-educated black men earned less than high-school-educated white men [still true], that the average two-income black family earned less than the ONE-INCOME white family [still true].No.According to Moynihan the thinking was that just make black men the lords of their own castles and everything would be alright. To get to this utopia, of course, black women would somehow have to slow down, become less achievement-oriented, give up all the independence they acquired because of the burdens they’ve shouldered, burdens put on them by white society. Black women were expected to give up their independence and all the resilience they developed from living in a sexist, racist society that sought to destroy both them and black men at every turn.The Moynihan report was not so much racist as it was sexist.But, given the time when this report was written, and that males of that period were in revolt against all women who sought to assert and better themselves, it is no wonder that black women 40 years later still have to fight the lie/myth of the “Black Matriarchy”.No such thing has ever existed in the black family/community.And anyone who believes that there is a black matriarchy either does not know the history of black women in America, does not comprehend the brutalizing effects of racism on the black family, nor the savage effects of sexism on black women.Anyone who still believes that black women have a matriarchy will believe anything instead of the truth that was right there in front of them all along.It is not black women’s striving to keep their families intact against almost inhumane odds that should be attacked, but, the huge disparities in social, educational, economic, legal, political and environmental savage inequalities that continue to be produced due to institutionalized systemic structural racism.It is the white patriarchy that destroys everyone.It is not black women destroying anyone.

The continued source/problem is still directly related to what is and still is at the heart of black women’s condition in present day society, as it was in the past:

No one seems to want to acknowledge that black women suffer from a DOUBLE OPPRESSION, racism and sexism, ergo, that which is shared by ALL black Americans and that which is shared by most women. Every economic, social, legal, political index shows up the powerlessness of black women in American society. A consequence of this double jeopardy AND powerlessness is the INVISIBILITY of all black women.

Much of what is important to black Americans is not VISIBLE or important to whites, and much of what is important to women is not visible to men. White men wrote all the history of the so-called peculiar institution; white men kept all the records and gave their slant on what a slave thought and felt, never caring how slavery truly degraded and harmed the enslaved human beings who suffered under it. White men are the ones who created the controlling images of Jezebel, Mammy, Sambo, Rastus, Tragic Mulatto and Sapphire. White men created and wrote all the lies against black people.

And just as white people wrote most of the antebellum slave records, so did black American males write just about all of the antebellum slave records left by former enslaved black people.

To both white male historians and black male historians, the enslaved female’s world was more than just peripheral; the enslaved female’s world did not exist as meriting validity, recognition or humanity. Enslaved women were everywhere (visible), yet nowhere (invisible).

And by this understanding of how little value black women had in the eyes of both white men and black men, if you are a black woman, you don’t exist in anyone’s eyes, you are unimportant to them at least until only when your activities somehow involved both white men and black men.

No one expects women to be assertive, aggressive, strong and prevailing. That is considered a non-female trait, but, black women had no choice but to develop such traits, because such traits kept her alive, such traits and character/personality developments gave her the strength to go on and live through such horrors of daily mass gang rapes from ALL men, gave her the strength to deny her suffering so that her children could eat; gave her the strength to defy mobs that came to her family’s door looking to mete out death to her family, lynch mobs that sought to drink the blood of her sons, her father, her brother, her daughters.

Yes, there are many people within, and without the black race who would love to believe that all the women are white, and all the blacks are men—–BUT SOME OF US ARE STILL BRAVE. Black people are not just only black men; black people are black women AND black men, and black children.

Black women have had enough to contend with from white men and women.

There is no question that black women have suffered tremendously from our double oppression of racism and sexism, but, we were never superwomen, we were never inhuman Amazons. The unrelenting effects of both racism and sexism—-disease, mortality, depression—-have certainly taken their toll on black women’s physical and mental health, but, black women have fought mightily against white terror and exploitation that has, and continues to try and destroy the black family. Yes, black people lived and practiced an alternative family lifestyle. A lifestyle that was based on equality, a lifestyle that was based on egalitarianism. That white people could not understand that, especially when this report by Moynihan was written, says just as much about white racist America as it does about black America. That any black person, man or woman, would want to emulate white people defies logic. That any black person would want to imitate a race of people who have committed the worst kinds of aberrations and perversity’s is beyond comprehension. That any black people would work to uphold white patriarchy is beyond unfathomable.

Black women are not the enemy. The enemy was always the white man and the white woman. The enemy still is the white man and the white woman. And to that must be added all the non-black races/ethnicity’s that have bought into the worship of whiteness, and the destruction of blackness.

Black women do not need for black men to war against them. Black women do not deserve the wrath and assaults that tear apart and distance black women from black men.

Black women need black men’s help and support.

If black women can give help and support to black men through slavery, the failed history of Reconstruction, through Jim Crow segregation, then surely, black men can give black women help, back-up, understanding and solidarity.

Or is that too much to ask of black men?

As for the Moynihan report, it still pollutes the world with its disinformation, its misinformation, its lies, its myth.

It is time for black people to create their own report, their own agenda. Enough of letting others outside of the race have the last word on what black people can and should do for themselves.

Until the lioness learns how to write, history will continue to be written by the hunter.

REFERENCES:

1 .Leon F. Litwak, “Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery”, New York Vintage Books, 1980, pg246.

2. Joyce A. Ladner, “Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman”, (Garden City, NY.: Doubleday, 1971), p. 273.

3. Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”, BLACK SCHOLAR (December, 1971), p. 14.

4. Robert Staples, “The Myth of the Black Matriarchy”, BLACK SCHOLAR (November-December, 1981), p. 32.

5. Albert Murray, “White Norms, Black Deviation”, The Death of White Sociology”, Joyce Ladner, ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1973), p. 104.

– (1-5): “When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America”, by Paula Giddings, William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York, 1984.

– “Arn’t I A Woman?:Female Slaves in the Plantation South”, by Deborah Gray White, W.W. Norton & Company, 1999.

LINKS:

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/blacklib/

http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/wlm/fun-games2/argument.html

http://www.anarchistblackcross.org/org/wp/argument.html

http://www.bilkent.edu.tr/~/jast/Numbers5/Demirturk.html

http://www.lib.ncsu.edu.theses/available/etd-03232006-110329/unrestricted/etd.pdf

http://www.fiu.edu/~stephens/Sister_to_Sister_Talk.pdf

http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/roots/essay1.htmlhttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2294/is_n1-2_v28/ai_13810695/pg_1

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August 14, 2007 · 8:20 PM

EUROPE SUPPORTED BY AFRICA AND AMERICA

by William Blake

“Engravings for J.G. Stedman, Narrative, of a five year’s expedition, against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam, in Guinea, on the Wild Coast of South America; from the year 1772, to 1777. Published in London, 1796.”

“Going now to take my leave of Surinam, after all the horrors and cruelties with which I must have hurt both the eye and the heart of the reader, I will close with an emblematical picture of Europe supported by Africa and America, accompanied by an ardent wish that the friendly manner as they are represented, they may henceforth and to all eternity be the props of each other… We only differ in colour, but are certainly all created by the same hand.” [Capt. John Gabriel Stedman]

From the book, ‘Narrative, of a Five Years’ Expedition, Against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam’ by JG Stedman.

LINKS:

http://www.betatesters.com/penn/blake1.htm

http://www.artknowledgenews.com/William_Blake.html

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August 13, 2007 · 8:34 PM

BUNCH-O-LINKS, AUGUST 13, 2007

This is my first bunch-o-links roundup post, so here are some topics that I think are sure to give thoughtful discussions:

1. I want to commend Gina McCauley of the blog, What About Our Daughters (http://whataboutourdaughters.blogspot.com/2007/08/updated-list-of-immorally-indifferent.html) ) for her strength and fortitude in championing the cause of black women who are under assault in this country. Gina has a list of the black organizations which need to be alerted about the horrific gang rape of a black mother and her son that happened in Dunbar Village in Florida.

2. The Content Black Woman (http://whyblackwomenareangry.blogspot.com/2007/08/souls-of-black-folks-dunbar-village.html) another blogger who speaks up for all black women, also has a contact for us to write to on this incident as well. She also has written a wonderful essay on the Dunbar Village gang rape attack.

3. Rachel of Rachel’s Tavern has an excellent write-up (http://rachelstavern.com/?p=658) about the “whiny white people” who complain about the racism that black people suffer, or preferably, do not suffer from, in America.

4. Stephanie of Stephanie’s Journal has a write-up (http://httpjournalsaolcomjenjer6steph.blogspot.com/2007/08/check-out-my-latest-artwork.html) ) on some of her lovely and beautiful artwork she has dedicated to the many black women who have been hurt and destroyed by a callous, sexist and racist society in America.

5. Angry Indian, a frequent guest commentator on Stephanie’s Journal, alerts readers on the disenfranchisement of black citizens of their votes in the 2004 Ohio Presidential elections. Here is the link: http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/073107C.shtml

6. I came across this blog (http://assaultonblacksanity.blogspot.com/2007/06/reality-check_29.html) while googling info on an upcoming post I am writing. The owner of this blog obviously has bought into the lie/myth of the “Black Matriarchy” of the Moynihan Report written 40 years ago. I left a comment challenging him on why he would believe such a lie, as there is no evidence of any matriarchy, matrifocal or matrilineal society among black American women.

7 Also, from that same site, a link was provided to this site,”Blacktown” (http://www.blacktown.net/chuckie_blonde.htm) which made very hateful comments on black women not leading any social or historical movements in the United States. (I tried to leave an e-mail comment addressing this site’s ignorance and hatred at not learning of the many accomplishments that black women have made and impacted on race, sex, labor and so many aspects of American life, but, I kept getting a non-response from the website.) So much benighted, incredibly frightening ignorance out there to fight against in the world. Sigh, the battle never ends.

So, that’s it for my first bunch-o-links roundup.

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August 13, 2007 · 8:32 PM

AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,
And the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for a tree to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop. (1)

When people think of the savage act of the lynching of black people, many people think of black men:

-1930 lynchings of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indiana

-1913 lynching of William Brown in Douglas County, Nebraska

-1935 lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida

-1936 lynching of Lint Shaw in Royston, Georgia

And that is just a few names.

But, often left out of this list of names are those of black women who were brutally tortured, and raped, before they were lynched:

-Mary Turner

-Cordella Stevenson

-Laura Nelson

-Jenny Steers

-Ann Barksdale

-Marie Scott

-Maggie and Alma Howze

-Mae Murray Dorsey

-Dorothy Malcolm

-Ballie Crutchfield

-Belle Hathaway

-Mary Conley

-Bertha Lowman

That black women have been left out of the history of lynching comes as no surprise. Black women’s voices and history has never been accorded the same respect and validation as the history of black men. Black women’s history is only just now coming into the light, especially in the realm of lynching. It was the valiant efforts of black women, most notably the great Ida B. Wells- Barnett…………….

Ida B. Wells-Barnett

……………………and the black women organization known as the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, headed by Mary Talbert, who fought so hard to eradicate this brutally barbaric crime that this country perpetuated against its defenseless black citizens. Ida’s contribution was crucial: she spoke out at a time when few people challenged the horror and injustice of the lynch law, and her research, writing and public speaking informed people of the true facts of the viciousness of lynching. Ida was convinced that the public’s awareness of the atrocity of lynching would lead towards its demise.

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders also worked diligently with the N.A.A.C.P. to get a federal bill passed to stop the lynching of America’s black citizens, most notably the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill. The bill did not come to fruition; the notorious racist senator Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina filibustered in the senate thereby preventing the bill’s passage.

The “Million Women to Stop Lynching” campaign was to have young women stump the country to raise 1 million dollars, with citizens contributing one dollar per person to the campaign.

Taking a look at the Anti-Lynching Crusaders publishing the number of women lynched in America shows that lynching was anything but a crime carried out mainly against black men. The first document number 6 is from the correspondence between Ms. Talbert and the then executive secretary of the N.A.A.C.P., James Weldon Johnson, in 1922 on how to tackle the cruelties of lynching, especially concerning the lynchings of black women. In document 7, they state cases of black women who were lynched. In document 8 they offer suggestions on how to recruit young women and girls to spread the word on ending the violence of lynching. At the time Ms. Talbert formed the Anti-Lynching Crusaders, there were approximately 83 women who had been lynched in the United States of America. And those are the KNOWN women who were lynched.

Document 6: Mary Talbert to James Weldon Johnson, 28 June 1922, NAACP Papers, Part 1: Meetings of the Board of Directors, Records of Annual Conferences, Major Speeches, and Special Reports, 1909-1950, Library of Congress (Microfilm, Reel 24, Frames 410-12). Introduction        James Weldon Johnson became the executive secretary of the NAACP in December 1920 and alongside Walter White, his assistant, Johnson was the driving force behind the NAACP campaign for the Dyer Bill.[23] Mary B. Talbert wrote this letter to Johnson just eight days after the NAACP conference which inspired the formation of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders. Talbert indicated in this letter that the initial objective of the Crusaders was to focus on ending the lynching of colored women. The following two documents restate this view, but not enough documentary material has survived to evaluate whether the gendered goal stated in this letter became the sole justification for the Crusaders’ fundraising campaign. Documents 7 and 8 suggest that the prevention of lynching of both white and black women was the objective of the Crusaders, at least as stated in their publicity flyers.

Buffalo June 28- [1922]My Dear Mr. Johnson:       You certainly have it on me, but I am so rushed I guess I stand on my head part of the time. I really haven’t the time or money to come down again so soon. But I am going to make the sacrifice and be there Monday July 10.       I am also calling a small conference of women on July 8th. I firmly believe I can put this over–one million, but I can do it. I will enlist every secret organization in every state–and every church, including Colored Catholics. I believe it can be done. The only literature we will need will be for the 4000 speakers and workers, and the books for receipt. My plan is not to divide with any branch, but send money direct to National Office. The branch however can solicit their membership afterwards. This is to be a drive for one million women to suppress Lynching of Colored Women. I will see you July 10th.

Hastily,

M. B. Talbert

Document 7: “The Anti-Lynching Crusaders: The Lynching of Women,” [1922], NAACP Papers, Part 7: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Series B: Anti-Lynching Legislative and Publicity Files, 1916-1955, Library of Congress (Microfilm, Reel 3, Frames 570-73).

Introduction       In this and the following four documents, the organizers of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders articulated their objectives and imagined the form their organization would take. The horror of lynching and the prevalence of this crime had moved these women to action. While undated, this document and documents 8 and 9 were likely written in June or July of 1922 as the Crusaders took shape.       In this document the Crusaders spelled out their position on lynching and sought to dispel prevalent myths about lynch victims. Typically lynch victims were black men, but in this document, like several others reproduced in this project, the Crusaders emphasized the incidence of lynchings where women — black and white — were the victims. They asked: “how many people realize that since 1889 eighty-three women are known to have been lynched?” and included graphic descriptions of selected lynchings alongside statistics revealing the numbers of black and white women who had been lynched. The authors also sought to undermine the belief that lynching was typically a punishment doled out to rapists or attempted rapists. In only 16.6 per cent of lynchings, they argued, were lynch victims accused of rape. Moreover, the narratives they provided pointed to the prevalence of white men’s sexual abuse of African-American women and its connection to mob violence against blacks.

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders
The Lynching of Women.        The Anti-Lynching Crusaders are a band of women organized to stop lynching. Their slogan is: “A Million Women United to Stop Lynching.” They are trying to raise at least one dollar from every woman united with them and to finish this work on or before January 1st 1923. The reason that they believe this work to be of pressing importance is because of the facts as to lynching which confront every American. First of all, how many people realize that since 1889 eighty-three women are known to have been lynched? The record is as follows:

State Colored White Total

1. Mississippi 14 1 15

2. Texas   8 2 10

3. Alabama   9 –   9

4. Georgia   8 –   8

5. Arkansas   6 1   7

6. South Carolina   6 –   6

7. Louisiana   4 1   5

8. Tennessee   3 2   5

9. Kentucky   2 2   4

10. Oklahoma   2 2   4

11. Florida   3 –   3

12. Missouri   1 1   2

13. North Carolina   – 1   1

14. Virginia   – 1   1

15. Nebraska   – 1   1

16. W. Virginia   – 1   1

17. Wyoming   – 1   1

83

Let us consider a few facts.MARY TURNER        In May, 1918, a white plantation owner in Brooks County, Georgia, got into a quarrel with one of his colored tenants and the tenant killed him. A mob sought to avenge his death but could not find the suspected man. They therefore lynched another colored man named Hayes Turner. His wife, Mary Turner, threatened to have members of the mob arrested. The mob therefore started after her. She fled from home and was found there the next morning. She was in the eighth month of pregnancy but the mob of several hundred took her to a small stream, tied her ankles together and hung her on a tree head downwards. Gasoline was thrown on her clothes and she was set on fire. One of the members of the mob took a knife and split her abdomen open so that the unborn child fell from her womb to the ground and the child’s head was crushed under the heel of another member of the mob; Mary Turner’s body was finally riddled with bullets.TULSA        On Greenwood Avenue in the colored section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, two aged colored people, and man and his wife, lived. On the night of the Tulsa riot, May 31, 1921, a mob broke into the home and shot both the woman and her husband from behind. The home was then set on fire.MISSISSIPPI        The New York Tribune says, February 8, 1904:

“Luther Holbert, a Doddsville (Mississippi) Negro and his wife were burned at the stake for the murder of James Eastland, a white planter, and John Carr, a Negro. The planter was killed in a quarrel which arose when he came to Carr’s cabin, where he found Holbert, and ordered him to leave the plantation. Carr and a Negro, named Winters, were also killed.”Holbert and his wife fled the plantation but were brought back and burned at the stake in the presence of a thousand people . . . . . There is nothing . . . . . to indicate that Holbert’s wife had any part in the crime.”

OKLAHOMA        An Associated Press dispatch in 1911 reads as follows:

“At Okemah, Oklahoma, Laura Nelson, a colored woman accused of murdering a deputy sheriff who had discovered stolen goods at her house, was lynched together with her son, a boy about fifteen. The woman and her son were taken from the jail, dragged about six miles to the Canadian River and hanged from a bridge, The woman was raped by members of the mob before she was hanged.”

OKLAHOMA        An Associated Press dispatch in 1914 reads as follows:

“Marie Scott of Wagner County, a seventeen year old Negro girl, was lynched by a mob of white men because her brother killed one of the two white men who had assaulted her . . . . . The mob came to kill her brother but as he had escaped, lynched the girl instead.”

MISSISSIPPI        In 1918 Dr. E. L. Johnston, a white plantation owner, was killed and a colored boy was suspected of the deed. He was suspected because two colored girls, sisters, were working for Dr. Johnston and both were pregnant by the doctor. The boy was engaged to be married to the older. A mob took the two girls, the boy and the boy’s fifteen-year old brother to a bridge and hanged them.        It is asserted that none of these four knew anything about the killing; that Dr. Johnston had been killed by a white man for seducing a white woman.THE CAUSES OF LYNCHING        Most people assume that rape or attempted rape is practically the sole cause of lynching. This is not true. From 1889 up until July 1, 1922, there have been 3,465 known lynchings in the United States. In only 581 of these cases, or 16.6 percent, were there even an accusation of rape.        In the five year period from 1914 through 1918, 264 Negroes were lynched in the United States, not counting those killed in the East St. Louis riots. Of the 264 cases rape was the alleged cause in only 28 cases. On the other hand, in the single year of 1917 in New York County, one of the five counties forming the city of greater New York, 230 persons were indicted for rape, of whom 37 were indicted for rape in the first degree. Thus it may be seen that in one county alone, 9 more persons were indicted before courts for rape in the first degree than there were lynchings of Negroes for rape in the whole country during five years. And in the case of the Negroes there was only accusation and no proof. Among the 37 persons mentioned above there was not a single Negro.        From 1889 through July 1, 1922, the following causes of lynching has been alleged by the mob leaders in the news dispatched:

Murder 1291

Rape   581

Crimes against the person other than rape (i.e. “striking white man,” “talking back to a white man,” “refusing to turn out of road to let white boy pass,” etc.)   868

Crimes against property   343

Miscellaneous and petty offenses   454

Other crimes   254

No offense   183

In this connection two facts must be remembered. These alleged causes are telegraphed from the place where the lynchings take place and often the news gatherer is in sympathy with the mob. Secondly, if a mob is determined to lynch a man it will more surely gain public sympathy if rape is alleged rather than any other cause. It is fair to assume that in the above list the number of actual cases of rape had been greatly exaggerated.*    *    *

Document 8: “Plan Organization of 1,000,000 Women to Stop Lynching in United States,” [1922], NAACP Papers, Part 7: The Anti-Lynching Campaign, 1912-1955, Series B: Anti-Lynching Legislative and Publicity Files, 1916-1955, Library of Congress (Microfilm, Reel 3, Frame 559).Introduction        In the following document, the Anti-Lynching Crusaders described how their organization would be structured, where it would be located, and how it would recruit members. The organizers of the Crusaders hoped to tap into existing women’s clubs to staff their movement and as Document 9 indicates, recruiters were to approach Sunday schools and girls clubs to enlist the aid of girls between the ages of 8 and 18. The goal of ending lynching, the authors argued, was eminently suited to women whose task it was to ensure the “home is sacred from violence.” They asserted that lynching did not protect women from rape as this was a factor in only 16.6 percent of lynching incidents (see Document 7); instead, lynching had the undesirable effect of introducing violence into the home. As this document describes, the founders of the Crusaders envisioned the organization as a “mass movement of American women” who would ultimately protect the “fair name” of their nation.

PLAN ORGANIZATION OF 1,000,000 WOMEN TO
STOP LYNCHING IN UNITED STATES.ZONA GALE, NOVELIST, ACTIVE IN WISCONSINGUARANTY TRUST CO., ACCEPTS OFFICE OF DEPOSITORY         One million women throughout the United States are to be enrolled in an organization called “The Anti-Lynching Crusaders”, according to plans made public today by Mrs. Grace Johnson, New York representative of the movement. Headquarters have been established at 521 Michigan Avenue, Buffalo, New York, under the directorship of Mrs. Mary B. Talbert, winner of the Spingarn Medal for 1921, the first woman to achieve that distinction. The Guaranty Trust Co., of New York, has accepted the office of depository for the Anti-Lynching Crusaders.        The aims of the organization as set forth in an initial statement are:        “The Anti-Lynching Crusaders are a band of women organized to stop lynching. Their slogan is: ‘A Million Women United To Stop Lynching.’ They are trying to raise at least one dollar from every woman united with them and to finish this work on or before January 1st, 1923. The reason that they believe this work to be of pressing importance is because of the facts as to lynching which confront every American.” (2)

Black women lynch mob victims:

Ballie Crutchfield (D. march 15, 1901)

We know nothing of her life, only of her death, as recorded in the March 17, 1901 edition of the New York Tribune under the headline NEGRO SUSPECT ELUDES MOB; SISTER LYNCHED INSTEAD.

NASHVILLE, Tenn., Mar. 16- Ballie Crutchfield, a colored woman, met her death at the hands of a mob at Rome about midnight last night. The mob surrounded her home and took her to a bridge over Round Rock Lick Creek, near town. Her hands were tied behind her, and after being shot through the head her lifeless body was thrown into the creek. The body was removed to-day, and the jury of inquest returned a verdict that she met death at the hands of unknown persons.

“This Is Her First Lynching”, by Reginald Marsh (1898-1954) The New Yorker, September 8, 1934.

The lynching was the result of a suspicion that the negress was in some way connected with the theft of the contents of a pocketbook containing $120, which was lost by Walter Sampson last week. The purse was found on the ground by a negro boy, who was on his way to return it to the owner, when he was met by William Crutchfield, a brother of the dead woman, who induced the boy to give him the pocketbook upon representation that the contents were of no value. Mr. Sampson had Crutchfield arrested, and he was taken to the house of Squire Bains for safekeeping.

That night a mob visited the house of Squire Bains and took Crutchfield from the custody of the Sheriff. The mob started with Crutchfield to the place selected for execution, when he broke from them and succeeded in effecting his escape in the dark.

This so enraged the mob that they suspected Crutchfield’s sister Ballie of being implicated in the theft, and last night’s work was the culmination of that suspicion.”

(“The Book Of African-American Women: 150 Crusaders, Creators and Upliftors”)

Although the overwhelming majority of lynch mob victims of white mob violence were men and boys, lynchers did not discriminate. Ballie Crutchfiled was not the first, nor only, black American woman who lost her life to a white mob, and she would not be the last. For example, the murder of Jennie Steers in 1903 was reported in the Chicago Record-Herald:

“SHREVEPORT, La., July 26—-Jennie Steers, a negro woman, who, it is charged, gave 16 year old Elizabeth Dolan a glass of poisoned lemonade, causing her death, was lynched on the Beard Plantation near here last night. The mob took her to a tree, placed a rope around her neck and demanded a confession. The woman refused and was hanged.”

(“The Book of African American Women: 150 Crusaders, Creators and Upliftors”)

ATLANTA CONSTITUTION

October 9, 1916

NEGRESS TAKEN FROM JAIL AND RIDDLED WITH BULLETS

ARLINGTON, Ga., Oct. 4—Mary Conley, the negro woman whose son, Sam Conley, killed E. M. Melvin, a prominent white planter, near here Monday, was taken from the guardinghouse in Leary some time during the night and lynched. Her body, riddled with bullets, was found by the roadside by parties coming into Arlington during the early morning hours.

When Melvin reprimanded Sam Conley for the way the latter was neglecting his work the negro’s mother showed resentment. It is claimed that Melvin then slapped and grappled with her, whereupon Sam Conley picked up an iron scale weight and struck the white man on the head in defense of the mother. Melvin died a short time later.

Conley escaped, but his mother was captured and put in jail here.

The mob had no difficulty in breaking into the guardhouse, which was unguarded, the officers not anticipating trouble.

The lynching was very quiet.”

(From, “100 Years Of Lynchings”)

Although her name is not mentioned among the above women’s names, the case of little Mildrey Brown stands out in its poignancy. Ida Wells investigated 728 lynchings at a time when they were routinely being carried out in this country. Mrs. Wells concluded that most victims were killed for alleged crimes like “incendiarism,” “race prejudice,” “quarreling with whites,” and “making threats.”Mrs. Wells used as an example one of the more horrible lynchings in the case of little Mildrey.”So great is the southern prejudice, they…hung poor little 13-year-old Mildrey Brown at Columbia, South Carolina, Oct. 7 on circumstantial evidence that she poisoned a white infant. “If her guilt had been proven unmistakable, had she been white, Mildrey Brown would never have been hung. The country would have been aroused and South Carolina disgraced forever.” (3)

Ms. Wells, while on her campaign through England speaking out against the atrocities of American lynch mob injustice, also spoke of a particularly vicious lynching of a defenseless black woman who suffered a monstrous death under the following circumstances:

“Their consciousness raised about the situation in the United States, now, as Wells reported, people were coming up to her after her lectures, expressing indignation when they heard of an American lynching. She was keeping up with the reports as well, but on one occasion someone told her of a recent incident that she had not yet heard about, and the cruelty and the shock of it unsettled her.

“A black woman in San Antonio, Texas, Ida was told, had been boxed up in a barrell with nails driven through the sides and then rolled up and down a hill until she was dead.

“I sat there as if turned to stone,” Ida recalled, “with tears rolling down my cheeks with this new evidence of outrage upon my people, and the apathy of the American white people.”

-excerpt from “Ida, A Sword Among Lions: Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching”, by Paula J. Giddings, Amistad (Harper Collins Publishers), pg. 292.

The mob lynchings of black Americans was a very brutal act of ultimate savagery, bordering on sadistic depravity:

Many of these victims were ritualistically tortured. In 1904, Luther Holbert and his wife were burned to death. They were tied to trees and while the funeral pyres were being prepared, they were forced to hold out their hands while one finger at a time was chopped off. The fingers were distributed as souvenirs. The ears. . .were cut off. Holbert was beaten severely, his skull fractured and one of his eyes, knocked out with a stick, hung by a shred from the socket. Members of the mob then speared the victims with a large corkscrew, “the spirals tearing out big pieces of. . . .flesh every time it was withdrawn.” (4)

CHICAGO DEFENDER

December 18, 1915

RAPE, LYNCH NEGRO MOTHER

Columbus, Miss., Dec. 17—Thursday a week ago Cordella Stevens was found early in the morning hanging to a limb of a tree, without any clothing, dead. She had been hung Wednesday night after a mob had visited her cabin, taken her from her husband and lynched her after they maltreated her. The body was found about fifty yards north of the Mobile & Ohio R. R., and the thousands and thousands of passengers that came in and out of this city last Thursday morning were horrified at the sight. She was hung there from the night before by a bloodthirsty mob who had gone to her home, snatched her from slumber, and dragged her through the streets without any resistance. They carried her to a far-off spot, did their dirt and then strung her up. The mob took the woman about 10 o’clock at night. After that no one knows exactly what happened. The condition of the body showed plainly that she had been mistreated. The body was still hanging in plain view of the morbid crowd that came to gaze at it till Friday morning, when it was cut down and the inquest held.

“The jury returned a verdict that she came to death at the hands of persons unknown.” (5)
Black women have been hunted down through many cities across America during race riots and pogroms; they have been drug from their homes and hung from lamp posts; they have had their children torn from their arms and seen those children’s brains dashed upon the pavement; they have been the objects of insult and outrage at every turn; they have had their homes burnt down over their heads; they have seen their children not allowed to enter schools, they have had their children sold from their loving embrace, before the child could barely come into the world—-black women have suffered from much cruelty and babarity in this country.

And that the history of the lynching of black women in America has been hidden so long from knowledge is unconscionable. As members of the community most severely targeted by lynch-law in the New South, black American women remain virtually invisible to historians examining this phenomenon. Though scholars acknowledge the lynching of black women, their deaths are presented as parenthetical, as footnotes, as afterthoughts, and therefore unworthy of historical analysis. Following in the footsteps of contemporary anti-lynching advocates who failed to view the lynching of black women as a unique and separate occurrence, current and past scholars have overlooked the fact that many Southern white mobs purposely and willfully sought out and brutalized black women.

Assigning the experiences of lynched black women to the margins widens the historical void, negating the importance of understanding that the rapes and lynchings of black women ties in with the lynchings of black men. First, it is the denial of giving an important aspect of black American women’s history. Whether one or one thousand women died at the hands of white southern mobs, those deaths must be counted and included in our collective remembering of black women’s lives in the post-Reconstruction South. Second, scholar’s avoidance of examining lynched black women suggest that this area of inquiry would add nothing to our understanding of lynching or southern mob violence. Unfortunately, this assumption is made without research or investigation, hence without basis. Additionally, as long as current scholarship continues to treat the mob murders of black American women as irrelevant, the implication is that their deaths held no meaning in local black communities, and had little, if any, impact on the southern community at-large. However, the lynching of black women was significant. It was an attempt to undermine black families and destabilize the entire black American community, while simultaneously reaffirming southern whites’ rabid power. In other words, terrorism at its most brutally sadistic and depraved. Finally, the exclusion of lynched women inadvertently masks the epidemic of racialized sexual violence experienced by many southern black women. It was a unique form of violence that permeated their everyday lives, often influencing decisions made and actions taken. In the bodies of lynched women we can see clearly the legacy of that violence.

To begin addressing some of the aforementioned historical voids, the buried history of black women’s lynchings is examined in the reported lynching of black American women in the South, as referenced by the inclusion of the Anti-Lynching Crusaders and the efforts of Ida B. Wells-Barnett in my essay. Researching more information and documentation is needed, as lynched black women are located at the center of their own stories where their experiences can be identified, and the condition of their lives and deaths explored.

Placing black women at the center, recognizes them as contributors to as well as victims of the entire southern race, class, and gender matrix. As laborers, grass root activists and organizers, mothers of black children, sexual and romantic partners to black and white men alike, black American women were an integral part of life in the New South. A race, class and gender framework reveals how those various roles made black women a valued group of producers and reproducers, yet also vulnerable to the South’s penchant for sexualized racial violence. Additionally, factoring in community membership as another target identity, we can discern how black women’s various roles made them a valued group of producers and reproducers. Yet, that unique status also made them vulnerable to racialized sexual violence.

As blacks, as women, as workers branded with the stigma of slavery, black American women not only faced economic exploitation and socio-political marginalization, but also beatings, sexual assaults, and murder. Indeed, the same forces that allowed for the exploitation of all black women, similarly created a dynamic that led to the lynching of others. (6)

Lynching.

It is time for America to come to terms with learning of and acknowledging this cruel part of American history. That the history of black women, men and children being lynched, tortured, burned at the stake and body parts fought over by savages who worshipped lawlessness and bestial behaviour is not taught in American public schools comes as no surprise.

How can such a subject be taught in the school system when this country still has not come to terms with the holocaust it has perpetuated against its black citizens for over 400+ years?

Until America finally decides to commit itself to a Reconciliation Committee that seeks to address all the legacies of the vestiges of slavery, segregation, and lynching, America can expect to continue to have race problems well into the future, as long as this country exists.

In June, 2005, the U. S. Senate after a contentious debate on the Senate floor, finally issued a formal apology to the black families of the victims of lynching. It (those members of the Senate who voted for this apology which as far as I am concerned, they can shove up a certain rectal orifice) finally did apologize for the callous disregard that this country’s legislative body showed when it had the chance to enact laws to stop lynchings. Too late for the tens of thousands of victims, both known and unknown, who fell prey to the brutality of lynch mob injustice.

HERE IS A PARTIAL LIST OF THE KNOWN BLACK WOMEN LYNCH VICTIMS:

Date	Name	Lynched with	County/City State	Allegation
1870
Sept	Mrs. John Simes		Henry Co KY	Republican
1872
Nov	Mrs. Hawkins (m)		Fayette Co KY	Republican
	—– Hawkins (d)		Fayette Co KY	Republican
1876
May	Mrs. Ben French		Warsaw KY	murder
1878
4 Nov	Maria Smith		Hernando MS	murder
1880
29 July	Milly Thompson		Clayton GA
6 Dec	Julia Brandt (15)	Joe Barnes Vance Brandt	Charleston SC	theft/murder
1881
*4 Sept	Ann (Eliza) Cowan (35)		Newberry SC	arson
1885
29 Sept	Harriet Finch	Jerry Finch John PattishalLee Tyson	Chatham Co NC	murder
1886
Sept	—–		Cummins Pulaski KY
25 July	Mary Hollenbeck		Tattnall GA	murder
18 Aug	Eliza Wood		Madison TN	murder
1887
28 April	Gracy Blanton		W. Carroll LA	theft
1891
15 April	Roxie Elliott		Centerville AL
9 May	Mrs. Lee		Lowndes MS	son accused of murder
1 Aug	Eliza Lowe		Henry AL	arson
	Ella Williams		Henry AL	arson
28 Sept	Louise Stevenson	Grant White	Hollandale MS	murder
1892
3 Feb	Mrs. Martin		Sumner Co TN	son accused of arson
10 Feb	Mrs. Brisco(w)		AK	race prejudice
10 Feb	Jessie Dillingham		Smokeyville TX	train wrecking
11 March	Ella (15)		Rayville LA	attempted murder/poisoning
2 Nov	Mrs. Hastings(m)	son (16)	Jonesville LA	husband accused
	Hastings(d,14)		Jonesville LA	father accused of murder
21 Dec	Cora		Guthrie,Indian Territory
1893
19 March	Jessie Jones		Jellico TN	murder
18 July	Meredith Lewis		Roseland LA	murder
15 Sept	Emma Fair	Paul Hill Paul ArcherWilliam Archer	Carrolton AL	arson
16 Sept	Louisa Carter (Lou)(m)		Jackson MS	poisoning a well
	Mahala Jackson (d)		Jackson MS	poisoning a well
1893
Nov	Mrs. Phil Evens (m)		Bardstown KY
	Evans (d)		Bardstown KY
	Evans (d)		Bardstown KY
4 Nov	Mary (Eliza) Motlow		Lynchburg VA	arson
9 Nov	Rilla Weaver		Clarendon AK
1894
6 March	unknown Negro woman		Pulaski AK
16 July	Marion Howard		Scottsville KY
24 July	Negro woman		Simpson Co MS	race prejudice
1895
20 March	Harriet Tally		Petersburg TN	arson
21 April	Mary Deane		Greenville AL	murder
	Alice Green		Greenville AL	murder
	Martha Green		Greenville AL	murder
1 July	Mollie Smith		Trigg County KY
20 July	Mrs. Abe Phillips (m)	unnamed child (1) Hannah Phillips (d)	Mant TX
23 July	Negro woman		Brenham TX
2 Aug	Mrs. James Mason	James Mason (h)	Dangerfield TX
*28 Aug	Negro woman		Simpson MS	miscegenation
26 Sept	Felicia Francis		New Orleans LA
11 Oct	Catherine Matthews		Baton Rouge LA	poisoning
2 Dec	Hannah Kearse	(Walker,m) Isom K. (s)	Colleton SC	stealing a bible
1896
*12 Jan	Charlotte Morris		Jefferson LA	miscegenation/living with white “husband”
1 Aug	Isadora Morely		Selma AL	murder
18 Nov	Mimm Collier		Steenston MS
1897
9 Feb	Negro woman		Carrolton MS	theft/arson
5 March	Otea Smith		Julietta FL	murder
12 May	Amanda Franks		Jefferson AL	murder
	Molly White		Jefferson AL	murder
1898
22 Feb	Dora Baker	(d,2) Frazier Baker(f)	Williamsburg SC	race prejudice
9 Nov	Rose Etheridge		Phoenix SC	murder
13 Nov	Eliza Goode		Greenwood SC	murder
1899 23 March	Willia Boyd		Silver City MS
1900
2 March	Mrs. Jim Cross (m)		Lowndes AL
	Cross (d)		Lowndes AL
7 July	Lizzie Pool		Hickory Plains AK	race prejudice
25 July	Anna Mabry		New Orleans LA	race prejudice
28 Aug	Negro woman	Negro man	Forrest City NC	theft of peaches
1901
5 March	Ballie Crutchfield		Rome TN	theft
20 March	Terry Bell		Terry MS
1 Aug	Betsey McCray (m)	Belfiield (s)	Carrolton MS	knowledge of murder
	Ida McCray (d)		Carrolton MS	knowledge of murder
4 Oct	Negro woman		Marshall TX	assault
1902
15 Feb	Bell Duly		Fulton KY
27 Dec	Mrs.Emma Wideman	Oliver Wideman	Troy SC	murder
1903
	Negro woman			murder of Mrs. Frank Matthews
8 June	Negro woman	Negro men (4)	Smith County MS	murder
24 June	Lamb Whittle		Concordia LA
*25 July	Jennie Steers		Beard Plantation, Shreveport LA	murder by poison
28 Oct	Jennie McCall		Hamilton FL	by mistake
1904
7 Feb	Holbert	Luther Holbert	Doddsville MS	burning barn
*14 June	Marie Thompson		Lebanon Junction KY	murder
30 August	unknown		Bates Union AK
1906
7 Nov	Meta Hicks		Mitchell GA	husband accused of murder
1907
20 March	Negro woman		Stamps AK
	Negro woman		Stamps AK
21 May	Mrs. Padgett (m)	Son	Tattnall GA	son accused of rape
	Padgett (d)		Tattnall GA	brother accused of rape
1908
3 Oct	Mrs. D. Walker (m)		Fulton KY	race hatred
	Walker (d)		Fulton KY	race hatred
1909
9 Feb	Robby Baskin		Houston MS	murder
30 July	Emile Antione		Grand Prairie LA	assault
1910
April 5	Laura Mitchell		Lonoke AK	murder
*25 Aug	Laura Porter		Monroe LA	disreputable house
1911
*25 May	Laura Nelson	L.D. (14)(s)	Okemah OK	murder
2 Sept	Hattie Bowman	Ed Christian	Greenville FL	theft
1912
**	Pettigrew (d)	Ben Pettigrew (f)	Savannah TN
**	Pettigrew (d)		Savannah TN
	Negro woman		Codele GA
*23 Jan	Belle Hathaway	John Moore Eugene HammingDusty Cruthfield	Hamilton GA	tenants of murdered man
11 Feb	Negro woman	Negro children (3)	Beaumont TX
13 Feb	Mary Jackson	George Saunders	Marshall TX
25 June	Ann Boston		Pinehurst GA	murder
1914
13 Mar**	Mrs. Joe Perry (m,w)	Joe Perry (h) SonChild	Henderson NC
*31 Mar	Marie Scott (17)		Muskogee OK	murder
28 May/June**	Jennie Collins		Shaw MS	aiding in escape
17 June	Paralee Collins (m)	Issac (s)	West Plains MO
*12 July	Rosa Richardson (27-35)		Providence/Santee SC	murder
25 Nov	Jane Sullivan	Fred Sullivan (h)	Byhalia MS	burning a barn
1915
15 Jan	Eula Charles	(Barber,d) Dan Barber (f)	Jasper County GA	parents accused of bootlegging
	Ella Charles	(Barber,d) Jesse Barber(b)	Jasper County GA	parents accused of bootlegging
May	Briley		Pescott AK
17 Aug	Hope Hull		AL
*8 Dec	Cordella Stevenson		Columbus MS
1916
19 Aug	Mary Dennis		Newberry FL	aiding in escape
	Stella Long		Newberry FL	aiding in escape
4 Oct**	Mary Conley		Arlington GA	complicity in murder
1917
1 March	Emma Hooper		Hammond LA	murder
1918
17 May	Mary Turner (pregnant)		Brooks Co GA	taught a lesson
4 June	Sarah Cabiness	unnamed children(2) Bessie Cabiness(d)Pete (s)Tenola Cabiness(d)Cute Cabiness (d)	Huntsville TX	threatening white man
4 Sept	Mrs. James Eyer		Marion GA
*21 Dec	Alma House (pregnant)	Andrew Clark	Shubuta MS	murder
1919
5 May	unknown Negro woman		Holmes MS	race prejudice
1920
2 Nov	unknown Negro woman		Ocoee FL	race prejudice
18 Nov	Minnie Ivory	Willie Ivory Will Perry	Douglass GA	murder
1921
9 April	Rachel Moore		Rankin MS	race prejudice
1922
25 June	Mercy Hall		Oklahoma City OK	strike activity
1923
5 Jan	Sarah Carrier		Rosewood FL	race prejudice
	Lesty Gordon		Rosewood FL	race prejudice
29 Sept	Negro woman		Pickens MS
31 Sept	Negro woman		Holmes MS	race prejudice
1924
23 June	Penny Westmoreland	Marcus Westmoreland	Spalding GA
19 July	—– Sheldon		Meridian MS
11 Sept	Sarah Williams		Shreveport LA
1925
*25 April	Annie Lowman (m)		Aiken SC	defending her daughter
1926
25 April	Lily Cobb		Birmingham AL
25 May	Eliza Bryant		Duplin NC	success
8 Oct	Bertha Lowman(d,s1)	Demon (b)	Aiken SC	lynched after acquitted of murder
11 Nov	Sally Brown	Clarence (c)	Houston TX
1928
25 Dec	Negro woman (1)		Eros LA	dispute w/ whites
	Negro woman (2)		Eros LA	dispute w/whites
1930
12 Feb	Laura Wood		Salisbury NC
5 July	Viola Dial (pregnant)		Narketta MS	race prejudice
6 July	Mrs. James Eyers		Markeeta MS	race prejudice
10 Sept	Holly White	Pigg Lockett	Scooba MS
1931
May	Mrs. Wise		Frankfort VA	resisting Klan
1946
*25 July	Dorothy Malcolm(w)	Roger Malcolm (h)	Monroe GA	able to identify mob members
	Mae Dorsey	George Dorsey (h)	Monroe GA	able to identify mob members
1956
*25 March	Angenora Spencer		Hyde NC	miscegenation
1957
18 Nov	Mrs. Frank Clay		Henderson NC	dispute

*Crystal Nicole Femister has a similar chart in the Appendix of her dissertation “Ladies and Lynching”: The Gendered Discourse of Mob Violence in the New South, 1880-1930. Having used overlapping sources accounts for similarities although there are differences in categories, variations of names, locations and some of the other content.

SOURCE

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LAURA NELSON

A week earlier, Laura tries to escape. She bites the jailor in the scuffle and he calls her wild and unruly. He recounts that as he choked her back into the makeshift women’s cell in the courthouse, Laura begged he kill her. (7)

The two negroes were taken west of town six miles to the Canadian river bridge in a negro settlement and were swung from the bridge. Both the woman and boy were gagged with tow sacks. The rope was half inch hemp, and the loops were made in the regular hangman’s knot. The woman’s arms were swinging at her side, untied, while about twenty feet away swung the boy with his clothes partly torn off and his hands tied with saddle string. The only marks on either body were that made by the ropes upon the necks. Gently swaying in the wind, the ghastly spectacle was discovered this morning by a negro boy taking his cow to water. (8)

The lynching came as a complete surprise to the sheriff’s forces and the people….and while the general sentiment was adverse to the method, it is generally thought that the negroes got what would have been due them under due process of law. (9)

The woman was very small of stature, very black, and about thirty-five years old, and vicious….the boy was about fourteen years old, slender and tall, yellow and ignorant. (9)

Janitor Frank Jacobs of the court house received a scare Sunday morning that he will remember for the rest of his life. He had business in the room in the county court house in which the female cell is located and entered the room before it was quite daylight. Not finding what he wanted he struck a match to look around, when he heard a noise in the female cell, and turning in that direction was almost paralyzed with fright to see standing in the cell door a negro woman clad in long white garments. He knew in an instant that the ghost of the Nelson woman had visited the cell from which she was taken, and as soon as he could move he started out of there. A few boxes, chairs etc., that got in his way were run over, and parties hearing the noise would have thought a half dozen mules were being driven down the court house stairs.

The apparition was the negro woman, Mable Brown, brought up from Weleetka Saturday evening and place in the cell without Mr. Jacobs knowing of her presence there. Hearing him moving around the woman got up to see what it was, and the ghostly robes were nothing more frightful than a long white night gown. (11)

“Grief and a haunting unreality permeate this photo. The corpse of Laura Nelson retains an indissoluble femininity despite the horror inflicted upon it. Specterlike, she seems to float – thistledown light and implausibly still. For many African Americans, Oklahoma was a destination of hope, where they could prosper without the laws in southern states that codified racism and repression. What was to be a promised land proved to be a great disillusionment. “District Judge Caruthers convened a grand jury in June 1911 to investigate the lynching of the Negro woman and her son. In his instructions to the jury, he said, “The people of the state have said by recently adopted constitutional provision that the race to which the unfortunate victims belonged should in large measure be divorced from participation in our political contests, because of their known racial inferiority and their dependent credulity, which very characteristic made them the mere tool of the designing and cunning. It is well known that I heartily concur in this constitutional provision of the people’s will. The more then does the duty devolve upon us of a superior race and of greater intelligence to protect this weaker race from unjustifiable and lawless attacks.” (12)

Laura Nelson. (The barefoot corpse of Laura Nelson. May 25, 1911, Okemah, Oklahoma. Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 3 1/2 x 5 1/2″ Etched in the negative:”copyright-1911-g.h.farnum, okemah. okla 2898.” Stamp on reverse, “unmailable.” Photographer: George H. Farnum, 1911.

This is the only known photo of a lynched black woman. Laura was murdered with her 14-year-old son Lawrence, after he was castrated by members of the mob, in Okemah, Oklahoma in 1911. She was raped by members of the mob, before she and her child were brutally murdered.

The lynching of Laura Nelson and her son, several dozen onlookers. May 25, 1911, Okemah, Oklahoma. Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 5 1/2 x 3 1/2″

Etched in the negative: “1911 copy right, g.h. farnum, okemah. okla\ 2897.”

The lynching of Lawrence W. Nelson, May 25, 1911 in Okemah, Oklahoma. Gelatin silver print. Real photo postcard. 3 1/2 x 5 1/2. Etched in the negative: “copyright-1911-g.h.farnum, okemah. okla 2894.” Photo by George H. Farnum. The image was published in 1911 as a postcard.

LINKS:

http://withoutsanctuary.org/

http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1979/2/79.02.04.x.html

http://tqnyc.org/NYC030395/DorotheaLange/postcards.htm

http://womhist.binghamton.edu/lynch/doc6.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAlynching.htm

http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/story?id=845713&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

http://www.gaypasg.org/gaypasg/PressClippings/2005/Jun/The%20Senate%20Apologizes,%20Mostly.htm

http://www.blackstate.com/senate-lynching.html

http://www.americablog.com/2005/06/senate-offices-intentionally-lying.html

http://www.observer.com/node/37453

http://www.michaelmoore.com/mustread/print.php?id=421

http://archive.salon.com/opinion/feature/2005/06/28/apology_for_lynching/index.html

http://landrieu.senate.gov/lynching/index.cfm

REFERENCES:

1. “Strange Fruit”, Abel Meerpol, 1939.

2. Anti-Lynching Crusaders, Documents 6, 7 and 8.

3. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, “1895 Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases”.

4. “Lynching, Federalism and the Intersecton of Race and Gender in the Progressive Era”, Yale Journal of Law and Feminism, by Barbara Holden-Smith.

5. 100 Years of Lynching”, by Ralph Ginsburg, Black Classic Press, 1996.

6. “Of These, One was a Woman: The Lynching of African-American Women, 1885-1946, by Marie Rose Johnson, 1998.

7. Various newspaper accounts. Thursday, May 25, 1911: The Okemah Ledger, Okemah, OK ‘Lynchers Avenge the Murder of Geo. Loney, The Nelson Woman and Her Boy are Taken from the County Jail by Unknown Parties and Swung from Bridge Across North Canadian’; The Independent Vol.7 No. 36 Okemah, Okfuskee County, OK ‘Woman and Boy Lynched, A Mob Enters the County Jail Last Night and Take two Negro Prisoners Whom They Hang from a Bridge’. Friday, May 26, 1911: The Daily Oklahoman, Oklahoma City, OK ‘Woman Lynched by Side of Son, Okfuskee County Mob Takes Double Revenge for Officer’s Death, Bridge is Gallows’; Tulsa World, Tulsa, Ok ‘Mother and Son are Lynched at Okeemah, jailor is surprised and bodies later found dangling from a bridge’.

8. Okemah Ledger May 25, 1911 ‘Lynchers Avenge the Murder of Geo. Loney. The Nelson woman and her boy are taken from the county jail by unknown parties and swung from bridge across North Canadian’

9. The Okemah Ledger, Okemah, OK Thursday, May 25, 1911 p.1

10. The Okemah Ledger, Okemah, OK Thursday, May 25, 1911 p.1

11. The Okemah Ledger Thursday, July 13, 1911 ‘Seen the Nelson Woman’s Ghost in Female Cell’

12. Journal E: Without Sanctuary – Lynching Photography in America”

13. Thirty Years of Lynching in the United States: 1889-1918, Greenwood Press Reprint, New Edition of 1919 Edition, (February 23, 1970)

14. “Stranger Fruit: The Lynching of Black Women – The Cases of Rosa Richardson and Marie Scott”, by Maria de Longoria (dissertation that opens in a pdf format).

15. Kara Lynch: “episode 3: Meet Me in Okemah“.

AUDIO/VIDEO CLIPS:

http://odeo.com/audio/157180/view

VIDEO OF PHILLIP DRAY LECTURE ON HIS BOOK, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America, taped February 4, 2003, at Boston University.

RELATED REFERENCES:

Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America by James Allen, Jon Lewis, Leon F. Litwack, and Hilton Als (Hardcover – Feb 1, 2000)



(48)

100 Years of Lynchings by Ralph Ginzburg (Paperback – Nov 22, 1996)

(11)

Lynching Photographs (Defining Moments in American Photography) by Dora Apel and Shawn Michelle Smith (Paperback – Jan 5, 2008)

(1)

At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America (Modern Library Paperbacks) by Philip Dray (Paperback – Jan 7, 2003)

(21)

The Other Reconstruction: Where Violence and Womanhood Meet in the Writings of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Angelina Weld Grimke, and Nella Larsen (Studies in African American History and Culture) by Ericka M Miller (Hardcover – Nov 1, 1999)

(2)

The Book of African American Women: 150 Crusaders, Creators, and Uplifters by Tonya Bolden (Paperback – Jan 2004)

(2)

Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America by Laura Wexler (Paperback – Dec. 30, 2003)

(11)

LAND OWNERSHIP MADE MANY BLACKS TARGETS

BOOK EXCERPT: “AT THE HANDS OF PERSONS UNKNOWN”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

IN REMEMBERANCE OF MARY TURNER, MAE MURRAY DORSEY AND DOROTHY MALCOLM:

REMEMBERING MARY TURNER

THE MARY TURNER PROJECT

MOORE’S FORD MEMORIAL COMMITTEE, INC.

AFRICAN AMERICAN HOLOCAUST

IMAGERY OF LYNCHING: BLACK MEN, WHITE WOMEN AND THE MOB

STRANGE FRUIT: PLAYS ON LYNCHING BY AMERICAN WOMEN

20 Comments

Filed under Uncategorized

August 10, 2007 · 10:27 PM

DUNBAR VILLAGE

I have been putting off posting my essay on this story for some time. I would sit down in front of my laptop and attempt to write my thoughts on this horrible crime, only to push away from the computer and compose myself, and promise myself that I would try again the next day. Only thing is, I would do the same thing the next day, and the next, and the next.

Finally, I told myself today I will speak to this tragic event; tragic in that the value of human life matters so very little to so many people. Tragic in that so few people know of this story. Tragic in that this story speaks of the heartlessness and inhumanity that so many people show towards their fellow human beings.

But first, here is the story of what happened to a Haitian mother and her young son on June 18, 2007:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19698132/

Dunbar Village Housing Projects is a public housing apartment complex in the North Tamarind area of West Palm Beach, Florida, which is adjacent to the neighborhoods of Pleasant City and Northwest and is in the northern part of the city. The complex is often called Dunbar and is known for its crime ridden streets and townhouses. According to The Palm Beach Post, prior to a woman being gang raped on June 18th, 2007, police were called to the housing complex almost two times a day. (Built in the late 1940s for West Palm Beach’s low-income black American citizens, Dunbar Village is one of the first housing projects in the state of Florida. It was named for the black American poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar.)

That this crime happened in this community with the mother and son screaming and crying for their lives while these “humans” attacked them brutally, speaks volumes about the coldness and deadness in these people who attacked this defenseless mother and her child:

“WEST PALM BEACH – Mother and son huddled together, battered and beaten, in the bathroom – sobbing, wondering why no one came to help.

Surely the neighbors had heard their screams. The walls are thin in the violence-plagued housing project.

For three hours, the two say, the 35-year-old Haitian immigrant was raped and sodomized by up to 10 masked teenagers as her 12-year-old son was beaten in another room.

Then, mother and son were reunited to endure the unspeakable: At gunpoint, the woman was forced to perform oral sex on the boy, she told a TV station.

Afterward, they were doused with household cleansers, perhaps in a haphazard attempt to scrub the crime scene. The solutions burned the boy’s eyes.”

No one came to the mother and child’s cry for help. No one called 911. No one did anything:

“The thugs then fled with a couple hundred dollars’ worth of cash, jewelry and cell phones.

In the TV interview, the mother described how she and her son sobbed in the bathroom, too shocked to move. Then, in the dark, they walked a mile to a hospital because they had no phone to call for help.

So far, three teenagers – ages 14, 15 and 16 – have been arrested.

Welcome to Dunbar Village, a place residents call hell.”

The reaction of some of the residents to this heinous crime was unfathomable:

“So a lady was raped. Big deal,” resident Paticiea Matlock said. “There’s too much other crime happening here.”

“Big deal.”

I guess humans destroying and annihilating each other is now so normal, that a mother and her innocent son can be subjected to vicious, savage and sadistic brutality. I guess, “Big deal”, if this woman who uttered those words ever needs for someone to come to her cry for help. I guess big deal that there are many people outside of this community who know nothing of this crime. I guess, “Big deal”, that the Reverends Al and Jesse have yet to speak out on this hateful crime. I guess, “Big deal” that it happened to a black woman and her son. I guess, “Big deal”, that it happened in a black neighborhood, afterall, they are just “animals” so who cares? I guess, “Big deal”, what can you expect of those who live below the poverty level? I guess, “Big deal”, all of them that live there have no morals nor are they respector of other human beings lives, what the hell, why not write them all off?

Big deal.

That this mother left Haiti in search of a better life, came to America only to end up being raped, beaten and sodomized, is the ultimate insult to her and her son. That she fled a country where destitute poverty, third-world conditions, corrupt government, lack of potable drinking water, sub-standard housing conditions, practically non-existent health care exists—-that she and her son were so hatefully abused when they came to America to escape a hard life in Haiti, only to experience this horrid crime of debasement and depravity is so heartbreaking.

“Dunbar Village was the only place the 35-year-old Haitian immigrant could afford on what money she got by selling Avon products or delivering phone books.

“Each day, she would shower, cook for her son, braid hair for her friends, and hope for relief from her chronic backaches. She was a university student in Haiti who came here and worked in a nursing home until she fell and hurt her back.

“She did not socialize with neighbors or buy the sin some of them sold.

“On Sundays, she made sure her son’s slacks were pressed, his tie knotted handsomely. She wore a bright smile and her best dress and drove two miles to the services in French and Creole at St. Ann Catholic Church.

“The single mom found the St. Ann congregation around 2000, after she and her son were granted green cards to relocate from Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, to live near her father in West Palm Beach.

“She usually arrived early and sat in the front row. Her son was her shadow. He sat with her, stood by her, listened to her conversations.

“She prayed. She read the liturgy. She sang in the choir.

“But she has not been back in three Sundays. And she has not returned to Dunbar Village since 3 a.m. June 19, when she walked a mile to the hospital in searing pain, her son holding her up.”

(http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/07/16/m1a_victim_0716.html)

Or what about this crime that occured less than a mile from Dunbar Village; a crime where a 14-year-old raped and robbed a 42-year-old woman?

(http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2007/07/28/m1a_teen_0728.html)

The perverse acts of these accused were violent and degenerate. People have to ask themselves what has happened to the minds and souls of these young men that raping, sodomizing and terrorizing a mother and her son was something that could be so cavalierly done, that these attackers cared so little for themselves, and therefore could not care about the humanity of another human being? That they committed these crimes and did not care whether or not they would be caught (one of the attackers left a used condom behind)?And what more horrific crimes did they have in mind to commit if the three who were caught would have been able to go on to commit more psychotic and damnable crimes? (The other 7 attackers remain at large.)
Many so-called black organizations have yet to speak out on this vicious crime, and what was done to the other woman in the second crime.

Rev. Sharpton can declare August 7, 2007 a “National Day of Shame”, over misogynistic rap lyrics. But, there is no day of shame response from him about what happened to this mother and her son. Where is the outcry from him?

Rev. Jackson can offer an unsolicited scholarship to the Duke rape accuser, but, where is he in offering a scholarship to this mother? She too is a student and not only is she in need of medical and psychological treatment, she also is in need of financial help for her school and for her not being able to return to work due to this trauma. Where is the outcry from him?

The N.A.A.C.P, which is still supposed to champion the cause of all black people, whether black American or Haitian. Where is the outcry from them?

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which is supposed to investigate heinous crimes committed against defenseless black people, where are they? Why have they not spoken out against this crime? Where is their outrage?

The National Council of Negro Women. The “organization of organizations” that was created to protect black women’s concerns, in the national as well as the international arena. The NCNW which was created by the great Mary McCloud Bethune in 1935. The organization founded to help black women realize their goals. Where is the outrage from the NCNW?

Where is NOW? The National Organization of Women. They jumped on the Duke rape case last year. So far nothing has been heard from them. Where is their outrage?

Presidential contender Senator Barack Obama, who is so busily championing the cause of Genarlow Wilson; Sen. Obama who feels that the crime of statutory rape did not occur in the Wilson case. Where is his outrage?

Where is the voice of Senator Hillary Clinton decrying the painful humiliating denigration that this defenseless woman and her son suffered in this crime? Where is her outrage?

Where is Senator John Edwards? Did he not speak of championing the causes of the poor, the downtrodden, the plight of society’s underclass? Where is his outrage?

Russell Simmons, the rap magnate who made much money off the backs of black women, is crying about the rights of dogs in the Michael Vick case? But, where is his voice in what has happened to this mother and her son? Where is his outrage?

I’ll tell you where everyone’s misplaced outrage is. It is that this black mother and her son do not have the right to be accorded humanity. The black woman victim in this crime is just another devalued black woman who has no right to live in so many people’s eyes. Not to mention that this crime does not fit all of the following:

It does not involve a white-beating-up-on-a black crime.

It does not involve a cop-beating-up-on-a-black crime.

The victim is Haitian, and definately not a “petite, blue-eyed, blonde-haired, upper-middle class PRETTY WHITE WOMAN.

Black women and children are slaughtered day in and day out, but practically little to no major coverage is given to them. Black women are raped, abused, tortured, murdered, and their dead bodies put into cardboard boxes, doused in gasoline, and then set on fire.

Black women have half their faces blown away by jealous former boyfriends and mostly only the local news will cover it.

Black women are disparaged in racist, sexist rap lyrics that promote the sexualized gendered racism against black women. Sexualized gendered racism that comes from the lips of black men who are plagued with self-hatred and demonic, vitriolic hatred of black women, hatred that puts money into the pockets of the white men who run the music industry that gets fat and rich off of the controlling images of black women.

Black women are degraded, assailed, denigrated and defiled constantly in America and very few people speak up; many people do not care about the safety and welfare of black women and black girls.

Open season was declared on black women over 400+ years ago, and there is no end nor let up to that war on us any where in sight.

Black women are the only ones who can and usually speak up for us, for we know that if we do not do it, no one else (save a few people) will.

Black women have always been the “slaves of slaves”, and the silence of the NCNW on this crime is deafening. It is one thing to not have some of the men of your race not speak up for you. It is another when one of the highest black women’s organizations in America does not speak out against this crime. It is shameful that the NCNW does not come to the aid of this woman and give her and her young son succor and comfort.

Black women are being savaged. The proverbial beat-down on black women is part of a long and brutal history of one form of attack after another.

And where are the high-profile black women “leaders” who should be speaking out on this crime? Can they not speak up for black women?

I for one will not wait on the Als, the Jesses, the NCNW, nor anyone else.

The unbrideled sanctioned violence against black women and girls must be stopped. And to remain silent about it and not speak up against it will not stop it. It will only escalate and tear to pieces everyone who dares step in its way. It must be confronted; it must be challenged by all, and not just by black women, for black women are the canary in the coalmine. What affects us, will eventually affect ALL women. To think that what only harms and destroys black women is the problem only of black women is wrong and foolish. The very survival of black women is imperiled. We are under seige. War has been declared against us. And the silence of the rest of America not addressing our casualties must be faced up to and spoken about and not run from. And the silence from major news sources, the lack of TV coverage, the silence of the community will not stop this out-of-control violence against black women. People are silent on the atrocities carried out against black women and girls, because, what the hey, they are only just black women and girls, who cares about their lives, their sanity, their safety? By ignoring the sufferings of black women and girls, we sow the seeds for our own destruction. As long as these crimes are being committed against black women and girls, many people do not care, and many people will not speak up for fear that their speaking up will make them “black women lovers”, to use a take on the old saying, “nigger lovers”. Well, this country, and this world, can stand to have many more black women lovers; this country and this world can stand to have more people who care enough to break the silence on the destruction that is going on against black women and girls.

If black women can take care of the white master’s children he had with the white woman, as well as take care of the children she had forced on her by the master suring slavery; if black women can take care of the poor whites who passed through her segregated community, if black women during the rabid mob rule of lynchings could take care of the children of white people; if black women can take care of and feed hungry whites during the Civil Rights Movement, while white people were murdering and destroying black men and women who attempted to exercise their rights as U.S. citizens, then white people can and should also care about what happens to black women and girls.

If black women can work in solidarity with Native Americans in the South, even while those same Native Americans of the Five Tribes kept black women in bondage; if black women could bear the children of Native American men while those same Native American men sold and bartered those children as if they were so much wheat, so much corn; if black women could show humanity towards Native American people while those people of the Five Tribes continued to return runaway black enslaves to their white masters, then so too should Native Americans care about what happens to black women and girls.

If black women can feed and give comfort to Latino people who lived in the South during segregation and not raise a hand in violence against Latinos; if black women can give love, kindness and loyalty to Latino men during segregation, then so too should Latinos care about what happens to black women and girls.

If black women can love, and bear the children of Chinese men during segregation; give their hearts and minds to Chinese men during segregation; if black women can watch those same Chinese men walk off and leave them, and the children they had with black women, because the white man drew a line on the ground and told Chinese men: “Choose us [white people], or choose them [black women], or else we will turn our backs on you and relegate you to the status of black people if you continue to seek solidarity with them”, and those same Chinese men who lived with those black women, who did not stand firm and say, “No, I will not leave this woman who gave me her love, her fidelity, her loyalty—-who bore my children through the pains of childbirth, I will stay with her.” If black women could watch those Chinese men walk off and leave them and their children to enter the arms of prejudiced whites and turn their backs on a race of women who have done them no harm, if black women can care for Asian people, then they too should care about what happens to black women and girls.

If black women can stand by the side of the black man during slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow segregation, risk lynching speaking up in the defense of black men and boys, take all the brunt of white society’s anger and rage when black men are accused of heinous crimes, if black women can still stand firm against any and all who defame and attempt to annihilate black men, then so too should black men care about what happens to black women and girls.

EVERYONE SHOULD CARE AND GIVE A DAMN ABOUT WHAT HAPPENS TO BLACK WOMEN AND GIRLS.

And their silence in standing by and watching this continued age-old war that is destroying black women and girls is the height of utter disregard.

Silence equals complicity.

Audre Lorde spoke about the tyranny of silence and how it leaves devastation in its wake:

“I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood.

“In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what have I ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed could have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or had only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

“I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself.

“My silences had not protected me.

“Your silence will not protect you.”

We can’t keep waiting to speak up in defense of black women and girls. We can’t keep waiting on someone else to speak up. So many missed opportunities, so many missed chances to do right. We all let those chances to make a difference pass us by. Chances many of us do not get again. We must not fret and worry about what someone else may think of what we say in defense of someone, anyone who has a different color, a different race, a different gender, a different nationality, a different socio-economical station in life. We risk living lives of paralysis if we sit around fearing what others may think of us when we speak up for and challenge the wrongs that daily go unacknowledged; wrongs that destroy so many lives.

The silence in not speaking up must cease.

The concern and caring that black women and children so desparately need is the contact that not only will help them, it will also help those who reach out to protect black women and children not just because they are black but because they are our fellow human beings who deserve just as much right to live lives of safety just as much as anyone else. The contact that other people make with black women in America, the contact that other Americans will need to look past the outer differences, and instead to acknowledge the inner humanity of all black women and children, will be the bridge that must be crossed to accept that black women and children should no longer have to suffer from cruelties and degradations other than just because they are black.

Crossing this bridge of outer differences, this bridge of indifference, this callousness of disregarding another human’s suffering will give strength to those who look at black women and children as what they are—members of the human race, not entities who are only worthy of contempt and disrespect.

There is a war going on in the lives of many black women and girls, and many people do not care and are beyond oblivious to it.

But, make no mistake, black women and girls are fighting a war for their very survival.

And it is time that ALL Americans cared enough to give a damn about what happens to black women and girls.

[A fund has been established for the young mother and her son.

Checks can be made payable to the Dunbar Village Victim Assistance Fund-St. Ann. They can be dropped off at any Wachovia branch or mailed to: St. Ann Catholic Church, 310 N. Olive Ave., West Palm Beach, FL 33401. The church’s phone number is (561) 832-3757.]

_______________________________________________________________________________

LINKS:

http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/local_news/special_reports/dunbar_village/index.html

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