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Amit, I think I understand what you are saying. I think, though, that the people who need the statistical piece are, quite frankly, looking for ways tAmit, I think I understand what you are saying. I think, though, that the people who need the statistical piece are, quite frankly, looking for ways to disengage and undermine the author's points. ...more (less)

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Amit, I think I understand what you are saying. I think, though, that the people who need the statistical piece are, quite frankly, looking for ways tAmit, I think I understand what you are saying. I think, though, that the people who need the statistical piece are, quite frankly, looking for ways to disengage and undermine the author's points.

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"It's just too fucking much to always have to be angry and alert. To always have to be ready and willing to challenge whiteness. To always have a perfectly pithy tweet or a thousand-word screed ready in response to the next Trayvon Martin, the newest Sandra Bland, and the latest Eric Garner, and to feel all the same feelings again. And again. And again. I just wanted a fucking break."

"I was Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful. Pittsburgh Young, Black, and Successful meant Friday evenings downstairs at Savoy in the Strip District, and perhaps a table upstairs if it was your birthday. It meant Alpha and Que boat rides, NEED Scholarship dinners, and Ronald H. Brown Leadership Awards galas. It meant a stint on the Urban League Young Professionals executive board. It meant brunches at the LeMont on Mother's Day and the Grand Concourse when you wanted to stunt. It meant frequent pictures in the Post-Gazette and the City Paper"

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"It's just too fucking much to always have to be angry and alert. To always have to be ready and willing to challenge whiteness. To always have a perfectly pithy tweet or a thousand-word screed ready in response to the next Trayvon Martin, the newest Sandra Bland, and the latest Eric Garner, and to feel all the same feelings again.

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15. Real American by Julie Lythcott-Haims
read by the author
published: 2017
format: 6:39 overdrive audiobook (~184 Pages, 288 pages on hardcover)
acquired: Library
listened: Mar 19-26
rating: 3½

I like this more now then when I first finished. First of all Lythcott-Haims writes well and is excellent reader. This was easy to listen to because of the nice presentation. And second because I'm thinking about it more and when I think about it a lot things come up.

Lythcott-Haims is a mixed-race American who...more

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15. Real American by Julie Lythcott-Haims read by the author published: 2017 format: 6:39 overdrive audiobook (~184 Pages, 288 pages on hardcover) acquired: Library listened: Mar 19-26 rating: 3½ I like this more now then when I first finished. First of all Lythcott-Haims writes well and is excellent reader.

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No. It explains history, injustice, value, seemingly fairly. If you're looking to find fault, you'll find it, but there is so much factual education, No. It explains history, injustice, value, seemingly fairly. If you're looking to find fault, you'll find it, but there is so much factual education, explained in a way that's understandable by nearly everyone. ...more (less)

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No. It explains history, injustice, value, seemingly fairly. If you're looking to find fault, you'll find it, but there is so much factual education, No. It explains history, injustice, value, seemingly fairly. If you're looking to find fault, you'll find it, but there is so much factual education, explained in a way that's understandable by nearly everyone.

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It's a painful subject, not to be casually approached, and I'm not sure an "every person" group will have the appetite or the stomach for the appallinIt's a painful subject, not to be casually approached, and I'm not sure an "every person" group will have the appetite or the stomach for the appalling history of racism Ms. Anderson recounts with passion, clarity and (from what I am able to tell), sound scholarship. If you live n the "red" South, as I do, where "white rage" is still alive and well, unfortunately, and the majority of white folks I know think Trump is the second coming, I recommend you first read this book yourself and then make an informed decision as to whether you want to tackle this topic with people who may or may not remain your friends when it's over. Since you posed this question 8 months ago, and I'm a tad "late to the dance" in responding, I'd be interested in whether you and your reading group read or tried to read the book and what the consensus was when you finished. ...more (less)

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It's a painful subject, not to be casually approached, and I'm not sure an "every person" group will have the appetite or the stomach for the appallinIt's a painful subject, not to be casually approached, and I'm not sure an "every person" group will have the appetite or the stomach for the appalling history of racism Ms. Anderson recounts with passion, clarity and (from what I am able to tell), sound scholarship.

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Every educator, whether you teach BIPOC students or not, needs to read this book. I'd actually recommend owning it so you can reread it every time you need to check your privilege or lend it to someone who seriously needs to.

One of the criticisms of a book with "Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom" in its title is that Love doesn't necessarily offer real teaching/pedagogical practices for educators. I'd argue otherwise. You'll quickly discover in this book that abolition...more

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Every educator, whether you teach BIPOC students or not, needs to read this book. I'd actually recommend owning it so you can reread it every time you need to check your privilege or lend it to someone who seriously needs to.

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"If there's a place for tolerance in racial healing, perhaps it has to do with tolerating my own feelings of discomfort that arise when a person, of any color, expresses emotion not welcome in the culture of niceness. It also has to do with tolerating my own feelings of shame, humiliation, regret, anger, and fear so I can engage, not run. For me, tolerance is not about others, it's about accepting my own uncomfortable emotions as I adjust to a changing view of myself as imperfect and vulnerable. As human."

"The story emerging for me, however, tells a tale of black and brown people being held down so long that white folks have come to believe they got there on their own. The removal of legal barriers that once separated the races has done little to change the distorted belief system that lives on in the hearts and minds of millions of individuals. At this point, the only thing needed for racism to continue is for good people to do nothing."

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"If there's a place for tolerance in racial healing, perhaps it has to do with tolerating my own feelings of discomfort that arise when a person, of any color, expresses emotion not welcome in the culture of niceness. It also has to do with tolerating my own feelings of shame, humiliation, regret, anger, and fear so I can engage, not run.

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"A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups."

"Slavery was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people. It was an American innovation, an American institution created by and for the benefit of the elites of the dominant caste and enforced by poorer members of the dominant caste who tied their lot to the caste system rather than to their consciences."

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"A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups." "Slavery was not merely an unfortunate thing that happened to black people.

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عمران ابن مصر

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Begin Again book. Read 18 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights mov...

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14 wins & 48 nominations. See more awards "

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:

Storyline

Jimmie Fails IV, a black man, is a third generation San Franciscan. Having been pushed out by circumstances like many others, Jimmie, who works a low paying job as a nurse in a seniors' care facility, returned to San Francisco three years ago and has been living in his best friend Montgomery Allen's house that he shares with his blind grandfather, Jimmie who sleeps on the floor in Mont's already cramped bedroom. Despite the house, Mont's situation is not much better than Jimmie's, Mont who works at a supermarket fish counter while he sketches and writes a play on the side. Other black people around him who are showing their anger in also being disenfranchised from San Francisco life are the soapbox preacher who Jimmie and Mont often watch as they wait for the bus, and a group of young black men who hang outside of Mont's house. All of Jimmie's family, who he rarely sees, are also disenfranchised from that San Francisco life in one way or another: his estranged father lives in an SRO; ... Written by Huggo

Taglines:

Fight for your land. Fight for your home.

Did You Know?

Goofs

When Jimmie and Mont first visit the house Jimmie says that the railings are Periwinkle not black> Periwinkle is a light blue/violet, not anything close to black. See more "

Quotes

Wanda Fails : You were telling your truth Jayboe, you were just lying to do it.
See more "

Soundtracks

Let's Do Somethin' Smooth
Performed by London
Written by John Costello, David Hilker, Danny Moore and William L. Thompson
Courtesy of Fervor Records
See more "

User Reviews

Details

Release Date:

7 June 2019 (USA)

Also Known As:

The Last Black Man in San Francisco

Box Office

Opening Weekend USA:

$235,272, 9 June 2019

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$4,607,017

Company Credits

Technical Specs

See full technical specs "

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The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) - IMDb

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14 wins & 48 nominations. See more awards " Cast overview, first billed only: Jimmie Fails IV, a black man, is a third generation San Franciscan.

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7 wins & 20 nominations. See more awards "

Cast

Cast overview, first billed only:

Storyline

Collin (Daveed Diggs) must make it through his final three days of probation for a chance at a new beginning. He and his troublemaking childhood best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal), work as movers and are forced to watch their old neighborhood become a trendy spot in the rapidly gentrifying Bay Area. When a life-altering event causes Collin to miss his mandatory curfew, the two men struggle to maintain their friendship as the changing social landscape exposes their differences. Explores the intersection of race and class set against the backdrop of Oakland.

Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated R for language throughout, some brutal violence, sexual references and drug use | See all certifications "

Did You Know?

Trivia

When Patrick encourages Miles and Colin to stare into each other's eyes, Miles demurs by comparing their relationship to Calvin & Hobbes. Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs previously portrayed Calvin & Hobbes in a series of live-action videos called "Hobbes & Me," which were posted to Casal's YouTube channel. See more "

Quotes

: You are a convicted felon, Mr. Hoskins. You are now that until proven otherwise. Prove otherwise at all times.
See more "

Crazy Credits

AND TO ALL THE BAY AREA LANGUAGE ORIGINATORS, RAPPERS, POETS, HUSTLERS, PYMPS, PATNAS, MAINS, SIDES, OGS, DOPE FIENDS, BUYERS, SUPPLIERS, MOVERS, SHAKERS, HIPPIES, PARKIES, SQUARES, MARKS, NOODLES, J-CATS, CUTTIES, CUZOS, BRUH BRUHS, LIL BRUHS, BIG BRUHS, UNCLES, BIG HOMIES, AUNTIES, CITAS, GRAND CITAS, MOMMAS, CAPTAIN SAVE A HOES, RIDE OR DIES, DAY 1S, OLD HEADS, YOUNG BLOODS, BOPS, BEEZIES, BABAS, UMIS, KINFOLK, MACS, ETC. - GAME RECOGNIZES GAME See more "

Soundtracks

Talk to Me
Written by Anthony Hamilton & Kelvin Wooten
Performed by Anthony Hamilton
Published by Ola's Boy Music & SteyGrean Music
Courtesy of Anthony C. Hamilton LLC
See more "

User Reviews

Details

Release Date:

27 July 2018 (USA)

Box Office

Opening Weekend USA:

$338,999, 22 July 2018

Cumulative Worldwide Gross:

$5,006,989

Company Credits

Technical Specs

See full technical specs "

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7 wins & 20 nominations. See more awards " Cast overview, first billed only: Collin (Daveed Diggs) must make it through his final three days of probation for a chance at a new beginning. He and his troublemaking childhood best friend, Miles (Rafael Casal), work as movers and are forced to watch their old neighborhood become a trendy spot in the rapidly gentrifying Bay Area.

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The people doing the least can be found in every viral video clip of a white person hysterically refusing to wear a mask at Trader Joe's. These people are unhinged, dangerous and just plain goofy, willing to die (and kill) overJicama Wraps and Kale Gnocchi. And the people doing the most? Well, the most happens anytime a white person encounters a Black person who writes about race - or just a Black person who just happens to be Black - and the Serious Conversation About Racism (SCAR) must ensue. This isn't a new phenomenon. I've been SCARed before in the grocery store express aisle, between pickup hoop games at the gym, while getting a colonoscopy, and at least 82 percent of the unsolicited emails I get are drive-by SCARings. But now America feels like a deleted scene from " Get Out. " Or better yet, " The Sixth Sense." But instead of seeing dead people, white people see us as walking, talking, antiracist book lists.

There's no better example of the absolute most than the recent ABC News feature on Ernest Skelton. Mr. Skelton, an appliance technician, was just doing his job when the white woman whose house he was working on grilled him about the plight of blacks in America. He shared that racism is, um, bad. The woman, Caroline Brock, wrote a post about their conversation on Facebook, and it went viral. Local news stations called, and they eventually appeared on "Nightline" as an example of what happens when America allows itself to "heal from the heart." But all I can think about is this man trying to fix a sink while taking a random pop quiz about redlining.

I guess I understand the compulsion to find somewhere to engage this national conversation, even if that space is shoehorned. It feels sometimes like double dutch, as if white people are waiting on the sidewalk for a cue to jump in. And today's best seller lists are stocked with guidebooks for navigating this terrain. Two of the most popular picks - "How to Be an Antiracist" and "So You Want to Talk About Race" - are by my friends. But I doubt either author wishes to be SCAR-bombed at Jiffy Lube.

The white people who do this don't realize (or maybe just don't give a damn) that we're on different timelines. You learned yesterday what white privilege means? Great! Welcome to 1962. This, however, doesn't mean I need to engage you about it today. Or tomorrow. Or ever. And most important, maybe I'm out walking, shopping or playing with my children, or out just, I don't know, staring at a fire hydrant because I want to give myself a break from writing about, from speaking about, from thinking about and from raging about racism, and you're asking me to work for you for free. And that's what it is: work. Free labor. An absolution device for your conscience, provided by me, shipped for free. There's nothing inherently valuable for me out of that exchange. I don't have a bucket list. But if I did, a 17-minute conversation about lynching, while in line for ice cream, wouldn't be on it.

And, well, how do I put this delicately? I've never met him before, so perhaps I'm being presumptuous. But I doubt the Road Runner, after a day of outrunning, outscheming and outlasting Wile E. Coyote, wishes to come home and explain coyote supremacy to the liberal coyotes who live in his neighborhood.

I recently grew desperate enough to buy one of those portable driveway basketball hoops, despite not owning or having reasonable access to a driveway. For two weeks it sat unassembled in my garage. Each time I saw it, I almost persuaded myself to put it together, but the lack of anywhere to set it up dampened my motivation. And then, I was approached during my evening walk by a woman who bought my book ("Thanks!"), and she asked if I saw the email she sent me about microaggressions.

The hoop was assembled that weekend. Still don't know where to put it. But I will find somewhere.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some . And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | You Want to Talk About Racism? Pay Me

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The people doing the least can be found in every viral video clip of a white person hysterically refusing to wear a mask at Trader Joe's. These people are unhinged, dangerous and just plain goofy, willing to die (and kill) overJicama Wraps and Kale Gnocchi. And the people doing the most?

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Mike Baker, Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, Manny Fernandez and Michael LaForgiaJune 28, 2020

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Three Words. 70 Cases. The Tragic History of ‘I Can’t Breathe.’ (Published 2020)

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The deaths of Eric Garner in New York and George Floyd in Minnesota created national outrage over the use of deadly police restraints. There were many others you didn’t hear about.

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From the Magazine: ‘It Is Time for Reparations’ (Published 2020)

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Nikole Hannah-Jones explains the history of economic injustice and argues that if black lives are to truly matter in America, the nation must finally pay its debts.

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Credit... Photo illustration by Chris Burnett

Feature

Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries.

Credit... Photo illustration by Chris Burnett

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We saw a man face down on the pavement, pinned beneath a car, and above him another man, a man in uniform, his skin lighter than the man on the ground, and the lighter man was bearing down on the darker man, his knee boring into the neck of the darker man, the lighter man's hands at his sides, in his pockets - could it be that his hands were so nonchalantly in his pockets? - such was the ease and casual calm, the confidence of embedded entitlement with which he was able to lord over the darker man.

We heard the man on the ground pleading with the man above him, saw the terror in his face, heard his gasps for air, heard the anguished cries of an unseen chorus, begging the lighter man to stop. But the lighter man, the dominant man, looked straight at the bystanders, into the camera, and thus at all of us around the world who would later bear witness and, instead of heeding the cries of the chorus, pressed his knee deeper into the darker man's neck as was the perceived right granted him in the hierarchy. The man on the ground went silent, drained of breath. A clear liquid crept down the pavement. We saw a man die before our very eyes.

What we did not see, not immediately anyway, was the invisible scaffolding, a caste system with ancient rules and assumptions that made such a horror possible, that held each actor in that scene in its grip. Off camera, two other men in uniform, who looked like the lighter man, were holding down the darker man from the other side of the police car as dusk approached in Minneapolis. Yet another man in uniform, of Asian descent and thus not in the dominant caste, stood near, watching, immobilized, it seemed, at a remove from his own humanity and potential common cause, as the darker man slipped out of consciousness. We soon learned that the man on the ground, George Floyd, had been accused of trying to pass a counterfeit $20 bill, and, like uncountable Black men over the centuries, lost his life over what might have been a mere citation for people in the dominant caste.
[Listen to Sway: A Black and Asian Female V.P. Doesn't Mean We've Escaped Caste.]
In the weeks leading up to the country's commemoration of its founding, protests and uprisings took hold in cities in every state, in Bakersfield, Charleston, Buffalo, Poughkeepsie, Wichita, Boise, Sioux Falls. Protesters tore down a statue of Christopher Columbus in St. Paul, Minn. They toppled a statue of Jefferson Davis in Richmond, Va. And the country was forced to contemplate the observation of Frederick Douglass a century and a half before: "What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?" What, we might ask in our day, is freedom to those still denied it as their country celebrates its own?

The inspector trained his infrared lens onto a misshapen bow in the ceiling, an invisible beam of light searching the layers of lath to test what the eye could not see. This house was built generations ago, and I had noticed the slightest welt in a corner of plaster in a spare bedroom and chalked it up to idiosyncrasy. Over time, the welt in the ceiling became a wave that widened and bulged despite the new roof. It had been building beyond perception for years. An old house is its own kind of devotional, a dowager aunt with a story to be coaxed out of her, a mystery, a series of interlocking puzzles awaiting solution. Why is this soffit tucked into the southeast corner of an eave? What is behind this discolored patch of brick? With an old house, the work is never done, and you don't expect it to be.

America is an old house. We can never declare the work over. Wind, flood, drought and human upheavals batter a structure that is already fighting whatever flaws were left unattended in the original foundation. When you live in an old house, you may not want to go into the basement after a storm to see what the rains have wrought. Choose not to look, however, at your own peril. The owner of an old house knows that whatever you are ignoring will never go away. Whatever is lurking will fester whether you choose to look or not. Ignorance is no protection from the consequences of inaction. Whatever you are wishing away will gnaw at you until you gather the courage to face what you would rather not see.

We in this country are like homeowners who inherited a house on a piece of land that is beautiful on the outside but whose soil is unstable loam and rock, heaving and contracting over generations, cracks patched but the deeper ruptures waved away for decades, centuries even. Many people may rightly say: "I had nothing to do with how this all started. I have nothing to do with the sins of the past. My ancestors never attacked Indigenous people, never owned slaves." And yes. Not one of us was here when this house was built. Our immediate ancestors may have had nothing to do with it, but here we are, the current occupants of a property with stress cracks and bowed walls and fissures in the foundation. We are the heirs to whatever is right or wrong with it. We did not erect the uneven pillars or joists, but they are ours to deal with now.

And any further deterioration is, in fact, on our hands.

Unaddressed, the ruptures and diagonal cracks will not fix themselves. The toxins will not go away but rather will spread, leach and mutate, as they already have. When people live in an old house, they come to adjust to the idiosyncrasies and outright dangers skulking in an old structure. They put buckets under a wet ceiling, prop up groaning floors, learn to step over that rotting wood tread in the staircase. The awkward becomes acceptable, and the unacceptable becomes merely inconvenient. Live with it long enough, and the unthinkable becomes normal. Exposed over the generations, we learn to believe that the incomprehensible is the way that life is supposed to be.

In my own house, the inspector was facing the mystery of the misshapen ceiling, and so he first held a sensor to the surface to detect if it was damp. The reading inconclusive, he then pulled out the infrared camera to take a kind of X-ray of whatever was going on, the idea being that you cannot fix a problem until and unless you can see it. He could now see past the plaster, beyond what had been wallpapered or painted over, as we now are called upon to do in the house we all live in, to examine a structure built long ago.

Like other old houses, America has an unseen skeleton: its caste system, which is as central to its operation as are the studs and joists that we cannot see in the physical buildings we call home. Caste is the infrastructure of our divisions. It is the architecture of human hierarchy, the subconscious code of instructions for maintaining, in our case, a 400-year-old social order. Looking at caste is like holding the country's X-ray up to the light.

Image

Credit... Photo illustration by Chris Burnett

[The 1619 project: reframing the legacy of slavery in the United States.]
A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste, whose forebears designed it. A caste system uses rigid, often arbitrary boundaries to keep the ranks apart, distinct from one another and in their assigned places.

Throughout human history, three caste systems have stood out. The lingering, millenniums-long caste system of India. The tragically accelerated, chilling and officially vanquished caste system of Nazi Germany. And the shape-shifting, unspoken, race-based caste pyramid in the United States. Each version relied on stigmatizing those deemed inferior to justify the dehumanization necessary to keep the lowest-ranked people at the bottom and to rationalize the protocols of enforcement. A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.

As we go about our daily lives, caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance. The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality. It is about power - which groups have it and which do not. It is about resources - which groups are seen as worthy of them and which are not, who gets to acquire and control them and who does not. It is about respect, authority and assumptions of competence - who is accorded these and who is not.

As a means of assigning value to entire swaths of humankind, caste guides each of us often beyond the reaches of our awareness. It embeds into our bones an unconscious ranking of human characteristics and sets forth the rules, expectations and stereotypes that have been used to justify brutalities against entire groups within our species. In the American caste system, the signal of rank is what we call race, the division of humans on the basis of their appearance. In America, race is the primary tool and the visible decoy for caste.

Race does the heavy lifting for a caste system that demands a means of human division. If we have been trained to see humans in the language of race, then caste is the underlying grammar that we encode as children, as when learning our mother tongue. Caste, like grammar, becomes an invisible guide not only of how we speak but also of how we process information, the autonomic calculations that figure into a sentence without our having to think about it.

Many of us have never taken a class in grammar, yet we know in our bones that a transitive verb takes an object, that a subject needs a predicate; we know without thinking the difference between third-person singular and third-person plural. We may mention "race," referring to people as Black or white or Latino or Asian or Indigenous, when what lies beneath each label is centuries of history and assigning of assumptions and values to physical features in a structure of human hierarchy.

What people look like, or rather, the race they have been assigned or are perceived to belong to, is the visible cue to their caste. It is the historic flashcard to the public of how they are to be treated, where they are expected to live, what kinds of positions they are expected to hold, whether they belong in this section of town or that seat in a boardroom, whether they should be expected to speak with authority on this or that subject, whether they will be administered pain relief in a hospital, whether they are more or less likely to survive childbirth in the most advanced nation in the world, whether they may be shot by the authorities with impunity.

We know that the letters of the alphabet are neutral and meaningless until they are combined to make a word, which itself has no significance until it is inserted into a sentence and interpreted by those who speak or hear it. In the same way that "black" and "white" were applied to people who were literally neither, but rather gradations of brown and beige and ivory, the caste system sets people at poles from one another and attaches meaning to the extremes, and to the gradations in between, and then reinforces those meanings, replicates them in the roles each caste was and is assigned and permitted or required to perform.

And yet, in recent decades, we have learned from the human genome that all human beings are 99.9 percent the same. "Race is a social concept, not a scientific one," said J. Craig Venter, the genomics expert who ran Celera Genomics when the initial sequencing was completed in 2000. "We all evolved in the last 100,000 years from the small number of tribes that migrated out of Africa and colonized the world." Which means that an entire racial caste system, the catalyst of hatreds and civil war, was built on what the anthropologist Ashley Montagu called "an arbitrary and superficial selection of traits," derived from a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of genes that make up a human being. "The idea of race," Montagu wrote, "was, in fact, the deliberate creation of an exploiting class seeking to maintain and defend its privileges against what was profitably regarded as an inferior social caste."

Caste and race are neither synonymous nor mutually exclusive. They can and do coexist in the same culture and serve to reinforce each other. Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste. Caste is the bones, race the skin. Race is what we can see, the physical traits that have been given arbitrary meaning and become shorthand for who a person is. Caste is the powerful infrastructure that holds each group in its place. Its very invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. And though it may move in and out of consciousness, though it may flare and reassert itself in times of upheaval and recede in times of relative calm, it is an ever-present through line in the country's operation.

Caste is rigid and deep; race is fluid and superficial, subject to periodic redefinition to meet the needs of the dominant caste in what is now the United States. While the requirements to qualify as white have changed over the centuries, the fact of a dominant caste has remained constant from its inception - whoever fit the definition of white, at whatever point in history, was granted the legal rights and privileges of the dominant caste. Perhaps more critical and tragic, at the other end of the ladder, the subordinated caste, too, has been fixed from the beginning as the psychological floor beneath which all other castes cannot fall.

Thus we are all born into a silent war game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing. The side to which we are assigned in the American system of categorizing people is proclaimed by the team uniform that each caste wears, signaling our presumed worth and potential. That any of us manages to create abiding connections across these manufactured divisions is a testament to the beauty of the human spirit.

In the early winter of 1959, after leading the Montgomery bus boycott that arose from the arrest of Rosa Parks and before the trials and triumphs to come, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his wife, Coretta, landed in India, in the city then known as Bombay, to visit the land of Mohandas K. Gandhi, the father of nonviolent protest. They were covered in garlands upon arrival, and King told reporters, "To other countries, I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim."

He had long dreamed of going to India, and they stayed for more than a month, welcomed by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. King wanted to see for himself the place whose fight for freedom from British rule had inspired his fight for justice in America. He wanted to see the so-called untouchables, the lowest caste in the ancient Indian caste system, whom he had read of and had sympathy for, and who were left behind after India gained its independence the decade before.

He discovered that people in India had been following the trials of his own oppressed people in America, knew of the bus boycott he led. Wherever he went, people on the streets of Bombay and Delhi crowded around him for an autograph.

One afternoon, King and his wife journeyed to the southern tip of the country, to the city then known as Trivandrum in the state of Kerala, and visited with high school students whose families had been untouchables. The principal made the introduction.

"Young people," he said, "I would like to present to you a fellow untouchable from the United States of America."

King was floored. He had not expected that word to be applied to him. He was, in fact, put off by it at first. He had flown in from another continent, had dined with the prime minister. He did not see the connection, did not see what the Indian caste system had to do directly with him, did not immediately see why the lowest-caste people in India would view him, an American Negro and a distinguished visitor, as low-caste like themselves, see him as one of them.

"For a moment," he would later recall, "I was a bit shocked and peeved that I would be referred to as an untouchable."

Then he began to think about the reality of the lives of the people he was fighting for - 20 million people, consigned to the lowest rank in America for centuries, "still smothering in an airtight cage of poverty," quarantined in isolated ghettos, exiled in their own country.

And he said to himself, "Yes, I am an untouchable, and every Negro in the United States of America is an untouchable." In that moment, he realized that the Land of the Free had imposed a caste system not unlike the caste system of India and that he had lived under that system all his life. It was what lay beneath the forces he was fighting in America. He would later describe this awakening at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta in 1965 during his sermon for the Fourth of July.

"Caste" is not a word often applied to the United States. It is considered the language of India or feudal Europe. But some anthropologists and scholars of race in America have made use of the word for decades. Before the modern era, one of the earliest Americans to take up the idea of caste was the antebellum abolitionist and U.S. senator Charles Sumner as he fought against segregation in the North. "The separation of children in the Public Schools of Boston, on account of color or race," he wrote, "is in the nature of Caste, and on this account is a violation of Equality." He quoted a native of India: "Caste makes distinctions among creatures where God has made none."

What are the origins and workings of the hierarchy that intrudes upon the daily life and life chances of every American? That had intruded upon my own life with disturbing regularity and consequences? I wanted to understand the origins and evolution of classifying and elevating one group of people over another and the consequences of doing so to the presumed beneficiaries and to those targeted as beneath them. Moving about the world as a living, breathing caste experiment myself, I wanted to understand the hierarchies that I and many millions of others have had to navigate to pursue our work and dreams.

Once awakened to the underlying power of caste, we can better see the tool of race for what it is. What we face in our current day is not the classical racism of our ancestors' era but a mutation of the software that adjusts to the updated needs of the operating system. In the half century since civil rights protests forced the United States to make state-sanctioned discrimination illegal, what Americans consider to be racism has shifted, and now the word is one of the most contentious and misunderstood in American culture. For many in the dominant caste, the word is radioactive - resented, feared, denied, lobbed back toward anyone who dares to suggest it. Resistance to the word often derails any discussion of the underlying behavior it is meant to describe, thus eroding it of meaning.

Social scientists often define racism as the combination of racial bias and systemic power, seeing racism, like sexism, as primarily the action of people or systems with personal or group power over another person or group with less power, as men have power over women, white people over people of color and the dominant over the subordinate.

But over time, racism has often been reduced to a feeling, a character flaw, conflated with prejudice, connected to whether one is a good person or not. It has come to mean overt and declared hatred of a person or group because of the race ascribed to them, a perspective few would ever own up to. While people will admit to or call out sexism or xenophobia or homophobia, people may immediately deflect accusations of racism, saying they don't have "a racist bone in their body" or are the "least racist person you could ever meet," that they "don't see color," that their "best friend is Black," and they may have even convinced themselves on a conscious level of these things.

What does racism mean in an era when even extremists won't admit to it? What is the litmus test for racism? Who is racist in a society where someone can refuse to rent to people of color, arrest brown immigrants en masse or display a Confederate flag but not be "certified" as a racist unless he or she confesses to it or is caught using derogatory signage or slurs? The instinctive desire to reject the very idea of current discrimination on the basis of a chemical compound in the skin is an unconscious admission of the absurdity of race as a concept.

With no universally agreed-upon definition, we might see racism as a continuum rather than an absolute. We might release ourselves of the purity test of whether someone is or is not racist and exchange that mind-set for one that sees people as existing on a scale based on the toxins they have absorbed from the polluted and inescapable air of social instruction we receive from childhood.

Caste, on the other hand, predates the notion of race and has survived the era of formal state-sponsored racism long officially practiced in the mainstream. The modern-day version of easily deniable racism may be able to cloak the invisible structure that created and maintains hierarchy and inequality. But caste does not allow us to ignore structure. Caste is structure. Caste is ranking. Caste is the boundaries that reinforce the fixed assignments based upon what people look like. Caste is a living, breathing entity. It is like a corporation that seeks to sustain itself at all costs. To achieve a truly egalitarian world requires looking deeper than what we think we see.

Caste is the granting or withholding of respect, status, honor, attention, privileges, resources, benefit of the doubt and human kindness to someone on the basis of their perceived rank or standing in the hierarchy. Caste pushes back against an African-American woman who, without humor or apology, takes a seat at the head of the table speaking Russian. It prefers an Asian-American man to put his technological expertise at the service of the company but not aspire to chief executive. Yet it sees as logical a white 16-year-old serving as store manager over employees from the subordinate caste three times his age. Caste is insidious and therefore powerful because it is not hatred; it is not necessarily personal. It is the worn grooves of comforting routines and unthinking expectations, patterns of a social order that have been in place for so long that it looks like the natural order of things.

What is the difference between racism and casteism? Because caste and race are interwoven in America, it can be hard to separate the two. Any action or institution that mocks, harms, assumes or attaches inferiority or stereotype on the basis of the social construct of race can be considered racism. Any action or structure that seeks to limit, hold back or put someone in a defined ranking, seeks to keep someone in their place by elevating or denigrating that person on the basis of their perceived category, can be seen as casteism.

Casteism is the investment in keeping the hierarchy as it is in order to maintain your own ranking, advantage or privilege or to elevate yourself above others or keep others beneath you. For those in the marginalized castes, casteism can mean seeking to keep those on your disfavored rung from gaining on you, to curry the favor and remain in the good graces of the dominant caste, all of which serve to keep the structure intact.

In the United States, racism and casteism frequently occur at the same time, or overlap or figure into the same scenario. Casteism is about positioning and restricting those positions, vis-à-vis others. What race and its precursor, racism, do extraordinarily well is to confuse and distract from the underlying structural and more powerful Sith lord of caste. Like the cast on a broken arm, like the cast in a play, a caste system holds everyone in a fixed place.

For this reason, many people - including those we might see as good and kind people - could be casteist, meaning invested in keeping the hierarchy as it is or content to do nothing to change it, but not racist in the classical sense, not active and openly hateful of this or that group. Actual racists, actual haters, would by definition be casteist, as their hatred demands that those they perceive as beneath them know and keep their place in the hierarchy.

In everyday terms, it is not racism that prompts a white shopper in a clothing store to go up to a random Black or brown person who is also shopping and to ask for a sweater in a different size, or for a white guest at a party to ask a Black or brown person who is also a guest to fetch a drink, as happened to Barack Obama as a state senator, or even perhaps a judge to sentence a subordinate-caste person for an offense for which a dominant-caste person might not even be charged. It is caste or rather the policing of and adherence to the caste system. It's the autonomic, unconscious, reflexive response to expectations from a thousand imaging inputs and neurological societal downloads that affix people to certain roles based upon what they look like and what they historically have been assigned to or the characteristics and stereotypes by which they have been categorized. No ethnic or racial category is immune to the messaging we all receive about the hierarchy, and thus no one escapes its consequences.

When we assume that a woman is not equipped to lead the meeting or the company or the country, or that a person of color or an immigrant could not be the one in authority, is not a resident of a certain community, could not have attended a particular school or deserved to have attended a particular school, when we feel a pang of shock and resentment, a personal wounding and sense of unfairness and perhaps even shame at our discomfort upon seeing someone from a marginalized group in a job or car or house or college or appointment more prestigious than we have been led to expect, we are reflecting the efficient encoding of caste, the subconscious recognition that the person has stepped out of his or her assumed place in our society. We are responding to our embedded instructions of who should be where and who should be doing what, the breaching of the structure and boundaries that are the hallmarks of caste.

Race and caste are not the cause of and do not account for every poor outcome or unpleasant encounter. But caste becomes a factor, to whatever infinitesimal degree, in interactions and decisions across gender, ethnicity, race, immigrant status, sexual orientation, age or religion that have consequences in our everyday lives and in policies that affect our country and beyond. It may not be as all-consuming as its targets may perceive it to be, but neither is it the ancient relic, the long-ago anachronism, that post-racialists, post-haters of everything, keep wishing away. Its invisibility is what gives it power and longevity. Caste, along with its faithful servant race, is an X-factor in most any American equation, and any answer one might ever come up with to address our current challenges is flawed without it.

My flight to India landed in a gray veil that hid the terminal and its tower at the international airport in Delhi. It was January 2018, my first moments on the subcontinent. The pilot searched for a jetway through the drapery of mist. It was 2 in the morning, and it was as if we had landed in a steam kettle, were still airborne in a cloud, the night air pressing against cabin windows, and we could see nothing of the ground. I had not heard of rain in the forecast and was fascinated by this supernatural fog in the middle of the night, until I realized that it was not fog at all but smoke - from coal plants, cars and burning stubble - trapped in stagnant wind. The pollution was a shroud at first to seeing India as it truly was.

At daybreak, the sun pushed through the haze, and once I connected with my hosts, I raced along with them to cross an intersection, an open stretch of asphalt with cars hurtling in every direction with no lanes or speed limits. We made our way along the side streets to the conference we were attending. I saw the wayside altars and mushroom temples with their garlands and silk flowers to the Hindu deities at the base of the sacred fig trees. There, commuters can pause for reflection as they head to work or an exam or a doctor's visit. The sidewalk shrines seemed exotic to me until I thought of the American ritual of spontaneous altars of flowers and balloons at the site of something very different, at the site of an accident or tragedy, as for Heather Heyer, the counterprotester killed at the infamous neo-Confederate rally in Charlottesville, Va., just months before. Both reflect a human desire to connect with and honor something or someone beyond ourselves.

The United States and India are profoundly different from each other - in culture, technology, economics, history, ethnic composition. And yet, many generations ago, these two great lands paralleled each other, each protected by oceans, fertile and coveted and ruled for a time by the British. Each adopted social hierarchies and abides great chasms between the highest and the lowest in their respective lands. Each was conquered by people said to be Aryans arriving, in one case, from across the Atlantic Ocean, in the other, from the north. Those deemed lowest in each country would serve those deemed high. The younger country, the United States, would become the most powerful democracy on Earth. The older country, India, would become the largest.

Their hierarchies are profoundly different. And yet, as if operating from the same instruction manual translated to fit their distinctive cultures, both countries adopted similar methods of maintaining rigid lines of demarcation and protocols. Both countries kept their dominant caste separate, apart and above those deemed lower. Both exiled their Indigenous peoples - the Adivasi in India, the Native Americans in the United States - to remote lands and to the unseen margins of society. Both countries enacted an amalgam of laws to chain the lowliest group - Dalits in India (formerly known as the untouchables) and African-Americans in the United States - to the bottom, using terror and force to keep them there.

"Perhaps only the Jews have as long a history of suffering from discrimination as the Dalits," the American civil rights advocate Yussuf Naim Kly wrote in 1987. "However, when we consider the nature of the suffering endured by the Dalits, it is the African-American parallel of enslavement, apartheid and forced assimilation that comes to mind."

The United States and India have since abolished the formal laws that defined their caste systems - the United States in a series of civil rights laws in the 1960s and India more than a decade before, starting in 1949 - but both caste systems live on in hearts and habits, institutions and infrastructures. Both countries still live with the residue of codes that prevailed for far longer than they have not.

In both countries and often at the same time, the lowest castes toiled for their masters - African-Americans in the tobacco fields along the Chesapeake or in the cotton fields of Mississippi, Dalits plucking tea in Kerala and cotton in Nandurbar. Both worked as enslaved people and later for the right to live on the land that they were farming, African-Americans in the system of sharecropping, Dalits in the Indian equivalent, known as saldari, both still confined to their fixed roles at the bottom of their respective societies.

While doors have opened to the subordinated castes in India and in America in the decades since discrimination was officially prohibited, the same spasms of resistance have afflicted both countries. What is called "affirmative action" in the United States is called "reservations" in India, and they are equally unpopular with the upper castes in both countries, language tracking in lock step, with complaints of reverse discrimination in one and reverse casteism in the other.

There are many overarching similarities to the countries' caste systems, but they are not the same in how they are structured or operate. The American system was founded as a primarily two-tiered hierarchy with its contours defined by the uppermost group, those identified as white, and by the subordinated group, those identified as Black, with immigrants from outside Europe forming blurred middle castes that sought to adjust themselves within a bipolar structure, and Native Americans largely exiled outside it.

The Indian caste system, by contrast, is an elaborate fretwork of thousands of subcastes, or jatis, correlated to region and village, which fall under the four main varnas - the Brahmin, the Kshatriya, the Vaishya, the Shudra and the excluded fifth, the Dalits. It is further complicated by non-Hindus - including Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs and Christians - who are outside the original caste system but have incorporated themselves into the workings of the country, at times in the face of resistance and attack, and may or may not have informal rankings among themselves and in relation to the varnas.

The Indian caste system historically has been said to be stable and unquestioned by those within it, bound as it is by religion and the Hindu belief in reincarnation, the belief that a person carries out in this life the karma of the previous ones, suffers the punishment or reaps the rewards for deeds in a past life, and that the more keenly you follow the rules for the caste you were born into, the higher your station will be in the next life.

Some observers say that this is what distinguishes the Indian caste system from any other, that people in the lowest caste accept their lot, that it is fixed and unbending, that Dalits presumably live out their karma decreed by the gods and do their lowly work without complaint, knowing not to dream of anything more. In order to survive, some people in a subordinated caste may learn and believe that resistance is futile. But this condescending view disregards generations of resistance, and the work of the beloved Dalit leader Bhimrao Ambedkar and the reformer Jyotiba Phule before him. It was also wrongly assumed of enslaved Africans, and it disregards a fundamental truth of the species, that all human beings want to be free.

The Dalits were no more contented with their lot than anyone would be. In a caste system, conflating compliance with approval is dehumanizing in itself. Many Dalits looked out beyond their homeland, surveyed the oppressed people all over the world and identified the people closest to their lamentations. They recognized a shared fate with African-Americans, few of whom would have known of the suffering of Dalits. Some Dalits felt so strong a kinship with one wing of the American civil rights movement and followed it so closely that in the 1970s they created the Dalit Panthers, inspired by the Black Panther Party.

Several years ago, a group of largely African-American professors made a trip to a rural village in the Indian state Uttar Pradesh. There, hundreds of villagers from the lowliest subcaste, the scavengers, came together for a ceremony to welcome the Americans.

The villagers sang Dalit liberation songs for the occasion. Then they turned to their American guests and invited them to sing a liberation song of their own. A law professor from Indiana University, Kenneth Dau-Schmidt, began a song that the civil rights marchers sang in Birmingham and Selma before they faced sheriffs' dogs and fire hoses. As he reached the refrain, the Dalit hosts joined in and began to sing with their American counterparts. Across the oceans, they well knew the words to "We Shall Overcome."

When a house is being built, the single most important piece of the framework is the first wood beam secured to the foundation. That piece is called the mudsill, the sill plate that runs along the base of a house and anchors the entire structure above it. The studs and subfloors, the ceilings and windows, the doors and roofing, all the components that make it a house are built on top of the mudsill. In a caste system, the mudsill is the bottom caste that everything else rests upon.

In the Indian caste system, an infinitely more elaborate hierarchy, the subcaste, or jati, to which a person was born established the occupation their family fulfilled, from cleaners of latrines to priests in the temples. Those born to families who collected refuse or tanned the hides of animals or handled the dead were seen as the most polluted and lowest in the hierarchy, untouchable because of the dreaded and thankless though necessary task they were presumably born to fulfill.

Similarly, African-Americans, throughout most of their time in this land, were relegated to the dirtiest, most demeaning and least desirable jobs by definition. After enslavement and well into the 20th century, they were primarily restricted to the role of sharecroppers and servants - domestics, lawn boys, chauffeurs and janitors. The most that those who managed to get an education could hope for was to teach, minister to, attend to the health needs of or bury other subordinate-caste people.

The state of South Carolina, right after the Civil War, effectively prohibited Black people from performing any labor other than farm or domestic work, defining their place in the caste system. In North Carolina, during slavery, people in the lowest caste were forbidden to sell or trade goods of any kind or be subject to 39 lashes, a custom that echoed into the era of sharecropping. This blocked the main route to earning money from their own farm labors and forced them into economic dependence on the dominant caste, as intended.

"Anything that causes the Negro to aspire to rise above the plow handle, the cook pot - in a word the functions of a servant," said Gov. James K. Vardaman of Mississippi, elected in 1903, "will be the worst thing on earth for the Negro. God Almighty designed him for a menial; he is fit for nothing else."

Those who managed to go North after the Civil War and in the bigger waves of the Great Migration, starting during World War I, found that they could escape the South but not their caste.

They entered the North at the bottom, beneath Southern and Eastern Europeans who might not yet have learned English but who were permitted into unions and into better-served neighborhoods that barred Black citizens whose labor had cleared the wilderness and built the country's wealth. While there was no federal law restricting people to certain occupations on the basis of race, statutes in the South and custom in the North kept lower-caste people in their place. Northern industries often hired African-Americans only as strikebreakers, and unions blocked them from entire trades reserved for whites, such as pipe fitters or plumbers. City inspectors would refuse to sign off on the work of Black electricians. A factory in Milwaukee turned away Black men seeking jobs as they walked toward the front gate. Even before many Black Southerners arrived in the North, Black people in New York and Philadelphia were denied licenses merely to drive carts.

Thus, the caste lines in America may have at one time appeared even starker than those in India. In 1890, "85 percent of Black men and 96 percent of Black women were employed in just two occupational categories," wrote the sociologist Stephen Steinberg, "agriculture and domestic or personal service." Forty years later, as the Depression set in and as African-Americans moved to Northern cities, the percentages of Black people at the bottom of the labor hierarchy remained the same, though by then, nearly half of Black men were doing manual labor that called merely for a strong back. Only 5 percent were listed as white-collar workers - many of them ministers, teachers and small-business owners who catered to other Black people.

The historic association between menial labor and Blackness served to further entrap Black people in a circle of subservience in the American mind. They were punished for being in the condition that they were forced to endure. And the image of servitude shadowed them into freedom.

As the caste system evolved in the 20th century, the dominant caste found ever more elaborate ways to enforce occupational hierarchy. "If white and colored persons are employed together," the sociologist Bertram Doyle wrote in the 1930s, "they do not engage in the same tasks, generally, and certainly not as equals." He continued: "Negroes are seldom, if ever, put into authority over white persons. Moreover, the Negro expects to remain in the lower ranks; rising, if at all, only over other Negroes." No matter how well he does his job, Doyle wrote, "he cannot often hope for promotion."

Since the early 20th century, the wealthiest African-Americans - from Louis Armstrong to Muhammad Ali - have traditionally been entertainers and athletes. Even now, in a recent ranking of the richest African-Americans, 17 of the top 20 - from Oprah Winfrey to Jay-Z to Michael Jordan - made their wealth as innovators, and then moguls, in the entertainment industry or in sports.

Historically, this group would come to predominate the realm carved out for them, often celebrated unless they went head to head against a person in the dominant caste, as did the Black boxer Jack Johnson when he was pitted against the white boxer James J. Jeffries in 1910. Many white people resented Johnson after he became the first Black heavyweight champion in 1908. They mounted a campaign to coax Jeffries, the undefeated former champion, out of retirement to reclaim the title they believed was theirs. In an era of virulent race hatred, the press stoked passions by calling Jeffries "the Great White Hope."

The two faced off on the Fourth of July at a packed stadium built just for the occasion in Reno, Nev. It was billed as the "Fight of the Century," with bookies heavily favoring Jeffries to win. Johnson knocked Jeffries down in the 15th round and was declared the victor, to jeers and epithets. It was taken as an affront to white sovereignty and triggered white riots across the country, in the North and the South, including 11 separate ones in New York City, where white mobs set fire to Black tenements and tried to lynch two Black men over the defeat. The message was that, even in an arena into which the lowest caste had been permitted, they were to know and remain in their place.

Some years ago, I was a national correspondent at The New York Times, based in Chicago, and decided to do a lighthearted piece about Chicago's Magnificent Mile, a prime stretch of Michigan Avenue that had always been the city's showcase, but now several big luxury names from New York and elsewhere were about to take up residence. I figured retailers would be delighted to talk. As I planned the article, I reached out to them for interviews. Everyone I called was thrilled to describe their foray into Chicago and to sit down with The Times.

The interviews went as expected until the last one. I had arrived a few minutes early to make sure we could start on time, given the deadline I was facing.

The boutique was empty at this quiet hour of the late afternoon. The manager's assistant told me the manager would be arriving soon from another appointment. She went to a back corner as I stood alone in the showroom. A man in a business suit and tie finally walked in, harried and breathless. From the back corner, she nodded that this was he, so I went up to introduce myself and get started. He was out of breath, had been rushing, coat still on, checking his watch.

"Oh, I can't talk with you now," he said, brushing past me. "I'm very, very busy. I'm running late for an appointment."

I was confused at first. Might he have made another appointment for the exact same time? Why would he schedule two appointments at once? There was no one else in the boutique but the two of us and his assistant in back.

"I think I'm your appointment," I said.

"No, this a very important appointment with The New York Times," he said, pulling off his coat. "I can't talk with you now. I'll have to talk with you some other time."

"But I am with The New York Times," I told him, pen and notebook in hand. "I talked with you on the phone. I'm the one who made the appointment with you for 4:30."

"What's the name?"

"Isabel Wilkerson with The New York Times."

"How do I know that?" he shot back, growing impatient. "Look, I said I don't have time to talk with you right now. She'll be here any minute."

He looked to the front entrance and again at his watch.

"But I am Isabel. We should be having the interview right now."

He let out a sigh. "What kind of identification do you have? Do you have a business card?"

This was the last interview for the piece, and I had handed them all out by the time I got to him.

"I've been interviewing all day," I told him. "I happen to be out of them now."

"What about ID? You have a license on you?"

"I shouldn't have to show you my license, but here it is."

He gave it a cursory look.

"You don't have anything that has The New York Times on it?"

"Why would I be here if I weren't here to interview you? All of this time has passed. We've been standing here, and no one else has shown up."

"She must be running late. I'm going to have to ask you to leave so I can get ready for my appointment."

I left and walked back to the Times bureau, dazed and incensed, trying to figure out what had just happened. This was the first time I had ever been accused of impersonating myself. His caste notions of who should be doing what in society had so blinded him that he dismissed the idea that the reporter he was anxiously awaiting, excited to talk to, was standing right in front him. It seemed not to occur to him that a New York Times national correspondent could come in a container such as mine, despite every indication that I was she.

The article ran that Sunday. Because I had not been able to interview him, he didn't get a mention. It would have amounted to a nice bit of publicity for him, but the other interviews made it unnecessary in the end. I sent him a clip of the piece along with the business card that he had asked for. To this day, I won't step inside that shop. I will not mention the name, not because of censorship or a desire to protect any company's reputation but because of our cultural tendency to believe that if we just identify the presumed-to-be-rare offending outlier, we will have rooted out the problem. The problem could have happened anyplace, because the problem is, in fact, at the root.

At the turn of the 20th century, as the country began refining the rules of admittance to the dominant caste and further tightened the restrictions on those at the bottom, Ybor City, Fla., as elsewhere in the South, began to segregate its streetcars. Cubans there, uncertain as to how they would be classified, were relieved "to discover that they were allowed to sit in the white section," according to the historical researcher Jan Voogd.

By extending the dream of dominion over the land and all others in it to anyone who could meet the definition of white, the American caste system became an all-or-nothing gambit for the top rung.

Those permitted under the white tent could reap the rewards of full citizenship, rise to positions of high status (or as far as their talents could take them), get access to the best the country had to offer or, at the very least, be accorded respect in everyday interactions from subordinate groups who risked assault for any misstep. A two-tiered caste system raised the stakes for whiteness, leading to court dockets filled with people on the borderline seeking admission to the upper caste.

A Japanese immigrant named Takao Ozawa had lived in the United States for more than 20 years. He tried to make the case that he was worthy of citizenship and should qualify as white because his skin was lighter than that of many "white people." What did it mean to be white if someone with actual white skin was not white? His case went all the way to the Supreme Court. In 1922, the court held unanimously that white meant not skin color but "Caucasian," and that Japanese were not Caucasian, notwithstanding the fact that few white Americans had origins in the Caucasus Mountains of Eurasia either and that those who did were at that very moment being kept out, too.

The Ozawa decision and others of that era were a heartbreaking catastrophe for Asians seeking citizenship. With pro-Western European sentiment running high, the government began rescinding the naturalized citizenship of people of Asian descent who were already here. This amounted to an abandonment of people who had lived legally in the United States for most of their adult lives, as would echo a century later with undocumented immigrants crossing the U.S. border with Mexico.

An Indian immigrant named Vaishno Das Bagai had been in the United States for 10 years when he was stripped of his citizenship in 1925 as a result of these rulings. By that time, he had a wife and three children and his own general store on Fillmore Street in San Francisco. He lost the business he had built, because of a California law restricting the economic rights of people who were not citizens. He was left without a passport and thus was thwarted in his attempt to get back to India, and made a man without a country. He was far from his original home and rejected by his new one. One day, he traveled alone to San Jose and rented a room. There, he turned on the gas and ended his life.

No matter which route a borderline applicant took to gain acceptance, the caste system shape-shifted to keep the upper caste pure by its own terms. What a thin, frayed thread held the illusions together. A Japanese novelist once noted that, on paper anyway, it was a single apostrophe that stood between rejection and citizenship for a Japanese Ohara versus an Irish O'Hara.

These cases laid bare not just the absurdity but the inaccuracy of these artificial labels and the perception of purity or pollution implied by them. At the same time, they exposed the unyielding rigidity of a caste system, defiant in the face of evidence contrary to its foundation, how it holds fast against the assault of logic.

On an otherwise ordinary Sunday afternoon in October 2018, a white woman began to track a Black man in Georgia when she saw him out and about with two white children. The Black man, Corey Lewis, was the children's babysitter, and from her car, the woman stalked him as he drove them from a Walmart to a gas station and then to his home. She first began tracking Lewis after he did not permit her, a complete stranger, to talk with the older of the two children to confirm to her satisfaction that they were all right.

If there is anything that distinguishes caste in America, it is, first, the policing of roles and behavior expected of people based on what they look like, and second, the monitoring of boundaries - the disregard for the boundaries of subordinated castes or the passionate construction of them by those in the dominating caste, to keep the hierarchy in place.

Modern-day caste protocols are often less about overt attacks or conscious hostility. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work. They are sustained by the muscle memory of relative rank and the expectations of how one person interacts with others based on their place in the hierarchy. It is a form of status hypervigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them, as they see fit.

That afternoon, Lewis, a youth mentor who runs an after-school program, took notice of the woman trailing him and started recording the situation on his cellphone. In a video, the children can be seen calm and unfazed, buckled in their seatbelts in the back of his car.

His voice is strained and disbelieving. "This lady is following me," he says, "because I got two kids in the back seat that do not look like me."

The woman called 911 and asked if she should keep following him. She continued to trail him even though she was told not to. Soon after Lewis arrived home with the children, a patrol car pulled up behind him. An officer got out and headed toward him.

The officer told the children, a 6-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, to step out of Lewis's car, and Lewis's voice began to grow tense. The outcome of this police encounter and his safety and very life depended on what those children said, and he asked them to please tell the officer who he was.

"Please," he said to them.

The officer asked the children repeatedly, "Are y'all OK?"

"Jesus have mercy - what is wrong with this country?" a Black woman outside cried.

Satisfied that Lewis was, in fact, their babysitter and that the children were not in danger, the officer took the additional step of calling the parents, who were out at dinner.

"It just knocked us out of our chair," the children's father, David Parker, told The New York Times.

Caste had intruded into all of their lives. Caste entitlement is not about luxury cars and watches, country clubs and private banks, but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based on rules not set down on paper but reinforced in commercials, television shows and billboards, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions to who gets killed first in the first half-hour of a movie, and affects everyone up and down the hierarchy. This is the blindsiding banality of caste.

After the incident, a reporter asked the 10-year-old girl, Addison, what she would tell the woman who followed them that day. Her father told The Times her response: "I would just ask her to, next time, try to see us as three people rather than three skin colors, because we might've been Mr. Lewis's adopted children."

Through no fault of any individual born to it, a caste system centers the dominant caste as the sun around which all other castes revolve and defines it as the default-setting standard of normalcy, of intellect, of beauty, against which all others are measured, ranked in descending order by their physiological proximity to the dominant caste.

They are surrounded by images of themselves, from cereal commercials to sitcoms, as deserving, hardworking and superior in most aspects of American life, and it would be the rare person who would not absorb the constructed centrality of the dominant group. It would be the rare outliers who would go out of their way to experience the world from the perspective of those considered below them, or even to think about them one way or the other, and the caste system does not require it of them.

Society builds a trapdoor of self-reference that, without any effort on the part of people in the dominant caste, unwittingly forces on them a narcissistic isolation from those assigned to lower categories. It replicates the structure of narcissistic family systems, the interplay of competing supporting roles - the golden-child middle castes of so-called model minorities, the lost-child Indigenous peoples and the scapegoat caste at the bottom.

The centrality of the dominant caste is not lost on those considered beneath them in the hierarchy. The highest and lowest rungs are seen as so far apart as to seem planted in place, immovable. Thus those straddling the middle may succumb to the greatest angst and uncertainty as they aspire to a higher rung.

Everyone in the caste system is trained to covet proximity to the dominant caste: an Iranian immigrant feeling the need to mention that a relative had blond hair as a child; a second-generation child of Caribbean immigrants quick to clarify that they are Dominican and categorically not African-American; a Mexican immigrant boasting that one of his grandfathers back in Mexico "looked just like an American" - blond hair and blue eyes - at which point he was reminded by an African-American that Americans come in all colors of hair and eyes.

Those accustomed to being the measure of all that is human can come to depend on the reassurance that while they may have troubles in their lives, at least they are not at the bottom. As long as the designated bottom dwellers remain in their designated place, their own identities and futures seem secure.

"No matter how degraded their lives, white people are still allowed to believe that they possess the blood, the genes, the patrimony of superiority," the political scientist Andrew Hacker wrote in his 1992 book, "Two Nations." "No matter what happens, they can never become 'Black.'" Hacker continued, "White Americans of all classes have found it comforting to preserve Blacks as a subordinate caste: a presence that despite all its pain and problems still provides whites with some solace in a stressful world."

We are accustomed to the concept of narcissism - a complex condition of self-aggrandizing entitlement and disregard of others, growing out of a hollow insecurity - as it applies to individuals. But some scholars apply it to the behavior of nations, tribes and subgroups. Freud was among the earliest psychoanalysts to connect a psychiatric diagnosis to Narcissus of Greek mythology, the son of the river god who fell in love with his own image in a pool of water and, not realizing that it was he who was "spurning" his affection, died in despair. "Narcissus could not conceive that he was in love with his own reflection," wrote the Harvard clinical psychologist Elsa Ronningstam in her 2005 book, "Identifying and Understanding the Narcissistic Personality." "He was caught in an illusion."

So, too, with groups trained to believe in their inherent sovereignty. "The essence of this overestimation of one's own position and the hate for all who differ from it is narcissism," wrote Erich Fromm, a leading psychoanalyst and social theorist of the 20th century. "He is nothing," Fromm wrote, "but if he can identify with his nation, or can transfer his personal narcissism to the nation, then he is everything."

Fromm well knew the perils of group narcissism from both his training in psychoanalysis and his personal experience. He was born into a Jewish family in Germany and came of age during World War I, witnessing the hatred and fervor that took hold in that conflict, only to see it resurface again with the ascension of the Third Reich. He managed to flee Germany after the Nazis took power in 1933, forced to abandon the psychoanalytic institute he had built, and immigrated to the United States.

He saw firsthand, and through a psychoanalyst's lens, the seductive power of nationalistic appeals to the anxieties of ordinary people. When a person is deeply invested in his group's dominance, he "has a euphoric 'on-top-of-the-world' feeling, while in reality he is in a state of self-inflation," Fromm wrote. "This leads to a severe distortion of his capacity to think and to judge. ... He and his are overevaluated. Everything outside is underevaluated." And underneath may lie the fear that he cannot live up to the constructed ideal of his own perfection.

History has shown that nations and groups will conquer, colonize, enslave and kill to maintain the illusion of their primacy. Their investment in this illusion gives them as much of a stake in the inferiority of those deemed beneath them as in their own presumed superiority. "The survival of a group," Fromm wrote, "depends to some extent on the fact that its members consider its importance as great as or greater than that of their own lives."

Thus, when under threat, they are willing to sacrifice themselves and their ideals for the survival of the group from which they draw their self-esteem. The political theorist Takamichi Sakurai, in his 2018 examination of Western and Eastern perspectives on the topic, and channeling Fromm, wrote bluntly: "Group narcissism leads people to fascism." He went on, "An extreme form of group narcissism means malignant narcissism, which gives to rise to a fanatical fascist politics, an extreme racialism and so on."

Fromm identified this kind of group narcissism in two nations in particular: "the racial narcissism which existed in Hitler's Germany, and which is found in the American South," he wrote in 1964, at the height of the civil rights era. In both instances, Fromm found the working class to be among the most susceptible, harboring an "inflated image of itself as the most admirable group in the world, and of being superior to another racial group that is singled out as inferior," he wrote. A person in this group "feels: 'Even though I am poor and uncultured, I am somebody important because I belong to the most admirable group in the world - I am white'; or 'I am an Aryan.'"

A group whipped into narcissistic fervor "is eager to have a leader with whom it can identify," Fromm wrote. "The leader is then admired by the group which projects its narcissism onto him." The right kind of leader can inspire a symbiotic connection that supplants logic. The susceptible group, Fromm teaches us, sees itself in the narcissistic leader, becomes one with the leader, sees his fortunes and his fate as their own.

In the winter of 2019, an invisible life form awakened in the Eastern Hemisphere and began to spread across the oceans.

The earth's most powerful nation watched as faraway workers in hazmat gear tested for what no one could see, and deluded itself into believing that American exceptionalism would somehow grant it immunity from the sorrows of other countries.

Yet the virus arrived on these shores, and it planted itself in the gaps of disparity, the torn kinships and fraying infrastructure in the country's caste system, just as it exploited the weakened immune system in the human body.

Soon, America had the largest coronavirus outbreak in the world. The virus exposed both the vulnerability of all humans and the layers of hierarchy.

While anyone could contract the virus, it was Asian-Americans who were scapegoated for it merely because they looked like the people from the part of the world that the virus first struck. As the crisis wore on, it was African-Americans and Latinos who began dying at higher rates. Pre-existing conditions, often tied to the stresses on marginalized people, contributed to the divergence. But it was the castelike occupations at the bottom of the hierarchy - grocery clerks, bus drivers, package deliverers, sanitation workers, low-paying jobs with high levels of public contact - that put them at greater risk of contracting the virus in the first place. These are among the mudsill jobs in a pandemic, the jobs less likely to guarantee health coverage or sick days but that sustain the rest of society, allowing others to shelter in place.

As the number of deaths climbed to the highest of all nations, America - and those looking to it for leadership - had to come to terms with the untested fragilities of its social ecosystem. The pandemic, and the country's fitful, often self-centered lack of readiness, exposed "a failure of character unparalleled in U.S. history," Stephen Walt, a professor of international relations at Harvard University, wrote in Foreign Policy. The pandemic forced the nation to open its eyes to what it might not have wanted to see but needed to see.

"This is a civilization searching for its humanity," Gary Michael Tartakov, a social and cultural historian, said to me as we discussed caste in America at a conference in 2018. "It dehumanized others to build its civilization. Now it needs to find its own."

It was earlier that spring that I was forced to face the mystery of the misshapen corner of the ceiling in my own old house and summoned inspectors to try to solve it. One man used an infrared light. Others went into the attic and onto the roof. The bow in the corner had come from a long-ago leak that had grown beyond notice, unattended by a series of previous owners, the moisture from the original leak long evaporated but leaving the plaster weakened over time, heavy and tugging at adjacent seams, inch by inch, until a section of the ceiling was now threatening to cave in on itself and perhaps take the rest of the ceiling with it.

I hadn't caused this problem, hadn't been there when the leak first crept toward the ceiling. In fact, I had been the one to install the new roof. But it fell to me to fix it or suffer the consequences. Contractors offered to trim it out and Sheetrock over it. A plasterer said he could replaster the fragile section to blend with the rest of the old ceiling. It would be indistinguishable to the naked eye but would not protect against further weakness in what remained of the original plaster, strained as it was from the adjacent frailties.

The only way to truly fix it, he said, was to tear out the plaster, down to the beams, inspect and rebuild the rotting lath and replaster the entire ceiling. And so we did. It took days to scrape and inspect, recast and reconstruct. When it was done, it was quietly glorious, as ceilings go.

And I could breathe free, knowing, as we now are called upon to do in our era, in the house we all live in, that it was sound and secure, not merely patched and papered over, but maybe even better than it was, for ourselves and for the generations that come after us.

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America's Enduring Caste System (Published 2020)

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Feature Our founding ideals promise liberty and equality for all. Our reality is an enduring racial hierarchy that has persisted for centuries. Credit... Photo illustration by Chris Burnett Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

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No Justice, No Peace | On the Media | WNYC Studios

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Is this "unrest" or an "uprising"? And a look back at the policies and cultural assumptions that have powered law enforcement.

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Listening. Learning. Sharing. Taking action. Advancing ideas and solutions to accelerate social justice demands that all of us take these simple, powerful steps. Everyone at NJPAC stands in solidarity with those fighting against structural racism, societal inequity, and police brutality, and for civil rights, multiculturalism and authentic inclusion. Changing the world requires the efforts of everyone. Now, more than ever, each of us has an indispensable part to play.

John Schreiber, President & CEO, NJPAC

To bring our community together, and to encourage everyone to take part in the movement to ensure civil rights for all, NJPAC has launched a series of events and initiatives focused on promoting racial equality. On these pages, you can find resources that will help you take action, in the voting booth and elsewhere, and join us for conversations and discussions that can help you understand the issues we're all grappling with today. Join us here to learn more, do more and help our nation achieve the more perfect union it always promised.

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To bring our community together, and to encourage everyone to take part in the movement to ensure civil rights for all, NJPAC has launched a series of events and initiatives focused on promoting racial equality.

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It was Shirley Chisolm who said, "If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair."

So, let's say you bring one. The chair brings you closer to the table, but its legs are wobbly and it lacks the support you need to survive and thrive. Your posture is compromised.

It's the price Black students often pay for a seat at the table, for access to opportunity, particularly when they are the only Black student in their honors class.

Picture it: You're in a class that will challenge your mind, expand your world and ultimately give you a competitive edge in college admissions. Your honors class is an opportunity-an opportunity that is not in the cards for many Black students. You know that Black, Native American and Latinx students are generally less likely to attend schools that even offer advanced classes. Opportunity gaps can limit your access to academic success from the start, resulting in racialized achievement gaps. These inequities present major obstacles for many students in search of a seat at the table.

Nevertheless, you're still here. You still made it to the table.

Making the grades, doing the work, you're making leaps and bounds, theoretically. But how far can you really go, sitting in a crooked chair?

I wish I could have told my teachers about my experience. I wish I'd had the nerve to tell them, "I am the only Black student in your honors classes, and I am not OK. Don't let the A's fool you." I've been that student many, many times and I'm here to tell you that grades alone are an inaccurate indicator of Black student success.

Allow me to go back in time, putting myself in that crooked seat again, so I can convey to you some things you may want to consider in order to offer a more inclusive environment for your own Black honors students and Black students in other classes.

Legitimize my existence without fetishizing me.

I know: It may be easy to forget about me because I'm the only Black one, but please don't. I am here, and so are my thoughts, my intellect and my emotions. Being ignored will crush my capacity to learn and to feel good about myself, just like it would for any other student. Think about this the next time you overlook my raised hand in fear of having to address whatever non-dominant opinion or idea may or may not come out of my mouth. At the same time, I'm no unicorn; I am a human being, just like the rest of your students. I am not your project or your assignment. Think about that before you decide to interrupt class just to compliment my hair or ask me to represent my entire race in my response to your questions. "Do you all prefer 'African American' or 'Black'?" I know what I prefer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that my momma, the Black kids across the hall or Al Sharpton all feel the same exact way. The only way for you to get the answer for the whole collective is to ask the whole collective; I can't do that for you.

Realize how other students may act toward me when you're not looking.

The girl who sits in front of me in your class covers her paper every time we take a quiz or a test because she is assuming that I'm cheating off of her paper. The boy who sits beside me constantly stares at me because to him, my bamboo earrings, my wooly hair and its various styles, and my copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X have no place whatsoever in an honors class. And when you tell us to work in groups, I'm really working alone because my partners don't even acknowledge my presence in the group. Their eye contact, their respect and my dignity are all but missing. The moment you turn your back, your classroom turns into my battleground.

Understand my Blackness as conflicted in this space.

I am Black and I'm proud to be Black because of how I was raised, but lately, my Blackness has been tested and questioned. Although my mother and father are so proud of me and my ability to thrive in honors classes, my success is an expectation rather than an exception. My mother was an honors student herself and was offered the chance to skip a grade in middle school, amidst the many trials and tribulations of coming up in one of Brooklyn's toughest housing projects, Red Hook. Some of my Black friends look down on my participation in honors classes; they feel that I'm not "Black enough" because of it. Some of my white friends look down on my participation in honors classes, somehow thinking I've been given special privileges to get my seat at the table simply because of the color of my skin, completely dismissing my intellect, my work ethic and my sincere desire to learn and do well in school.

Should I be proud? Should I be ashamed? Am I Black? Who am I? I used to think, This must be how it feels to be in no man's land -too white to be Black and too Black to be white. But then I realized: To be in no man's land means to belong somewhere.

For me, being a Black honors student means belonging nowhere. For me, the seat is crooked and the table is lonely, and I have no reason being anywhere near it.

Or do I?

Acknowledge how tiresome it is to do the code-switching that your class calls for.

In your class, you see only one version of me. In your class, I'm abandoning the way I really talk and the way I really walk in order to conform to the constraints of the class. I put on my "proper" voice for your class because my natural voice will not be taken seriously. Code-switching is the way I thrive and survive in your class and in many other settings, but that doesn't mean I'm not tired.

Actually, I am tired. I'm tired of home not being good enough for school. I'm sick of the concrete wall that towers between who I really am and who I have to be to make it. I'm tired of minimizing my Black girl joy-my big, hearty laugh; my assertive demeanor and my confident swagger-because it may increase my odds of suspension and other disciplinary consequences. It hurts me to be limited to literature by white authors only, to learn about famous experiments that exploited Black folks and never about those led by Black scientists themselves. It hurts me to be taught to discredit Black vernacular instead of recognizing its value and significance, even if it is not necessarily significant in your classroom. I get eight hours of sleep a night and I eat a full breakfast every morning, but I'm still tired. In your class, my eyes are wide open and my mind is ready to learn, but my soul is exhausted.

Nevertheless, I'm still here.

Educators: You must genuinely embrace your Black honors students. Make it so they see themselves in your classroom through and through, from the educational content itself down to the decor that adorns the walls. Address the limitations of Eurocentric curricula. Include images of Black leaders and other content that centers Black stories and success-not because you have to but because you want to. Intentionally create space and opportunity for Black students to share their brilliance and their culture, although it may not necessarily be included in the statewide curriculum or the educational standards of your school district. Doing so will help to encourage a sense of belonging for the Black students in your classroom, something that white students have had the privilege of taking for granted since the beginning of time.

Your lone Black honors student may be wobbling in their chair as you read this. They deserve to have the same experience as others whose chairs are historically solid and sturdy.
Lee-Heart teaches writing in the Department of Focused Inquiry at Virginia Commonwealth University. Read more of her writing at theBlackertheBerry.org.

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A Crooked Seat at the Table: Black and Alone in an Honors Class

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Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators-teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners-who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.

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A return to school this fall will be far different from other back-to-school seasons of the past. In the midst of a global pandemic, and the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and many others, the systemic inequities that face BIPOC (Black and Indigenous and People of Color) individuals daily are being pushed to the forefront in many conversations among non-BIPOC parents, teachers, co-workers and neighbors.

If you are like me and want resources to keep this conversation going with students and adults, we created an anti-racist reading list for children in grades preK-12, as well as for adults, that can help us all become more kind, caring, and empathetic. The list will be updated as we learn about and read more texts. Do you have additional recommendations for our anti-racist reading list? Please let us know in the comments below.
By Marianne Celano, PhD, ABPP,
Ages 4-8, and
Two families, one Black and one White, discuss a police shooting of a Black man in their neighborhood. This story aims to answer many questions that children have about traumatic events and racial injustice.
By Lupita Nyong'o (author) and Vashti Harrison (illustrator)
Ages 4-8
This picture book is a story about a Black girl who learns to love herself despite having darker skin than the rest of her family.
By Matthew A. Cherry (author) and Vashti Harrison (illustrator)
Ages 4-8
This book is a celebration of natural, Black hair.

As a young girl observes six very different women in her life who each wear the hijab in a unique way, she also dreams of the rich possibilities of her own future, and how she will express her own personality through her hijab.
By Jenny Devenny
Ages 4-8
A story of 2 best friends, a white car and a black car, that have different experiences and face different rules while entering the same race.

Ages 8-12
The biographies of 40 Black women are brought to life in this text that not only educates, but also inspires.

Ages 8-12
This story is about a boy, Garvey, who is bullied until he finds a passion that helps him learn to accept himself.
By Anastasia Higginbotham
Ages 8-12
This book offers an honest and open explanation about how White privilege factors into the lives of White children.

This book about race helps students learn about how racist ideas have permeated the American culture, and what they can do to become anti-racist.

Ages 12+
This novel, written in two parts by two authors-one Black and one White-explores the repercussions of a violent act on a racially divided town.
By Gilly Segal and Kimberly Jones
Ages 12+
When violence erupts at a football game, two girls from different racial backgrounds only have each other to rely on to survive.
By Angie Thomas
Ages 12+
The uneasy balance between Starr's school world and home world is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer.
By Nic Stone
Ages 12+
The story of an Ivy League-bound African-American student named Justyce who becomes a victim of racial profiling. He struggles to reconcile the fact that he's a "good kid" with suddenly being in police handcuffs

Do you have more resources or ideas for our anti-racist reading list? Please comment below.

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An Anti-Racist Reading List for Children and Adults

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A return to school this fall will be far different from other back-to-school seasons of the past. In the midst of a global pandemic, and the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks and many others, the systemic inequities that face BIPOC (Black and Indigenous and People of Color) individuals daily are being pushed to the forefront in many conversations among non-BIPOC parents, teachers, co-workers and neighbors.

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Special Guests: Candra Flanagan, Director of Education for the Teaching and Learning Unit and Anna Hindley, Director of Early Childhood Education at Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture

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talking about race and racism with our families

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‎Parenting Beyond the Headlines: Talking About Race and Racism with Our Families on Apple Podcasts

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‎Special Guests: Candra Flanagan, Director of Education for the Teaching and Learning Unit and Anna Hindley, Director of Early Childhood Education at Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African American History and Culture

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As nationwide protests against police brutality continue, teachers in their virtual classrooms are once again searching for ways to help their students process the killings of black people in police custody in the United States.

Speaking with Education Week on Monday, teachers said that they and their colleagues have a responsibility to address these protests, which erupted when George Floyd, an unarmed black man, died after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes.

"Teachers cannot be silent during this time," said Patrick Harris, a 6th and 7th grade English and social studies teacher at the Detroit Achievement Academy. "Teachers have to take a stand. Students are absorbing this, [and] they're going to ask themselves later on in life or even now, 'What was my teacher doing during this time?'"

Talking with students about these events, as they experience them, is top priority right now, said Abdul Wright, who teaches 8th grade language arts in North Minneapolis. "I have to find a way to make meaning of this in a way that creates a better society for them," he said.

Some teachers whose classes have already ended for the school year are reaching back out to students, particularly their black students, giving them space to talk about their emotions and ask questions.

Other teachers in schools still in session are seeking materials and resources to teach about this moment, such aslesson plans that engage students in conversations about racism, policing, and protest.

On Monday, Chicago Public Schools released "Say Their Names," a collection of lessons and materials designed "to help foster productive conversations about race and civil disobedience."

The toolkit links to other organizations' resources on supporting black students' mental and emotional health, discussing the Black Lives Matter movement, and talking about anti-black racism with non-black students. And it encourages teachers to educate themselves on racism in the U.S. before broaching these topics with students.

In California, theLos Angeles Unified School District posted a collection of resources for teachers, for talking about race with children and addressing trauma. The superintendent of education in the state, Tony Thurmond, said the California Department of Education will also be releasing online materials and trainings.

For teachers looking for more classroom resources-for themselves and their students-Education Week has compiled the following list:

Resources about George Floyd's death and the current protests:

The Anti-Defamation League has created a short lesson on Floyd's death and police killings of black people, which includes a reading, discussion questions, and action steps for students aged 11 and up.

Resources for talking about race, racism, and Black Lives Matter:

In addition to addressing race and racism in lesson plans, experts and advocates have urged teachers to build a diverse classroom library with protagonists who look like their students.

The group Embrace Race compiled a list of 31 children's books that address race, racism, and activism. And the nonprofit Teaching for Change put together a list of social justice books for teens.

Joe Truss, the principal of Visitacion Middle School in San Francisco Unified and a consultant on racial equity in schools, has curated a list of books for teachers who want to engage in anti-racist work.

Starting these classroom conversations can be uncomfortable and challenging. But for black teachers, talking about police brutality and anti-black racism can be particularly emotionally draining. The Practice Freedom Project, founded by Atlanta educator Tamara Pearson, is hosting virtual meditations and reflections for black educators.

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15 Classroom Resources for Discussing Racism, Policing, and Protest

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As nationwide protests against police brutality continue, teachers in their virtual classrooms are once again searching for ways to help their students process the killings of black people in police custody in the United States.

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Materials recommended by Education Week Teacher

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Materials recommended by Education Week Teacher

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First Encounters With Race and Racism: Teaching Ideas for Classroom Conversations (Published 2017)

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Using firsthand accounts from teenagers to guide classroom discussions around race and racism.

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Resources for Teaching about Racism, Racial Injustice, and Human Rights.

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Resources for Teaching about Racism, Racial Injustice, and Human Rights.

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The following articles have been selected from our three main journals for K-12 teachers: Social Education, Middle Level Learning, and Social Studies and the Young Learner. These articles are grouped by topic for easy reference. Also included are recent current event responses that address racism and call for human rights education.

NCSS Current Events Responses (2020)
Teaching about Race and Racism in the Classroom
The African American Struggle for Civil Rights
Slavery and Its Legacy
Racism against Numerous Minority Groups
Human Rights Education
Middle Level Lessons on Racial Injustice and the Promotion of Civil Rights
Elementary Lessons on Racial Injustice and the Promotion of Civil Rights

Joint Statement (from the National Coalition Against Censorship, co-signed by NCSS), June 2020
The Free Press in a Time of Crisis
Joint Statement (from the American Historical Association, co-signed by NCSS), June 2020 Press Release, May 29, 2020 Statement, May 2020
A National Council for the Social Studies Response to Anti-Asian Harassment and Violence during COVID-19
NCSS Condemns the Killing of George Floyd and Countless Black People
AHA Statement on the History of Racist Violence in the United States
Teachers can use specific tools and strategies highlighted in this article to foster open, honest, and productive dialogues on race and identity in an educational setting.
Secondary/High School

Exploring race and other controversial issues in a civil and productive manner develops students' racial literacies and equips them to be proactive citizens in a democratic society. Secondary/High School

As social studies teachers, we play an essential role in preparing the next generation with the knowledge, skills, and dispositions needed to become informed and engaged citizens.

The events in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014 can serve as a jumping off point into an exploration of students' own communities.
Secondary/High School

This article examines the challenges of teaching about the deaths of African American men at the hands of police in Ferguson and Staten Island in 2014, and shows that when students engage in discussions about civic rights and processes, their sense of discouragement transforms to a sense of empowerment.

This inquiry, which explores the current debate on what should be done with Confederate monuments, engages students in historical, geographic and civic skills.
Secondary/High School

A textbook author reflects on the ethical and ideological choices she made in her quest to create a history book that would be relevant to demographically diverse high school students. Secondary/High School

High school ethnic studies courses that address the perspectives and experiences of people of color are increasingly in demand. The author describes the thematic, inquiry-based approach she developed that reflects her school's diversity.
Secondary/High School

Who is Afro-Latin@? Examining the Social Construction of Race and Négritude in Latin America and the Caribbean
Christopher L. Busey, Bárbara C. Cruz

This article reviews the distinctive social construction of race in Latin America and the Caribbean, discussing its historical background and contemporary manifestations.
Secondary/High School

These recommended sites offer materials, lesson plans, and activities for teaching about our democratic principles.
Secondary/High School

The lesson presented in this article offers an expansive view of Black history, which moves beyond the limited focus on slavery, reconstruction, and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
Secondary/High School

A project-based approach to studying the civil rights movement can stimulate student engagement and their sense of connection to this historic period.
Secondary/High School

A close look at Rosa Parks's handwritten notations on the program from a Montgomery bus boycott event can engage students into a deeper study of Parks, the boycott, and the civil rights movement.
Secondary/High School

A class lesson on Walker v. Birmingham, the legal case related to Martin Luther King Jr.'s arrest in Birmingham, can lead to a stimulating exploration of civil disobedience and its role in a democratic society.
Secondary/High School

As students use geospatial technology to discover streets named for Martin Luther King, Jr., they learn about politics and social power as well as geography.
Secondary/High School

In this lesson, students consider important factors that converged to help civil rights activists win a decades-long struggle for voting rights.
Secondary/High School

The two featured documents from the 1940s offer insight into the African American struggle for economic opportunity in the South and can help teach about the greater civil rights movement.
Secondary/High School

The featured letter to President Truman about the murder of an NAACP official can be used as a springboard into the exploration of the civil rights struggle and violence, as well as the issue of presidential powers.
Secondary/High School

The memoir of a white journalist who disguised himself as an African American in the pre-civil rights South provides students with greater insight into the evolution of segregation in American society.
Secondary/High School

An oral history project by students in Southside, Virginia, exposes a neglected aspect of the civil rights movement-a generation of young people who were deprived of an education by segregationists.
Secondary/High School

The highlighted documents from Boston´s desegregation case can serve as a jumping off point into an engaging classroom study of education equality and civil rights.

The role that racial slavery played in the founding and development of our republic should be woven into the bedrock of how we teach American history and civics.
Secondary/High School

Students can use the large Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to conduct research and discover the scope of the slave trade over four centuries.
Secondary/High School

Digital sources like Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl can involve students in a deep investigation of the long-term history and personal impacts of slavery in the United States.
Secondary/High School

An inquiry framed around the experience of an enslaved woman, highlighted in a recent film, offers an opportunity for meaningful student engagement with the history of American enslavement.
Secondary/High School

When studying the early colonization of the Caribbean, students will gain a deeper, more nuanced, understanding of the institution of slavery by examining Spanish colonial documents and comparing them with documents from the antebellum U.S. South.
Secondary/High School

Examining the life of an enslaved West African man in North Carolina who wrote a memoir in Arabic can broaden students' perspectives on slavery in America.
Secondary/High School

The featured lesson examines the role that race played in the history of the United States and in the decision-making of President Lincoln during the Civil War.
Secondary/High School

A close look at the struggle to pass the 13th Amendment will ignite a stimulating classroom debate on the legacies of slavery that persist today.
Secondary/High School

The featured letter from an emancipated slave to his former master illuminates the historical transition from slavery to freedom and is an excellent resource for classes in both history and literature.
Secondary/High School

Case Study of Chinese Exclusion Act Enforcement
Joanne Dufour Enduring Lessons of Justice from the World War II Japanese American Internment
The Library of Congress's Slave Narratives Collection present students with an opportunity to expand their understanding of slavery in America while grappling with questions about interpretations of the past.
Secondary/High School

Toward Responsibility: Social Studies Education that Respects and Affirms Indigenous Peoples and Nations (NCSS position statement, 2018)

Promising practices offer educators opportunities to confront the perspective of white settler colonialism that has permeated the study of the history of Indigenous peoples.
Secondary/High School

The featured primary source in support of Native American tribes who were victims of the Indian Removal Act in 1830 can be used to spark a classroom lesson on this disturbing period in American history.
Secondary/High School

Primary sources on the treatment of contracted Mexican workers in Arkansas in the mid-twentieth century can launch an engaging lesson on the role of race, economic power, regional differences, and citizenship status in historical events.
Secondary/High School

A creative and intriguing lesson plan examining the Zoot Suit Riots in Los Angeles in June 1943, in which naval servicemen clashed with Mexican Americans.
Secondary/High School

The featured lesson exploring early twentieth-century U.S. policies towards Chinese immigrants can serve as a jumping off point into a discussion of contemporary U.S. immigration issues.
Secondary/High School

The featured documents related to the Chinese Exclusion Act can launch an engaging classroom lesson on the complicated history of United States immigration policy.
Secondary/High School

A close look at documents related to the case of Mabel Ping-Hua Lee can be a springboard into an engaging classroom lesson on the Chinese Exclusion Act and its impact on the voting rights of women in the United States.
Secondary/High School

Nancy P. Gallavan and Teresa A. Roberts
Investigating the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II helps students develop an appreciation of constitutional rights and civil liberties.
Secondary/High School

A short 1945 film in the Library of Congress archives starring Frank Sinatra, who stops a group from bullying a young Jewish boy, could jumpstart a range of classroom projects such as an inquiry into post-World War II domestic issues.
Secondary/High School

The authors recommend important steps and strategies to help schools and educators reduce or prevent bullying.
Secondary/High School

At Risk of Prejudice: Teaching Tolerance about Muslim Americans
Karima Alavi
Common misperceptions about the religion of Islam threaten to distort views of Muslim Americans and their convictions. The author answers questions about the Muslim faith, community, and beliefs.
Secondary/High School

At Risk of Prejudice:The Arab American Community
Zeina Azzam Seikaly
How can we protect our Arab American students from encountering prejudice, educate all our students about the Arab American community, and emphasize tolerance over bigotry? Secondary/High School

Examining the featured political cartoons offers students an opportunity to analyze myths about immigration and to consider ways that politicians have historically used nativist sentiments for political gain.
Secondary/High School
Middle Level Learning January/February 2016
This lesson on the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment will give students a deeper understanding of the issues framing the current immigration debate.
Secondary/High School
Middle Level Learning September 2008
Human Rights Education: A Necessity for Effective Social and Civic Learning (NCSS position statement, 2014)
Middle Level Learning May/June 2013
It is important to consider the influence of students' social context when teaching about human rights.
Secondary/High School
Middle Level Learning September 2005
This historical analysis and teaching activity offers teachers an approach for integrating human rights issues into the world history curriculum.
Secondary/High School
Middle Level Learning May/June 2012
The document that began as a declaration of human equality and dignity has become the foundation of the human rights movement and a cornerstone of world political dialogue.
Secondary/High School
Middle Level Learning Jan/Feb 2002
By studying moments in history where bystanders made a difference, teachers can motivate students to think critically in the face of social dilemmas.
Secondary/High School
Middle Level Learning September 2016
Allowing students to take the lead in a specific social action campaign enables them to take classroom learning about the democratic process to a much deeper level.
Secondary/High School

To cultivate engaged citizens, we should ensure that students have real-world opportunities to develop, practice, and apply civic skills.
Middle Level Learning May/June 2018
In the featured lesson, students explore the ways that individuals, groups, communities, and nations define who belongs and who does not.
Secondary/High School

"Benjamin Banneker's Letter to Thomas Jefferson" by John A. Moore provides students with excerpts from one of America's first Abolitionist documents. Both men were well-known public figures, free and patriotic citizens, and scientists who had worked on the planning and measurement of the new nation's capital (Washington, D.C.). Both professed to uphold the unalienable rights of man, but one was an independent farmer, the other a wealthy slaveholder. (pp. 1-11)

"Frederick Douglass, the Constitution, and Slavery: A Classroom Debate" by Vanessa Rodriguez invites students to read excerpts, from different decades, from the writings by the famous American Abolitionist. Was Douglass inconsistent, or did his interpretation of the U.S. Constitution evolve in a meaningful way? (pp. 1-13)
Middle Level Learning September 2016
"Harriet Tubman: 'Emancipate Yourself!'" by Steven S. Lapham and Peter Hanes provides student handouts with images of historical primary sources preserved at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, as well as incidents from Tubman's biography that are not well known today, but that propelled the global struggle to end slavery at that time. (pp. 1-11)

"Philip Reid and the Statue of Freedom" by Eugene Walton reveals that an enslaved American solved a technical puzzle, then assisted in the casting of the bronze figure that now stands atop the U.S. Capitol. Handouts provide historical evidence of these events, and a handout with "An Abolitionist Cartoon, 1830" closes the issue. (pp. 1-16)

"Slavery After the Civil War: 'It Makes a Long-Time Man Feel Bad'"and "The Convict-Lease System, 1866-1928" (three lessons with four readings and two worksheets), both by Christine Adrian, reveal how the institution of slavery was reinvented, after the Civil War, in a new form and then persisted, in many states, for another 60 years. (pp. 1-16)

"The WPA Slave Narratives: Teaching with Oral Histories" by Paul Horton provides a variety of excepts from this famous historical collection at the Library of Congress and guides students in interpreting what they have read. (pp. 3-8)

"Voting Rights and Literacy Tests"by R. Z. Seitz and P. T. Chandler includes a handout from a 1956 "literacy test" that was designed to exclude Black citizens from voting. (pp. 8-13)

A "Book Review: She Stood for Freedom" invites teachers and students to learn about "the untold story of a civil rights hero, Joan Trumpauer Mulholland," who was attacked along with other young civil rights protesters at a lunch counter, captured in a famous 1963 photo. (pp. 14-16)

"How to Be an American" is an article with handouts that links to two video resources: Judge Lucy Koh: "Be Fully Engaged in Democracy" as well as Karen Korematsu: "You Can Make a Difference." In a candid conversation (transcribed on the handouts), these two prominent civic leaders, Korematsu and Judge Koh, discuss growing up as the children of immigrants and how they became involved in advancing civil and human rights for all people. Discussion questions challenge students to consider the many "ways to be fully engaged in democracy." (pp. 1-7)

Videos at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvkwlphRcjM&feature=youtu.be
and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mxj9iNnLbK0&feature=youtu.be.

"Conflict, Service, and Civic Involvement" by Sarah K. Anderson. The author describes leading Project Citizen activities with her students, which include identifying a local problem, researching it, proposing a policy-based solution, and putting the solution into action. One of the student-generated questions is: Why are immigrants so often treated differently? (pp. 8-12)

"Immigration Today: Teaching with Film" by Jeremy Hilburn and Lisa Brown Buchanan.
A discussion strategy "Take a Stand" has students move about the room as they read, respond, analyze, and deliberate statements individually and as a group. There are many variations, and using the strategy after viewing a documentary can help students begin thoughtful deliberation about a challenging or controversial issue. (pp. 1-7)

Social Studies and the Young Learner January/February 2020

Powerful stories of three Americans-girls of Indigenous, Chinese, and Mexican ancestry-who fought for equal education in America in the last century. Their struggles all pre-dated that of the well-known African-American girl, Ruby Bridges, whose story is included in the first grade unit plan, which includes handouts that can be found in the Pullout.

Teachers, in accordance with NCSS guidelines, can use picture books to spur discussions about justice-oriented citizenship, including protest marches, as a means to understand the past and present.

Indigenous women have long held positions of leadership, including the position of President, Chairperson, or Chief, among other titles, within their Native nations. The authors describe how students in grades 3-5 can learn about and from Indigenous women changemakers and their professions, communities, and Native nations.

Students engage with primary source texts, a painting, and a photograph (images created in different decades) to arrive at a more complex understanding of a historic American icon and the society he lived in. A handout features a stereograph, ca. 1860s, "Slave family picking cotton in the fields near Savannah, Georgia."

A ten-week inquiry project is designed to address issues of inequity and privilege. Challenges in enacting justice-focused pedagogy are discussed. A sidebar spotlights Benjamin R. Tillman, Jr. (1847-1918), who served as governor of South Carolina, U.S. senator, and was an avowed white supremacist. His statue was erected on the grounds of the state capitol in 1940.

Students analyze an 1855 ad for a "great sale of slaves" and interact with an online map created by a George Mason University professor. "Slide your finger along the timeline at the bottom and watch the institution of slavery grow in this color-coded map of the United States. Zoom to any county by clicking on it and view the original U.S. Census data behind the illustration. You can also view data on free African Americans, total population, and other groupings."

What Makes a Family? Sharing Multiple Perspectives through an Inclusive Text Set
Christina M. Tschida and Lisa Brown Buchanan
Pullout: Activities for Learning about Diverse Families using Picture Books

Providing students with multiple perspectives that disrupt "the single story of family" helps students be open to diversity and see the complexity of the social world around them. Educators can be ready with text sets (picture book collections) in their classrooms that will engage students in discussions and activities about a concept of "family" that more closely reflects their own social reality.

The authors provide pedagogical and curricular insight for discussing global nuances of race and systemic racism with elementary students. They offer an integrated approach to teaching AfroLatin@ identity using social studies, reading, math, and art.

Fifth graders study the history of voting rights (which have often been denied to African Americans) and create pamphlets to spur voter turnout in their community.

Reading Closely and Discussing the 'I Have a Dream' Speech
Elizabeth S. Brown

The author highlights the importance of an in-depth examination of the language of lesser-known parts of King's famous speech as a vehicle for connecting historical circumstances and current conditions of discrimination. In a sidebar, Susan Goetz Zwern briefly reviews the picture book I Have a Dream, illustrated the Kadir Nelson.

Pullout: Millicent's Story: School Desegregation in South Carolina, 1963

Millicent E. Brown was one of the first eleven African American students in South Carolina to attend formerly all-white public schools. Millicent's memoir of that time (provided in a pullout) begins the night before her entry into the tenth grade in September of 1963. A short article provides context and discussion questions for teachers. (p. 16 and pullout)

The author focuses on Executive Order 9066 and the resulting incarceration of 120,000 Japanese Americans, an aspect of World War II rarely addressed in elementary schools. She describes how two teachers used children's literature and primary sources to teach students about racism, prejudice, discrimination, and civil rights.

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Resources for Teaching About Racism, Racial Injustice, and Human Rights

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The following articles have been selected from our three main journals for K-12 teachers: Social Education, Middle Level Learning, and Social Studies and the Young Learner. These articles are grouped by topic for easy reference. Also included are recent current event responses that address racism and call for human rights education.

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Materials recommended by the National Council for the Social Studies 

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Materials recommended by the National Council for the Social Studies 

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Affirming Black Lives in School: Teachers, Administrators, Students

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Materials from The NJ Social Studies Supervisors Association 

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Materials from The NJ Social Studies Supervisors Association 

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Wrongful Convictions in the United States by Julia Johnson

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Wrongful Convictions in the United States by Julia Johnson

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Compiled from past TED book lists, here's a curated selection of fiction and non-fiction titles to check out now.

Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Change by Stacey Abrams (TED talk: 3 questions to ask yourself about everything you do)
I work in government affairs, and the last thing I enjoy reading for pleasure are books by politicians. However, this book is different on so many levels and is a must-read - whether you're a political junkie or just someone seeking inspiration to chart your own course. I instantly related to and was inspired by Abrams's candid struggles to overcome self-doubt and embrace the full range of her abilities as a talented woman of color. Her writing is candid, eloquent, familiar, funny and highly digestible. I found myself nodding, smiling, dog-earing pages, and taking deep inhalations to digest her inspiring wisdom. (Read an excerpt here.)
- Nikki Clifton (TED talk: 3 ways business can fight sex trafficking)

Adichie's approach to the politics of gender is sharp and funny and really accessible. Without ever seeming idealistic or naive, she uses her superhuman compassion to imagine a future in which women and men have more possibilities for how to be at home in the world.
- Mandy Len Catron (TED Talk: A better way to talk about love)

Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
If the desert island you're on happens to be moreLord of the Flies than Lord Howe Island, Parable is one of the best books possible to both acclimate yourself to your new struggle for survival and provide a narrative for how, even in a dystopia, one can rebuild civilization and lead a path to the stars. In the mid-2020s, when society has effectively collapsed due to climate change and ineffective social governance, a young woman from Southern California is forced to go on a dangerous journey to the Pacific Northwest to try to find safety. Through her many shocking and harrowing trials, she remains driven and inspired by a future where humanity can still find a way to leave the Earth and build a new home in the stars despite its flaws and failures. Together with its sequel, Parable of the Talents, it is arguably the greatest story ever told about the power of spaceflight that features no spaceships.
- Alex MacDonald (TED Talk: How centuries of sci-fi sparked spaceflight)

This is a powerful read that evokes action in us all and provides a well-researched historical account of race relations in the US. Coates's writing is excellent, and he describes how understanding starts with communication - not assumption. This book will open your eyes and increase your empathy.
- Shivani Siroya (TED Talk: A smart loan for people with no credit history (yet))

This is an impressive novel to get lost in. It gives a historical perspective on slavery and the slave trade and explores how our identities are shaped by personal and political circumstances. Although this book must have required painstaking research, Gyasi seamlessly transitions from history to the present, managing to capture the natural authenticity of each character.
- Sayu Bhojwani (TED Talk: How immigrant voices make democracy stronger)

Akata Witch by Nnedi Okorafor (TED Talk: Sci-fi stories that imagine a future Africa)
I love fantasy and science fiction, but people of color are sorely underrepresented across the speculative fiction universe. This young adult coming-of-age story's main character struggles with her bi-cultural identity, which resonates with me. (She also struggles with understanding her magical powers, which I can also relate to.) I read this book to my daughter, and we both couldn't wait to get to it every night. (Read an interview with Okorafor here.)
- Mia Birdsong (TED Talk: The story we tell about poverty isn't true)

The Race Whisperer: Barack Obama and the Political Uses of Race by Melanye Price
This book helped me to grapple with the meaning of the Obama era, in this moment where many of us miss the sanity of that era. It is critical and thoughtful but written in an engaging and accessible style.
- Brittney Cooper (TED Talk: The racial politics of time)

Feel Free: Essays by Zadie Smith
Feel Free is a collection of intriguing essays that speak about modern-day, socio-political, newsworthy topics, including the movie Get Out and pop icon Justin Bieber. Smith is an inventive free thinker - she's viscerally, audibly and visually refreshing. Through her writing, she offers readers the opportunity to learn to trust their own voices.
- tobacco brown (TED talk: What gardening taught me about life)

Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption by Bryan Stevenson ( TED Talk: We need to talk about an injustice)
This is one of those books that will hang onto you, long after you finish reading. It is an exceptionally well-written memoir that provides a startling depiction of the depths of institutionalized racism that pervade the US criminal justice system, particularly as it relates to death-row inmates. Before reading this book, I had an intellectual sense of how institutionalized racism manifests itself in criminal justice, but reading this book really opened my eyes not only to the pervasiveness of the problem but also to concrete and tragic examples of the real lives that have been destroyed by injustice.
- Wendy Troxel ( TED Talk: Why school should start later for teens)

The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race, edited by Jesmyn Ward
In this compelling collection, award-winning author Ward looks to James Baldwin's seminal bookThe Fire Next Time for comfort and counsel. In response, she has compiled an anthology of work from thinkers of her generation that speaks about race in ways that are compelling, thought-provoking and extremely salient for our times. From essays to poems, these pieces will leave you thinking about them long after you've finished reading them.
- Liz Ogbu (TED Talk: What if gentrification was about healing communities instead of replacing them?)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley
I read this when I was in eighth grade, and it truly changed my outlook on the world. Malcolm's transformation, religious journey, and views on identity and race made me who I am today. It's beautifully written, engaging and dramatic. Each time I read this, I find some beautiful nugget about growing up and finding your purpose in life. I know there are some issues with the accuracy of the manuscript, and as a scholar that interests me greatly. However, as a reader, an American, and a black American, Malcolm X's story of redemption, loneliness and salvation, reminds me of the highs and lows that I've felt many times when I was searching for answers, looking to people who were questioning society in the same way I was, and looking for my place in America.
- Reniqua Allen (TED Talk: The story we tell about millennials and who we leave out)

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62 great books by Black authors, recommended by TED speakers

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Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Change by Stacey Abrams (TED talk: 3 questions to ask yourself about everything you do) I work in government affairs, and the last thing I enjoy reading for pleasure are books by politicians.

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In response to recent events in the United States, now is a crucial time to think about how we're teaching our children - and ourselves - to combat racism. Below is a growing list of resources from PBS and trusted partners, to use as tools to support anti-racist learning and growth.
Middle and High School Resources
Confronting Bias: Ethics in the Classroom
Th e resource s in t his PBS LearningMedia collection p rovide teachers with tools to incorporate ethics education in the classroom, promote understanding of differing viewpoints, and foster civil dialogue about bias. The collection is divided into three subcategories; Understanding Bias, Experiencing Bias, and Addressing Bias . Selected resources include:

Confronting Anti-Black Racism
This PBS LearningMedia collection includes news coverage of recent protests, videos on the origins of the Black Lives Matter Movement and protests against police brutality within the past decade, iconic PBS documentaries on the histories of race and racism in America, and activities addressing civic engageme nt and elevating students' voices. Selected resources include:

Reflecting on George Floyd's Death and Police Violence Toward Black Americans
Use t his teaching guide from Facing History and Ourselves to begin conversations with students about recent events.

Resources for Younger Children T hese resources and activities from PBS are appropriate for use with pre-school children.
Resources for Families Resources on Race and Racism Book Lists and More for Children and Adults

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Anti-Racist Resources: For Families, Educators, and Students | Blog | WNET Education

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In response to recent events in the United States, now is a crucial time to think about how we're teaching our children - and ourselves - to combat racism. Below is a growing list of resources from PBS and trusted partners, to use as tools to support anti-racist learning and growth.

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Materials recommended by WNET Education 

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Materials recommended by WNET Education 

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I'm talking with professor Ibram Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and the Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. We talk about racial disparities, policy, and equality, but we really focus on How to Be an Antiracist, which is a groundbreaking approach to understanding uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves.

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brené with ibram x. kendi on how to be an antiracist

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‎Unlocking Us with Brené Brown: Brené with Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist on Apple Podcasts

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‎I'm talking with professor Ibram Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and the Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. We talk about racial disparities, policy, and equality, but we really focus on How to Be an Antiracist, which is...

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Awash in the ghastly video mosaic shot by black people's cameraphones, I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink. Then a lyric gave me strength.

Thousands of people gathered at City Hall in San Francisco on Monday to protest the death of George Floyd. Credit... Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The most urgent filmmaking anybody's doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones. Their work comprises a ghastly visual mosaic of mistreatment, at best, and whose victims are international symbols of mourning: Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland. Art is not the intent. These videos are the stone truth. Quaking proof of insult, seasick funerals. Livestreamed or uploaded, or suppressed then suspiciously unearthed as found footage. Last week, the archive grew by two, and now the nation's roiling.

First, a white dog walker called the police on Christian Cooper, a birder in Central Park. Her unrestrained dog disturbed this man's peace. He asked that the dog be leashed (the park's rules, not his) and its affronted owner told him that if he didn't stop recording their interaction she'd tell the police that an "African-American man is threatening my life." He kept rolling - actually, he kept directing. "Please call the cops," he calmly instructs her. "Please tell them whatever you like." And she does.

But it was how she told on him that you don't forget. Three times, she informs the dispatcher that this man is her emergency. By the last round, she's made herself hysterical. The person at the other end can hear distress and can probably sense that the greater victim in this exchange might be her mewling dog, choking because the grip on its leash is so tight. When the call is over, Cooper thanks her - for now endangering him, for living down to herself, for quite a performance of umbrage. This woman has dialed 911, but she's also got access to an ancient American network of interpersonal fraud. She knows the advantage of her role. So, of course, did he. That's why his camera's on. In case. The video would be the counterfactual that might save his life.

That's not how it went for George Floyd, that same Monday, 1,200 miles away. In this video footage, captured, in part, by Darnella Frazier, the Minneapolis police officers who bore down on his body appeared immune to the cameras trained on them, immune to his gasping pleas for air and his mother. There is a madness in how calm they appear as a grown man rasps and begs. For stretches, one officer stands there like an inanimate object that refuses to hear the bystanders beseeching on Floyd's behalf. Another officer had rested his knee in the man's nape, comfortably. For more than eight minutes - eight of George Floyd's last - it barely moves, as though that's what God intended napes to be, a kneeler.

The Cooper and Floyd videos capture ancestral false alarms and overreactions, centuries-old hatreds, miserable inequalities. (The dog in one video fares better than the human being in the other.) These videos are part of some newish optic tradition that dates back, at least, to those abstract camcorder images of the L.A.P.D. going to town on Rodney King, stories black people share to keep one another safe and warn others; bystander evidence, filmed by all kinds of people, that has to embarrass the wheels of justice into their slow grind. It's video that is currently breaking open the United States once again.

Image

A still from video of George Floyd with Minneapolis police officers.

This country manufactures only one product powerful enough to interrupt the greatest health and economic crisis it's probably ever faced. We make racism, the American virus and the underlying condition of black woe. And the rage against it is strong enough to compel people to risk catching one disease in order to combat the other - in scores and scores of American cities, in cities around the world. They're a tandem now, the pandemic bold-underlining-italicizing what's endemic to us. The underfunded hospitals, appalling factory conditions and unequal education were readily evident last year, before Covid-19. Now, the inadequacies and inequalities expedite death and compound estrangement. The low-wage workers have been deemed essential yet remain paid inessentially. The numbers of black, Latino and Indigenous people infected, deceased and unemployed are out of whack with their share of the population. And the president has yet to offer his condolences, in earnest.

So maybe we were due for another round of unrest and conflagration. Maybe, Black Lives Matter and Colin Kaepernick were simply ahead of their time, even if the calls for respect that they marched and knelt for remain absurdly longstanding. This explosion seems meant to occur in the year in which we saw a video of a 25-year-old black man, a runner named Ahmaud Arbery, chased down by white men in Georgia and shot dead, men who went on about their lives for months after.

It had to happen in a year in which police killed a sleeping black woman, Breonna Taylor, wanted on suspicion of nothing. It had to be in the year of lockdowns, masks, in-a-blink job loss and funerals no one could physically attend. It had to be the year whose numbers refer to perfect vision. People could, perhaps, see anew that, when it comes to certain white people, what we call freedom is basically impunity. Freedom-plus. Americans have watched that plus burn outside their homes.

Impunity permits politicians and TV hosts to lie about whatever and the police to shoot rubber bullets at nonprotesters as if they were squirrels. Impunity is what brings black men as different and differently eloquent as the rapper-activist Killer Mike and the Princeton professor Dr. Eddie Glaude Jr. to anger and the verge of tears, in separate appearances before the media on Friday. They both embodied a sentiment of the protests. We've been trying to make this country great, but you won't let us.

Black Americans have come in peace, they've come armed. They've just been trying to mind their business. Disappointment awaits, regardless. Anytime the racial temperature goes up and hell pays a visit to earth, the disappointment takes a holiday. And you fight. You fight because you're tired. Yet you're tired because you've been fighting. For so long. In waves, in loops, in vacuums, in vain.

Patti LaBelle performing in Illinois in the 1980s. Credit... Paul Natkin/Getty Images

I suppose this is all how I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink on Sunday, bawling into a bowl of greens, a knife in one hand, the other gathered into the loneliest fist that hand had ever made. I was doubled over because Patti LaBelle had wrecked me.

Now, somehow, Patti's not for everybody. And I don't mean white people (although I've heard the complaints). My mother was a black woman from Philadelphia just like Patti and her feelings remained mixed. Not something you need to know about my otherwise perfect mother; it's just to say that Patti LaBelle is an unsettled matter. And her unorthodoxy - as a cookbook author, a vocalist and someone who believes that a black woman's hair ought to be a wonder of the world - makes her all the more beloved to her partisans.

The last song on her 1985 album, "Patti," is a live cover of a classic written by Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff and released in 1972: "If You Don't Know Me by Now." Harold Melvin & the Blue Notes recorded the raw, plangent definitive version; Simply Red the comparatively subdued hit 1989 incarnation. Both are excellent. It's a perfect song that LaBelle moves into and refurnishes. She flips and flexes every syllable. The word "eye" is elongated so that suddenly there's an "o" in there. Pure Patti. The chorus - "if you don't know me by now, you will never, never, never know me" - is left to the men doing her backing vocals, while LaBelle spreads icing all over their cake.

This version is arranged as a march that keeps cresting: big drums, wagging piano, bass that vamps. After four minutes, the band offers her a clearing to do some trapeze work. And this is the moment - in the middle of a pandemic, with the country in some of its worst-ever shape, with protesters on my street damning the police, with black America at yet another wit's end - that I heard a song I've listened to a hundred times like I've never heard it before.

"I thought you knew me by now," she sings, "but you don't." She's off-book as they say, working on mood, instinct and fatigue. "Heh, heh," she says with a weary laugh before she starts talking to the room.

"You break your back, you break your legs and you break your face, trying to make these people know you in life. But somehow they just don't wanna try to," she says and goes on to wonder, "Is it the way I look?" In her story, she's talking about a man and has a mirror moment. "Self," she asks, "is it worth it?" And, in her four-alarm soprano, she lets out a naying, "Uh-uh," only with more "uhs" than I could count. "I'm not going to try to prove myself no more," she proclaims as her singers back her, firm yet softly, with that chorus ("never, never, never"). For half of the remaining 90 seconds, she is knocking everything off the emotional table she'd spent the previous five minutes setting.

This is not a protest anthem. It's a lovers-at-a-crossroads jam. But LaBelle is working this crowd. She's preaching about something that, at my sink, at a crossroads, along with millions of other black people, sounded like a much bigger love. Her exasperation felt transcendently real and timelessly final. Enough.

I heard a woman declaring her value. George Floyd was suspected of having used a counterfeit bill at a corner store, which means his life was worth less than money. I heard her thinking through an ultimatum now being laid down in the streets of this country. You still think we're monkeys, monsters, beasts, thugs, the living dead, minorities? If you don't know that a black man, calling for his mother, his dead mother, is so desperate for somebody to hear him that he's screaming for ghosts - or fears he's in the process of becoming one; if you don't know that we, too, can run for leisure and sleep for rest; if you don't know that this skin is neither your emergency nor an excuse to invent one, that the emergency has tended to be you - by now? - you will never, never, never ...

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The Videos That Rocked America. The Song That Knows Our Rage.

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Awash in the ghastly video mosaic shot by black people's cameraphones, I found myself doubled over the kitchen sink. Then a lyric gave me strength. The most urgent filmmaking anybody's doing in this country right now is by black people with camera phones.

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In the winter 2018 edition of The Legal Eagle, we published a story ( Limiting Protest Silences Dissent) about limiting protests, specifically National Football League (NFL) players taking a knee during the national anthem to protest social injustice and brutality against African Americans.

As reported in that original article, the NFL's policy did not compel players to stand during the anthem. It only stated that players "should" stand. In May 2018, the NFL amended its policy, which stated: "All team and league personnel on the field shall stand and show respect for the flag and the anthem." The new policy did give players the option of staying in the locker room if they did not want to stand, but warned that disciplinary action would be taken on any player taking a knee during the anthem. That discipline would be left up to the individual teams to decide, but the NFL would also have discretion to fine teams for the actions of their players.

President Donald Trump, who had made his opinion on the kneeling football players known, applauded the new policy. Not everyone was as pleased.

Players Rebel

All league owners, with the exception of the 49ers, who abstained, adopted the new policy. There was no input from the players or their union, the National Football League Players Association (NFLPA), which immediately filed a grievance with the NFL and released a statement saying: "NFL players have shown their patriotism through their social activism, their community service, in support of our military and law enforcement and yes, through their protests to raise awareness about the issues they care about."

The NAACP denounced the NFL's decision, saying in a statement: "Protest is an American tradition; by protesting we work to hold our country accountable to its highest ideals. Instead of coming together to address an issue disproportionately plaguing the African American, the NFL owners have chosen to bury their heads and silence players."

Malcolm Jenkins, who plays safety for the Philadelphia Eagles and is co-founder of the Players Coalition, a socially active organization of more than 75 NFL players that focuses on criminal justice reform and police and community relations, also issued a statement.

"What NFL owners did today was thwart the players' constitutional rights to express themselves and use our platform to draw attention to social injustices like racial inequality in our country. Everyone loses when voices get stifled," Jenkins said.

Last season, Jenkins did not kneel during the anthem, but raised his fist in protest.

The American Civil Liberties Union also weighed in on the issue. "Protest isn't supposed to be comfortable," ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jeff Robinson said in a statement. "It's not supposed to happen in the shadows. It's supposed to disrupt. Patriotism is demanding America uphold the ideals it was founded on: equality and justice for all. Patriotism is pledging allegiance to democratic values, not to symbols or songs. Patriotism is dissent."

In July 2018, the NFL and the NFLPA issued a joint statement advising that the new policy had been suspended while the two sides work out a solution.

"In order to allow this constructive dialogue to continue, we have come to a standstill agreement on the NFLPA's grievance and on the NFL's anthem policy," the league said in a statement. "No new rules relating to the anthem will be issued or enforced for the next several weeks while these confidential discussions are ongoing."

If the NFL policy had been challenged in court, Alan Hyde, a professor at Rutgers Law School-Newark and an expert in labor and employment law, says it would have been hard to predict which side would have prevailed.

"Each side would have good arguments," Professor Hyde says. "The labor laws draw a line between protests about working conditions (protected) and political protests (often not protected). It's often difficult to untangle these. And while employees have a right to public protests to get public support, employers also sometimes have a right to restrict protected protests to protect the image of their business."

Covered by First Amendment?

Some legal scholars contend that NFL players don't have the right to protest because the right only applies to freedom from government speech violations. In other words, your employer, in this case the NFL, can curb the free speech of its employees.

"The right of free speech guaranteed by the First Amendment is indeed held only against public officials like police or school principals," Professor Hyde says. "But private-sector employees have a right to take group action under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935. The right isn't absolute, of course, and employers also have a right to make reasonable rules."

In an op-ed for Vox, Benjamin Sachs, a labor law professor at Harvard University, said that President Donald Trump's influence on the national anthem debate changes the free speech dynamic, violating the players' rights to be free of government censorship.

"The owners have made clear that their adoption of the new rule was made in response to presidential intervention: They believe that if they do not ban the protests, the president will continue to make the protests a national issue and thereby negatively affect the league's income stream," Professor Sachs wrote. "When the president and the vice president of the United States are this intimately involved in encouraging a private employer to adopt a workplace rule, the Constitution should have something to say."

Just Like Every Employee?

Professor Hyde says that NFL players are like all employees who are represented by a union. "Their union filed a grievance over the anthem policy," he says, "and that is why the team owners backed down."

Asked whether employers can compel employees to comply with its wishes, Professor Hyde says that individual employees have very little way to fight employer demands unless they are discriminatory, such as treating African American or women employees differently from everyone else.

"An individual told to stand may lose their job if they don't," Professor Hyde says. "The labor laws only kick in to protect group action."

History of Sports Protests

NFL players are not the first athletes to use their high profiles to protest injustice and bring about change. There is a long history of protest in sports, most famously Muhammad Ali's protest of the Vietnam War and the two track stars (Tommie Smith and John Carlos) raising gloved fists on the podium after winning gold and bronze medals in the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Sports figures on the collegiate level have protested as well. In 2003, Toni Smith, a member of the Manhattanville College women's basketball team, made headlines when she protested the Iraq War by turning her back on the flag. She was ostracized for her silent protest but did not waiver.

In a statement after the uproar, Smith said, "It is my right as an American to stand for my beliefs the way others have done against me. Being patriotic cannot simply be an empty slogan. Patriotism can be shown in many ways, but those who choose to do so by saluting the flag should recognize that the American flag stands for individuality and freedom."

A Washington Post op-ed, written by Lonnie Bunch, director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and David Skorton, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, contends that sports offers a powerful way to protest "because it resonates with people; passion for a team is often passed down from generation to generation."

Bunch and Skorton wrote: "In some ways, sports are conducted on the ultimate level playing field, a meritocracy where ability outweighs backgrounds, beliefs, race and religion. Athletes have unique insight into working toward a goal and looking past individual glory for the greater good. As such, they have something profound to say about our nation, our freedoms and who we aspire to be. We should listen."

Check out the original article : Limiting Protest Silences Dissent

meritocracy - the holding of power based on a person's ability.

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Right to Protest Forms a More Perfect Union - New Jersey State Bar Foundation

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In the winter 2018 edition of The Legal Eagle, we published a story (Limiting Protest Silences Dissent) about limiting protests, specifically National Football League (NFL) players taking a knee during the national anthem to protest social injustice and brutality against African Americans. As reported in that original article, the NFL's policy did not compel players [...]

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by Hanna Krueger

Free speech is one of the most sacred rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and nowhere has it been more revered than on college campuses, with sit-ins and student activists arrested fighting for the right to free speech and political action on campus.

The Free Speech Movement was born on the campus of the University of California-Berkeley in the 1960s. A journalist covering the protests at the time remarked, "It wasn't exactly that Berkeley was the first place where this mechanism [political protest] kicked in, but it was the place where it went critical."

Fast forward a half a century later and it seems to be a different story on the Berkeley campus. In February 2017, the Berkeley College Republicans invited right-wing commentator Milo Yiannopoulos to speak on campus. More than 1,500 students gathered on the campus to protest Yiannopoulos, who promotes white supremacy and neo-Nazi ideals. The gathering turned violent when an anarchist group joined the protest throwing fireworks and rocks at police officers. The university condemned the violence and ultimately canceled the Yiannapoulos speech.

Suing over viewpoint

The free speech issue resurfaced months later when the Berkeley College Republicans invited conservative authors Ann Coulter and David Horowitz to speak on campus. Administrators originally rescinded the invitations, citing concerns about violence similar to the Yiannopoulos protests.

Amid national criticism that the university was suppressing free speech, administrators reversed course and invited them back to speak but at an alternative venue. Coulter and Horowitz rejected the renewed invitation because they were moved to a building on the outskirts of campus and the event had been changed to daytime hours, not the evening as originally planned. As a result, Young America's Foundation, a conservative youth organization, filed a federal lawsuit against the university.

"Berkeley promises its students an environment that promotes free debate and the free exchange of ideas," the lawsuit said, but that promise was broken by "the repressive actions of university administrators and campus police."

In April 2018, a U.S. district court judge dismissed the plaintiff's claim of viewpoint discrimination against UC Berkeley, but allowed them to move forward with charges of bias in the relocation of speakers. In December 2018, the university settled the lawsuit, agreeing to pay $70,000 in attorneys' fees, along with the promise that it would not charge any group a fee for increased security or relocate speeches based on a speaker's viewpoint.

Teachable moments

Similar free speech battles are playing out at universities across the nation. On more than one occasion in the past few years, student protests against political speakers have spiraled into violence and chaos.

"If there is any place in the world that an individual's right to free speech and thought should be protected, it is on a college campus where young adults can pursue their passions and figure out how they think and who they want to be," argues Zach Greenberg, a program officer at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).

Administrators must also maintain an environment of civility and dignity, which has become increasingly more difficult since the polarization of politics, says Svetlana Mintcheva, free speech activist and program director with the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC).

A month after the protest at Berekley, student protesters at Middlebury College shut down a speech by Charles Murray, a conservative social scientist who wrote The Bell Curve, a book which concluded that intelligence and race are connected. Students at his speech pulled fire alarms and chanted until Murray stopped speaking. He was then harassed by protesters in the parking lot on the way to his car. Murray had previously spoken on campus in 2007 without incident.

"There is a fine line between protected speech and punishable conduct," says Greenberg. "You have the right to protest, but not the right to throw bottles at someone you disagree with or shout them down and drown them out."

In an opinion piece for The Guardian, Zachary Wood, a graduate of Williams College and president of its "Uncomfortable Learning" program, recalled his brush with Charles Murray. Wood, an African American, received pushback from his peers after inviting Murray to speak on the Williams campus.

"I wanted to use the education I received at Williams to create positive change in the world one day," Wood wrote. "How would I do that if I shut out the voices I disagreed with instead of engaging with them?"

On behalf of his colleagues on the Free Speech Movement Archive Board of Directors at Berkeley, Robert Cohen, now a social studies professor at New York University, wrote an opinion piece for The Daily Californian about the Yiannopoulos protest.

"If even a 10 th of the 100 or so faculty who signed those pro-ban open letters showed up to ask this bigot tough questions or held a teach-in about what's wrong and unethical in his vitriol (and in the rest of the so-called 'alt right'), they could puncture his PR bubble instantly, avoid casting him in the role of free speech martyr and prove that the best cure for ignorant and hateful speech is speech that unmasks its illogic, cruelty and stupidity," Professor Cohen wrote.

What's protected?

Some experts believe that current college students have a skewed view about what type of behavior is protected and acceptable under the First Amendment. For example, a Cornell University student told Time Magazine, "Free speech is speech that is not aimed to hurt. Free speech that dehumanizes is not free."

A survey conducted by the Brookings Institution, an educational research group, reveals that 20 percent of college respondents think it is acceptable to use violence to shut down a speaker known for making offensive and hurtful statements. The same survey asked college students if the First Amendment protects "hate speech." Nearly half said it did not. Legal experts say that is incorrect.

"The Supreme Court has never created a category of speech that is defined by its hateful conduct, labeled it hate speech, and said that that is categorically excluded by the First Amendment," former American Civil Liberties Union president Nadine Strossen told National Public Radio (NPR). "Speech cannot be punished just because of its hateful content."

Indeed, in a dissenting opinion, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, "If there is any principle of the Constitution that more imperatively calls for attachment than any other, it is the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."

Just as student protesters are grappling with how to protest without inciting violence, universities face the question of whether they should curtail First Amendment rights or give a platform to hateful speech. Some universities and colleges are instituting free speech codes and policies that allow them to address First Amendment issues before they become headlines.

According to Mintcheva, that means answering a significant question: "How do you balance the rights of protesters without silencing those that are being protested?"

What these universities decide will likely have far-reaching effects.

"What is happening on campuses has a ripple effect into society," says Greenberg. "When an institution makes the decision to silence a group on a college campus, they are sending the message to the rest of the educational community and society at large that certain voices do not need to be heard."

1. What do you think the consequences are of silencing certain viewpoints?

2. If certain viewpoints are silenced do you think people that hold those views stop having them? Why or why not?

3. How would you feel if your opinion was disregarded? What would you do to be heard?

4. What steps do you currently take so that you are exposed to opinions or ideas that conflict with your beliefs? Is it enough? Why or why not?

Glossary Words
: a set of rules to be followed in calculations.
: a person who is intolerant of those of different races or religions.
plaintiff: person or persons bringing a civil lawsuit against another person or entity.
: cruel and bitter criticism.

This article originally appeared in the fall 2019 edition of The Legal Eagle.

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Balancing the Right to Protest with the Right to Be Heard - New Jersey State Bar Foundation

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by Hanna Krueger Free speech is one of the most sacred rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution and nowhere has it been more revered than on college campuses, with sit-ins and student activists arrested fighting for the right to free speech and political action on campus.

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by Michael Barbella
The way a disciplinary incident involving a sixth-grader was handled at a school in Florida is reflective of the racial bias that has existed in American school discipline policies for at least half a century, according to a 2018 report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan, independent watchdog agency that works for the U.S. Congress.

The 11-year-old had never been in serious trouble, but in February 2019 police in Lakeland, Fla. arrested him for disrupting his middle school classroom when he refused to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. According to media reports, the student had not stood for the Pledge that whole academic year, because he deemed the salutation "offensive to black people" and the American flag "racist." Students are not required to stand during the Pledge so it had not been a problem before.

A substitute teacher, unaware of the school district policy, confronted the student, demanding he participate. When he refused, words were exchanged and the situation escalated. The substitute contacted school administrators and a school resource officer with the Lakeland Police Department eventually arrested the youth for disrupting a school function and resisting an officer without violence. He was suspended from school for three days.

Two U.S. congressmen-Robert C. Scott of Virginia and Jerrold Nadler of New York-commissioned the GAO report, which was issued in April 2018. The report revealed that black students are disciplined more often and more harshly than their white peers, often for similar offenses.

The analysis in the GAO report also discovered evidence of racial disciplinary disparities by both grade level and type of educational institution (public, private, charter). In addition, the report stated, "black students accounted for 15.5 percent of all public school students, but represented about 39 percent of students suspended from school-an overrepresentation of about 23 percentage points."

Rescinded guidelines

The GAO report is the first federal examination of school discipline policies since 2014 when the Obama administration issued guidance to educators, seeking alternatives to suspension and other penalties that remove students from classrooms. The non-binding document was issued after federal data indicated that minority students were three times as likely to be expelled or suspended, despite the fact that black and Hispanic students made up only 18 percent of public school students. The guidance also noted that suspensions correlated with higher dropout rates and lower academic achievement.

"Fair and equitable discipline policies are an important component of creating an environment where all students feel safe and welcome," the 2014 guidance stated. "Equipping school officials with an array of tools to support positive student behavior- thereby providing a range of options to prevent and address misconduct-will both promote safety and avoid the use of discipline policies that are discriminatory or inappropriate. The goals of equity and school safety are thus complementary, and together help ensure a safe school free of discrimination."

The Trump administration opposed the Obama-era guidance, believing it represented government overreach. Although the GAO's findings seemed to bolster the case for preserving the 2014 guidance, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded the decree in December 2018 after nearly a year-long school safety commission probe. Secretary DeVos, who led the commission, contended that the mandate placed more importance on statistics than student safety.

"Every student has the right to attend school free from discrimination. They also have the right to be respected as individuals and not treated as statistics," DeVos said in a statement. "In too many instances, though, I've heard from teachers and advocates that the previous administration's discipline guidance often led to school environments where discipline decisions were based on a student's race and where statistics became more important than the safety of students and teachers. Our decision to rescind that guidance makes it clear that discipline is a matter on which classroom teachers and local school leaders deserve and need autonomy."

Racial justice groups and civil rights advocates criticized the decision to rescind the guidance, contending the move contradicts the commission's other recommendations, which call for safe and supportive learning environments that promote strong relationships between students and teachers.

"Rescinding this important school discipline guidance signals that the federal government does not care that too many schools have policies and practices that push children of color out of school," Vanita Gupta, president and CEO of The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said in a statement. "Federal nondiscrimination laws have not changed. Any school with discipline policies or practices that discriminate against children based on race, ethnicity, sex or disability is still breaking the law. We urge educators and schools to implement evidence-based strategies that will create the safe, welcoming schools all of our children deserve."

Not so black and white

A recent 2019 study, this one from researchers at Rutgers University, Vanderbilt University and California Polytechnic State University, indicates that when it comes to classroom behavior white teachers in majority-black classrooms have more negative interactions with students than a white teacher in a mostly-white classroom or a black teacher in a majority-black classroom.

Dan Battey, an associate professor at Rutgers and lead author of the study, told Education Week, "Those [students] who are being reprimanded more for behavior are often the ones who get removed from the classroom or [get] suspended." Professor Battey said that repeated negative responses from teachers could also "stamp out students' motivation," causing them to shut down and stop learning.

Another older study from 2015, conducted at Stanford University also revealed disciplinary bias. In the experiment, more than 250 teachers were asked to read four school discipline reports and were told that these students had been in trouble twice, all for similar offenses. The only difference in the records was the names of the students. Two were identified with stereotypical black names (Darnell or Deshawn), the other two had typically white names (Greg or Jake). The study found that most of the teachers determined that "Darnell" and "Deshawn" warranted harsher punishment for the same misdeeds as "Greg" and "Jake."

Montclair Board of Education administrator Davida Harewood, Ph.D., believes a better respect of cultural diversity and more accountability at all education levels can improve and perhaps someday remedy the longstanding racial disparity in school discipline.

"Increasing the cultural competence of educators and school administrators is needed," she says. "Today we still hire a disproportionate number of young Anglo women as educators. Few are required to have taken courses to prepare them for the cultural norms of children that may be different than their own culture."

In a commentary for Education Week, Bettina L. Love, a professor of educational theory and practice at the University of Georgia, wrote about the fact that white teachers don't really know their black students culturally. "Let me be clear," Professor Love wrote. "I do not think White teachers enter the profession wanting to harm children of color, but they will hurt a child whose culture is viewed as an afterthought."

Dr. Harewood also points out that school disciplinarians are often from a racial or gender group that is in the majority and often have limited training on how to support students with different cultural norms or life experiences.

"Forcing children to leave their cultural norms at the school door and conform to the culture of 'the other' then disciplining them when they break the rules is not an effective strategy," Dr. Harewood says. "More understanding of cultural norms, interactions that encourage us to see children as valuable and not problematic 'others' is needed."

1. The GAO report found that Black students are disciplined more harshly and more often than their White peers. What do you think of these findings? Do you see this in your school or in other schools in your area?

2. U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos rescinded guidance from the Obama administration that guided educators to promote positive student behavior and to look for alternatives to suspension and other penalties that remove students from classrooms. What do you think about the guidance? And what do you think about DeVos rescinding the guidance?

3. Both Dr. Harewood and Professor Love talk about a need for understanding the cultures that exist in a school better to avoid unfair punishment practices. What do you think can be done to understand cultures better? Do you think your school understands the culture of its students? Explain.

autonomy: independence or self-rule.
nonpartisan: not adhering to any established political group or party.

This article first appeared in the spring 2019 edition of Respect.

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School Discipline Harsher for Black Students - New Jersey State Bar Foundation

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by Michael Barbella The way a disciplinary incident involving a sixth-grader was handled at a school in Florida is reflective of the racial bias that has existed in American school discipline policies for at least half a century, according to a 2018 report issued by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), a nonpartisan, independent watchdog agency [...]

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by Phyllis Raybin Emert
Individual acts of racism are easy to identify. A young white man shoots members of a black church. The n-word is painted on a family's home. Black people are beaten or terrorized because of the color of their skin.

Instances of institutional racism are not so obvious. Also known as structural racism, it is defined as the continuation of inequality in societal institutions, including, but not limited to, schools, financial institutions and the court system. Whether on purpose or unintentional, this type of racism is built into the system and can affect entire racial groups, offering less chance and opportunities for minorities.

In her 2014 book, Race and Social Equity: A Nervous Area of Government, Susan T. Gooden, Ph.D., explained that racial inequality is cumulative and reinforced in society.

"Racial outcomes in health, education, employment, environmental risk, occupational status and crime are not randomly assigned," Dr. Gooden writes. "They are embedded in a historical structure where racial minorities chronically experience pervasive negative differences. These differences compound exponentially to generate a cycle of racial saturation that continues generation after generation."

Examples of institutional racism are when minorities don't have access to proper medical care, when they cannot qualify for home mortgages under bank lending policies, when they are forced to live in poor communities with excessive crime, when they are arrested at higher rates and put in prison more often than others and when they do not get quality education because the schools in their neighborhood are underfunded or in disrepair.

Dr. Donnetrice Allison, a professor of Africana Studies at Stockton University, explains that institutional racism is a complex combination of factors.

"It is absolutely linked to enslavement, but more specifically, our socialization about race," Dr. Allison says. "The notion of 'race' came to be to distinguish and differentiate human value, such that 'white' became more politically, economically and socially valuable than 'black.'"

The notion of race, she says, helped to justify the enslavement of black people because they were deemed as "less than."

Historical background

Institutional racism was baked into the U.S. Constitution, dating back to when the Founding Fathers were determining how to calculate the number of seats each state would have in the House of Representatives. Article I, Section 2 of the Constitution states: "...shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons...three fifths of all other Persons." Those three-fifths persons were slaves.

"There is also a power differential and a financial differential," says Dr. Allison. "Whites were perceived to be superior and since the early establishment of the United States, they held the vast majority of the wealth and power, and anytime in our history when that has been threatened, those whites in power have lashed out with legislation that helped to maintain their wealth and power, so the cycle continues."

There are many examples of this throughout history, the first and most historic being what many historians consider a short-lived time of "biracial democracy" after the Civil War during the Reconstruction Era. During this time, Hiram Rhodes Revels became the first African American to serve in the U.S. Senate-ironically filling the seat vacated by Jefferson Davis, who left to become the president of the Confederacy.

According to an article in The Washington Post, "For a brief period immediately after the Civil War, newly enfranchised African Americans would participate widely and freely in electoral politics, putting their candidates in office from courthouses to Capitol Hill. At its peak, at least 15 African Americans served in Congress-some of them former slaves." According to the article, just five years after Revels was installed in Congress, the election of 1875 was "marked by violence and repression" and a "mob-fueled assertion of white political dominance." The Ku Klux Klan was also born during this time and threatened African American politicians, assassinating a South Carolina congressman in 1868.

There are also instances of institutional racism where minorities were excluded from benefits other Americans enjoyed. For instance, The Social Security Act of 1935 excluded agricultural workers and servants, positions primarily held by African Americans. The Wagner Act of 1935 did not allow blacks to join protected labor unions. The National Housing Act of 1939 tied the property value appraisal and access to government loans to race. As a result, between 1934 and 1962, less than two percent of government-subsidized housing went to minorities.

Probably the most well known example of institutional racism came in 1896, when the U.S. Supreme Court held in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson that schools could be segregated so long as they were equal. It took 58 years for the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the Plessy decision with Brown v. Board of Education, a ruling that held segregation in public schools is unconstitutional. The landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964 would expand rights for African Americans, prohibiting employment discrimination and banning discrimination in public facilities. The milestone Voting Rights Act of 1965, which fully secured the right to vote for all minorities, soon followed.

Embedded in our institutions

Despite the gains of the Civil Rights Movement, today institutional racism is still deeply implanted in governmental entities. Environmental protection and health care programs, for example, are slower to protect minority communities than white neighborhoods. For instance, minorities are more likely to be exposed to lead, illustrated in the case of predominantly black Flint, Michigan, where the city's water was contaminated. Poor minority communities are also more likely to be exposed to pesticides or pollution because chemical plants are frequently built in poorer neighborhoods that don't have the political clout to fight the government.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, in the 1850s the infant mortality rate for black babies was 57 percent higher than white babies. Today, that rate is 131 percent higher. In addition, in 2015, the infant mortality rate among black mothers with advanced degrees was higher than that of white mothers with an eighth grade education. Research has shown that chronic stress related to racism is contributing to these high statistics.

According to the United States Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2013, black males made up 37 percent of the total male prison population compared to 32 percent of white males. Since African Americans comprise 12 to 14 percent of the total U.S. population, their imprisonment level is disproportionately high. The First Step Act, recently signed into law, aims to lessen the extreme prison sentences of the past and allow early release for many of the nearly 200,000 non-violent offenders serving time in the federal prison system. The Act may only have a slight effect on the overall mass incarceration problem in the U.S. but many believe it is a step forward.

Dr. Allison says the way the criminal justice system is set up contributes to institutional racism. "Who are the judges on the bench across this country?" she asks. "Do they believe that justice is blind or do they operate from bias and sentence black and brown men differently than they do white men? History has shown us that they absolutely do. The system would have to be completely overhauled in order to change it."

Ending institutional racism

In a column for The Huffington Post, Robin L. Hughes, a professor at Indiana School of Education writes, "Institutional racism is a powerful system of privilege and power based on race. Those powerful structures begin and are perpetuated by seemingly innocent, normal events and daily occurrences and interactions." For instance, Professor Hughes points out the overwhelming research that indicates people tend to hire those that "act and look exactly like themselves." Statistics show that white males make up nearly 75 percent of Fortune 500 company boards.

"Since racism is so deeply embedded in our culture, we cannot assume that those who benefit from a powerful system of privilege built on race will somehow learn to see or even want to see inequity and institutionalized systems of racism overnight," Professor Hughes writes.

Many believe that once institutional racism is identified, it can be specifically addressed over time with legislation. Dr. Allison disagrees.

"We cannot eliminate institutional racism unless those in power who deem themselves superior and worthy to maintain their power, give it up. There is power in numbers and those who have maintained positions of power in our government for generations have always understood that," she says and suggests that "poor blacks and whites" can join together in "alliances for needed change."

While America has come a long way in matters of race, there is no question that there is a long way yet to go.

1. Institutional racism connects race to laws and norms set forth by policy and law in our country. What examples of institutional racism have you personally seen in your life? With your family? Your friends? Your community? Your state? The country?

2. What was the Reconstruction era? Why do you think it was short-lived? What is the significance, both then and now, of the Ku Klux Klan being born during Reconstruction?

3. Some people believe there is still segregation in schools, even if it isn't legal. What do you think of this idea?

4. There are many examples of institutional racism in this article. What do you think it will take to end institutional racism?

enfranchise: give the right to vote.
mortality: death or the number of deaths in a certain population.
pervasive: common or widespread.
segregation: the enforced separation of different racial groups in a country, community or establishment.

This article first appeared in the spring 2019 edition of Respect.

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Explaining the Roots of Institutional Racism - New Jersey State Bar Foundation

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by Phyllis Raybin Emert Individual acts of racism are easy to identify. A young white man shoots members of a black church. The n-word is painted on a family's home. Black people are beaten or terrorized because of the color of their skin. Instances of institutional racism are not so obvious.

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Materials from the New Jersey State Bar Association 

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Materials from the New Jersey State Bar Association 

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If you, like many of us, are finding it hard to articulate how to discuss issues of racism, injustice, discrimination and privilege, we'd like to encourage you to take some time to learn and listen.

Take some time to watch some (or all) of these important documentaries about race, racial prejudices and privilege within our society.

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10 Documentaries To Watch About Race Instead Of Asking A Person Of Colour To Explain Things For You

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If you, like many of us, are finding it hard to articulate how to discuss issues of racism, injustice, discrimination and privilege, we'd like to encourage you to take some time to learn and listen. Take some time to watch some (or all) of these important documentaries about race, racial prejudices and privilege within our society.

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As a black woman who was a black kid who sat at the table with the other black kids... Brava Dr. Tatum. A seamless and thoughtful examination of the implications of race in our formative social settings. This book gives valuable insights into how identity establishment and esteem is necessary to healthy social development. She approaches the very relatable snapshot of black kids at the table and dissects it with purpose and precision. This book should be read by all educators.

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"Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?"

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As a black woman who was a black kid who sat at the table with the other black kids... Brava Dr. Tatum. A seamless and thoughtful examination of the implications of race in our formative social settings. This book gives valuable insights into how identity establishment and esteem is necessary to healthy social development.

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Read 113k reviews from the world's largest community for readers. The unforgettable novel of a childhood in a sleepy Southern town and the crisis of consci...

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The Black Lives Matter movement was formed three years ago. That phrase - "Black Lives Matter" - first came up in a frustrated Facebook post in response to the George Zimmerman case. A jury acquitted him after he killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. Then, Black Lives Matter became a hashtag and soon, a national movement.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talked with three of the founders - Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi - about the cultural shift they've seen in the past three years, the frustration that's bubbled to the surface in that time and what they still want to see change.

Interview Highlights
On describing this moment
Alicia Garza: I would describe this moment for the movement as a real paradigm shift. It is a indicator of what is to come. But it also, I think, points to the agency that we have, collectively, to change our conditions. I think if we demonstrate a collective commitment and a collective practice to changing not just how police and policing happens in this country, but certainly to changing the conditions that black communities are living and existing in, then we have a real shot for living in a world that is more just, more equitable - in a world where black lives actually do matter.

We're seeing a really vibrant, multiracial movement for Black Lives.
On if this is a turning point for the movement
Opal Tometi: So I do see this as a very real turning point for the movement. What we're witnessing right now is a deepening level of commitment from people of conscience from all different walks of life. We're seeing a really vibrant, multiracial movement for Black Lives. And we're seeing it evidenced by the people who still committed to being in the streets this weekend, even though we did experience a shift in the narrative and a shift in the understanding of what was happening because of the really unfortunate and sad events in Dallas.
On their response to critics who say the Black Lives Matter movement has created a less safe environment for police
Patrisse Cullors: I think all of us inside of this movement have a deep understanding that what happened in Dallas was a tragedy and that we also can hold the tension of what continues to happen in black communities, which is being brutalized, killed and abused by the state, often at the hands of law enforcement. And so I think people are smart enough to be able to understand that both things are tragic, but - not but - and that we can't be deterred from fighting for black lives. The conversation about Black Lives Matter is an age-old conversation. You know, we talk about this movement really blossoming in the last three years. But we often - the three of us - talk about that "we." We're part of a movement that's been happening for hundreds of years, and this just happens to be a tipping point.
To hear the full interview, click "listen" above.

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Black Lives Matter Founders Describe 'Paradigm Shift' In The Movement

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subscribe to Code Switch podcast subscribe to Code Switch podcast The Black Lives Matter movement was formed three years ago. That phrase - "Black Lives Matter" - first came up in a frustrated Facebook post in response to the George Zimmerman case. A jury acquitted him after he killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla.

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"Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black. Eleven"

"I want to look happily forward. I want to be optimistic. I want to have a dream. I want to live in jubilee. I want my daughters to feel that they have the power to at least try to change things, even in a world that resists change with more strength than they have. I want to tell them they can overcome everything, if the are courageous, resilient and brave. Paradoxically, I also want to tell them their crowns have already been bought and paid for and that all they have to do is put them on their heads. But the world keeps tripping me up. My certainty keeps flailing."

More quotes...

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"Though the white liberal imagination likes to feel temporarily bad about black suffering, there really is no mode of empathy that can replicate the daily strain of knowing that as a black person you can be killed for simply being black: no hands in your pockets, no playing music, no sudden movements, no driving your car, no walking at night, no walking in the day, no turning onto this street, no entering this building, no standing your ground, no standing here, no standing there, no talking back, no playing with toy guns, no living while black.

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The history of racial housing discrimination in the United States and what has been done-and hasn't been done-to rectify it.

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Equal Justice Initiative's Report on Lynching

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Equal Justice Initiative's Report on Lynching

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Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror

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History, despite its wrenching pain,
Cannot be unlived, but if faced
With courage, need not be lived again.

Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morning

During the period between the Civil War and World War II, thousands of African Americans were lynched in the United States. Lynchings were violent and public acts of torture that traumatized Black people throughout the country and were largely tolerated by state and federal officials. These lynchings were terrorism. "Terror lynchings" peaked between 1880 and 1940 and claimed the lives of African American men, women, and children who were forced to endure the fear, humiliation, and barbarity of this widespread phenomenon unaided.

Lynching profoundly impacted race relations in this country and shaped the geographic, political, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today. Terror lynchings fueled the mass migration of millions of Black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Lynching created a fearful environment where racial subordination and segregation was maintained with limited resistance for decades. Most critically, lynching reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed in America. The administration of criminal justice in particular is tangled with the history of lynching in profound and important ways that continue to contaminate the integrity and fairness of the justice system.

This report begins a necessary conversation to confront the injustice, inequality, anguish, and suffering that racial terror and violence created. The history of terror lynching complicates contemporary issues of race, punishment, crime, and justice. Mass incarceration, excessive penal punishment, disproportionate sentencing of racial minorities, and police abuse of people of color reveal problems in American society that were framed in the terror era. The narrative of racial difference that lynching dramatized continues to haunt us. Avoiding honest conversation about this history has undermined our ability to build a nation where racial justice can be achieved.

In America, there is a legacy of racial inequality shaped by the enslavement of millions of Black people. The era of slavery was followed by decades of terrorism and racial subordination most dramatically evidenced by lynching. The civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s challenged the legality of many of the most racist practices and structures that sustained racial subordination but the movement was not followed by a continued commitment to Consequently, this legacy of racial inequality has persisted, leaving us vulnerable to a range of problems that continue to reveal racial disparities and injustice. EJI believes it is essential that we begin to discuss our history of racial injustice more soberly and to understand the implications of our past in addressing the challenges of the present.

Lynching in America is the second in a series of reports that examines the trajectory of American history from slavery to mass incarceration. In 2013, EJI published Slavery in America, which documents the slavery era and its continuing legacy, and erected three public markers in Montgomery, Alabama, to change the visual landscape of a city and state that has romanticized the mid-nineteenth century and ignored the devastation and horror created by racialized slavery and the slave trade.

Over the past six years, EJI staff have spent thousands of hours researching and documenting terror lynchings in the twelve most active lynching states in America: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia. We have more recently supplemented our research by documenting terror lynchings in other states, and found these acts of violence were most common in eight states: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia.

We distinguish racial terror lynchings-the subject of this report-from hangings and mob violence that followed some criminal trial process or that were committed against non-minorities without the threat of terror. Those lynchings were a crude form of punishment that did not have the features of terror lynchings directed at racial minorities who were being threatened and menaced in multiple ways.

We also distinguish terror lynchings from racial violence and hate crimes that were prosecuted as criminal acts. Although criminal prosecution for hate crimes was rare during the period we examine, such prosecutions ameliorated those acts of violence and racial animus. The lynchings we document were acts of terrorism because these murders were carried out with impunity, sometimes in broad daylight, often "on the courthouse lawn." These lynchings were not "frontier justice," because they generally took place in communities where there was a functioning criminal justice system that was deemed too good for African Americans. Terror lynchings were horrific acts of violence whose perpetrators were never held accountable. Indeed, some public spectacle lynchings were attended by the entire white community and conducted as celebratory acts of racial control and domination.

KEY FINDINGS

1. Racial terror lynching was much more prevalent than previously reported. EJI researchers have documented several hundred more lynchings than the number identified in the most comprehensive work done on lynching to date. The extraordinary work of E.M. Beck and Stewart E. Tolnay provided an invaluable resource, as did the research collected at Tuskegee University in Tuskegee, Alabama. These sources are widely viewed asthe most comprehensive collection of research data on the subject of lynching in America. EJI conducted extensive analysis of these data as well as supplemental research and investigation of lynchings in each of the subject states. We reviewed local newspapers, historical archives, and court records; conducted interviews with local historians, survivors, and victims' descendants; and exhaustively examined contemporaneously published reports in African American newspapers. EJI has documented 4084 racial terror lynchings in twelve Southern states between the end of Reconstruction in 1877 and 1950, which is at least 800 more lynchings in these states than previously reported. EJI has also documented more than 300 racial terror lynchings in other states during this time period.

2. Some states and counties were particularly terrifying places for African Americans and had dramatically higher rates of lynching than other states and counties we reviewed. Mississippi, Florida, Arkansas, and Louisiana had the highest statewide rates of lynching in the United States. Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana had the highest number of lynchings. Lafayette, Hernando, Taylor, and Baker counties in Florida; Early County, Georgia; Fulton County, Kentucky; and Lake and Moore Counties in Tennessee had the highest rates of terror lynchings in America. Phillips County, Arkansas; Lafourche and Tensas parishes in Louisiana; Leflore and Carroll counties in Mississippi; and New Hanover County, North Carolina, were sites of mass killings of African Americans in single-incident violence that mark them as notorious places in the history of racial terror violence. The largest numbers of lynchings were found in Jefferson County, Alabama; Orange, Columbia, and Polk counties in Florida; Fulton, Early, and Brooks counties in Georgia; Caddo, Ouachita, Bossier, Iberia, and Tangipahoa parishes in Louisiana; Hinds County, Mississippi; Shelby County, Tennessee; and Anderson County, Texas.

3. Racial terror lynching was a tool used to enforce laws and racial segregation-a tactic for maintaining racial control by victimizing the entire African American community, not merely punishment of an alleged perpetrator for a crime. Our research confirms that many victims of terror lynchings were murdered without being accused of any crime; they were killed for minor social transgressions or for demanding basic rights and fair treatment.

4. Our conversations with survivors of lynchings show that terror lynching played a key role in the forced migration of millions of Black Americans out of the South. Thousands of people fled to the North and West out of fear of being lynched. Parents and spouses sent away loved ones who suddenly found themselves at risk of being lynched for a minor social transgression; they characterized these frantic, desperate escapes as surviving near-lynchings.

5. In all of the subject states, we observed that there is an astonishing absence of any effort to acknowledge, discuss, or address lynching. Many of the communities where lynchings took place have gone to great lengths to erect markers and monuments that memorialize the Civil War, the Confederacy, and historical events during which local power was violently reclaimed by white Southerners. These communities celebrate and honor the architects of racial subordination and political leaders known for their belief in white supremacy. There are very few monuments or memorials that address the history and legacy of lynching in particular or the struggle for racial equality more generally. Most communities do not actively or visibly recognize how their race relations were shaped by terror lynching.

6. We found that most terror lynchings can best be understood as having the features of one or more of the following: (1) lynchings that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; (3) lynchings based on allegations of serious violent crime; (4) public spectacle lynchings; (5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and (6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment, which were most common between 1915 and 1940.

7. The decline of lynching in the studied states relied heavily on the increased use of capital punishment imposed by court order following an often accelerated trial. That the death penalty's roots are sunk deep in the legacy of lynching is evidenced by the fact that public executions to mollify the mob continued after the practice was legally banned.

The Equal Justice Initiative believes that our nation must fully address our history of racial terror and the legacy of racial inequality it has created. This report explores the power of truth and reconciliation or transitional justice to address oppressive histories by urging communities to honestly and soberly recognize the pain of the past. As has been powerfully detailed in Sherrilyn A. Ifill's extraordinary work on lynching , there is an urgent need to challenge the absence of recognition in the public space on the subject of lynching. Only when we concretize the experience through discourse, memorials, monuments, and other acts of reconciliation can we overcome the shadows cast by these grievous events. We hope you will join our effort to help towns, cities, and states confront and recover from tragic histories of racial violence and terrorism and to improve the health of our communities by creating an environment where there can truly be equal justice for all.

As the Civil War dragged on, however, increasing numbers of enslaved African Americans fled slavery to relocate behind Union lines, and the cause of emancipation became more militarily and politically expedient. On January 1, 1863, President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation,4 which declared enslaved people residing in the rebelling Confederate states to be "then, thenceforward, and forever free."5 The Emancipation Proclamation did not apply to the roughly 425,000 enslaved people living in Tennessee, Delaware, Kentucky, Missouri, and Maryland-states that had not seceded or were occupied by Union forces.

Formal nationwide codification of emancipation came in December 1865 with ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, which prohibited slavery throughout the United States Several states continued to symbolically resist into the twentieth century: Delaware did not ratify the Thirteenth Amendment until 1901; Kentucky ratified in 1976; and Mississippi ratified in 1995.9

At the Civil War's end, Black autonomy expanded but white supremacy remained deeply rooted. The failure to unearth those roots would leave Black Americans exposed to terrorism and racial subordination for more than a century.

PRESIDENTIAL RECONSTRUCTION

President Johnson also opposed Black voting rights. During , whites of diverse political affiliations declared voting a "privilege" rather than a universal right, and even some whites who had opposed slavery were wary of measures that would lead to Black voting in the North.In his 1867 annual message to Congress, President Johnson declared that Black Americans had "less capacity for government than any other race of people," that they would "relapse into barbarism" if left to their own devices, and that giving them the vote would result in "a tyranny such as this continent has never yet witnessed.14 Johnson believed Black people were inherently servile and unintelligent; he feared they would vote as instructed by their former masters, reestablishing the power of the planter class and relegating poor white farmers to virtual slavery.15 Johnson made little effort to disguise his racist views. 16" Not surprisingly, under President Johnson, federal Reconstruction efforts to support and enforce Black Americans' citizenship rights and social and economic freedom went largely unsupported and unrealized.

Less than three months later, in New Orleans, a group of African Americans-many of whom had been free before the Civil War-attempted to convene a state constitutional convention to extend voting rights to Black men and repeal racially discriminatory laws known as When the delegates convened at the Mechanics' Institute on July 30, 1866, groups of Black supporters and white opponents clashed in the streets. The white mob began firing on Black marchers, indiscriminately killing convention supporters and unaffiliated Black bystanders. Rather than maintain order, white police officers attacked Black residents with guns, axes, and clubs, arresting many and killing several. By the time federal troops arrived to suppress the white insurgency, as many as forty-eight Black people were dead and two hundred had been wounded.18

PROGRESSIVE RECONSTRUCTION

The Memphis and New Orleans attacks, which occurred just before the midterm elections of 1866, sparked national outrage outside the South and mobilized voters to support the progressive platform advocating expansive rights and protections for African Americans. Republicans won a landslide victory in the 1866 congressional races, gaining a veto-proof majority and control of the legislative agenda.19 Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts and Representative Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania then led the progressive caucus in devising an ambitious civil rights program broader than anything Congress would attempt for another century.

First, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared Black Americans full citizens entitled to equal civil rights.20 President Johnson vetoed the bill, but Congress-for the first time in United States history-overrode the veto.21 Next, the progressive Republican supermajority quickly passed the Fourteenth Amendment. Intended to eliminate any doubt about the constitutionality of civil rights, the proposed amendment established that all persons born in the country, regardless of race, were full citizens of the United States and the states in which they resided, entitled to the "privileges and immunities" of citizenship, due process, and the equal protection of the law.22 If ratified, the amendment would supersede the United States Supreme Court's 1857 decision in , which held that African Americans were not citizens and had no standing to sue in federal court.23

WHITE BACKLASH: THE KU KLUX KLAN AND THE REIGN OF TERROR

Occupation by federal troops restrained this violence but did not eliminate racial attacks or the commitment to white supremacy that fueled them. The political movement to restore white dominance in the South following the Civil War was termed Redemption and its advocates, called Redeemers, were staunchly opposed to progressive Republicans and Black citizenship rights.36 This set up a tense conflict. As Black people became voters with significant political power, especially in states and counties where they constituted majorities, disputed elections often devolved into bloody massacres.

In the face of Black political and economic competition created by emancipation and progressive Reconstruction, white backlash worked to re-impose white dominance through violent repression.37 In 1868, white Democrats angered by growing Black support for white Republican candidates in St. Landry Parish, Louisiana, terrorized the local Black community in two weeks of attacks that left more than a hundred Black people dead.38 In 1873, after a very close gubernatorial election, a militia of white Democrats killed dozens of Black Republicans in what came to be known as the Colfax Massacre.39 Similarly, in 1875, a paramilitary group known as the Red Shirts organized in Mississippi to undermine Black political power by disrupting Republican rallies, intimidating Black voters with threats of violence and economic reprisal, and assassinating Black leaders.40

COLFAX, LOUISIANA

On Easter Sunday, 300 whites attacked the courthouse and three whites were killed in the assault. The outnumbered Black forces waved white flags in surrender, but the assault continued; numerous unarmed Black men who hid in the courthouse or attempted to flee were shot and killed. Approximately fifty African Americans who survived the afternoon assault were taken prisoner and executed by the white militia later that evening. As many as 150 African Americans were killed in the massacre, described as "the bloodiest single act of carnage in all of Reconstruction."43

The whites who exacted this violence faced no consequences because the United States Supreme Court dismissed all federal charges against them.

The local narrative in Colfax has continued to praise the cause of racial violence and embrace the message of racial hatred. In 1921, the town erected a memorial to the three whites who died during the Colfax Massacre, memorializing them as "heroes [who] fell . . . fighting for white supremacy." In 1950, at the site of the old courthouse, the state erected a monument that reads, "On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873, marked the end of misrule in the South." Today, Colfax is a town of less than 2000 people. Both markers still stand.

The earliest seeds of violent white resistance to Reconstruction were planted in Pulaski, Tennessee, in late 1865, when six Confederate veterans formed the Ku Klux Klan.Famed Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was the Klan's first leader, or Grand Wizard, and today he is immortalized in stone monuments in many towns and cities throughout the South.44 Made up of well-educated young men of comparative wealth who would go on to prominent careers in law and state politics, the group was initially informal, with a stated purpose of "amusement."45 The KKK spread quickly and developed a complex hierarchy with rules as intricate as an army manual. In less than a year, chapters spread throughout Tennessee and into northern Alabama. 46 Far from the small band of extremist outsiders it is now, the Klan drew members from every echelon of white society in the nineteenth century, including planters, lawyers, merchants, and ministers. In York County, South Carolina, nearly the entire white male population joined.47 The Klan and similar organizations, including the Knights of the White Camelia and the Pale Faces, were independent and de-centralized but shared aims and tactics to form a vast network of terrorist cells. By the 1868 presidential election, those cells were poised to act as a unified military force supporting the cause of white supremacy throughout the South.48

Shortly before the 1868 election, progressive Republicans looking to remove President Andrew Johnson managed to have him impeached by the House of Representatives but failed to secure his conviction in the Senate. As a result, Johnson remained in office and the Republican party suffered politically. As a result, former Union General Ulysses S. Grant-a moderate-won the Republican presidential nomination.In the general election, Grant faced former New York Governor Horatio Seymour, who campaigned as the "white man's candidate." In a March 11, 1868 speech to the New York State Democratic Convention, Seymour said that Black people "are in form, color, and character unlike the whites, and [] are, in their present condition, an ignorant and degraded race."As white terror groups sought to suppress the Black vote and deliver the South for Seymour, violent attacks in Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia resulted in hundreds of deaths and successfully prevented Black people from casting a single vote in many counties with significant Black populations.49 50 Seymour also criticized post-war congressional civil rights laws that, by prohibiting racial discrimination and establishing equal citizenship rights, "abolished the Black man and made him a white man by legislation."51 52

Varied white groups took up the cause of restoring labor discipline in the absence of slavery. Vigilantes whipped and lynched Black freedmen who argued with employers, left the plantations where they were contracted to work, or displayed any economic success of their own.54 White terror groups also focused intense energy on imposing "their own vision of a righteous society,"55 which usually meant targeting Black men for perceived sexual transgressions against white women. Charges of rape, while common, were "routinely fabricated" and often extrapolated from minor violations of the social code, such as "paying a compliment" to a white woman, expressing romantic interest in a white woman, or cohabitating interracially.56 White mobs regularly attacked Black men accused of sexual crimes and historians estimate that at least 400 African Americans were lynched between 1868 and 1871.57 Whites also sought retribution for alleged rapes by targeting entire Black communities with violent, public, and sexualized attacks, including forcing victims to strip, binding them in compromising positions, and whipping their genitals; widespread rape of Black women, sometimes in front of their families; and genital mutilation and castration.58 Through these acts of violence, white vigilantes used terror "to revive the privileges of white masculinity over the bodies of their former slaves."59

WAVERING SUPPORT: FEDERAL INDIFFERENCE AND LEGAL OPPOSITION

Campbell's case and several others were consolidated into The Slaughterhouse Cases and considered by a newly activist Supreme Court. Prior to 1865, the Court had only twice struck down congressional acts as unconstitutional; between 1865 and 1872, the Court did so twelve times.68 The Slaughterhouse Cases would make thirteen.

The Court's 1872 decision held that the Fourteenth Amendment protected solely the conferred by national citizenship-a narrow category of rights mostly irrelevant to the struggles facing Southern Black people.69 The Court reasoned that rights derived from a person's state citizenship were enforceable only in state court-a forum dominated by the white ruling class and utterly hostile to claims by African Americans in the South. Though The Slaughterhouse Cases explicitly acknowledged that the Reconstruction amendments were adopted to protect the rights of formerly enslaved people, the decision eviscerated their practical impact by drastically limiting freedmen's ability to enforce their rights in federal court, the only forum where they stood a chance of a fair hearing.

The response was immediate. Enforcement Act trials in most of the Southern states had been halted pending the Supreme Court appeal. When Cruikshank was decided, the Justice Department dropped 179 Enforcement Act prosecutions in Mississippi alone.75 Violence continued to spread, and increasingly, attacks on African Americans in the South were carried out by undisguised men in broad daylight.76

The Amnesty Act was passed over the objection of Congressman Jefferson Long. Born into slavery in 1836 and elected in 1870 as Georgia's first Black representative in the United States Congress, Long became the first Black person to speak on the House floor when he opposed amnesty.

Long asked: "Do we, then, really propose here today, when the country is not ready for it, when those disloyal people still hate this government, when loyal men dare not carry the 'stars and stripes' through our streets, for if they do they will be turned out of employment, to relieve from political disability the very men who have committed these Kuklux outrages? I think that I am doing my duty to my constituents and my duty to my country when I vote against any such proposition...

Mr. Speaker, I propose, as a man raised as a slave, my mother a slave before me, and my ancestry slaves as far back as I can trace them... If this House removes the disabilities of disloyal men by modifying the test-oath, I venture to prophesy you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before."78

Long's warning went unheeded. Even before Reconstruction's official end, Confederate veterans espousing white supremacist rhetoric were able to employ violent intimidation to regain political control over many Southern governments. In Virginia, former Confederate General James L. Kemper was inaugurated as governor in 1874 and, that same year, delivered an address to the General Assembly outlining the racial regime he intended to create:

Things were not much better outside the South, as the Supreme Court continued to chip away at federal Reconstruction laws. In 1875, Congress passed Senator Charles Sumner's Civil Rights Act, which mandated desegregation and imposed criminal penalties for racial discrimination in jury selection.83 But the Cruikshank decision left little legal basis to enforce desegregation provisions, and in 1883, the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional.84 The next decade, in Plessy v. Ferguson, the Court would uphold racial segregation as fully consistent with the Fourteenth Amendment and create the doctrine of "separate but equal."85

On the defeat of Reconstruction, The Nation offered a solemn assessment: "The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics. Henceforth, the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him.""They are to be returned to a condition of serfdom," predicted Governor Ames of Mississippi. "An era of second slavery."88 For millions of Black men, women, and children, that abandonment foretold a grim future. 89

AFTER RECONSTRUCTION: UNEQUAL, AGAIN

The presence of federal troops in the South during the Reconstruction era acted as a penetrable dam holding back some of the violence, political suppression, and racist rhetoric employed by those intent on restoring white supremacist rule. Their premature withdrawal unleashed a pent-up wave of violence that easily topped the few remaining protective structures and left Black people cemented in an inferior economic, social, and political position.

Over the ensuing decades, aided by convict leasing and Jim Crow laws, and emboldened by the federal government's disinterest in enforcing the racial equality guaranteed by the federal Constitution, Southern legislatures institutionalized the racial inequality enshrined in their state constitutions. The South created a system of state and local laws and practices that constituted a pervasive and deep-rooted racial caste system. The era of "second slavery" had officially begun.

CONVICT LEASING

JIM CROW

In South Carolina, a 1917 law required that all circuses and other tent events maintain separate entrances and ticket booths for Black and white attendees and imposed a maximum $500 fine for noncompliance.104 A 1915 law required that Black and white employees of cotton textile mills be segregated at every stage of employment and restricted them from using the same entry/exit, occupying the same stairwell, or using the same tools.105 A 1924 law effectively outlawed interracial pool rooms by declaring that no license would be issued to a billiard room owner who intended his establishment to be patronized by customers of another race.106 And a 1910 law prohibited placing a white child in the permanent custody of a Black adult.107 Similarly, Florida law required separation of the races on streetcars;108 Mississippi law mandated separate hospital entrances for white and Black patients;109 North Carolina law authorized librarians to create separate reading areas for Black patrons;110 and Alabama law prohibited white nurses from treating Black male patients.111

Racial segregation often translated to the total exclusion of Black people from public facilities, institutions, and opportunities. This separation plainly disadvantaged Black people and served as a constant symbol of their inferior position in Southern society.

Though legally emancipated from slavery and endowed with constitutional rights to participate in society as full citizens, Black people soon learned that those rights were unenforceable in a white-controlled political system hostile to their exercise. This message was communicated through an intricate and complex system of racial subordination built after the Civil War to maintain and reinforce white supremacy in a world without chattel slavery. Constructed of law and custom, force and fear, disenfrachisement, convict leasing, and Jim Crow segregation, the system was fragile and fiercely guarded. Over the century that this racial caste system reigned, perceived violations of the racial order were met with brutal violence targeted at Black Americans-and lynching was the weapon of choice.

Even as lynchings became more frequently deadly, they differed greatly by region. An individual subject to a frontier lynching typically was accused of a crime such as murder or robbery, given some form of process and trial, and hanged without any additional torture or foul play.120 Southern lynchings, on the other hand, were commonly extrajudicial and employed to defend slavery.121 Between 1830 and 1860, Southern mobs killed an estimated 130 white individuals122 and at least 400 enslaved Black people. Most were lynched under suspicion of conspiring to mount a slave uprising-a growing but largely unsubstantiated fear among whites in slaveholding states.123 In addition, Southern lynchings of African Americans were distinct from lynchings of whites, and often featured extreme brutality such as burning, torture, mutilation, and decapitation of the victim.124

The character of the violence also changed as gruesome public spectacle lynchings became much more common. At these often festive community gatherings, large crowds of whites watched and participated in the Black victims' prolonged torture, mutilation, dismemberment, and burning at the stake."Lynching has been resorted to by whites not merely to wreak vengeance, but to terrorize and restrain this lawless element in the Negro population. Among Southern people, the conviction is general that terror is the only restraining influence that can be brought to bear upon vicious Negroes."130 Such brutally violent methods of execution had almost never been applied to whites in America. Indeed, public spectacle lynchings drew from and perpetuated the belief that Africans were subhuman-a myth that had been used to justify centuries of enslavement, and now fueled and purportedly justified terrorism aimed at newly-emancipated African American communities.131 A report published in 1905 explained that 132

Through lynching, Southern white communities asserted their racial dominance over the region's political and economic resources-a dominance first achieved through slavery would now be restored through blood and terror.

CHARACTERISTICS OF THE LYNCHING ERA

The thousands of African Americans lynched between 1880 and 1950 differed in many respects, but in most cases, the circumstances of their murders can be categorized as one or more of the following: (1) lynchings that resulted from a wildly distorted fear of interracial sex; (2) lynchings in response to casual social transgressions; (3) lynchings based on allegations of serious violent crime; (4) public spectacle lynchings; (5) lynchings that escalated into large-scale violence targeting the entire African American community; and (6) lynchings of sharecroppers, ministers, and community leaders who resisted mistreatment, which were most common between 1915 and 1940.

LYNCHINGS BASED ON FEAR OF INTERRACIAL SEX

Whites' fears of interracial sex extended to any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contact with a white woman. In 1889, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, Keith Bowen allegedly tried to enter a room where three white women were sitting; though no further allegation was made against him, Mr. Bowen was lynched by the "entire (white) neighborhood" for his "offense."144

William Brooks was lynched in 1894 in Palestine, Arkansas, after he asked his white employer for permission to marry the man's daughter.145

General Lee, a Black man, was lynched by a white mob in 1904 for merely knocking on the door of a white woman's house in Reevesville, South Carolina.146

In 1912, Thomas Miles was lynched for allegedly writing letters to a white woman inviting her to have a cold drink with him.147

In 1934, after being accused of "associating with a white woman" in Newton, Texas, John Griggs was hanged and shot seventeen times and his body was dragged behind a car through the town for hours.148

Whites' fear of sexual contact between Black men and white women was pervasive and led to many lynchings. Narratives of these lynchings reported in the sympathetic white press justified the violence and perpetuated the deadly stereotype of African American men as hypersexual threats to white womanhood.

LYNCHINGS BASED ON MINOR SOCIAL TRANSGRESSIONS

In 1940, Jesse Thornton was lynched in Luverne, Alabama, for referring to a white police officer by his name without the title of "mister."150

In 1918, Private Charles Lewis was lynched in Hickman, Kentucky, after he refused to empty his pockets while wearing his Army uniform.151

Richard Wilkerson was lynched in Manchester, Tennessee, in 1934 for allegedly slapping a white man who had assaulted a Black woman at an African American dance.152

White men lynched Jeff Brown in 1916 in Cedarbluff, Mississippi, for accidentally bumping into a white girl as he ran to catch a train.153

In 1917, Sam Gates was lynched for the offense of "annoying white girls" in England, Arkansas.154

Law-abiding African Americans lived at risk of arbitrary and deadly mob violence. These lynchings and the threat of falling victim to the mobs who committed them sought to keep the African American community terrorized and in a constant state of fear.

LYNCHINGS BASED ON ALLEGATIONS OF CRIME

More than half of the lynching victims EJI documented were killed under accusation of committing murder or rape. The deep racial hostility that permeated Southern society during this time period often served to focus suspicion on Black communities after a crime was discovered, whether evidence supported that suspicion or not. This was especially true in cases of violent crime against white victims.

It is dubious to claim that all or even most individuals lynched for violent offenses had committed them, considering that whites' accusations of rape or murder were rarely subject to serious scrutiny when lodged against Black people. In a strictly maintained racial caste system, the mere suggestion of Black-on-white violence could spark outrage, mob violence, and murder before the judicial system could act. In this society, white lives held heightened value, while the lives of Black people held little or none.

Race, rather than the alleged offense, sealed lynching victims' fates. Lynching, a statement of racial terror and white supremacy, was largely reserved for Black suspects. White people accused of murder or rape during this era were much more likely to be tried, convicted, and punished by the legal system than by a mob.157 In Thomasville, Georgia, in 1930, a Black man named William Kirkland was arrested for the alleged rape of a nine-year-old white girl, and before a trial could be held, a mob of between fifty and seventy-five white men seized him from the jail, hung his body from a tree, riddled it with bullets, and then dragged the corpse through town behind a truck before depositing it on the courthouse lawn.158 Just three days after Mr. Kirkland's lynching, an African American man named Lacy Mitchell was lynched in Thomasville for testifying against a white man accused of raping an African American woman. Mr. Mitchell, a key witness, was shot in his home by four white men and died; the white defendant was acquitted and released.159

PUBLIC SPECTACLE LYNCHINGS

These killings were not the actions of a few marginalized vigilantes or extremists; they were bold, public acts that implicated the entire community and sent a clear message that African Americans were less than human, their subjugation was to be achieved through any means necessary, and whites who undertook the duty of carrying out lynchings would face no legal repercussions.

PARIS, TEXAS

Founded in 1844, Paris, Texas, was named for the famous French city and quickly became the seat of Lamar County.169 By the start of the Civil War, the town of 700 residents was a center of farming and cattle ranching,170 and 28 percent of county residents were enslaved Black people.171 In the lynching era that followed the Civil War and emancipation, Paris was the site of repeated bloody racial terror.

Today, Paris is a small but vibrant and diverse city of 25,000 people, with no historical markers to document either lynching. A large Confederate memorial adorns the courthouse lawn-a site of racial unrest in the twenty-first century.

In 2008, a twenty-four-year-old Black man named Brandon McClelland was found dead by a roadside in Paris. An investigation determined he had been dragged behind or under a vehicle as far as seventy feet. Two white men who spent several hours with Mr. McClelland on the night he died were arrested after blood reportedly was found on the undercarriage of their truck. When the local prosecutor dropped all charges against the men in 2009, citing a lack of evidence, racial tensions flared. Members of the local Black community rallying at the courthouse to protest officials' inaction were met with a counter-protest by dozens of white supremacists holding Confederate flags and shouting "White Power!" State police in riot gear were called to quell the conflict.175

LYNCHINGS TARGETING THE ENTIRE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY

The practice of terrorizing an entire African American community after lynching one alleged "wrong-doer" demonstrates that Southern lynching during this era was not to attain "popular justice" or retaliation for crime. Rather, these lynchings were designed for broad impact-to send a message of domination, to instill fear, and sometimes to drive African Americans from the community altogether.

LYNCHINGS OF Black PEOPLE RESISTING MISTREATMENT (1915 - 1940)

From 1915 to 1940, lynch mobs targeted African Americans who protested being treated as second-class citizens. African Americans throughout the South, individually and in organized groups, were demanding the economic and civil rights to which they were entitled. In response, whites turned to lynching.

African Americans' efforts to fight for economic power and equal rights in the early twentieth century-a prelude to the civil rights movement-were violently repressed by whites who acted with impunity. Whites used terrorism to relegate African Americans to a state of second-class citizenship and economic disadvantage that would last for generations after emancipation and create far-reaching consequences.

LYNCHINGS IN THE SOUTH, 1877 - 1950

This report documents 4084 lynchings of Black people that occurred in Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia between 1877 and 1950. The data reveals telling trends across time and region, including that lynchings peaked between 1880 and 1940. (See Figure 1.)

Mississippi, Georgia, and Louisiana had the highest absolute number of African American lynching victims during this period. (See Table 1.) The rankings change when the number of lynchings are considered relative to each state's total population and African American population. Mississippi, Florida, and Arkansas had the highest per capita rates of lynching by total population, while Arkansas, Florida, and Mississippi had the highest per capita rates of lynching by African American population. (See Tables 2 and 3.)

The twenty-five counties with the highest rates of lynchings of African Americans during this era are located in eight of the twelve states studied: Arkansas, Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, Georgia, Kentucky, Texas, and Mississippi. The terror of lynching was not confined to a few outlier states. Racial terror cast a shadow of fear across the region. (See Tables 4 and 5.)

(Rank, County, Lynchings)

Lynching Outside the South, 1877-1950

In addition to the 4084 documented lynchings committed in the South between 1877 and 1950, EJI has documented more than 300 racial terror lynchings of Black people that took place in other parts of the United States during the same period. The vast majority of these 341 lynchings were concentrated in eight states: Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maryland, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, and West Virginia. Though the numbers were lower, mirroring the lower concentration of Black residents in these states, racial terror lynchings committed outside the South featured many of the same characteristics.

EJI found the highest numbers of documented racial terror lynchings outside the South during the lynching era in Oklahoma, Missouri, and Illinois, and those totals were largely fueled by acts of mass violence against entire Black communities that left many people dead, property destroyed, and survivors traumatized.

The lynching era was fueled by the movement to restore white supremacy and domination, but Northern and federal officials who failed to act as Black people were terrorized and murdered enabled this campaign of racial terrorism. For more than six decades, as Southern whites used lynching to enforce a post-slavery system of racial dominance, white officials outside the South watched and did little.

TURNING A BLIND EYE TO LYNCHING: NORTHERN AND FEDERAL COMPLICITY

Congress made efforts to pass federal anti-lynching bills throughout the lynching era, but Southern white representatives predictably and consistently protested so-called federal interference in local affairs.Very few white people were convicted of murder for lynching a Black person in America during this period,197 Southern states passed their own anti-lynching laws to demonstrate that federal legislation was unnecessary,198 but refused to enforce them. 199 and of all lynchings committed after 1900, only 1 percent resulted in a lyncher being convicted of a criminal offense.200

Throughout the lynching era, as thousands of Black people were killed and countless more were terrorized by racial violence, Congress repeatedly failed to muster enough votes to pass any of the anti-lynching statutes proposed, largely due to arguments that no such law could withstand a constitutional test under the Court's Reconstruction-era precedent.Southern officials seized on this rhetoric and argued that, because lynching primarily affected Black people, federal lynching legislation constituted racial "favoritism" and reprised what most regarded as failed Reconstruction-era policies.202 Further, the majority opinion in Cruikshank had declared-barely a decade after emancipation-that formerly-enslaved people had reached the "stage in the progress of his elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases to be the special favorite of the laws," and thus had no claim to specialized legal protection.203 204

By 1886, a "New South" controlled by white supremacist leaders was largely established. The dominant political narrative blamed lynching on its victims, insisting that brutal mob violence was the only appropriate response to the growing scourge of Black men raping white women.208 Northern academics promoting the field of concocted theories to legitimate the claim that Black men were dangerous subhumans predisposed to rape. By the late 1880s, numerous American scholars viewed African Americans as "a race that was devolving on the scale of civilization and becoming increasingly dangerous."209 University of Pennsylvania professor Daniel G. Brinton, who later became president of the International Congress of Anthropology and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, opined in 1890 that Black people had regressed to "midway between the Orang-utang and the European white."210 Brown University sociologist Lester Ward likewise concluded in 1930 that the Black man was compelled by the "imperious voice of nature to rape white women and thus raise his race to a little higher level."211 It would be another two decades before liberal anthropologists and other social scientists debunked these malicious myths, marking a turning point in the public discourse about race.212

Meanwhile, Southern white politicians relied on "lynching and vigilantism as instruments of political terrorism"The Republican Party responded to its electoral defeat by abandoning racial equality as a platform; it "defected entirely to the resurgent white supremacist order," and in 1896 regained power by running "strictly as a party of economic interests, not civil rights."213 to recreate state governments based in white supremacy and worked hard to defeat proposed federal laws that would have protected Black citizens' voting rights. Southern officials branded proposed voter protection legislation a "Force Bill" that would trample states' rights and create a dangerous "new Reconstruction" in which increased Black voting would arouse Black criminality.214 Its success in defeating efforts to protect and restore Black Americans' voting rights allowed the Southern-dominated Democratic Party to win the White House and a majority of Congress in 1892-just as the national lynching rate soared. 215

By the start of the twentieth century, national leaders had learned to profitably employ popular white supremacist views and pro-lynching rhetoric. In 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt declared that "the greatest existing cause of lynching is the perpetration, especially by Black men, of the hideous crime of rape.""[If] it requires lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from ravening, drunken human beasts," white women's rights activist Rebecca Felton wrote in the Atlanta Journal in 1898, "then I say lynch a thousand a week if necessary."216 "Let [the Black man] keep his hands off white women," the Memphis Avalanche-Appeal editorialized, "and lynching will soon die out."217 218

OPPOSITION TO LYNCHING

Black anti-lynching activists like journalists Ida B. Wells222 and T. Thomas Fortune and Tuskegee sociologist Monroe Work harnessed the growing power of the Black press.223 Their articles demanded that lynch mobs be held accountable for committing murder and launched a public education campaign to combat the spread of misinformation and dispute the myth of widespread Black-on-white rape.224 Black advocates also formed national anti-lynching organizations and petitioned for legislation and official intervention in response to lynchings.225

In February 1898, a white mob in Lake City, South Carolina, set fire to the home of the Baker family and riddled it with gunshots, killing Frazier Baker and his infant daughter, Julia, and leaving his wife and five surviving children wounded and traumatized. Baker, a Black man, had aroused the hatred of the predominately white community when President William McKinley appointed him to the position of local postmaster. After efforts to have Baker removed from the post failed, local whites resorted to mob violence.226 The murder prompted a national campaign of letter-writing, activism, and advocacy spearheaded by Wells and others, which ultimately persuaded President McKinley to order a federal investigation that resulted in the prosecution of eleven white men implicated in the Baker lynching. Despite ample evidence, an all-white jury refused to convict any of the defendants.

Ida B. Wells

Anti-lynching crusader Ida Bell Wells was born into slavery in Holly Springs, Mississippi, in 1862.227 At age eighteen, she moved to Memphis to work as a teacher and at age twenty-two, she sued the Chesapeake & Ohio & Southeastern Railroad Company for forcibly removing her from a train after she refused to be reseated in a segregated car. Though she ultimately lost the case, the effort foreshadowed her lifelong fight against racial injustice.228

An avid reader and writer, Ms. Wells became a popular columnist in Black newspapers while in Memphis, eventually rising to editor and part owner of the local Free Speech and Headlight.229 She regularly used the platform to criticize racial inequality. When Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart-three Black men and friends of Ms. Wells-were brutally lynched in Memphis in March 1892 for defending their grocery business against white attackers, she immediately published an editorial urging Memphis's Black community to "save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons."230

More than 6000 African Americans heeded the call, but Ms. Wells stayed to promote the movement she had begun. In May 1892, she published another editorial that challenged the claim that lynching was necessary to protect white womanhood. In response, Memphis's white newspapers denounced and derided Ms. Wells as a "black scoundrel." On May 27, 1892, while she was visiting Philadelphia, a white mob attacked and destroyed the Free Speech and Headlight office and threatened her with bodily harm if she returned.231

Ms. Wells relocated to New York, where she continued her anti-lynching efforts by writing for the New York Age, publishing several anti-lynching pamphlets, and embarking on a speaking tour through the Northern states and Britain, where she decried the atrocities of lynching and urged federal and international intervention.232 Ultimately settling in Chicago, Ms. Wells became Mrs. Wells-Barnett and raised five children while collaborating with leaders like Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois; helping to found the NAACP; organizing legal aid for victims of the 1918 race riots; publicly challenging racism within the women's rights movement; and remaining the nation's foremost anti-lynching crusader for forty years.233

In the preface to her 1892 pamphlet, Southern Horrors, Ida B. Wells-Barnett described the goal of her life's work: "The Afro American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way toward proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance."234 She died of natural causes in Chicago in 1931, as the terror of the lynching era still raged and before the legacy of her tireless dedication was fully realized.

Black efforts to combat racial violence during the lynching era spawned many important Black organizations, including the nation's most effective and longstanding, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The NAACP formed in direct response to racial attacks in Springfield, Illinois, in 1908-an outbreak of violence that shocked Northerners and demonstrated that lynching was not only a Southern phenomenon.235 When it officially launched in 1910, the NAACP's president, treasurer, board chair, and secretary were all white men; the organization was one of the first in America in which white and Black, male and female members worked side by side on a public level.236 When the NAACP made lynching a primary focus in 1912,237 its support in the Black community soared. By 1919, 310 chapters boasted 91,203 members nationwide.238 Black scholar and activist W. E. B. Du Bois served as editor of the NAACP news magazine The Crisis. By 1919, the magazine had a circulation of 100,000 and soon became the most influential race publication in the country's history.239

Due in large part to the racist propaganda disseminated during World War ISouthern lawmakers mobilized against the bill in the Senate, resurrecting familiar objections demanding In the end, Southern Democrats filibustered the Dyer bill in the Senate and, on December 4, 1922, it was officially abandoned.240 and the nationwide outbreak of racial violence that characterized the "Red Summer" of 1919,241 lynching became a major national issue by the 1920s. The NAACP launched a renewed campaign for federal anti-lynching legislation that succeeded in winning passage of the Dyer anti-lynching bill in the House of Representatives on January 26, 1922, by a vote of 231-119.242 243 alleging racial favoritism, and warning of the threat of Black rapists. Southern representatives appealed to racial division by accusing the law's supporters of promoting an unconstitutional bill to satisfy "Negro agitators"244 and shield rapists from justice.245 Tennessee Representative Finis J. Garrett suggested the bill's title be amended to read, "A bill to encourage rape."246 247

The NAACP continued to push for federal anti-lynching legislation into the 1930s. Though white supremacist Southern Democrats continued to use the filibuster to defeat proposed bills,In 1919, a group of primarily white Southerners formed the anti-lynching Committee on Interracial Cooperation in Atlanta, and in 1930, it launched the Association of Southern Women to Prevent Lynching (ASWPL). By 1940, the ASWPL claimed 40,000 supporters,248 the NAACP's campaign decrying lynching as "America's shame" helped turn the tide of public opinion-including in the South. 249 and by 1937, Gallup polls showed overwhelming white support for anti-lynching legislation.250

The NAACP's campaign persuaded some Southern newspapers to oppose lynching because it was damaging the South's image and economic prospects.By the mid-1930s, "forward-looking white Southerners were compelled to adopt the position that lynching was barbaric and disgraceful, even as they continued to defend white supremacy or rail against Black criminality."251 252 Also, in the 1940s, for the first time in four decades the Federal Bureau of Investigation increased investigations of lynchings,253 and the Department of Justice began using NAACP lawyer Charles Hamilton Houston's legal theory that the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871 created federal jurisdiction over such crimes.254

Though the growth of Northern cities and wartime industrial work increased the volume of Black movement out of the South, the terror of lynching and other racial violence had long made the South a tenuous homeland for Black Americans. In a letter published in the Chicago Defender, one Black migrant explained, "After twenty years of seeing my people lynched for any offense from spitting on a sidewalk to stealing a mule, I made up my mind that I would turn the prow of my ship toward the part of the country where the people at least made a pretense at being civilized."261

Lynchings of Mexican Nationals

Lynching and racial violence in border states of the South and Southwest from 1849 to 1928 targeted Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans, who were shot en masse and lynched by mobs that often included Texas Rangers and other law enforcement officials.

While these lynchings frequently took place after an allegation of crime, Latino people, like African Americans, were considered undeserving of arrest and trial, and some were lynched not for crimes but for social transgressions such as "practicing witchcraft," suing a white person, or yelling "Viva Diaz."

Researchers estimate that hundreds of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans were lynched in the South and Southwest during this period, and have identified 232 lynchings in Texas alone.

Scholars have argued that these lynchings in border states served to establish white economic, political, and social dominance in the border areas acquired by the United States following the war with Mexico. Violence forced Mexican residents of territory newly claimed by the United States to flee their homes, allowing whites to seize their land and natural resources.264

When the era of racial terror and widespread lynching ended in the mid-twentieth century, it left behind a nation and an American South fundamentally altered by decades of systematic community-based violence against Black Americans. The effects of the lynching era echoed through the latter half of the twentieth century. African Americans continued to face violent intimidation when they transgressed social boundaries or asserted their civil rights, and the criminal justice system continued to target people of color and victimize African Americans. These legacies have yet to be confronted.

VIOLENT INTIMIDATION AND OPPOSITION TO EQUALITY

After the rate of lynchings abated, the central feature of the era of racial terror-violence against Black Americans-took new forms. The social forces and racial animus that made lynching a frequent occurrence and constant threat in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries remained deeply rooted in American culture, and violent intimidation continued to be used to preserve social control and white supremacy. African Americans in the South faced violence, threats, and intimidation in myriad areas of daily life, with no protection from the justice system.

Black Southerners who survived the lynching era remained subject to the established legal system of racial apartheid known as Jim Crow. As organized resistance to this racial caste system began to swell in the early 1950s, Black demonstrators were met with violent opposition from white police officers and community members. Black activists protesting racial segregation and disenfranchisement through boycotts, sit-ins, voter registration drives, and mass marches consistently faced physical attacks, riots, and bombings from whites.

As a leader of the nonviolent protest movement, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. challenged white law enforcement officials and private citizens who issued death threats, physically assaulted him at public lectures, and bombed his Montgomery, Alabama, home while his wife and infant daughter were inside. Police attacked demonstrators during highly publicized events like Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, in 1965. Even Black children engaging in peaceful demonstrations were at great risk of harm and death. In 1963, four young girls were killed when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, and that year, more than 700 Black children protesting racial segregation in the city were arrested, blasted with fire hoses, clubbed by police, and attacked by police dogs.

SHERIDAN, ARKANSAS

On Tuesday, October 6, 1903, a mob of masked men took Ed McCollum, a Black citizen of Grant County, Arkansas, from the county jail in Sheridan. The men tied him to a tree on the lawn of the county courthouse in the town's center square and shot him to death, leaving his body "riddled with bullets."266 Mr. McCollum had been in the county jail since the previous Saturday for wounding a local constable during an arrest.267 Newspaper coverage of the lynching was terse and matter-of-fact, a reflection of how common such extrajudicial killings of African Americans had become during this time and in this region.

The town of Sheridan remained a hostile environment for African Americans in the following decades, but some found work at the local sawmill and built a small, resilient Black community.

In May 1954, four days after the United States Supreme Court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education banned racial segregation in public schools, Sheridan's school board unanimously voted to integrate its junior high and high schools.268 Under the vote, twenty-one Black students would join six hundred white students in upper school that fall and were guaranteed a discrimination-free experience in athletics, cafeteria service, and school dances.269 Younger Black students would continue to attend the local two-room segregated lower school.270 The district's swift move toward integration, which made Sheridan the first community in the South to take such action after Brown, was likely influenced by the fact that the town was spending nearly $5000 per year to maintain segregation by busing Black high school students to a segregated school twenty-five miles away.271

Recently, James Seawood, a Black man who attended Sheridan's segregated elementary school as a child, recalled marveling at the white school's huge building, marching band, and football team from atop the sawmill's lumber stacks before returning to his own two-room school with two teachers and outdoor toilets. Mr. Seawood's mother was the last Black teacher in Sheridan. Just before they left town, they watched a bulldozer dig a large hole and push the entire school into the ground, then cover it up, wiping out all evidence of its existence.274

Much of Sheridan's racial history of lynching, segregation, and violent intimidation has also been buried. The town remained completely white for decades, and its public schools did not desegregate until 1992, when the school districts of two small interracial communities nearby consolidated with the larger district. Even then, Sheridan's white parents and students yelled racial epithets during high school sporting events against interracial teams. In 2014, less than 2 percent of the town's residents were African American.275

RACIALLY-BIASED CRIMINAL JUSTICE AND MASS CRIMINALIZATION

Southern courts were deeply embedded in the exploitation of Black workers in the South long after the formal abolition of slavery. States exploited the Thirteenth Amendment's exemption for prisoners by passing "Black Codes" and convict leasing laws that branded Black people as criminals to facilitate their reenslavement for state profit.277 Further, although the Civil Rights Act of 1875 and Supreme Court rulings banned racial discrimination in jury selection,278 local officials barred African Americans from serving on juries.279 African Americans "virtually disappeared from the Southern jury box by 1900, even in counties where they constituted an overwhelming majority of the local population,"280 which reinforced the impunity under which lynching flourished.281 The fairness of the judicial system was wholly compromised for African Americans, and the courts operated as tools of their subjugation.

Lynching also directly fostered the racialization of criminality. Whites defended vigilante violence aimed at Black people as a necessary tactic of self-preservation to protect property, families, and the Southern way of life from dangerous Black criminals. The link between lynching and the image of African Americans as "criminal" and "dangerous" was sometimes explicit, such as when lynchings occurred in response to allegations of criminal behavior. In other cases, white mobs justified lynching as a preemptive strike against the threat of Black violent crime.

Decades of racial terror in the American South reflected and reinforced a view that African Americans were dangerous criminals who posed a threat to innocent white citizens. Although the Constitution's presumption of innocence is a bedrock principle of American criminal justice, African Americans were assigned a presumption of guilt.

America has never addressed the effects of racial violence, the criminalization of African Americans, and the critical role these phenomena have played in shaping the American criminal justice system, particularly in the South. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, a signature legal achievement of the civil rights movement, contains provisions designed to eliminate discrimination in voting, education, and employment, but it does not address discrimination in criminal justice. Though the most insidious tool of racial subordination throughout the era of racial terror and its aftermath, the criminal justice system remains the institution in American life least impacted by the civil rights movement. Similarly, the system's endorsement of racist myths of Black criminality has never been meaningfully confronted. The unprecedented level of mass incarceration in America today is a contemporary manifestation of these past distortions and abuses that continues to limit the opportunities of our nation's most vulnerable.

LYNCHING'S LEGACY: CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN AMERICA

"Perhaps the most important reason that lynching declined is that it was replaced by a more palatable form of violence."282

The most famous attempted "legal lynching" likely is that of the so-called Scottsboro Boys-nine young African Americans charged with raping two white women in Scottsboro, Alabama, in 1931. White mobs converged outside the courtroom during the trial to demand that the accused be executed. Represented by incompetent lawyers, the nine were convicted by all-white, all male juries within two days, and all but the youngest were sentenced to death. When the NAACP and others launched a national movement to challenge the cursory proceedings, "the white people of Scottsboro did not understand the reaction. After all, they did not lynch the accused; they gave them a trial."284 Many defendants of the era learned that being sentenced to death rather than lynched did little to increase the fairness of trial, reliability of conviction, or justness of sentence.

Northern states had abolished public executions by 1850, but some Southern states authorized the practice until 1938.285 Public hangings were often racialized displays intended to deter mob lynchings more than individual crimes.286 Following Will Mack's execution by public hanging in Brandon, Mississippi, in 1909, the Brandon News reasoned that "public hangings are wrong, but under the circumstances, the quiet acquiescence of the people to submit to a legal trial, and their good behavior throughout, left no alternative to the board of supervisors but to grant the almost universal demand for a public execution."287 Mobs often succeeded in forcing a public hanging in Southern states where the practice was illegal.

In Sumterville, Florida, in 1902, a Black man named Henry Wilson was convicted of murder in a trial that lasted just two hours and forty minutes. To mollify the mob of armed whites that filled the courtroom, the judge promised the death sentence would be carried out by public hanging, despite state law prohibiting public executions. Even so, when the execution was set for a later date, the enraged mob threatened, "We'll hang him before sundown, governor or no governor."288 Florida officials quickly moved up the date, authorized Mr. Wilson to be hanged before a jeering mob, and congratulated themselves on the "avoided" lynching.

By 1915, court-ordered executions outpaced lynchings in the former slave states for the first time.289 Two-thirds of those executed in the 1930s were Black,290 and the trend continued. As African Americans fell to just 22 percent of the South's population between 1910 and 1950, they constituted 75 percent of those executed in the South during that period.291

In the 1940s and 1950s, the NAACP's Legal Defense Fund (LDF) began a multi-decade litigation strategy to challenge the American death penalty-which was most active in the South-as racially-biased and unconstitutional.292 They won in Furman v. Georgia in 1972 when the United States Supreme Court struck down Georgia's death penalty statute, holding that capital punishment too closely resembled "self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law" and that "if any basis can be discerned for the selection of these few to be sentenced to die, it is the constitutionally impermissible basis of race."293

Southern opponents decried the decision and immediately proposed new death penalty statutes.294 In 1976, in Gregg v. Georgia, the Supreme Court upheld Georgia's new death penalty statute and reinstated the American death penalty, capitulating to the claim that legal executions were needed to prevent vigilante violence.295

The new death penalty statutes continued to result in racial imbalance, and constitutional challenges persisted. In the 1987 case of McCleskey v. Kemp, the Supreme Court considered statistical evidence demonstrating that Georgia decisionmakers were more than four times as likely to impose death for the killing of a white person than a Black person. Accepting the data as accurate, The Court described racial bias in sentencing as "an inevitable part of our criminal justice system"296 and upheld Warren McCleskey's death sentence because he had failed to identify a "constitutionally significant risk of racial bias" in his case.297

Race remains a significant factor in capital sentencing. African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the nation's population, but nearly 42 percent of those currently on death row in America are Black,298 and 34 percent of those executed since 1976 have been Black.299 In 96 percent of states where researchers have completed studies examining the relationship between race and the death penalty, results reveal a pattern of discrimination based on the race of the victim, the race of the defendant, or both.300 Capital trials today remain proceedings with little racial diversity; the accused is often the only person of color in the courtroom and illegal racial discrimination in jury selection is widespread, especially in the South and in capital cases. In Houston County, Alabama, prosecutors have excluded 80 percent of qualified African Americans from juries in death penalty cases.301

More than eight in ten American lynchings between 1889 and 1918 occurred in the South, and more than eight in ten of the nearly 1400 legal executions carried out in this country since 1976 have been in the South.As contemporary proponents of the American death penalty focus on form rather than substance by tinkering with the aesthetics of lethal punishment to improve procedures and methods, capital punishment remains rooted in racial terror-"a direct descendant of lynching."302 Modern death sentences are disproportionately meted out to African Americans accused of crimes against white victims; efforts to combat racial bias and create federal protection against racial bias in the administration of the death penalty remain thwarted by familiar appeals to the rhetoric of states' rights; and regional data demonstrates that the modern death penalty in America mirrors racial violence of the past.303 304

The lynching era left thousands dead; it significantly marginalized Black people in the country's political, economic, and social systems; and it fueled a massive migration of Black refugees out of the South. In addition, lynching-and other forms of racial terrorism-inflicted deep traumatic and psychological wounds on survivors, witnesses, family members, and the entire African American community. Whites who participated in or witnessed gruesome lynchings and socialized their children in this culture of violence also were psychologically damaged. And state officials' indifference to and complicity in lynchings created enduring national and institutional wounds that we have not yet confronted or begun to heal. Establishing monuments and memorials to commemorate lynching has the power to end the silence and inaction that have compounded this psychosocial trauma and to begin the process of recovery.

THE NEED FOR MONUMENTS AND MEMORIALS

Until the opening of EJI's National Memorial for Peace and Justice in 2018, no prominent monument or memorial commemorated the thousands of African Americans who were lynched during the American era of racial terrorism. Of the 4084 Southern lynchings documented in this report, the overwhelming majority took place on sites that remain unmarked and unrecognized. In contrast, the landscape of the South is cluttered with plaques, statues, and monuments that record, celebrate, and lionize generations of American defenders of white supremacy, including countless leaders of the Confederate war effort and white public officials and private citizens who perpetrated violent crimes against Black citizens during the era of racial terror. Many of these monuments, markers, and memorials have been erected in just the last sixty years. In this context, the lack of public memorials acknowledging racial terrorism is a powerful statement about our failure to value the African Americans who were killed or gravely wounded in this brutal campaign of racial violence.

Formal spaces that memorialize mass violence help to establish trust between communities and build faith in government institutions. Lynchings occurred in communities where African Americans today remain marginalized, disproportionately poor, overrepresented in prisons and jails, and underrepresented in decisionmaking roles in the criminal justice system-the institution most directly implicated in facilitating lynching and failing to protect Black Americans from racial violence. Only by telling the truth about the age of racial terror and collectively reflecting on this period and its legacy can we hope that our present-day conversations about racial exclusion and inequality - and any policies designed to address these issues - will be accurate, thoughtful, and informed.

SIGNIFICANCE FOR THE AFRICAN AMERICAN COMMUNITY

Each lynching or near-lynching instilled an overwhelming sense of fear and terror in African Americans. Lynching underscored the "cheapness of Black life [and] reflected in turn the degree to which so many whites by the early twentieth century had come to think of Black men and women as inherently and permanently inferior, as less than human, as little more than animals." The traumatic experience of surviving mass violence creates "insecurity, mistrust, and disconnection from people"-a series of psychological harms that were amplified by the dangers inherent in navigating Southern racial boundaries. In the aftermath of a lynching, African Americans became "exceedingly circumspect in their dealings with whites;" survivors bore the burden of being indebted to "their 'white friends' for saving their lives."

Millions of Black Americans left the South between 1910 and 1970 in response to the instability and threat of violence that racial terror created in the region. These largely involuntary relocations compounded the trauma suffered by terror survivors, even as leaving the South improved their physical safety. After generations in this country, Black Americans who moved to the North and West were exiles-internally displaced people who "had more in common with the vast movements of refugees from famine, war, and genocide in other parts of the world" than with their new neighbors. African American migrants were less terrorized in their new cities and towns, but they were not entirely welcomed. Institutional inequality, continued marginalization, and unaddressed histories of trauma have created a unique legacy of chronic generational poverty, persistent urban distress, debilitating violence, and limited educational opportunities.

TRAUMATIC LEGACY FOR THE WHITE COMMUNITY

As attendees and participants in lynchings, Southern white children were taught to accept and embrace traumatic violence and the racist narratives underlying it. At one Kentucky lynching, young white children between six and ten years old brought wood and tended to the fire in which the victim was burned. Boys especially were expected to actively engage in lynching; their roles expanded as they got older until, as young adults, they took on a direct role in the torture and murder. Lynching was characterized as a civic duty of white Southern men that brought praise rather than sanctions from community elders and institutions.

Generations of white people were raised in communities where myths of racial superiority dominated and went largely unchallenged. Many of those people hold powerful positions today. There has been no significant effort to confront white Southerners with the damage done by lynching or to facilitate recovery, and we live with the lingering legacies of that inaction.

MARIANNA, FLORIDA

A visitor would never know that Marianna also is the site of one of the nation's most well-known public spectacle lynchings.

Marianna's legacy of violence and abusive racial mistreatment includes the Dozier School for Boys, a state juvenile reform school that operated in Marianna from 1900 until 2011. The school faced serious allegations of abuse and closed during a federal investigation. In 2014, researchers conducting an excavation project uncovered the remains of fifty-five boys in the school cemetery, which was twenty-four more than were documented in official records. Surviving former residents shared the experiences they endured at the Dozier School, which remained racially segregated until 1967. Richard Huntly, a sixty-seven-year-old Black man sent to the school at age eleven, recalled that white boys were given vocational work while he and other Black boys were made to work in the field planting and picking crops for state profit. "It was kind of like slavery," he told reporters in 2014.

In 2014, Marianna celebrated the 150th anniversary of the Battle of Marianna by honoring the memories of Confederate soldiers and officers who fought and died to preserve slavery and the white supremacist ideologies on which slavery was built. The community voice remains silent as to Marianna's other legacies. No prominent memorial or marker tells of Claude Neal's brutal lynching, and that silence is deafening.

IMPORTANCE FOR THE NATION

The United States government compounded the psychological harm experienced by African Americans by permitting the torture and murder of Black citizens. Federal and state officials' inaction communicated that no democratic institution valued Black citizens' lives enough to protect them against terrorism by local officials and private citizens alike. "They had to have a license to kill anything but a nigger," explained one African American man from the Mississippi Delta. "We was always in season." Today, public and private institutions in the South memorialize the Confederacy and celebrate the architects of white supremacy while remaining conspicuously silent about the terror, violence, and loss of life inflicted on Black Americans during the same historical period. This selective public memory compounds the harm of officials' complicity in lynching and maintains the otherness of Black people who have lived in these communities for generations.

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Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror

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To heal the wounds from our present, we must face our past.

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*Note: The following is the Summary of the Kerner Commission Report. The entire report is available here. For a compilation of key recommendations, click here.
Summary of the Kerner Commission Report INTRODUCTION
The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation.

The worst came during a two-week period in July, first in Newark and then in Detroit. Each set off a chain reaction in neighboring communities.

On July 28, 1967, the President of the United States established this Commission and directed us to answer three basic questions:

To respond to these questions, we have undertaken a broad range of studies and investigations. We have visited the riot cities; we have heard many witnesses; we have sought the counsel of experts across the country.

This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white--separate and unequal.

Reaction to last summer's disorders has quickened the movement and deepened the division. Discrimination and segregation have long permeated much of American life; they now threaten the future of every American.

This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed. Choice is still possible. Our principal task is to define that choice and to press for a national resolution.

To pursue our present course will involve the continuing polarization of the American community and, ultimately, the destruction of basic democratic values.

The alternative is not blind repression or capitulation to lawlessness. It is the realization of common opportunities for all within a single society.

This alternative will require a commitment to national action--compassionate, massive and sustained, backed by the resources of the most powerful and the richest nation on this earth. From every American it will require new attitudes, new understanding, and, above all, new will.

The vital needs of the nation must be met; hard choices must be made, and, if necessary, new taxes enacted.

Violence cannot build a better society. Disruption and disorder nourish repression, not justice. They strike at the freedom of every citizen. The community cannot--it will not--tolerate coercion and mob rule.

Violence and destruction must be ended--in the streets of the ghetto and in the lives of people.

Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans.

What white Americans have never fully understood but what the Negro can never forget--is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.

It is time now to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens-urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.
Our recommendations embrace three basic principles:
* To mount programs on a scale equal to the dimension of the problems:

* To aim these programs for high impact in the immediate future in order to close the gap between promise and performance;

* To undertake new initiatives and experiments that can change the system of failure and frustration that now dominates the ghetto and weakens our society.

These programs will require unprecedented levels of funding and performance, but they neither probe deeper nor demand more than the problems which called them forth. There can be no higher priority for national action and no higher claim on the nation's conscience.

We issue this Report now, four months before the date called for by the President. Much remains that can be learned. Continued study is essential.

As Commissioners we have worked together with a sense of the greatest urgency and have sought to compose whatever differences exist among us. Some differences remain. But the gravity of the problem and the pressing need for action are too clear to allow further delay in the issuance of this Report.
PART I--WHAT HAPPENED? Chapter I--Profiles of Disorder
The report contains profiles of a selection of the disorders that took place during the summer of 1967. These profiles are designed to indicate how the disorders happened, who participated in them, and how local officials, police forces, and the National Guard responded. Illustrative excerpts follow:
NEWARK
. . . It was decided to attempt to channel the energies of the people into a nonviolent protest. While Lofton promised the crowd that a full investigation would be made of the Smith incident, the other Negro leaders began urging those on the scene to form a line of march toward the city hall.

Some persons joined the line of march. Others milled about in the narrow street. From the dark grounds of the housing project came a barrage of rocks. Some of them fell among the crowd. Others hit persons in the line of march. Many smashed the windows of the police station. The rock throwing, it was believed, was the work of youngsters; approximately 2,500 children lived in the housing project.

Almost at the same time, an old car was set afire in a parking lot. The line of march began to disintegrate. The police, their heads protected by World War I-type helmets, sallied forth to disperse the crowd. A fire engine, arriving on the scene, was pelted with rocks. As police drove people away from the station, they scattered in all directions.

A few minutes later a nearby liquor store was broken into. Some persons, seeing a caravan of cabs appear at city hall to protest Smith's arrest, interpreted this as evidence that the disturbance had been organized, and generated rumors to that effect. However, only a few stores were looted. Within a short period of time, the disorder appeared to have run its course.

* * *

. . . On Saturday, July 15, [Director of Police Dominick] Spina received a report of snipers in a housing project. When he arrived he saw approximately 100 National Guardsmen and police officers crouching behind vehicles, hiding in corners and lying on the ground around the edge of the courtyard.

Since everything appeared quiet and it was broad daylight, Spina walked directly down the middle of the street. Nothing happened. As he came to the last building of the complex, he heard a shot. All around him the troopers jumped, believing themselves to be under sniper fire. A moment later a young Guardsman ran from behind a building.

The Director of Police went over and asked him if he had fired the shot. The soldier said yes, he had fired to scare a man away from a window; that his orders were to keep everyone away from windows.

Spina said he told the soldier: "Do you know what you just did? You have now created a state of hysteria. Every Guardsman up and down this street and every state policeman and every city policeman that is present thinks that somebody just fired a shot and that it is probably a sniper."

A short time later more "gunshots" were heard. Investigating, Spina came upon a Puerto Rican sitting on a wall. In reply to a question as to whether he knew "where the firing is coming from?" the man said:

"That's no firing. That's fireworks. If you look up to the fourth floor, you will see the people who are throwing down these cherry bombs."

By this time four truckloads of National Guardsmen had arrived and troopers and policemen were again crouched everywhere looking for a sniper. The Director of Police remained at the scene for three hours, and the only shot fired was the one by the Guardsman.

Nevertheless, at six o'clock that evening two columns of National Guardsmen and state troopers were directing mass fire at the Hayes Housing Project in response to what they believed were snipers. . . .
DETROIT
. . . A spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold. To riot and destroy appeared more and more to become ends in themselves. Late Sunday afternoon it appeared to one observer that the young people were "dancing amidst the flames."

A Negro plainclothes officer was standing at an intersection when a man threw a Molotov cocktail into a business establishment at the corner... In the heat of the afternoon, fanned by the 20 to 25 m.p.h. winds of both Sunday and Monday, the fire reached the home next door within minutes. As residents uselessly sprayed the flames with garden hoses, the fire jumped from roof to roof of adjacent two- and three-story buildings. Within the hour the entire block was in flames. The ninth house in the burning row belonged to the arsonist who had thrown the Molotov cocktail. . . .

* * *

. . . Employed as a private guard, 55-year-old Julius L. Dorsey, a Negro, was standing in front of a market when accosted by two Negro men and a woman. They demanded he permit them to loot the market. He ignored their demands. They began to berate him. He asked a neighbor to call the police. As the argument grew more heated, Dorsey fired three shots from his pistol into the air.

The police radio reported: "Looters, they have rifles." A patrol car driven by a police officer and carrying three National Guardsmen arrived. As the looters fled, the law enforcement personnel opened fire. When the firing ceased, one person lay dead.

He was Julius L. Dorsey. . .

* * *

. . . As the riot alternately waxed and waned, one area of the ghetto remained insulated. On the northeast side the residents of some 150 square blocks inhabited by 21,000 persons had, in 1966, banded together in the Positive Neighborhood Action Committee (PNAC). With professional help from the Institute of Urban Dynamics, they had organized block clubs and made plans for the improvement of the neighborhood. . . .

When the riot broke out, the residents, through the block clubs, were able to organize quickly. Youngsters, agreeing to stay in the neighborhood, participated in detouring traffic. While many persons reportedly sympathized with the idea of a rebellion against the "system," only two small fires were set--one in an empty building.

* * *

. . . According to Lt. Gen. Throckmorton and Col. Bolling, the city, at this time, was saturated with fear. The National Guardsmen were afraid, the residents were afraid, and the police were afraid. Numerous persons, the majority of them Negroes, were being injured by gunshots of undetermined origin. The general and his staff felt that the major task of the troops was to reduce the fear and restore an air of normalcy.

In order to accomplish this, every effort was made to establish contact and rapport between the troops and the residents. The soldiers--20 percent of whom were Negro--began helping to clean up the streets, collect garbage, and trace persons who had disappeared in the confusion. Residents in the neighborhoods responded with soup and sandwiches for the troops. In areas where the National Guard tried to establish rapport with the citizens, there was a smaller response.
NEW BRUNSWICK
. . . A short time later, elements of the crowd--an older and rougher one than the night before--appeared in front of the police station. The participants wanted to see the mayor.

Mayor [Patricia] Sheehan went out onto the steps of the station. Using a bullhorn, she talked to the people and asked that she be given an opportunity to correct conditions. The crowd was boisterous. Some persons challenged the mayor. But, finally, the opinion, "She's new! Give her a chance!" prevailed.

A demand was issued by people in the crowd that all persons arrested the previous night be released. Told that this already had been done, the people were suspicious. They asked to be allowed to inspect the jail cells.

It was agreed to permit representatives of the people to look in the cells to satisfy themselves that everyone had been released.

The crowd dispersed. The New Brunswick riot had failed to materialize.
Chapter 2--Patterns of Disorder The "typical" riot did not take place. The disorders of 1967 were unusual, irregular, complex and unpredictable social processes. Like most human events, they did not unfold in an orderly sequence. However, an analysis of our survey information leads to some conclusions about the riot process. In general:
* The civil disorders of 1967 involved Negroes acting against local symbols of white American society, authority and property in Negro neighborhoods--rather than against white persons.

* Of 164 disorders reported during the first nine months of 1967, eight (5 percent) were major in terms of violence and damage; 33 (20 percent) were serious but not major; 123 (75 percent) were minor and undoubtedly would not have received national attention as "riots" had the nation not been sensitized by the more serious outbreaks.

* In the 75 disorders studied by a Senate subcommittee, 83 deaths were reported. Eighty-two percent of the deaths and more than half the injuries occurred in Newark and Detroit. About 10 percent of the dead and 38 percent of the injured were public employees, primarily law officers and firemen. The overwhelming majority of the persons killed or injured in all the disorders were Negro civilians.

* Initial damage estimates were greatly exaggerated. In Detroit, newspaper damage estimates at first ranged from $200 million to $500 million; the highest recent estimate is $45 million. In Newark, early estimates ranged from $15 to $25 million. A month later damage was estimated at $10.2 million, over 80 percent in inventory losses.
In the 24 disorders in 23 cities which we surveyed:
* The final incident before the outbreak of disorder, and the initial violence itself, generally took place in the evening or at night at a place in which it was normal for many people to be on the streets.

* Violence usually occurred almost immediately following the occurrence of the final precipitating incident, and then escalated rapidly. With but few exceptions, violence subsided during the day, and flared rapidly again at night. The night-day cycles continued through the early period of the major disorders.

* Disorder generally began with rock and bottle throwing and window breaking. Once store windows were broken, looting usually followed.

* Disorder did not erupt as a result of a single "triggering" or "precipitating" incident. Instead, it was generated out of an increasingly disturbed social atmosphere, in which typically a series of tension-heightening incidents over a period of weeks or months became linked in the minds of many in the Negro community with a reservoir of underlying grievances. At some point in the mounting tension, a further incident-in itself often routine or trivial-became the breaking point and the tension spilled over into violence.

* "Prior" incidents, which increased tensions and ultimately led to violence, were police actions in almost half the cases; police actions were "final" incidents before the outbreak of violence in 12 of the 24 surveyed disorders.

* No particular control tactic was successful in every situation. The varied effectiveness of control techniques emphasizes the need for advance training, planning, adequate intelligence systems, and knowledge of the ghetto community.

* Negotiations between Negroes--including your militants as well as older Negro leaders--and white officials concerning "terms of peace" occurred during virtually all the disorders surveyed. In many cases, these negotiations involved discussion of underlying grievances as well as the handling of the disorder by control authorities.

* The typical rioter was a teenager or young adult, a lifelong resident of the city in which he rioted, a high school dropout; he was, nevertheless, somewhat better educated than his nonrioting Negro neighbor, and was usually underemployed or employed in a menial job. He was proud of his race, extremely hostile to both whites and middle-class Negroes and, although informed about politics, highly distrustful of the political system.

* A Detroit survey revealed that approximately 11 percent of the total residents of two riot areas admitted participation in the rioting, 20 to 25 percent identified themselves as "bystanders," over 16 percent identified themselves as "counter-rioters" who urged rioters to "cool it," and the remaining 48 to 53 percent said they were at home or elsewhere and did not participate. In a survey of Negro males between the ages of 15 and 35 residing in the disturbance area in Newark, about 45 percent identified themselves as rioters, and about 55 percent as "noninvolved."

* Most rioters were young Negro males. Nearly 53 percent of arrestees were between 15 and 24 years of age; nearly 81 percent between 15 and 35.

* In Detroit and Newark about 74 percent of the rioters were brought up in the North. In contrast, of the noninvolved, 36 percent in Detroit and 52 percent in Newark were brought up in the North.

* What the rioters appeared to be seeking was fuller participation in the social order and the material benefits enjoyed by the majority of American citizens. Rather than rejecting the American system, they were anxious to obtain a place for themselves in it.

* Numerous Negro counter-rioters walked the streets urging rioters to "cool it." The typical counter-rioter was better educated and had higher income than either the rioter or the noninvolved.

* The proportion of Negroes in local government was substantially smaller than the Negro proportion of population. Only three of the 20 cities studied had more than one Negro legislator; none had ever had a Negro mayor or city manager. In only four cities did Negroes hold other important policy-making positions or serve as heads of municipal departments.

* Although almost all cities had some sort of formal grievance mechanism for handling citizen complaints, this typically was regarded by Negroes as ineffective and was generally ignored.

* Although specific grievances varied from city to city, at least 12 deeply held grievances can be identified and ranked into three levels of relative intensity: '
First Level of Intensity
1. Police practices

2. Unemployment and underemployment

3. Inadequate housing
Second Level of Intensity
4. Inadequate education

5. Poor recreation facilities and programs

6. Ineffectiveness of the political structure and grievance mechanisms
Third Level of Intensity
7. Disrespectful white attitudes

8. Discriminatory administration of justice

9. Inadequacy of federal programs

10. Inadequacy of municipal services

11. Discriminatory consumer and credit practices

12. Inadequate welfare programs

* The results of a three-city survey of various federal programs--manpower, education, housing, welfare and community action--indicate that, despite substantial expenditures, the number of persons assisted constituted only a fraction of those in need.

The background of disorder is often as complex and difficult to analyze as the disorder itself. But we find that certain general conclusions can be drawn:

* Social and economic conditions in the riot cities constituted a clear pattern of severe disadvantage for Negroes compared with whites, whether the Negroes lived in the area where the riot took place or outside it. Negroes had completed fewer years of education and fewer had attended high school. Negroes were twice as likely to be unemployed and three times as likely to be in unskilled and service jobs. Negroes averaged 70 percent of the income earned by whites and were more than twice as likely to be living in poverty. Although housing cost Negroes relatively more, they had worse housing-three times as likely to be overcrowded and substandard. When compared to white suburbs, the relative disadvantage is even more pronounced.
A study of the aftermath of disorder leads to disturbing conclusions. We find that, despite the institution of some postriot programs:
* Little basic change in the conditions underlying the outbreak of disorder has taken place. Actions to ameliorate Negro grievances have been limited and sporadic; with but few exceptions, they have not significantly reduced tensions.

* In several cities, the principal official response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons. In several cities, increasing polarization is evident, with continuing breakdown of inter-racial communication, and growth of white segregationist or black separatist groups.
Chapter 3--Organized Activity
The President directed the Commission to investigate "to, what extent, if any, there has been planning or organization in any of the riots."

To carry out this part of the President's charge, the Commission established a special investigative staff supplementing the field teams that made the general examination of the riots in 23 cities. The unit examined data collected by federal agencies and congressional committees, including thousands of documents supplied by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, gathered and evaluated information from local and state law enforcement agencies and officials, and conducted its own field investigation in selected cities.

On the basis of all the information collected, the Commission concludes that:

The urban disorders of the summer of 1967 were not caused by, nor were they the consequence of, any organized plan or "conspiracy."

Specifically, the Commission has found no evidence that all or any of the disorders or the incidents that led to them were planned or directed by any organization or group, international, national or local.

Militant organizations, local and national, and individual agitators, who repeatedly forecast and called for violence, were active in the spring and summer of 1967. We believe that they sought to encourage violence, and that they helped to create an atmosphere that contributed to the outbreak of disorder.

We recognize that the continuation of disorders and the polarization of the races would provide fertile ground for organized exploitation in the future.

Investigations of organized activity are continuing at all levels of government, including committees of Congress. These investigations relate not only to the disorders of 1967 but also to the actions of groups and individuals, particularly in schools and colleges, during this last fall and winter. The Commission has cooperated in these investigations. They should continue.
PART II--WHY DID IT HAPPEN? Chapter 4--The Basic Causes
In addressing the question "Why did it happen?" we shift our focus from the local to the national scene, from the particular events of the summer of 1967 to the factors within the society at large that created a mood of violence among many urban Negroes.

These factors are complex and interacting; they vary significantly in their effect from city to city and from year to year; and the consequences of one disorder, generating new grievances and new demands, become the causes of the next. Thus was created the "thicket of tension, conflicting evidence and extreme opinions" cited by the President.

Despite these complexities, certain fundamental matters are clear. Of these, the most fundamental is the racial attitude and behavior of white Americans toward black Americans.

Race prejudice has shaped our history decisively; it now threatens to affect our future.
White racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II. Among the ingredients of this mixture are:
* Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education and housing, which have resulted in the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes from the benefits of economic progress.

* Black in-migration and white exodus, .which have produced the massive and growing concentrations of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, creating a growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs.

* The black ghettos where segregation and poverty converge on the young to destroy opportunity and enforce failure. Crime, drug addiction, dependency on welfare, and bitterness and resentment against society in general and white society in particular are the result.

At the same time, most whites and some Negroes outside the ghetto have prospered to a degree unparalleled in the history of civilization. Through television and other media, this affluence has been flaunted before the eyes of the Negro poor and the jobless ghetto youth.
Yet these facts alone cannot be said to have caused the disorders. Recently, other powerful ingredients have begun to catalyze the mixture:
* Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.

* A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.

* The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of "moving the system." These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan "Black Power."

* A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to "the system."

* The police are not merely a "spark" factor. To some Negroes police have come to symbolize white power, white racism and white repression. And the fact is that many police do reflect and express these white attitudes. The atmosphere of hostility and cynicism is reinforced by a widespread belief among Negroes in the existence of police brutality and in a "double standard" of justice and protection--one for Negroes and one for whites.

To this point, we have attempted to identify the prime components of the "explosive mixture." In the chapters that follow we seek to analyze them in the perspective of history. Their meaning, however, is clear:

In the summer of 1967, we have seen in our cities a chain reaction of racial violence. If we are heedless, none of us shall escape the consequences.
Chapter 5--Rejection and Protest: An Historical Sketch
The causes of recent racial disorders are embedded in a tangle of issues and circumstances--social, economic, political and psychological which arise out of the historic pattern of Negro-white relations in America.

In this chapter we trace the pattern, identify the recurrent themes of Negro protest and, most importantly, provide a perspective on the protest activities of the present era.

We describe the Negro's experience in America and the development of slavery as an institution. We show his persistent striving for equality in the face of rigidly maintained social, economic and educational barriers, and repeated mob violence. We portray the ebb and flow of the doctrinal tides--accommodation, separatism, and self-help--and their relationship to the current theme of Black Power. We conclude:

The Black Power advocates of today consciously feel that they are the most militant group in the Negro protest movement. Yet they have retreated from a direct confrontation with American society on the issue of integration and, by preaching separatism, unconsciously function as an accommodation to white racism. Much of their economic program, as well as their interest in Negro history, self-help, racial solidarity and separation, is reminiscent of Booker T. Washington. The rhetoric is different, but the ideas are remarkably similar.
Chapter 6--The Formation Of the Racial Ghettos
Throughout the 20th century the Negro population of the United States has been moving steadily from rural areas to urban and from South to North and West. In 1910, 91 percent of the nation's 9.8 million Negroes lived in the South and only 27 percent of American Negroes lived in cities of 2,500 persons or more. Between 1910 and 1966 the total Negro population more than doubled, reaching 21.5 million, and the number living in metropolitan areas rose more than fivefold (from 2.6 million to 14.8 million). The number outside the South rose eleven-fold (from 880,000 to 9.7 million).

Negro migration from the South has resulted from the expectation of thousands of new and highly paid jobs for unskilled workers in the North and the shift to mechanized farming in the South. However, the Negro migration is small when compared to earlier waves of European immigrants. Even between 1960 and 1966, there were 1.8 million immigrants from abroad compared to the 613,000 Negroes who arrived in the North and West from the South.

As a result of the growing number of Negroes in urban areas, natural increase has replaced migration as the primary source of Negro population increase in the cities. Nevertheless, Negro migration from the South will continue unless economic conditions there change dramatically.
Basic data concerning Negro urbanization trends indicate that:
* Almost all Negro population growth (98 percent from 1950 to 1966) is occurring within metropolitan areas, primarily within central cities.[2] .

* The vast majority of white population growth (78 percent from 1960 to 1966) is occurring in suburban portions of metropolitan areas. Since 1960, white central-city population has declined by 1.3 million.

* As a result, central cities are becoming more heavily Negro while the suburban fringes around them remain almost entirely white.

* The twelve largest central cities now contain over two-thirds of the Negro population outside the South, and one-third of the Negro total in the United States.

Within the cities, Negroes have been excluded from white residential areas through discriminatory practices. Just as significant is the withdrawal of white families from, or their refusal to enter, neighborhoods where Negroes are moving or already residing. About 20 percent of the urban population of the United States changes residence every year. The refusal of whites to move into "changing" areas when vacancies occur means that most vacancies eventually are occupied by Negroes.

The result, according to a recent study, is that in 1960 the average segregation index for 207 of the largest United States cities was 86.2. In other words, to create an unsegregated population distribution, an average of over 86 percent of all Negroes would have to change their place of residence within the city.
Chapter 7-Unemployment, Family Structure, and Social Disorganization
Although there have been gains in Negro income nationally, and a decline in the number of Negroes below the "poverty level," the condition of Negroes ill the central city remains in a state of crisis. Between 2 and 2.5 million Negroes-16 to 20 percent of the total Negro population of all central cities live in squalor and deprivation in ghetto neighborhoods.

Employment is a key problem. It not only controls the present for the Negro American but, in a most profound way, it is creating the future as well. Yet, despite continuing economic growth and declining national unemployment rates, the unemployment rate for Negroes in 1967 was more than double that for whites.

Equally important is the undesirable nature of many jobs open to Negroes and other minorities. Negro men are more than three times as likely as white men to be in low paying, unskilled or service jobs. This concentration of male Negro employment at the lowest end of the occupational scale is the single most important cause of poverty among Negroes.

In one study of low-income neighborhoods, the "subemployment rate," including both unemployment and underemployment, was about 33 percent, or 8.8 times greater than the overall unemployment rate for all United States workers.

Employment problems, aggravated by the constant arrival of new unemployed migrants, many of them from depressed rural areas, create persistent poverty in the ghetto. In 1966, about 11.9 percent of the nation's whites and 40.6 percent of its nonwhites were below the "poverty level" defined by' the Social Security Administration (currently $3,335 per year for an urban family of four). Over 40 percent of the nonwhites below the poverty level live in the central cities.

Employment problems have drastic social impact in the ghetto. Men who are chronically unemployed or employed in the lowest status jobs are often unable or unwilling to remain with their families. The handicap imposed on children growing up without fathers in an atmosphere of poverty and deprivation is increased as mothers are forced to work to provide support.

The culture of poverty that results from unemployment and family breakup generates a system of ruthless, exploitative relationships within the ghetto. Prostitution, dope addiction, and crime create an environmental "jungle" characterized by personal insecurity and tension. Children growing up under such conditions are likely participants in civil disorder.
Chapter 8--Conditions of Life In the Racial Ghetto
A striking difference in environment from that of white, middle-class Americans profoundly influences the lives of residents of the ghetto.

Crime rates, consistently higher than in other areas, create a pronounced sense of insecurity. For example, in one city one low-income Negro district had 35 times as many serious crimes against persons as a high-income white district. Unless drastic steps are taken, the crime problems in poverty areas are likely to continue to multiply as the growing youth and rapid urbanization of the population outstrip police resources.

Poor health and sanitation conditions in the ghetto result in higher mortality rates, a higher incidence of major diseases, and lower availability and utilization of medical services. The infant mortality rate for nonwhite babies under the age of one month is 58 percent higher than for whites; for one to 12 months it is almost three times as high. The level of sanitation in the ghetto is far below that in high income areas. Garbage collection is often inadequate. Of an estimated 14,000 cases of rat bite in the United States in 1965, most were in ghetto neighborhoods.

Ghetto residents believe they are "exploited" by local merchants; and evidence substantiates some of these beliefs. A study conducted in one city by the Federal Trade Commission showed that distinctly higher prices were charged for goods sold in ghetto stores than in other areas.

Lack of knowledge regarding credit purchasing creates special pitfalls for the disadvantaged. In many states garnishment practices compound these difficulties by allowing creditors to deprive individuals of their wages without hearing or trial.
Chapter 9--Comparing the Immigrant and Negro Experience
In this chapter, we address ourselves to a fundamental question that many white Americans are asking: why have so many Negroes, unlike the European immigrants, been unable to escape from the ghetto and from poverty. We believe the following factors play a part:

* The Maturing Economy: When the European immigrants arrived, they gained an economic foothold by providing the unskilled labor needed by industry. Unlike the immigrant, the Negro migrant found little opportunity in the city. The economy, by then matured, had little use for the unskilled labor he had to offer.

*The Disability of Race: The structure of discrimination has stringently narrowed opportunities for the Negro and restricted his prospects. European immigrants suffered from discrimination, but never so pervasively.

* Entry into the Political System: The immigrants usually settled in rapidly growing cities with powerful and expanding political machines, which traded economic advantages for political support. Ward-level grievance machinery, as well as personal representation, enabled the immigrant to make his voice heard and his power felt.

By the time the Negro arrived, these political machines were no longer so powerful or so well equipped to provide jobs or other favors, and in many cases were unwilling to share their influence with Negroes.

* Cultural Factors: Coming from societies with a low standard of living and at a time when job aspirations were low, the immigrants sensed little deprivation in being forced to take the less desirable and poorer-paying jobs. Their large and cohesive families contributed to total income. Their vision of the future--one that led to a life outside of the ghetto--provided the incentive necessary to endure the present.

Although Negro men worked as hard as the immigrants, they were unable to support their families. The entrepreneurial opportunities had vanished. As a result of slavery and long periods of unemployment, the Negro family structure had become matriarchal; the males played a secondary and marginal family role--one which offered little compensation for their hard and unrewarding labor. Above all, segregation denied Negroes access to good jobs and the opportunity to leave the ghetto. For them, the future seemed to lead only to a dead end.

Today, whites tend to exaggerate how well and quickly they escaped from poverty. The fact is that immigrants who came from rural backgrounds, as many Negroes do, are only now, after three generations, finally beginning to move into the middle class.

By contrast, Negroes began concentrating in the city less than two generations ago, and under much less favorable conditions. Although some Negroes have escaped poverty, few have been able to escape the urban ghetto.
PART III-WHAT CAN BE DONE? Chapter 10--The Community Response
Our investigation of the 1967 riot cities establishes that virtually every major episode of violence was foreshadowed by an accumulation of unresolved grievances and by widespread dissatisfaction among Negroes with the unwillingness or inability of local government to respond.

Overcoming these conditions is essential for community support of law enforcement and civil order. City governments need new and more vital channels of communication to the residents of the ghetto; they need to improve their capacity to respond effectively to community needs before they become community grievances; and they need to provide opportunity for, meaningful involvement of ghetto residents in shaping policies and programs which affect the community.
The Commission recommends that local governments:
* Develop Neighborhood Action Task Forces as joint community government efforts through which more effective communication can be achieved, and the delivery of city services to ghetto residents improved.

* Establish comprehensive grievance-response mechanisms in order to bring all public agencies under public scrutiny.

* Bring the institutions of local government closer to the people they serve by establishing neighborhood outlets for local, state and federal administrative and public service agencies.

* Expand opportunities for ghetto residents to participate in the formulation of public policy and the implementation of programs affecting them through improved political representation, creation of institutional channels for community action, expansion of legal services, and legislative hearings on ghetto problems.

In this effort, city governments will require state and federal support.
The Commission recommends:
* State and federal financial assistance for mayors and city councils to support the research, consultants, staff and other resources needed to respond effectively to federal program initiatives.

* State cooperation in providing municipalities with the jurisdictional tools needed to deal with their problems; a fuller measure of financial aid to urban areas; and the focusing of the interests of suburban communities on the physical, social and cultural environment of the central city.
Chapter 11--Police and the Community
The abrasive relationship between the police and the minority communities has been a major-and explosive-source of grievance, tension and disorder. The blame must be shared by the total society.

The police are faced with demands for increased protection and service in the ghetto. Yet the aggressive patrol practices thought necessary to meet these demands themselves create tension and hostility. The resulting grievances have been further aggravated by the lack of effective mechanisms for handling complaints against the police. Special programs for bettering police-community relations have been instituted, but these alone are not enough. Police administrators, with the guidance of public officials, and the support of the entire community, must take vigorous action to improve law enforcement arid to decrease the potential for disorder.
The Commission recommends that city government and police authorities:
* Review police operations in the ghetto to ensure proper conduct by police officers, and eliminate abrasive practices.

* Provide more adequate police protection to ghetto residents to eliminate their high sense of insecurity, and the belief of many Negro citizens in the existence of a dual standard of law enforcement.'

* Establish fair and effective mechanisms for the redress of grievances against the police, and other municipal employees.

* Develop and adopt policy guidelines to assist officers in making critical decisions in areas where police conduct can create tension.

* Develop and use innovative programs to ensure widespread community support for law enforcement.

* Recruit more Negroes into the regular police force, and review promotion policies to ensure fair promotion for Negro officers.

* Establish a "Community Service Officer" program to attract ghetto youths between the ages of 17 and 21 to police work. These junior officers would perform duties in ghetto neighborhoods, but would not have full police authority. The federal government should provide support equal to 90 percent of the costs of employing CSOs on the basis of one for every ten regular officers.
Chapter 12--Control of Disorder
Preserving civil peace is the first responsibility of government. Unless the rule of law prevails, our society will lack not only order but also the environment essential to social and economic progress.

The maintenance of civil order cannot be left to the police alone. The police need guidance, as well as support, from mayors and other public officials. It is the responsibility of public officials to determine proper police policies, support adequate police standards for personnel and performance, and participate in planning for the control of disorders.
To maintain control of incidents which could lead to disorders, the Commission recommends that local officials:
* Assign seasoned, well-trained policemen and supervisory officers to patrol ghetto areas, and to respond to disturbances.

* Develop plans which will quickly muster maximum police man power and highly qualified senior commanders at the outbreak of disorders.

* Provide special training in the prevention of disorders, and prepare police for riot control and for operation in units, with adequate command and control and field communication for proper discipline and effectiveness

* Develop guidelines governing the use of control equipment and provide alternatives to the use of lethal weapons. Federal support for research in this area is needed.

* Establish an intelligence system to provide police and other public officials with reliable information that may help to prevent the outbreak of a disorder and to institute effective control measures in the event a riot erupts.

* Develop continuing contacts with ghetto residents to make use of the forces for order which exist within the community.

* Establish machinery for neutralizing rumors, and enabling Negro leaders and residents to obtain the facts. Create special rumor details to collect, evaluate, and dispel rumors that may lead to a civil disorder.

The Commission believes there is a grave danger that some communities may resort to the indiscriminate and excessive use of force. The harmful effects of overreaction are incalculable. The Commission condemns moves to equip police departments with mass destruction weapons, such as automatic rifles, machine guns and tanks. Weapons which are designed to destroy, not to control, have no place in densely populated urban communities.

The Commission recognizes the sound principle of local authority and responsibility in law enforcement, but recommends that the federal government share, in the financing of programs for improvement of police forces, both in their normal law enforcement activities as well as in their response to civil disorders.
To assist government authorities in planning their response to civil disorder, this report contains a Supplement on Control of Disorder. It deals with specific problems encountered during riot-control operations, and includes:
* Assessment of the present capabilities of police, National Guard and Army forces to control major riots, and recommendations for improvement;

* Recommended means by which the control operations of those forces may be coordinated with the response of other agencies, such as fire departments, and with the community at large;

* Recommendations for review and revision of federal, state and local laws needed to provide the framework for control efforts and for the call-up and interrelated action of public safety forces.
Chapter 13--The Administration of Justice Under Emergency Conditions
In many of the cities which experienced disorders last summer, there were recurring breakdowns in the mechanisms for processing, prosecuting and protecting arrested persons. These resulted mainly from long-standing structural deficiencies in criminal court systems, and from the failure of communities to anticipate and plan for the emergency demands of civil disorders.

In part, because of this, there were few successful prosecutions for serious crimes committed during the riots. In those cities where mass arrests occurred many arrestees were deprived of basic legal rights.
The Commission recommends that the cities and states:
* Undertake reform of the lower courts so as to improve the quality of justice rendered under normal conditions.

* Plan comprehensive measures by which the criminal justice system may be supplemented during civil disorders so that its deliberative functions are protected, and the quality of justice is maintained.
Such emergency plans require broad community participation and dedicated leadership by the bench and bar. They should include:
* Laws sufficient to deter and punish riot conduct.

* Additional judges, bail and probation officers, and clerical staff.

* Arrangements for volunteer lawyers to help prosecutors and to represent riot defendants at every stage of proceedings.

* Policies to ensure proper and individual bail, arraignment, pre-trial, trial and sentencing proceedings.

* Procedures for processing arrested persons, such as summons and release, and release on personal recognizance, which permit separation of minor offenders from those dangerous to the community, in order that serious offenders may be detained and prosecuted effectively.

* Adequate emergency processing and detention facilities.
Chapter 14--Damages: Repair and Compensation The Commission recommends that the federal government:
* Amend the Federal Disaster Act-which now applies only to natural disasters--to permit federal emergency food and medical assistance to cities during major civil disorders, and provide long-term economic assistance afterwards.

* With the cooperation of the states, create incentives for the private insurance industry to provide more adequate property-insurance coverage in inner-city areas.

The Commission endorses the report of the National Advisory Panel on Insurance in Riot-Affected Areas: "Meeting the Insurance Crisis of our Cities."
Chapter 15--The News Media and the Disorders
In his charge to the Commission, the President asked: "What effect do the mass media have on the riots?"
The Commission determined that the answer to the President's question did not lie solely in the performance of the press and broadcasters in reporting the riots. Our analysis had to consider also the overall treatment by the media of the Negro ghettos, community relations, racial attitudes, and poverty-day by day and month by month, year in and year out. A wide range of interviews with government officials, law enforcement authorities, media personnel and other citizens, including ghetto residents, as well as a quantitative analysis of riot coverage and a special conference with industry representatives, leads us to conclude that:
* Despite instances of sensationalism, inaccuracy and distortion, newspapers, radio and television tried on the whole to give a balanced, factual account of the 1967 disorders.

* Elements of the news media failed to portray accurately the scale and character of the violence that occurred last summer. The overall effect was, we believe, an exaggeration of both mood and event.

* Important segments of the media failed to report adequately on the causes and consequences of civil disorders and on the underlying problems of race relations. They have not communicated to the majority of their audience--which is white-a sense of the degradation, misery and hopelessness of life in the ghetto.

These failings must be corrected, and the improvement must come from within the industry. Freedom of the press is not the issue. Any effort to impose governmental restrictions would be inconsistent with fundamental constitutional precepts.

We have seen evidence that the news media are becoming aware of and concerned about their performance in this field. As that concern grows, coverage will improve. But much more must be done, and it must be done soon.
The Commission recommends that the media:
* Expand coverage of the Negro community and of race problems through permanent assignment of reporters familiar with urban and racial affairs, and through establishment of more and better links with the Negro community.

* Integrate Negroes and Negro activities into all aspects of coverage and content, including newspaper articles and television programming. The news media must publish newspapers and produce programs that recognize the existence and activities of Negroes as a group within the community and as a part of the larger community.

* Recruit more Negroes into journalism and broadcasting and promote those who are qualified to positions of significant responsibility. Recruitment should begin in high schools and continue through college; where necessary, aid for training should be provided.

* Improve coordination with police in reporting riot news through advance planning, and cooperate with the police in the designation of police information officers, establishment of information centers, and development of mutually acceptable guidelines for riot reporting and the conduct of media personnel.

* Accelerate efforts to ensure accurate and responsible reporting of pot and racial news, through adoption by all news gathering organizations of stringent internal staff guidelines.

* Cooperate in the establishment of a privately organized and funded Institute of Urban Communications to train and educate journalists in urban affairs, recruit and train more Negro journalists, develop methods for improving police-press relations, review coverage of riots and racial issues, and support continuing research in the urban field.
Chapter 16--The Future of the Cities
By 1985, the Negro population in central cities is expected to increase by 72 percent to approximately 20.8 million. Coupled with the continued exodus of white families to the suburbs, this growth will produce majority Negro populations in many of the nation's largest cities.

The future of these cities, and of their burgeoning Negro populations, is grim. Most new employment opportunities are being created in suburbs and outlying areas. This trend will continue unless important changes in public policy are made.

In prospect, therefore, is further deterioration of already inadequate municipal tax bases in the face of increasing demands for public services, and continuing unemployment and poverty among the urban Negro population:
Three choices are open to the nation:
* We can maintain present policies, continuing both the proportion of the nation's resources now allocated to programs for the unemployed and the disadvantaged, and the inadequate and failing effort to achieve an integrated society.

* We can adopt a policy of "enrichment" aimed at improving dramatically the quality of ghetto life while abandoning integration as a goal.

* We can pursue integration by combining ghetto "enrichment" with policies which will encourage Negro movement out of central city areas.

The first choice, continuance of present policies, has ominous consequences for our society. The share of the nation's resources now allocated to programs for the disadvantaged is insufficient to arrest the deterioration of life in central city ghettos. Under such conditions, a rising proportion of Negroes may come to see in the deprivation and segregation they experience, a justification for violent protest, or for extending support to now isolated extremists who advocate civil disruption. Large-scale and continuing violence could result, followed by white retaliation, and, ultimately, the separation of the two communities in a garrison state.

Even if violence does not occur, the consequences are unacceptable. Development of a racially integrated society, extraordinarily difficult today, will be virtually impossible when the present black ghetto population of 12.5 million has grown to almost 21 million.

To continue present policies is to make permanent the division of our country into two societies; one, largely Negro and poor, located in the central cities; the other, predominantly white and affluent, located in the suburbs and in outlying areas.

The second choice, ghetto enrichment coupled with abandonment of integration, is also unacceptable. It is another way of choosing a permanently divided country. Moreover, equality cannot be achieved under conditions of nearly complete separation. In a country where the economy, and particularly the resources of employment, are predominantly white, a policy of separation can only relegate Negroes to a permanently inferior economic status.

We believe that the only possible choice for America is the third-a policy which combines ghetto enrichment with programs designed to encourage integration of substantial numbers of Negroes into the society outside the ghetto.

Enrichment must be an important adjunct to integration, for no matter how ambitious or energetic the program, few Negroes now living in central cities can be quickly integrated. In the meantime, large-scale improvement in the quality of ghetto life is essential.

In the meantime, large-scale improvement in the quality of ghetto life is essential.

But this can be no more than an interim strategy. Programs must be developed which will permit substantial Negro movement out of the ghettos. The primary goal must be a single society, in which every citizen will be free to live and work according to his capabilities and desires, not his color.
Chapter 17--Recommendations For National Action INTRODUCTION
No American-white or black-can escape the consequences of the continuing social and economic decay of our major cities.

Only a commitment to national action on an unprecedented scale can shape a future compatible with the historic ideals of American society.

The great productivity of our economy, and a federal revenue system which is highly responsive to economic growth, can provide the resources.

The major need is to generate new will--the will to tax ourselves to the extent necessary, to meet the vital needs of the nation.

We have set forth goals and proposed strategies to reach those goals. We discuss and recommend programs not to commit each of us to specific parts of such programs but to illustrate the type and dimension of action needed.

The major goal is the creation of a true union--a single society and a single American identity. Toward that goal, we propose the following objectives for national action:

* Opening up opportunities to those who are restricted by racial segregation and discrimination, and eliminating all barriers to their choice of jobs, education and housing.

* Removing the frustration of powerlessness among the disadvantaged by providing the means for them to deal with the problems that affect their own lives and by increasing the capacity of our public and private institutions to respond to these problems.

* Increasing communication across racial lines to destroy stereotypes, to halt polarization, end distrust and hostility, and create common ground for efforts toward public order and social justice.

We propose these aims to fulfill our pledge of equality and to meet the fundamental needs of a democratic and civilized society--domestic peace and social justice.
EMPLOYMENT
Pervasive unemployment and underemployment are the most persistent and serious grievances in minority areas. They are inextricably linked to the problem of civil disorder.

Despite growing federal expenditures for manpower development and training programs, and sustained general economic prosperity and increasing demands for skilled workers, about two million-white and nonwhite-are permanently unemployed. About ten million are underemployed, of whom 6.5 million work full time for wages below the poverty line.

The 500,000 "hard-core" unemployed in the central cities who lack a basic education and are unable to hold a steady job are made up in large part of Negro males between the ages of 18 and 25. In the riot cities which we surveyed, Negroes were three times as likely as whites to hold unskilled jobs, which are often part time, seasonal, low-paying and "dead end."

Negro males between the ages of 15 and 25 predominated among the rioters. More than 20 percent of the rioters were unemployed, and many who were employed held intermittent, low status, unskilled jobs which they regarded as below their education and ability.
The Commission recommends that the federal government:
* Undertake joint efforts with cities and states to consolidate existing manpower programs to avoid fragmentation and duplication.

* Take immediate action to create 2,000,000 new jobs over the next three years--one million in the public sector and one million in the private sector-to absorb the hard-core unemployed and materially reduce the level of underemployment for all workers, black and white. We propose 250,000 public sector and 300,000 private sector jobs in the first year.

* Provide on-the-job training by both public and private employers with reimbursement to private employers for the extra costs of training the hard-core unemployed, by contract or by tax credits.

* Provide tax and other incentives to investment in rural as well as urban poverty areas in order to offer to the rural poor an alternative to migration to urban centers.

* Take new and vigorous action to remove artificial barriers to employment and promotion, including not only racial discrimination but, in certain cases, arrest records or lack of a high school diploma. Strengthen those agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, charged with eliminating discriminatory practices, and provide full support for Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act allowing federal grant-in-aid funds to be withheld from activities which discriminate on grounds of color or race.

The Commission commends the recent public commitment of the National Council of the Building and Construction Trades Unions, AFL-CIO, to encourage and recruit Negro membership in apprenticeship programs. This commitment should be intensified and implemented.
EDUCATION
Education in a democratic society must equip children to develop their potential and to participate fully in American life. For the community at large, the schools have discharged this responsibility well. But for many minorities, and particularly for the children of the ghetto, the schools have failed to provide the educational experience which could overcome the effects of discrimination and deprivation.

This failure is one of the persistent sources of grievance and resentment within the Negro community. The hostility of Negro parents and students toward the school system is generating increasing conflict and causing disruption within many city school districts. But the most dramatic evidence of the relationship between educational practices and civil disorders lies in the high incidence of riot participation by ghetto youth who have not completed high school.

The bleak record of public education for ghetto children is growing worse. In the critical skills--verbal and reading ability--Negro students are falling further behind whites with each year of school completed. The high unemployment and underemployment rate for Negro youth is evidence, in part, of the growing educational crisis.

We support integration as the priority education strategy; it is essential to the future of American society. In this last summer's disorders we have seen the consequences of racial isolation at all levels, and of attitudes toward race, on both sides, produced by three centuries of myth, ignorance and bias. It is indispensable that opportunities for interaction between the races be expanded.

We recognize that the growing dominance of pupils from disadvantaged minorities in city school populations will not soon be reversed. No matter how great the effort toward desegregation, many children of the ghetto will not, within their school careers, attend integrated schools.

If existing disadvantages are not to be perpetuated, we must drastically improve the quality of ghetto education. Equality of results with all-white schools must be the goal.
To implement these strategies, the Commission recommends:
* Sharply increased efforts to eliminate de facto segregation in our schools through substantial federal aid to school systems seeking to desegregate either within the system or in cooperation with neighboring school systems.

* Elimination of racial discrimination in Northern as well as Southern schools by vigorous application of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

* Extension of quality early childhood education to every disadvantaged child in the country.

* Efforts to improve dramatically schools serving disadvantaged children through substantial federal funding of year-round compensatory education programs, improved teaching, and expanded experimentation and research.

* Elimination of illiteracy through greater federal support for adult basic education.

* Enlarged opportunities for parent and community participation in the public schools.

* Reoriented vocational education emphasizing work-experience training and the involvement of business and industry.

* Expanded opportunities for higher education through increased federal assistance to disadvantaged students.

* Revision of state aid formulas to assure more per student aid to districts having a high proportion of disadvantaged school-age children.
THE WELFARE SYSTEM
Our present system of public welfare is designed to save money instead of people, and tragically ends up doing neither. This system has two critical deficiencies:

First, it excludes large numbers of persons who are in great need, and who, if provided a decent level of support, might be able to become more productive and self-sufficient. No federal funds are available for millions of men and women who are needy but neither aged, handicapped nor the parents of minor children.

Second, for those included, the system provides assistance well below the minimum necessary for a decent level of existence, and imposes restrictions that encourage continued dependency on welfare and undermine self-respect.

A welter of statutory requirements and administrative practices and regulations operate to remind recipients that they are considered untrustworthy, promiscuous and lazy. Residence requirements prevent assistance to people in need who are newly arrived in the state. Regular searches of recipients' homes violate privacy. Inadequate social services compound the problems.
The Commission recommends that the federal government, acting with state and local governments where necessary, reform the existing welfare system to:
* Establish uniform national standards of assistance at least as high as the annual "poverty level" of income, now set by the Social Security Administration at $3,335 per year for an urban family of four.

* Require that all states receiving federal welfare contributions participate in the Aid to Families with Dependent Children Unemployed Parents program (AFDC-UP) that permits assistance to families with both father and mother in the home, thus aiding the family while it is still intact.

* Bear a substantially greater portion of all welfare costs-at least 90 percent of total payments.

* Increase incentives for seeking employment and job training, but remove restrictions recently enacted by the Congress that would compel mothers of young children to work.

* Provide more adequate social services through neighborhood centers and family-planning programs.

* Remove the freeze placed by the 1967 welfare amendments on the percentage of children in a state that can be covered by federal assistance.

*Eliminate residence requirements.
As a long-range goal, the Commission recommends that the federal government seek to develop a national system of income supplementation based strictly on need with two broad and basic purposes:
* To provide, for those who can work or who do work, any necessary supplements in such a way as to develop incentives for fuller employment;

* To provide, for those who cannot work and for mothers who decide to remain with their children, a minimum standard of decent living, and to aid in the saving of children from the prison of poverty that has held their parents.

A broad system of implementation would involve substantially greater federal expenditures than anything now contemplated. The cost will range widely depending on the standard of need accepted as the "basic allowance" to individuals and families, and on the rate at which additional income above this level is taxed. Yet if the deepening cycle of poverty and dependence on welfare can be broken, if the children of the poor can be given the opportunity to scale the wall that now separates them from the rest of society, the return on this investment will be great indeed.
HOUSING
After more than three decades of fragmented and grossly underfunded federal housing programs, nearly six million substandard housing units remain occupied in the United States.

The housing problem is particularly acute in the minority ghettos. Nearly two-thirds of all non-white families living in the central cities today live in neighborhoods marked with substandard housing and general urban blight. Two major factors are responsible.

First: Many ghetto residents simply cannot pay the rent necessary to support decent housing. In Detroit, for example, over 40 percent of the non-white occupied units in 1960 required rent of over 35 percent of the tenants' income.

Second: Discrimination prevents access to many non-slum areas, particularly the suburbs, where good housing exists. In addition, by creating a "back pressure" in the racial ghettos, it makes it possible for landlords to break up apartments for denser occupancy, and keeps prices and rents of deteriorated ghetto housing higher than they would be in a truly free market.

To date, federal programs have been able to do comparatively little to provide housing for the disadvantaged. In the 31-year history of subsidized federal housing, only about 800,000 units have been constructed, with recent production averaging about 50,000 units a year. By comparison, over a period only three years longer, FHA insurance guarantees have made possible the construction of over ten million middle and upper-income units.
Two points are fundamental to the Commission's recommendations:
First: Federal housing programs must be given a new thrust aimed at overcoming the prevailing patterns of racial segregation. If this is not done, those programs will continue to concentrate the most impoverished and dependent segments of the population into the central-city ghettos where there is already a critical gap between the needs of the population and the public resources to deal with them.

Second: The private sector must be brought into the production and financing of low and moderate rental housing to supply the capabilities and capital necessary to meet the housing needs of the nation.
The Commission recommends that the federal government:
* Enact a comprehensive and enforceable federal open housing law to cover the sale or rental of all housing, including single family homes.

* Reorient federal housing programs to place more low and moderate income housing outside of ghetto areas.

* Bring within the reach of low and moderate income families within the next five years six million new and existing units of decent housing, beginning with 600,000 units in the next year.
To reach this goal we recommend:
* Expansion and modification of the rent supplement program to permit use of supplements for existing housing, thus greatly increasing the reach of the program.

* Expansion and modification of the below-market interest rate program to enlarge the interest subsidy to all sponsors and provide interest-free loans to nonprofit sponsors to cover pre-construction costs, and permit sale of projects to nonprofit corporations, cooperatives, or condominiums.

* Creation of an ownership supplement program similar to present rent supplements, to make home ownership possible for low-income families.

* Federal writedown of interest rates on loans to private builders constructing moderate-rent housing.

* Expansion of the public housing program, with emphasis on small units on scattered sites, and leasing and "turnkey" programs.

* Expansion of the Model Cities program.

* Expansion and reorientation of the urban renewal program to give priority to projects directly assisting low-income households to obtain adequate housing.
CONCLUSION
One of the first witnesses to be invited to appear before this Commission was Dr. Kenneth B. Clark, a distinguished and perceptive scholar. Referring to the reports of earlier riot commissions, he said:

I read that report. . . of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of '35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of '43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot.

I must again in candor say to you members of this Commission--it is a kind of Alice in Wonderland--with the same moving picture re-shown over and over again, the same analysis, the same recommendations, and the same inaction.

These words come to our minds as we conclude this report.

We have provided an honest beginning. We have learned much. But we have uncovered no startling truths, no unique insights, no simple solutions. The destruction and the bitterness of racial disorder, the harsh polemics of black revolt and white repression have been seen and heard before in this country.

It is time now to end the destruction and the violence, not only in the streets of the ghetto but in the lives of people.

REPORT OF THE NATIONAL ADVISORY COMMISSION ON CIVIL DISORDERS (New York: Bantam Books, 1968), pp. 1-29.

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Note: The following is the Summary of the Kerner Commission Report. The entire report is available here. For a compilation of key recommendations, click here. Summary of the Kerner Commission Report INTRODUCTION The summer of 1967 again brought racial disorders to American cities, and with them shock, fear and bewilderment to the nation.

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Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 28 wins & 46 nominations. See more awards "

Storyline

In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, "Remember This House." The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. At the time of Baldwin's death in 1987, he left behind only 30 completed pages of this manuscript. Filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished. Written by Jwelch5742

Taglines:

In "Remember This House" Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished -a radical narration about race in America, through the lives and assassinations of three of his friends: Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers and Malcolm X. using only the writer's original words.

Motion Picture Rating (MPAA)

Rated PG-13 for disturbing violent images, thematic material, language and brief nudity | See all certifications "

Details

Release Date:

17 February 2017 (USA)

Also Known As:

Remember This House

Box Office

Opening Weekend USA:

$686,378, 3 February 2017, Limited Release

Gross USA:

$7,120,626, 2 June 2017

Company Credits

Technical Specs

See full technical specs "

Did You Know?

Trivia

I Am Not Your Negro was one of 15 films included on the shortlist for the best feature documentary Oscar. See more "

Quotes

James Baldwin : The story of the Negro in America is the story of America, and it is not a pretty story.
See more "

Soundtracks

Stormy Weather
Written by Harold Arlen, Ted Koehler
Published by EMI Mills Music Inc.
Courtesy of Sony ATV Music Publishing
Performed by Lena Horne and Recorded March 30, 1956.
(p) 2002, all rights reserved by BMG Music
See more "

User Reviews

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Nominated for 1 Oscar. Another 28 wins & 46 nominations. See more awards " In 1979, James Baldwin wrote a letter to his literary agent describing his next project, "Remember This House." The book was to be a revolutionary, personal account of the lives and assassinations of three of his close friends: Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

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The United States has seen escalating protests over the past week, following the death of George Floyd while in custody of the Minneapolis police. Educators everywhere are asking how can we help students understand that this was not an isolated, tragic incident perpetrated by a few bad individuals, but part of a broader pattern of institutionalized racism. Institutional racism-a term coined by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their 1967 book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America-is what connects George Floyd and Breonna Taylor with Ahmaud Arbery, Philando Castile, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Emmett Till, and the thousands of other people who have been killed because they were black in America.

This context seems vital for discussions both inside and outside the classroom. The following articles, published over the course of JSTOR Daily's five years try to provide such context. As always, the underlying scholarship is free for all readers. We have now updated this story with tagging for easier navigation to related content, will be continually updating this page with more stories, and are working to acquire a bibliographic reading list about institutionalized racism in the near future. (Note: Some readers may find some of the stories in this syllabus or the photos used to illustrate them disturbing. Teachers may wish to use caution in assigning them to students.)

Racial (In)Justice: Putting Protest into Perspective

Video Documentation & Police Brutality: Ethical Considerations

Racial, Economic, and Educational Disparities Go Hand in Hand

Editor's notes: We welcome reader comments: get in touch with comments, pitch us, or offer recommendations for further coverage here. These articles are just a small selection of the work we publish on JSTOR Daily. We've added tags on this article to help you find your way to related content, but are in the process of reviewing our tagging structure so these may change. We encourage you to sign up for our newsletter to get a digest of stories each week. Note: This story was updated June 4 with additional stories and tags for navigation to other related content. Thanks to reader comments, the introduction was updated June 3 with Breonna Taylor and Sandra Bland's names and the phrase "people of color" was changed to "people." To support JSTOR Daily's work providing historical and scholarly context to the news and current affairs, you can become a member on Patreon.
Resources

JSTOR is a digital library for scholars, researchers, and students. JSTOR Daily readers can access the original research behind our articles for free on JSTOR.

Journal of Negro Education

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Institutionalized Racism: A Syllabus | JSTOR Daily

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The United States has seen escalating protests over the past week, following the death of George Floyd while in custody of the Minneapolis police. Educators everywhere are asking how can we help students understand that this was not an isolated, tragic incident perpetrated by a few bad individuals, but part of a broader pattern of institutionalized racism.

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The WHS No Place for Hate committee is committed to doing all we can to help ensure that centuries of racism in the U.S. are not repeated anymore. We believe that we must be allies in anti-racism, and we believe that being silent is equal to condoning racism. We encourage the members of our WHS community to make their voices heard peacefully and to inform others about the need to deepen our commitment to equality and equity. We are dedicated to education, empathy, allyship, civility and understanding.

If you are interested in signing this statement, click here.

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Performative Allyship Is Deadly (Here’s What to Do Instead)Activism can’t begin and end with a hashtag

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Performative Allyship Is Deadly (Here’s What to Do Instead)Activism can’t begin and end with a hashtag

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by Holiday Phillips

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National Museum of African American History and Culture

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Talking about race, although hard, is necessary. We are here to provide tools and guidance to empower your journey and inspire conversation.

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7:08 PM ET

Adam RittenbergESPN Senior Writer

Close

College football reporter.

Joined ESPN.com in 2008.

Graduate of Northwestern University.

More than 60 Missouri football players registered to vote Wednesday as part of the team's call to action following the death of George Floyd while in police custody.

Missouri players led a walk from campus to the Boone County Courthouse in Columbia, Missouri, according to a tweet from coach Eliah Drinkwitz. Players and coaches knelt for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor Floyd, who died May 25 in Minneapolis after a police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes.

Together. ✊🏾✊🏽✊🏿✊🏻 pic.twitter.com/OnVPe31rb6
- Mizzou Athletics (@MizzouAthletics) June 3, 2020

Drinkwitz and the football coaching staff joined the players, along with Missouri basketball coaches Cuonzo Martin and Robin Pingeton, athletic department staff members, university system president Mun Choi and members of the Columbia police department. Sixty-two players then registered to vote, according to Drinkwitz.

"Today we decided that action is what causes change," Drinkwitz tweeted after the walk. "Our integrity is when words and actions come into alignment. So we did that. Our players led a powerful walk to the courthouse where we took a knee for 8 minutes and 46 seconds to honor the life of George Floyd and demand justice. This isn't political. It's a human rights issue. And then we registered to vote. 62 student athletes registered. Change will happen."

pic.twitter.com/zL1rWuMhRf- Eliah Drinkwitz (@CoachDrinkwitz) June 3, 2020

In 2015, racial tensions escalated at Missouri following several campus incidents and an administrative response that set off protests and widespread criticism. In November 2015, a group of black Missouri football players threatened to boycott games if university president Tim Wolfe did not step down. Gary Pinkel, then Missouri's football coach, voiced his support for the players.

Wolfe resigned days later and the players did not sit out any games.

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Missouri football players march, register to vote

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7:08 PM ET Adam RittenbergESPN Senior Writer Close College football reporter. Joined ESPN.com in 2008. Graduate of Northwestern University. More than 60 Missouri football players registered to vote Wednesday as part of the team's call to action following the death of George Floyd while in police custody.

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Home Current Initiatives Membership Newsletter Calendar

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Video by Alvin Ailey choreographer Jamar Roberts

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Video by Alvin Ailey choreographer Jamar Roberts

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This video was recorded while he was sheltering in place but prior to the death of George Floyd for the Guggenheim Museum's Works & Process performance series.

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WPA Virtual Commissions: "Cooped" by Jamar Roberts

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Race in America, Through a Grandfather's Lens

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Race in America, Through a Grandfather's Lens

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by Warren Hynes

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I have been crying on and off since May 26. Between the killing of George Floyd and Amy Cooper's Oscar-worthy performance that could have resulted in New York City cops doing the unthinkable to another Black man, I haven't slept much either.

I've talked to friends, joined one of the Minneapolis rallies protesting Floyd's death at the hands of police in that city and fielded emails, texts and calls from folks expressing concern. But the one person I wanted to talk to most, I couldn't. It's ironic that when I felt my most vulnerable, my mother is the last person I could call, but I have good reason.

My mother is white. I am mixed race. A lifetime of growing up as her Black daughter has taught me that I can't always count on her understanding. As events unfolded in my hometown of Minneapolis, a similar theme played out in many of my conversations, and it's made me realize that my relationship with my mother is a microcosm of the relationship that most Black Americans have with white Americans.

From the first moment I watched the video of Floyd's killing, I felt fear, anger, outrage and terror because I saw myself under attack. My mother felt sympathy. She felt sad for "them," ― Floyd and other Black people killed in recent years by cops ― not fear for her own safety. Even though she was married to a black man and has two mixed-race children, she has never lost her ability to distance herself.

I'm nearly 60 years old, but even today my mother has a hard time accepting for what it is the racism I experience. When I bring it up, her first reaction, like so many other white people's, is often to question me. "Why do you say racist?" she asks. "Are you sure that's what they meant?" It is hard work to get her to see the world through my eyes, even when the facts are staring her right in the face ― or in the neighborhood where we both lived.

I grew up just around the corner from where Floyd died. I spent much of my childhood waiting for buses with my mother at the very same intersection where millions of people have now watched videos showing the life drain right out of him as a white police officer's knee pressed against his neck. In the six years I've been back in Minnesota, a similar killing has occurred almost annually. I've been outraged every time. But the brutality of this death terrorized me.

My skin is not as dark or my hair as kinky as Floyd's, but I felt all the anguish and terror that any Black person feels when witnessing a lynching. This was domestic terrorism, just as Cooper's phone call from Central Park was a direct threat of violence toward a Black man who had the audacity to ask her to follow the law. I've known too many women just like her.

Many people assume that because they think I don't look "as Black" as some other people, I don't experience racism. Wrong. That's why I've awakened repeatedly, haunted by the racist acts leveled at me over my life and career. The truth is that while I'm lighter skinned than my father, there is no aspect of life that isn't potentially dangerous for me. I'm not speaking philosophically ― I mean literally.

I've been screamed at, called a ni**er and told to get out of my own neighborhood more than once. I've been refused the right to purchase a house, denied help with financial aid at a prestigious college, harassed out of jobs, homes, bars, churches, new age spiritual groups, furniture stores, the Girl Scouts, universities and schools as a student and a teacher.

I never met my great grandparents because they disowned my mother for marrying my father and having me. They rubbed it in by sending Christmas presents to everyone in the family but us. I spent half of my childhood silently watching these relatives open those gifts while expecting us not to make them uncomfortable as they did so.

I fought for over a year with my father's nursing home because not one, but two of his roommates threatened his life. These white men swore at him, called him names and threatened to kill him daily. Only when I began talking legal action did the administrators finally move him to a safe room. Nothing happened to the perpetrators. During all of these incidents, only the man who called me the N-word didn't pretend his actions weren't racist.

Last week, once the images of rioters and buildings on fire hit the news, I heard from many friends. My mother texted me too, expressing her outrage and concern. Like many of the other white people I talked to, she seemed much more upset about watching the city burn than Mr. Floyd's death. Others sounded the same, clearly more outraged by the threat to their neighborhoods and property than by the killing itself. My feelings were the opposite. That's the crux of the whole problem.

Many people assume that because they think I don't look "as Black" as some other people, I don't experience racism. Wrong... The truth is that while I'm lighter skinned than my father, there is no aspect of life that isn't potentially dangerous for me. I'm not speaking philosophically ― I mean literally.

As long as you can distance yourself from a lynching or any kind of racist attack, you can remain unafraid.

Most white Americans, regardless of their politics, respond similarly. They feel bad for "them," but not afraid until their own streets are burning. Then it becomes personal because they don't feel safe. I, too, mourn the burning on our beautiful, vibrant Lake Street in Minneapolis. It took decades to build. However, as we move forward, this question of personal safety is paramount.

If you think this question does not apply to you, try a little experiment. Think back to the beginning of last week. How did you feel when you first saw the videos of Floyd having the life drained out of him? Upset? Sad? Sick to your stomach? Think back to that night or the next day. Did you feel fear welling up in your gut or a tightness in your chest?

Now try to remember how you felt last Friday night after seeing footage and hearing reports of buildings burning and people throwing rocks or running from tear gas. Were you just upset ― or did you feel afraid? Did you start worrying about your own house or street? Did you start worrying about what could happen if the rioters came to your block? Did you have trouble sleeping? Did you get angry?

What did that feel like in your body? Be honest with yourself. No one else will know.

If you were more outraged by property being destroyed than the moment you saw or heard about the killing of Floyd, you see yourself as separate and different from Black Americans. That is the very essence of white privilege. It's a luxury to feel safe in a city ― and country ― where people die regularly at the hands of those we pay to protect us. To feel sad but unafraid in your own community, even in the face of lethal violence against a fellow citizen, is only possible if you believe you are not at risk.

I have lived throughout the U.S. in cities, suburbs, small towns and rural communities. I have never lived anywhere without some fear of my white neighbors or the police. Never.

At this moment it may be wise for us all to remember that rioters who threw tea into a Boston harbor helped foment the revolution that founded this country. I studied U.S. history at a Minneapolis high school, but I had to move to South Carolina to learn that 100 years ago, most riots were attacks against black people by white mobs. Conversely, the recent protests in Minneapolis and across the country have been made up of very diverse people. I believe most Americans want justice for Floyd, but even convicting all four police officers who participated in his death will not make our future safe.

There have been reports that white nationalists may have infiltrated some of the protests that have taken place over the past week, traveling to these demonstrations specifically to cause violence and destruction. Yes, there were local people of all colors participating in the violence, as well, but who really instigated much of that burning? And why? In the context of President Donald Trump 's tweets that inflame rather than calm and his threat to use the military to quell the unrest in so much of the nation, we must consider what this means for our cities and our country. And it isn't just African Americans who are in danger.

With the coronavirus nipping at our heels and Trump pushing to re-open the country regardless of the potential death toll, our entire country is at risk. Billions of dollars that could have been used to help people find work and pay their bills have gone to corporations who are now busy playing roulette on Wall Street. What is going to happen as millions of people find themselves unemployed and unable to pay rent or mortgages for months or even years?

Our president may be crazy, but he's no fool. When he said there were "very fine people" among the rioting white nationalists whose protest in Virginia resulted in the death of a young woman, he sent a clear message. When he tweeted " Liberate Michigan," it was a test. Two days later his message to "Liberate Minnesota" and other battleground states helped spur his armed followers onto the streets to challenge our governor and others without any concern for spreading a killing virus.

Last Friday, Trump's tweet, "when the looting starts, the shooting starts," was strategic. He used a phrase that was infamously uttered in 1967 by a Miami police chief who went on to say, "We don't mind being accused of police brutality... They haven't seen anything yet." That attitude is now evident in National Blue Lives Matter spokesperson Randy Sutton's video on the Facebook page of BlueLivesMatter.

Imagine life a year from now, with Trump back in office and double the number of dead from COVID-19 while half the country is unemployed and many are headed into homelessness. How does that feel? I know how it feels in my body. We are all in grave danger.

Last Sunday I talked to my mother in person. It was my birthday so we met at a local park to celebrate. With my face mask firmly in place, I opened the card she brought me and we talked about the week's events. Even though I have been hurt and disappointed in the past, I shared my feelings honestly and she listened. I spoke my truth because she is the only mother I have. As I felt the early summer sun soak into my bones, I heard her admit that she "doesn't get it," but she wants to understand. For me, this is where love lives ― in the never giving up.

I spoke my truth because she is the only mother I have. As I felt the early summer sun soak into my bones, I heard her admit that she 'doesn't get it,' but she wants to understand. For me, this is where love lives ― in the never giving up.

Just as all of America is having similar conversations, my white mother and I, her black daughter, promised each other that we will keep showing up and keep listening to each other. We also vowed that in the months to come, we would stand together and work to ensure that every vote is cast and counted. On this, we agree: If we don't do all that we can to turn the tide, we may both have a knee on our neck.

My mother and I made these promises knowing that we are both of an age that makes us highly vulnerable to this pandemic. Still, we are willing to do the work because that's how she raised me. This is what she taught me democracy is all about. My mother taught me why Black lives matter: because they have to. Because a world in which a man can be killed by the police just around the corner from our home is not a world that any of us should live in. Because neither one of us can stand by and watch the rights we fought so hard for go up in smoke. Because Floyd's life matters just as much as ours does.

After a couple of hours, it was time to go. I helped her adjust her face mask, then she steadied herself with my elbow. As we slowly walked to the parking lot, I felt proud. I could not help but be grateful for all that she has taught me about right and wrong. She may never understand exactly what it's like to live in my skin, but she is my mother.

She believes in freedom. And I am her legacy.
Kimberly J. Miller is a writer, performing artist, activist, businesswoman and a native of Minneapolis.
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The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) denounces all forms of racial violence and brutality. We grieve with the family and friends of George Floyd and with all who are suffering during these devastating times. As we seek justice, we stand in solidarity with demonstrations and protests that raise awareness of, and that call for action against, systemic racism in this country. Because we treasure our First Amendment rights, we also denounce the arrest and mistreatment of journalists, especially journalists of Color, who work tirelessly to keep the world informed about what is happening in our various communities.

Injustices and acts of brutality are real. In fact, they are revolting. Racist acts keep recurring, and systems of oppression continue to exist, proving the need for systemic and structural change. That change can begin with protests, but ultimately it must happen through action. As educators, we are poised to lead the way through our teaching.

NCTE's vision and long-held commitment is "to apply the power of language and literacy to actively pursue justice and equity for all students and the educators who serve them." As literacy educators, we are concerned for our students and their families. We pledge to continue our efforts to create equity inside classrooms. We celebrate the Gary B., et al. v. Whitmer, et al. settlement: students in Detroit and elsewhere "have a fundamental right to education." And we applaud the New Mexico Yazzie/Martinez decision "to provide all students with a uniform and sufficient education . . . ." Equity in classrooms for teachers of English and our students is paramount. It is through education that we believe we can make a lasting difference.

This includes educating about the right to vote. As Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has advised, " . . . if you want change in America, go and register to vote. Show up at the polls."

We cannot stop there. As literacy educators, our aim is to help students and communities to imagine a better, more humane world and to take the steps to achieve it. As advocated by NCTE's Statement on Anti-Racism to Support Teaching and Learning, we must be active, both collectively and individually, in "counteracting racism and other forms of bigotry in teaching materials, methods, and programs for the teaching and learning of English and the language arts."

As the nation's oldest organization of preK through graduate school literacy educators, NCTE has a rich history of deriving expertise and advocacy from its members' professional research, practice, and knowledge. We are stronger by looking to one another for wisdom. Some of our NCTE members have already begun to speak on recent events, such as the Early Childhood Education Assembly, which recently released its powerful Call to Action Countering Anti-Blackness in Society & Schools. We are grateful for this work, and we know that other NCTE members are also finding ways to address these issues and to provide resources.

NCTE's publications serve as important resources that can guide our thoughts and actions during this time, and we recommend them to you. The following materials may also be helpful:

Also, we remind members that NCTE continues to offer opportunities such as the online Member Gatherings and author-led talks as ways to ensure that we support, encourage, and uplift each other. Know that we are committed to motivating action, working for educational equity, and standing in solidarity, together.

Leah Zuidema, President
Alfredo Celedón Luján, President-Elect
Valerie Kinloch, Vice President
Franki Sibberson, Past President
Emily Kirkpatrick, Executive Director

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NCTE Takes A Stance Against Racism - NCTE

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The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) denounces all forms of racial violence and brutality. We grieve with the family and friends of George Floyd and with all who are suffering during these devastating times. As we seek justice, we stand in solidarity with demonstrations and protests that raise awareness of, and that call for action against, systemic racism in this country.

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"Black same-sex love is revolutionary because we must first convince ourselves we are deserving of receiving and giving what has been denied us for so long."

I love the kind of memoirs where the writer is so open and honest and writes with such clarity and insight that you feel like you've made a new friend. That is the way Darnell L. Moore has written No Ashes in the Fire, with such stark and brutal honesty, laying bare his hopes and dreams, sadness and fear and joy and love.

Mr. Moore is a...more

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"Black same-sex love is revolutionary because we must first convince ourselves we are deserving of receiving and giving what has been denied us for so long." I love the kind of memoirs where the writer is so open and honest and writes with such clarity and insight that you feel like you've made a new friend.

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Viggo Jabon's Graphic Design Project and Artist's Statement

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Viggo Jabon's Graphic Design Project and Artist's Statement

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I'm talking with professor Ibram Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and the Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. We talk about racial disparities, policy, and equality, but we really focus on How to Be an Antiracist, which is a groundbreaking approach to understanding uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves.

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Brené with Ibram X. Kendi on How to Be an Antiracist - Unlocking Us with Brené Brown

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I'm talking with professor Ibram Kendi, New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and the Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. We talk about racial disparities, policy, and equality, but we really focus on How to Be an Antiracist, which is a groundbreaking approach to understanding uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves.

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Oh My God....UNBELIEVABLE!!!

Within seconds of beginning this story, we are SICK....sick with rage, over the most inhumane - infuriating injustice.
"ANTHONY RAY HILTON.....the youngest of 10 children of a single mom,
SPENT 30 years on Alabama's death row for two murders he didn't commit"...."HE WAS INNOCENT"...
ANTHONY didn't kill ANYONE!! ....he was never in a fight. He wasn't violent. He prayed to God to forgive those who DID HIM WRONG.
He didn't know anything about the murders when he was arres...more

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Oh My God....UNBELIEVABLE!!! Within seconds of beginning this story, we are SICK....sick with rage, over the most inhumane - infuriating injustice."ANTHONY RAY HILTON.....the youngest of 10 children of a single mom, SPENT 30 years on Alabama's death row for two murders he didn't commit"...."HE WAS INNOCENT"...ANTHONY didn't kill ANYONE!!

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From BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3:
This ground-breaking play, set on Chicago's South Side in the 1950's, revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of an Afro-American working-class family. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway. In this new production for radio, rarely produced scenes from the original play, which were cut from the original film and stage and subsequent contemporary stage productions, have been rein...more

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From BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3:This ground-breaking play, set on Chicago's South Side in the 1950's, revolves around the divergent dreams and conflicts within three generations of an Afro-American working-class family. A Raisin in the Sun was the first play written by a black woman to be produced on Broadway.

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I'm not white. I read this book. I enjoyed it and derived value from it, but there were moments when the author was trying to process her actions in cI'm not white. I read this book. I enjoyed it and derived value from it, but there were moments when the author was trying to process her actions in certain situations that made me, as a woman of color, sigh. Adrian Jackson...more (less)

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I'm not white. I read this book. I enjoyed it and derived value from it, but there were moments when the author was trying to process her actions in cI'm not white. I read this book.

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The 1619 Project Curriculum in Lesson Plan Grouping - The 1619 Project, inaugurated with a special issue of The New York Times Magazine, challenges us to reframe U.S. history by marking the year when the first enslaved Africans arrived on Virginia soil as our nation’s foundational date. Here you wil…

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Materials suggested by the Pulitzer Center

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Materials suggested by the Pulitzer Center

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I have mixed feelings on this book. On one hand I loved the writing style and I loved the main character and following her journey through life's struggles. On the other hand it was slow moving, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I felt things could've been cut to keep the story moving better. I understand why this is such a well loved classic, but I didn't love it as much as I'd hoped to! :(

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I have mixed feelings on this book. On one hand I loved the writing style and I loved the main character and following her journey through life's struggles. On the other hand it was slow moving, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but I felt things could've been cut to keep the story moving better.

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During that time period in the US, public schools used Dick and Jane readers to teach all 1st and 2nd graders. The books showed nothing other than theDuring that time period in the US, public schools used Dick and Jane readers to teach all 1st and 2nd graders. The books showed nothing other than the "typical" American family: financially secure, white (with blue eyes, no doubt), mother, father, sister, brother, dog, cat, all living in a lovely house they surely own. They have toys and friends who play nicely with them. They are a happy family! No cares, no troubles. All is well in the world. When TV came on the scene, families were all depicted in the same way - Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Leave It to Beaver, The Donna Reed Show, etc., the only slight variations being the number and genders of children and inclusion or not of pets. ...more

Yet in 1940, 12% of the US population was not white and the divorce rate was 22%. Nonetheless, in the ubiquitous Dick and Jane series there was never a nod, much less full inclusion, in a single paragraph about or illustration of any kind of family but the one described above. Dolls were all white, too.

So, to answer your question, I believe Morrison included the first perfectly written, sample of a Dick and Jane reader to show what the supposed typical American family looked like and what was presented day after day to millions and millions of students, many of whom could not relate at all. In fact, I guarantee you, the vast majority of all those kids were gettin whooped at home. Immediately following the first, perfect Dick and Jane sample, the same words are strung together in a smaller font without punctuation. That, in turn, is followed by the same words in a tiny font, again without punctuation, but also without spaces between words. The rest of the examples in the story are much like the third one, with one addition: words are simply cut off when the line ends, leaving them dangling. I believe the third example and all the subsequent ones represent the differences between the supposed real world and the world of the characters living in Loraine. Life there is not the American norm. Instead, it's chaotic, jumbled, hard to understand, confusing, difficult, unexpected, unreliable, disappointing. And yet, some of the basic elements are the same: there are mothers and fathers and children and a dog. They just don't live together, or if they do, they are a dysfunctional unit that eventually falls apart. There are houses, too, but unlike the lovely one Dick and Jane live in, the people of Loraine are lucky if they have a small, run-down house to rent from a white person.

What do YOU think?(less)

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During that time period in the US, public schools used Dick and Jane readers to teach all 1st and 2nd graders. The books showed nothing other than theDuring that time period in the US, public schools used Dick and Jane readers to teach all 1st and 2nd graders.

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‘Riots,’ ‘violence,’ ‘looting’: Words matter when talking about race and unrest, experts say

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When “violence” is defined as attacks against property, rather than against people, experts take issue with the term’s use in George Floyd coverage.

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Cultivate positive identity formation, encourage students to confront racial and ethnic injustice, and prepare them to live and work together in a diverse world. Our resources can help you facilitate discussions about race and guide students through lessons on white privilege, economic inequality, mass incarceration, the complexities of identity and more.

"We may be uncomfortable talking about race, but we can no longer afford to be silent. We have chosen a profession that-like parenting-requires us to put our comforts second to those of children."

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Cultivate positive identity formation, encourage students to confront racial and ethnic injustice, and prepare them to live and work together in a diverse world. Our resources can help you facilitate discussions about race and guide students through lessons on white privilege, economic inequality, mass incarceration, the complexities of identity and more.

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How to be actively antiracist.

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The Obama Foundation Names Adren Wilson as New Executive Director of the My Brother's Keeper Alliance (MBKA). Learn more about this new chapter of MBKA.

President Obama launched My Brother's Keeper in February 2014 to address persistent opportunity gaps facing boys and young men of color and to ensure all youth can reach their full potential. Today, the work continues as the MBK Alliance, an initiative of the Obama Foundation. Within the Obama Foundation, MBK Alliance focuses on building safe and supportive communities for boys and young men of color where they feel valued and have clear pathways to opportunity.

Get Involved with the Alliance

We started My Brother's Keeper so that every boy and young man of color in America would know that their dreams mattered as much as any other child's.

Get Involved

JOIN THE MBK NETWORK OF COMMUNITIES

Learn about the steps any community can take to become a registered, certified MBK Community.

Get Started

IMPACT & SEED COMMUNITIES

Learn more about our impact and seed communities who are accelerating impact, reducing barriers and building cross-sector coalitions focused on long-term success.

See the latest updates from MBK Alliance & MBK Communities

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My Brother's Keeper Alliance - Obama Foundation

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The Obama Foundation Names Adren Wilson as New Executive Director of the My Brother's Keeper Alliance (MBKA). Learn more about this new chapter of MBKA. President Obama launched My Brother's Keeper in February 2014 to address persistent opportunity gaps facing boys and young men of color and to ensure all youth can reach their full potential.

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Now also on Bogi Reads the World:
http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/nonf...

Impulse library borrow, in an attempt to find something that would explain white Midwesterners to me. :) I appreciated this ethnographic study of children from affluent white Midwestern families a lot. I am a Hungarian Jewish immigrant to the Midwest and I feel I learned a great deal; mostly that many aspects of how white Anglo-American people talk about race that I used to chalk up to ignorance are actually deliberately ta...more

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Now also on Bogi Reads the World: http://www.bogireadstheworld.com/nonf... Impulse library borrow, in an attempt to find something that would explain white Midwesterners to me. :) I appreciated this ethnographic study of children from affluent white Midwestern families a lot.

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I am the mother of a brilliant eight-year-old boy. His name is Romeo and I love him very much. He has this beautiful dark curly hair that always smells like coconut. When he smiles, his sweet little eyes disappear in his cheeks and his smile becomes so contagious that you can't help but smile back at him. When we are out and about, I constantly get compliments about how cute and adorable my Romeo is ...but soon those "cute" compliments will fade and none of the aforementioned will matter because he is BLACK.

Raising a black boy is a scary blessing. It is like a big countdown from when your child grows from this cute little person into a threatening weapon. Even though, my black baby boy may hate violence, may not believe in carrying weapons or even fighting. The sheer amount of melanin in his skin will make him a threat in a short amount of time.

I wish time would slow down. Not only because I want to cherish these sweet moments of his childhood, but also because I know that it's only a matter of time before I can no longer protect this beautiful black boy from the ignorant people that will see him as a weapon of mass destruction only because of his skin color.

How much longer do I have before my 8-year-old son grows from cute to a threat?

This is a question I constantly ask myself.

Maybe 20 years? No... that can't be right because AhmaudArbery was an unarmed black boy killed at the age of 24 for just going on a daily jog.

Maybe 10 years? No... that can't be right because Trayvon Martin was an unarmed black boy killed at the age of 17 for just wearing a hoodie.

Maybe 5 years? No... that can't be right either because Tamir Rice was an unarmed black boy killed at the age of 12 for just playing with toys in the park.

How much time? Could my son be seen as threatening today? Tomorrow? I am so worried.

Worried.

Worried that I won't be able to protect him from those that fear him. Worried that he will be the next hashtag of an unarmed black boy dead due to a white person's fear and ignorance.

I guess it's time to have "the talk" with Romeo. You know "the talk" that I am referring to...

The talk about how it doesn't matter how good of a person he is, how smart he is, how caring he is, that he is still a black person in America and black people are seen as scary to white people and police officers. I know I will have to share facts when having this conversation so he will understand how serious this is. Facts on police violence like,

Black people are most likely to be killed by police officers

AND... Police killed 1,099 people in 2019 and black people were 24% of those killed despite being only 13% of the population.

ALSO... Police are 3x more likely to kill a black person over a white person knowing that black people are 1.3x more likely to be unarmed compared to white people.

Unarmed and black is a death sentence.

I don't want to scare Romeo. I don't want to see his innocence stripped away from him as I tell him about this cruel reality that he may soon face.

I wish I didn't have to have this conversation with my brilliant son.

How can I not have this conversation?

How can we make sure that another mother does not have to bury her unarmed black son like the mothers of the brilliant black boys below:

Mike Brown, 18 years old

Walter Scott, 50 years old

Philando Castile, 32 years old

Botham Jean, 26. year old

Brandon Jones, 18 years old

William Chapman, 18 years old

Christian Taylor, 19 years old

To the Non-Black Mom, Can you raise your child not to fear my son's black skin? Can you become an advocate and stand with mothers of black sons, to fight for justice? We need you as allies. We need you to pull up and be an activist when we are too. We show up for you being feminists and advocating Women's Rights, now is the time that I need you to show up for us. Every last one of those men that killed an unarmed black boy was raised by a mother. I wish that mother had the opportunity to read this post when her child was young. I need you to go beyond sharing posts on social media. We need your votes. We need your voices. We need your help to ensure that our black boys live the lives they deserve. They will no longer be seen as less than human beings if you stand with us. I strongly encourage you to think about how you can support your fellow black moms before time runs out and our beautiful black boys grow from being cute to a threat.

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When My Beautiful Black Boy Grows from Cute to a Threat

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I am the mother of a brilliant eight-year-old boy. His name is Romeo and I love him very much. He has this beautiful dark curly hair that always smells like coconut. When he smiles, his sweet little eyes disappear in his cheeks and his smile becomes so contagious that you can't help but smile back at him.

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Let's just start here. Racism is unacceptable. Unacceptable.

I'm a white mom, and I know that makes my experience different. I acknowledge who we are. But that doesn't mean I don't have a visceral reaction to injustice and I want to share with you how we are standing up in our family.

My kids are little and when they play with friends on the playground they do not think about skin color. Then just play and have fun and it's beautiful. And, truth be told, I hadn't seen evidence of much racism in my circles until recently.

Somewhere along the line kids learn. Parents, we are teaching them. God didn't design us to be this way.

In the last month, I've heard stories in every aspect of my circles. They are stories of name-calling, inappropriate graffiti, of telling people they "aren't welcome" because of the color they are. I was, honestly, completely shocked. This is unacceptable.

Friends of color, I want you to know, first and foremost that we are standing with you. We are right beside you. We care deeply about this.

Second, when moments happen with my children, we are not beating around the bush. I'm not naïve. Things will happen. Kids will learn things they don't understand. They are parrots and they will repeat them, sometimes unknowingly. Every moment is a teaching moment. We vow to have these hard conversations with our children over and over again as many times as we need to. Why? Because this needs to end.

Third, friends of color, we love you. We love your history and diversity. We love your beauty and your culture and your heritage. We are so thankful God did not make us all the same. You are not alone. You do not need to be silent. You do not need to be afraid.

Fourth, Let's agree to see and believe the best about each other and hold each other accountable. If you see my family doing something offensive, call us on it, in love. If we see something that offends us we will do the same. Let's learn to communicate with one another. We might mess up sometimes and we apologize and ask for grace. We're trying, we're learning, we're growing. Can we agree to help each other?

Finally, to the churches, the schools, the communities...truth must prevail. We need to raise our children in truth. We cannot beat around the bush when things happen right in front of our eyes. We must have hard conversations with our children. They must see the fire in our eyes that this is an issue we care about deeply.

White mom who hasn't seen, experienced or doesn't even understand racism, I think it's time. You and I have to make our voices heard in our homes and in our circles. We need to start with our children and in our homes. We need to ask our friends how they are feeling, if we can help. We need our eyes to be opened. If this is you, will you join me in praying that God would reveal to us how we can circle around our brothers and sisters of color?

Heavenly Father, open our eyes wide. Help us to see people as you see people. Search our hearts and transform our minds. Psalm 129:1-4 - O Lord, you have searched me and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise; you perceive my thoughts from affair. You discern my going out and my lying down; You are familiar with all my ways. Before a word is on my tongue you know it completely, O Lord.
RELATED:
The Race Discussion and The Ominous Absence of Calvary

Raising White Sons, Raising Black Sons: Two Moms Answer Your Questions

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Let's just start here. Racism is unacceptable. Unacceptable. I'm a white mom, and I know that makes my experience different. I acknowledge who we are. But that doesn't mean I don't have a visceral reaction to injustice and I want to share with you how we are standing up in our family.

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There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing.

"Rise Up," a statue by Hank Willis Thomas at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. It's the nation's first memorial dedicated to the legacy of enslaved black people, people terrorized by lynching, African Americans humiliated by racial segregation and Jim Crow, and people of color burdened with contemporary presumptions of guilt and police violence. Credit... Brynn Anderson/Associated Press

At a time of so much death and suffering in this country and around the world from the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be easy, I suppose, to take any incidents that don't result in death as minor occurrences.

But they aren't. The continued public assault on black people, particularly black men, by the white public and by the police predates the pandemic and will outlast it. This racial street theater against black people is an endemic, primal feature of the Republic.

Specifically, I am enraged by white women weaponizing racial anxiety, using their white femininity to activate systems of white terror against black men. This has long been a power white women realized they had and that they exerted.

This was again evident when a white woman in New York's Central Park told a black man, a bird-watcher, that she was going to call the police and tell them that he was threatening her life.

This was not innocent nor benign nor divorced from historical context. Throughout history, white women have used the violence of white men and the institutions these men control as their own muscle.

From the beginning, anti-black white terrorists used the defense of white women and white purity as a way to wrap violence in valor. Carnage became chivalry.

We often like to make white supremacy a testosterone-fueled masculine expression, but it is just as likely to wear heels as a hood.

Particularly in the post-Civil War era, when slavery had been undone, white male politicians used the fear of rape of white women by black men to codify racial terror.

As the author and scholar Rebecca Edwards has pointed out in her book "Angels in the Machinery: Gender in American Party Politics From the Civil War to the Progressive Era," white politicians have long focused their furor by claiming to be the defenders of white women, a last guard against their suffering.

As Dr. Edwards noted, Mississippi's James Vardaman, arguably one of the most violent racist politicians in American history, and that's quite a feat, said in 1903, "a vote for Vardaman is a vote for white supremacy, a vote for the quelling of the arrogant spirit that has been aroused in the blacks by Roosevelt and his henchmen, ... a vote for the safety of the home and the protection of our women and children." Vardaman, who once famously said, "If it is necessary, every Negro in the state will be lynched," won election and became governor of Mississippi.

Indeed, untold numbers of lynchings were executed because white women had claimed that a black man raped, assaulted, talked to or glanced at them.

But it goes even further than that. The Tulsa Race massacre, the destruction of Black Wall Street, was spurred by an incident between a white female elevator operator and a black man. As the Oklahoma Historical Society points out, the most common explanation is that he stepped on her toe. As many as 300 people were killed because of it.

In 1944, 14-year-old George Stinney Jr. was electrocuted for the killing of two little white girls. He was the youngest person executed in the United States in the 20th century. His trial lasted only a couple hours. There was little or no cross-examination of prosecution witnesses or calling of defense witnesses. The all-white, all-male jury deliberated for only 10 minutes before finding Stinney guilty, and he was sentenced to death.

He was just 5 feet 1 inch tall. As Laura Bradley wrote in Slate, "He weighed 95 pounds when he was arrested, and was so small he had to sit on a phone book in the electric chair when he was executed within three months of the murders." Some say the book was in fact a Bible.

A circuit court judge threw out Stinney's conviction in 2014.

The torture and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955, a lynching actually, occurred because a white woman said that he "grabbed her and was menacing and sexually crude toward her." His torturers beat him, shot him in the head and tossed his body into the Tallahatchie River tied to a cotton gin fan with barbed wire. A few years ago, the woman admitted to an author that she had lied.

Till's lynching would serve as the big bang of the Civil Rights Movement. Indeed, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus, she said that she was thinking of Till.

This practice, this exercise in racial extremism, has been dragged into the modern era through the weaponizing of 911, often by white women, to invoke the power and force of the police who they are fully aware are hostile to black men.

In a disturbing number of the recent cases of the police being called on black people for doing everyday, mundane things, the calls have been initiated by white women.

And understand this: Black people view calling the police on them as an act of terror, one that could threaten their lives, and this fear is not without merit.

There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for these white women not to know precisely what they are doing: They are using their white femininity as an instrument of terror against black men.
The Times is committed to publishing Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter (@NYTopinion), and Instagram. a diversity of letters to the editor. We'd like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here's our email: letters@nytimes.com.

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Opinion | How White Women Use Themselves as Instruments of Terror (Published 2020)

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There are too many noosed necks, charred bodies and drowned souls for them to deny knowing precisely what they are doing. At a time of so much death and suffering in this country and around the world from the Covid-19 pandemic, it can be easy, I suppose, to take any incidents that don't result in death as minor occurrences.

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Created by Kenya Barris. With Anthony Anderson, Tracee Ellis Ross, Marcus Scribner, Miles Brown. A family man struggles to gain a sense of cultural identity while raising his kids in a predominantly white, upper-middle-class neighborhood.

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Malcolm X (1992) Official Trailer - Denzel Washington Movie HD