Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history. -Maya Angelou
The Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota Sioux, the original occupants of the area when white settlers arrived. For some, the four presidents carved in the hill are not without negative symbolism. The Sioux have never had much luck dealing with white men.
In the Treaty of 1868, the U.S. government promised the Sioux territory that included the Black Hills in perpetuity. Perpetuity lasted only until gold was found in the mountains and prospectors migrated there in the 1870s. The federal government then forced the Sioux to relinquish the Black Hills portion of their reservation.
A Few of the Many Black Communities Destroyed in America
(Also see American Race Riots)
Hundreds of Black American communities have been destroyed from the day we landed on this land, til now.
1. Atlanta Race Riot
On Sept. 22, 1906, Atlanta newspapers reported four alleged assaults on local white women. Soon, some 10,000 white men and boys began gathering, beating, and stabbing Blacks. It is estimated that there were between 25 and 40 African-American deaths; it was confirmed that there were only two white deaths.
2. The Black Wall Street. Tulsa, Oklahoma
On the night of May 31, 1921, a mob called for the lynching of Dick Rowland, a Black man who shined shoes, after reports spread that on the previous day he had assaulted Sarah Page, a white woman, in the elevator she operated in a downtown building.
In the wake of the violence, 35 city blocks lay in charred ruins, over 800 people were treated for injuries and estimated 300 deaths occurred.
Lynchings in America
From 1865 to 1965 more than 6,000 African-Americans died in racial violence in the United States.
This inventory includes the names of 2,400 of the African-Americans who were lynched in the United States from 1865 to 1965.
The inventory is necessarily incomplete. Records are scant. Newspaper reports are scattered. The Tuskegee Institute Lynching Inventory began in 1882 -- just before the great surge of lynchings that occurred around the turn of the century -- a surge that accompanied the American conquest of the Philippines, defeating the colored fighters of the Philippine War of Independence, called by Anglo-American historians “The Philippine Insurrection.”
This inventory is offered in the spirit of healing and reconciliation, for until the wounds of the Lynching Century are healed there is little chance of reducing the ever so pervasive racism in the United States, as Ida B. Wells put it: The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave.
Americans have a long way to go to see full realization of the promises of the Pledge of Allegiance, to see America as a land with Liberty and Justice for All instead of liberty and justice for the white Anglo-Saxon economic elite.
16th Street Bombings
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham was used as a meeting-place for civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King, Ralph David Abernathy and Fred Shutterworth. Tensions became high when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) became involved in a campaign to register African American to vote in Birmingham.
On Sunday, 15th September, 1963, a white man was seen getting out of a white and turquoise Chevrolet car and placing a box under the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Soon afterwards, at 10.22 a.m., the bomb exploded killing Denise McNair (11), Addie Mae Collins (14), Carole Robertson (14) and Cynthia Wesley (14). The four girls had been attending Sunday school classes at the church. Twenty-three other people were also hurt by the blast.
Civil rights activists blamed George Wallace, the Governor of Alabama, for the killings. Only a week before the bombing he had told the New York Times that to stop integration Alabama needed a "few first-class funerals."
Assassinated for protecting his community: Fred Hampton
FBI and Chicago police worked together to murder 21 year old Fred Hampton
On December 4th, 1969, Chicago police raided Fred Hampton’s apartment and shot and killed him in his bed. Black Panther leader Mark Clark was also killed in the raid. While authorities claimed the Panthers had opened fire on the police who were there to serve a search warrant for weapons, evidence later emerged that told a very different story: that the FBI, the Cook County state’s attorney’s office and the Chicago police conspired to assassinate Fred Hampton.
The first legally elected prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), on 17 January, 1961. This heinous crime was an assassination plot by American and Belgian governments, which used Congolese accomplices and a Belgian execution squad to carry out the deed.
In October, 1958, Lumumba founded the National Congolese Movement (MNC). He became president of the organization and the following year led a series of demonstrations and strikes against the Belgian colonial government. Lumumba called for the Congo to be granted its immediate independence from Belgium.
Lumumba became the new prime minister and immediately talked about the need for social and economic changes in the country. His decision to adopt a non-aligned foreign policy resulted in the CIA becoming interested in the developments in the Congo.
For over 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo's destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognize the claims of King Leopold II of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin.
When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold's Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs.
SHE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT PERSON IN SCIENCE
Henrietta Lacks, a poor, African-American mother of five who died in 1951 of cervical cancer.
Over the past six decades, huge medical advances have sprung from the cells of Henrietta Lacks. She was vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, herpes, leukemia, influenza, and Parkinson's disease and hundreds more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.
When she died in Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins Hospital of cervical cancer at the age of 31 and her cells were removed to become the first human ones that could be grown indefinitely in a laboratory, no one bothered to ask permission.
For years, her own family had no idea that her cells were still alive in petri dishes in scientists' labs. They eventually learned they had fueled a line called HeLa cells, which have generated billions of dollars, but they didn't realize until this spring that her genome had been sequenced and made public for anyone to see. Her fast-growing cells have been used in over 70,000 medical studies. The family has not been compensated for the illegal use of her cells.
"GATOR BAIT" OR NIBS
BLACK BABIES USED AS ALLIGATOR BAIT
During slavery and the Jim Crow era in the United States, African Americans were brutalized and mistreated in almost every way imaginable. If there was a way to kill, maim, oppress, or use an African American for any reason, it more than likely happened. If the skin from an African American might be used for leather shoes or handbags, (see Human Leather), then pretty much all atrocities were possible and probable.
Yes, slave owners skinned their slaves and used their skin as leather for clothes and shoes.
African American babies being used as alligator bait really happened, and it happened to real people. It doesn't seem to have been a widespread practice, but it did happen.
In 1908 the Washington Times reported that a keeper at the New York Zoological Garden baited "Alligators With Pickaninnies" out of their winter quarters. In the article two "small colored children happened to drift through the reptile house among the throng of visitors" and they were "pressed into service."
The headline in the September 21, 1923 Oakland Tribune reads "PICKANINNY BAIT LURES VORACIOUS 'GATOR TO DEATH. And Mother Gets Her Baby Back in Perfect Condition; Also $2".
Wall Street Was a Slave Market
The very name "Wall Street" is born of slavery, with enslaved Africans building a wall in 1653 to protect Dutch settlers from Indian raids. This walkway and wooden fence, made up of pointed logs and running river to river, later was known as Wall Street, the home of world finance. Enslaved and free Africans were largely responsible for the construction of the early city, first by clearing land, then by building a fort, mills, bridges, stone houses, the first city hall, the docks, the city prison, Dutch and English churches, the city hospital and Fraunces Tavern. At the corner of Wall Street and Broadway, they helped erect Trinity Church.
In 1711 the city's Common Council established a Meal Market at Wall and Water streets for hiring slave labor and auctioning enslaved Africans who disembarked in Manhattan after their arduous transatlantic journey. The merchants used these laborers to operate the port and in such trades as ship carpentry and printing, according to the National Park Service. Africans, according to the Park Service, also engaged in heavy transport, construction work, domestic labor, farming and milling. Their efforts were part of the euphemistically titled Triangular Trade: Africans living on what was then called the Gold Coast -- with Africans being considered black gold -- were bought using New England rum; the Africans were sold in the West Indies to work the fields to create sugar and molasses; and the sugarcane products were taken to New York and New England to be made into rum.
Read Here and Here
African Burial Ground project began in 1991, when, during pre-construction work for a new federal office building, workers discovered the skeletal remains of the first of more than 400 men, women and children. Investigations revealed that during the 17th and 18th centuries, free and enslaved Africans were buried in a 6.6 acre burial ground in lower Manhattan outside the boundaries of the settlement of New Amsterdam, which would become New York.
Over the decades, the unmarked cemetery was covered over by development and landfill.
Daufuskie Island was originally inhabited by the Cusabo and then later the Yamacraw Native Americans. Native American pottery dating back to as far back as 9,000 years ago has been found on the island and represents some of the oldest artifacts found theUSA.
When Union forces overran Beaufort-area islands early in the Civil War, white plantation owners fled, leaving property and slaves behind. After the war, Daufuskie’s remoteness allowed Gullah to survive and flourish through the generations.
Most native residents of Daufuskie today are descendants of slaves who live off of oystering and fishing
Native American Boarding Schools
For the government, it was a possible solution to the so-called Indian problem. For the tens of thousands of Indians who went to boarding schools, it's largely remembered as a time of abuse and desecration of culture.
"I remember coming home and my grandma asked me to talk Indian to her and I said, 'Grandma, I don't understand you,' " Wright says. "She said, 'Then who are you?' "
Wright says he told her his name was Billy. " 'Your name's not Billy. Your name's 'TAH-rruhm,' " she told him. "And I went, 'That's not what they told me.' "
Civil Rights Leader Harry T. Moore and his wife, Harriette Moore murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. A bomb was planted in their home. They were murdered on December 25, 1951, Christmas day.
Black Wall Street, the name fittingly given to one of the most affluent all-Black communities in America, was bombed from the air and burned to the ground by mobs of envious Whites. In a period spanning fewer than 12 hours, a once thriving Black business district in northern Tulsa lay smoldering
The night’s carnage left some 3,000 African Americans dead and over 600 successful businesses lost. Among these were 21 churches, 21 restaurants, 30 grocery stores and two movie theaters, plus a hospital, a bank, a post office, libraries, schools, law offices, a half dozen private airplanes and even a bus system. As could have been expected, the impetus behind it all was the infamous Ku Klux Klan, working in consort with ranking city officials and many other sympathizers.
A local newspaper had printed a fabricated story that Rowland tried to rape Sarah Page, a white woman. In an editorial, the same newspaper said a hanging was planned for that night.
American government and police organization bombs innocent civilians.
Philadelphia officials, in collusion with state and federal agencies, dropped a four-pound bomb made of C-4 plastic explosive and Tovex, a dynamite substitute, onto the roof of the Osage Avenue headquarters of the MOVE organization in West Philadelphia on May 13, 1985
The MOVE 9 are innocent men and women who have been in prison since August 8, 1978, following a massive police attack on us at our home in the Powelton Village neighborhood of Philadelphia. This was seven years before the government dropped a bomb on MOVE, killing 11 people, including 5 babies.
The August 8, 1978 police attack on MOVE followed years of police brutality against MOVE and was a major military operation carried out by the Philadelphia police department under orders of then-mayor, Frank Rizzo.
During this attack, heavy equipment was used to tear down the fence surrounding our home, and cops filled our home with enough tear gas to kill us and our babies, while SWAT teams covered every possible exit. We were all in the basement of our home, where we had 10 thousand pounds of water pressure per minute directed at us from 4 fire department water cannons (for a total of 40 thousand pounds of water pressure per minute). As the basement filled with nearly six feet of water we had to hold our babies and animals above the rising water so they wouldn’t drown. Suddenly shots rang out (news reporters and others know the shots came from a house at 33rd and Baring Street, not our home, because they actually saw the man shooting) and bullets immediately filled the air as police throughout the area opened fire on us.
MOVE members recent deaths 1 and 2