Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

That the 1890s were a period of intense, horrifying racial violence and continued political oppression of African Americans.

These are the people you didn't tell

 

The things you didn’t tell us

You did tell us

The Emancipation Proclamation freed all slaves living in areas controlled by Southern rebels

You didn’t tell us

On January 1, 1863, when the Proclamation came into effect, no African American slaves actually received their freedom

You didn’t tell us

They still didn't own any land to farm, and if they tried to get land, white people attacked them

You didn’t tell us

A lot of people kept on planting and picking cotton, but now they were sharecroppers instead of slaves

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

That some people chose to leave the plantations, now that they were free. Or some of them moved to the North to work on the railroads or as house-cleaners or nannies or cooks, or to start their own businesses.

You didn’t tell us

That some people went out West to be settlers or cowboys, but Western states made laws preventing African-Americans from moving there.

You didn’t tell us

A few people went back to Africa

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

That they forced the former slaves to work, elite Southerners established a series of Black Codes. These laws applied only to African Americans. The Codes took advantage of the recently freed slaves' lack of financial resources

You didn’t tell us

When arrested for such crimes as vagrancy, African Americans would receive prison sentences that required bail.

You didn’t tell us

Most freed slaves were unable to pay the amount and had to work off their fines on plantations

You didn’t tell us

That the Black Codes were initially constitutional because the Thirteenth Amendment’s wording allowed servitude for those convicted of criminal charges

You didn’t tell us

That nothing in the Amendment spoke to the requirement for the convictions to be fair

You didn’t tell us

That the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified on July 9, 1868, granted African Americans citizenship in both the nation and their respective states

You didn’t tell us

That African American males received the right to vote through the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified on February 3, 1870

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

That the fundamental reason for the killing of African-Americans by whites has been fear by many whites of all classes that the existing rules of racial hierarchy, that is, white supremacy, are endangered — whether by slave uprisings, Blacks threatening white job companies, taking political power from whites, moving into white neighborhoods, undermining their companies on white women by supposedly having “intimate relations” with

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

May 29,1866

Richard Dick's wife beaten with club by her employer. Richard fought back in the night was taken

From his house and whipped nearly to death with a buggy eyes

traced back to the son of the employer & two others.

You didn’t tell us

April 3,1866

Woman taken by three men out of her house in middle of night to swamp & badly whipped - beaten on head with pistol

You didn’t tell us

May 30,1866

Mulatto hung by grapevine near roadside between

Tuscaloosa & Greensboro

You didn’t tell us

Sept. 14,1866

Black man picking fodder in a field shot dead & another who had difficulty with a white man abducted & supposed to have been murdered near Tuscaloosa

 

You didn’t tell us

Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by an Alabama State Trooper in Marion, Alabama on February 26, 1965 following a civil rights march. The trooper was not even reprimanded

You didn’t tell us

Herbert Lee, an NAACP activist shot to death by a Mississippi state legislator acting alone, in 1961

You didn’t tell us

Dylan Roof, the Charleston church shooter also seemingly acted as a “lone-wolf.” There have been countless others

You didn’t tell us

Also September, 1963 Birmingham, Alabama church bombing that killed four girls aged 11-14

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

The definition excludes many racist murders committed by one or two persons, as in the case of 14-year-old Emmett Till,  murdered in Mississippi in 1955 after a woman accused Till of whistling at her. Her husband and a friend kidnapped him, shot him, and dumped his body in the Tallahatchie River

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

What qualifies as a “lynching”? These studies, where the numbers run to more than 4,000, are both based on a rather legalistic definition

You didn’t tell us

That  “There must be legal evidence that a person was killed. That person must have met death illegally. A group of three or more persons must have participated in the killing

You didn’t tell us

That the group must have acted under the pretext of service to justice, race or tradition

You didn’t tell us

That  “Lynch mobs” do not always lynch in the literal sense. A typical “pogrom” took place following a union meeting of Black sharecroppers in Elaine, Arkansas on September 30, 1919. The meeting (protected by armed guards) was attacked by 500-1,000 armed whites.]
 

You didn’t tell us

Pogrom is an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group

You didn’t tell us

Another pogrom took place in Tulsa, Oklahoma in May, 1921, triggered by rumors that a white woman had been attacked by an African-American man

You didn’t tell us

A white mob invaded the Black neighborhood of Greenwood; despite a defense by armed Blacks, some 1,500 Black-owned homes and a booming Black business district were destroyed and 10,000 left homeless

You didn’t tell us

Another pogrom, the Detroit “race riot” of June, 1943 was set off when a white sailor’s girlfriend was allegedly insulted by a Black man

You didn’t tell us

The pogrom was finally halted only after martial law was declared

You didn’t tell us

A white mob looted and burned Black-owned stores; 25 Blacks and nine whites were killed, 17 of the Blacks by police

You didn’t tell us

That one military official in Tennessee in 1865 wrote that former slaves were: "dying by scores – that sometimes 30 per day die and are carried out by wagonloads without coffins, and thrown promiscuously, like brutes, into a trench"

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

That this man Willie Lynch created a letter that says he knows how to control slaves

The Willie Lynch that had said you have to instill FEAR, DISTRUST AND ENVY FOR CONTROL PURPOSES

This man

Willie lynch

Said this will control slaves for up to 300 years

Willie Lynch

Degraded black people for enternity

This man

wanted black people as a whole to fight against each other no matter the age, the color, or the height

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

That this man willie lynch had made multiple letters on how blacks are supposed to be

This man had thought of a way to “breed” black people and how the kids would turn out and how to keep them under control and how to raise them

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

That klanlike violence was also used to control freed people's social behavior, but with less success

You didn’t tell us

That black churches and schools were burned, teachers were attacked, and freedpeople who refused to show proper submission were beaten and killed

You didn’t tell us

That black Georgians fought their attackers, rebuilt their churches and schools, and shot back during attacks on their communities. While these attacks surely terrorized some freedpeople, they failed to destroy the cultural and social independence blacks had gained with emancipation

You didn’t tell us

That by the 1890s many men proudly claimed to have ridden with the Klan and thereby saved Georgia and the South from "Negro domination"

You didn’t tell us

That this sentimentalize vision of the Klan was celebrated in popular novels and laid the foundation for the more openly organized Knights of the Ku Klux Klan

You didn’t tell us

That the second Ku Klux Klan, founded in Atlanta in 1915

 

Things you didn’t tell us

You didn’t tell us

That americans have usually observed the "one drop" rule, which said that "one drop of African blood is enough to color a whole ocean of caucasian whiteness

You didn’t tell us

That racism assumes that white and black can never be equal or the same

You didn’t tell us

That there was, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, a period of dramatic political and economic gains for African Americans

You didn’t tell us

That they were elected to national and local offices, and were able to establish free public schools and colleges

You didn’t tell us

That  but in the face of growing northern apathy and growing southern hostility, these gains were undone

You didn’t tell us

That by 1877 Reconstruction was declared over

 

Because you did not tell us these things

Now... I'm telling you