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Kay Bradley

"One Drop of Blood", by Lawrence Wright - 1 views

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    Definitions of race in US History; race categories on the US census
Kay Bradley

Surprises in the Family Tree - The New York Times - 0 views

  • A retired oil-refinery engineer in Collegeville, Pa., Mr. Heinegg, who is white, has compiled genealogies of 900 mixed-race families who lived freely in slaveholding states in ''Free African Americans of North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia'' and ''Free African Americans of Maryland and Delaware.'' (The information is posted on a Web site, www.freeafricanamericans.com.)
  • Mr. Heinegg's research offers evidence that most free African-American and biracial families resulted not from a master and his slave, like Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, but from a white woman and an African man: slave, freed slave or indentured servant.
  • Since there was not a clear distinction between slavery and servitude at the time, he said, ''biracial camaraderie'' often resulted in children. The idea that blacks were property did not harden until around 1715 with the rise of the tobacco economy, by which time there was a small but growing population of free families of color. Dr. Boles estimated that by 1860 there were 250,000 free black or mixed-race individuals.
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  • It is incontrovertible that America is a multiracial society, from the founding father Alexander Hamilton (the son of a mixed-race woman from the British West Indies) to Essie Mae Washington-Williams, 78, a retired schoolteacher, who, the late Senator Strom Thurmond's family acknowledged last month, is his daughter. And for decades there have been questions about the possible mixed-race ancestry of Ida Stover, Dwight D. Eisenhower's mother.
  • One is Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, whose blood lines, according to the historian Mario de Valdes y Cocom, go back to the van Salees, a Muslim family of Afro-Dutch origin prominent in Manhattan in the early 1600's. If any branch of your family has been in America since the 17th or 18th centuries, Dr. Berlin said, ''it's highly likely you will find an African and an American Indian.''
  • he found that Mrs. Phillips and his wife, Rita, had white ancestors who were not slave masters, including a woman who started a family with John Kecatan, an African slave freed in 1666.
  • ''There were communities in 17th- and 18th-century America where blacks and whites, both free, of equal rank and shared experiences, were working together, living together, drinking and partying together, and inevitably sleeping together.''
  • An added challenge is that racial identity can mutate from free black to white in just a few generations.
  • Mr. Heinegg is familiar with racial prejudice. He and his wife, who met as members of the Brooklyn outpost of the Congress on Racial Equality, left the country in 1969, disgusted by what they saw as a lack of progress. They raised their three daughters in Tanzania, Liberia and Saudi Arabia.
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    Paul Heinegg Genealogical Research on 1200 mixed race families.
Kay Bradley

The Debate Over Critical Race Theory - The New York Times - 0 views

  • In a culture-war brawl that has spilled into the country’s education system, Republicans at the local, state and national levels are trying to block curriculums that emphasize systemic racism.More than 20 states have introduced legislation restricting lessons on racism and other so-called divisive concepts.
Kay Bradley

Targeting 'Critical Race Theory,' Republicans Rattle American Schools - The New York Times - 0 views

  • They say that much of what conservatives object to amounts to little more than more frequent and frank discussions of subjects like slavery.
  • Republicans’ attacks on critical race theory are in sync with the party’s broad strategy to run on culture-war issues in the 2022 midterm elections, rather than campaigning head-on against Mr. Biden’s economic agenda — which has proved popular with voters — as the country emerges from the coronavirus pandemic.
  • discussions of systemic racism have become more common in American schools in recent years, particularly in liberal areas.
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  • highlight subjects like redlining and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II.
Kay Bradley

Rooted in Reconstruction: The First Wave of Black Congressmen | The Nation - 0 views

  • Well over a century ago, during the turbulent era of Reconstruction, they were preceded by another three: Hiram Revels and Blanche Bruce, both senators from Mississippi, and P.B.S. Pinchback, briefly the governor of Louisiana.
  • It also underscores how remarkable, if temporary, a transformation in American life was wrought by Reconstruction. Revels, Bruce and Pinchback were only the tip of a large iceberg--an estimated 2,000 black men served in some kind of elective office during that era.
  • For many decades, historians viewed Reconstruction as the lowest point in the American experience, a time of corruption and misgovernment presided over by unscrupulous carpetbaggers from the North, ignorant former slaves and traitorous scalawags (white Southerners who supported the new governments in the South). Mythologies about black officeholders formed a central pillar of this outlook. Their alleged incompetence and venality illustrated the larger "crime" of Reconstruction--placing power in the hands of a race incapable of participating in American democracy. D.W. Griffith's 1915 film Birth of a Nation included a scene in which South Carolina's black legislators downed alcohol and propped their bare feet on their desks while enacting laws. Claude Bowers, in The Tragic Era, a bestseller of the 1920s that did much to form popular consciousness about Reconstruction, offered a similar portrait. To Griffith and Bowers, the incapacity of black officials justified the violence of the Ku Klux Klan and the eventual disenfranchisement of Southern black voters.
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  • Capitol Men
  • Dray's
  • It does not really offer an assessment of Reconstruction's successes and failings
  • Twelve years earlier, Smalls had piloted the Planter, on which he worked as a slave crewman, out of Charleston harbor and delivered it to the Union navy, a deed that made him a national hero. In 1864, while the ship was undergoing repairs in Philadelphia, a conductor evicted Smalls from a streetcar when he refused to give up his seat to a white passenger. Ninety years before a similar incident involving Rosa Parks sparked the Montgomery bus boycott, Smalls's ordeal inspired a movement of black and white reformers to persuade the Pennsylvania legislature to ban discrimination in public transportation.
  • Stephens offered a long argument based on states' rights as to why the bill was unconstitutional.
  • The subject of their exchange was a civil rights bill banning racial discrimination in places of public accommodation.
  • Elliott launched into a learned and impassioned address explaining why the recently enacted Fourteenth Amendment justified the measure (which was signed into law by President Grant the following year), then reminded Congress of an infamous speech Stephens had delivered on the eve of the Civil War: "It is scarcely twelve years since that gentleman shocked the civilized world by announcing the birth of a government which rested on human slavery as its cornerstone." Elliott already had proved that he refused to be intimidated by whites: in 1869 he whipped a white man in the streets of Columbia for writing inappropriate notes to his wife. A black man assaulting a white man in defense of his wife's good name was not a common occurrence in nineteenth-century South Carolina.
  • Robert Elliott
  • Many of the black Congressmen spoke of the abuse they suffered while traveling to the Capitol. Joseph Rainey
  • Robert Elliott was refused service at a restaurant in a railroad station
  • In the House, one Virginia Democrat announced that he was addressing only "the white men," the "gentlemen," not his black colleagues
  • Congressmen Dray profiles came from diverse origins and differed in their approach to public policies. Some had been free before the Civil War, others enslaved
  • Some favored government action to distribute land to former slaves; others insisted that in a market society the only way to acquire land was to purchase it. Some ran for office as representatives of their race, others as exemplars of the ideal that, with the end of slavery and the advent of legal equality, race no longer mattered. Reconstruction's black Congressmen did not see themselves simply as spokesmen for the black community
  • was one of the more conservative black leaders; yet in the Senate he spoke out for more humane treatment of Native Americans and opposed legislation banning immigration from China
  • Blanche Bruce
  • sixteen black members of Congress
  • had enjoyed opportunities and advantages unknown to most African-Americans
  • Revels
  • had been born free in North Carolina
  • Bruce
  • was the slave son of his owner and was educated by the same tutor who taught his white half-siblings.
  • Some Congressmen had enjoyed unique privileges as slaves.
  • enjamin Turner's
  • wner allowed him to learn to read and write and to run a hotel and livery stable in Selma
  • Others, however, had experienced slavery in all its brutality.
  • Jeremiah Haralson
  • John Hyman
  • None of these men fit the old stereotype of Reconstruction officials as ignorant, incompetent and corrupt.
  • All were literate, most were seasoned political organizers by the time of their election and nearly all were honest.
  • Governor Pinchback
  • ne who does fit the image of venality wa
  • of Louisiana, whose career combined staunch advocacy of civil rights with a sharp eye for opportunities to line his pockets
  • Pinchback grew up and attended school in Cincinnati. In the 1850s he worked as a cabin boy on an Ohio River steamboat. He fell in with a group of riverboat gamblers and learned their trade. He turned up in New Orleans in 1862 and expertly navigated the byzantine world of Louisiana's Reconstruction politics. Pinchback was undoubtedly corrupt (he accumulated a small fortune while in office) but also an accomplished politician.
  • Reconstruction ended in 1877, when President Rutherford B. Hayes abandoned the idea of federal intervention to protect the rights of black citizens in the South, essentially leaving their fate in the hands of local whites.
  • black political power, while substantially diminished, did not vanish until around 1900, when the Southern states disenfranchised black voters. Six more African-Americans served in Congress before the end of the nineteenth century. Some of their Reconstruction predecessors remained active in politics
  • Robert Smalls
  • of Planter fame, served as customs collector at Beaufort until 1913, when he was removed as part of a purge of blacks from the federal bureaucracy by Woodrow Wilson, the first Southern-born president since Reconstruction.
  • Pinchback and Bruce moved to Washington, where they became leaders of the city's black elite and arbiters of federal patronage appointments for African-Americans. Bruce worked tirelessly but unsuccessfully to persuade Congress to reimburse blacks who had deposited money in the Freedman's Savings Bank, which failed during the Panic of 1873. Like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in our own time, the bank was a private corporation chartered by Congress that enjoyed the implicit but not statutory backing of the federal government. Its counterparts today are being bailed out with billions of taxpayer dollars, as they have been deemed too big to fail. The Freedman's Savings Bank was too black to rescue.
  • George White
  • The last black Congressman of the post-Reconstruction era wa
  • of North Carolina, whose term ended in 1901. From then until 1929, when
  • Oscar DePriest
  • took his seat representing Chicago, Congress remained lily-white. Not until 1972, with
  • Andrew Young's
  • election in Georgia and
  • Barbara Jordan's
  • in Texas, did black representation resume from states that had experienced Reconstruction. Today the Congressional Black Caucus numbers forty-two members, seventeen of them from the states of the old Confederacy.
  • Robert Smalls
  • One such episode involves
  • who in 1874 was elected to Congress from Beaufort County, South Carolina.
  • Alexander Stephens
  • Equally riveting is the 1874 confrontation between
  • he former vice president of the Confederacy, then representing Georgia in the House of Representatives, and another black South Carolinian,
  • Robert Brown Elliott (1842-1884) was an African American member of the United States House of Representatives from South Carolina. Robert Brown Elliott's early life is a mystery. Although he claimed to have been born in Liverpool, England to West Indian immigrants, and to have graduated from Eton College, biographers have been unable to corroborate these facts. He moved to South Carolina in 1867 and established a law practice. Elliott helped organize the local Republican Party and served in the state constitutional convention. In 1868 he was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives. The next year he was appointed assistant adjutant-general; he was the first African American commanding general of the South Carolina National Guard. As part of his job, he helped form a state militia to fight the Ku Klux Klan. Elliott was elected as a Republican to the Forty-second and Forty-third United States Congress. He "delivered a celebrated speech" in favor of the Civil Rights Act of 1875.[1] He resigned on November 1, 1874, to fight political corruption in South Carolina. He served again in the South Carolina House of Representatives, where he was elected as Speaker of the House. He ran unsuccessfully for South Carolina Attorney General in 1876. Reconstruction ended that year and he was forced out of office.[] He set up a private law practice in New Orleans.
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    "Rooted in Reconstruction: The First Wave of Black Congressmen Eric Foner"
pobrien16

Race/Gender voting - 0 views

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    This is analyzing how people perceive candidates and vote when gender and race is at play.
Kay Bradley

Angela Davis Still Believes America Can Change - The New York Times - 0 views

  • there’s no love lost between mainstream liberalism and the more so-called radical voices that arose in the ’70s
  • Angela Davis survived that dangerous time with her reputation intact, her spirit unbroken and her critical vision of the American free-enterprise system unchanged
  • she is to a piercing and radical tradition of struggle in the Black community that has never, as the kids say, “been given their flowers.”
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  • As a bridge between the past and present eras of protest, Davis can explain both what went right and wrong while also helping to shape the future.
  • she expresses a relaxed optimism about the country’s direction.
  • a professor who has taught history of consciousness, critical theory and feminist studies for five decades,
  • Stuart Hall,
  • Prudence Crandall
  • Anne Braden
  • For many contemporary African-American activists, race has been a blind spot for white feminists and for the feminist movement at large.
  • But the numerous issues of inequality facing working-class and poor Black women
  • had never been very vital to the mainstream feminist agenda
  • So how is it possible to develop the kinds of arguments that will allow people to recognize that one cannot effectively struggle for gender equality without racial equality?
  • She believes narrow definitions of any progressive movement feed a self-centeredness that limits its ability to unify with other groups. In other words, she understood the necessity of intersectionality before the term was even invented.
  • “Intersectionality” is a neologism introduced in 1989 by the Black law professor Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches at U.C.L.A.
  • and Columbia University.
  • that Black women are subject to discrimination based not just on race, class or sex but the interaction of all of them
  • this philosophy is easier to demand from a podium than to write into policy, where efforts have been stymied by self-interest and personal prejudices. But as we discuss her past, I detect no cynicism, no despair nor frustration —
  • Davis sees a chance for us to re-examine capitalism, which she views as irredeemably flawed
  • And yet in so much of what they did accomplish — with civil rights, women’s rights, L.G.B.T.Q. rights, the environment and scores of other issues — they have radically shifted America’s expectations and norms.
  • Along with coalition building, Davis has long been passionate about radically changing the criminal justice system
  • a reimagining of policing and incarceration has been essential to her vision for decades.
  • )
  • It allows us to imagine other ways of addressing issues of safety and security. Most of us have assumed in the past that when it comes to public safety, the police are the ones who are in charge. When it comes to issues of harm in the community, prisons are the answer. But what if we imagined different modes of addressing harm, different modes of addressing security and safety?
  • I have thought often of Davis’s ideas on law enforcement, especially around issues involving the mentally il
  • but also their leadership models — and in particular, how they have avoided the pitfalls of their predecessors: primarily, a cultish fixation on a charismatic male leader
  • most left-of-center organizations opposed to the American status quo in the ’60s suffered from some version of the Great Man syndrome, where women were either relegated to support roles or their contributions to the organizations were minimized.
  • Fannie Lou Hamer
  • Huey P. Newton w
  • Mark Rudd
  • [Younger activists] know so much more than we did at their age,” she says. “They don’t take male supremacy for granted.
  • One aspect of this shift in leadership models has to do with a critique of patriarchy and a critique of male supremacy.
  • Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors and Opal Tometi
  • all of whom have prevented a cult of personality developing around themselves
  • E.D. Nixon,
  • Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
  • Yet “[the boycott] took place because Black women — domestic workers — had the collective imagination to believe that it was possible to change the world, and they were the ones who refused to ride the bus,”
  • Crucial to her intellectual development was her mother’s participation with the Southern Negro Youth Congress;
  • several of the organization’s leaders were members of the Communist Party.
  • the Communist Party supported the struggle against segregation from the 1930s until the Red Scare in the 1950s forced their participation underground. (It’s widely known, for example, that Bayard Rustin, a gay activist and former Communist, was a leading tactician of the 1963 March on Washington. What is less well remembered is how much the party supported the grass-roots organizing of the S.N.Y.C., along with many activist groups across the nation.)
  • Davis spent two of her high school years attending an integrated school in New York thanks to a Quaker-run program that placed promising Black Southerners in Northern schools
  • she studied under the philosopher Herbert Marcuse,
  • From 1965 to 1967, she studied in Europe, learning several languages, deepening her understanding of German philosophy and participating in rallies for the Socialist German Student Union.
  • t was during these expatriate years that Davis began to see the racism she’d experienced growing up as a byproduct of an economy predicated on cheap, exploited labor, identifying institutional racism as a systemic problem long before the phrase came into vogue.
  • After returning to the United States in 1967, Davis affirmed her commitment to Communism
  • a key reason that she became associated with the Marxist-influenced Black Panthers
  • Because of her training and time spent abroad, Davis offered a more international vision as she attempted to build connections between oppressed groups, choosing not to separate the African-American struggle from that of other marginalized peoples, such as the Hmong, caught in the violence of the Vietnam War, and the battle against apartheid in South Africa. It’s why, in part, her arrest so resonated across the world.
  • In 1991, she stepped away, along with a number of other members, because the party refused to engage in processes of democratization; they formed a new organization, the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism.
  • NO MOVEMENT IS static. Contemporary Black activism has also largely been informed by the concurrent agitation surrounding trans and queer rights,
  • oth forces that have pushed back against the staunchly cis and heteronormative values that have dominated mainstream Black politics.
  • Though briefly married to a man in the early ’80s, Davis came out as a lesbian in 1997 and now openly lives with her partner, the academic Gina Dent.
  • There would have been no way to imagine that trans movements would effectively demonstrate to people that it is possible to effectively challenge what counts as normal in so many different areas of our lives.
  • A part of me is glad that we didn’t win the revolution we were fighting for back then, because there would still be male supremacy. There would still be hetero-patriarchy. There would be all of these things that we had not yet come to consciousness about.”
  • There’s a tendency to define racial progress in America by the upward mobility of various “minority groups” — to count and celebrate how many members have entered the middle class, have graduated from college or have multimillion-dollar deals with streaming services.
  • Davis, however, finds those signifiers meaningless. Racism, she believes, will continue to exist as long as capitalism remains our secular religion.
  • The elephant in the room is always capitalism,”
  • Capitalism has always been racial capitalism.
  • We do need free education. Why is it that people pay fifty, sixty, seventy thousand dollars a year to study in a university? Housing: That’s something sort of just basic. At a time when we need access to these services more than ever before, the wealth of the world has shifted into the hands of a very small number of people.”
  • It may be easy to be cynical about Communism and claim that America won the Cold War, but it’s also impossible to deny that this country’s financial system breeds income inequality, homelessness and divides us into warring camps separated by class, sex and race.
  • Does she think the Democratic Party could be a vehicle for transforming America? “To be frank, no,” she says, but then adds, “I think it’s important to push the Democrats further to the left,” expressing great enthusiasm for the four progressive female congresswomen — Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley and Rashida Tlaib — elected in 2018.
  • Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011
  • Black Lives Matter movement.
  • this is a moment many years in the making, based in grass-roots organizing that’s been happening outside the world of party politics and thus underrecognized by the mainstream media.
  • It’s also the kind of organizing that doesn’t always bear fruit quickly.
  • there are no guarantees, to use Stuart Hall’s phrase, that our work will have an immediate effect,” she says. “But we have to do it as if it were possible.”
  • She’s heartened, too, by the diversity of participants in Black Lives Matter marches and the willingness of white protesters to embrace the battle against white supremacy
  • As we looked at the damage that the pandemic was doing, people began to realize the extent to which Black communities, brown communities and Indigenous communities were sustaining the effect of a pandemic in ways that pointed to the existence of structural racism.
  • AMERICANS ARE TERRIBLE at understanding history.
  • We buy all too easily into the jingoism of Hollywood movies and our politicians’ pious platitudes. We possess an unjustified sense of self-regard. The effects of an inflated ego are pernicious; they stifle our ability to clearly see the world outside of ourselves, or our own role in it.
  • Davis, though, has never accepted the myth of American exceptionalism. Rather, she has consistently argued that our triumphant narrative of Manifest Destiny is simply a cover for an exploitive financial system that corrupts our public life and represses our humanity
Kay Bradley

United States Senate elections, 2020 - Ballotpedia - 0 views

  • Ballotpedia defined wave elections as the 20 percent of elections in the last 100 years resulting in the greatest seat swings against the president's party. U.S. Senate waves from 1918 to 2016 are listed in the table below.
  • Battleground elections
  • Ballotpedia has identified 16 races as general election battlegrounds. Of the 16 seats, four have Democratic incumbents and 12 have Republican incumbents heading into the election.
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  • These battleground seats were selected by examining the results of the 2016 presidential election in the state, whether the incumbent was seeking re-election, and whether the incumbent was serving his or her first term in the Senate.
  • Information on states held by a party opposite the winning 2016 presidential candidate A list of race ratings Information on historical wave elections Contents [hide]  1 Partisan breakdown 2 Seats up for election 3 Battleground elections 3.1 Seats that changed party hands in 2014 4 Outside ratings 5 Fundraising by candidate 6 Fundraising by party 6.1 Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee 6.2 National Republican Senatorial Committee 7 Filed candidates by political party 8 Incumbents not seeking re-election in 2020 8.1 Historical comparison 9 Presidential election data 10 Special elections 10.1 Historical special election data 10.1.1 Special elections, 2013-2020 10.1.2 Special elections, 1986-2012 11 Annual Congressional Competitiveness Report, 2020 12 Congressional approval rating 13 Noteworthy events 13.1 Supreme Court vacancy, 2020 14 Important dates and deadlines 15 Ballot access requirements 16 Wave elections 17 See also 18 External links 19 Footnotes
  • Information on 2020's battleground races
  • The current and historical partisan balance of the U.S. Senate
  • South Carolina Lindsey Graham
  • Arizona Martha McSally
  • Colorado Cory Gardner
  • Alabama Doug Jones
  • Georgia David Perdue
  • Maine Susan Collins
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    Wave Elections, 1918-2016
Kay Bradley

US History Films--Line 'em up on Netflix and have fun! - 6 views

U.S. History Films List: a collection of suggestions from other people-I have bold faced my top ten . . . The First List is from John Nesbit, of Phoenix, AZ. http://www.epinions.com/content_19656...

US History

started by Kay Bradley on 14 Feb 11 no follow-up yet
Rachel Simon

The Strive to Become Truly Color Blind or to Lack Bias - 4 views

http://www.understandingprejudice.org/readroom/articles/affirm.htm

race color bias

Kay Bradley

Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity | The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation - 0 views

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    Kaiser Family Foundation
Kay Bradley

Opinion | What 'Structural Racism' Really Means - The New York Times - 0 views

  • “Race prejudice,” Cox writes, “developed gradually in Western society as capitalism and nationalism developed. It is a divisive attitude seeking to alienate dominant group sympathy from an ‘inferior’ race, a whole people, for the purpose of facilitating its exploitation.”
  • It survives because it is inscribed and reinscribed by the relationships and dynamics that structure our society, from segregation and exclusion to inequality and the degradation of labor.
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    Jamelle Bouie: it's not the language, it's the structural facts.
Kay Bradley

United States presidential election, 1896 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 0 views

  • One month after McKinley's nomination, the silverites took control of the Democratic convention held in Chicago on July 7–11. Most of the Southern and Western delegates were committed to implementing the free silver ideas of the Populist Party.
  • An attorney, former congressman, and unsuccessful U.S. Senate candidate named William Jennings Bryan filled the void
  • Bryan hailed from Nebraska and spoke for the farmers who were suffering from the economic depression following the Panic of 1893.
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  • Bryan delivered one of the greatest political speeches in American history, the "Cross of Gold" Speech
  • Bryan presented a passionate defense of farmers and factory workers struggling to survive the economic depression, and he attacked big-city business owners and leaders as the cause of much of the economic suffering.
  • He called for reform of the monetary system and an end to the gold standard, and promised government relief efforts for farmers and others hurt by the economic depression.
  • Several third parties were active in 1896. By far the most prominent was the Populist Party
  • Formed in 1892, the Populists represented agrarian interests in the South, West, and rural Midwest.
  • In the 1892 presidential election Populist candidate James B. Weaver had carried four states, and in 1894 the Populists had scored victories in congressional and state legislature races in a number of Southern and Western states.
  • By 1896 some Populists believed that they could replace the Democrats as the main opposition party to the Republicans.
  • At their national convention in 1896, the Populists chose Bryan as their presidential nominee.
  • With this election, the Populists began to be absorbed into the Democratic Party; within a few elections the party would disappear completely
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