Special shout out: My friend and colleague Adam, whose work at https://northomahahistory.com/ has inspired much of this blog, and whose groundbreaking work continues opening up new chapters of local history to new generations of readers

“I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness, but will have the light of life.”

–  John 8:12

“You are the light of the world.  A town built on a hill cannot be hidden.  Neither do people light a lamp and put it under a bowl.  Instead they put it on its stand, and it gives light to everyone in the house.  In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”

– Matthew 5:14-16 (Sermon on the Mount) 

“Some sentient power has wrought a marvelous change in the prairie lands in the span of year that measures a man’s life.  Where the Indian’s council-fires burned in the days of Jackson, the Caucasian’s dream of beauty has found a fleeting shape in the white city that rises out on the plains today…  At night, twenty thousand electric lights paint a scene from fairyland upon the waters of the lagoon.  The temples that stand there are erected to appease the gods of the latter days, the gods of machinery, electricity, the liberal arts, and all their kith and kin.”  

– William Allen White on Omaha’s Trans-Mississippi Exposition, 1898

 

On a calm summer evening in 1898 there was electricity in the air, in the wiring, and flowing through the crowd of thousands gathered in silence around a lagoon in North Omaha, in darkness, waiting for the gods to reveal themselves.  Neptune lit up first, surrounded by lily pads and water fountains that burst into brilliant flashes of “opals or rubies or sapphires or emeralds or diamonds,” according to one observer.  Then an array of buildings lit up one by one, each representing various gods of capitalist industry: Manufacturing, Agriculture, Mines and Mining, Machinery and  Electricity.  The crowd stood in silent awe at the spectacle in front of them – many had never seen electrical lighting before that moment.  Hovering just behind and high above Neptune, Lady Liberty held a torch “Enlightening the World,” illuminating truth, beauty, righteousness, all that was good and holy, including whiteness.  She stood high above all the rest, perched atop the government building, christening the newly tamed West, surrounded by American flags.

Earlier that day, from the comfort of the White House, William McKinley pressed a button which shot an electrical current from the nation’s capital to Omaha, gateway of the West, carrying a message signifying the official start of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition.  In his telegraph, McKinley congratulated the city and propped up the vast land between Omaha and Sacramento, as a whole, as a place of boundless potential.  His message of hope and optimism resonated with an American population still reeling from the Panic of 1893, an economic crisis severe enough to challenge peoples’ faith in the United States, leaving many uncertain about their jobs, their banks, their government, their very futures.  The electric signal from D.C., accompanied by the elaborate lighting ceremony, functioned like a magic trick, a political spectacle designed to instill faith in the future of the nation, its economy, its lifeblood.

The financial backers of the exposition hoped the spectacle would function as a defibrillator, presided over by the president and gods of industry themselves, to shock life back into the young city, and thus outward into the nation.  From Omaha, at the heart of an expanding empire, pulsated the light of Western civilization to beam into the heavens and across the globe, spreading its benevolent touch to all who would submit to its iron, and often violent, will.  White Christian settler colonialism had finalized its grip over the New World.  From the first world’s fair in London half a century earlier, all that was worshipped inside the Crystal Palace had now crystallized all the way across the Atlantic, spreading across the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Great Basin Desert, and finally the Sierra Nevadas, to reach the Pacific.  In his address on the Exposition’s opening day, prominent Council Bluffs businessman John Baldwin said, “the Exposition has become the instrument of civilization.  Being a concomitant to empire, westward it takes its way… The Crystal Palace, the World’s Fair, The Trans-Mississippi Exposition.”

World fairs were opportunities for Western civilization to look at itself in the mirror, flex its muscles, ponder itself, explain and excuse itself, mostly to itself.  All that technological and economic prowess appeared beautiful in the mirror, as did the exposition’s buildings and their statues, illuminated and reflected off the lagoon.  This was the legacy left to us from the Greeks and Romans, and when the audience bore witness to the dark night suddenly turned into perfectly lit Corinthian columns, they stood breathless for a moment.  To them it was magical, or supernatural, or some combination of both.  A Harper’s Weekly writer stated, “I have seen men and women stand stupefied at the entrance of the Grand Curt, blinded as they would have been by a flash of lighting.”

Manifest Destiny was playing out right in front of their eyes, and they were honored to be a part of God’s plan to civilize the earth and its inhabitants, to rid the world of ignorance and evil.  They were guests at the big party celebrating the end of the Wild West and the opening of a new era, in which life would be perfected, truth would be illuminated, and all that was righteous would win the day.  The lighting ceremony at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition repeated every night throughout Summer and into Fall, each night leaving visitors in awe, feeling they were part of something holy, divine, eternal, transcendent.

Of course, the reality was much different.  The entire 180 acres of spectacle were a facade, a stage set designed to give the illusion of something greater.  In his autobiography, actor Joseph Henabery, who played Abraham Lincoln in D.W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ recalled his time as a youth working construction for the Trans-Mississippi Exposition:

One big job was to dig a lagoon about six blocks long and three or four hundred feet wide.  All the principal structures in the Exposition… were to be erected around the lagoon… Many of the buildings were of simulated marble in the classic style, with fluted columns.  I watched the construction with great interest, especially the short cuts they used.  Later on, I found that motion picture set construction was handled in much the same way.  Of particular interest was the use of staff, a composition of plaster of Paris and hemp, cast in molds or formed by templates, on a backing of wire or burlap.  When dry, the quickly formed staff material could be nailed in place in large sections.

In other words, the great marble arches that recreated ancient Greece and Rome were actually made out of an artificial stone cast, and in just a couple years they would be crumbling into disrepair, then demolished shortly afterwards.  The mesmerizing lights of Neptune, showering glittering jewel-water into the night sky, were nothing more than multicolored incandescent bulbs.  Lady Liberty’s torch, which capped off the ceremony every night beaming a light of hope out into the heavens, was merely a high powered incandescent light which, along with the 20,000 other lights scattered through the lagoon area, was powered by a special plant built nearby.  All of it was an elaborate stage set up to put on a mystical appearance.  The audience would have been somewhat aware of the basic science behind the mechanisms at work, so while they didn’t view the stage set itself as being divine, there was a sense that all the inspiration behind these technological advances must have been guided by the hand of God, right into the laps of the white settler colonialists of the Great American West.

In October, in time before winter would have started wearing the faux Greek columns of the Omaha Exposition down, President McKinley made his grand entrance into Omaha as the keynote speaker for the ‘Peace Jubilee,’ a celebration of peace to mark the closing of a splendid little war against Spain over several foreign islands.  The purpose of this event was more to justify war and imperialism than to celebrate peace, as many American citizens still viewed the whole expansionist endeavor with skepticism, and were speaking out against the prospect of a growing American empire, the eagle spreading its wings too far and wide.  McKinley arrived by train to a raucous crowd, then pulled up to the Expo alongside Omaha’s movers and shakers in an elaborate parade event building up to his speech.  Just three years before his assassination at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, McKinley stood in front of thousands in Omaha and defended his foreign policy with lofty rhetoric:

The faith of a Christian nation recognizes the hand of Almighty God in the ordeal through which we have passed.  Divine favor seemed manifest everywhere.  In fighting for humanity’s sake we have been signally blessed… The genius of the nation, its freedom, its wisdom, its humanity, its courage, its justice, favored by divine Providence, will make it equal to every task and the master of every emergency.

Here, McKinley invoked the image of manifest destiny and sent his message as clearly as he possibly could: the United States never fights wars for self interest, but rather for the sake of humanity and under God’s will, so anyone who questioned creeping American expansionism was going against God’s divine wishes, and who is anyone to question God?  The speech was touted as a blueprint for Republican-led progress in expanding the American project into new heights heading into a new century, a way for the American people to move in unison towards a common goal, spreading the light of civilization to the world as the leaders of new industries and technologies.  This would become the cornerstone of Teddy Roosevelt’s foreign policy only a short number of years later.

 

As the talons of America’s eagle reached out to grasp lands beyond its own shores, Americans attempted to process what, and who, had been taken into its grip over the past 50 years, as it finalized its control of its own mainland.  They gazed upon the Native inhabitants of the mainland with titillated fascination.   Who were these people whose lives had been so utterly shattered, upended, and reconfigured by Manifest Destiny? The Omaha Exposition promised to answer these questions for white settlers up close and personal, through the ‘Indian Congress,’ the last chance for the Indigenous peoples of the United States to be seen in their authentic state, before their way of life vanished completely.  The official exposition guidebook called it, “the last opportunity of seeing the American Indian as a savage, for the Government work now in progress will lift the savage Indian into American citizenship before this generation passes into posterity.”

Representatives from two dozen tribes showed up to the ‘Congress,’ but their authentic ways of life were already essentially destroyed.  The railroads had brought in floods of white settlers, who massacred the bison to near extinction, spread deadly diseases, and took the best land for themselves, relegating Indigenous peoples to the outskirts of what for thousands of years had been their own lands.  In response, the prophet Wovoka spread the Ghost Dance Movement, which taught that Indigenous peoples would have their world once again, that a coming event would wipe out the white civilization that had been enveloping and swallowing their ways of life.  They only needed to perform the Ghost Dance and everything would come back into the right place again.  During the dance, many people went into a trance, or even lost consciousness and reported traveling to other worlds, speaking to dead relatives, seeing visions.  They had come to believe all the dead ancestors would join them in a new world, free from the white man’s violence.  It was a final desperate plea to the universe to stop the cultural genocide that had been occurring for the past few hundred years.

Lame Deer stated:

They told the people they could dance a new world into being. There would be landslides, earthquakes, and big winds. Hills would pile up on each other. The earth would roll up like a carpet with all the white man’s ugly things – the stinking new animals, sheep and pigs, the fences, the telegraph poles, the mines and factories. Underneath would be the wonderful old-new world as it had been before the white fat-takers came. …The white men will be rolled up, disappear, go back to their own continent. 

The final thrust of this resistance ended in the Wounded Knee Massacre, in which paranoid white soldiers butchered several hundred men, women, and children as they camped along a creek in the winter of 1890.  It was the end of an era, the end of Native  autonomy as they had known it.  As if to put a nail into the coffin of Indigenous resistance, the Omaha Expo featured a group of Arapaho and Cheyenne Ghost Dancers performing their ritual around an American flag, the embodiment of the white settler colonial project which had so thoroughly destroyed their ancient ways of life.  In viewing this event, white spectators were therefore able to confirm their place as colonial masters over the West, the purveyors of all things considered civilized, and of that which would be thrown into the museum as archaic vestiges from a savage human past.  Of course white people would cough up money to be able to feel like a part of this moment cementing whiteness as the big winners in the struggle over the American West.  It was an easy sell.

Though deemed educational at first, in practice Indian Congress ended up becoming more like a Wild West show, with mock battles staged every day in which white and Native American people pretended to fight against one another.  This novel concept was originally conceived by a fraternal group of well-to-do white men pretending to be Native Americans, called the Improved Order of Red Men, who proposed staging an epic battle: cowboys (white men) and ‘friendly Indians’ (played by white men in redface) vs ‘hostile Indians’ (actual Native American people).  Although the ‘Order of Red Men’ might seem ridiculous today, they had membership of half a million at their height, including Presidents Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt, and Warren Harding, among their ranks.  Apparently the irony, hurtfulness, and absolute absurdity of forming an all white group called the ‘Improved Order of Red Men’ that blatantly appropriated Native dress, language, and customs was lost on its members then, and continues to be lost on its members today.

Clown shoes aside, the mock battles were a huge success.  For its opening day, 700 white and Native actors got into costume and acted out their battle, firing blank rounds, hooting and hollering in front the audience for full dramatic effect.  As the battle raged, the villainous ‘hostile Indians’ acted out the scalping of their enemies and tying them to a post to burn them with the hot end of a stick, causing gasps from the captivated crowd.  At the end of the massive theater production, the ‘U.S. Army’ came in to save the day, and the hostile Indians were forced off the stage onto a reservation.  Each day the crowds were left as mesmerized as they were by the electrical lighting display each night.  The play was a campy Greek tragedy, a kitschy re-telling of the Manifest Destiny narrative, in which brave westward pioneers, aided in part by the U.S. government, tamed the savage West through courage, sacrifice, determination, and the hand of God Himself.

The mock battles were a huge success for the Exposition’s organizers and their coffers.  Many Indigenous people showed up on the promise they would be able to sell their wares to thousands of tourists, and many took full advantage of this opportunity.  If they were to survive in the white man’s world, they would have to participate in his economy.  Various tribal members camped out on exposition grounds in their traditional housing structures, including tipis and wigwams.  Some chose to have their portraits taken by local photographer Frank Rinehart, in exchange for a copy of the photo.  Rinehart’s collection from the Exposition is an invaluable documentation of the last generation of Native American people still living relatively immersed in the lifestyles of their ancestors.  Through the camera lens, he humanized a people being dehumanized at every turn, and his compassion for his subjects comes through in the shots themselves, perhaps best exemplified in his photos of a strikingly beautiful Apache girl named Hattie.  Her eyes tell the story of the last generation to live according to the old ways, and the first to enter a new era in which Native peoples would have to navigate new paths and new identities in a white world.  If she were 15 at the time of the photos, she would have been just a baby as Geronimo led her people in one last stand against the U.S. military in 1886.

However humanizing Rinehart’s photos are, the Indian Congress as a whole was an ugly piece of white supremacist and nationalist propaganda, like every ‘living exhibit’ before and after it.  On the opening day of the mock battle, there was a big parade which ended in an American flag raising ceremony, using the biggest flag that could be found, punctuated by a Native marching band playing the Star Spangled Banner.  The symbolism was clear: these Natives had assimilated to the white ways, and no longer posed a threat to American progress.  Geronimo and other Apaches were carted into the Exposition as prisoners of war, the old warrior of fierce reputation, who had eluded the U.S. military for many years, now available for autographs and photos, a novelty for white folks to gawk at.

Like Sitting Bull, Geronimo had become a legend and a caricature both at once, a man whose entire life story had been built on the theme of resistance, now withering in submission to the almighty white civilization which bulldozed through every crevice of the Americas.  The writing was on the wall and Geronimo knew it.  Defeated and forced to assimilate, he said,

“Right here at the exposition are enough people coming every day to put an end to every Indian in the world if they saw fit to do so.  Then, besides this, the white men have all the guns, powder and bullets.  They have all of the big guns and they are the ones that count…. I am an old man, and I want to see my people learn the ways of the whites.  I want to see them raise corn and cattle and live in houses and I believe that the president and the big men at Washington will help my people if they will try to help themselves.”

Meanwhile, Native American kids were sent off to boarding schools to learn the ways of the whites, and in the process unlearn the ways of their families and ancestors.  Teachers at places like the Carlisle school, where many Apache children ended up, cut these kids’ hair, gave them white names, converted them to Christianity, and many times abused them psychologically, physically, and sexually in the process.  Near the twilight of his life, when Geronimo met with Teddy Roosevelt, he pleaded for the big man in Washington to allow his people to go back home to their home in Arizona.  Roosevelt replied that Geronimo had a “bad heart,” that he had been a “bad Indian.”  The president didn’t hide his racist views, stating, “I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe nine out of ten are, and I shouldn’t like to inquire too closely into the case of the tenth.”  When the old Apache warrior finally died, newspapers ran headlines dehumanizing him and celebrating his death.

But Native American people were not the only ones exploited and dehumanized at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition of 1898.  Organizers also imported set pieces from the South to recreate a Southern slave plantation, complete with Black actors playing the roles of enslaved African people, going about their daily business on the plantation.  It was a bit of interactive theater, designed to allow white visitors to gaze upon and interact with the ‘enslaved people,’ or even touch them if one so desired.  The idea was to show an exotic world of decades past, one people had only read about, and to show an authentic representation of Antebellum life.  Advertised as a depiction of the “joys” of slavery, the Old Plantation also fell in line with a steady stream of ‘Lost Cause’ mythology seeping into the nation from the Southern states since the end of the Civil War.  In order to push the narrative that slavery wasn’t really so bad after all, the Black actors were made to sing and dance while processing cotton, clearly marking the exhibit as a minstrel show under the guise of an anthropological study of enslaved African peoples.

Even children were employed in this racist, exploitative exhibit.  The Nebraska State Journal reported:

In the old plantation is an interesting collection of plantation darkies.  Ladies fond of children are especially pleased, as they find half a dozen small pickaninnies, about two years old.  It is no uncommon thing to see three or four ladies with kodaks posing the children for a “snap shot” picture.  The manager of the old plantation extends to the camera clubs the freedom of the old plantation for securing pictures.  The old log cabins and peculiar people make most interesting subjects for the amateur photographer.

At the time, personal cameras were a new sensation, so the Old Plantation was an opportunity for people to take a snap, not unlike a turn of the century selfie, with ‘darkies’ dressed as slaves.  These would be the main representations of Black people at the Omaha Expo, as well as at the Buffalo Pan-American Exposition three years later, where President McKinley met his fate from an anarchist’s bullet.  And it was the unsettling sight of the Old Plantation exhibit in Buffalo, which followed in the footsteps of the one in Omaha, that led activist Mary Talbert to reach out to W.E.B. Du Bois and discuss ideas on how to combat such harmful stereotyping and exploitation.  They then formed the Niagara Movement, precursor to the NAACP.

Although an organization called the Omaha Black Woman’s Club pushed organizers to employ local Black people in more prominent roles at the Expo, ones which would allow them to portray themselves as part of the larger Omaha community, and nation as a whole, their efforts were almost entirely fruitless.  White managers made all the decisions, and they had little room for Black people in the Exposition except as caricatures designed to entertain the white masses. In the Expo’s Manufacturing Building, a Black woman dressed as Aunt Jemima served pancakes to white visitors, advertising the mix as a sort of ‘slave in a box’ that did all the labor of making pancake mix for you.  Exploitation for profit was the name of the game.

However, there was another group of Black civil rights pioneers, ranging from conservative to radical and everything in between, who found a way to utilize the Exposition in a way that they felt would be beneficial.  Omaha’s Ferdinand L. Barnett (not to be confused with his cousin Ferdinand Lee Barnett of Chicago, husband of Ida B. Wells), Reverend John Albert Williams, newspaper editor Cyrus Bell, politician Edwin R. Overall, and a slew of other local Black leaders aimed to create a public forum at the Exposition, featuring speeches by prominent white and Black intellectuals on various political topics.  (Although women activists outnumbered men in this group, it was nonetheless headed by men.)  They secured the Exposition’s main auditorium for the opening day of what they called the ‘Mixed Congress,’ in which race relations could be discussed and debated formally, in a structured manner, in front of an audience.  Exposition organizers surely saw dollar signs with such an event, and hoped to draw in as many attendees from bordering states as possible, and surely also saw an opportunity to showcase Omaha as a tolerant, progressive city with its arms open to Black laborers who might seek to migrate from the South.

The official stated goals of the Mixed Congress were to “bring together representatives of both classes of American citizens for exchange of views on the industrial, educational, social and moral questions of vital moment to the prosperity of our country” and to “crystalize such views into some organization which will put into practice such principles as the congress may agree upon for the accomplishment of the end desired.”  However political these goals may appear to be, Black leadership of the Mixed Congress explicitly stated the organization would “not be political, but ethical.”  This was perhaps an attempt to draw in white participants who might otherwise be turned off at the prospect of getting into a heated, mud-slinging, political debate about difficult topics such as racial discrimination.  It would also have served as a way to pitch the event as a nonpartisan one, in which people of all ideological stripes were welcome.

At the turn of the century, political partisanship was heavy indeed.  The two most prominent Black intellectual leaders, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois, and their legions of followers clashed over the politics of how to forge a more equitable and just future for their race.  Where the conservative Washington advocated for a bottom up, incrementalist approach in which Black people slowly built their own equality through hard, steady work as individuals, the progressive Du Bois advocated for a full-scale top down approach, utilizing the power of the federal government to enact laws which would enforce equality at a structural level.  Neither leader was invited to Omaha for the Mixed Congress.

Just a few years before the Omaha Exposition, at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta, Washington delivered his famous speech, dubbed the ‘Atlanta Compromise,’ advocating for Black people to steer away from political ideals that focused on structural racism and inequality, and to focus rather on building their own economic security, brick by brick, through trade work and menial labor.  His was a bootstrap-mentality that demanded nothing from white people but patience, as Black folks respectfully found their way out of the deep hole they had been pushed into through centuries of oppression.  In his Atlanta speech, Washington said:

The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly, and that progress in the enjoyment of all the privileges that will come to us must be the result of severe and constant struggle rather than of artificial forcing. No race that has anything to contribute to the markets of the world is long in any degree ostracized. It is important and right that all privileges of the law be ours, but it is vastly more important that we be prepared for the exercise of these privileges. The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera-house.

So where Washington and his ilk saw white people generally as friendly neighbors waiting for their Black peers to fix up their houses and curate their lawns, Du Bois saw them generally as antagonistic neighbors actively seeking to maintain a pristine, segregated, gated community, and to keep their Black peers out at any cost, by any means.  On the topic of Black education and the value of pursuing white collar jobs,  Du Bois said:

In the professions, college men are slowly but surely leavening the Negro church, are healing and preventing the devastations of disease, and beginning to furnish legal protection for the liberty and property of the toiling masses. All this is needful work. Who would do it if Negroes did not? How could Negroes do it if they were not trained carefully for it?  If white people need colleges to furnish teachers, ministers, lawyers, and doctors, do black people need nothing of the sort?

Du Bois sought to form a phalanx of highly trained Black intellectual warriors to stand in opposition to the white power structure, to uproot white supremacy from its socio-political base, and knew just as well as Washington did that this process would be met with violent responses from whiteness.  The major difference between the two men is that Du Bois was willing to lead Black Americans into this conflict and absorb white violence, and Washington was not.  In many ways their story foreshadowed the ideological conflict between Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcolm X, although it’s important to note that by the 1960s, Washington’s ideas had been relegated to the dustbins of activist history, where King carried the torch of Du Bois to the very heights of the white power structure, and Malcolm X pushed the movement into new levels of radicalism almost unheard of a half century earlier.  In other words, Du Bois helped set the standard of Black political activism that would carry on for decades after his death, even though at the time it was never clear this would be the case.

Both Washington and Du Bois’ calls for true equality were met with indignation and fury from white America, and perhaps not coincidentally, neither man was in attendance at the Mixed Congress.  However, during the course of events leading up to the event, a war of words erupted in the public editorial pages of the Omaha World Herald between Reverend John Albert Williams of St. Phillip the Deacon, perhaps the most prominent Black leader in Omaha, and  Reverend John Williams of St. Phillips of St. Barnabas, an Irish-American immigrant.  The debate echoes that of Du Bois vs Washington, and arose following an editorial written by John Albert Williams, airing grievances about how Black people were often treated in Omaha, and offering solutions to help alleviate the problem.  Williams stated:

It is rapidly becoming a notorious fact that it is almost a matter of impossibility for an Afro-American, however respectable or genteel he may be, to obtain accommodation in hotel, restaurant, ice cream parlor, labor shop or public resort of any kind.  Certain places he is refused point blank.  At other places he is met with some subterfuge or overcharged.  Nor is this state of affairs confined to the city proper.  It has invaded the great Trans-Mississippi and International exposition grounds. 

Williams went on to list several examples of subtle and blatant discrimination in the Exposition as well as its host city, opining that business owners often choose to discriminate not based on their own personal prejudice, but based on the fear that white customers will stop frequenting their establishment if it’s known to serve Black people.  He also noted that Black people from Omaha know which places discriminate, and would generally simply avoid them.  But he questioned how visitors from out of town, especially during the Exposition, could possibly know which places to avoid, and asked if the city could afford to treat its visitors of color in such a way.  As we so frequently do still to this day, Williams framed his anti-racist argument here in terms of economic health, which is often the best if not only way to persuade white people to take the issue seriously.  Then he offered solutions to the problem, differentiating between legal and moral methodology:

The legal remedy is this: Taking advantage of the (Nebraska) civil rights bill, file information against, arrest and prosecute every person who violates this statute.  Frequent lawsuits, fines and the attendant vexations and notoriety resulting there-from would eventually correct and modify, if not totally eradicate, the evil.  This would create much unnecessary ill-will, which might otherwise be avoided.  It is not the better plan, in my judgement…. must we seek this remedy?

The moral remedy is this: Believing in the injustice and iniquity of the pernicious public sentiment which fosters this discrimination injurious alike to the businessmen of our city and the people against whom they discriminate, let the liberal-minded and substantial white citizens issue a manifesto or statement over their signatures that they have no sympathy with such discrimination and that they will withdraw their patronage from all persons who practice it, and the evil will disappear…

…. it seems to me that this is the true way to right the matter.  It will give the best results.  It will avoid lawsuits and cheap notoriety.  It will prevent ill-will and hard feeling between common citizens.  It will remove embarrassment from the well-disposed proprietors as well as humiliation from those who would be their patrons and add to their business returns.  It will give our city high rank as a progressive city among those of the land.  It will above all show to the world that the metropolis of Nebraska believes in justice and right for all her citizens.  Cannot this be done?

He then asked if “liberal-minded” city leaders would join him in the endeavor to lead the charge in publicly opposing discriminatory practices prevalent in Omaha, calling over a dozen of them by name in his closing paragraph, including the white Reverend John Williams, who would respond in due time.  The concerns highlighted in this opinion piece were not called into question in subsequent responses, meaning people generally did not take issue with the concept that in spite of a state anti-discrimination law passed in Nebraska in 1885, racism was still alive and well, and practiced in relatively plain view, over a decade later.  Cyrus Bell even did a bit of investigative journalism in order to detail this blatant discrimination, canvassing local businesses, asking what their practices were in regard to serving Black customers.  Going door to door with blunt questions and an inquiring eye, he found clear evidence of widespread discrimination that proprietors would usually try to obfuscate through confusing, contradictory language games.  Everyone discriminated in practice, yet none would freely admit it.  Perhaps more importantly, very few white leaders were willing to publicly oppose it, as they were challenged to do.

In line with the confusing language documented by Bell, (white) Reverend John Williams responded to John Albert Williams’ piece by unleashing a tirade of gaslighting language:

The Rev. John Albert Williams makes a pathetic appeal in your columns for social justice and fair play toward his race… I wish his appeal could be not only heard, but answered as he desires; but he asks, I fear, for the impossible, so far as the world at large is concerned… I do not say that it will be forever impossible, but social equality between the different strata of either race… as man are at present, is all but a social impossibility.  Of course, it is most gallingly impossible between the white and colored races.

Differences of education and external condition largely determine social rank and privilege between men of the same race among us.  But no training or education, no external condition of wealth or culture can secure social equality or recognition for negroes.  Among white men of any degree, educated or uneducated, the colored man may be nine-tenths white, and one-tenth black, and that one-tenth damns the nine-tenths of his Caucasian blood, however unexceptionable in education and training and gentlemanly bearing the man may be.  He is barred by his fraction of black blood from equal association with the most uncultivated grade of white men.

He then claimed white people are not bothered being near Black people who are in positions of servitude and menial labor, such as porters, shoeshiners, and maids, but…

… as quickly as a colored man or woman… claims even the shadow of social equality then our proud white blood is up in arms, and we repel the contact with indignation at the presumption of the “n***er…” if he presumes to wear, or to ask for the shoulder strap of a lieutenant, or if he dares to sit at a lunch counter with us white men, or if he dares to ask for a soda at the same fountain with us, then our proud white blood is up, and the negro must be taught to keep his own place.

This is all… too sadly, unjustly true.  No one knows better than Mr. Williams does, that I am absolutely at war with the social ostracism and injustice under which colored men labor.  I detest our northern hypocrisy which arraigns southern men for their social injustice toward the black race, and yet without a hundredth part of the provocation makes constant use of the same, or similar injustice here.  And yet, I can see no practical use in Mr. Williams or any of his people trying to force, by law or otherwise, social equality one day before white men are ready to grant it, as a natural inalienable right of every man, regardless of color.  Colored men must labor and wait, must be self-respecting and patient, patient not in a humble or servile sense, but in a manly, independent way, which will prompt them to ask for no social favor that is not given them without sense of condescension on the part of those who yield them…

… Any other race with half the opportunities that colored men possess will forge ahead and receive the patronage of their own people.  Why do not colored men do so, and let their civil rights under the law wait upon their natural and unquestioned right to do business for and with their own people, and with such others as would gladly recognize the force of character which will enable manly men to rise above their adverse circumstances?  The mutual jealousies of the intelligent colored men of this city are far more detrimental to their common interests than the unreasonable prejudices of white men.

In Williams’ rollercoaster ride of contradictions, he simultaneously denounced anti-Black racism and indulged in it.  In line with Washington, he said Black people need to simply pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and rise above the low-paying menial labor they found themselves bound to, and to simultaneously stop expecting white people to be ok with them doing that very thing.  Using language such as, “our proud white blood” and “the negro must be taught to keep his own place,” Williams revealed his own white supremacist leanings, but then disowned white supremacy by claiming to be “at war” against racism.  One might have asked Williams how he claimed to be at war against racism if his only solution was telling Black people to try harder and do better.  His Black Anglican counterpart asked him to take the very first and most basic step in going to war against racism, which would be to clearly denounce racist practices by local businesses that were already illegal at the time, and instead of entering the battlefield, he ridiculed this call to arms as “pathetic” and unmanly.  Of course, churches also operate as businesses to some degree, so it’s entirely possible Williams was trying to tow his white congregation’s line by assuring them he stood on their side of the color line, but anyone willing to cater this blatantly to racism is guilty of racism.

As the reverends Williams debated in the opinion pages of the local paper, preparations continued for the Mixed Congress, and the event ended up going off without a hitch.  Judging by the war of words between local clergy, the decision to frame the event as somehow being apolitical might have been a wise one, if the goal was to keep tensions low.  In order to demonstrate assimilation and respectability, the program consisted of patriotic songs along with speeches from an array of leaders from around the Midwest:

With its focus on peaceful, formalized dialogue about race and racism, the Mixed Congress represents an early effort on the part of community leaders to forge a path towards interracial unity, an idealism set in the midst of Jim Crow reality that was never truly confined to the South.  While there appear to be no surviving minutes from the Congress detailing what exactly was said, the program clearly shows its creators were concerned with not only racism itself, but also how racism intersects with labor issues, and the media’s role in creating a more racially harmonious society.  The care put into the program’s language indicates a high level of awareness regarding white fragility; the main question explored on the opening night of discussion wasn’t “how can racism be eradicated” or “how can racial equality be achieved,” but rather “what can be done to bring about a better and more respectful feeling between white and colored Americans,” followed by white and colored perspectives on the matter.  If the editorial debate between the Reverends Williams represents the major ideological divide in the air at the time, then each side thought the other should do the heavy lifting in creating this ideal, sought-after feeling, bringing a tension which ironically would have led to worse and less respectful feelings between the two sides.

Again, there doesn’t appear to be any surviving records detailing the dialogues which occurred at the Mixed Congress, but on the topic of labor, it isn’t difficult to imagine speakers tackled the ongoing conflict between white unions and Black strikebreakers.  White capitalists frequently pitted exploited, striking white unionists against Black strikebreakers seeking any sort of meager living they could find.  While W.E.B. Dubois led the charge to push more Black people into academia, the arts, and white collar work that was primarily performed by the mind, rather than the body, the Black population remained disproportionately undereducated, politically and economically oppressed to the point of desperation, fighting for the scraps of whatever manual labor positions were still open after working class white American and European immigrant workers took the lion’s share.  This often left Black workers in the position of accepting work with miserable conditions and extremely low pay, a phenomenon that left a bitter taste in the mouths of white unionists seeking better treatment for working class people.

In opposition to W.E.B. Dubois’ push to create more Black academics and artists, and in spite of the poor working conditions prevalent at the time, Booker T. Washington spoke in favor of Black industrial labor as the best strategy for paving the way towards a better future, and provided a model for Black vocational training schools with his increasingly famous Tuskegee Institute.  Many influential white industrialists backed him in this vision, although their primary motivation was often to enhance their own economic standing, and that of their peers, rather than to uplift Black people.  Washington found allies in practice, even if their motivations differed.  Wealthy philanthropist George F. Peabody, namesake of the Peabody Awards who also served on the board of the Tuskegee Institute, said:

…. have you the least doubt that if one million Negroes, constituting nearly one-half of the men, women and children of Georgia were rightly educated to the development of their bodily health and strength and facilities and of the application of the same, which means their minds trained, to have their arms and legs work promptly and accurately in coordination, their moral apprehension rightly trained to know and do the right and avoid the wrong, and their affectional nature encourage to love and not hate their white neighbors, and to respect and honor their own sexual purity, that they would be worth in dollars and cents to the state of George more than three times their present value.  If this be true, as I am positively sure that it is, and as the property of the State of Georgia is so largely owned by the white race, would not the gain to the white race, under present methods of distribution, be most incalculable in dollars and cents…

Also on the Tuskegee Board of Trustees, and an even closer friend of Washington’s, was another wealthy white man, William H. Baldwin, who cut his teeth in Omaha, rising up the ladder at Union Pacific Railroad.  Baldwin originally came to Omaha on the invitation of his close friend’s father, Charles Francis Adams Jr., a Civil War veteran who was then president of Union Pacific.  The year Baldwin arrived in Omaha, 1886, also happened to be the year of the Great Southwest Railroad Strike, in which railroad magnate and robber baron Jay Gould crushed the nation’s largest labor organization, the Knights of Labor, through the use of (often Black) strikebreakers and Pinkerton mercenaries, providing a model for how management could win future labor wars.  While the Knights of Labor invited Black laborers into its fold, most unions after its dissolution were only open to white members, forcing Black workers into the desperate position of strike-breakers who felt they had no choice but to work for less.

Baldwin watched the politics of race and labor unfold from his office in Omaha, then traveled into the South to influence the politics of education and labor there.  He was at the original meetings from 1898 to 1900 at Capon Springs, West Virginia, that led to the creation of the extremely influential Southern Education Board.  As a close friend of Washington, Baldwin entrenched himself in the cause of public education for Southerners of all races based on the model of the Tuskegee Institute, aimed at vocational training to help grease the gears of industry and give people a steady living.  While Baldwin claimed humanitarian motives for his efforts, W.E.B. Du Bois was skeptical, stating, “His plan was to train in the South two sets of workers, equally skilled, black and white, who could be used to offset each other and break the power of the trade unions.”  Baldwin likely would have denied it, but his own words proved his true intentions were aimed at crushing unions so the U.S. would be able to compete with the cheap labor in other nations:

The union of white labor, well organized, will raise the wages beyond a reasonable point, and then the battle will be fought, and the Negro will be put in at a less wage, and the labor union will either have to come down in wages, or Negro labor will be employed.  The last analysis is the employment of Negro labor in the various arts and trades of the South, but this will not be a clearly defined issue until your competition in the markets of the world will force you to compete with cheap labor in other countries…. I believe, as a last analysis, the strength of the South in its competition with other producing nations will lie in the labor of the now despised Negro, and that he is destined to continue to wait for that time.

Thus, while Booker T. Washington might have been helping Black people to some degree in the short term by providing a means to earn a meager living, he was ultimately playing into the hands of wealthy white capitalists who sought to exploit Black labor as strike breakers when the unions became powerful enough to force concessions through large scale strikes.  W.E.B. Du Bois correctly surmised that white philanthropy was largely a scheme to further line the pockets of the white bourgeoisie, while producing public relations gold through generous donations to institutions such as the Tuskegee Institute.  The titans of capitalism almost always had their way, skillfully playing working class people of differing races against one another, in order to keep them divided and powerless in the face of exploitation.

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On the same day corporatist President William McKinley spoke glowingly of American empire and the light of white Christian civilization in front of thousands in Omaha, a group of armed, mostly white, unionists of the United Mine Workers in Virden, Illinois, watched as a train of 50 Black strikebreakers and their families, over a hundred men, women, and children, rolled into town on a train car.  The unionists had been at war against their employers for months, striking en masse until they could reach better working terms, and were fully aware of the strikebreakers coming into the area.  The miners were led to action the previous year by General Alexander Bradley, who had learned to organize protest marches when Coxey’s Army of populists literally marched across the nation to Washington, D.C., demanding workers rights and human dignity for the poor and destitute during the economic depression of the early 1890s.  The unionist men were organized into militias, armed and ready to fight to the death if need be, for a living wage.  After a series of negotiations bore the fruit of an agreed upon wage for miners at the national level, the Chicago-Virden Mining Company stood alone in refusing to honor this wage, leading to a situation in which blood was sure to be spilled.

The Black strikebreakers were recruited from Birmingham, where company men told them the Virden miners had gone off to fight in the Spanish American War, so the Chicago-Virden Mining Company needed more labor.  A previous group of their Birmingham peers brought up to Illinois, sensing trouble along the way, had refused to break the strike upon learning of the true nature of their trip.  This time company owners were going to get their laborers into their mines and working, by any means necessary.  From St. Louis, armed mercenaries of the Thiel Detective Agency boarded the train, in anticipation of the violence to come.  The train doors were locked, keeping the Black laborers and their families trapped inside.  The train depot itself had been fortified with a stockade, complete with barbed wire and sentry towers, inside of which were specially built company houses, a miniature community of exploited laborers sealed as if in a castle, from a potential siege.  The stench of feudalism and backstabbing in the air, this group of Black laborers smelled trouble as well as their predecessors did, and there are reports that on this occasion, company men forced them to follow orders at gunpoint, making the situation a blatant case of kidnapping and false imprisonment.

As the train approached, a miner shot his rifle into the air, signaling to the other miners to prepare for the showdown.  The train slowed to a stop as company men took position behind a long, narrow pile of coal they had stacked between the tracks and the stockade, armed with the cutting edge firearms of the day.  Miners approached the scene armed with .22 caliber rifles and pistols, some without any firearms at all, and a shootout ensued, lasting roughly ten minutes.  In the process dozens of men on each side were seriously injured and seven miners were killed, along with four company-hired men.  It isn’t known for certain how many Black strikebreakers or members of their families were injured or killed, as there are no official reports on the matter.

What is certain is the company felt they needed state intervention to restore order and escort their workers into the mines safely, but Illinois Governor John Riley Tanner sided with the unionists.  Tanner was clear in his judgement, bucking the longstanding trend of governors sending in state militias to aid capitalists in breaking strikes.  He said, “The laboring man’s only property is the right to labor, which is as dear to him as the capitalist’s millions, and he has the same right to carry arms in defense of his property as the capitalist has to protect his millions.”  Without support at the state level, company men persuaded the local sheriff to round up a citizens’ militia, asking for 100+ men, but only a dozen showed up willing to risk death for the company.  Instead, a group of citizens sent a petition to Governor Tanner, stating:

“We are opposed to the importation of colored miners from the south under any and all conditions, as a menace to our peace and that of our city, believing, as we do, that it will depreciate the value of our property, foster crime within our midst, and degrade every social condition now existing in our city.”

Once again, the motivation for white citizens opposing the use of Black strikebreakers was racism and self-interest rather than humanitarianism.  Regardless of motive, Illinois citizens were united against the company, giving the miners strength in numbers and ultimately, support from the state itself.   Ahead of the shootout, Governor Tanner even sent company owner J.C. Loucks a letter warning that company leaders would be considered responsible for any potential violence in Virden:

After the gun fight, company manager Fred Lukins holed up in his house inside the protective cover of the stockade and fumed over Tanner’s refusal to send aid.  He stated, “The blood of every man shed here is on the governor’s head. He is absolutely outside the law and has no justification whatever in refusing to send troops . . . His statement that the miner had the same right to fight for his property, which was his labor, as the mine owner did to protect his property, inspired these men to the action which they took in firing upon this train as soon as it came into our town.”  Then Lukins took things a step further, doubling down on his company’s gamble that Tanner would eventually have to capitulate and send aid, puffing his chest about how tough he was by bragging that the sight of dead bodies didn’t bother him in the least, threatening to continue the fight regardless of how many bodies piled up in the process.  This was perhaps not the public relations campaign the Chicago-Virden Mining Company needed, but it’s what they got.

In response, Tanner sent in state troops with gatling guns to restore order in defense of the miners, with the intent of restoring order and ultimately, punishing the company.  A warrant was issued for Fred Lukin and two Thiel mercenaries, making it clear as day where all the pieces had fallen. Athough the charges were eventually dropped, the miners had done nothing less than set a new standard for labor rights movements moving into the 20th century.  They stood their ground and proved they were willing to die for their cause, drawing sympathy from across the nation, and exposing their exploitative employers as ruthless tyrants hellbent on having things their own way, regardless of agreed upon, national level wages negotiated between labor and capital.  In shooting at their labor force, the company shot itself in the foot.

In the meantime, the train full of Black workers from Birmingham and their families rolled on to Springfield, where they were left waiting to see what would happen to them next.  According to the Illinois State Register, “Shivering and hungry in the third story of what is known as Allen’s hall are huddled together about 106 negroes, men, women and children, practically prisoners of war, and in danger of their lives if they should attempt to assert their liberty…”  A couple of the men snuck out, only to be beaten into a bloody pulp by angry white mobs who didn’t want any more Black families moving into their town, especially as strikebreakers.  Eventually these workers and their families received food and coffee, then headed back south, some migrating to St. Louis, others going all the way back home to Birmingham.  They were, in essence, refugees in their own country.  A decade later, Springfield would erupt into an orgy of violence as a mob of thousands of white people descended upon the Black part of town with torches, knives, guns, and bats, brutally slaughtering scores of people in the streets and burning their homes to the ground, sending the entire Black population fleeing from their own town, once again as refugees in their own country.  In 1909, in direct response to this anti-Black pogrom in Springfield, and following the racist display of the Old Plantation in Omaha and Buffalo, W.E.B. Du Bois and and a group of multiracial activists first formed the NAACP, which would come to dominate the fight for justice and equality over the next several decades.

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With the rise of the NAACP and W.E.B. Du Bois as its bold, confrontational spearhead, in the face of repeated scenes of anti-Black violence such as the pogrom in Springfield, Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist ‘Atlanta Compromise’ philosophy began to crumble.  White people were just not going to let Black people gain equality socially, politically, or economically.  Only two years before the carnage in Springfield, Atlanta had its own turn in experiencing large scale communal anti-Black violence, in which a mob of thousands of white Atlantans savagely slaughtered innocent Black civilians, men and women alike, in the streets over several days, leaving roughly two dozen people dead.  What could Washington say to this grotesque anti-Black violence…  wait things out longer?  Don’t use violence in self defense against violence?  Herd yourself and your family into the slaughter?  Go back to work, keep quiet about white supremacist terrorism threatening the very existence of Black people in the United States?  In the waning years of his life, Washington and his ideas became increasingly irrelevant, as his optimistic view of white people was decimated and splattered across the streets of cities across the nation.

The Atlanta city government failed entirely to protect its own citizens during its pogrom, with Mayor Woodward on record saying, “The best way to prevent a race riot depends entirely upon the cause. If your inquiry has anything to do with the present situation in Atlanta then I would say the only remedy is to remove the cause. As long as the black brutes assault our white women, just so long will they be unceremoniously dealt with.”  While city government failed miserably in stopping or even truly denouncing the massacre, the state sent troops in to ‘disarm’ every Black person in the city.  They then rounded up about 300 Black men for questioning about their role in alleged attacks on city police officers.  This pattern of allowing white supremacists to conduct pogroms in the streets of American cities in broad daylight, followed by sending in state or federal troops to disarm and police Black peoples’ response to the violence committed against them, would play out in cities across the nation throughout the Jim Crow period.  Even Black professors were rounded up and shaken down, interrogated, blamed for their own oppression.

Here, the intersection of academic intellectualism and the “by any means necessary” strain of militant ideology famously espoused by the likes of Malcolm X and the Black Panthers a generation later come to light.  One couldn’t so breezily dismiss armed Black citizens as ‘hoodlums’ when they had respected university professors in their midst.  This concept so terrified the white establishment that it played a role in the original formation of the Bureau of Investigation, or BOI, later known as the FBI.  Black militancy, headed by Black people who came to be called the ‘New Negros,’ ranged from those calling for using arms for simple self defense to radical separatists calling for the creation of a new Black nation state.  Du Bois, for his part, an Atlantan to the bone, said of the Atlanta riots:

I rushed back from Alabama to Atlanta where my wife and six year old child were living.  A mob had raged for days killing Negroes.  I bought a Winchester double-barreled shotgun and two dozen rounds of shells filled with buckshot.  If a white mob had stepped on the campus where I lived I would without hesitation have sprayed their guts over the grass.

Du Bois was not alone in his willingness to meet violence with violent self defense.  Among the many budding Black intellectuals at the time of the Battle of Virden who would grow increasingly militant over the years was a young man from Omaha by the name of George Wells Parker.  From an early age, Parker demonstrated remarkable talents as a thinker, writer, and orator.  The son of a prominent Black businessman, he utilized the means at his disposal to curate his own personal library, accumulating 400 books by the age of 22.  In a 1905 piece from the St. Louis Dispatch, Parker was described as a sort of tortured genius holed up in his dark room at 925 N. 27th St. (now the Viewhouse apartments adjacent to Creighton University), reading for hours on end, where he “mastered the Greek language unaided” and memorized passages of Huxley, Darwin, Comte, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hume, Spinoza, John Stuart Mills, and other great thinkers.  His book collection included “encyclopedias, works on science, literature, history, art and religion and many volumes of poetry.”

While Parker had his hands in a bit of everything, writing history appears to have been his true calling from early on.  In 1898 while still in high school, Parker made his first splash as a promising public intellect at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition.  The St. Louis Post article mentioned a diploma awarded to him, “for the best essay on Modern History, exhibited at the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in 1898.”  There does not appear to be surviving a record of this essay, but because the contest was open to students across the nation, it certainly was no small feat for young Parker to take first prize.

By the time he was of college age, Parker had already developed a devastatingly sharp tongue, piercing wit, and grace with language rarely matched by peers of his age.  In 1903 he wrote a ‘defense of his race’ against an unnamed local newspaper editor who had written a racist diatribe claiming Black people shouldn’t be educated to seek socioeconomic equality, because it would damage the economic standing of white people, thereby disrupting the racial hierarchy.  The editor suggested Black should people be content in their menial labor, lest they spark backlash from their white peers who would naturally defend their place at the top of that hierarchy.  In the editor’s view, neither Du Bois’ nor Washington’s vision for a more equitable future would do, because even the most difficult and low paying industrial labor positions should be left for white men.  Parker’s takedown reads like Mike Tyson swinging on Tucker Carlson in a boxing ring:

Under the caption, “The False Education of the Negro,” an Omaha paper published an editorial in the issue of December 3 which merits a criticism, and it is the purpose of the writer of this article to take upon himself the answering of that most unjust attack.

The color problem is the problem of the twentieth century.  Nearly all of the great nations have this problem in some form or other and here in the United States the question is receiving its full discussion at the hands of persons both competent and incompetent, and if the views stated in the above mentioned article are the sincere expressions of this particular paper then it must of necessity be classed among the incompetent.

In the first place, the negro question in the United States is the result of a blunder.  Some say the freeing of the slaves was that blunder; others argue that it was the enfranchisement of the freedmen; some lay it to the efforts to educate the black man; but if there were a blunder it was in all probability made by a Dutch Trader, who landed a score of Africans at Jamestown in 1619.  The mistakes which have been made, the faults which have been discovered, the evils which have arisen, are all the consequences of that blunder and in the light of the twentieth century we find in America 10,000,000 of colored people struggling to attain the dignity of true manhood and true womanhood, and the man or paper that can see no virtue in this and can only find time to try to crush and humiliate this struggling mass not only commits a crime against these, but threatens the safety of themselves.

The paper referred to says: “No sane white man or white woman has at heart any real fear that social equality of the races will ever come about.  The real thing which is objected to, and which is at hand is industrial equality.”  That word “equality” has a very familiar sound.  There are a few statesmen who had something to say about it in a declaration of rights, but their posterity have decided that they did not know what they were talking about.

The signers of that immortal paper did not mean that all men were socially nor morally equal, but what they evidently meant was that every man had a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and the negro only asks that these inherent rights be his heritage as well as the heritage of any other race of beings.  As to social equality, there are thousands of negroes in the United States who would be greatly humiliated to be classed as the equals of some of the types of white Americans. 

But the industrial equality is a new battle cry.  It has an ominous ring.  A man can live without rights, but he cannot live without bread, and you who believe that the white man may oppress with impunity must not delude yourselves too long.  If you attempt to force bread from the mouths of 10,000,000 people, I believe there are grounds for one to tremble for the oppressor.  I do not mean by this that I am in favor of rebellion, but I do mean to say that history teaches that such a thing is possible.

I quote further: ‘The education has been generally lavished upon the negroes at the expense of the white – yes, doubly at their expense – for the education has turned menial servants into industrial equals and competitors.”  What is education for but to uplift?  Ignorance is the only crime and it is the ignorance in the world that makes the human lot so miserable.  But ignorance is by no means confined to the negro, and if, in the future hundreds of years, the negro makes no more advance than that has been made by the whites in their thousands of years of freedom, then may they be left to the commiseration of the world.  All men cannot work in “the fields and the railroad grades,” nor can all “young colored women do housework” for the whites.  In a great country like America, where no law bids his son to follow in the footsteps of his father, I think that this should merit the condemnation of mankind if, after forty years of freedom, there were not some who longed to climb higher in the walks of life.  And we, as a race, shall not pause to question if servility is our lot, for we know that it is not. We are men and manhood is not a question of color, but of character, and oppression is forging for this benighted race a character which shall not be spoiled, even in the face of such ignorant quibbling as was published in the newspaper referred to.

“The race problem,” says this Omaha paper, “reduced to plain English, is the servant problem.  In freeing and educating the negroes we have made them our industrial equals and deprived ourselves of a distinctive race that had performed our menial work.”  Why did not the paper say: “We should again make the negro a slave, for in freeing him we deprived ourselves of a class of good servants:”  And then they say further that, “The situation came home in its full force when a crowd of striking union negroes fired upon a squad of white men who had taken their places.  In leaping up to the industrial equality the negroes can ape the white man in more ways than one.”  Then the negro unionists did wrong.  But the white men strike too and shoot and kill, and yet the critic of the negro says that the negroes did wrong because they “aped” the white men.  Then the boasted superiority of the whites lies in committing crimes which a colored man must not imitate.  Then they are welcome to that kind of superiority.

The critic continues and speaks something about turning “savage into man,” and something about what “his half-made nature can comprehend.”  I have often wondered which was the savage, the poor naked slave, cowering and weak, or the cruel white master, tearing the fallen man’s flesh with slave drivers’ help?  Whether the patient black, toiling in the cotton fields, or the white man destroying his home, selling his sons, outraging his daughters and ruining his wife?  Whether the young negro learning the alphabet by the dying embers, or the white man trying to keep him in perpetual darkness?  Whether the negro, seeking the nobler walks of life, or the editor who would have him back in those days, where he probably supported his father in luxury and idleness?

Space will not permit me to say more.  This must suffice until another time.  But, in closing, let it be said that the writer is acquainted with many of the weaknesses of the negro, for he is of that race.  The negro has his faults and his vices, but some of the worst are the teachings he learned while taking the 300-year course in the hard school of slavery.  The white man is only reaping what it has sown.  It was Burke who said that “it is sometimes as hard to persuade a slave to be a freeman as it is to persuade a freeman to be a slave.”  It was hard at first for the negro to learn what it is to be free, but in the dawning light of this great century he begins to perceive the light; he begins to feel that he, too, is a child of nature and is destined to fill a part in the world’s great drama.  And when you preach to him of treading the paths of slavery again you need only listen and you will hear murmurs of 10,000,000 hearts as they beat, Never!  Never!  Never!

Here, Parker demonstrated his early intellectual prowess and dexterity with language, masterfully breaking down his opponent’s argument piece by piece.  The passages reveal a man far ahead of his time, writing about ideas that remain bitter points of contention to this day.  The reference to Jamestown in 1619 foreshadowed the New York Time’s ‘1619 Project’ by over a century.  His prose straddled the line between that of an armed, pro-Black militant nationalist and that of a nonviolent, New Testament Christian universalist.  He alluded to armed Black rebellion against the racial apartheid state by referencing the historical track record of starving people turning against their oppressors, but cleverly dodged potential accusations that he was advocating for this sort of revolution by simply stating the fact that, “such a thing is possible.”  The implied threat of revolution was reminiscent of Marcus Garvey, who at the time Parker wrote this piece in 1903 was still just a young man working at his godfather’s print shop in Jamaica.  Parker also preceded MLK by six decades in stating that the measure of a man is in the content of his character, not the color of his skin, and anticipated Malcolm X’s classic line reversing the imagery of Plymouth Rock, having it landing on Black people, by reversing the image of who the true savage was, the “poor naked slave” or the “cruel white master” with the whip in his hand.  In all these passages, Parker anticipated revolutions decades down the road.

The last paragraph in Parker’s 1903 piece also indicated the seeds of something larger looming over the horizon for Black Americans.  In referencing the “dawning light of this great century” that illuminated the original humanity of Black people as “children of nature,” Parker reversed the overriding message of the Trans-Mississippi Exposition only five years earlier, and of every world’s fair since the Crystal Palace made its debut in London half a century before that.  If the light of the new century was to be one that humanized and uplifted Black people, then it would necessarily humanize every other race of oppressed peoples living under the yoke of global white supremacy, including the Indigenous people put on display at the Omaha Exposition.  Parker’s version of the “dawning light of the new century” reversed the notion of Manifest Destiny, reversed the idea that everything displayed at world fairs were celebrations of progress, rather than celebrations of racist barbarism against entire swaths of humanity.  If Parker’s light was the true one, then the light of Western, Christian, European civilization was operating under a farce, because it was only by dehumanizing everyone else, after all, that white people were able to justify the entire white settler colonialist project in the first place.  While Parker only briefly hinted at this new “light” concept which illuminated Black humanity in 1903, he was only just getting started on it, as we will see later.

Even with his radical ideas and sharp tongue, young George Wells Parker was willing to stomach, to some degree, the electoral politics of his day.  During his college age years, he attempted to make practical change from within the system through the Republican Party, evidenced by his position as secretary of the Douglas County Colored Men’s Roosevelt and Webster Club.  This group lobbied the Nebraska Republican establishment into political action which lived up to the ideals espoused by President Teddy Roosevelt when he said, “I cannot consent to take the position that the door of hope — the door of opportunity — is to be shut upon any man, no matter how worthy, purely upon the grounds of race or color.”  Roosevelt had, after all, opened the doors of the White House to dine with Booker T. Washington, so perhaps there was cause for optimism in Washington’s idealist notion that white people would eventually accept Black equality, that their leaders would do what was right if only Black people didn’t act too brazenly.

In 1904, the Omaha Bee reported on the purpose and goals of Parker’s Roosevelt Club:

We view with apprehension and alarm the apparent growth of a public sentiment which is willing to acquiesce in state legislation having for its object the disenfranchisement of colored men, the passage of “Jim Crow” laws, the curtailment, if not the abolition, of public schools, and the practical reinstatement of the colored people in certain sections of the south.  If the Republican Party of the state and of the nation will do its duty the wrongs and the injustice of which we complain can and will be remedied.  In this fight for justice, for liberty, for the right and for fair play we want the Republican Party of Nebraska to be in the forefront of the battle.

By 1908 Parker was singing an entirely different tune.  In another opinion piece written to the Omaha World Herald, Parker raged against the party he had believed in only four years earlier:

He is indeed a blind man who cannot see more nobility in a consistent and open enemy than in a treacherous and pretending friend… the republicans have joked so long with the negro they are unable to see anything but a joke…. The greatest harm done the negro was when the northern republicans went south and used the ignorant freedman agains the best interests of the south.  These carpetbaggers sowed the wind and left the negro to reap the whirlwind… there are many among us who are going to work hard for (Democrat William Jennings) Bryan, and in so doing, if we gain nothing, we shall at least have the satisfaction of defeating or trying to defeat the party which we made, which we have kept in power, and which now in its days of prosperity has forgotten the hand which fed it. 

What had happened in those four years that caused such a dramatic shift in Parker’s ideology?  For one, he appears to have read up on some history, giving him a new perspective from the one he held in 1904.  Only a month after his 1908 piece railing against the Republican party, Parker wrote another piece giving insight into his shifting worldview.  In it, he quoted from a book titled, ‘Colonel Alexander K. McClure ‘s recollections of half a century:’

The disenfranchisement of the negro in the District of Columbia would be but the beginning of the end, as thereafter congress could make no accusation against the southern states for taking the same action…. The same republican authority, that had enfranchised the negro under the very shadow of the capital of the nation was compelled to declare that his disenfranchisement had become an imperious necessity to protect property and maintain social order.  The southern states, which have, by ingenious constitutional devices, practically disenfranchised the negro, have simply followed the teaching of a republican congress and president, which disfranchised him in the capital city.

Parker referred here to the history of Washington D.C., which received an influx of newly emancipated Black people following the Civil War.  In 1868 Black men residing in the District of Columbia were granted the right to vote, and in 1871 D.C. was granted self-rule as a territory.  Its newly elected governor, Alexander ‘Boss’ Shepard, a Republican crony of President Grant’s, began a series of massive municipal projects that turned D.C. from a backwoods city along the Potomac into a proper national capital, employing thousands of Black workers in the process, who in turn provided their political support.  Unfortunately, Shepard’s projects ended up running up a bill three times what he had asked and been approved for, leading to widespread and bipartisan opposition to not only his leadership, but also to the concept of D.C. as a self-governing territory.  Usually a corrupt politician and his administration would simply be ousted, but in the case of D.C., Shepard’s rule came with the voting support of enfranchised Black men, which led to Congress taking the drastic measure of revoking D.C.’s territorial status, appointing a three member Board of Commissioners, effectively disenfranchising the entire city, regardless of race.  This, Parker said, is evidence that the Republican Party would sell out Black people at any moment, and helped set the precedent for Jim Crow and the disenfranchisement of Black people across the South.

Parker’s argument is not without merit, and stands as a solid indictment against the Reconstruction era Republican party.  Leadership starts at the top, and if D.C. represents the head of the nation’s political apparatus, then the most important progressive Republican politicians who claimed to champion the rights of emancipated Black people failed absolutely in their goal, right at the moment they were needed the most.  Parker’s claim that it’s better to have a “consistent and open enemy” than a “treacherous and pretending friend” further anticipated Black nationalists such as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X, the former of which famously met with the KKK in an effort to communicate about their shared desire to form racially segregated nations.  At least they weren’t pretending *not* to be white supremacists, the thinking went.

In shifting his support away from the Republican Party, Parker became more politically aligned with Omaha’s “Cowboy Mayor,” Democrat Jim Dahlman, who was credited for being progressive in his views on race, but who ran with a rough crowd (more on that in another piece).  In 1909 , Dahlman and the city council set up an arch on 18th and Farnam with incandescent lights spelling the words “Welcome I.S.L. of K,” a warm greeting for the Interstate Literary Association of Kansas, a group of influential Black thinkers, artists, poets, writers, and civil rights leaders, who were holding their annual conference in Omaha that year.  Although the group was based out of Kansas, its reach extended throughout the Midwest, and roughly 100 delegates from four different states convened at Zion Baptist Church in Omaha.  At the convention, Dahlman “turned over the keys of the city, assuring them that the welcome arch represented their sincerity, and their interest in the education of the race, and belief that the delegates would do honor to these expressions of good will on the part of the city of Omaha,” after which came dozens of speeches and performances, including by Parker himself, who must have felt more solidarity with a progressive Democratic mayor than with any Republican claiming to represent the best interests of Black people.

The Topeka Plaindealer gave Dahlman, and Omaha, a glowing review in hosting the Literary Association:

While Parker might have found himself aligning more with Democratic politicians like Mayor Dahlman and Congressman William Jennings Bryan, there was something more to his radical ideological shift than mere politics.  He was also experiencing a psychological issue of some sort that led him into a spiral of manic work, which in his case meant studying and writing.  He worked to the point that his health declined and his family became worried sick.  A man of extremes, Parker’s intellect was unfortunately coupled with mental illness that appears to have simultaneously pushed him in his intellectual work but also disabled him from living a healthy, balanced lifestyle. The 1905 St. Louis Dispatch article mentioned earlier ran under this headline:

The article stated:

Human efforts to do something in the world rarely surpass the labors of the brilliant George Wells Parker, a colored youth of 22, whose frenzy for knowledge and achievement have left him a mental wreck. 

Friend of Paul Lawrence Dunbar and admired by Booker T. Washington, a writer of splendid promise, well equipped with a thorough education, a great future had been confidently predicted for him by his friends in Omaha.  First in his thoughts was ever the welfare of his race. 

Engaged in a work in which the energies of both mind and soul were concentrated, he applied himself so constantly that he could not be persuaded to desist until the limit of mental endurance had been reached.  In the quest of his chamber by the light of his lamp, he worked many night through.  Surrounded with his books and the piles of notes which he compiled, he toiled, inspired by hopes that swelled within his breast and by dreams of things seemingly fated never to be realized.

Overcoming disadvantages that would have effectively impeded many, he strove to educate himself, realizing that no effort toward self-improvement is thrown away.  Parker is but 22 years of age, but has seen much of the world, and possesses an unusually good education… He attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., for two years.  He devoted himself to the study of law, but did not finish the course.  Through the offices of Congressman Mercer he was appointed to a clerkship in the census bureau, and was later promoted a number of times.  While in the capital city he made the acquaintance of Booker T. Washington and Paul Lawrence Dunbar and imbibed many of their views.

Later in the piece, some of Parker’s poetry was highlighted, and then the narrative takes a dramatic turn:

The book he was writing consisted of essay, and was entitled, “Because.”  The efforts he bestowed on this work, becoming constantly more labored, finally resulted in a mental frenzy.  While his parents anxiously besought him to take precautions for his health, he would not stop for a moment’s rest.  Fascinated by his work he kept on making out his notes and enlarging on them in preparing his manuscript.  After he finished compiling each essay he would copy it off on the typewriter

During the two weeks preceding his breakdown he hardly took food enough for his barest needs.  Whatever time he could snatch he devoted to his pastime, sacrificing the very rest and sleep so essential to his welfare.  Alone with his fancies, he molded the thoughts that swelled in his seething brain, often blinded by the intensity of his vision. Through the agency of his mind he would be carried an illimitable distance from his surroundings, finally to be aroused from his dreamy state to vivid consciousness by a sound in the distance betokening the first signs of life without in the early dawn. Then perhaps he would rise and throw himself on his bed for a short period of repose for his exhausted faculties.

The firmness of thought and clearness of reasoning that characterized the most of his writings had given away to disordered and confused imaginings, and it is feared that the closing chapters of his book degenerated into a meaningless array of words. His book completed, he sent the manuscript away to the Doubleday & Page Publishing company. His parents have written to have the book returned as they have fears for the consistency of the closing chapters.

Before he was confined and sent to Lincoln for treatment, he scattered all his writings over the floor of his room. These his parents picked up and saved, trusting that their boy will in time be restored to them sound in body and mind.

Although his present is blighted by an overshadowing misfortune, the career of this brilliant young negro is remarkable in the light of what he accomplished.

From the description, it sounds as if Parker might have suffered from what today would be called bipolar disorder, experiencing manic episodes with heightened energy, thoughts and feelings of grandiosity, and a near constant output of creative work, followed by periods of extreme depression.  While even medical experts can’t truly diagnose people based on historical documents alone, it’s worth speculating that Parker was afflicted with some sort of mental illness, or some combination of mental illnesses, which served both as a well of creative energy and a deep, dark hole from which he struggled to climb out.  Here was a savant who at a young age had already rubbed elbows with the likes of Booker T. Washington, illuminating the nature of reality through laborious study, throwing his entire being into his work to the point of an unhealthy obsession.  Surely this mental breakdown contributed in some way to Parker’s radical shift in ideology, or at the very least coincided with it.

While people speculated for years about what caused Parker’s breakdown, including the idea that his loss of religious faith was the culprit (he was an atheist), his own close friend and colleague, Reverend John Albert Williams, offered his own explanation to the Omaha Bee in 1912.  Williams stated the breakdown was:

…. due to incessant labor in writing a book in reply to Dixon’s “Leopard’s Spots.”  When Parker read that book the injustice of it seemed to set him on fire.  He addressed himself to the task of answering it and worked incessantly at it night and day, going without food and proper sleep, and as the result of that tension he became violently insane.  Many of us who know and love him, and there has never been any break in our friendship, have felt apprehensive about him since that time lest from overstudy, he might break down again.

The Dixon referred to here was none other than Thomas Dixon, whose sequel to his best selling 1902 novel ‘The Leopard’s Spots’ was ‘The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan,’ which went on to become the basis for D.W. Griffith’s groundbreaking film ‘The Birth of a Nation.’  In other words, it was a massively popular piece of white supremacist propaganda which sent Parker over the edge.  Dixon’s thesis in his first of a trilogy of racist novels is that Black people can’t change their violent, savage, subhuman ways any more than a leopard can its spots.  The title refers to Jeremiah 13:23: “Can an Ethiopian change his skin or a leopard its spots?  Neither can you do good who are accustomed to doing evil.”  The primary theme of the novel, and the trilogy as a whole, is that Black people are subhuman, savage beasts let out of their cages through the Civil War and Reconstruction era, ready to decimate all that white civilization had built since the Greeks, and that Black men were primarily interested in sexually assaulting any white woman they could find.  It sold over a million copies.

As a work of historical fiction, the novel was as ridiculous at its premise.  After setting an apocalyptic scene of devastation in the South, with defeated yet somehow heroic country boys from North Carolina walking home through the ruins of their countryside to tell their wives of their ultimate failure, Dixon introduces the story’s antagonists in no uncertain terms:

In every one of these soldier’s hearts, and over all the earth, hung the shadow of the freed Negro, transformed by the exigency of war from a Chattel, to be bought and sold, into a possible Beast to be feared and guarded.  Around this dusky figure every white man’s soul was keeping its grim vigil… As the sun was setting behind the peaks of the Blue Ridge, a giant negro entered the village of Hambright.  He walked rapidly down one of the principal streets, passed the courthouse square unobserved in the gathering twilight…

Right off the bat, Parker would have noticed Dixon’s use of light and dark to contrast the white heroes and Black villains.  Surrounded by the imposing darkness of night, as well as millions of freed Black people, white people were keeping vigil, or lighting candles, in order to keep an eye on these “Beasts” who were walking into their lives “unobserved in the gathering twilight.”  The title of the novel’s second chapter is ‘A Light Shining In Darkness,’ followed by the third chapter, ‘Deepening Shadows.’  Perhaps it was in reading these kinds of words that Parker was first inspired to use the concept of light in an opposite manner, reframing it as the humanity of Black people rather than the godliness of white people.  While one can only speculate, the timing lines up perfectly for Parker’s earliest documented use of the concept, only a year after Dixon’s novel made its debut.

The entire project Dixon set out to accomplish was itself a reversal of something he saw as a grave injustice, the negative portrayal of white Southerners in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’  He even went so far as to name characters in ‘The Leopard’s Spots’ after characters in the Stowe novel, including its main protagonist, Tom.  Because Dixon thought Stowe’s work dangerously humanized Black people and portrayed Southern plantation owners as evil villains, his version of Tom would no longer be a kind and gentle enslaved Black man who rescues and befriends an angelic white girl, but rather a wise old Confederate soldier with a wooden leg who attempts to protect his home and loved ones from marauding bands of savage Black men.  This places Dixon’s work into the Lost Cause mythological tradition, which painted Southern secession as a righteous cause about autonomy and freedom from Northern oppression, as well as framing slavery as an experience more like the theatrics portrayed in The Old Plantation than the actual brutal, tortuous reality it was.  Dixon’s work was also the last in a long line of ‘anti-Tom literature,’ in which Southern writers took specific aim at Stowe’s novel for over a half century after its original publication in 1851.  By naming a white supremacist, former Confederate after Stowe’s oppressed enslaved Black man, Dixon demonstrated just how personal the issue was, and this would not have been lost on George Wells Parker.

In the key passage from the novel, from which its title is derived, and which one can easily speculate sent Parker into his frenzied work, Dixon lays out his white supremacist thesis in bare language.  He also hypothesized that not only Du Bois, but the relatively moderate incrementalist Washington, were both entirely wrong in their idea that Black people can or should be educated at all, let alone achieve socio-political equality:

Even you are still labouring under the delusions of ‘Reconstruction.’ The Ethiopian can not change his skin, or the leopard his spots. Those who think it possible will always tell you that the place to work this miracle is in the South. Exactly. If a man really believes in equality, let him prove it by giving his daughter to a negro in marriage. That is the test. When she sinks with her mulatto children into the black abyss of a Negroid life, then ask him! Your scheme of education is humbug. You don’t believe that any amount of education can fit a negro to rule an Anglo-Saxon, or to marry his daughter. Then don’t be a hypocrite… The more you educate, the more impossible you make his position in a democracy. Education! Can you change the colour of his skin, the kink of his hair, the bulge of his lips, the spread of his nose, or the beat of his heart, with a spelling book? The Negro is the human donkey. You can train him, but you can’t make of him a horse. Mate him with a horse, you lose the horse, and get a larger donkey called a mule, incapable of preserving his species. What is called our race prejudice is simply God’s first law of nature—the instinct of self preservation.”

Dixon responded to accusations of racism with typical arrogance:

When Parker read ‘The Leopard’s Spots’ for himself, he was so profoundly shaken by the experience that he dedicated his entire being to penning a proper response to it, even to the point of obsession.  The brilliant writer went to work, sacrificing sleep, food, and water, in order to devise a response powerful enough to land a decisive blow against Dixon and his propaganda.  But Parker was no novelist.  He was a student of science, poetry, literature, philosophy, and especially history, so his response came in the form of a persuasive essay rather than a fictional narrative.  By at least 1908, Parker was delivering this response in front audiences in Omaha, including the Omaha Philosophical Society, and to rooms full of intellectuals around the nation.  The response was first titled, ‘The History of the African Race,’ which then morphed into ‘The African Origins of Grecian Civilization,’ published in 1917 by The Journal of Negro History, cementing Parker’s place as a nationally renowned scholar.  This work culminated in the legendary series of essays illuminating Black peoples’ contributions to civilization, collectively and fittingly titled, ‘The Children of the Sun.’

In his response to Dixon, Parker didn’t want to merely paint a reverse picture with victimized Black protagonists and cruel white antagonists.  Instead, he dug into the very roots of the ideologies behind white supremacy, the very foundations upon which it was built and justified, and twisted the soil around it until he was able to snatch the root out entirely, and toss it to the curb along with the trash.  In order to do this work of uprooting, Parker utilized history, archeology, geography, mythology, linguistics, and a host of other tools, demonstrating that when he was engulfed in work only a few years before, and when he so worried his parents and loved ones, his intense labor was not to be done in vain.  As he worked so feverishly, he was not merely splattering the incoherent ramblings of a mentally ill man into existence, but forging a groundbreaking worldview decades ahead of its time, a worldview still hotly debated among academics to this day.

Parker’s thesis posited that while most the accomplishments of Western Civilization can be traced directly back to ancient Greece, and therefore fit conveniently into the myth of ‘Aryan’ or white superiority, the ancient Greeks actually lifted their own civilization directly from Africa, and from African people, thereby making Black people the very originators of Western civilization itself.  Not only did Parker claim African culture was the root of all Western Civilization, he claimed this fact was indisputable based on the available historical and scientific evidence, and that the idea was not even in dispute among the ancients, citing Herodotus and the Homeric epics as evidence.   He noted frescoes found during excavations on Crete, which for the first time in thousands of years gave humanity a glimpse of the Minoan civilization, stating:

The colors are almost as brilliant as when laid down more than three thousand years ago. Among these frescoes are numerous representations of the race whose civilization they represent. It was a race neither Aryan nor Semitic, but African. The portraitures follow the Egyptian precedent and for the first time the mysterious Minoan and Mycenean people rise before us. The tint of the flesh is of a deep reddish brown and the limbs finely moulded. The profile of the face is pure and almost classically Greek. The hair is black and curling and the lips somewhat full, giving the entire physiognomy a distinct African cast.

Parker also quoted famous excavator Heinrich Schliemann, who uncovered what was widely assumed to be the city of Troy itself, stating it appeared to him like the “Civilization of an African people.”  Thus, Parker took some of the very same achievements white supremacists used as evidence of white superiority (classical Greece, the study of Homeric myth, the excavation and study of ancient Greece and its precursors) and turning the evidence against the Aryan myth, utilizing some of the very tools used to propagate Manifest Destiny to instead destroy that narrative from its very base.   The ideas Parker espoused were not accepted into mainstream academia until the 1970s, when famed Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop published ‘The African Origin Of Civilization: Myth or Reality.’  Diop had received an award in 1966 as the most influential African intellectual of the 20th century, alongside W.E.B. De Bois, at the first World Festival of African Arts in Darkar, so his reach was much more massive than Parker’s.  But the general concept in Diop’s work was the same as Parker’s, one that is still hotly debated to this day, as evidenced by the ferocious academic wars fought from the late 1980s through the 1990s over Martin Bernal’s book, ‘Black Athena, which essentially took Parker’s and Diop’s ideas and expanded on them.

 

Classicist scholars railed against Martin Bernal and his work, often passionately.  They attacked his scholarship and argued he was taking modern revisionist history, which seeks to locate and dismantle Eurocentrism in historical narratives, and applying it to ancient times.  In other words, he was taking the lens of his own historical epoch and using it to distort the past, making his work nothing more than the vanity project of a naive activist professor who simply couldn’t see past his own nose.  Bernal’s reply was as simple as it was elegant: the concept that Greek culture was derived from Africa was the commonplace view through the vast majority of history, up until the 18th century, making the classicists’ view the aberration.

The idea that ancient Greeks such as Herodotus simply took it as a given that their culture was rooted in Egyptian civilization means there was a time when that concept died, and was replaced with another narrative.  Enter the white supremacist Aryan mythology, which claims that Greek civilization was created on the spot by white Aryan peoples who invaded from the mountains of the Caucasus region.  This idea gained steam in the late 18th and through the 19th century, culminating in the Nazi movement and its quest for a pure Aryan race.  Because a connection had been found between ancient Sanskrit and European languages, a flock of academics gathered to push the story that white Aryans originated in Asia, then spread their civilization through ancient Greece, Rome, and eventually modern Europe and the United States.  To these hugely influential thinkers, Egypt was either removed from the picture entirely, or at least separated from Africa, as the famous German Romanticist G.W.F. Hegel did when he wrote that there were three Africas: Africa Proper south of the Sahara, European Africa north of the Sahara, and Egypt, which he bizarrely connected to Asia.  In truth, Egypt’s civilizational origins lie in Ethiopia, also known as the Ancient Kingdom of Kush and now known as Sudan, where the color of peoples’ skin tends to be dark, with little to no ties to Asia.  The Eurocentric thinkers of recent centuries had buried this truth, so Parker’s job was to excavate and re-introduce it to the world.

While Dixon’s novels never dug into any of the historical myths Parker so vehemently worked to dismantle, they were rooted in the basic premise of the of the white Aryan myth.  And although Parker never directly referred to Dixon or his novels, on the fifth page of ‘The Children of the Sun,’ he quoted the same phrase Dixon did from the Book of Jeremiah, about a Leopard’s spots, except in Parker’s framework, the quote proves that civilization itself was rooted in Blackness, because Ethiopia is where civilization began,  thus reversing Dixon’s premise that dark skin is a sign of savagery.  Parker stated, “Greece seems to have had a respect for the Ethiopians that amounted to almost reverence.  To them Ethiopia was the home of a divine people, and from Ethiopia came their great God Zeus.”  Then he quoted from the Iliad, in which Ethiopian people are referred to as a “blameless race.”  One can easily picture Parker’s delight as he poured through thousands of pages in his room, collecting each gem that he would eventually use to complete his ultimate takedown of Dixon and all foundational myths that white supremacy stood upon.  He ended his speech in front of the Omaha Philosophical Society in 1917, and the essay that made him famous, with poetic words of his own creation that throw a mighty shot back against Dixon and his use of light, and of shadow:

“Those first affections,

Those shadowy recollections,

Which, be they what they may,

Are yet the fountain light of all our day,—

Are yet the master-light of all our seeing,—

Upholds us, cherish and have powers to make

Our noisy years seem moments in the being

Of Eternal Silence.”

I close with the hope of a time when earthly values will be measured with a justice now deemed divine.  It is then that Africa and her sun-browned children will be saluted.  In that day men will gladly listen with open minds when she tells how in the deep and dark pre-historic night she made a stairway of the stars so that she might climb and light her torch from the altar fires of heaven, and how she has held its blaze aloft in the hall of ages to brighten the wavering footsteps of earthly nations.

Parker was not the first in making the assertion that African people have been unfairly written out of history.  For example, pioneering Black feminist and abolitionist Maria Stewart, a school teacher, spoke of the infinite potential inside Black people, trapped and caged through an oppressive society.  Soon after abolitionist William Loyd Garrison established his radical newspaper, The Liberator, in 1831, Stewart submitted essays that ran in the newspaper over the next year.  She was even bold enough risk her own safety in order to preach these ideas live, in front of mixed race audiences, as far back as the 1830s, making her the first woman in U.S. history to do so.  Looking at the words she spoke in 1833 in front of a mixed audience in Boston, one can see how visionary she was, and how remarkably courageous she was to say them in an official public forum:

Nothing would raise our respectability, add to our peace and happiness, and reflect so much honor upon us, as to be ourselves… the supporters… of scientific knowledge.  The rays of light and knowledge have been hid from our view; we have been taught to consider ourselves as scarce superior to the brute creation; and have performed the most laborious part of American drudgery.  Had we as a people received one half the early advantages the whites have received, I would defy the government of these United States to deprive us any longer of our rights…

… give the man of color an equal opportunity with the white from the cradle to manhood, and from manhood to the grave, and you would discover the dignified statesman, the man of science, and the philosopher. But there is no such opportunity for the sons of Africa … I fear that our powerful ones are fully determined that there never shall be … O ye sons of Africa, when will your voices be heard in our legislative halls, in defiance of your enemies, contending for equal rights and liberty? … Like King Solomon, who put neither nail nor hammer to the temple, yet received the praise; so also have the white Americans gained themselves a name, like the names of the great men that are in the earth, while in reality we have been their principal foundation and support. We have pursued the shadow, they have obtained the substance; we have performed the labor, they have received the profits; we have planted the vines, they have eaten the fruits of them.

Here, Stewart used the imagery of “rays of light” alongside knowledge as something kept away from Black people, in order to keep them in the darkness of their bondage. Similarly, she utilized “the shadow” as the endless toil Black people must endure only to provide material sustenance for their white enslavers.  Her message was powerful enough, and her assertiveness bold enough, that it resulted in a strong backlash, as the intersectional approach she took towards anti-racism and feminism was so far ahead of its time that it enraged people of all races and genders, including Black people.  Her willingness to criticize Black men from a Black feminist perspective certainly did not win her more support from that demographic, who wielded decidedly more power in the lecturing and activist circuit.  Shortly after her 1833 speech, she went back to teaching and eventually became head matron of the Freedman’s Hospital in Washington D.C.

Decades after Stewart delivered her speech and was quickly ostracized from public speaking, a Black freeborn man named Martin Delany, whose mother moved her family from Virginia to Pennsylvania in order to avoid being penalized for teaching her children to read and write, was able to speak in similar tones as Stewart, but without fear of such a backlash against him.  Men like William Loyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass were continuing to push radical abolitionist ideas into the mainstream, and the abolitionist movement was gaining steam, providing a relatively safe platform from which men could preach radical views.  Like Stewart before him, Delany wrote articles for The Liberator, and eventually formed his own newspaper with Frederick Douglas, called The North Star in 1848.

Although the two men were lifelong friends, they experienced a rift in 1850 that separated them ideologically for the remainder of their lives.  Douglass was an assimilationist who wanted to focus on creating an equal society in the United States.  Delany was more skeptical of that goal, and for him the final break came when he and two other students were the first Black students to ever be accepted into Harvard Medical School, only to then be hastily expelled, simply for being Black, following pressure from white students who did not want to have to share their education with Black peers.  That same year, the Fugitive Slave Act was enacted, indicating that progressive Northern Republicans were either unwilling or unable to protect Black people, even those born free (some of whom were kidnapped and enslaved under the new law), from the white supremacist behemoth emanating from the Deep South.  From that point, Delany gave up on the progressive, assimilationist ideal and became a separatist, under the belief that Black people in the Americas would need to form their own nations, in which they were in majority rule.

In 1852, Delany published a book titled ‘The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States,’ in which he wrote:

From the earliest period of the history of nations, the African race had been known as an industrious people, cultivators of the soil. The grain fields of Ethiopia and Egypt were the themes of the poet, and their garners, the subject of the historian. Like the present America, all the world went to Africa, to get a supply of commodities. Their massive piles of masonry, their skillful architecture, their subterranean vaults, their deep and mysterious wells, their extensive artificial channels, their mighty sculptured solid rocks, and provinces of stone quarries; gave indisputable evidence, of the hardihood of that race of people.

In a chapter titled ‘Capacity of Colored Men and Women as Citizen Members of Community he wrote:

Though shorn of their strength, disarmed of manhood, and stripped of every right, encouraged by the part performed by their brethren and fathers in the Revolutionary struggle—with no records of their deeds in history, and no means of knowing them save orally, as overheard from the mouths of their oppressors, and tradition as kept up among themselves—that memorable event, had not yet ceased its thrill through the new-born nation, until a glimmer of hope—a ray of light had beamed forth, and enlightened minds thought to be in total darkness. Minds of no ordinary character, but those which embraced business, professions, and literature—minds, which at once grasped the earth, encompassed the seas, soared into the air, and mounted the skies. And it is none the less creditable to the colored people, that among those who have stood the most conspicuous and shone the brightest in the earliest period of our history, there are those of pure and unmixed African blood. A credit—but that which is creditable to the African, cannot disgrace any into whose veins his blood may chance to flow.

 

Armed with the concepts that Black people had been instrumental in creating civilization itself and the “ray of light” that had shone itself through Black intellectual and artistic achievements over thousands of years, Delany abandoned all hopes for assimilation or reconciliation and proposed a separate nation altogether.  Along with his peers, such as prominent Minister Dr. Alexander Crummell, Delany planted the seeds that would sprout into Pan Africanism, the separatist movement aimed at creating a new Black nation away from white society.  The slogan “Africa for Africans” would echo through the 20th century through Marcus Garvey and his army of followers, but Delaney said it first, in the previous century.  Both Delany and Crummell visited Liberia, where they had hoped to water the seeds of exodus which had already been planted there, but to no avail.  Without the resources to provide a decent environment on which to grow a nation in the first place, the seeds that sprouted mostly withered away, as disease took hold and killed off at least 1/3 of the immigrants who attempted to live there.

When the Civil War took hold, Delany went back to the States and started recruiting Black men to enlist.  Highly successful in his efforts, Delany met with Abe Lincoln and requested a corp of Black soldiers led by Black officers, and was denied.  However, Lincoln was impressed and eventually appointed Delany to the rank of major, making him the first Black field officer in U.S. history.  Near the end of the war, Delany was tasked alongside Harriet Tubman with the goal of recruiting enslaved Black people in the South into the Union Army ranks, but it was not to be, as the war came to an end before this strategy could be put into practice. 

On April 14th, 1865, one week after General Lee surrendered, Major Robert Anderson, who had surrendered Fort Sumter to the Confederates four years to the day prior, led an elaborate ceremony in which he hoisted the American flag up in the same spot he had been forced to take it down from.  Delany watched the ceremony from the deck of the USS Planter, alongside Robert Smalls, the formerly enslaved man who had stolen the ship from the Confederacy and taken it past Confederate lines in order to turn it over to the Union, as well as the son of Denmark Vessey, an enslaved man who was executed for planning a slave uprising in Charleston in 1822.  Thousands attended the massive event that officially marked the end of the war, then had a massive series of parades and celebrations in the streets of Charleston.  Only hours later Lincoln was assassinated, ending the jubilation, and the next morning the flag was flown at half-mast.

Delany went on to write a book on the origins of race called Principia of Ethnology: The Origins of Races and Color, in which he posited that the origins of three races occurred when Noah gave birth to three sons with different complexions, Shem who was white, Japeth who was yellow, and Ham who was black.  All the 19th century pro-Black pioneers, including Stewart, Douglass, Garrison, Delany, and Crummell, took a religious approach to their doctrines.  They spoke of history in Christian terms, including the concept that Black and Brown people had descended from Ham, the cursed son of Noah, and thus the term ‘Hamitic’ was often used as a general descriptor for people of color.

In The Genesis 9:20-27, Noah’s sons are delegated into a hierarchy after Ham saw their father’s nakedness:

And Noah began to be an husbandman, and he planted a vineyard:  And he drank of the wine, and was drunken; and he was uncovered within his tent.  And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without.  And Shem and Japheth took a garment, and laid it upon both their shoulders, and went backward, and covered the nakedness of their father; and their faces were backward, and they saw not their father’s nakedness.  And Noah awoke from his wine, and knew what his younger son had done unto him.  And he said, Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.  And he said, Blessed be the Lord God of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.  God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.

Many white people utilized this myth in order to justify slavery (their punishment for the original sin of their ancestor Ham), while the pioneering Black intellects of the day merely sought to use it as a way to explain the existence of different races in the first place.

What separated George Wells Parker from these earlier thinkers was his rejection of religious ideology as a literal historical truth, and his insistence that the world is best understood through Enlightenment concepts of logic, reason, and evidence, a secularist approach that finally removed religion from the social and biological sciences.  On this topic, Parker minced no words, stating:

The goddess of Truth dwells in the temple of Nature, in the green woods, on the blue seas, and on the snowy summit of the hills.  The paths which lead to the noble divinity of truth and knowledge are the loving study of nature and its laws, the observation of the infinitely great star world with the aid of the telescope, and the infinitely tiny cell world with the aid of the microscope – not senseless ceremonies and unthinking prayers.

Parker sought to use science and reason to pierce through layers of false information produced by centuries of Eurocentric, white supremacist ideologies, to dig into the very core of the Aryan myth and uproot it from where it grew, but he needed a network in order to disseminate his ideas.  For these purposes, he found an ally in Reverend John Albert Williams, who in 1915 founded the Omaha branch of the NAACP, along with his own newspaper, The Monitor, which became Omaha’s prime Black newspaper for the next decade.  By this time, the ‘New Negro’ movement was in full swing across the nation, so Parker and Williams found themselves part of a national dialogue about race, racism, Black self-love, and perhaps most importantly, self defense against white supremacy, or even proactive measures to combat white supremacy.  As noted earlier, the NAACP sprouted from the Niagara Movement, which formed in direct response to the blatant racism displayed in the Old Plantation as it was presented in Buffalo, following its appearance in Omaha.  W.E.B. Du Bois was at the helm of the group at the national level, and they organized effectively to make it a formidable coalition by 1915, with membership doubling that year from 5,000 to 10,000, and they were just getting started.  By 1918, the NAACP’s flagship newspaper, The Crisis, would reach 100,000 households in the United States and their political influence became substantial.

Even though Parker stood on the more militant end of things, he and Williams worked together in order to combine various spectrums of Black political camps into one go-to newspaper where they all supported each other for a common cause.  Vestiges of Parker’s old Republican coalition-building idealism still resonated, even as he gradually shifted into a more militant stance.  While Parker and Williams attempted to be respectful and welcoming of varying pro-Black ideologies in The Monitor, editorially they pushed their own local brand of pragmatic pro-Black ideology, one that veered away from the incrementalism preached by Washington and his peers, but also didn’t push so hard as to turn off sympathetic white politicians and businessmen entirely. Williams took special care to cater to white concepts of respectability in his approach to combating white supremacy, something that would cause a rift between him and the more militant Parker down the road.

For several years, Parker’s ideas were published and promoted in The Monitor, and Williams appeared to subscribe at the very least to the intellectual foundations upon which Parker’s militancy stood.  That Williams was willing to publish and promote ‘The Children of the Sun’ in The Monitor indicates as much.  Even more, Williams joined Parker in forming a Pan-Africanist group called The Hamitic League of the World in 1917, predating Marcus Garvey’s much larger Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA)  by a year.  The Hamitic League was largely based on concepts put forth by Parker in his work, thereby giving Pan-Africanism a strong academic/intellectual base structure from which to grow.  Their willingness to take ownership and pride in supposedly being the descendants of Ham indicates another attempt at reversing the white supremacist myths prevalent at the time – Ham’s progeny not only as equals, but as the very creators of civilization.

The Hamitic League was based in Omaha but soon expanded to New York, where fellow pro-Black intellectual Cyril Briggs utilized his paper, The Crusader, as the official organ of the League as well as to continue promoting Parker’s work.  The era was ripe and rich with expanding forms of Black newspapers, which were considered vital in the counter-narrative against systemic white supremacy, and Parker and his ilk were major contributors to this ‘New Negro’ movement that was sweeping the nation.  The new vision for Black people was always contested, represented especially clearly along the lines of Washington and Du Bois, but the universal concept of Black freedom, equality, and empowerment ran through the core of each newspaper in each city.  The end goal was the same, but leaders of various factions disagreed about the best route to take in order to reach it.

The written word and printing press remained potent in the early 20th century, but some privileged visionaries were already moving on to potentially bigger and better things.  From the time of the Omaha Exposition through the time of the New Negro Movement, the moving picture was making its debut in the human saga, setting the stage for Hollywood to become one of the most influential media hubs in all of history.  While Parker and company moved to the hum of the printing press, Dixon and his ilk were already looking at film as the future of media, and making moves based on this assumption.  Dixon linked up with groundbreaking film maker, fellow Southerner and ‘Lost Cause’ sympathizer D.W. Griffith, to create  Hollywood’s first blockbuster smash hit ‘The Birth of a Nation.’  While Dixon’s name usually isn’t attached to the film and its legacy, it was based entirely off his novel, ‘The Clansman,’ and created to a large degree with his guidance.  On the power of film, Dixon stated:

The moving picture man, author and producer and exhibitor should take himself more seriously.  He is not merely the purveyor of a form of amusement.  He is leading a revolution in the development of humanity – as profound a revolution as that which followed the first invention of printing.  The new film press uses the rays of the sun to etch thoughts on yellow parchment – instead of dull printer’s ink.

Thus, Dixon and Griffith were the first to utilize the “rays of the sun to etch” white supremacist propaganda into the fabric of American society.  Dixon was not speaking in metaphor.  As these were some of the very earliest days in the pioneering field of film making, shooting night scenes was not yet feasible, so artificial lighting was not yet widely used.  The cameraman and cinematographer Billy Bitzer, who captured the sun rays that illuminated the white supremacist film, stated:

“There was no night photography, of course, and it was all done in sunlight, even the assassination of President Lincoln in Ford’s Theater.

The era of American expansionism, the ‘taming’ of the Wild West, the final destruction of Indigenous autonomy, the New Negro Movement, and the birth of film all coincided at the turn of the century, in Omaha and across the nation.  The very first footage ever shot in the state of Nebraska was made in the light of the sun, of President McKinley giving his imperialist speech at the 1898 Exposition in Omaha.  That footage has apparently been lost to history.  The earliest surviving footage ever shot in Nebraska was created in 1900 by none other than Billy Bitzer, who tied a camera to the front of a Union Pacific Railroad car and filmed as it passed over the Missouri River from Council Bluffs into Omaha.

Gurdon Wattles, the chairman of the Omaha Exposition, who escorted McKinley into the Exposition grounds and introduced him before his speech, was a man  intrigued enough by film in these early days to make major investments in it.  He organized a team of local leaders and academics to produce a film advertising Nebraska’s expansive agricultural productive value as well as its metropolitan center Omaha, to be shown at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition held in St. Louis in 1904.  Between 1903 and 1904, they filmed the harvesting of wheat and corn in rural areas, and by attaching a camera to a streetcar as it ran across downtown Omaha during the busiest time of day, captured the hustle and bustle of the city.  At the end of shooting, 10,000 feet of film had been produced.  University of Nebraska professor E.H. Barbour sketched the ideas for the films and for the theater they would be shown in.

Instead of constructing a Nebraska state building, as all the other states did, Wattles and company decided to house a Nebraska pavilion within the Palace of Agriculture, setting the state apart from the rest.  Famed architect Thomas Kimball designed a 98 x 52 foot space designed to advertise Nebraska to the world.  Upon entering the pavilion, visitors would pass through several areas, including a reception room, a ‘Palace of Horticulture,’ a ‘Palace of Eduction,’ and a stuffed, world award-winning steer to show off Nebraska’s immense cattle industry.  Eventually they would make their way to the main attraction, which was the novel movie theater everyone was talking about.  The entire structure was housed within the Nebraska Pavilion, described in the ‘Report of the Nebraska State Commission to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition’ in some detail:

A huge tower, completely covered with ears of corn and surmounted by a great ball and eagle, was erected.  Four large pyramids of solid corn flanked the tower, and the entire space was enclosed with long tables where was shown the very best corn of the state.  Here over eight-two varieties of corn were shown, Nebraska exhibiting more distinct varieties of corn than all other corn states showing in the exposition.  Here also was shown a collection of twenty-six bottles of products from corn.

The theater was a huge success, so much so that the original plan to have two showings per day had to be adjusted to meet demand, and shows were given every half hour from 10am to 6pm, along with a lecturer who would narrate the scenes and provide facts to further showcase the state.  Footage of President McKinley’s speech, along with scenes of farmers, ranchers, and city life, left audiences stunned, the new medium of film offering an exciting novelty experience different from the rest of the state exhibits.  The power of cinema was on display, the screen making its early appearance in the politics of a state government as a persuasive force.   Even as viewers of today would likely consider the film a snooze-fest, people in 1904 crowded into a 100-seat theater, which was later expanded by another 100 seats to meet the high demand.  The numbers tracked by the State Commission Report demonstrate just how high demand for moving pictures were, even in their earliest stages of development, even if they merely showed scenes of daily life in the Cornhusker state.  Total attendance reached 70,00 per month, averaging well over 200 viewers per showing, meaning people were willing to stand in order to see the film.

The State Commission Report went on to claim the Nebraska theater:

… established a new idea in the matter of advertising a state’s resources and advancement at an exposition.  Shortly after the Nebraska moving pictures were installed and presented to the public, the idea was copied by other states and by various larger manufacturing corporations and put into execution at the exposition… Moving picture experts also declare that the Nebraska pictures have created a demand of a new kind for work in their line.  Since the Nebraska Commission began showing its pictures, an entirely new idea has been evolved.  The moving picture, from a purely entertaining feature, has advanced into the educational and scientific field.

The educational nature of the film didn’t make it any less desirable.  Of its many fans, the Nebraska theater’s most enthusiastic was none other than Geronimo, who at age 74 only had five years left to live.  By this point the old man had learned how to utilize his fame to earn money, much of which he gave to Apache children to help them get an education.  He learned how to write his name in English lettering and sold these to lines of white tourists eager to purchase a piece of the legend to take back home and show off.  He watched the Nebraska film over and over again, seemingly entranced by the moving images of farmer, cattle, city life, and especially the shots of wildlife, which he enjoyed most.  Geronimo was so taken by the experience that he decided to share the magic of motion picture with a group of Apache school kids.

The image of Geronimo, an old, frail man struggling with alcoholism and womanizing, fairly alone by this time (towards the end, he had one daughter who stayed around to take care of him), sitting in a dark movie theater surrounded by all the trappings of Western civilization and “latter-day gods” of industry, enjoying a moving picture with Apache school children is striking.  He had no choice but to embrace the very same kinds of technologies that had destroyed his people, and was giving his blessing to the future Apache leaders, the children, to get acquainted with the ways of the white man, to learn them and utilize them for their own well being.

The tamed savage, gently embraced by the peaceful lady liberty, was displayed as a symbol of Manifest Destiny’s triumph not only in the artwork of the St. Louis Exposition itself, but in newspapers of the day in order to tell the story of the reformed Geronimo as an individual.  ‘Little Miss St. Louis,’ embodiment Christian society, liberty, innocence, and the maternal gaze from which white society viewed the Indigenous peoples they had successfully conquered, colonized, and possessed, offers Geronimo the pipe of peace.  In the Nebraska movie theater, Geronimo made peace with the fate of his Indigenous peers, to whatever degree that was possible for a man who’d experienced the traumatic journey he had.  He was giving the Apache children some light, however little it may have been, in the darkness of what had become of his peoples’ ways of life, what had become of their autonomy to live in the ways authentic to them.  He was endorsing the inevitability that the white man’s culture would annihilate his own, and attempting to make peace with that horrible truth.

The power of imagery to carry propagandistic messages about moral virtues, the nature of power dynamics, and as promotional material was nothing new at the turn of the 20th century.  Images have been used for thousands of years for these exact purposes.  But with the advent of the moving picture, opportunities opened for those with the vision and access to utilize it for these purposes.  As early as February 1898, the idea of filming the impending war against Spain was already in circulation.  Thomas Edison and and some of his competitors at Vitagraph Studios ended up capturing film of the war, which was then utilized as the very first propaganda films in history.  At the 1898 Exposition in Omaha, a movie theater housed Edison’s films, a popular attraction which inspired Wattles to shoot the film of Nebraska only five years later.

 

In the decade after the St. Louis Exposition of 1904, hundreds of inventors experimented with new technologies, pushing the medium to new levels of efficiency and popularity.  The mixture of entertainment and education continued to blur as people crowded into theaters to watch boxing matches, news reels, and the first series of feature films starring professional actors.  But it was a single 1915 film, ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ that finally broke the seal off the lid of power waiting to be unleashed by film, and the kind of hold it can have over an entire nation as its captive audience.  D.W. Griffith, armed with the cinematographic talents of Billy Bitzer and the powerful narrative already penned by Thomas Dixon, utilized a dizzying array of innovative techniques for the film, which combined into the first blockbuster film in history, which every American had to see at least once, if not multiple times in the theater.  The film sold out in cities across the nation for months on end, further spreading the white supremacist propaganda Dixon added to the already overwhelming level of anti-Black racism and violence that permeated through society.

Despite the obvious and blatant racist message at the core of the film, it passed the National Board of Censorship of Motion Pictures, a group composed almost entirely of white women, without issue.  Then with the movie’s premier in Los Angeles, local NAACP leadership appealed to local censors, the mayor, chief of police, and city council, but to no avail.  Even as The Sims Act of 1912 outlawed interstate transport of boxing films, in effort to subvert the racialized performances of boxer Jack Johnson successfully dominating white athletes in the art of pugilism, anticipating these images would provoke bloodshed, white America appeared unwilling to extend its hand of censorship to Dixon and Griffith’s racist propaganda.  The fledgling NAACP, at 5,000 members nationally, had a steep mountain to climb if it were to stop the rising tide of approval ‘Birth’ was gathering.

For those arguing to ban the film, there was precedent.  In the wake of the Atlanta race riot in 1906, Dixon’s wildly popular theater production for ‘The Clansman,’ the novel upon which ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was based, was banned in several cities, including Macon, Montgomery, and Philadelphia.  The reasoning was obvious, with different critic only varying in their descriptions of the dangers it posed to society.  The play had already been tied to the lynching of a Black man in Georgia the previous year, and tensions were at a fever pitch.  The Washington Post called for a ban in D.C., calling the play a “spark in a powder house.”  In Philadelphia, when the mayor refused to stop the production, Black residents came out in number to physically confront it, and all who patronized it, with nonviolent direct action.

According to the New York Age, a crowd of a couple hundred protestors first gathered and then:

… by 8 o’clock there were 3,000 filing the streets and jeering those who entered the theatre.  The crowd was very orderly, and well under the control of its leaders… But inside the theatre a more unruly set had gathered in the gallery and as soon as the curtain rose began to pelt the actors with fragrant eggs and aged vegetables.  This fusillade threw the audience into a panic…

One representative of the activists stated:

The gathering of our citizens last night was not that of a riotous or unruly mob.  We came as orderly, peaceful citizens to show by our presence in large numbers our indignation at such a base production.  We were not riotous, but the play is, and it incites to riot and to hatred of our people all who see it….

This was a debate about art and censorship that rages through society to this day, a debate where there are some clear lines to be drawn, and where much grey area and many, perhaps unanswerable, questions lurk.  Surely art can’t be considered the primary cause of violence in this world, lest we attribute World War II and The Holocaust to Hitler’s obsession with the virulently anti-semitic composer Richard Wagner and his art, which frequently contained violent themes.  Does Shakespeare, with its rape, incest, murder, and infanticide cause violence?  Does the Old Testament, with all the ingredients of Shakespeare plus god-ordained genocide, cause violence?  Surely the popular opinion is that they absolutely don’t, yet a Pew poll from 2007 showed 70% of Americans think rap music causes violence.  If we move back through the 1950s and back to the time of ‘The Clansman,’ surely there were similar views about rock n roll and jazz music, which have been well documented.  The double standard is glaring, making hypocrites of people who are far too often unaware of how their own deeply embedded racist worldview shapes their opinions on things.

The difference, of course, is almost entirely racial in nature.  Shakespeare, Wagner, Hitler, and the Abrahamic god himself (after whiteness appropriated him), are considered white, while jazz, rock n roll, and rap music are, or at least were, considered Black.  Footage of Jack Johnson making fools of his opponents terrified white society so profoundly that they quickly moved to ban it at the national level, lest it cause violence, and these were merely images of boxing matches between consenting, professional athletes of different racial categories, competing according to the rules of the sport.  Yet Dixon’s work, which was clearly designed to evoke anti-Black racism, was only banned by a few scattered local authorities.  Even though the federal Supreme Court ruled in the 1915 Mutual Film Corp. v. Industrial Commission of Ohio case that films were not protected under the first amendment, and were subject to state discretion in terms of licensing, few state authorities moved to ban ‘Birth.’   The national consensus was to let the the white supremacist propaganda play, because it was a masterful work of art regardless of how anyone might interpret its message.

One might argue that if rap music doesn’t cause violence then neither does Dixon’s pieces of theater, but this argument would fail to recognize how blatantly and overtly propagandistic Dixon was in attempting to oppress Black people through his works.  As documented earlier, Dixon’s protagonists spewed racist diatribes as if they were Shakespearean literary masterpieces, as if they were the moral teachings of the wisest philosopher.  In ‘The Clansman,’ as in all his novels, his heroes spoke in ornate passages that gave white supremacy a sort of Biblical language for white supremacists to latch onto, spread, and indoctrinate with:

Black hordes of former slaves, with the intelligence of children and the instincts of savages, armed with modern rifles, parade daily in front of their unarmed former masters. A white man has no right a negro need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure it? When Goth and Vandal barbarians overran Rome, the negro was the slave of the Roman Empire. The savages of the North blew out the light of Ancient Civilization, but in all the dark ages which followed they never dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his former master! No people in the history of the world have ever before been so basely betrayed, so wantonly humiliated and degraded!…

In the final passages of the novel, Dixon planted the seeds that would become the calling card for the second wave of KKK that sprang into existence from his propaganda, which leapt from the pages of his books and later the flickering images on movie screens captured by the light of the sun, the burning cross which symbolized the “revolutionist” white supremacist warfare against attempts to destroy Civilization itself through Black suffrage and attempts at reaching equal status, which Dixon and his ilk automatically viewed as Black dominance:

At twelve o’clock Ben stood at the gate with Elsie.

“Your fate hangs in the balance of this election to-night,” she said. “I’ll share it with you, success or failure, life or death.”

“Success, not failure,” he answered firmly. “The Grand Dragons of six States have already wired victory. Look at our lights on the mountains! They are ablaze—range on range our signals gleam until the Fiery Cross is lost among the stars!”

“What does it mean?” she whispered.

“That I am a successful revolutionist—that Civilization has been saved, and the South redeemed from shame.”

Earlier in the novel, Dixon introduced the concept of the burning cross as a symbol for the KKK, a symbol that had not been used since the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, and was never used by the first wave of KKK back in the Reconstruction era.  Dixon first conceived the idea in his novel, in a scene where a Klansman holds a burning cross with a Black man bound and gagged on the ground beneath him.  The Black man had raped an angelic white Southern woman, and rather than live with the shame of having been tainted, she and her mother jump off a cliff to their deaths.  A variation of this scene appears in ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ in a scene where a Black man asks a white Southern woman for her hand in marriage and she refuses, so he chases her off a cliff, where she falls to her death.  In response, the KKK capture the captain and hold a “trial” in which the grand wizard convicts him on the spot, in front of a burning cross.  After killing the captain, the KKK dump the man’s body at the doorstep of South Carolina’s governor, with the words KKK and a skull and bones logo left on the body, an act of white supremacist terrorism framed as heroic vigilante justice, in response the legalization of interracial marriage.  As usual, laws promoting basic equal rights were viewed as acts of tyranny in the eyes of white Southerners.  The iconic movie poster also showed a Klansman on horseback holding up the burning cross, a powerful symbol that captivated the hearts and minds of millions across the nation.

The film and novels by themselves were never enough to revive the Klan from a few thousand members in 1915 to five or six million a decade later.  Dixon and Griffith both went on the offensive, arguing the film promoted peace and that its suppression would be ‘intolerance’ of the truth about the Reconstruction era, a continuation of the Lost Cause mythology but this time playing out not within academic circles, but in American popular culture.  Both men armed themselves with propaganda pamphlets to spread around to their audiences.  Dixon had already published a pamphlet defending the written and theatrical versions of ‘The Clansman,’ which was handed out at showings of the play.  The pamphlet included a biographical background of Dixon, a synopsis of the play, the story of how the play came to be, and then the author’s “Famous Articles,” which were propaganda that would have made Joseph Goebbels proud.  Of course, Dixon included a photo of himself, legs crossed, pen and pad in hand, with the smug look of a talented, self-satisfied, racist propagandist written across his face.  His bragging rights were backed up by the overwhelming popularity of his work.

The biographical section in Dixon’s pamphlet, written by E.F. Harkins, reads as a propaganda piece propping up Dixon’s character and defending his work much in the way a political advisor would spin a story for maximum affect.  First, Harkins summarized Dixon’s thesis against Reconstruction and progressive views on race relations:

“Can the Ethiopian change his skin or the leopard his spots?”  Can the thoughtful white man here admit the negro to full social and political equality?  Possibly some Northerners would vote for a negro of Dr. Booker T. Washington’s stamp for Presient of the United States.  Mr. Roosevelt has had Doctor Washington at dinner in the White House.  But would the most sympathetic Northern negromanic, a refined, aristocratic white man, courage and permit a negro to marry into his family?

Then Harkins simply allowed Dixon to defend his own work, in his own words:

“I have not sought to arouse race hatred or prejudice.  For the negro I have the friendliest feelings and the profoundest pity… I claim the book is an authentic human document, and I know it is the most important moral deed of my life.  There is not a bitter or malignant sentence in it.  It may shock the prejudices of those who have idealized or worshipped the negro as canonized in ‘Uncle Tom.’  Is it not time they heard the whole truth?  They have learned only one side for forty years… The only question for a critic to determine when discussing my moral right to publish such a book is this: Is the record of life given important and authentic?  If eighteen millions of Southern people, who at present rule, believe what my book expresses is it not well to know it?  I assert that they do believe it, and the number of Southern white people today who disagree with ‘The Leopard’s Spots’ could all be housed in a half-acre lot.  I challenge any man to deny this.  If it is true, is it not of tremendous importance that the whole nation shall know it?”

In essence, Dixon’s argument falls down to the fallacious reasoning that if a lot of people think something is true, then it must be true.  If we applied this same logic to the time of Copernicus, then the truth was that the Sun revolves around the Earth, until the Copernican Revolution persuaded the majority of people that the Earth actually revolves around the Sun, at which point that then became the truth.  Dixon would have a point if he were in a courtroom with a bunch of unbiased eyewitnesses, but the Civil War and its aftermath wasn’t exactly the type of event that produced unbiased parties.  The entire nation was at war, after all.  And can it be that if a bunch of white supremacists in the South say Black people are savage beasts out to rape and pillage white civilization, then it must be true?  Of course it seems ridiculous to most people today, but Dixon apparently persuaded many people, including Northerners, a century ago.

Dixon’s diatribe continues:

I have for the negro race only pity and sympathy, though every large convention of Negroes since the appearance of my first historical novel on the race problem have gone out of their way to denounce me personally and declare my books caricatures and libels on their people.  Their mistake is a natural one.  My books are hard reading for a Negro, and yet the Negroes, in denouncing them, are unwittingly denouncing one of their best friends. 

I have been intimately associated with Negroes since the morning of my birth during the Civil War.  My household servants are all Negroes.  I took them to Boston with me, moved them to New York, and they now have entire charge of my Virginia home.  The first row I ever had on the Negro problem was when I moved to Boston from the South to take charge of a fashionable church at the Hub.  I attempted to import my baby’s Negro nurse into a Boston hotel.  The proprietor informed me that no “coon” could occupy a room in his house in any capacity, either as guest or servant.  I gave him a piece of my mind and left within an hour…

… My books and plays are simply merciless records of conditions as they exist, conditions that can have but one ending if they are not honestly and fearlessly faced.

These “conditions,” as he went on to explain, are that by the year 2000 there will be “60 Million Negroes” (there were in fact 34 million Black people living in the U.S. at the time), and that because the forces working against Black people are too strong, because white supremacy is so overwhelmingly popular, there will inevitably be a race war.  In order to justify the validity of this concept, he cited the musings of one British philosopher named Frederic Harrison.  In other words, Dixon’s argument was that he couldn’t possibly be racist and was actually Black peoples’ best friend because he grew up having Black people working for him and his family, and got mad one time when a Northerner wouldn’t let a Black woman breastfeed his own child, in the chattel slavery tradition. And if anyone called out the blatantly racist portrayals of Black people in his work, well that was just because it’s a tough truth that Black people are savage beasts (and also he wants us to know he isn’t racist.)  The mental gymnastics Dixon utilized are gargantuan in scale, obviously ridiculous on their face, but again, these ideas caught fire around the nation and spread the idea of the KKK as heroic Christian superheroes from Atlanta to New York and San Francisco.

Then, as if to announce to the world that his protagonists’ racist statements reflect his own racist views, he recycled a line one of his protagonists in ‘The Clansman’ uses to illustrate his own white supremacist ideology:

Education is the development of that which is. Since the dawn of history the negro has owned the continent of Africa—rich beyond the dream of poet’s fancy, crunching acres of diamonds beneath his bare black feet. Yet he never picked one up from the dust until a white man showed to him its glittering light. His land swarmed with powerful and docile animals, yet he never dreamed a harness, cart, or sled. A hunter by necessity, he never made an axe, spear, or arrowhead worth preserving beyond the moment of its use. He lived as an ox, content to graze for an hour. In a land of stone and timber he never sawed a foot of lumber, carved a block, or built a house save of broken sticks and mud. With league on league of ocean strand and miles of inland seas, for four thousand years he watched their surface ripple under the wind, heard the thunder of the surf on his beach, the howl of the storm over his head, gazed on the dim blue horizon calling him to worlds that lie beyond, and yet he never dreamed a sail!

In other sections of the essay, Dixon’s language wasn’t as restrained:

Expressed even in the most brutal terms of Anglo-Saxon superiority there is here an irreducible fact.  It is possibly true, as the Negro, Professor Kelly Miller, claims that the Anglo-Saxon is “the most arrogant and rapacious, the most exclusive and intolerant race in history.”  Even so, what answer can be given to his cold-blooded proposition: “Can you change the color of the Negro’s skin, the kink of his hair, the bulge of his lip or the beat of his heart with a spelling book or a machine?”

… This creature, with a racial record of four thousand years of incapacity, half-child, half-animal, the sport of impulse, whim and conceit, pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw, a being who, left to his will, roams at night and sleeps in the day, whose native tongue has framed no word of love, whose passions once aroused are as the tiger’s – equality is the law of our life! – when he is educated and ceases to fill his useful sphere as servant and peasant, what are you going to do with him?

Through implication, Dixon appears to have agreed with Professor Miller’s assessment that white people are “the most arrogant and rapacious, the most exclusive and intolerant race in history,” then offers a critical assessment of his own life work’s thesis, that you can’t change a Black person’s savage nature, calling it “cold-blooded.”  Here, Dixon shows himself more clearly than in the dodgy, gaslighting language where he claimed to be Black peoples’ best friend.  His true nasty soul came to light and it’s clear he was *proud* of being arrogant, rapacious, exclusive, intolerant, and cold-blooded.  It was these qualities, in his view, that made the white race so superior to others.  In the zero-sum worldview of the racist, he was afraid that in empathizing and working with Black people to form a more equal society, whiteness would then become dominated by other races who beat them at their own game.

It’s here that Dixon’s argument becomes economic, rather than purely racial.  He went on to spend quite a bit of space attacking Booker T Washington and the Tuskegee Institute:

If there is one thing a Southern white man cannot endure it is an educated Negro.  What’s to be the end of it if the two races are to live forever side by side in the South?  Mr. Washington says: “Give the black man so much skill and brains that he can cut oats like the white man – then he can compete with him.”

And then the real tragedy will begin.  Does any sane man believe that when the Negro ceases to work under the direction of the Southern white man, this “arrogant,” “rapacious” and intolerant race will allow the Negro to master his industrial system, take the bread from his mouth, crowd him to the wall and place a mortgage on his house?  Competition is war- the most fierce and brutal of all its forms.  Could fatuity reach a sublimer height than the idea that the white man will stand idly by and see this performance?  What will he do when put to the test?  He will do exactly what his white neighbor in the North does when the Negro threatens his bread – kill him!

Finally, Dixon laid out his conspiracy-ridden worldview in defense of the Klan and all it stands for, a framework hinging upon the prospect of Thaddeus Stevens’ attempt to confiscate Southern land from the local aristocrats and distribute it evenly between people, including formerly enslaved Black people, as a form of reparations for the war.  His effort failed, of course, and Andrew Johnson’s corrupt administration bowed to the demands of the Southern oligarchs and the terrorist organization they utilized to maintain the racial apartheid state, at least as close in form as they could, to the former system of chattel slavery they had become so used to and dependent upon.  In Dixon’s worldview, the KKK saved civilization itself, through its acts of terrorism:

Mr. Stevens determined to blot the old South from the map, confiscate the property of its citizens, give it to the negroes, deprive the whites of the ballot, send their leaders into beggared exile, enfranchise the negro and make him the master of every state from the James to the Rio Grande…

… During this period in South Carolina 80,000 armed negro troops, answerable to no authority save the savage instincts of their officers, terrorized the state and not a single white man was allowed to bear arms.  Hordes of former slaves, with the intelligence of children and the instincts of savages, armed with modern rifles, paraded daily before their former masters.  The children of the breed of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh had been made subject to the spawn of an African jungle.  When Goth and Vandal overran Rome and blew out the light of civilization they never dreamed the infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his white master and lay his claws upon his daughter… The Ku Klux Klan, a secret oath-bound brotherhood, rose, disarmed every negro and restored Aryan civilization. 

As if to add a cherry on top of his rabid conspiratorial rants, in his obsession with interracial sex, romance, and marriage, Dixon tied Stevens’ radicalism to his ‘wench,’ a “yellow vampire” mulatto woman of “extraordinary animal beauty” whom he claimed poisoned his mind and sat by his side as he lay dying, “sinking with this woman into the night of negroid animalism.”  As usual, the paranoid racist mind tied love between people of different races into the very fabric of society coming undone at the seams.  Dixon would recycle these same themes into all his subsequent works, the mark of a man who had found his brand, which became wildly popular, and who appears to have been a true believer in all the racist ramblings he scribbled onto paper from beginning to end.

By the time ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was released, both Dixon and Griffith were prepared for the inevitable storm of criticism, and unleashed a blitz of propaganda in defense of the film, and of film in general, as an attack on freedom of speech and, predictably, on civilization itself.  Griffith’s version of Dixon’s propaganda pamphlet was called, ‘The Rise and Fall of Free Speech in America.’  Its central claim centered around the concept of ‘tolerance’ and ‘intolerance,’ tying attempts to suppress their film into the poisoning of Socrates, the burning of Joan of Arc, even the crucifixion of Jesus.  If censors wish to suppress images of violence, Griffith argued, then they would be denying the role of the villain in any Shakespearean play, and even in the Bible itself, if the censors followed their argument to its logical conclusion.  He also made the case that censorship of film implies a slippery slope towards suppression of print media, and therefore would hasten the decline of civilization.

In contrast, according to Griffith, allowing film to flourish and depict historical conflict offers “light and progress” for people who can learn as much history from three hours of a film like ‘Birth’ than they could from reading entire volumes of books.  This allows humanity to learn from the mistakes of our past, thereby reducing the chances of war breaking out over lack of understanding.  In utilizing film as an educational tool, he argued, “the deadly monotony of the cheerless existence of millions would be brightened by this new art, two of the chief causes making war possible would be removed.  The motion picture is war’s greatest antidote.”  He then quoted an unnamed source, only described as an “eminent divine,” who described film as a medium that “teaches history by lighting.”  (This quote has since been attributed to Woodrow Wilson, a close friend and old schoolmate of Dixon’s, but the attribution has been heavily disputed.  It would follow, though, in line with Wilson’s decision to screen the film at the White House and the fact his own name appears in the film, waxing poetic about the heroism of the KKK.)

Like with all effective propaganda, Griffith’s pamphlet included numerous illustrations to demonstrate Griffith’s main arguments.  On the front cover, Lady Liberty herself is shackled in chains.

Unlike Dixon’s racist tirades full of child-like bitterness and ignorance, Griffith’s approach is not without merit in terms of the arguments themselves.  It is true that villains, and therefore villainous human behavior such as violence, are necessary components to storytelling, and are part of all the classics nobody would think of censoring, including The Bible.  It’s also true that any form of censorship ought to be scrutinized heavily before it’s enacted, and every effort must be made to keep it from overreach, lest it spread to places where it shouldn’t exist.  Film has also proven to be an incredibly powerful tool in the field of education.

However, when the context of any piece of artistic work, literary, theatrical, cinematic, or otherwise, involves the systemic oppression and dehumanization of entire groups of humanity, and the art overtly aims to contribute to that oppression and dehumanization, then the standard rules and ethics surrounding censorship no longer apply.  In 1915, the world had not yet seen Leni Riefenstahl and The Holocaust.  Even to this day, humanity has yet to fully process exactly how and why something like that could happen, and how Nazi works of racist propaganda helped make it possible.  The power of harnessing light to project images onto a screen had not yet been fully realized, and the dangers that can come from it not yet witnessed.  Griffith made the case that teaching “history with lightning” through film is our best shot at learning from the mistakes of the past, but was so blinded by his own embedded white supremacist worldview, and certainly to a large degree by his own ego and vanity, to see that his work was a massive punch down onto one of the most vulnerable groups of people in the world.  In other words, he failed to anticipate the problems his own work might contribute to the historical mistakes humanity must study in order to avoid repeating again in the future.

Leaders of the NAACP were not so blind.  They lobbied the National Board of Censors and at one point came away from a meeting convinced the second, and most virulently racist, half of the film would be cut.  This turned out not to be true, as the censors held a subsequent meeting with Griffith in which he promised to make a few changes, which ended up being only cosmetic, and the mildly re-cut version was approved by the Board by a vote of 12 to 9.  The NAACP then appealed to Mayor Mitchel of New York, who seemed at least somewhat sympathetic to their concerns.  A delegation of 500 members of NAACP, clergymen, and sympathetic censorship authorities presented their case at City Hall, with W.E.B. Du Bois was at the helm.

The moment of unity was a mirage.  Booker T. Washington, clinging to relevancy in his waning years, threw a wrench in Du Bois’ wheels by sending one of his cronies to meet with the mayor a week before the delegation at City Hall, convincing him to screen the film at once and take decisive action.  Mayor Mitchel informed the NAACP delegates that he had already seen the film and spoken with its producers, and they had agreed to cut two objectionable scenes from the film, at the mayor’s request.  Washington said he was proud to have taken “some of the wind out of their sails,” referring to his rival Du Bois’ organization.  Of course, Dixon and Griffith only made a few more cosmetic cuts to the film, the most ludicrous scenes (a forced marriage and a Black character chasing the white woman off the cliff) remained.  They had successfully outmaneuvered the NAACP and the mayor of New York simply by lying their way through it all.

By the time of its New York Premier, he had inserted a new slide into the beginning of the film in a ‘Plea for the art of the motion picture,’ framing the battle as one of showing the “dark side of wrong” and illuminating the “bright side of virtue,” and repeating the line about classic works being granted freedom of expression, implying that film was being unfairly singled out:

After numerous attempts to nip the spread of ‘Birth’ at the bud failed at the national level, it became the responsibility of local NAACP chapters to combat the film in their own cities.  The battles were fought in a tug of war fashion, with some city officials offering promising moments solidarity, but ultimately, the film always ended up being shown regardless.  City leadership in Pittsburgh and a few other cities had at least given lip service to banning the showing of the film, and in Omaha, John Albert Williams, George Wells Parker, and the staff of The Monitor sounded off on the issue, offering Pittsburgh as a model for other cities to copy.  They offered a copy of a resolution circulating against the film that laid out some of the basic arguments against the film:

WHEREAS, The colored race has been humiliated by the exhibition in various cities of this country of moving picture films which are not true to the life of these worthy citizens of this republic, and

WHEREAS, No race of people in modern time has made greater progress in civilization and are more worthy of praise, rather than libel, for the upward climb they have made from their former position of servitude to that of first class American citizens, therefore be it.

RESOLVED, That the Mayor be and is herby requested to direct the Director of the Department of Public Safety to inaugurate a rigid censorship of all films in which this race is depicted and is present the exhibition of such reels as ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ or any similar moving picture which tends to bring disgrace, criticism or scorn on the colored people of our city.

At the tail end of this issue of The Monitor, a brief editorial made the case that if ‘Birth’ were to be shown in Omaha, city leadership would be expected to make similar stands against it as had been seen in other cities before it:

We have abundant grounds for encouragement in the growing sentiment in many parts of the country to remove causes of irritation by forbidding the presentation of moving pictures and plays which misrepresent our race and create prejudice.  In this connection the action of the Pittsburg, Pa. city council, noted on the first page of this issue, is significant and highly gratifying to all lovers of truth and justice.  Similar action has been taken in other cities.  Should an attempt be made to show these photoplay here, we know that our mayor and city commission will fall in line with the authorities of Boston, Chicago, Pittsburg, Cleveland, St. Paul and other cities in forbidding their presentation with the objectionable features against which protest has been made. 

Unfortunately, the mayor of Pittsburgh had offered a caveat to his support to ban the film.  He would prevent the showing of the film “unless forced by courts to do so,” which in city after city across the nation, courts did.  In Omaha, the outcome was no different.  Faced with an overwhelming blitz of advertising and raving reviews in the local papers, Williams and Parker were swinging against a Goliath they didn’t quite have the reach to knock down, let alone land any decisive blows against.  The Brandeis Theater downtown, a city jewel only five years old at the time, hosted the film against all objections, and the people of Omaha and its surrounding area flocked to see what was billed as nothing less than the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”  Local advertisements even contained defenses of the film in and of themselves.  On its opening day in Omaha, November 14th, Booker T. Washington passed away, leaving the door open to W.E.B. Du Bois and his NAACP peers, including John Albert Williams, to take the helm as the leaders of Black people in their fight for equality.

As the gears of Dixon and Griffith’s propaganda machine churned, the World Herald simultaneously ran editorials praising the film’s majesty, with lines that could have been written by Dixon and Griffith themselves:

Never before has matter in glowing and highly, but artistically colored action, been so masterfully and effectively brought out by means of musical accompaniment as in “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s photo spectacle, now being presented at the Brandeis theater.  Every passage is musically explained to every amazed spectator and listener.  “The Birth of a Nation” inspires patriotism, teaches history, prolongs peace and commands respect for music better than any offering before public display.

So completely swept away that all sense of everything but the rapidly unfolding scenes before you is lost, the spectator of “The Birth of a Nation” entirely forgets that he is watching a picture, and enjoys this colossal spectacle exactly as he would if it were being presented in actuality in a gigantic coliseum.

“The Birth of a Nation” may injure the feelings of some, and it may open wounds long healed in others, but when one stops to realize that the picture is merely an historic presentation of facts as they were more than half a century ago, there is no reason to feel the slightest offense.

… The second half of the picture has been called an exposition of “the second struggle between the north and the south,” a struggle caused by an attempt to impose carpet-bagger rule upon the conquered states.  The wild adventures and achievements of the Ku-Klux-Klan dominate the final scenes, which yield a happy ending to a double romance of the southern and northern sweethearts.

… When a photo-play can force a modern day audience into tears at intervals of ten seconds through a period of two and a half hours, or bring this same audience to its feet in a wild frenzy of cheering, it must be admitted that the picture is a masterpiece.  This is exactly what “The Birth of a Nation” does.  It cannot be helped.  One is but human, and humanity, the world over, expresses its emotions, either with tears or cheering.

This wonderful photoplay could be described in columns; it is entirely too large a thing to be intelligently criticized in a brief space.  Suffice to say that whoever misses it will live to regret the day. It is a historic and histrionic masterpiece that everyone should view – not once, but several times.

The people of Omaha and its surrounding area took the World Herald’s advice, as by the end of its first record-breaking six week run, about one in four people in the region had already seen the film.

The World Herald even offered a long-winded defense of the film which ultimately boiled down to the straw man argument that the film’s critics expected it to be 100% objective truth without a hint of bias:

That stupendous photo play, “The Birth of a Nation,” is now showing in Omaha, and in Omaha as elsewhere industrious and respectable negroes are moved to protest against its presentation because they believe it operates to create prejudice against their race.  In one sense they are right.  The play does tend to create a prejudice against the negro of the time and place with which it deals.  Just in the same way does “Uncles Tom’s Cabin” tend to arouse feeling against the whites of the ante-bellum South.  Neither, it should be unnecessary to remark, is it a strictly accurate and truthful and impartial record of that lamentable portion of American history with which it concerns itself.  Even the most carefully and scientifically prepared history is replete with errors and unfairness, conscious or unconscious on the part of the writer, of both commission and omission.  Quite naturally, a novel, such as “The Clansman,” on which the play is based – a novel written from a violently biased viewpoint, must contain the same defects multiplied a thousandfold.

Station a dozen of Omaha’s best trained and most experienced citizens at Sixteenth and Farnam streets for an hour.  Require them, on their departure, to write down fully and truthfully everything that they observed at that tiny pin-point on the map of Omaha – itself a pin-point on the map of the republic – within that little bit of time.  You will have a dozen different reports, no two in exact agreement, some of them differing radically.  What, then, can be expected of the written history of a continent, of a race?  And how much less is to be expected of a dramatic plea such as “The Birth of a Nation!”

But there is another angle from which to consider this truly remarkable production.  It shows us a certain element of the negro population of the south after several generations of slavery.  It shows us negroes who had had no voice or share in the shaping of their own destines, in the control of their own lives and activities.  It shows us the negro with no chance except such as the white man, his master, had given him.  It shows us, in a word, the negro as the white man had made him.

Compare the typical negro of “The Birth of a Nation” with the negro of today, either north of south.  The written history of all time records no other human achievement comparable with what the negro has made of himself, under the most adverse and discouraging circumstances.  In barely two generations of freedom – or freedom of a sort.  The more unflatteringly the negro as he came from the hands of the white man in 1865, is depicted, the more startling becomes the contrast with the negro of fifty years later, and the higher the degree of credit due to the race.

In reading these passages, it becomes clear that the organs of Dixon and Griffith’s propaganda machine reached out through the press like the tentacles of a massive octopus, their main talking points regurgitated through local newspapers almost word for word.  The language in the World Herald editorial sections was every bit as much of a gaslight as Dixon’s pamphlet, even down to the idea that Black people ought to be thankful for such a film, since it only makes it clear how far they’ve come since the days of Reconstruction – the NAACP’s own argument flipped and turned against it.  As The Brandeis was gearing up to break local attendance records with its showing of the film, a local judge basically washed his hands of it, saying it was not within his purview to say whether it should be shown or not.

When Williams and his NAACP peers took the issue to Mayor Dahlman, he agreed to pass an ordinance banning films that incited racism in the future, but told them it was already too late to stop ‘Birth’ in its tracks.  According to the Omaha Bee,

An ordinance to prohibit motion pictures, vaudeville, drama, songs, advertisements or bill displays which tend to incite race hatred or riot has been introduced by Mayor Dahlman…

… a section of the ordinance reads, “Or which shall represent or purport to represent any hanging, lynching, burning or placing in a place of ignominy any human being, the same being incited by race hatred.

During the week a delegation of negro citizens called upon city officials to protest against allowing a motion picture spectacle already advertised.  The officials contend there is no law covering a situation of this nature… The “Birth of a Nation” will be shown in its entirety.

As the film played to record crowds of enthusiastic fans at The Brandeis, debate over its merits raged across the ‘Public Pulse’ opinion section of the World Herald.  Prominent local lawyer and civil rights activist H.J. Pinkett, who also wrote for The Monitor, offered his criticism while spinning his language to the best intentions of World Herald editorial staff, a subtly implied criticism of their propagandistic support for the film:

The colored people of that day and this… are the ones who suffer most.  For they feel that this play is not only unjust to them, but to their northern friends who have done so much for them.  And they know, too, that the play is not historically true.  It shows nothing that is good in the negro; nothing of the homes that former slaves made for their masters not a sign of their gift of the free public school system to the southland nothing of the strong and honest men they produced in that day.  Nor is there one unworthy deed of the Klu Klux Klan or the “red shirts” shown, when the records proves that these organizations burned the school houses which were established by northern men and women, and assassinated the white teachers, many of them women, to say nothing of the negro men, women and children who were killed by them.

But why bring these scenes here and try to justify what is unjustifiable.  Of course, the reconstruction period was replete with excesses, alike by white and blacks of all sections.  And if all persons in the north were as generous as the World-Herald has been to the negro, the wrong impression would not be made.  But the younger generation, unfamiliar with the reconstruction period, accept the “Birth of a Nation” as true, and they go through life hating the negro and repressing him in every possible way.

The colored and white people are living here in amity and peace, why not help the weaker element instead of injuring it through the malignant scenes in this play.  Let us put down these things which breed rancor and hate between groups and classes in society.  As a great newspaper in our midst, you have brightened our horizon, and for that we are grateful.

Local progressive businessman S.J. Woodruff expanded on Pinkett’s claims by offering a critical analysis of the film’s historical accuracy, calling it “scientific lying,” and challenging the city of Omaha itself, as a whole, to reject it:

The play portrays that the first elections after the war were dominated by negro militia, that prominent southern-borders were refused a chance to vote, that whites were spied upon and abused by negroes, and that the Ku-Klux-Klan was organized to protect whites, especially women.  The facts are that the Ku-Klux-Klan was organized and commenced its career of murder, arson and rapine in 1867.  Keep the dates.  Up to this time negro suffrage had not been proposed by congress or any political party.  Neither the “Civil Rights Bill,” the second “Freedmen’s Aid Bill,” nor the fourteenth amendment, all passed by congress in the latter part of 1866, even hinted at negro suffrage.  The fourteenth amendment was not ratified until July, 1868, over a year after the Ku-Klux-Klan commenced operations.  All these acts only raised the negro from a chattel to a citizen, not a voter.  The Ku-Klux-Klan was organized, not to prevent the negro from voting, but to precent him from having any of the rights of a man or citizen, even the right to life and family.  Up to 1868 all the seceded states were under military governors supported by the armies of the United States, not negro militia.  In July of this year, seven of these states were reconstructed and readmitted with all the state official machinery in operation, almost two years before the negro was given the right to vote; but at this very time this play pictures the south overrun with negro militia and noble white men deprived of their vote.  What an audacity to so presume on the ignorance of the audience!  But for the outrages of the Ku-Klux-Klan and the intolerance of the men of the south very likely the fifteenth amendment giving the negro the right of franchise would have been long delayed.  Still I heard an Omaha audience applaud the Ku-Klux-Klan!

But the meanest, most brutal outrage is the series of pictures that aim to fasten on the negro race the ravishment of white women.  These pictures are hideous.  The plan is subtle.  The whole plot is an appeal to the grossest prejudice.  Where one white woman has been outraged by negroes perhaps a thousand white women and as many negro women have been outraged by white men.  Still the audience applauded!… The whole play is an example of scientific lying polluting and poisoning public opinion.  The play is no disgrace to the negro race; but it is a disgrace to the community that tolerates it.

 

In response, local “playwright” Louis H. Miller offered vicious words for anyone who would criticize a theatrical work of art, in any way, ever.  In his rant, he included the blatantly fallacious argument that because the film was popular then it must be good:

This world has always had, more or less, what one might consider, a critic.  No matter what play you might chance to view, you are very apt to come upon one that does not meet with your fancy… Now, critics get busy, find all the supposed flaws you might chance to see, saying only, they are with yourself.  Then run home, tell your neighbors, what a punk show it is, what ignorant bliss, one must find, in the imaginary film land.  Run the play into the very heart of Mother Earth, squeal about the money you had thrown away for going to see this worthless play.  Call it a disgrace to the community, to tolerate so poor a lingering, lying, good-for-nothing photo-play.

Now, if the play had been a disgrace, why did it pass?  Why did it shows for a record run at the Liberty theater in New York, showing 628 consecutive presentations of this noted spectacle… continuing there for an indefinite period?  Now, was the spectators of New York a lubber-headed bunch of hay-seeds, or did they know when a good play came their way?  I ask you, Mr. and Mrs. and yet Miss Critic, where is your mind flowing when you try to turn against such vast masses?

Recently Mr. or Mrs. S.J. Woodruff had a very neat unapplauded  article in the “Public Pulse.”  There was a very neat column of didn’t likes put in black and white.  It caused some comment with those who are campers in the movie field.  How strange some characters are, about giving their uncalled-for criticized thoughts.  Not fearing that their work might pass the eyes of those who understand how the film came about, how it was written, how hard the directors worked to give a splendid play before the public’s eyes, how actors used their best influences, risking life, just to please others, what enormous amount was spent, what time it took and yet how easy for critics to run down…

Woodruff responded with heavy handed words of his own, including a powerful if somewhat dehumanizing metaphor about the oppressed condition Black people were forced to endure in the United States:

Mine eyes are moist with much weeping over the anguish of spirit of “Mr.” or “Mrs.” Louis H. Miller, photo playwright.  The party aforesaid uses up a large amount of perfectly good words to say in effect that no matter how vile or unclean a movie picture is no one should say a word.  Then comes a deluge of the astonishing logic that because anything passed in New Yawk (accent on the awk), it must be past censure!  The next spasm of pain is over the fact that the editor of the World Herald tolerates public discussion.  This writer intimates that an audience should have no opinion, but always applaud.  If a movie is inane, vile, vulgar, vicious or malicious never cheep, sneak away without a word, maybe there is some chump who will like it…

… This particular play is a brutal, underhanded, malicious attempt to slander an entire race.  It tries to beat back and crush down a race of men struggling from the depths of chattel bondage to the heights of movement, to put pitfalls in the path of progress is as mean and cowardly as a group of ruffians standing safely on the shore and pushing back to death in hopelessness a struggling animal that is using every ounce of its strength to escape the abyss of waters and gain life and freedom. 

By December the owner of Brandeis Theater, C.J. Sutphen, representing Crawford, Philly & Zehrung, a corporate entity that operated theaters across the region, chimed in.  In order to make the case that the film was historically accurate, once again echoing Dixon’s own arguments, he cited popular novelist and occasional Lost Cause pseudohistorian Edward S. Ellis:

I quote from “The History of Our Own Country”… by Edward S. Ellis… “The interlopers who flocked southward like vultures scenting their prey were said to carry all their possessions in a carpetbag from which they received the derisive name.  The majority were adroit scoundrels, who took advantage of the ignorance and fear of the black men to secure power.  They terrified the negroes by making them believe that if the democrats gained the upper hand again, they would make slaves of the colored people.  The carpetbaggers and southern “scalawags” (generally former fire-eaters and plantation overseers) plumed the states headlong into debt.  They openly bribed the voters, stole hundreds of thousands of dollars, debauched the negroes of whom the most besotted and ignorant, unable to read or write, were sent to the legislatures to make laws for their former masters.  They lounged in their seats, with their huge feet elevated in front while they smoked expensive cigars for which the state paid; they adjourned pell-mell to attend the circus, rode in gorgeous carriages beside gorgeously arrayed black women, whose houses were furnished with carpets costing $1 a yard, and with furniture corresponding; they wallowed in Champaign, voted away vast sums of money for thieves, who divided with them, and who joined in their wild rioting and deviltry.”

By Christmas Day, with the film coming to the end of its first run in Omaha, the editors of The World Herald once again strongly asserted support for the film, although with an added caveat that the film is simultaneously a great record of history *and* a work of fiction, followed by more propagandistic language that could have easily been penned by Dixon or Griffith themselves:

“The Birth of a Nation,” a living history of the civil war and the troublous reconstruction period which followed, will close its successful engagement of six weeks and one day at the Brandeis theater tomorrow night.  In many respects it has exceptional value as a historical record, otherwise it is fiction.  The scenes run on hundred, perhaps thousands of them, and the combined sum is the greatest of picture dramas, in scope the mightiest, in treatment the most daring, in theme the most intimate, in feeling the richest.  In these unhappy times it is a great argument for peace.”

With the record breaking ticket sales enjoyed by those who profited from the film’s unprecedented success, ‘The Birth of a Nation’ returned for runs in Omaha again at the Brandeis and Boyd theaters in 1917.  The prospect of dollar signs kept theater operators coming back to the honey pot again, and again, and again, and movie-goers kept coming back for more, like they were addicted.  The Brandeis Theater offered tickets at half the former price for its 94th showing in that theater alone, a number that was massive for the time.

This time, however, the tone was a little different:

By the patronage at the Boyd theater yesterday, one might suppose that “The Birth of a Nation” had never before been shown in Omaha.  This, however, happens to be the fourth engagement. Once more, as formerly, this film spectacle, pageant, romance and melodrama of the civil war and reconstruction period, succeeds in rousing excited approval.  Excited is the adjective which describes the ardors of applause, especially during the rescue scenes in the second part, when the Ku-Klux-Klan makes its dramatic charges, first to save the heroine and then to save the Cameron family…

…That the film story bristles with prejudice against the negro is not to be doubted.  The blacks of the south, during the dominance of the carpetbag administration, are shown to be about as savage as were the whites during the mob riots in East St. Louis.  But regardless of the race antipathy which such a film may be likely to foster, “The Birth of a Nation” still holds its place as the peerless film production. 

Between the ‘Birth’s’ first run in Omaha at the tail end of 1915 and its subsequent run at the end of 1917, East St. Louis had erupted into a catastrophic anti-Black riot that left the city in ruins and up to 250 people dead, many more left severely wounded, homeless, and hopeless.  It had had all the ingredients of previous and subsequent race riots, with white labor tensions and misplaced anger towards Black strikebreakers, corrupt city officials, rabid anti-Black racism, and lots of alcohol.  The riot was so severe, and apparently hit so close to home, that World Herald editorial staff likened the behavior of white supremacists in East St. Louis to that of the Black villains portrayed in the film.

The East St. Louis riot also caught the attention of W.E.B. Du Bois and his NAACP colleague Martha Gruening, who traveled to the scene of the crime in order to do a thorough piece of investigative journalism for ‘The Crisis.’  Their report, titled ‘The Massacre of East St. Louis’ offered a detailed account of the events leading up to the riot as well as eyewitness accounts from the ground about the violence itself.  What started as random beatings devolved into what can only be described as full on ethnic cleansing.  The white mob burned sixty houses to the ground, then shot, stabbed, beat, raped, and tortured anyone, men, women, children, elderly, as they attempted to escape.  Black people set on fire crawled onto the streets and sidewalks as their houses were incinerated in front of them, breathing their last.  One mother was forced to watch her husband and son be killed, then was raped and beaten unconscious, almost to death, and woke up in a stack of bodies missing her scalp.  As she came to, she suddenly realized she had been stacked on top of her son’s corpse.  A white man reached his fingers into a gaping hole in a Black man’s head, like it was a bowling ball, to hoist him to a rope.  Dozens of Black bodies were left hanging, on display, down the main street in the Black business section of the city.

In Du Bois and Gruening’s telling, white union leadership was almost entirely to blame, and they had evidence to back the claim:

The leader of a labor union must be an opportunist. The psychology of any unskilled laborer is comparatively simple. To the knowledge then that his job is being held by an outsider add his natural and fostered prejudice against an outsider who is black and you have something of the mental attitude of the rioters of East St. Louis. Doubtless it was with some such prophetic vision as this that Edward F. Mason, secretary of the Central Trades and Labor Union, issued a letter, the facsimile of which appears on the opposite page.

In publishing their searing expose, Du Bois and the NAACP were utilizing the printing press in combat against white supremacy, in the same way Black newspapers had been doing for nearly a century by then.  His hope was to spread knowledge not only of the atrocities themselves, but also of what caused them, including the socio-political factors related to labor and capital that were so heavily embedded into the racial fabric of society at the time.  The idea behind this was ultimately a call to action against systemic racism, the written word providing kindling to the fire of resistance. The effort bore some fruit.  Membership in the NAACP soared from 9,000 in 1917 to 90,000 in 1920, and many thousands attended a nonviolent protest against race riots in the form of a ‘Silent Parade,’ which was also documented in ‘The Crisis.’  The seeds of a civil rights movement were sprouting.

As NAACP membership soared, so did membership in the KKK.  Disgruntled preacher William Joseph Simmons capitalized on the popularity of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ to bring Dixon’s new hooded, cross-burning Klan to life, by staging an event to coincide with the film’s Atlanta premier.  On Thanksgiving Day, Simmons and a small group of friends went to the top of Stone Mountain, 25 miles east of Atlanta, and staged the first real life KKK cross burning event.  He even took out advertisements in the local newspapers, and received glowing media coverage at the same time the film was making its first waves across the nation.  The Atlanta Constitution described the KKK as a “new secretive organization founded with a view to taking active part in the betterment of mankind.”  On opening night, Simmons and his cronies donned their robes on the backs of hooded horses, marching down Peachtree Street firing their rifles into the air.  Across the nation, Klan members distributed their own propaganda in addition to the film.  Thus, Dixon’s propaganda leaped from the pages of his novel to stages across the nation, then to the silver screen and, finally, leapt from the screen into reality.  Membership peaked at five million in 1925, which is to say nothing of the millions of sympathizers who supported the Klan without becoming official members.

What Simmons and the KKK had that Du Bois and the NAACP didn’t was the power of the film as a recruiting tool.  Although there is debate over the degree to which ‘Birth’ sparked the surge in KKK membership that spiked in the 1920s, but it is inarguable that it served as an incubator for the second wave Klan, and that it was among the Klan’s most powerful tools in persuading people to their cause.  Dixon’s use of “the rays of the sun to etch thoughts on yellow parchment” was a steamroller in the national battle for the hearts and minds of its citizens, and men like Du Bois and Parker, who typed furiously in rebuttal, lacked access to the film studios that made ‘Birth’ possible in the first place.  The written word remained potent but the new, exciting medium growing out of Hollywood was dominated by white men writing, directing, and acting in everything cinema had to offer.  Even the Black characters in ‘Birth’ were played by white actors in blackface.

There were, however, films being produced by Black people at the time to offer a counter-narrative to ‘Birth,’ but these were monopolized by Booker T. Washington and his circle, so they carried Washington’s brand of political propaganda.  The Tuskegee Institute and The Hampton Institute both produced promotional films depicting young Black men going from rags to riches by studying a trade skill and then bringing his education back to his hometown in order to achieve economic prosperity and spread Washington’s gospel about Black empowerment through the trades.  One of these films, titled ‘A New Era,’ was even shown at the tail end of ‘Birth,’ at least sporadically in a few theaters in a few cities, as a way for censors to appease the NAACP, and came to be known as ‘The Hampton Epilogue.’  But white audiences generally did not care about it and this film has been lost to history, although descriptions of it remain.

The handful of films produced out of Tuskegee and Hampton were the seeds of what came to be known as ‘race films,’ which would tell stories from a Black perspective, humanizing rather than degrading Black people, all more or less through Washington’s accommodationist lens.  These were pro-Black films but remained limited to the scope and aim of publicizing the institutes that created them.  One Hampton Institute graduate named George P. Johnson, along with his brother Noble, took the next natural step and formed the second Black owned and run film production studio in history, The Lincoln Motion Picture Company.  (The first had been formed in Chicago only a few years earlier, but didn’t last long and only produced novelty “burlesque” films portraying Black people in stereotypical ways).  Although the Johnson brothers expanded Black film to more elaborate cinematic storytelling, they largely stayed within Washington’s ideological framework.  Their stated purpose was “producing Negro moving pictures that will reflect merit and credit upon the Race, as well as opening up a field of employment to Negroes and an opportunity to make profitable financial investments.”

The Johnson brothers operated as a team with Noble working as an actor and writer in Hollywood and George acting simultaneously as chief writer, booking agent, producer, and publicist.  The Lincoln Motion Picture Company set out in their task to counter Dixon and Griffith’s narrative from their filming stage on Tennessee Avenue in Los Angeles, just east of Santa Monica, officially incorporating with only $75,000 in hand.  While Noble made moves acting in Los Angeles, appearing in 34 films between 1915 and 1918, George networked and publicized their movies through mail, notably with the owners of Black newspapers in Chicago, St. Louis, New York, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Atlanta.  After a full day at work building a film network from his home office at 2816 Pratt Street in Omaha, George then worked a regular 3pm to midnight shift for the post office.  He would continue this double shift, switching between his labor in film and postal delivery, for the rest of his working life.

Lincoln Motion Picture Company’s first film, ‘The Realization of a Negro’s Ambition,’ starred Noble Johnson as a Black man who graduates from the Tuskegee Institute to work in the oil drilling industry in California, but is denied a position due to his race.  After saving the life of a wealthy white oil man’s daughter, he is given a prominent position and while leading a drilling expedition, realizes the land under which oil lay resembled the land on his father’s farm back home in the South.  He returns home and discovers there is a bounty of oil under the land his family owns, making them rich, and marries the woman he loves.  Similarly to how Parker sought to reverse Dixon’s thesis in ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ the Johnson brothers used ‘Realization’ to reverse the thesis presented in ‘Birth.’  Instead of featuring a Black antagonist chasing a white woman off a cliff to her death and then being executed under a blazing cross, their film featured a Black protagonist saving a white woman’s life and then realizing his ambition, the American dream of rags to riches – the Horatio Alger narrative for a Black audience.

George Johnson premiered ‘Realization’ in a test run at two white owned movie theaters in Omaha, then utilized his network of contacts in cities across the nation to shoot the film, and Lincoln Motion Picture Company, to roaring success.  Theater managers wrote to Johnson about how their audiences raved about the film, setting the Johnson brothers up as the premier ‘race movie’ producers in the world.  During the National Negro Business League’s weeklong convention at Lincoln Electric Park in Kansas City, the film was viewed by leading Black entrepreneurs and received a glowing review in ‘The Kansas City Sun,’ which stated:

This educational and interesting picture marks the beginning of a new era in the production of Race pictures.  Feeling that the trend of public sentiment among the Race lovers of the silent drama is growing so antagonistic to the insulting, humiliating and undignified portrayal of the cheap burlesque, slap-stick comedies so universally shown as characteristics of the Afro-American ideals, the Lincoln Motion Picture Co. of Los Angeles, Cal., a Race firm, has in their first release successfully eliminated these undesirable features and produced a really interesting, inspiring and commendable educational love drama featuring the business and social life of the Negro, as it really is and not as our jealous contemporaries would have us appear.

Following the film’s success, the duo turned to history in order to tell another story of Black empowerment.  Their subject was the the famed 10th Cavalry, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers, and their experience along the Mexican border during the Mexican Revolution.  Their aim was to display the heroic sacrifice Black men contributed to the American project, a demonstration of their courage, intelligence, and ultimately their loyalty to the flag.  This was the same cavalry regiment who had done the heavy lifting in tracking down Geronimo before his capture, and who had guarded him from escape as he was transferred from Arizona to Florida as a prisoner of war.  He was one of many Native American warriors either wounded, captured, or killed by the 10th under the banner of the American flag.  It was Native Americans, after all, who gave them their nickname in the first place, for the texture of their hair and fierceness in battle.

Just months before Geronimo came to Omaha for the Exposition, and before President McKinley delivered his blustering imperialistic speech there, the Buffalo Soldiers charged up San Juan Hill alongside Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, a decisive battle in that splendid little war.  Sgt. George Berry was the first to reach the top of Kettle Hill and plant his 10th Cavalry’s colors into its ground alongside the American flag. They went on to suppress Filipino resistance fighters the very next year, who utilized psychological warfare against them by distributing leaflets encouraging them to defect and fight against a nation where they’re treated as subhumans, noting the stories of lynchings as their evidence.  The leaflets promised positions of respect amongst the Phillippine Revolutionary Army, a chance to live as an equal.  A handful of Black soldiers took up this offer and one of them, David Fagen, became a captain  who fought and killed American soldiers so efficiently that the U.S. government put a price on his head.  While a decomposed head was brought in by a Filipino defector who claimed it was Fagen’s, and the U.S. government quickly announced the news, it’s highly likley that Fagen continued to live out his life peacefully with his Filipina wife.

The Buffalo Soldiers’ mission in the Philippines was a point of major contention among Black thinkers at the time.  Ever the optimist, conservative Booker T. Washington encouraged Black soldiers to sign up and prove their loyalty to the United States, while the realist progressive W.E.B. Du Bois said they should stay home and fight against the lynchings in their own backyards instead.  In essence, these soldiers were being asked to prove their loyalty not only to the United States, but also to that lingering strain of the American DNA that is whiteness.

Washington might have truly hoped some heroic sacrificial lambs thrown into the embers of American imperialism might increase the chances that white people would begin to see them as human, and the soldiers would go home to much patriotic fanfare, but in reality he witnessed Jim Crow go from bad to worse.  With each step closer Black people took towards empowerment and true equality, the more severely whiteness lashed the whip back down onto them in order to remind them of their place.

Between the time the Buffalo Soldiers stormed up San Juan Hill in 1898 and the Mexican Revolution was sparked in 1910, they heard and read about anti-Black pogroms in Wilmington (where white supremacists literally took the democratically elected government in a bloody coup), New Orleans, several in New York, Little Rock, Atlanta, Springfield, and finally in dozens of cities across the nation following Jack Johnson’s defeat of Jim Jeffries.  Very few white people were ever punished for their violence, and the leaders of the Wilmington coup ran the state of North Carolina for a generation afterwards.  In 1906, Teddy Roosevelt turned his back on the Buffalo Soldiers by ordering 167 of them dishonorably discharged after a false accusation that some of them had fired shots that killed a white person in Brownsville, Texas, where they were stationed.  They had seen Washington’s dreams for them, and for Black people as a whole, maimed and tattered, again and again.

Yet there the 10th Cavalry were, in the scorching heat of the Chihuahuan Desert in June of 1916,  charging straight into the bursts of Mexican gatling guns in the Punitive Expedition to capture or kill Pancho Villa.  They were sent into the unnecessary Battle of Carrizal, in which they were outnumbered 10 to 1 by the ego of their white commanding officer, Captain Boyd.  In a melee lasting roughly an hour, 14 of them were killed and many more wounded, with 23 taken as prisoners of war, stripped naked, taken by train to Chihuahua City, and forced to march a mile and a half to a penitentiary.  After being fed near starvation rations and being forced to sleep on concrete floors, they were released and sent back to the U.S. through El Paso.  Details of the battle made headlines, often in exaggerated form, and the soldiers received a hero’s welcome.

One of the more inspiring details from the Battle of Carrizal, about a dying white officer and one of his Black comrades, reads like a scene from a movie:

The black man fought in deadly shamble side by side with the white man, following always, fighting always as his Lieut. fought. And finally when (Lieutenant) Adair, literally shot to pieces, fell in his tracks, his last command to his black trooper was to leave him and save his own life. Even then the heroic Negro paused in the midst of that hell of courage for a final service to his officer.  Bearing a charmed life he had fought his way out. He saw that Adair had fallen with his head in the water and with superb loyalty the black trooper turned and went back to the hailstorm of death; lifted the head of his superior officer out of the water, leaned his head against a tree, and left him there dead with dignity when it was impossible to serve him any more.  There is no finer piece of soldierly devotion and heroic comradeship in the history of modern warfare that that of Henry Adair and the black trooper who fought with him at Carrizal.

Out of this incident, the Johnson brothers formed the framework for the second film, ‘A Trooper of Troop K.’  Noble played the lead role as Shiftless Joe, a Black man who is fired from his job, thereby losing the prospect of marrying the woman he desires, Clara.  To make matters worse for Joe, another more successful suitor is seeking Clara’s hand, and while the suitor disparages Joe’s character, she encourages him to enlist.  Joe ends up at the Battle of Carrizal where he rescues his white officer and helps his fellow soldiers escape their Mexican enemy’s clutches, winning him a promotion and the status that comes from having your name and heroic actions printed in the newspapers, after which he finally wins Clara’s hand in marriage.  Although the character and many of the aspects of the story are fictional, the battle scene was staged with some historical accuracy, making the film a work of historical fiction, or a docudrama.  The core difference between fact and fiction is the account of a Black soldier returning to the danger of battle to give his white officer a more dignified death being exaggerated into Shiftless Joes saving his white officer’s life.

The official movie poster the Johnsons devised to promote the film depicts its key scene, with Shiftless Joe carrying his white officer over his back to safety.  The image stands as a reversal of the famous Judge Magazine cartoon utilized in classrooms across the nation to depict the concepts of the ‘white man’s burden,’ which was published in light of the new territorial expansion the U.S. engaged in with the Spanish American war.  Uncle Sam is shown carrying racist caricatures of Cuban, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Guamanian, and Hawaiian people up a mountain over boulders representing barbarism, ignorance, oppression, vice, superstition, cannibalism, and other negative human traits, towards Lady Liberty, who sits atop the mountain representing civilization per usual.

In the Johnson brothers’ narrative, people of color are not savages in need of saving at all, but are in fact capable not only of defending the United States, but of defending white people individually and collectively.  The question might arise as to why the first two Lincoln films featured Black protagonists saving white peoples’ lives as key plot devices, instead of Black people saving other Black people, but as the Johnson brothers knew all too well, if their business was to thrive, they would eventually have to woo white audiences.  The growth of the movie industry was moving at rapid pace, and in order to keep up with the white Joneses of Hollywood, Lincoln would eventually need to siphon some of the big studios’ customers into their fold.

In catering to whiteness, Lincoln films were not only saving the United States and individual white people, but saving whiteness itself, in the broader sense, in the process.  Within the context of all the Jim Crow violence that occurred in the years between the Judge Magazine cartoon and the Battle of Carrizal, Black troops serving in the U.S. military in expanding and protecting its borders were proving their loyalty not only to their nation, but to white expectations that people of color make sacrifice without true gain in equality.  Black soldiers had, after all, fought in every war the U.S. fought in some capacity, and had been serving in combat roles sacrificing their own lives for a nation in which they were second class citizens.  From 1775 to 1916, these troops were never able to see their status as human beings recognized under law.  But in ‘A Trooper of Troop K,’ like in all race films, the hope is still there just over the horizon.

 

Like its predecessor, ‘Trooper’ wowed Black audiences nationwide.  As a docudrama, it even found its way into churches, schools, and fraternal lodges.  After a showing at Wiley University, an hbu in Texas, the college president said, “Could Noble Johnson have heard the applause and the singing, ‘My Country ’Tis of Thee’ by the audience during the battle scene in the picture, he would have felt rewarded for his clever acting.”  Some of the enthusiasm also came from a jingoistic desire to kill the Mexican enemy, Black and Latino people being pitted against one another in bigotry for nationalist pride, as one commenter stated, “When Joe shot that greaser off the horse at the 8 o’clock show there was a yell let out that almost raised the roof.”  The film left an indelible mark in the minds of Black people as a representation of their contribution to the film industry and to the American project as a whole.

Meanwhile, George Johnson continued his push to expand the company by advertising to potential investors, luring them with promises of giant returns in an exciting new market.  In one ad, he highlighted the accomplishments already under their belt:

A chance to invest in a producing Film Company now earning profits.  We are not offering a “prospect” company.  We are offering a chance to invest in the stock of a Company that is operating, earning profits and that has so much business ahead that expansion is absolutely necessary.  We have done all the preliminary work.  We have grown in less than one year over 1,000 per cent.  In the next year we should more than triple our growth.  We have in sight thousands of dollars’ worth of business for the coming year.  To handle this enormous demand we MUST HAVE MORE CAPITAL for faster productions, factory development and operating expenses.

When the U.S. entered World War I, the federal government appropriated $10 million for the production of propaganda films.  George sought to capitalize on this opportunity, pitching the concept that 10 to 12 percent of that money be granted to Lincoln, in order for him to produce films that would speak directly to the 12 million Black patriots residing in the States.  He wanted to produce films with titles such as, ‘The Evolution of the Negro Recruit,’ ‘The Negro at Work,’ and ‘The Negro as an Aid to the Administration.’  He argued that he was necessary to do the job right, or else any outfit assigned the task of depicting Black soldiers and patriotic citizens would only create “some humiliating farce in the way of a burlesque comedy staged by either white directors or inexperienced colored actors.”  In a letter from the head of the director of publicity for the Treasury Department, George was gaslit, his concerns about how Black soldiers might be portrayed in propaganda films ignored entirely:

To be perfectly frank with you I do not think that the charge you make to the effect that the various publicity departments of Federal organization invariably treat loyal colored American citizens in a humiliating way is correct.  It may be that some of the motion pictures portray the colored Americans in a humorous way just as they do the Southern colonel, the Irish, the stupid Englishman with his monocle and cane, the dude, the Western cowboy, the New England prude and the bloated bond holder. 

Instead of portraying Black people in negative stereotypes, the white propagandists hired for the job simply didn’t do much of anything to include them.  Even as the Johnson brothers took effort to appeal to white audiences, the same gesture was not issued in kind from the federal government, and George’s request was denied, and even as Lincoln films wowed Black audiences, the Johnson brothers’ attempts to reach white audiences didn’t catch on.  While the Lincoln Motion Picture Company went on to make one more popular film starring Noble, in order to keep up with the latest film industry developments they were forced to reinvest almost all their earnings into the next production.  This fact, on top of increased competition from other Black film production companies sprouting up around them, and the sad truth that white audiences simply didn’t appear to be interested in watching movies with Black main characters, left Noble in a tight situation when executives at his main paying gig with Universal pressured him to leave Lincoln and work for them exclusively.  They had noticed Black audiences, when faced with a choice between seeing Noble in minor Universal roles or major Lincoln roles, tended to purchase tickets to the latter, and even this mild competition from a niche Black film company couldn’t be tolerated.

Like sharks, the white industry men smelled blood in the water and essentially forced Noble into choosing between his brother, and his Blackness, or the pot of gold white film studios could promise delivering on a regular basis.  Johnson chose the latter, forcing George to seek a new leading man for his own projects.  In his new contract, his own brother was forbidden from producing new material for advertising the three films Noble did with Lincoln.  The contract specifically, and brutally, barred the Lincoln Motion Picture Company utilizing “any part of the negative or positive films, slides, stills, plates, cuts, heralds, or lithographs.”  Noble went on to play minor roles in over 100 films, including classics such as ‘The Ten Commandments,’ ‘The Thief of Bagdhad,’ ‘The Mummy,’ ‘Ben Hur,’ and ‘King Kong,’ among others.

George went on to produce two more films with Lincoln Motion Picture Company, with new leading man Clarence Brooks filling the space Noble once did.  After completion of the fourth Lincoln film, ‘A Man’s Duty,’ George took a leave from his job at the post office and set out on a guerilla marketing campaign.  With a copy of the film in hand, he stopped to show the film and collect his portion of ticket sales in Topeka, Muscogee, Dallas, Fort Worth, and El Paso.  His final destination was Los Angeles, where he would work on what ended up becoming his last film, and the only surviving Lincoln film today, ‘By Right of Birth.’  This film would be his official response to ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ and Lincoln’s biggest production yet.

The plot of Lincoln’s last film centers on Juanita, an adopted woman who accompanies and supports a Mexican-American man who is in the business of tricking Black freedmen allottees into selling their land to him, as he’s aware of oil under the ground.  As he focuses on tracking down a missing allottee named Helene, Juanita finds out she’s Helene, meaning she’s a Black woman who’s been living as a white woman her entire life.  She’s reunited with her biological mother and inherits her fortune.  For its premier he booked the massive Trinity Auditorium, home to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and hired the ten prettiest young women he could find to sell tickets – they sold out in a couple weeks.  Sparing no expense, George even had valet drivers suited up in gloves, a Black cinema gala event for the ages.

 

While the premier party for ‘By Right of Birth’ was surely a blast, and the film gained Lincoln more rave reviews, it was not to last.  Faced with the low ceiling that came with lack of Black owned movie theaters, and white owned theaters that would consider showing race films, plus the outbreak of the Spanish flu that had closed many of those theaters down, Lincoln finally came to an end in 1923.  While Noble forged a storied career in white produced films, George continued working for the post office, now in Los Angeles, and documented the story of Black cinema as it expanded with new writers, producer, and actors who found more success than he had.  Before his death in 1977, he donated a mountain of archival materials to UCLA, where they can still be accessed.

While George P. Johnson failed in his goal of generating enough profit to make his company, the second Black owned and run film company in history, he succeeded in being the first Black person to use “the rays of the sun to etch thoughts on yellow parchment – instead of dull printer’s ink,” and to harness this new powerful medium to portray Black characters in a positive light within the framework of serious narratives.  Like George Wells Parker, the Johnson brothers sought to counter the mainstream narratives about race, history, civilization, and the very nature of humanity as one species who are all capable, intelligent, creative, courageous, loving, creatures.  Dixon’s white supremacist narrative was only a more extreme and pronounced version of the consensus among white people that all the darker racial categories were inferior, so every time Black pioneers stepped into the arena of ideas to challenge that narrative, they were throwing rocks at a Goliath of whiteness, but this Goliath sustained those blows, and sustains them even to this day.

The story of the Johnson brothers reminds us that not all pathways of human progress are clearly defined.  They are muddied with uncertainties, setbacks, failures, serendipity, and often great ironies.  Noble Johnson’s very first movie appearance was uncredited, but it was in the most spectacular film produced since ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ and that was D.W. Griffith’s response to critics of ‘Birth,’ another epic cinematic experience called ‘Intolerance.’  Johnson’s fate as a minor character in white films seemed to be sealed from his very first step onto a movie set.  In this instance, it was the most elaborate stage ever constructed at the time: a massive reconstruction of the ancient city of Babylon, complete with 300 foot walls and elephant statues, plus 3,000 extras wearing detailed Babylonian garments, all set up on what was then a quiet dirt road called Sunset Boulevard.  Standing in the midst of the madness was Noble Johnson, playing the role of a Babylonian soldier during the Fall of Babylon.  In succumbing to the powerful, wealthy white studio rather than continuing to pioneer Black-made films with his brother, many would say he sold out to the Babylon of Hollywood.

 

Eighteen years before Noble Johnson stepped foot onto Griffith’s gargantuan movie set, while Omaha Exposition tourists reveled in the exciting prospects of expanding Manifest Destiny beyond America’s continental borders, gawking at Black people in the Old Plantation, cheering as subjugated Native Americans staged sham battles with white men in redface, and standing in awe at the way it was all so beautifully and almost supernaturally lit up at night, they also swung by to see what was billed as *the* work of art of the 19th century.  A single painting hung, enshrined in its own building, with advertisers drawing tourists in using signs declaring it the winner of a fancy contest in Paris.  French painter Georges Rochegrosse depicted the destruction of one of the great cities of the ancient world, and the piece was titled simply, ‘The Fall of Babylon.’

The story of Babylon takes us back to the Biblical concept on the origin of races, that Noah’s three sons were of various shades of color, and that the darker colored descendants of Ham bore his curse through all of history, which explained and justified anti-Black racism to white supremacists.  The same story explained the existence of different races generally to early pro-Black thinkers such as Alexander Crummell.  But the story takes on more than just the meaning of race – it’s also an explanation for why humans of different races and geographical regions speak different languages, which confuses and puts us at odds with each other.  In Hebrew, ‘ba-bel’ translates to ‘confusion.’

In the Book of Genesis there are two contradicting stories about the variation of languages among humans.  The first, in Genesis 10:5, the three sons of Noah split into different language families.  In the second, Genesis 11:1-9, all humans spoke the same language up until the construction of the Tower of Babel, when Noah’s grandson Nimrod was the ruler of Babylonia.  Under Nimrod’s rule, his people rebelled against God and constructed the Tower of Babel in order to reach the heavens, which was seen an attempt to reach the same heights and status as their creator.  God swiftly punished all of humanity for their sinful hubris:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar (Babylonia) and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us make bricks, and burn them thoroughly.” And they had brick for stone, and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.”

The Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the Lord said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the Lord scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Later in the Bible, Babylon has grown into a great power while falling further into hedonism, from the time of Nimrod through Nebuchadnezzar, who destroyed Jerusalem, to his son Belshazzar, who is the last of the Neo-Babylonian kings.  Babylon and its pagan population stand with Satan and all the vices of evil, in direct contrast to Jerusalem and its Godly, obedient population of Israelites.  In the Book of Daniel, Belshazzar holds a feast in which he drinks wine from vessels his father had looted from Solomon’s Temple during the destruction of Jerusalem, yet another act of defiance and blasphemy against God.  During the drunken festivities, a floating hand appears and writes some indecipherable words on the wall in front of everyone, and Daniel is asked to interpret their meaning, which he transcribes to read, “Mene, God has numbered the days of your kingdom and brought it to an end; Tekel, you have been weighed in the balances and found wanting; Peres, your kingdom is divided and given to the Medes and Persians.” The Medes then invade Babylon and Belshazzar is murdered, hence the term “the writing is on the wall,” and the subject of the famous painting hanging up at the Omaha Exposition in 1898.

The painting depicts Beltazarr on his throne in the right foreground, surrounded by his nude and semi-nude concubines, which surely angered some of the more conservative Christian elements in Omaha at the time.  In the background, the invading force of Medes approach as Belthazarr and the few women who are awake look on, contemplating their impending doom.  The Omaha World Herald described the painting and its popularity at the Exposition:

It represents the great sculptured half of the royal palace of Beslhazzar on the morning after a night given up to the wildest and most extravagant bacchanalian feasting and debauchery.  The picture almost overwhelms the senses with its wealth of coloring.  Its gorgeousness is superlative.  No work of the present day is more striking in this regard.  The building has only been thrown open to the public a day or two, yet great throngs have looked on the picture in wonder and amazement.

By the time depicted in Revelation 18, Babylon’s final and total destruction during the End of Times is foretold, as the Archangel Michael descends from heaven to illuminate the earth with God’s wrath against the unholy Babylonians, yet again.  Their light is being snuffed out while the light of God bursts out through his greatest warrior angel:

After this I saw another angel coming down from heaven. He had great authority, and the earth was illuminated by his splendor.  With a mighty voice he shouted: ‘Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!’  She has become a dwelling for demons and a haunt for every impure spirit, a haunt for every unclean bird, a haunt for every unclean and detestable animal…

… Then a mighty angel took up a stone like a great millstone and threw it into the sea, saying, “Thus with violence the great city Babylon shall be thrown down, and shall not be found anymore.  The sound of harpists, musicians, flutists, and trumpeters shall not be heard in you anymore. No craftsman of any craft shall be found in you anymore, and the sound of a millstone shall not be heard in you anymore. The light of a lamp shall not shine in you anymore, and the voice of bridegroom and bride shall not be heard in you anymore. For your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your sorcery all the nations were deceived. And in her was found the blood of prophets and saints, and of all who were slain on the earth.”

 

Repeatedly through the Bible, light is separated from darkness, associated with God and godliness, and finally used to describe God’s wrath in the final judgement of humankind in the destruction of Babylon.  But there is another, almost opposite meaning in the story of Satan.  The name Lucifer means ‘light bearer’ or ‘morning star’ in Latin, and in the Book of Isaiah Lucifer is an angel of God whose attempts to become a brighter light than God cause him to fall down to sheol, or the place where the wicked are punished, also known as hell.  In this sense, light also represents Satan himself, further adding to the list of what how light can be interpreted in different, and often opposite or competing, ways.  Isaiah 14:12-15 reads:

How you have fallen from heaven,
morning star, son of the dawn!
You have been cast down to the earth,
you who once laid low the nations!
You said in your heart,
“I will ascend to the heavens;
I will raise my throne
above the stars of God;
I will sit enthroned on the mount of assembly,
on the utmost heights of Mount Zaphon.
I will ascend above the tops of the clouds;
I will make myself like the Most High.”
But you are brought down to the realm of the dead,
to the depths of the pit.

 

Varying concepts about the meaning of light played out in a painting that hung in D.W. Griffith’s own house, picturing himself surrounded the images from his own films, representing competing, and often confusing, ideas about race, civilization, history, religion, and morality.  Warren A. Newcombe, who painted the piece for Griffith, described the use of light in his own words:

In the upper right is a light.  I originally though of this as a sunlight arc in the studio which, combined with the stand for the director and the cameraman, would be the important point of a portrait of Mr. Griffith.  This light then unfolded to me an idea which, as you see, is used as a symbol of Love, Victory, the Handwriting on the Wall, Tolerance.  The light as the symbol of the Handwriting on the Wall in the temple of Belshazzar, as shown in the scene in the upper right, comes from Mr. Griffith’s ‘Intolerance.’  In the ray of light you will see a mother over a cradle, which expresses the Mother Love of the World, as brought out in ‘Intolerance’…. Following the light of Victory is the Ku Klux Klan, incidental of the Civil War, and ‘The Birth of a Nation.’ 

With so many competing and often conflicting notions of what light can represent, the confusion of tongues following the Tower of Babel, the opposing historical narratives regarding the origins of civilization, the origins of sin, and the origins of race itself, it becomes difficult to pin down what these things actually mean, or perhaps more accurately, what they ought to mean.  George Wells Parker wrote his right hook punch to Dixon’s thesis about the Aryan myth and the origins of civilization by speaking about race in clear terms, using words like ‘Ethiopian’ and ‘Cushite’ and ‘Hamitic’ as if these were clearly defined things.  Dixon also spoke about races in monolithic terms, so it makes sense that a response would utilize similar language in order to make clear counter-arguments.  But Parker knew full well that the truth is much less clear, and that in terms of race as a social construct, there are few clear boundaries, with tons of overlap and nearly infinite shades of grey.  Just one month after Noble Johnson’s image as a Babylonian soldier first appeared on a movie theater screen with the release of ‘Intolerance’ in September 1916, Parker wrote an odd, brief opinion piece in the Corsicana Daily Sun out of Corsicana, Texas, in which he made claims about the purity and impurity of race in Biblical terms:

The United States is a nation in the making, a people of potential dreaming of her destiny we need the geologian’s sense of time and the astronomer’s sense of distance.  The verdict of history is that no pure blooded race has ever become great of itself.  Such a race, if ever there can be one, must stand alone LIKE A SINGLE CHEMICAL ELEMENT AWAITING COMBINATION WITH OTHER CHEMICALS TO MAKE IT USEFUL.

National existence depends upon healthy ideals and sterling virtues.  When a civilization become effete; when the moral law is shattered upon the rock of might; when lust, vanity, cruelty and oppression destroy purity, honorable pride, mercy and justice; when honest labor becomes degraded and the pursuit of wealth for wealth’s sake become the low ambition, then the fate of that nation is sealed.  Out of the mists sweep a Sesostris, Darius, Alexander, Caesar, Atilla, Alaric or Bonaparte. 

ALL ARE SCOURGES OF GOD COMING IN ANSWER TO INEVITABLE AND IMMUTABLE LAWS TO PURGE THE WORLD AND TO GIVE MANKIND ANOTHER CHANCE.

In his miniature rant, Parker suggests the concept of a pure race is a figment of our imagination, and also boldly declares that only ‘mixed race’ civilizations flourish and create useful, morally vibrant civilizations.  In this claim, Parker suggests the path of civilization from Ethiopia to Egypt, then Minoa, Greece, Rome, Europe, and across the pond the the United States, is one of cross pollination of different ideas from different groups of people living in different places, all intermingling, procreating, and building together, rather than one straight line from one pure blooded race of people.  The lines between various races, languages, and cultures have always blurred together in a mosaic, so the origins of civilization can be credited to many groups of people we would today categorize into many different racial categories.  Not only is Parker ok with that, he appears happy this is the case.  He wants this great human story to continue, but in order to move forward, Parker first sought to discredit the oppressive concepts that were keeping Black people oppressed, by flipping the Aryan myth around and replacing it with his own, pro-Black origin story in its place.

As young Parker gave his award winning speech at the Exposition in Omaha and visitors were flocking to pay money for the chance to see a single painting depicting the Fall of Babylon, a German archeologist named Robert Koldewey was gearing up to excavate the ruins of Babylon in the Iraqi desert.  He would continue his work all the way until British soldiers overtook Egypt and he was forced to flee.  He uncovered a treasure trove of cuneiform tablets that tell the story of Babylonia as part of one of the very first civilizations to spring up on the planet, Sumeria.  History texts often credit Mesopotamia as the birthplace of both agriculture and writing, and therefore civilization, with cuneiform predating any other writing system on the planet.   But the Fertile Crescent stretched into Egypt, and there is good evidence there were writing systems in parts of Africa appearing at roughly the same time as cuneiform did in the Middle East.  In other words, there is no clear, easy, or simple answer to the question, “where did civilization come from?”  It’s complicated.

In ancient Babylon, there was a story about Etana, a king whose wife couldn’t bear children, so he would not have an heir.  He finds a wounded eagle that flies him high up toward the gods, in order to find the plant of life for his wife’s fertility, and then they fall back down to earth, crashing and shattering in the process.  Ancient Athenians told the story of Icarus, who used his wings to fly too close to the sun, so they melted and he crashed down to the earth.  In the Bible, Lucifer’s hubris gets him cast out of heaven and into the void of hell, and the arrogance of the Babylonians brings the destruction of their civilization.  Are these not all variations of the same story?  Is it not possible they were all told in some form, being copied, borrowed from, shifting and morphing in the process?  It’s even possible humans in different parts of the world create nearly identical stories independent of one another, only to meet and create a fusion that would go on to fuse with others, and so on and so forth, for thousands of years, leading to the rich tapestry of cultures we’ve seen come and go over the milllennia.

Which leads to the final portion of this narrative.

In the United States at the turn of the 20th century, the American government was sending its soldiers to mow down any resistance to its expansionist tentacles, utilizing new technologies such as the Gatling gun, the latest and greatest weapon on earth.  The myths used to justify this behavior told of Aryans, a genetically superior race of people carrying the torch of civilization and progress across the world, and of God’s chosen Christians, the white people of America, who were destined to spread the light of His truth, even at the end of a rifle.  But these stories were not new.  They were merely the latest reincarnation of stories and events that have been playing out since the dawn of humanity.  Every group of humans who wield powerful new weapons and use them to crush much weaker enemies have told themselves, in one way or another, they were doing the right thing, that this was their destiny, part of God’s will.

The architects of the Omaha Exposition utilized incandescent light as a positive affirmation of white, Christian, American civilization’s role in the world during one of our most imperialistic moments as a nation.  The idea that the American project was finally complete with the conquest and subjugation of the Indigenous peoples all the way to the Pacific Ocean, embodied in the defeat of resistance fighters like Geronimo, was called into question when the project didn’t come to a halt in California, Arizona, or Florida.  The capitalist project needed more resources to extract, more islands on which to station military garrisons, more tentacles to reach out and grab more, more, more, sending its young men to kill and die in foreign lands many had never heard of before.

The Vietnam war had its precursor in the Philippines, with young American troops wading through rice paddies, facing ambush attacks from an unseen enemy that could easily slip in and out between warfare and civilian life, and Uncle Sam was scrambling to make sense of the ugly thing, to justify it.  What were we there for?  What did these people do to us?  After delivering his rousing speech in front of thousands in North Omaha, President McKinley lit up in the darkness of the night, promising everything was all right, that we were the good guys and that it had all been well worth it.  Incandescent McKinley spoke authoritatively from his glowing perch on high, “the American empire is the world’s most benevolent empire, and all of you should feel lucky and grateful just to be part of it.”  This was the big ending of the big show that had been going on all summer, and which molded the hearts, minds, and imaginations of millions.

Six years later, at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, while Geronimo signed autographs and watched movies of farm and city life in Nebraska with a fascinated gaze, visitors also walked up a hill to gaze upon a bizarre scientific contraption called The Pyrheliophor, a “sun machine” invented by eccentric Portuegese priest and self-taught scientist, Manuel António Gomes, also known as Father Himalaya.  The machine consisted of 6,117 mirrors that rotated to compensate for the earth’s orbit as they captured, reflected, and concentrated the sun’s midday rays into a single point, producing a remarkable 6800 degrees Fahrenheit, twice the heat generated in electric arc ovens used to melt industrial metals.  While Himalaya touted many potential uses for his contraption, including converting the heat and light from the sun into electricity, his ultimate goal was to patent his invention for industrial use, with the dream that it would become the new technology factories would use it to melt metals.

 

While his dreams of revolutionizing industry never played out, Father Himalaya wowed his audience in St. Louis, visitors and judges alike, taking home the grand prize for his invention.  Visitors gasped as pieces of wood were set into the furnace of his contraption and vaporized in an instant.  Newspapers touted his invention as practical machine that could melt and fuse even the toughest metals, and a scientific breakthrough that shattered prevailing scientific theories.  The St. Louis Republic reported in depth:

A great scientific truth has been demonstrated at the World’s Fair. Through the aid of the great sun motor, just to the southwest of the Administration building, Father Himalaya has found without the possibility of a mistake, that the actual origin of the rays and the heat of the sun is electrical. This explodes a lot of theories and disproves many more that were based upon incorrect deductions.

The Pyrheliophoro, or sun motor, is the invention of Father M.A.G. Himalaya, a Portuguese priest and professor of physics and chemistry at two colleges in Portugal… He has found that the heat of the sun is more than double that of the electric arc… He has found that there is no known substance, not even asbestos, that will not fuse in his wonderful sun furnace, into which the concentrated rays of his great mirror reflector and concentrator are thrown. Asbestos always chars and sometimes fuses.

Manganese, the hardest known metal to fuse, melts and runs as water in the Pyrheliophoro. Iron has no opportunity to melt, so intense is the heat. Instead of fusing and running in liquid state as it would in a blast furnace, it shrivels and drys up and becomes as paper that has been burned in a fire…

… On the brow of a green hill looking toward the floral clock of the Agriculture building, with Forestry, Game and Fish in the rear and flanked to the west by the children’s working gardens, rises, not unlike a huge extended Morris chair, the pyrheliophor. A steel frame 42 feet high with conch-shell like outline painted brightly blue encircles the reflector. This reflector in shape suggests the section of a cone and in its suspended position the whole is not unlike the back of a reclining chair. The reflector is made of steel lattice slats, each set with mathematical accuracy…

The rays of the sun are collected by the reflector and concentrated so that they are thrown into the mouth of the furnace with a diameter or about fifteen to eighteen inches. If, says Father Himalaya, the rays could be further concentrated to a diameter of eight or ten inches a temperature could be produced so high that it would be almost beyond the conception of the men of science…

“This discovery has opened to me a window into the face of nature, which has been hitherto closed to us. I now have a well-based theory, only a theory as yet, however, as to the source of the electrical energy that produces the rays of the sun. I have found theoretically, at least, the way to use hitherto unknown forces of nature. If this theory of mine is practical, our knowledge of Nature will be settled upon entirely new basis, and our actual industrial methods of today will be changed. The problem of energy is to be solved in another way than those known at present… My apparatus proves conclusively that there is no limit to the high temperatures. With it we can reach the highest physically possible, and even a little higher than the actual temperature of the sun, owing to the mirror concentration. The present pyrheliophoro has not been constructed, however, for such very high temperatures. Such an instrument can be built for, say, $50,000, and I hope to accomplish this…”

The pyrheliophoro is to be removed from the World’s Fair grounds at the close of the Exposition and probably set up again at Lisbon, Portugal. Father Himalaya also hopes to enlist the aid of wealthy men in his own and other countries, in building another and larger instrument that will catch and confine the highest heat that is physically possible.

 

Father Himalaya aimed high in his goal to capture and harness the power of the sun, so much so that he aimed to produce the “highest heat that is physically possible,” the opposite of absolute zero, a temperature on the thermic scale he dubbed the “supreme degree.”  Not only did he think humans could produce this temperature on earth, he thought we could control it and utilize it to our benefit.  His contraption never took off, largely because his science wasn’t entirely on point, but also because most places in the world don’t produce the degree of consistent sunlight necessary to make it economically viable.  His hopes and aspirations embody the modernist concept of human progress perhaps as much as any others, “playing with fire” taken to its maximum limit, but when Icarus got too close to the sun, his wings melted and he fell back to the ground.  Just as the Babylonian Etana and his eagle, just as the Hebrew Lucifer and his lofty visions of grandeur, just as the people of Babylonia and their hubristic attempt at building their tower to the heavens, the same myths repeat across space and time, echoing through the ages.

Light has represented many different things to many different people through time: from the modernist concept of human progress, signified through new technologies such as the incandescent light bulb on display at the 1898 Omaha Trans Mississippi Exposition, to the light of Western civilization spreading concepts of truth, knowledge, and justice to the far reaches of the earth under the divine guidance of Manifest Destiny, to the Aryan myth about the origins of Western civilization, to Parker’s reversal of the Aryan narrative in his manifesto ‘The People of the Sun,’ to the vigilante form of ‘revolutionary justice’ dished out by the KKK under their burning crosses, to the power of cinema projecting images of light onto a screen to shape our beliefs about ourselves, others, and the world around us.  It can even represent the supposedly final stages of knowledge through scientific inquiry, as in the case of the pyrheliophor, and the hubris that entails.  In all these varying and opposing concepts of light as a metaphor, people on all sides claim to have the truth on their side, and with so many competing concepts of truth there is bound to be conflict, chaos, destruction, and death.

On June 5th 1904, eight thousand spectators lined the seats of an arena inside the St. Louis fair grounds, ready to see some blood spilled.  It was on a sleepy Sunday when the rest of the fair was closed, but the crowd was on edge.  They had been drinking, and they expected the dollar they’d spent on a ticket would reveal an authentic demonstration of Spanish bullfighting in front of their eyes, right there in the state of Missouri, where bullfighting had been banned by law.  The prospect of illegal violence titillated them, sent adrenaline coursing through their veins.  Although local animal rights activists groups had attempted to put a halt on the show, it was apparently still going on.  The mood for human debauchery was properly set.

When a local official stepped in to stop the show, the crowd erupted in anger.  When their demands for ticket refunds were refused, their anger turned to pure rage, and the scene turned to bedlam.  Rocks were thrown, windows smashed, and bulls were let loose for spectators to abuse on their own accord.  Eventually the arena was set on fire, burning to the ground overnight only to be seen again as a smoldering wreck the following morning.  Various newspaper accounts provide vivid details of the mob’s savagery:

Parties of men smashed seats and every other smashable thing in the arena.  Men escorting women hurried them from the area, but hundreds of women watched the destruction from neighboring lots.  At 6:30 fire started in the hay loft of the stables, bringing a great cheer from thousands of spectators… A few moments later fire appeared in the arena.  More shouts of approval were heard.  The fire spread so rapidly that within a half-hour the entire building was doomed.  No fire alarm was sent in.  The engine companies on the World’s Fair grounds hasted to the convention entrance and began pouring water on the nearby World’s Fair buildings, making no attempt, however, to save the rapidly disappearing arena.  At a late hour tonight the scene of the attempt today to hold a bullfight is a huge heap of smoldering ashes.

The mob had brought in the bulls, taken possession of the bullfighting paraphernalia of the Spanish matadors, and was giving a bullfight of its own, with three bulls in the ring, a dozen American bullfighters badgering them with small canes, while the mob, delirious with joy, howled like the bander-long and pelted the pestered bulls with chair, bottled soda, water, oranges and bananas…

… Dozens of men and boys were arrested during this two hours of rioting and burning out at the bullfighting arena, but the rioters arrested were so hotly defended by their fellow that only two boys and two men are in jail.

The riot and burning of an arena erected for bullfights in St. Louis carries with it two lessons. One is that the oft-repeated boast “that the American people are the most law-abiding people on the earth” is not entirely borne out by the facts, and the other is that while the government of Missouri is competent to stop a bullfight it is not competent to check a riot… The two most disturbing features connected with government in this country today are the disposition of mobs to take matters into their own hands when they feel so minded, and the incapacity of the various governments to enforce the laws except against individuals… Of course, the municipality of St. Louis will be required to pay the owner of the building for the destruction of his property, for it was the incapacity of the city government that caused the damage. There is no excuse to be given by a city of half a million population for failure to suppress a riot, and the courts will listen to no attempt to excuse a plain violation of duty… The authorities have virtually demonstrated that the great power of the State can handle the offense of a single violator of the law, but is powerless in the face of a mob of over one thousand persons. This is not a comforting proposition to be faced, but it must be faced nevertheless.

What stands out the most in this narrative is the way power is contested between various competing parties.  State law made the entire spectacle illegal, yet no local officials came out to stop the gathering until the very last minute, after thousands had already paid for their tickets and gathered for the show.  In a subsequent murder trial (an American matador shot and killed a Spanish matador, claiming self defense), some of the players involved claimed the St. Louis promoter had never truly intended to have a bullfight in the first place, which calls into question who was getting a piece of the cut from the profits, especially in light of the fact that authorities waited until the last minute to call the whole thing off.  Human treachery abounds, making it possible for any sense of order and reason to come undone at any given moment.  Was the light of Western civilization shining through this event?  If so, what does that light represent, and is it something we ought to be proud of?

We can take our line of questioning further, back to the beginning.  What was on display at the Crystal Palace in 1851 London, at the Fountain of Neptune in 1898 Omaha, at the Palace of Electricity in 1904 St. Louis?  What meaning was light projecting onto screens when it depicted the KKK riding in as caped crusaders, saving civilization from the savage Negro hordes?  If we are to give credence to the idea that Wilson said ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was like “writing history with lightning,” then what sparks might that lighting produce… what might catch fire, and whose livelihood might be put at risk?  These are questions people appear to not have been asking at the time, questions that we still challenge us to ask to this day.  The concept of Manifest Destiny hasn’t aged well, but its core tenets are rarely truly called into question in practice, much less proactively disassembled.  We can draw a straight line from American expansion to the West Coast and subjugation of Geronimo’s Apaches, along with the enslavement and oppression of African peoples across the continent, the Jim Crow era anti-Black pogroms, through the violence wrought upon Cuba, the Philippines, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan… the question always remains: who are we, and what does our light truly represent?

In the final analysis, the human element must always be taken into account.  With any religious, nationalistic, or racialized notions of truth and progress, the human element always creeps in with uncontainable, unrestrained, volcanic eruptions of ultra-violent impulses.  All the world’s fairs demonstrated the folly inherent to humankind in exaggerated form, and If the pyrheliophor represented the best of our intentions, and the innocent flaws in our dreams to reach the heavens, then the Spanish Bullfight represented our worst flaws and basest instincts, and our tendency towards tribalistic, ritual execution.  If the light of God shines through the technologies put on display at world’s fairs, from the Crystal Palace on through Omaha and St. Louis, then the spark of fire residing inside humanity can also burn the entire facade of civilization down in an instant.  If the light of the sun can be harnessed to project flashing images of racist propaganda in front of impressionable, captive audiences, who already view entire groups of people as subhuman, then the spark of fire is waiting at any moment to turn any movie theater, or any city, into a scene from the Fall of Babylon at any given moment as well.  And if the conditions are ripe enough for fire to burn, then burn it will.

George Wells Parker wrote a devastating takedown of the entire premise upon which white supremacy, and therefore mainstream American society, was built.  His words cut through Dixon’s thesis with swift, brutal precision, breaking Aryan mythology down at its very roots.  What mattered most was never Dixon himself as an individual, but the widespread notion from North to South, that his ideas were creditable at all to begin with, along with the overlap between Dixon’s extremist white supremacy and the more centrist white supremacy at the core of all real American power structures.  From his speech as a promising young teenage intellect at the Omaha Exposition in 1898, to his mental breakdown upon reading Dixon’s ‘The Leopard’s Spots,’ to his searing editorials printed in newspapers across the nation, to his impassioned speeches in front of the Omaha Philosophical Society and the Interstate Literary Association, to the final culminations of his life work in ‘Children of the Sun,’ George Wells Parker fought as if his life depended on it, and that of his descendants as well.

Parker responded to Dixon and Griffith’s “writing history with lighting” with lightning of his own, dropping lines like this in front of white audiences, as early as 1906:

Before closing I wish again to enforce the fact that the ferment creating the wonderful Grecian civilization was preeminently the ferment of African blood.  Take all the archeological facts of the last fifty years and read them up or down, across or diagonally, inside and out, and this fact rises into your mind like a Banquo that will not down.  Historians may distort truth and rob the African race of its historical position but facts are everywhere throwing open the secret closets of nations and exposing ethnic skeletons that laugh and jest at our racial vanities.

The ideas Parker espoused hit close on the truth that Aryan myths have never been anything more than myths, and that civilization’s roots lie in Africa and the Middle East, not in Europe or some purely ‘Caucasian’ peoples.  He took these ideas from his own mind onto the papers he so furiously scribbled on in his Omaha home, to multiracial audiences of intellectual movers and shakers, to a pamphlet published in various Black newspapers nationwide, and finally to the stage, a theatrical response to Dixon’s ‘The Clansman.’  Although few details survive about the theater version of ‘Children of the Sun,’ it appears to have been a large scale production set in Africa, depicting the dawn of civilization Parker illuminated in his grand thesis work.  Sadly, in order to boost ticket sales, the show as promoted as a ‘comedy’ alongside stereotypical Blackface-style images of Black characters.  The show made its run starting in Fall of 1919 and even played at the Brandeis Theater in Omaha in Winter of 1920, which had been Dixon and Griffith’s own stomping grounds for the past five years straight.  This puts Parker’s ‘Children of the Sun’ in direct competition with ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ sharing the same physical and metaphysical space in downtown Omaha just after the horrible scene would erupt at the Douglas County Courthouse.

 

Although George Wells Parker threw mighty blows against the prevailing white supremacist narrative at the turn of the century, socio-economic realities kept him from ever reaching his full potential to influence the mainstream American psyche.  There simply weren’t enough theaters playing Black films, white studios weren’t going allow for the competition, and besides that white audiences didn’t seem interested in the first place.  While there is no evidence that Parker ever tried to turn ‘Children of the Sun’ into a film version, it isn’t difficult to imagine him dreaming of audiences of all races watching the creation of civilization projecting and playing out across screens in dark rooms across the nation, to standing ovations and rave reviews from an adoring press, his ultimate takedown of Dixon’s thesis taking place finally taking place in movie theaters rather than through the printed word.  In that dream, Black people would finally be given their due respect as a race, because Parker would have illuminated ancient truths long buried and forgotten.  As it stands, Parker’s work is largely forgotten, while ‘The Birth of a Nation’ continues being taught in film courses as a necessary piece to examine in any study of film.

The ideas Parker proposed were decades ahead of their time, as evidenced by the fact they weren’t fully brought to light and debated in academia until the 1970s with Cheikh Anta Diop, a debate that continued raging through the 1980s and 90s with the work of Martin Bernal.  Can anyone honestly say we’ve fully moved past the Aryan myth about the origins of Western Civilization in 2020?  The ideas at the root of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ are that a monolithically white race of people somehow received the brilliance necessary to create civilization in ancient Greece, and then spread this exceptional culture and humanity, which borders on godliness, from Rome on through to the European Renaissance, and finally to the West Coast of the United States and beyond.  Have these ideas been upended, debunked, replaced with a more accurate telling that takes into account the reality that civilizations arose side by side in Africa and the Middle East?

As a World History teacher, I can honestly say we’re making slow, incremental progress in debunking Dixon’s horrifyingly racist ideas.  But with the ongoing so-called ‘culture wars’ in the United States, and with the white, conservative Christian evangelical right pushing a man like Donald Trump to the heights of power, marching in the streets with torches shouting, “you will not replace us,” it’s important to consider just how heavily embedded white supremacy remains in the social, political, and economic ether.  Parker and his peers likely could have never predicted seeing a Black president.  The closest any Black person got to that sort of power back in their day was a dinner in the White House between Booker T. Washington and Teddy Roosevelt, before Roosevelt stabbed Black America in the back during the Brownsville Affair.  But if they could speak to us now, they would tell us not to be surprised by the racist backlash following a Black president.  They would tell us to expect this monster to live and breathe on, fighting til its last breath, because the core of ‘The Birth of a Nation’ is embedded into the core of the American DNA, whether we like it or not, and it does no good to deny this, terrifying, uncomfortable, essential truth about us.  So long as people live in denial of this, there be massive projection and victim blaming played out through electoral politics, in school board and PTA meetings, in online message forums and social media outlets, mainstream media outlets, inside and outside our own individual and collective pysches, and the fire will always be there, ready to set things ablaze at any time, and the light from these flames will continue representing a thousand different things to a billion different people…

 

 

 

 

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

– James Baldwin

“In this country American means white. Everybody else has to hyphenate.”

– Toni Morrison

“Any man who carries a hyphen about with him carries a dagger that he is ready to plunge into the vitals of this Republic whenever he gets ready.”

– Woodrow Wilson

In the sweltering humidity of July 1919, within the cooling walls of the Douglas County courthouse, a two year old boy with golden hair named Francis Dwyer crawled around on a courtroom floor, oblivious to the centuries of wars being fought through him.  He had not yet become conscious of any concepts beyond toys, mommy and daddy, and food.  And although the limestone structure kept him safe from the summer heat, Francis’ life was in turmoil, because even though he couldn’t understand at the time, he was witnessing the dissolution of his parents’ marriage, and quite possibly the dissolution of his existence as a white child.

The stakes in the battle were opaque:  in order to win an annulment to his marriage, baby Francis’ father, Francis Senior, had to prove his wife, and therefore also his son, were Black people.  That would mean Clara was a Black woman living as a white woman.  In order to win a divorce from her husband for falsely labeling her a ‘negro,’ Clara Dwyer had to prove she, and therefore baby Francis, were in fact white.  That would mean Francis Sr. was abusive, especially because at the time, a white woman accused of being ‘tainted’ with ‘negro blood’ would have her entire life as she knew it destroyed in one fell swoop, as well as that of her children and entire family, by extension.

The nature of the court conflict is as bizarre as it is illuminating, as well as confusing.  It raises questions about the concept of race that are perhaps unanswerable.  Its murkiness makes it one of the clearest places to unpack what race is, and isn’t, in American society.  The concepts of ‘whiteness’ and ‘Blackness,’ are not easy to define.  When I ask students in my classroom what ‘white’ means in the term ‘white people’, their most common answers are usually ‘a color,’ or ‘your ancestry,’ or ‘an ethnicity.’  While none of these answers are necessarily wrong, they’re also not entirely correct, or correct even in the slightest.

Whiteness could mean color alone, but most white people aren’t albino, and therefore the color white as we know it is not what the standard definition of the term means.  Most white people are peach, tannish, or olive colored – not white.  Whiteness could mean ancestry alone, and we could divide race along geographical lines between Europe and Africa, but then we’d be pretending as if the Mediterranean didn’t exist at all, and that the two continents somehow had a barrier that served as a magical wall between them, leaving no grey area for racial lines to be blurred over the sands of time.  Do any of us really believe there is some definitive biological divide between the people of Southern Europe and Northern Africa?  Would any of us truly argue that the Strait of Gibraltar represents a solid line dividing whiteness and Blackness?

The truth is that race doesn’t exist biologically at all, but rather merely as a social construct.  In other words, it doesn’t exist inside our bodies in any way, shape, or form, but exists all throughout our imaginations and within the very fabric of our societies.  It resides in the ethers of our history, our politics, our laws, our economies, our conscious and subconscious everyday lives.  And even though it’s something that has been fabricated in our imaginations, we can’t expect to avoid the issue by becoming ‘color blind.’  The old white proverb ‘I don’t see race’ is a cop-out of epic proportions, because the toothpaste is already out of the tube, and pretending it’s not there does nothing to solve anything.  The claim is disingenuous at best, a gaslighting mechanism at worst.  It’s like telling a person of color that you don’t recognize an essential piece of their identity, because it makes you uncomfortable to talk about.  Not a good look.

Sociologists have created a mountain of evidence proving people do in fact see race in every moment they encounter people of different racial categories.  Unless you live in an uncontacted tribe such as those found in the Amazon, your mind has been formed within a heavily racialized society, and you’ve been bathed in racial narratives since birth.  So we can’t *not* see race.  It’s there every time people walk into a room, whether it’s at the forefront of our minds or somewhere in our subconscious, and it’s best to simply acknowledge this phenomenon is real, then do what we can to grapple with it.

No therapist would ever advise people to pretend their issues away, although abusive husbands might try to persuade their victimized wives to pretend away their abuse.  Such is the nature of the conflict between the ‘Black Lives Matter’ and ‘All Live Matter’ crowds, the former of which is an attempt to point out a specific problem in American society and give voice to an oppressed demographic, the latter of which is an attempt to silence those same voices and cover up the problem.  It’s a way of looking at Black people who are begging us to see their continued struggle in a world designed to work against them and saying, “shut up,” without saying those words specifically.  As the great wordsmith Talib Kweli once said, you wouldn’t go to a cancer awareness rally and scream “all diseases matter,” yet that’s precisely what’s happened in the 21st century.

In order to understand how we got to this point, and how baby Francis ended up in his absurd situation, we have to begin at the beginning.  While humans have been placing each other into various tribal categories for all the hundreds of thousands of years of our existence, sometimes noting skin tone in these categories, the modern concept of race as we know it is a fairly recent invention.  Traveling to ancient Rome, one would struggle explaining the concepts of ‘Black people’ and ‘white people’ to anyone living there, even if you spoke their language.  Although Romans enslaved many human beings, this enslavement was not based on racial concepts that would be familiar to us today.  Whomever Rome conquered became fair game for enslavement, including people we would deem as being white today, and at the same time many Roman leaders were people we would describe as being Black.  The Roman term for Sub-Saharan African peoples was ‘Aethiope,’ and the term carried no social weight to it at all, because the Roman Empire never experienced the wave of race-based slavery the Americas did through the more recent era of European settler colonialism. So the Roman worldview didn’t consist of the race-based lens that so dominates across the world today.

If one is looking for the true origins of modern racial constructs, 1492 and beyond is the best place to start.  Modern racial constructs were conceived in the midst of post-Columbian Trans-Atlantic slavery, in which African peoples were particularly targeted for enslavement and forced into new horrifying lives, and new traumatized identities, in the New World.  White enslavers methodically dismantled African tribal identities, separating people from their own ilk in order to minimize the chances of an uprising coordinated by friends who speak common languages, and to destroy any sense of humanity or self-love that might remain after the trauma of the disturbingly cruel trip across the Atlantic.  The new identities forced onto these African peoples placed them into the bottom of a social hierarchy that diminished their basic humanity and their agency as free human beings, stripping them of power in a near absolute sense.

As the 18th century American colonies stewed into revolutionary fervor, the number of enslaved African peoples living within them shot through the roof, inspiring white intellectuals of the day to pen new theories about how to make sense out of it all.  The most commonly accepted birth of the ‘official’ new racial hierarchy is in Johann Friedrich Blumenbach’s seminal 1775 book, ‘On the Natural Varieties of Mankind,’ in which Blumenbach placed humans into five racial categories.  His new categories were ‘Caucasian’ (white), ‘Mongolian’ (yellow), ‘Malayan’ (brown), ‘American’ (red), and ‘Ethiopian’ (black).  Although Blumenbach’s text visually represented the various races horizontally, as opposed to a hierarchical totem pole or triangle, his text clearly indicates his belief in the superiority of the white race over all others, so it is useful to place the image into a triangular hierarchy, as Stephen Jay Gould did in his groundbreaking 1981 book, ‘The Mismeasure of Man.’

In order to justify the usefulness of the rearranged version, Gould cited Blumenbach’s own clear language about a racial hierarchy:

I have allotted the first place to the Caucasian… which makes me esteem it the primeval one. This diverges in both directions into two, most remote and very different from each other; on the one side, namely, into the Ethiopian, and on the other into the Mongolian. The remaining two occupy the intermediate positions between that primeval one and these two extreme varieties; that is, the American between the Caucasian and Mongolian; the Malay between the same Caucasian and Ethiopian.

Although his work appears anthropological, and therefore nonreligious, Blumenbach’s era of science had not yet separated itself from Christian-based dogma that still dominated every sphere of thought at the time.  He followed a logic shared by many of his peers which posited that the white race originated in the Caucasus region, and that Adam and Eve were Caucasian.  Under this popular ‘degenerative hypothesis’ on the origins of race, the various non-Caucasian races were therefore the result of biological degeneration, due to poor diet and climate conditions.  In this sense, whiteness was literally associated with godliness, since the Bible states Adam and Eve were created in the image of God.  This would account for and justify rules made to benefit white people at the expense of everyone else, and who is anyone to argue with God himself, anyways?

From this new racial and racist hierarchy, anthropologists fleshed out endless variations of it, using pseudoscientific techniques such as phrenology to measure the innate physical and mental capacities of each race.  This elaborate set of ideologies penetrated every corner of the earth as the ‘Age of Exploration’ gave way to the Age of Imperialism, and was written into the social fabric through an endless deluge of academic, literary, political, and legal texts.  The official view of human races spread into the ether just as the Founding Fathers were penning their famous texts, declaring the rights of (white) men to be to be free from tyranny.  Blumenbach’s ideas were then used to justify the creation of a white supremacist state based largely on the concept of his racial hierarchy, as wealthy white men of property and power justified the vastly unequal society they were creating through the popular pseudoscience of their time.

Thomas Jefferson, a man credited with writing much of the great American language on the concepts of freedom and liberty, also enslaved human beings.  One of his enslaved humans was a teenage girl whom he repeatedly raped and impregnated, keeping her in a secret room near his bedroom to be used as he pleased.  It doesn’t matter what the standards of Jefferson’s society were at the time, or if that society lacked the same concepts of sexual assault we have today – Sally Hemings could not consent because she was in practice a piece of property he owned, legally more like a couch than a human with her own agency and rights, and therefore we must call it rape.  No other word will suffice, and any Stockholm Syndrome she may have suffered does not negate the point either.  Although Jefferson felt some moral qualms about owning slaves, he denied the better voices of morality in his head and ultimately justified his enslavement of human beings using the concepts presented by Blumenbach.  In his 1781 ‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’ Jefferson wrote:

… let me add too, as a circumstance of great tenderness, where our conclusion would degrade a whole race of men from the rank in the scale of beings which their Creator may perhaps have given them. To our reproach it must be said, that though for a century and a half we have had under our eyes the races of black and of red men, they have never yet been viewed by us as subjects of natural history. I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may posses different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct…

Just five years prior to ‘Notes on the State of Virginia,’ when the authors of the Declaration of Independence declared, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” they were referring specifically, and only, to white male landowners.  Everyone else was denied the right to vote, including poor white men, who were only granted the ballot through the 19th century populist battles of Jacksonian Democracy.  White men of all classes had the right to vote by 1840, including those without property, yet all other demographics would have to continue their fight for a voice at the ballot.

The Founding Fathers therefore intentionally created a system that was racist, classist, and sexist, as the upper crust of wealthy white men hoarded wealth amongst themselves and abused those upon whose labor they relied for the creation of that very wealth, then justified it through the use of intellectual, rational, Enlightenment ideals.  These were the concepts deified in the Crystal Palace and all the subsequent world’s fairs, the intellectual seeds of white supremacist-based global imperialism and settler colonialism that permeate through our imaginations to this day.

As always, with racism comes xenophobia.  On the issue of citizenship, the Founding Fathers deliberately stated in the Naturalization Act of 1790 that the pathway to citizenship would be limited to “any alien, being a free white person” who had resided in the United States for at least two years.  This law clearly rejects the citizenship of European indentured servants as well as all foreign-born people of color.  While all European people were considered white, ‘Anglo-Saxon’ (British), ‘Nordic’ (Scandinavian), and ‘Teutonic’ (German) white people were by and large considered superior to other European groups, which made up the so-called ‘hyphenated Americans’ who came from Ireland and all the nations of eastern and southern Europe.  It was immigrants from these areas that made up the largest portion of indentured servants in the U.S.  So within the category of ‘white’ there were subcategories considered inferior or superior based upon which geographic region one’s ancestors came from.  Like in the complex maze of racial categories created by the Spanish and Portuguese throughout Latin America, the racial hierarchy of the United States was never destined to be as simple as Blumenbach first conceived it.

As with whiteness, Blackness has contained subcategories of its own.  With most enslaved African peoples coming from West Africa, the diverse phenotypes shared by people of the African continent were not visibly represented in the enslaved population, and therefore most of the enslaved people shared similar physical features, including skin tone.  However, as these people procreated with people of other racial categories, a new racial strata took shape.  Babies born to white fathers and Black mothers, the majority of whom were conceived through the act of rape, proved especially daunting to categorize.  Were they Black?  White?  Neither?  Both?  What about their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren?  If enough whiteness was added, could Blackness become erased from the genetic line entirely?  If so, at which point?  Through this confusion, the terms ‘mulatto,’ ‘quadroon,’ ‘octaroon,’ and ‘hexadecaroon’ were employed, in order to describe those who were one half, one fourth, one eighth, and one sixteenth Black, with the rest of their ancestry being white.

As a general rule, the closer one was to whiteness, the more privileges one had within the hierarchy of enslaved people.  Lighter skinned slaves would be given lighter work around the house, as opposed to the back-breaking labor done out in the fields.  It must also be stated clearly here that white enslavers who raped and impregnated their slaves most frequently *enslaved their own children,* or sold them off so their white wives would not have to live with the evidence of their husbands’ infidelities.  The lightest skinned Black women, particularly those deemed pretty, might even be sold off to become another white enslaver’s sex slave, a fate that would have been presented to her as an opportunity to live a relatively pampered life, or at least treated better than most of her peers, alongside her repeated rape.  This system of abuse gave birth to the concepts of ‘house slaves’ and ‘field slaves’ that pitted Black people against one another in an endless cycle of colorism that continues to this day.

Throughout the 19th century, as race mixing became increasingly common, popular novels and plays told ‘tragic mulatto’ narratives in which lighter skinned Black people were torn between racial identities.  Abolitionists frequently used these tales as a way to appeal to Northerners in the cause to abolish slavery.  The implication was clear: these people are almost like you.  They were almost white, and therefore easier to empathize with than their darker skinned peers.  In addition to serving abolitionist propaganda, these tales also flew off the shelves, not unlike how tabloid rags continue to sell today, and how Jerry Springer and General Hospital have so captivated generations of Americans – so there was a profit motive as well, based largely on voyeurism into the tragic lives of the enslaved ‘other.’

The most popular form of these stories came in the form of the tragic mulatta, in which lighter skinned women were usually depicted as being attractive, and frequently as sex objects who were torn between racial worlds.  She was used as a vehicle to explore the psychological, sociological, and political confusion the people of the United States were experiencing at the time.  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ended his 1842 poem, ‘The Quadroon Girl,’ with a slaver taking away a beautiful Black woman to be his sex slave:

His heart within him was at strife
  With such accurséd gains:
For he knew whose passions gave her life,
  Whose blood ran in her veins. 

But the voice of nature was too weak;
  He took the glittering gold!
Then pale as death grew the maiden’s cheek,
  Her hands as icy cold. 

The Slaver led her from the door,
  He led her by the hand,
To be his slave and paramour
  In a strange and distant land! 

Abolotionist Lydia Maria Child, famous for writing the poem ‘Over the River and Through the Woods,’ also published a popular book in 1842 called ‘The Quadroon.’  In it, the tragic mulatta (or tragic quadroon as it applies in this story) named Rosalie has a common law marriage with a white man named Edward.  Together, they have a daughter named Xarifa.  When Edward wants to pursue a career in politics, he leaves Rosalie to marry a white woman, since he would never stand a chance winning any elections while presenting a quadroon woman as his partner.  Rosalie eventually dies, and then when Xarifa grows older she is discovered to be the product of an illegitimate partnership between a white man and a Black woman, and therefore Black herself.  Xarifa is sold off into slavery, after which she commits suicide, producing the template for all subsequent tragic mulatta tales.

Again, even as the relationship between Rosalie and Edward is presented as a romance, the power dynamics involved mean Rosalie was never afforded the agency for true consent.  If we have no issue calling statutory rape by its name, even if an underaged person claims they agreed to sex, due to the power dynamic involved, then it should be easy to apply that same logic to enslaved women and their captors.  During the era of American slavery this sort of rape was not necessarily condoned, but was also not really condemned.  As with lynching, it was carried out somewhat in full view of the public, with mixed race children resembling their rapist fathers inhabiting plantation houses along with the rest of the white family, and the rest of the enslaved people who made up each plantation community.

Thomas Jefferson fathered six children through his rape of Sally Hemings, and while this secret remained  up until relatively recent times, there were more than a few whispers about the matter beginning at least as early as 1802, when the affair was first exposed by one of Jefferson’s enemies.  Although accusations flew, Jefferson had made sure to be discreet enough to keep the issue at bay.  He had kept his rape at least semi-hidden from the public.  And because he only kept Hemings as a sex object, never once trying to present her to the public as either his mistress or common law wife, he was able to weather the storm of accusations and remain president for two full terms.

Due to the fact Hemings was never granted official legal status as Jefferson’s wife, she and her children were never granted the privileges that come from being the family of a president.  Therefore, they posed no threat to the established racial order.  The color line was kept intact so long as Black people weren’t allowed access to the social, political, economic, and legal benefits that would have come from marriage to a white man.  However, because they and many of their descendants were so light skinned and European-looking in various other phenotypes, many of them went out into the social ether and ‘passed’ as white.  In order to live life passing as white, Black people were forced to abandon all ties to their Black families, friends, and culture, lest they be discovered.

Harriet Beecher Stowe explored the concept of ‘passing’ in some detail in her classic, best selling novel, ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’  In this tragic mulatto narrative, an octoroon woman named Eliza and her mulatto husband, George, find out their son is going to be sold to a particularly cruel enslaver, and decide to flee North, where they can live their lives passing as white people.  Stowe described Eliza as being “so white as not to be known as of colored lineage, without a critical survey, and her child was white also, it was much easier for her to pass on unsuspected.”  When George enters a bar full of slave catchers, he passes without detection, even as an advertisement for his capture describes him:

Ran away from the subscriber, my mulatto boy, George. Said George six feet in height, a very light mulatto, brown curly hair is very intelligent, speaks handsomely, can read and write; will probably try to pass for a white man; is deeply scarred on his back and shoulders; has been branded in his right hand with the letter H.”

Stowe elaborated on George’s appearance, and his attempts to maximize his whiteness through both physical and social racial cues:

… George was, by his father’s side, of white descent. His mother was one of those unfortunates of her race, marked out by personal beauty to be the slave of the passions of her possessor, and the mother of children who may never know a father. From one of the proudest families in Kentucky he had inherited a set of fine European features, and a high, indomitable spirit. From his mother he had received only a slight mulatto tinge, amply compensated by its accompanying rich, dark eye. A slight change in the tint of the skin and the color of his hair had metamorphosed him into the Spanish-looking fellow he then appeared; and as gracefulness of movement and gentlemanly manners had always been perfectly natural to him, he found no difficulty in playing the bold part he had adopted—that of a gentleman traveling with his domestic.

Here, Stowe hints at the blurring of racial lines which occurs between Southern Europe and North Africa – a Black man might actually be Spanish and a Spanish man might actually be Black.  She also points us to the fact that ‘whiteness’ isn’t limited to biological markers, as George’s very styles of movement, of speaking, of overall personality also play essential roles in allowing him to pass undetected even in the lion’s den of slave catchers whose professional lives depend on their ability to spot Black men trying to pass as white.  In this context, the ridiculousness of categorizing humans into different races is revealed to us, as the ambiguity of blurred racial lines wins out over the hard drawn racial concept originally hypothesized by Blumenbach and his ilk.  The fact that George can enjoy himself as a white man in the company of the men sent to detect his Blackness indicates that the entire hierarchy has been absurd from its inception, built on nothing more than a house of cards.

Yet even as paper-thin the conceptual structure of race is, the spoken and unspoken rules of racial color lines were enforced as if they were built of granite, and tragic mulatto tales reflected this fact.  In an 1859 play called ‘The Octoroon,’ two white men fight over a beautiful Black woman named Zoe.  George, the protagonist, is in love with Zoe and also happens to be her first cousin, as she was conceived through his uncle’s rape of an enslaved woman.  George’s uncle had supposedly granted his Black daughter freedom before his death.  The antagonist, Jacob, is in the process of removing George and his family from their plantation, due to financial difficulties.  He plans on making the plantation his, and because he has documentation that Zoe was never formally freed by her father, he also plans on forcing Zoe to be his sex slave.

Despite having an opportunity to marry a wealthy white woman who is after him, and thus save his family’s plantation, George only has eyes for Zoe, the tragic mulatta.  When Zoe is put on the auction block to be sold off to her soon-to-be serial rapist, George attacks Jacob, only to be held back by his friends.  Then when Jacob is discovered to be guilty of a murder that occurs earlier in the play, the audience becomes aware that George will be able to keep the plantation, and ‘be with’ Zoe, who is presented as reciprocating his love for her.  Before the message that she will no longer be sold off to Jacob reaches her, Zoe drinks a vial of poison, choosing to die rather than live as Jacob’s sex slave.  The news that she won’t be sold off to Jacob finally reaches her as she is slowly dying, with George by her side, completing the tragedy.  The play is very much an American Romeo and Juliet tale, but instead of portraying star-crossed lovers being torn apart by warring families, George and Zoe are star-crossed lovers being torn apart by warring races.

The Octoroon might seem overly salacious, an exaggerated fiction meant to shock and titillate audiences, but it’s a fairly realistic depiction of racial politics of the time.  One need not look further than Vice President Richard Mentor Johnson for a revealing account of how these politics played out in real life.  After inheriting his father’s property, including the people he had enslaved, Johnson openly carried on a relationship with Julia Chinn, an octoroon woman.  Although Johnson and Chinn couldn’t legally be married, it is believed they performed a secret ceremony that would have been illegal at the time.  Johnson referred to her as his wife, and together that had two daughters.  When he was away, often for months at a time, Chinn managed his estate in every sense, including his finances and the daily routines performed by the rest of Johnson’s enslaved labor force.  She even hosted a dinner party of 5,000 guests in honor of the Marquis De Lafayette, one of the major figures in the American and French revolutionary wars.

Johnson himself was a decorated veteran of the War of 1812, laying claim to the American victory over British and Native American forces at the Battle of the Thames.  Johnson claimed to have personally killed the great warrior Tecumseh, making him quite the star in his time.  Following the war he served as the chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, then went on to serve in the Senate.  While Johnson pushed against the expansion of slavery, and eventually the Missouri Compromise, his own Black daughters received the finest education and wore the fanciest clothes money could buy, enjoying some of the social-political status that the strict color lines of the time strictly forbade.  They even carried Johnson’s surname, a potent signifier of power and privilege attached to their prestigious war hero father.

Here the lines between race, politics, romance, marriage, and rape converge into a perfect storm of grey matter.  Chinn and her daughters were legally Johnson’s property, yet she was presented as his wife, and they as his daughters.  Because Chinn was legally his property, it’s clear that she could not fully consent, as was the case with Sally Hemings.  Through this lens, Chinn was made to be a sex slave with the highest status possibly afforded to an enslaved person at the time.  She was given the keys to wealth and power, but only under the command of the white man who had the ability to snatch it away from her at any given moment, and who ultimately refused to emancipate her, indicating a power dynamic that simply fails to meet any standard of true romance based upon love and mutual respect.  Without documentation of Chinn’s own personal thoughts and feelings about the matter, we are left to speculate about how she viewed the complex situation.  If she felt love for the man who kept her in bondage, could it have really been anything more than Stockholm Syndrome?

When Julia Chinn died during a cholera epidemic in 1833, Johnson began raping another woman he had enslaved.  When she left him to be with her common law husband whom she had been with before her rape, he had her tracked down, seized, and put up on the auction block to be sold deeper into the South, a punishment frequently threatened by white enslavers who viewed themselves as benevolent masters, as opposed to the monsters in Alabama and Louisiana.  Johnson then proceeded to take that woman’s sister as his third ‘wife,’ indicating Johnson’s fixation on controlling Black women and then trying to push them into white society as both his slaves and his dear wives, a bizarre type of contradiction among many that frequently occurred in the racially confused United States.

By the time Johnson ran for vice president alongside Martin Van Buren in 1836, Julia Chinn had been dead for several years, and one of her daughters had also become a victim of cholera.  That didn’t stop Johnson’s political opponents from vile, racist attacks on her and her children.  In one attack, Johnson’s war hero status was turned against him in a cartoon called, ‘Carrying the War into Africa,’ which implies Johnson’s vitality as a soldier had been used to impregnate an African woman, and represents his common-law marriage to Chinn as a violent conquest into what was viewed as the savage continent.  Visually, Chinn is represented as a runaway slave with dark skin and short, coarse hair, an exaggeration of her African phenotypes used for maximum anti-Black effect.  She also speaks in stereotypical African American English Vernacular, stating, ” Let ebery good dimicrat vote for my husband, and den he shall hab his sheer ub de surplum rebbenu wat is in my bag.”

Finally, a slogan is presented to set up a sexually deviant situation between Julia Chinn, Richard Mentor Johnson, Martin Van Buren, and the American populace.  The word ‘pluck’ here is used as we would use the word ‘fuck,’ and the word ‘dick’ is used in the same way it is today, referring to a penis.  The slogan, “She plucks dick – and Dick plucks you – and Van plucks dick” suggests that through Chinn’s sexual contact with Johnson, and Johnson’s vice presidential candidacy with Van Buren, she and the men she has tainted with her sexuality will fuck the American people, if Van Buren is elected to the presidency.

In another 1836 cartoon, ‘An Affecting Scene in Kentucky,’ Johnson is shown holding his head in agony as a copy of a newspaper that attacked his relationship with his now deceased wife falls from his other hand.  In his speech bubble he says, “When I read the scurrilous attacks in the Newspapers on the Mother of my Children, pardon me, my friends if I give way to feelings!!!  My dear Girls, bring me your Mother’s picture, that I may show my friends here.”  His daughters hold a portrait of their dead mother.  One of them says, “Here it is Pa, but don’t take on so,” and the other says, “Poor dear Pa, how much he is affected.”

The joke here is quite simply the fact that Johnson had a Black family and didn’t try to hide the fact.  In the slave era South, white men who took Black women as sex slaves were given a pass so long as they went along with the rest of society in pretending such a thing never happened.  The enslaved woman and the children she bore of her enslaver posed no threat to the established color line, and therefore the practice posed no threat to the racial hierarchy.  Johnson’s crime, therefore, was not in impregnating a woman he enslaved, but rather in publicly acknowledging her and their children’s existence.  He hadn’t even granted his Black family their freedom, yet his refusal to hide this family functioned as a sin against American society, a moral code based in hard-drawn color lines that only blurred when people like Johnson deviated from the nation-wide denial mechanisms that kept interracial families in the dark, conveniently hidden from view.

Johnson’s nomination as vice presidential candidate was fraught with skepticism.  Tennessee Supreme Court Chief Justice John Catron predicted, “the very moment Col. J. is announced, the newspapers will open upon him with facts, that he had endeavored often to force his daughters into society, that the mother in her life time, and they now, rode in carriages, and claimed equality.”  Although Van Buren won the presidency with 170 electoral votes, Johnson came up one point short of winning the vice presidency, with only 147 of the 148 he needed.  Southern political forces had refused to endorse a man who so blatantly crossed the establish color lines of American society.  In the end, Johnson was elected vice president by a Senate vote, marking the only time in history such a process was needed to pass the torch of executive power in an election year.

When Johnson passed away in 1850, his estate was divided between his brothers.  His surviving daughter was left with nothing, being an illegitimate child in the eyes of the law.  Even though Julia Chinn was educated and literate, and her common law husband often spent half of any given year away from his plantation while she managed it, it appears that no letters between the two survive.  In fact, what would have been Richard Mentor Johnson’s archive of letters and other documents that might serve as a memory of the man appears to have been destroyed.  Professor Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, who is currently working on a book about Julia Chinn, hypothesizes Johnson’s brothers purposefully destroyed these items, in order to suit their financial needs as well as to scrub their family ties to a Black woman and her children.  And just like that, the story of a vice president and his Black family was largely buried in the annals of American history.

A decade after Johnson’s death, the United States was plunged into the Civil War, and emotions were high.  Many Northerners resented the war, as evidenced by the bloody New York Draft Riots in the summer of 1863, in which mobs of enraged white people, bitter at the prospect of being forced into fighting what they viewed as a rich man’s war in the cause of abolition, slaughtered over a hundred Black people in the streets of Manhattan.  During the riot, a white mob set the Colored Orphan Asylum on fire with children inside, looted it for all its goods, and watched it burn to the ground.  Luckily, the children were able to escape before being consumed in the flames.

Most of the New York mob consisted of Irishmen who faced competition for low paying, physically demanding jobs on the docks, from Black men.  Capitalists often pitted hyphenated European American laborers against African-American (notice that Black people have been hyphenated as well) laborers, playing on racism as a way to keep the workforce from uniting into larger, multiracial unions.  If white working class Northerners were willing to slaughter Black people in the streets and burn Black children alive, how could they be convinced to support the Union and abolitionist causes?  Abolitionists went to work brainstorming ideas.

Then in 1864, as the Union consolidated its control of the Mississippi River following General Grant’s Vicksburg campaign, and General Sherman’s war machine geared up to slit the Confederacy’s throat with one final push across Georgia, new questions arose regarding what to do with the millions of freed Black people who were now in a state of limbo between their old and new lives.  How would they assimilate into white society?  Where would they work?  Where would they be educated?  New Orleans, the jewel of the South, was under Union control, but what would the future of its inhabitants look like after the entire Southern economy was uprooted and millions displaced?

At least a few abolitionists sought to answer these questions, as well as to build support for the Union and the cause of abolition, by taking the tragic mulatto tale to another level and appealing directly to whiteness itself.  In an effort to raise money for the schooling of freed Black children in the South, eight newly emancipated people, five children and three adults, were taken on a tour of the North where they would humanize the Black population of the South.  The catch here was that four of the five children were so white-passing that white Northerners would be hard pressed to tell them from their own kids.  The chosen eight were professionally photographed, and the resulting photos were sold individually, with profits going directly to schools for Black people in New Orleans.

Harper’s Weekly then ran a story about the eight newly ‘Emancipated Slaves, White and Colored’ in 1864, as a way to promote the campaign.  The angle here was simple, yet carries all the complexities of race within it: appeal to white Northerners by showing them formerly enslaved children who looked just like their own.  Shamelessly, the progressive Yankees wrote, “These are, of course, the offspring of white fathers through two or three generations. They are as white, as intelligent, as docile, as most of our own children.”  Therefore, white progressives of the time were willing to depict Black people as human beings, but still had to work within the framework of the racial hierarchy, and therefore the unstated premise of the message is that whiteness and humanity are quite nearly the same thing.  In other words, the message was not that Black people are human, but rather that Black people are capable of reaching towards whiteness if given the chance, and therefore of reaching towards full humanity, which is whiteness.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Following the Civil War came decades of brutal Jim Crow-era racism, and such racism was never confined in any way to the South.  Tragic mulatta tales continued titillating white audiences, but now that Black women had been legally freed from bondage, what would the nature of their relationships with white men be, and how would those relationships be viewed?  One telling example of how acceptable such relationships were, half a century after the Civil War, comes out of Cincinnati in 1904 when the mother of a white man who was set to marry a quadroon woman attempted to intervene, prompting threats of suicide, which she whole-heartedly condoned.

According to the Cincinnati Times-Star:

The boy’s mother had been to see the quadroon and had pleaded with her to refuse.  The girl says she told him of his mother’s objections.  He drew a revolver and said that he would kill himself.  “I don’t care to live if I can’t have you,” he said.  The mother of the girl, Mrs. Sulser, grabbed the revolver away from Adams…

… His gray-haired mother with the tears rolling down her cheeks, talked of her boy Tuesday morning.  “We shall move away from here,” she wept. “I have cried and cried till the tears won’t come any more.  I can’t bear the thought of my boy marrying a colored girl. We are going to sell out and go somewhere where no one knows us.  I sent Willie word that he has broken his father’s heart and mine.  I sent the girl word I’d do something she wouldn’t like if she married Willie.  I’m afraid I’ll just go madlike if I think about the thing much longer.  I wish that Willie had killed himself that time he tried to kill the girl and himself.  I’d rather attend his funeral than have him marry this girl.  Oh, the disgrace of a disinherited son married to a colored girl.”

Such virulently racist views continued to be widespread, as propaganda surged nationwide as a way to push back against the multicultural messages pushed by progressives who envisioned a mixed race future for the United States.  In the years leading up to the moment when baby Francis Dwyer Jr’s racial identity was put on trial inside the Douglas County courthouse of Omaha, the most successful white supremacist narrative of all time was making waves into American popular culture.  Hollywood’s first blockbuster smash hit, ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ played to sold out audiences week after week, month after month, in the increasingly popular silent movie theaters popping up across the nation.. 

The groundbreaking film broke into new cinematic territory, yet also featured a classic tragic mulatta character in the form of house servant Lydia Brown, played by  actress Mary Alden in blackface.  In a scene near the beginning of the film, the main villain, abolitionist Austin Stoneman (based largely on Thaddeus Stevens), discusses politics in his library with Radical Republican Senator Charles Sumner.  Lydia overhears the dialogue and is turned on by the power emanating from the room.

Then as Sumner makes his way out the door, he sees Lydia.  She pretends to drop his hat and then bends down to pick it up in a suggestive manner.

When she tries to physically touch Sumner, in an effort to seduce him, he pushes her away and makes his way out the door.  Infuriated, Lydia spits out the door towards him as he walks away.  The lustful mulatta can’t control her sexuality or her rage, those savage qualities so frequently associated with Blackness.  These qualities are the ones that slavery kept in check, kept in their proper place by Southern society, and now unleashed following the North’s victory in the Civil War.

Turning from lust to rage, and rage back to lust, Lydia falls to the floor in agony, a cat in heat without a mate.  She rubs her breasts and licks her paws, the tragic mulatta in full blown meltdown over the sex she desires with powerful white men.

Lydia then hatches a plan to get what she wants.  When Stoneman enters the room, she tells a sob story about how Sumner tried to assault her, invoking sympathy from Stoneman, who consoles her in his arms, and in that moment of physical touch, realizes his own attraction to his Black house servant.  Lydia is therefore the character with true agency, pulling strings behind closed doors through powerful men, all through her cunning, her sociopathic willingness to falsely accuse powerful men, and her raw sexual powers that weak men like Stoneman stood no chance against.

But it isn’t just the individual characters of Lydia Brown, Charles Sumner, and Austin Stoneman who are playing roles here.  These characters represent archetypes that symbolized entire sections of the American population at the time.  Stoneman represents white progressives in the North who envision a multiracial society in which the hard-drawn color lines established through the racial hierarchy become blurred.  Lydia’s sexuality is therefore political, a way to infiltrate the white power structure and destroy it from the inside.  She is a fifth column designed to destroy white civilization as we know it, and weak men like Stoneman will be to blame when it all comes crumbling down.  As ridiculous as that sounds today, such fears were very real a century ago, and ‘The Birth of a Nation’ was wildly successful as a propaganda piece pushing that fear to its extreme, embedding it into the national psyche.

It might be assumed that Southern revisionist propaganda portraying Black people in such blatantly racist ways, and the KKK as heroes on a mission to save the nation from Black savages, would have only been popular in the South, where generations of bitterness and entrenched racism kept emotions highest.  However, ‘The Birth of a Nation’ and its hateful message spread far and wide into every major city in the U.S., including Omaha.  On December 26th, 1915 The Omaha Bee reported on the film’s lingering success:

The Birth of A Nation’ will close its long engagement at the Brandeis theater with the two performances today, matinee and evening after having exceeded by weeks the longest previous local run, being presented from ten to twenty times as long as the average theatrical attraction which comes to Omaha.  Including tonight’s performance it will have been given at eighty-five consecutive performances, or twice daily during the six weeks and one day of its engagement.  This long engagement was made possible through the fact that it is unquestionably the greatest, if not the only great picture ever produced, and every patron left the theater with the intention of telling everyone he knew to be sure to go and see it, and over 85,000 of them did so, or about one in every four persons in Omaha, Council Bluffs, South Omaha and the surrounding country.

The mainstream narrative surrounding Black women and white men was thus set into its insidious form over a century of lurid tales told in novels and theater productions, framing Black women as jezebels intent on destroying men, destroying marriages, destroying families, destroying the color line, destroying the racial hierarchy, destroying white American society at large.  In cities like Omaha where the population of Black people had remained relatively small, these narratives were all most white people had to go on in terms of understanding or making sense of who Black people were, and what they intended to do as they made their way from the rural South into the urban North.

In the context of ‘The Birth of A Nation’ and other popular tragic mulatto narratives, Francis Dwyer’s accusation that his wife Clara was actually a Black woman in disguise became a scandal of epic proportions.  If his accusations were true, Clara and her son represented a clear violation of the color line, an infiltration into the white power structure, and a literal crime against society.  Omaha’s miscegenation laws had for decades barred white people from marrying people with one quarter or more “negro blood,” and in 1913 the law was amended to ban marriage between white people and those with “one eighth or more negro, Japanese or Chinese blood.”  Therefore, if Clara and Francis Jr. really were Black, then the child would be deemed illegitimate and stripped of all the sociopolitical capital that came from whiteness, a future his mother was not about to submit to if she had any say on the matter.

But how had a white man been duped into marrying and procreating with a Black woman in the first place, and how did he come to believe his wife and son were not white, as he had previously believed?

Only months after ‘The Birth of a Nation’ dazzled the city of Omaha, Francis Dwyer Jr. was born, and the attending physician told Francis Sr. that his son was almost certainly Black.  Francis then signed up to fight in World War 1, served in France where he had plenty of time to think about his domestic situation back home, and upon his return decided to move into legal proceedings against his wife.  Because of his Catholic faith, he sought to annul the marriage rather than divorce, on the grounds that his wife was more than one eighth Black and had lied to him.  Clara countered with divorce actions of her own, citing abandonment as her rationale.  Hanging in the air during the first days of courtroom proceedings was the prospect of testimony under oath from Clara’s father, Douglass P. McCary, whom Francis’ lawyer anticipated would not deny his Black heritage under such a legal microscope.  In the opening stages of the trial, Douglass was nowhere to be found, adding to the tension building up around Omaha’s racial soap opera.

Newspapers ran the Dwyer story nationwide, capitalizing on its salacious nature at every turn.  The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported under the headline, ‘Golden Haired Boy White, Mother Says’ with a subheading that spells out exactly how entrenched anti-Black racism has been in the United States:

The article then goes on to lay out some details of the case:

Science has been called into the Omaha District Court to decide whether Francis Dwyer, 2 years old, with golden hair and blue eyes, is a negro or a white boy – wether or not he has reverted to the type of some distant ancestor.  His parents grandparents, and great-grandparents were white and they have never been suspected of having a drop of negro blood.

On the outcome of the case depends whether the little fellow will be raised as a negro or a white boy.  While the trial is in progress, Francis plays around the courtroom.

At the same time his mother, Mrs. Clara McCreary (sic) Dwyer, the defendant in the case, who is seeking to purge herself and her child of the charge of “negro,” strongly denies she has a drop of negro blood.

To the birth of the child, Dwyer told the court, he had never dreamed that his wife was part negro or that any of her ancestors had been negro.  Miss McCreary was born in Omaha and has lived here all her life.  She went through the schools as a white girl, all her associates were white.  McCreary has lived in Omaha more than 25 years.  Part of the time he was a mail clerk in the post office and at present is foreman in one of the big packing houses in South Omaha.  His race has never been questioned, nor has that of Mrs. McCreary.

…. Dwyer’s family makes the statement that, if the child is given them to support, they will rear it as a negro child, not as a white boy.  “We do not intend that he shall be brought up as a white boy, to marry some white girl,” they say.  “He shall be a negro, shall live among negroes and shall be known as a negro.”

Francis Dwyer seemed especially adamant about clearing his name from any suspicion that he might raise his son as a white boy, placing particular emphasis on the idea that he would never risk harming a poor innocent white girl who might be fooled into marrying him.  His concern appears to be in saving face in white society, lest he be viewed as a race traitor, a deviant like Richard Mentor Johnson who challenged the racial hierarchy and thus brought shame upon his family.  The Lincoln Journal Star focused one of their stories on Dwyer’s insistence on keeping the color line intact:

Before diving into some of the more bizarre details of the Dwyer case, it is important to provide some family history, as the stories leading up to the birth of Francis Jr. offer a case study in American racial politics.  Clara’s family origins trace back to Natchez, Mississippi, where her great-grandfather Robert McCary was born enslaved to a white cabinetmaker and a Black woman.  Robert had a sister and a younger brother.  Although born enslaved, Robert was educated and brought up to understand the ways of white society.  In accordance with their father James McCary’s will, Robert and his sister were freed in 1815, and Robert inherited a substantial piece of the estate, including slaves of his own.  Although relatively rare, it was not unheard of for the elite of Black society to enslave Black people of their own in Mississipi.

As a free Black man of wealth, property, and means, Robert had entered into what was called the ‘blue vein’ society of Natchez, a club of upper class Black people made up of mulattos, quadroons, octoroons, and other variations of potentially white passing Black folks.  Many of those who made up this blue vein society took on all the manners of dress, speech, and overall habits of the Southern white aristocracy, including the enslavement of other, mostly darker skinned, Black people.

Only a month after the Dwyer court case hit newspapers across the nation, a Black journalist named Horace R. Cayton Sr., who published his own journal, Cayton’s Weekly, out of Seattle, editorialized on the issue.  In his writing, Cayton offers valuable first-hand insight into the complexities of race and the concept of passing for white, as Clara Dwyer had done.  In his piece titled, ‘They Turned White,’ he recalled being invited by a friend to visit Natchez, where he was taken to one of the “most select social functions” in the area.  Walking into a room full of blue vein elite, Cayton recalled, “a voice clear and distinct sarcastically exclaimed, ‘Well, I wonder what the n***er wants here?”  He went on to expose the story behind Clara’s true ancestry in great detail:

“Though in complexion I was between a mulatto and a quadroon, yet I was the darkest person in that room, and there was no doubt as for whom the insult was intended… I fully realized that I was in a strictly blue veined colored society, where darker persons were not wanted and such societies, be it remembered were more or less common in the South, owing to the concubinage of white men and colored women – master and slave – and there was nothing to do but to make the best of the ugly situation which I endeavored to do.

As time rolled on many of those white colored folks realized that they were entirely too white to be black and, by designation, too black to be white… and so they began to scatter and seek other places to cast their lots, where they could throw off their color handicaps.  The north, east and west soon contained many blue veined colored persons from Natchez, Mississippi, some of whom I have periodically met or read of in the newspapers… Even in Washington City they had little or no trouble in turning white and I am told many of those I knew well and with whom I mingled socially in Mississippi, on going to the national capital married ‘marble fronts’ and would now know me no more.

As I now remember, among those to whom I was introduced on that rather eventful bulletined party evening, so far as I was concerned were Douglas and Wallace McCary, two magnificent specimens of the genus homo, not quite so fair in complexion as the most of those present, but with shapely features and raven black hair that gave them much the appearance of Spaniards…

… Like most of the young men of the blue vein colored society of Natchez, both of the McCary boys became political proteges of John R. Lynch, the only colored congressman from Mississippi, and for some years Doug’s name often appeared in public print in connection with that of Mr. Lynch, but… after leaving Washington City and going to Omaha he dropped out of sight and so continued until the following excerpt was flashed over the wides some days ago:

“Omaha, Ne., July 18 – Douglas McCarry, the father of Mrs. Clara Dwyer, was the star witness in District Judge Troup’s court in the hearing of the suit of Mrs. Dwyer’s husband, Francis P. Dwyer (white) to have their marriage annulled on the ground that “Negro blood flows in her veins….”

 … I have no criticism of Mr. McCary and his family for turning white, even though the had a strain of colored blood in them, but it does seem to me that in going into court to establish his anti-Negro blood he was put on the defensive with the odds very much against him.  In turning white, however, Mr. McCary did no more than did scores of others of his social circles and such may be found from Natchez to Seattle, with the most of them doing it…

… I have not written this story for sinister motives, but to give the public some idea of how general is the mixture of white and colored bloods even in the far West, where the colored is so limited that the slight mixture would not be noticeable in a thousand years.  I think I can point out a hundred or more families in Seattle, who in the South or East were designated as colored, but who in Seattle are classed as white.  In my opinion any white colored person that is so white that it requires an expert to tell whether he or she is colored imposes on the colored folks when he or she says, “I am colored.”  

God works in mysterious ways.  His wonders to perform and He seems to have adopted the Douglas McCary way to work out His color scheme in the United States.  The amalgamation of races in the United States will be the ultimate outcome of this human juggling that has been going on since 1620, when that Dutch trading vessel landed twenty black persons on the shores of this country and sold them as slaves.  I am of the further opinion that Mrs. McCary was a white woman and also of the opinion that Mr. McCary, Senior, was one-quarter Negro, and I base my conclusions on the fact that his boon companions were John R. Lynch and other prominent colored men of Natchez and vicinity of like color as himself and on the further fact that his sons in their childhood and youth and even in their early manhood days associated with colored girls and boys and colored men and women exclusively, all of which has come out in the divorce proceedings.

Notice how confusing the language of this man, who understood race as well as anyone at the time, appears to be when confronted with the contradictions of hard color lines in a nation full of blurred color lines. He states that “white colored folk” were “too white to be black” and “too black to be white.”  These terms and descriptions perfectly encapsulate the ridiculousness of the racial hierarchy at its very core, exposing the false premises upon which they were constructed.  At what points do whiteness and Blackness start, and at which points do they end? While the language appears confusing, Cayton himself offers some clarity on the matter when he states that one quarter “Negro blood” definitely makes one Black, but one eighth can represent a break in the color line where a person can now be considered white.  He even goes so far as to say that people with such light skin as Clara possessed “impose” on Black people when they claim to be colored.  But in the wild west of racial constructs, these kinds of imagined biological markers were almost entirely subjective, up for debate and arbitrarily drawn by different judges in different states.  There was no national standard by which to measure race because there were no clear answers about where whiteness and Blackness begin or end.

Cayton discusses more than biological measurements as the markers of race in his analysis as well.  His case that Douglass McCary was Black depended on a ratio of whiteness to Blackness, but also rested on the fact that he associated with Black politicians and businessmen, and his children associated with other Black children.  Even as Douglass McCary was described as Spanish-looking, he was racially, at least to some degree, simply the company he kept.  This line of reasoning was standard at the time, as evidenced by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s reporting that Clara “went through the schools as a white girl” and that “all her associates were white.”  Thus, even as race was still considered a biological fact rather than a social construct, American society still knew, at least at a subconscious level, the truth that it is largely based on social markers.

The history shared by Clayton offers a glimpse into ideas of race a century ago, and opens up the McCary family of Natchez for further examination.  While Robert and his sister were granted their freedom, their younger brother Warner was not.  Even more astonishingly, Warner and any of his potential future offspring were commanded in James McCary’s will to be “held as slaves during all and each of their lives” in servitude to his mother and siblings.  It is difficult to imagine how and why anyone would ever sentence one of his children, and an entire line of his descendants, into a life of slave labor for his other children, but such is nature of the almost impenetrable social, political, and psychological formations that came out of the American system of enslavement.

Warner was having none of it.  He escaped to New Orleans and worked there for a few years before embarking on a journey across North America, and across racial and ethnic barriers, creating a legend in the process.  Warner eventually met a white Mormon woman, Lucy Stanton, and together they posed as a Native American couple, traveling state by state as performing artists.  Warner was talented in multiple instruments, but was particularly brilliant with a flute.  By the time they arrived in Nauvoo in 1845, Warner had transformed into Okah Tubbee, the half-Black son of the great Choctaw Chief Mushulatubbee, and was sealed to his wife under Mormon tradition.  Entrenching himself amongst Mormon leadership, he was baptized by Orson Hyde, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles.  Then in February of 1847, he appeared at Winter Quarters in what is now North Omaha, where he exhibited his wide-ranging musical talents for Brigham Young himself.

Not long after his arrival at Winter Quarters, the mysterious traveling musician started creating waves of controversy.  One Mormon official recorded in his notes, “Heard report that the N***er Indian McCarry was holding private meetings over the River. first entering into a Covt. of Secrecy.”  At this stage in the Mormon story, following Joseph Smith’s death, a power vacuum led to many competing factions scrambling for followers.  McCary capitalized on this tension by claiming to be a prophet who could appear in the form of characters from the Bible and the Book of Mormon, including Adam of the Old Testament.  He also formed his own tradition of ‘sealing’ husbands and wives together by sleeping with the wives ahead of time in his tent, a practice that did not go unnoticed by Young and his followers.

When Brigham Young and other Mormon elders summoned McCary for questioning, he told them of the racist taunts he constantly endured, mostly directed at his marriage to a white woman, and defended himself from accusations that he was of African descent, noting how straight his hair was.  He also employed humor in effort to put his interrogators at ease, playing on his skills as an entertainer that had been his bread and butter for many years.  On the issue of race, Young said, “Its nothing to do with the blood for [from] one blood has God made all flesh,” and, “we don’t care about the color.”

Although he had enjoyed the enigmatic performer’s music and claimed to be completely unconcerned with his race, Young’s future actions spoke louder than any lip service he gave to the idea that Mormon leadership was colorblind.  McCary was eventually chased out of town at gunpoint and the Mormon Church banned Black men from joining the priesthood, a doctrine that remained in practice until the ‘revelation’ in 1978 that God finally wanted to accept Black priests.  Brigham Young, facing accusations of adultery around the same time that Warner McCary was ruffling feathers at Winter Quarters, redirected attention away from himself by actively pursuing this anti-Black policy.  At a moment when his authority and power were under attack, Young also displaced his own personal rage onto the shoulders of Black people, a pattern of behavior that appears over and over again in the racial narrative of the United Staes.

Following his expulsion from Mormon circles, Warner McCary continued pushing his Okah Tubbee identity, performing with his flute in full Choctaw regalia (or at least his variation of it) in front of sold out audiences on the East Coast.  P.T. Barnum helped manage him for a time.  He even published a book, ‘A Sketch of the Life of Okah Tubbee (Called) William Chubbee, Son of the Head Chief, Mosholeh Tubbee, of the Choctaw Nation of Indians,’ which promoted his image as a true descendant of an Indigenous legend.  Eventually, however, Warner McCary’s identity was exposed and his reputation tarnished.  His celebrity had become large enough that people who remembered him from his southern origins began speaking out about his true identity, and the confidence man from Natchez was suddenly no more – he disappeared from the historical record.

While it might seem easy to pass judgement on Warner for appropriating Indigenous culture and fabricating his racial identity, it’s important to also put his story into context.  During the Second Great Awakening, religious sects popped up from spots across the nation, each with some sort of cultish leader promising eternal truths, salvation, and entertainment.  Joseph Smith convinced his followers he had found a golden tablet with ancient hieroglyphs that he was able to transcribe by placing magic seer stones into a hat, and Warner McCary persuaded people he was an Indian prophet.  At the time, peoples’ imaginations were wide open, seeking leaders to show them answers to the mysteries of life, and perhaps a bit of escapism from a bleak existence where the infant mortality rate was still sky high and life in the New World was cheap.  The world was wide open for a man born enslaved to become whomever he wanted to be, to create his own legend, and Warner seized upon the opportunities he saw.

Selling his identity as a ‘red man’ also served to highlight Warner McCrary’s troubling relationship with race, and the fluidity of racial constructs in general.  It’s impossible for any of us to step into the mind of a man born enslaved to his own mother and siblings.  What questions did he ask about this absurd situation growing up?  What answers were given?  If his identity as a ‘slave’ or a ‘free man’ depended entirely upon which words his father decided to jot down onto a piece of paper, then how solid is human identity in the first place?  It isn’t hard to imagine young Warner picking apart the idea of identities every minute of his life, deconstructing his own identity, and then taking it upon himself to reverse the odds that had been stacked against him, wrestling control of his racial, social, and political identity away from his father and using new ones to his advantage.  He became ‘red passing’ for as long as he could mange it, as a survival mechanism in a world designed to work against him, and who could blame him?

In the same sense that Warner flipped the racial tables in his favor by becoming ‘red,’  his relatives went out into the world and became ‘white’ to create better lives for themselves.  This process often involved abandoning all friends and family that might tie a white passing person back to Blackness in any way.  In the case of Douglass McCary, this meant moving to Omaha and presenting himself as a white man, which he had successfully done since at least 1905, when he was first listed as a white man in the official city directory.  But just as in the case of  his brother Warner, Douglass’ past was threatened to be revealed through the course of his daughter’s very public court case.  Francis Dwyer and his attorney assumed that under the spotlight, and under oath, Douglass would simply admit to being a Black man, rather than risk breaking the law by lying about his true heritage.

When Douglass McCary finally made his way into the court room, however, he flat out denied any and all traces of Black ancestry.  He said his grandfather was a slave owner with red hair, that is father was also a slave owner who served as county sheriff and postmaster of Natchez, and that his maternal line consisted only of purely white women.  The major point used against him was the fact that before his arrival in Omaha, he had worked for the defunct Capital and Savings bank in Washington D.C., which was operated by and for Black people.  He admitted working for the bank, but as a white man working in a Black institution.  Interestingly, he claimed not to remember if he had listed himself as ‘white’ or ‘colored’ when he registered for a civil service position.  The judge apparently bought his story, hook, line, and sinker.

But Douglass’ story did not go unchallenged. Of all the details in the Dwyer case, perhaps the most fascinating was how Francis Senior became convinced his wife and son were Black in the first place.  The ‘science’ brought into the courtroom, mentioned earlier in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, consisted of a single physician who was presented as an expert on the latest scientific discoveries about race.  According to the article:

Dr. A.A. Holtman, expert in obstetrics and heredity, present when the boy was born, was called as a witness to testify concerning reversion to type as well as of the birth of Francis. The doctor told the court that, while the child has a suspicious profile, he would not state positively that he was a negro. He cited cases showing that negro blood may become manifest in the offspring of a union for 16 generations and that a fair-skinned child may be followed by one of just the opposite competition.

“On the same principle that the child of a family, which for generations may have been upright and honest, without a taint of criminality, may develop into a criminal of the most degenerate type, so, where there is negro blood, the taint may not show through a number of generations, but suddenly an apparent full-blooded negro child may be born,” the doctor told the court. “The records show that negro blood can come out where there has been a negro parent as far back as 16 generations.”

“Is that a general rule?” Dr. Holtman was asked by Attorney Yeiser, acting for Dwyer.

“It is the exception, not the rule,” was the answer.

Here, Blumenbach’s ‘degenerative hypothesis,’ already a century and a half old by 1919, was alive and kicking in the Douglas County Courthouse, and presented as solid, objective truth.  The racial hierarchy is spelled out in Holtman’s choice of language, which implies that any trace of Blackness in the bloodline might pop out of a woman’s womb in the form of a Black child, a reversion from the state of white humanity to Black savagery.  In fact, all the language associated with Blackness that appeared throughout the case carries negative connotation: ‘tainted,’ ‘degenerate,’ ‘suspicious,’ ‘criminal.’  And while mainstream newspapers in 2019 would never print this type of language in reference to Black people, these are the kinds of signifiers that still spark into a chain of mental images today when people are presented with Blackness.  The choice of language is more subtle, and yet the implications of savagery and criminality still lurk, just below the surface, or sometimes even right in plain sight.

Sometimes it’s not just language, but imagery as well, that implies criminality and Blackness are synonymous.

Like Brigham Young 70 years before him, Dr. Amadeus A. Holtman, the testifying physician and supposed expert on race, could also be viewed as a white man who felt his power being threatened lashing out against those even less powerful than himself.  After a whirlwind and controversial marriage of his own (him being a Protestant man marrying his Catholic wife Alice against her family’s wishes) Holtman found himself the victim of a sociopathic spouse.  His wife Alice, as it turned out, was apparently abusive at best and murderous at worst.  And depending on who you believe, as bizarre as it sounds, Holtman ended up either dying of natural heart failure, being poisoned by Alice for money, or being somehow murdered by Hindu priests.

When Holtman suddenly went ill and died in 1926, Alice thought she would be receiving his $42,000 estate, equal to over $600,000 in 2019.  They had signed reciprocal wills just a few years earlier promising that in the event of the other’s death, they would receive the full amount of their estate.  Her own estate was worth $10,000, which was a hefty sum for a woman to call her own back in those days.  She was, after all, a society woman and member of the Omaha Board of Education, which was otherwise dominated exclusively by men.  However, the day after signing the reciprocal will, Holtman rushed to another lawyer and signed a second will, which he kept secret from Alice, granting $20,000 of his estate to his two sisters and brother, all living in Minnesota.

Upon learning of the second will, Alice became enraged and the battle for A.A. Holtman’s will went to court, unleashing a fury of scandalous details about one of Omaha’s leading physicians and his powerful, prominent society wife.  Through the course of the court proceedings, Holtman’s siblings testified that Alice was abusive to their brother.  According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, there were “endless stories of gun play, of hair-pulling, clothes-tearing fights, of threats by Mrs. Holtman to ‘put a bullet hole between her husband’s eyes,’ of quarrels and combats without number.”  The siblings testified they had heard Alice threaten their brother, “You will leave me all your money, or I will shoot you,” and “I don’t have to take dictation from you; I will kill you first”, as well as the decidedly poetic “Some day I will put a bullet hole through your head and you will wake up and find yourself dead.”

The Post-Dispatch article goes on to describe Alice Holtman’s character and highlight some more of the witness testimony against her:

For a long time she has been known as a rather fiery person, quick to fight and willing to fight to the bitter end, regardless of the consequences, if she thinks she is right… (Once) she engaged in an argument with a young member of the School Board and threatened to slap his face in public. When he kept up his barrage of sarcastic remarks she did try to slap him, and was only restrained by intervention of the chairman of the board…

John W. Cooper, first administrator of the Holtman estate, was the first witness and he started the hearing off in sensational style when he told of the circumstances under which the doctor made his secret will. A few hours after making the reciprocal will… Dr. Holtman came to his office and told how he had been forced to draw it under his wife’s threat to shoot him… the doctor was trembling, highly excited and worried. He then told how Mrs. Holtman had summoned him to read the doctor’s will a few hours after the latter’s death: how he had dissuaded her from that “for the sake of appearances,” how she had clashed with him later over the will and threatened to shoot him…

Holtman’s siblings also claimed he was constantly in a state of paranoia that his wife would follow through with her threats to kill him, potentially in his sleep.

But Alice’s apparent suspicious behavior did not end with these accusations.  Following Holtman’s death, Alice and the siblings put up their own armies of medical experts to examine the body and determine the cause of death.  Some doctors said there was evidence of poison in his stomach, although there was no consensus as to exactly how much, and some thought there was no poison at all.  The Post-Dispatch noted there were “so many conflicting statements by so many prominent physicians that the county attorney’s office decided there was not enough evidence to convict anybody of anything.”  In the end, it was reported that Holtman had died of natural causes, although the circumstantial evidence alone surrounding the death was reason enough to be skeptical.  Doctors claiming to have found poison in the stomach makes the story even more fishy.  To top it all off, Alice fought and won to have the body cremated, while the siblings were trying to have the body re-examined.

Although Holtman’s siblings didn’t outright accuse Alice of murdering their brother, the insinuation was there.  But from here, the plot only thickens.  Apparently the Holtmans – Amadeus, Alice, and at least some of his siblings – were also into clairvoyants, spiritual mediums, and related fields of practice.  According to the Lincoln Journal Star, one of the siblings testified that Alice had told her husband and others that “a clairvoyant had informed her that her husband would die within five years, that she would get all of his property and become a rich woman, that she would then marry a dark haired man and live to be eighty-five.”

But Alice and her lawyer, named Baker, had accusations of their own to throw back at them.  According to Alice, when she married Amadeus in 1903 against her parents’ wishes, she was already a fairly well off woman who was taking a penniless man off the streets, in order to help put him through medical school.  The Lincoln Journal Star relayed part of Alice’s claims against her husband:

In withholding the second will, Holtman “deceived her and kept himself in a position to reap the benefits of getting her property if she died first”… and that “it is apparent from the evidence and his early career as a street fakir, selling ready made fortunes at a dime a throw, an ordained spiritualist medium and an electric healer by the laying on of hands.”

Another Journal Star article reported:

At the time of Doctor Holtman’s death there were rumors afloat that he was a close friend of a Hindu philosopher and they had arranged to try communication after death.  

Baker asked John Holtman if he had stood at the head of the coffin and commanded the corpse to “rise up and speak,” but Holtman denied it…

Ida Holtman… denied that she was a spiritualist and said there was a medium having the same name in her home town of St. Paul.

Alice also reportedly said she believed her husband “had been killed by Hindu priests at midnight..”

So in essence, A.A. Holtman’s siblings had a mound of evidence that Alice was a violent, abusive spouse who was capable at the very least of threatening murder, and Alice’s response was that her husband and his siblings were… associated with Hindus.  In the end, of course, the siblings won their case.  The judge ruled that the reciprocal will was made “at the urgency” of Mrs. Holtman and “with no intention on the part of the testator to bequeath his property thereby,” and “in order to preserve undisturbed his relations with Mrs. Holtman,” and that the second will “embodied his real intentions.”  Alice took the case to the Nebraska Supreme Court, reportedly not giving a damn if it cost her the entire $40,000 fortune she stood to gain, and lost again there.

And yet, there are those strange details about A.A. Holtman being a “street fakir” who associated with a “Hindu philosopher.”  At the time this would have been associated largely with street performers who are now forever embedded into American memory as mystics who might read your fortune, communicate with the dead, or in the case of Hollywood imagination, appear as a fun novelty game at a carnival and turn a young boy into a grown man.

While the Holtman siblings denied any and all associations with such practices, there is simply too much smoke for there not to be a fire.  Of course being associated with Hinduism and/or mysticism in no way means someone is criminal, but back then it was regarded with heavy suspicion, and Alice was desperate to fend off the attacks on her character, so she pulled out the one thing she had on her husband, which was his association with something foreign.  And even though the judge would have likely ruled in favor of the siblings regardless, Alice and Baker missed evidence they could have used to strengthen their case, had they known where to look.

In the Catalog of Copyright Entries for 1925, Amadeus A. Holtman’s name appears next to the name of a man who was a well known Eastern philosopher.  And although the man was actually Sikh, the term ‘Hindu’ was used as a catch-all phrase at the time to describe anyone from what is now India and the surrounding area, so the accusation against Holtman wouldn’t have been incorrect in the eyes of judge and jury.

Thind was a Sikh man who immigrated to the west coast of the U.S. in 1913 from the Punjab region of what is now Northern India, in order to go to college.  When World War 1 broke out, he enlisted in the Army, becoming the first American soldier to wear a turban.  In 1918 he applied for citizenship in Washington and was granted it, only to have it revoked a few days later by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.  The following year he applied again, in Oregon, and was granted citizenship a second time, only to have it revoked again by the same immigration officer.  His case ended up going to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1922, which became the battleground in defining where whiteness begins and ends, and the issue of race was debated by the highest authorities in the land.  Thind was therefore on the front lines of the battle over racial politics in the United States, and his friend A.A. Holtman  brought this same conflict into the Douglas County Courthouse through the Dwyer family drama.

Thind’s Supreme Court case came on the heels of another case of racial politics, Ozawa v. United States, in which a Japanese born man argued for his citizenship on the basis that he was a white man.  As noted earlier, the Founding Fathers made the first naturalization code in 1790 based on white supremacy, granting a pathway to citizenship to “any alien, being a free white person” who had lived in the U.S. for at least two years.  In 1870, the law was amended to include “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent” as a way to assimilate the millions of Black people who had recently had their legal status changed from property to human beings.  So Ozawa argued that he was white because Japanese people fit within the definition of “free white people,” another indication of how many questions were floating around racial identities at the time.

The Supreme Court ruled against Ozawa:

(The original intent behind the 1790 Act) was to confer the privilege of citizenship upon that class of persons whom the fathers knew as white, and to deny it to all who could not be so classified. It is not enough to say that the framers did not have in mind the brown or yellow races of Asia. It is necessary to go farther and be able to say that had these particular races been suggested the language of the act would have been so varied as to include them within its privileges….

… Manifestly the test afforded by the mere color of the skin of each individual is impracticable, as that differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette, the latter being darker than many of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races. Hence to adopt the color test alone would result in a confused overlapping of races and a gradual merging of one into the other, without any practical line of separation…

… The determination that the words ‘white person’ are synonymous with the words ‘a person of the Caucasian race’ simplifies the problem, although it does not entirely dispose of it. Controversies have arisen and will no doubt arise again in respect of the proper classification of individuals in border line cases. The effect of the conclusion that the words ‘white person’ means a Caucasian is not to establish a sharp line of demarcation between those who are entitled and those who are not entitled to naturalization, but rather a zone of more or less debatable ground outside of which, upon the one hand, are those clearly eligible, and outside of which, upon the other hand, are those clearly ineligible for citizenship…

… The appellant, in the case now under consideration, however, is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian and therefore belongs entirely outside the zone on the negative side. A large number of the federal and state courts have so decided and we find no reported case definitely to the contrary. These decisions are sustained by numerous scientific authorities, which we do not deem it necessary to review. We think these decisions are right and so hold.

The opinion was penned by Justice George Sutherland, who had been on the Supreme Court for only a few days at the time.  One might notice the definition of ‘white person’ is presented as ‘of Caucasian race’ but no clear definition of ‘Caucasian race’ is stated.  This is Sutherland and the U.S. Supreme Court kicking the can further down the road, because they simply don’t know how to pick it up.  What is white?  Caucasian.  What is Caucasian?  That’s up for debate, but scientists say it’s definitely *not* Japanese.

This confused, and confusing, language from the Supreme Court reflects decades of fruitless efforts by American officials to draw clear racial lines.  As evidenced by the language of the ruling, race is not merely color.  Officials at Ellis Island had seen this fact clearly enough that when they started making a ‘List of Races or People,’ and saw that race can’t be reduced to color or nationality, they started thinking of race in terms of ethnicity, or “people who maintain recognized communities.”  Yet even this lens is flawed, as it merely points out social ties, when race was still being thought of as a biological fact rather than a social construct.  The can kept getting kicked around, and anyone trying to pick it up found that immediately upon touch, it slipped right out of their hands, so they kicked it again.

Only months after handling the Ozawa case, Justice Sutherland took on Thind’s, where he was once again facing an Asian man claiming whiteness.  This time, however, was even trickier than before.  Although Thind was from India and wore a turban, he could lay claim to ‘pure Aryan blood’ through popular pseudoscience of the time linking ancient Indian civilization to Classical Greece, the Roman Empire, and the modern civilizations sprouted by Teutonic and Anglo-Saxon peoples, including the American Empire.  It was this same line of thinking that had Hitler taking an ancient symbol from Asia, the swastika, and applying it to his vision of a new world that traced its origins back through Rome and Greece, all the way back to the Aryan peoples of ancient India.  Of course, Hitler and his Nazi peers lifted many of their ideas from American white supremacists, including the creators of ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ who tied the KKK to a glorious Aryan past.

Within the Aryan conceptual framework, Thind insisted not only that he was white, but also that due to the rigidity of the caste system in India, he and his people in North India were more purely white than most white Americans, who had a well known history of raping the Black women they enslaved.  He even went so far as to claim disgust at the prospect of Aryan Indians marrying darker skinned Indians of lower castes, stating “The high-caste Hindu regards the aboriginal Indian Mongoloid in the same manner as the American regards the Negro, speaking from a matrimonial standpoint.”

Thind therefore didn’t argue against the white supremacist American naturalization policy, but rather that high-caste Aryan Indians, the descendants of those light skinned people who conquered the darker skinned Indigenous peoples of India, and the originators of the Indo-Aryan languages that branched off into European languages such as English, were in fact white, and/or ‘Caucasian.’  While the linguistic links were valid, the racial ones were harder to identify, as there was no accepted method for measuring the biology of whiteness, or Aryanness, or Caucasianness.  So Thind took the social construct route, maintaining that the linguistic ties between India and Europe alone were enough evidence to signify his whiteness.

As with the Ozawa case, Justice Sutherland denied Thind his status as a white man.  But this time he kicked the can in an even more ridiculous manner, writing:

“Caucasian” is a conventional word of much flexibility, as a study of the literature dealing with racial questions will disclose, and, while it and the words “white persons” are treated as synonymous for the purposes of that case, they are not of identical meaning — idem per idem.

In the endeavor to ascertain the meaning of the statute, we must not fail to keep in mind that it does not employ the word “Caucasian,” but the words “white persons,” and these are words of common speech, and not of scientific origin. The word “Caucasian” not only was not employed in the law, but was probably wholly unfamiliar to the original framers of the statute in 1790. When we employ it, we do so as an aid to the ascertainment of the legislative intent, and not as an invariable substitute for the statutory words. Indeed, as used in the science of ethnology, the connotation of the word is by no means clear, and the use of it in its scientific sense as an equivalent for the words of the statute, other considerations aside, would simply mean the substitution of one perplexity for another…

… The words of the statute, it must be conceded, do not readily yield to exact interpretation, and it is probably better to leave them as they are than to risk undue extension or undue limitation of their meaning by any general paraphrase at this time.  word is popularly understood. As so understood and used, whatever may be the speculations of the ethnologist, it does not include the body of people to whom the appellee belongs. It is a matter of familiar observation and knowledge that the physical group characteristics of the Hindus render them readily distinguishable from the various groups of persons in this country commonly recognized as white. The children of English, French, German, Italian, Scandinavian, and other European parentage quickly merge into the mass of our population and lose the distinctive hallmarks of their European origin. On the other hand, it cannot be doubted that the children born in this country of Hindu parents would retain indefinitely the clear evidence of their ancestry. It is very far from our thought to suggest the slightest question of racial superiority or inferiority. What we suggest is merely racial difference, and it is of such character and extent that the great body of our people instinctively recognize it and reject the thought of assimilation.

Here, Justice Sutherland acknowledges again that the concept of whiteness and the definition of ‘Caucasian’ remain unclear, so instead of defining what whiteness is, he states what it clearly *isn’t.*  Only this time, he goes a step further than he had with Ozawa, arguing that because the framers of the original naturalization law had no idea what race was, it’s best to continue not knowing because the original law was “written in the words of common speech, for common understanding, by unscientific men.”  So in  a nutshell, Sutherland wants us to stop trying to pick the can up entirely, because it’s too slippery.  It’s best to just stick with the ignorant, racist policy that was originally written by men who were entirely ignorant of what exactly whiteness was, even as they created an entire nation and empire based upon it.

United States vs Thind solidified and expanded a cluster of anti-Asian federal policy, including the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act, to include Indian people, thereby opening the door for the Immigration Service to revoke citizenship of many more people from the region in and around India, who had gained their citizenship through smaller, local channels in previous decades.  Between World War 1 and World War 2, over 3,000 of these people made their way back out of the United States, and those who stayed were forced underground, where many picked up on the art of practicing street mysticism and spiritual lecturing, including Thind himself, who turned to preaching metaphysical philosophy, as well as his white supremacist racial ideology, around the nation in 1924.  It was under these circumstances that A.A. Holtman encountered the ‘Hindu philosopher’ his wife attempted to use against him in her battle for his estate.

While the date on the copyright that first connects Holtman’s name to Thind’s has them meeting in 1925 at the very latest, the first documented evidence that Thind visited Omaha is from the Omaha World Herald in 1926.  In this article, Thind and his ex wife Inez Pier Buelen, whom he had married and divorced before two years together, argued about marriage and race.  When Buelen heard he was speaking in Omaha, she had come to silence any criticisms he might have of her, and the former lovers ended up spilling their marital drama out through an eager World Herald reporter.  Their spat was reported in some detail:

“I left him about a year after we were married,” Mrs. Thind related. “He told me he was of white blood, but I learned that he was Oriental to the core. His subtle Oriental ways were unbearable to me. It got so that I became ill when he was near me.”

When told of her announced plan, Dr. Thind drew himself up haughtily, “I am white,” he said. “I am a Hindu of high caste, and told her so before we married. I was a naturalized American citizen once, but the United States supreme court revoked my citizenship on the grounds that I was an Asiatic. It was not because my blood is not white.

From the looks of their marriage photo published in January 1924, a year after the court ruling against him, the relationship was never meant to last anyways.  And from the words fired off in the World Herald article, Thind never stopped believing he was in fact a white man, which would have made for interesting dinner conversation for the average white American, and must have sparked the interest of Dr. A.A. Holtman whenever it was that their paths first crossed.  The two men obviously shared an interest in race, and perhaps helped to shape each other’s racial worldview.

Through the course of his traveling lectures, Thind eventually obtained citizenship in 1936, but not as a white man.  He married a white woman in 1940 and continued lecturing, publishing books, and it can be assumed making the case to whomever would listen, that the U.S. Supreme Court got it wrong, and that he was in fact, white.

Judges were faced with the near impossible task of determining clear racial lines in a world full of blurred ones, due to the fact that race is a social construct, and not a biological fact.  In the Thind case, it was ruled that non-scientific, common sense knowledge would place Indian people of any caste outside the realm of whiteness.  In the Dwyer case back in Omaha, Judge Troup ended up ruling against the father in scathing terms, granting Clara her divorce on the grounds of abuse and abandonment.  According to the Lincoln Journal Star:

District Judge Troup refused to annul the marriage of Francis P. and Clara Dwyer, asked by the husband on the grounds that his wife had at least one-eighth negro blood in her veins.

“The evidence has failed to show not only that this defendant has one-eighe (sic) negro blood but that she has any negro blood in her veins, or any of her family have it.  It follows as matter of course that the plaintiff’s cause of action is dismissed,” said Judge Troup, in giving his decision.

The court denounced in strong terms the physcian (sic) who first suggested that mother and child had negro blood.

“There is no evidence of anything but complete and perfect happiness in this home until the birth of the child, and until the most reprehensible and cruel act of the physician who delivered the child,” said the judge.  “After the delivery he took aside the father and asked if there was any negro blood in the child, thus putting the horror in the mind of the husband that he had married a negro.  What matter was it to that doctor if the child was as black as the ace of spades?”

… This little child was in the court room.  In all the fifteen years of my experience in this court, there has never been in the court room a more beautiful and attractive child than this little one, whose whole future the father would no propose to blast by this action.”

Here, Troup once again implies that Blackness is inherently negative, that the child is not Black and highlighting the child’s whiteness, it is implied, through words such as “beautiful” and “attractive,” in contrast with what can be assumed is ugliness that might come from the ‘taint’ of ‘negro blood.’  Following Troup’s decision, the Dwyers proved to be elusive in terms of the historical record.  Eric Ewing, Executive Director of the Great Plains History Museum in Omaha, suggests that Clara and Francis Jr. must have skipped town following the courtroom drama, as suspicion of her Black ancestry would have carried into her life regardless of the outcome of her case.  If anyone has information about Clara Dwyer or Francis Dwyer Jr., or any of the McCary family, please reach out to me at maniarticulate@gmail.com.

(I would also like to shout out Mr. Ewing here for reminding me to wrap up the Dwyer case by including its final outcome, which I had forgotten to do in my rush to finish this piece.  Critiques are not only welcomed but sought after, so anyone who wants to offer thoughts or criticisms, please feel free to comment or email me and I will take it all into consideration.)

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The issues explored in this piece should make a few things quite clear, especially the fact that the racial hiearchy, color lines, and racial identities themselves are based on the false premise that humans exist in biologically separate races.  We are one species with a beautiful variety of phenotypes that make us look different, including skin tones, eye colors, hair colors, hair textures.  But these differences do no not exist in our brains, and as far as human consciousness goes, we are our brains.  Any sort of statistics white supremacists throw out regarding differences in IQ, levels of criminality, addiction, violence, etc. are the result of external forces bearing down upon different groups of people over centuries.  Go anywhere in the world and you will find that poverty causes negative human behaviors, not race.

It’s also clear that when you get down to it with a microscope, race is one of the murkiest spaces in the modern human experience.  The Supreme Court of the United States could not define race a century ago any more than we can clearly define it today.  Opening up the history and sociology of race, one finds an onslaught of complexities that can be staggering enough to make people choose to look the other way, rather than face it head on and sift through its almost endless layers.  As the great emcee Nas put it, “people fear what they don’t understand, hate what they can’t conquer.”  And yet we are faced with race every day of our lives, whether we are consciously aware of it or not.  It’s there in our politics.  In our schools.  In our relationships with friends, family, neighbors.  It’s in the grocery store, in the mall, in the church, in the school.  It’s in our minds, working through us in ways we still don’t fully understand, and therefore it’s up to us to dig in and explore the rich history available to us.

For white people, it’s easy to dismiss such analysis as the product of unwarranted ‘white guilt,’ and people will constantly accuse those of us who call out racism where we see it as being ‘white knights’ and ‘social justice warriors’ who are hell bent on our own self-hatred, and of spreading self-hatred.  To these people I will only say that it’s not our fault for making the world this way, yet it is our responsibility to try and understand it, and then to work towards dismantling it, within ourselves and within the white power structures that still dominate our society.  Congress is now more racially diverse than it has ever been, and yet is still overwhelmingly white, male, and Christian, and it’s important to note that even if our political structure was proportionate to the demographics of the nation, that alone would still not reverse the centuries of trauma and oppression that still affect people of color in millions of way, seen and unseen, to this day.

One will likely ask, ‘well what do you propose is the solution,’ to which I will respond that I don’t have all the answers, but the first step in any sort of real solution is education.  And by this I don’t mean liberal feel-good education about how far we’ve come since the eras of slavery and Jim Crow, but rather deep, sustained, gut-wrenchingly painful education that explores all the nooks and crannies of this thing that simply won’t go away, this beast that roams so freely, yet so seemingly invisibly, through our lives even in 2019.

The myth that MLK was a docile yet forceful Christian leader who only preached colorblindness and warm ideas about white kids and Black kids playing together, where we judge people on the content of their character rather than the color of their skin, is perhaps the most dangerous one we could possibly tell ourselves moving into the future.  Advocates of color blindness pull out this sanitized version of MLK and his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech whenever they want to shut down any and all discussions about race and racism.  It’s a way of keeping blinders on, rather than exposing all the ugly monsters of our past and present that lurk in our closet, under our beds, looming over us and within us through our lives.

MLK was not a man who sought to make people simply feel good.  He understood that in order to deliver the medicine, there must first be the pain of the prick.  He cited Socrates, who advocated being a ‘gadfly’ that stirs society up into action by making it uncomfortable, the opposite of the character so many people have made him out to be.  A 1968 poll had 75% of the American people disapproving of him, indicating the shocking degree to which his life and message have been stolen, rearranged, and repackaged for people to use against the very life he lived and message he preached.  If we truly value MLK then we need to follow his example and make things uncomfortable by shining light on the terrible, and terribly confusing, truths about race and racism that we still live with.  Education is not sufficient in and of itself, but it is the necessary first step towards forming a more just world for our children and grandchildren to inhabit.

Note: this piece focuses on some of the national context surrounding the lynching of Will Brown in 1919 Omaha, with a particular focus on labor issues in early 20th century United States.  For an understanding of the symbolism of the eagle and the Crystal Palace please read The Lynching of Will Brown Part 2

“True Industrial Freedom”

– slogan etched into the 1935 Los Angeles Times building

“Everything to Make Steel – Iron Ore, Coal, and Limestone – Are All Within Gunshot of This Building”

– sign displayed on the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce at the turn of the century

The last day of September in 1910 was exceptionally hot and sticky in the new, fledgling City of Angels, but occasional bursts of violent rains eventually made way for a cooling blanket of fog, allowing people to calm their nerves before turning in to rest for the evening.  Employees working the night shift at the Los Angeles Times building on 1st and Broadway expected to grind away while the city around them slept peacefully, as usual.  But tonight would be different.

On this night, staff at the L.A. Times would be asphyxiated, burnt, crushed and left mangled beyond recognition, some reduced to ashes and barely recognizable blackened limbs separated from the rest of the body, underneath layers of debris from the building they had lovingly called ‘The Fortress.’  An official body count would be difficult, because so many bodies had been so fully pulverized.

On this night, rather than sleep peacefully, citizens of Los Angeles would be awakened suddenly and kept awake for hours, following a catastrophic dynamite blast heard from miles away, the reverberations of which can be felt to this day.   In all, twenty one lives were taken, giving the far political right all the ammunition it needed to help validate its campaign of anti-union propaganda.  It was a turning point in the labor wars at the turn of the century in the United States, leaving the political left and thrust of the labor movement forever crippled by blowback from a blast created by their own ilk..

The carnage and mayhem that night in L.A. had not come from nowhere.  In the era of American labor wars, in cities where unions held the keys to labor, otherwise known as ‘closed shop’ cities, businesses were not allowed to hire workers who were not signed up with a recognized union.  In ‘open shop’ cities, businesses could hire and fire at will, a concept that remains a point of contention to this day.  San Francisco was closed shop, but in L.A., one man and his descendants used their vast family newspaper empire to keep the city as free from unions as they possibly could throughout its first century in existence.

General Harrison Gray Otis, owner of The Times, was one of the most virulently anti-union men in the nation, and certainly the most powerful in the area.  Under his guidance, The Times launched full scale assaults on the very core ideals upon which labor unions had been formed, mincing no words in its editorials, rallying the right and igniting the rage of working class people who envisioned a better future through worker solidarity and collective action.  To top it off, he launched these attacks with a scornful smirk from underneath a mop of Colonel Sanders facial hair.

From his self-appointed position(s) as president, general manager, and editor-in-chief of L.A.’s most widely circulated newspaper, General Otis ranted about the infamous graft trials of San Francisco between 1905 and 1908, in which unionist men, including the mayor, were exposed for rampant corruption:

The hounds have acknowledged their guilt and should smart for it.  They are the criminals who have kept San Francisco under this fiendish, tyrannical, labor-union yoke.  They are the labor-union exponents of labor-union thievery, labor-union terror.  Labor-union assassination.  The blood of a hundred honest men is on their heads.  The thought of their escape from justice is enough to make any fair-minded and patriotic man explode with righteous wrath.

It is noticeable that most of the newspapers in describing and commenting upon the frightful revelations in San Francisco, entirely disregard the salient fact that the reign of robbery, extortion and sand-bagging is synonymous with labor-union domination…  

… The cycle of graft, blackmail and murder in San Francisco dates from the hour when the labor-union party elected Mayor Schmitz and a kindred Board of Supervisors and secured the control of all the departments of the city.

What Otis fails to mention is the reason other papers didn’t focus on San Francisco’s corrupt leaders being unionists is that their writers understood political inclinations played no role in causing the crime.  Like other major cities of the time, its history of political corruption ran through its bones from its very birth.  To claim corruption in San Francisco started with Schmitz’s election in 1902 was patently ridiculous, so unlike Otis and The Times, most newspapers focused on the crime itself, rather than the political leanings of those involved.  In other words, they did the job of professional journalists.

Otis, on the other hand, foamed at the mouth.  Hanging above his anti-union editorial tirade was this decidedly repetitive piece of prose that was likely written by his wife Eliza, an apparently accomplished and widely praised poet:

And on and on.  Adjacent to this ‘poem’ was a cartoon mocking Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W.) strikers in the gold mining town of Goldfield, Nevada, who were engaged in a dispute with their employers at the time.  Note the whiskey flask, the bindle, and the label ‘tyrant.’  In Otis’ confused world, leftists were simultaneously homeless, alcoholic beggars, and powerful, dangerous tyrants.

Union leaders launched their own verbal assaults in response to the consistent flood of lashings they took from The Times, and although it was impossible to drown out the Otis machine, labor was building up a reservoir of support in Southern California.  A formidable socialist lawyer named Job Harriman, who ran for vice president with I.W.W. founder Eugene Debs in the 1900, was running for mayor of Los Angeles a decade later.  The prospect of a socialist mayor sparked fear in the hearts of local capitalists whose bellies were full from their exploits in the wide open West.  Otis, a man who was known to wear his military uniform into the office to remind people of his toughness, was particularly terrified.

General Otis built his warrior reputation during the Civil War as a Union soldier, where he served in the 23rd Ohio Infantry with future president William McKinley.  Decades later when he was of retirement age, Otis eagerly jumped back into combat at the opportunity to crush Filipino rebels in the Philippine-American War, whom he certainly viewed as inferior beings undeserving of true autonomy following their ‘liberation’ from Spain.  He was promoted to brigadier general only after his brigade slaughtered over a thousand Filipino freedom fighters.  Otis therefore didn’t represent a feather on the American eagle’s wing so much as a scale on its talon, clutching its new territories tightly as it carried them where it pleased.  He wore his warrior status on his sleeve like an insecure, washed up, former movie star might wear an old Oscar performance on theirs.  It was he who dubbed his own building ‘The Fortress,’ and who referred to his own staff as his ‘phalanx.’

For The Times’ trademark symbols, Otis chose lady liberty and the eagle, the former representing his ideology of ‘true industrial freedom’ (which meant no unions), the latter representing his strength and military-like resolve to protect lady liberty and crush the enemies of the ‘true industrial freedom’ she channeled.

Early on in his leadership of The Times, he ruthlessly and efficiently crushed its one and only union.  From there he gathered with other prominent industry men to form their own union against worker’s unions, the Merchants and Manufacturers Association, also called the M & M.  Otis and The Times operated under the false premise that contracts were between private, equal individuals entering into negotiation, completely failing to note the power dynamics that were actually in play between employer and employee.  While denying workers the right to organize into unions, Otis organized his own union, and this hypocrisy was not lost on many of the working people of L.A.  Many organized against the M & M but Otis and his peers held all the keys to power.  City hall was located directly across the street from The Times building, offering the coziest of relationships between government and private enterprise, including the police force, which was deployed against worker’s unions any time they sought to consolidate their own power.

It is difficult for most people in the 21st century to truly grasp what conditions for working people were like in the United States a century ago.  Working class people at this point in history still had not won some of the basic rights we take for granted today.  The average American of 2019, from all ends of the political spectrum, would be horrified by the conditions workers faced at the turn of the century. By 1900, an annual average of 35,000 work related deaths were reported, with another 500,000 injured and maimed, and these workers and their families rarely received compensation for their distress. Capitalists forced people to work six days a week, often from sunup to sundown, and most still didn’t pay a high enough wage for a decent standard of living.  People crowded into tenement slums, with slumlords who exploited them at every turn. To make up for starvation wages, families often put their children to work.  Almost 2 million children under the age of 16 worked in factories alone.  Even elementary school-aged children wound up doing back-breaking labor in grueling heat, potentially lethal freezing cold, and in fire trap mines and factories.

Many of the work related injuries and deaths could have been avoided, had conditions been more humane.  It is now established fact that forcing people to work longer hours at faster paces with less breaks will inevitably increase the risk of worker error, and in factories and mines, those errors can lead to absolute horror.  In Cherry, Illinois, just west of Chicago, the St. Paul coal mine was constructed using the newest technological advancements for maximum efficiency, including electric lighting which made the mine less prone to catch fire.  However, an electrical outage in early November, 1909, left the miners with hastily placed kerosene lanterns and torches placed along the walls.  When hay brought in to feed the mules caught fire, the place turned into a massive fire trap, killing 259 people, including several boys as young as ten.

The St. Paul Coal Company paid $1,800 to each victims’ family and pled guilty to breaking child labor laws, slapped with a whopping $630 fine for violating those laws.  So if the powers to be in the United States were trying to send a message to industry that it was time to get serious about child labor, they failed miserably in their goal.  Doing the math, corporations likely would have felt emboldened to risk employing even more children, since they could be paid less and didn’t have the mental capacity to organize for their civil rights the way adults did.

Workplace safety was the other glaring issue presented by the disaster in Cherry.  Why had the workers been made to work in conditions that were known to be less safe than they had been before?  If electrical lighting made the mine safer than mines without it, then by definition it was less safe for workers the moment miners continued working using kerosene.  The company could have prioritized its workers’ safety above profit and either fixed the problem sooner or called work off until the electricity was restored, or both.  Instead, these victims of industrial greed were forced to use makeshift kerosene lighting in a fire trap in order to keep the coal production moving, and lost their lives because of it.

The Cherry example is merely one of many where workers died unnecessarily in the name of maximum profit, and many unionists would have viewed it as an example of criminal negligence, manslaughter, or even murder.  The stakes were literally life and death to these people.  Union membership rose steadily as news of these accidents increased every year through the early 1900s.

If it wasn’t enough that laborers frequently died due to unsafe work environments, attempts by workers to organize into unions and demand humane treatment were met with hostility at every turn.  Many industry titans threatened prison or even death to those who unionized and protested.  They used labor spies, agents provocateurs, and strike breakers (called ‘scabs’ by unionists) to undermine their employees at every turn.  Violence often broke out between strikers and strike breakers, creating a ripe environment for capitalists to justify their own violence, through police and even private mercenaries who did the dirty work of keeping workers voiceless.

Working in tandem with physical violence, capitalists engaged in legal warfare aimed at silencing unionists from even speaking.  When Los Angeles metal workers went on strike for a higher minimum wage in 1910, Otis and his allies drafted an ordinance outlawing picketing, which was quickly signed by the mayor and then used to punish any and all union members who attempted to communicate with nonunion workers.  It outlawed “loitering, picketing, carrying or displaying banners, signs or transparencies, or speaking in public streets in a loud or unusual tone, for certain purposes.”  Roughly 500 people were arrested under the new law under punishment of 50 days in jail and a hefty fine.

Although mainstream progressives of the era weren’t outright unionists or socialists, they generally shared a loathing for Otis and his ilk, as well as for his fully organized anti-union militia.  Otis had a habit of pissing lots of people off from all sides of the political spectrum.  Teddy Roosevelt said, “the attitude of General Otis in his paper affords a curious instance of the anarchy of soul which comes to a man who, in conscienceless fashion, deifies property at the expense of human rights,” and called him “a violent opponent of organized labor, a consistent enemy of every movement for social and economic betterment, just as he has shown himself a consistent enemy of men in California who have dared resolutely to stand against corruption and in favor of honesty.”

The legendary trust busting Roosevelt’s fellow ‘Bull Moose’ progressive running mate in the 1912 presidential election, Hiram Johnson of Sacramento, said:

In the city of San Francisco we have drunk to the very dregs of infamy; we have had vile officials; we have had rotten newspapers. But we have nothing so vile, nothing so low, nothing so debased, nothing so infamous, in San Francisco as Harrison Gray Otis… . He sits there in senile dementia, with gangrened heart and rotting brain, grimacing at every reform, chattering impotently at all things that are decent; frothing, fuming, violently gibbering, going down to his grave in snarling infamy.

While progressive politicians took their turns openly throwing shots at Otis and The Times, the anger and pure rage of unionists, with their backs against the wall, swelled.  For them, harsh words alone simply would not suffice, and for some of them, the war would only be won through escalation and fighting fire with fire.  Between 1906 and 1910, around 200 construction sites were blown to pieces, often days before their completion, and all of them had one thing in common – the targeted bridges and buildings were all built by nonunion labor. 

The series of targeted explosions came on the heels of a worker-led revolution in St. Petersburg, Russia, started by iron workers demanding the right to unionize and other basic rights, including the eight hour work day, universal suffrage, freedom of assembly, separation of church and state, and other basic civil liberties that were still not granted in the land of the Tsar.  The strikes spread far and wide, shutting down entire cities. 

When The Tsar’s guards charged and opened fire on a massive crowd of protesters gathered outside his winter palace, mainstream Americans read newspaper headlines with a sense of wonder and dread;  What if Marxist-inspired revolution spread to the United States through working class people, through class-conscious intellects who studied historical materialism, the Hegelian dialectic, and saw the value to gain from workers collectively seizing the means of production; or what if this revolution spread through nefarious foreign agents, those hell bent on destroying the American capitalist system from the inside, infiltrating unions, factories, mines, schools, mayoral races, senatorial races, and presidential races in order to spread pure chaos?  These were the questions floating in the zeitgeist, and the questions one asked, as well as the ways one answered them, largely defined the political partisanship of the era.

While Marxian ideas peaked in popularity in the U.S. at the same time as they did around the world, progressive reformists and centrists largely viewed true leftism as a disease, a blight to be stamped out of existence, before it spread any further into the American psyche.  Teddy Roosevelt’s full quote cited earlier is this:

The attitude of General Otis in his paper affords a curious instance of the anarchy of soul which comes to a man who, in conscienceless fashion, deifies property at the expense of human rights – no less surely than it comes to the man who in the name of human rights wars upon all men of property, good or bad.

Thus, even progressives who championed similar causes as unionists also viewed leftism as a very real threat to the capitalist/liberal democracy stronghold that is the United States.  In this context, leftists had their hands tied to a large degree politically, feeling that bourgeoisie reformists like Roosevelt would take too long to bring about meaningful change, if they brought it at all.  They felt the need to put the pressure on, so when their strikes were crushed, they felt their hands had been tied behind their backs.  It was war, and they felt cornered so lashed out.  Times management and their employees all knew they were engaged in a class war of sorts as well.  Some even said it would come as no big surprise if an attack of some type was launched against them.

Tension was in the air, and the writing was on the wall…

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

In 1905, five years before The Times building was reduced to rubble, the same year as the ‘Bloody Sunday’ massacre outside the Tsar’s winter palace, and just before a pattern of construction site bombings set the nation on edge, Vulcan’s iron body was left in pieces on the side of the Birmingham Mineral Railroad.  The ancient god of fire and metallurgy, the  mighty creator of weapons and armor, had finally been shipped back to his home in the Deep South from St. Louis, where he had won the grand prize at the world’s fair the year before.Vulcan had served his designed purpose and yet there he lay in the dirt, figuratively and physically torn.  The capitalists and government figures who commissioned his creation as one of the world’s great statues, a cast iron behemoth meant to represent the great natural resources and industry of Birmingham, had also failed to plan what would be done with him following his role at the fair.  As a result, he ended up in the middle of a custody battle between various cities, none of which seemed to know exactly what to do with him once they got him.

The immediate plans for Vulcan had been grand.  One Birmingham editorial read, “The Iron Man will indeed stand for Birmingham, the massiveness and solidarity of our statue typifying the great industrial city of the South, a city destined, in time, to be the foremost in the United States in all that pertains to iron and steel making.”  Another stated, “The colossus of Birmingham iron will be a fine work of art and will be a credit to Birmingham for all time to come.  Vulcan represents the genius of the liberal arts, and is especially the patron of the workers in metals.” 

If Vulcan represented solidarity as the patron of metal workers, then it is perhaps fitting that he was disassembled and sent back to his home in Birmingham, where his body parts were promptly discarded beside the railroad tracks, due to unpaid freight bills.  His capitalist fathers saw short term value in him, but only through exploitation and the selling-point optics of faux holiness, with little to no long term, sustainable plan for the future.  His productive value no longer clear, the owners of his means of production left him dismembered until they could figure out what to do with him next.

To add insult to injury, Vulcan lost his iron spear tip somewhere between St. Louis and Birmingham, the fruits of his labor vanished into thin air.  It isn’t difficult imagining some disillusioned freight workers hauling the giant iron spear back to their favorite pub as a form of vigilante justice, and who could truly blame them?  The value of their labor was left unpaid and they felt violated, so they took a piece of bourgeoisie property in retaliation for the labor value that had been taken from them.

After 18 months in the dirt, Vulcan’s body was re-assembled without his spear, although he wouldn’t have been able to hold it anyways, due to the fact that his right arm was put on upside down, causing a bizarre contortion in which his fingers appeared to point towards the heavens, where he probably would like to have returned.  Over the next few decades, he was exploited as a capitalist stooge, forced to hold an ice cream cone bearing the name of local favorite Weldon-Jenkins Ice Cream, followed by a series of nationally popular consumer products, including a bottle of Coca-Cola and a jar of Heinz pickles.

The mighty ancient Roman god whose origins can be traced back well before the Greeks in Athens, a statue whose grandiosity was second in the nation only to Lady Liberty herself, was thus reduced to a pawn of global capitalism’s mighty empire, a mockery of the ideals he was originally supposed to represent, alienated from his purpose like the legions of workers toiling in metal factories he was supposed to champion.

Vulcan’s own metal worker creators were subjected to exploitation in the name of productivity, given short notice to finish a job many didn’t think was possible to accomplish in the few months they had leading up to the fair.  Like the Crystal Palace before him, Vulcan still came into existence seemingly as a miracle of Western ingenuity when in reality, both projects’ almost instantaneous completion was the result of overworked and underpaid labor. Two of Vulcan’s foremen worked 60 hours a week for 35 cents an hour, which translates to $10.00 in 2019.  One of them reported working 6 weeks without going back to his home a single time, during the most demanding part of the job.

The contradictions within the American capitalist system and seeds of labor conflict thus ran through Vulcan himself, the product of capitalism’s awe-inspiring productive power, as well as its cold, brutal, profit-driven flaws.  His very conception was based on short term gain, utilizing the exploited labor of metal workers, with little to no planning regarding his long term value and fate.  He was birthed by American industrial might, placed on a pedestal as a holy man for half a year, then discarded and abused for decades to come.  His sacred image was no longer revered as it was in ancient times, but rather objectified as a commodity and exploited for the benefit of Birmingham’s movers and shakers, the true holy ideal underneath it all revealed to be nothing more than profit and the expansion of industry.

Substandard working conditions such as those Vulcan’s creators faced were common in the metal industry at the time, and many workers became disillusioned.  To fight back, the International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers formed and organized strikes when capitalists refused to meet their demands.  Leaders of this union must have watched the bizarre story of the iron giant with some sense of amusement, a welcome respite from the serious work of organizing against forces of private enterprise they saw as a threat to their livelihoods.  In 1903, various pieces of a corporate giant were forged together into one massive body when U.S. Steel and the American Bridge Association formed into the National Erector’s Association, an alliance between iron and steel that immediately began crushing unions through an elaborate network of labor spies, agents provocateurs, and strike breakers.  The International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers responded by nominating some of the more militant voices of their ranks into leadership positions, naming Frank Ryan president and John J. McNamara secretary treasurer.

As the U.S. moved into the 20th century, the growing iron workers union won concessions in areas dotted across the map, including from some nonunion companies whose construction projects had been all but completely destroyed by explosions set off in the night.   Some speculated the iron workers union was behind the explosions, but there was no proof.  The devices used to set off the dynamite were destroyed with each explosion, leaving behind little evidence for investigators to work with.  Plus, the leadership of the iron workers union was not incompetent.  They knew how to operate undetected, and because only a handful of people on the inside knew any details, investigators had a difficult time finding information of any kind tying the bombings and the union together.  When asked about the Times tragedy, J.J. McNamara said, “such an act is anarchy, pure and simple,” and “no sane individual or organization would resort to anything of the kind under any circumstances.”

Although a man who took orders from J.J. McNamara named Ortie McManigal carried out the majority of the dynamite jobs over the years, it was  J.J.’s younger brother, James B. McNamara, who eventually carried out the lethal attack on The Times building.  The men learned how to construct time bombs using New Haven Junior Tattoo alarm clarks, complete with dry cell batteries, mercury fulminate, and fuses connected to 16 sticks of dynamite.  For the Los Angeles job, J.B. carried three of these explosive devices, each carried in a suitcase.  His targets that night would be the house of  Felix Zeehandelaar, secretary of the M & M, General Otis’ own house, and The Times building.

With his three ‘infernal machines,’ as they were called, J.B. McNamara set out for his targets with a clean conscious.  In his mind, he was engaged in warfare and this act of valor would earn him stripes, respect, clout.  After setting the first two bombs at his enemies’ residences,  he walked into a covered alleyway between The Times’ main office area and its printing press, where barrels of petroleum-based ink were stored.  There he found an empty barrel, placed the last suitcase inside, and covered it with discarded newspapers.  Then walked into the printing press where he opened up the natural gas valves with a pair of pliers, releasing invisible, highly flammable fumes into the air.  Finally, he boarded a train for San Francisco, allowing him to gain sufficient distance from the site of the blast by the time it occurred.

At 1:07 am, the fuse lit and made its way to the 16 sticks of dynamite hidden in the empty ink barrel.  The explosion lifted all six floors of the printing press building and sent massive chunks of plaster crumbling down onto human bodies below.  The ink itself vaporized and shot into billions of microscopic droplets in the air, which ignited into fireballs that shot through the building, singeing and maiming all who came into contact with it.  People tried to help their peers to the exits, some of whose skin melted off with touch.

All the lighting went out and in the pitch black hallways, people scrambled blindly hoping to find their way to the exits.  Many found themselves at upper story windows, with a raging inferno behind them and a deadly fall in front of them.  Some clung to windows until they no longer could, falling as human torches, their clothes lit and slowly burning them to death, until they splattered into heaps on the pavement.  One man fell multiple stories down an elevator shaft, certain he was going to die, until a cluster of bodies broke his fall at the bottom.  One man was found inside the building with a typewriter caved into his chest.

A crowd of thousands watched in horror.  At least 21 people died that night, and approximately $500,000 of damage was done, equal to around $13 million today.

General Otis was out of town that night handling his political and economic interests in Mexico, so his son in law, Harry Chandler, was the man in charge of The Times following the blast.  It was only by chance that he wasn’t the first to be annihilated by the explosion, since the bomb was practically adjacent to his personal desk – but his wife had coincidentally called him to come home early that night.  He must have felt a divine hand influenced his fate.

When Chandler arrived at the grotesque scene in the early morning hours of October 1st, 1910, one of his  first actions was to call for a team of his employees to rush to work at a secret auxiliary printing press in San Fernando, maintained by Otis in case of emergency.  Another was to request the fire department aim some of its water to where the financial records were kept, indicating the leadership at The Times would practice what it preached in terms of its set of values.  ‘True Industrial Freedom’ in this sense meant the freedom to continue working immediately following a terrorist attack in which you and/or your colleagues were burnt, mangled, crushed, incinerated in a mad inferno inside your place of employment.  The freedom to treat your PTSD with a bandage around your burns and then produce the morning edition on time.

Within two hours, the paper was reporting on its own destruction.  Underneath the protection of its trademark eagle, The Times headline left no room for skepticism about who was responsible:

This ‘guilty until proven innocent’ stance was validated by California Governor James Gillette in the very next issue, in which he was quoted saying:

Whether guilty or not, the labor unionists will have to be blamed for the crime, until shown they are not guilty, as everything points to a desire to wipe out property and lives of those who have been fighting organized labor for years.

The Times also boasted of its ability to continue printing immediately after the attack:

… and churned out its trademark anti-union propaganda:

General Otis himself seemed unable to mourn the loss of his employees without bathing his language in narcissistic descriptions of his own greatness, craftily slipping in an advertisement for his newspaper in the moment he is supposed to be displaying true empathy for those workers who lost their lives fighting his personal war against labor:

More than all else do I deplore the sad loss of life.  I, with my co-owners in The Times property, can endure the physical loss which the destruction of the building involves, with its expensive plant of modern printing machinery and all necessary accessories of an up to date American newspaper.

The city acted just as swiftly as the paper in response to the attack.  Self-made celebrity detective William J. Burns was quickly hired to go on the hunt for perpetrators of what until then was the largest terrorist plot in the nation’s history.  Burns had already served as chief of the newly formed Secret Service following the assassination of President McKinley, and had spent his most recent years investigating the string of iron work-related explosions on behalf of the National Erectors Association.  He was known for self-advertising, but could also back his claims up with action.  He was a formidable detective with several movie script-like investigations under his belt, which led to an actual movie script and lead role in a silent film, starring as himself.

Following The Times blast, the best evidence Burns had came in the form of two infernal machines that hadn’t exploded, due to being wound too tight – one from a previous bombing in Illinois, and one that was left at Zeehandelaar’s house (the bomb at Otis’ house was taken out onto the street where it was allowed to explode safely.)   The labels on both of the intact infernal machines matched, so when the press typed up and published the words  found on the labels, a manufacturer contacted Burns to tell him the dynamite had come from his company.  He gave descriptions of two men who fit J.B. McNamara and Ortie McManigal’s physical appearance.  With this limited yet promising evidence and a well-paid team of experts, it didn’t take Burns long to track down his new primary suspects, whom they immediately began trailing.  

As Burns set his scope on his targets, J.B. McNamara went into a tailspin of depression.  He drank heavily and smoked cigarettes incessantly in San Francisco, growing out his beard while his face caved in from lack of food intake.  His nerves were shot after realizing that after causing so many deaths, people in the labor movement weren’t going to view him as a hero so much as a villain.  J.J. advised his brother to go stay with their sister and mother in Ballegh, Nebraska, where they would debrief and let things settle down before figuring out what to do next.  The remote area of Ballegh functioned as a safe house between home base in Indianapolis and the bombers’ targets to the west of it.  The McNamaras told people they were “hunting in Nebraska” when they were actually carrying out their industrial warfare campaign.

On the train ride from San Francisco to Nebraska, J.B.’s paranoia went into overdrive.  He saw everyone reading about the bombing in the newspapers, talking about the perpetrators as murderous villains, and thought everyone was looking at him.  While his paranoia was in overdrive, he had every reason to be terrified.  With an unexploded bomb in his possession, Detective Burns was hot on his trail already.

Strategically, Burns played the long game and let the conspirators think he had no idea about them, so they wouldn’t tip off other conspirators above them.  But he still had his men trail them everywhere they went.  The McNamara brothers were scared at first, but after enough time passed and the men they thought were trailing them hadn’t made an arrest, they figured they were in the clear. However,  J.B. was still struggling with crippling anxiety and self medicating with a steady diet of liquor and women to keep his mind off the fear of being caught and punished.  In California, he could have been executed for his crime.  As the midwestern states turned cold in late fall, the men planned a hunting trip in Wisconsin, out in the calm of nature, away from everything.  It was to be a healing trip.

Learning of the winter retreat plans, Burns had some of his men trail the hunting team out into the woods on Pioneer Lake near Conover, Wisconsin, where they posed as fellow hunters.  The sleuths quickly befriended the unionists, and it didn’t take long for J.B.’s alcoholism to kick in.  Burns’ men were more than happy to fill him up with all he wanted, getting him inebriated to the point that he spilled sensitive information, which was quickly jotted down and sent back to Burns.  As it turned out, J.B.’s paranoia was well founded, and Burns’ long game was working like a charm

From the iron union’s main office in Indianapolis, as his brother was getting hammered with the very men investigating them, J.J. felt emboldened to continue hatching schemes, setting his sights on several places, including Nebraska, for the next round of explosions. During the open vs closed shop battles of the early 1900s, Omaha was very much an open shop city.  Early in 1910, months before the explosion at The Times, the nonunion Omaha and Council Bluffs Street Railway Company hired  the nonunion Wisconsin Bridge Company to work on a new power station for its improved streetcars, putting it into the union bombers’ crosshairs.  McManigal made a special trip to Omaha to do what he did best.  The ensuing explosion caused some significant damage to the power plant, but like with the other bombings leading up to The Times, nobody was there to be hurt or killed.  As a true believer and agent for his cause, McManigal felt morally clean throughout that period because he was merely destroying property created by what he viewed as immoral labor practices, not taking human lives.  He never felt the hit J.B. made in Los Angeles was righteous.

As the winter of 1910 turned to spring of 1911, for their second attack on Omaha’s bourgeoisie, the iron men targeted Omaha’s new million dollar courthouse in the heart of its downtown area, built by nonunion labor under the direction of Caldwell & Drake.  This Omaha job consisted of two blasts, the second of which was somewhat of a dud, likely due to poor quality of the dynamite itself.  The basement of the courthouse was destroyed, but its stone walls remained unfazed.  This time, J.J. threw in a twist to confuse investigators, and perhaps to toy with them.  Only minutes after the Omaha courthouse attack,  another series of explosions rocked the Caldwell & Drake offices in Columbus, Indiana, just south of Indianapolis.  This double hit on the same night signaled the non-lethal explosions were not only being sustained, but even amplified in ways, following the the destruction of The Times building.

The Omaha courthouse explosion didn’t create the headline news the carnage in L.A. did, but it was a precursor to the disturbing headlines that would splash across the front pages around the nation only seven years later, of an unspeakable series of violent crimes inside and outside that very building.  It was also a potent message from the unionists.  If the courthouse symbolizes civil society and even civilization itself, or at least the one enshrined within the Crystal Palace, and is seen as the thing separating humans from the laws of the jungle, then the destruction of the courthouse represents rejection of that civilization and a return to the jungle, at least in the eyes of the majority of Americans who subscribe fully to capitalism.

But for the unionists, the courthouse was capitalist property which upheld an unjust society built on the laws of the jungle.  It served as a conduit for the capitalist power structure that allowed corporations to exploit, neglect, and even kill their employees as they saw fit.  The courthouse was where corporations like St. Paul Coal Company were given slaps on the wrists for criminal negligence that ended up widowing the wives of working men, so for those who wanted justice for working people, destruction of property would never seem to be equal to the destruction of working class lives.  Like McManigal, they would never lose sleep over broken inanimate objects that amplified the immorality of a wicked system.

Only a month after the courthouse explosion, Burns decided to shoot his shot.  He sent his son Raymond to Detroit, in order to lead Chicago police in arresting McManigal and J.B. McNamara on charges of safe-cracking from a crime the week before.  That way the alarm bell wouldn’t signal for J.J. McNamara to start destroying evidence back in Indianapolis.  The bombers were then whisked away to the police Sergeant’s house, where they were held captive while Burns attempted to get extradition papers from California.  In strictly legal terms, Burns had them kidnapped, so that they would not, in his own words, “have to waste time in fighting habeas corpus proceedings and other obstables.”

Terrified at the prospect of never seeing his wife and children again and perhaps feeling more than a subtle pang of guilt over the lives taken at The Times, McManigal sang like a canary.  He told investigators about hidden stashes of dynamite, named all the conspirators, and in return was promised his freedom after all the court proceedings were wrapped up.  Although evidence against the union men was stacked a mile high, famed labor lawyer Clarence Darrow was unaware and agreed to take the case.  Samuel Gompers of the American Federation of Labor, the largest and most powerful union in the nation, bankrolled an enormous fee requested by Darrow, and unions across the world engaged in fundraising campaigns to support the men they felt had been framed by capitalists trying yet another one of their dirty tactics in crushing organized labor.

When Darrow dug into the case, however, he quickly realized the men were guilty.  The question that bothered him most was whether or not the bombing at The Times was an act of premeditated murder, or if J.B. simply had not understood how ink inside its barrels would vaporize and turn into lethal balls of fire the way it did.  However, the fact he had turned on the gas valves indicated fairly clearly that regardless of how humanistic McManigal remained, the McNamara brothers seemed willing to destroy more than mere property.

Upon the announcement that Darrow suggested a plea deal, unionists who had rallied behind the cause of men they said were framed, men they (correctly) said had been kidnapped, men they knew in their hearts couldn’t have possibly killed all those people in such grotesque fashion in L.A., felt shocked and betrayed.  Could it be true?  It couldn’t be true…. there is no way…. but they confessed…. Darrow wouldn’t betray labor…. it must be true… denial turned to bitter acceptance, the morale of American unionists crushed  in the process.  Perhaps more devastating, the entire concept of unionism was invalidated in the national psyche through their ill-fated campaign of support.

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In the end, dozens of men were arrested and imprisoned for the bombing campaign, except for Ortie MgManigal, who lived the rest of his days under an assumed name.  J.B. served life in San Quentin, while J.J. was released after 9 years.  Job Harriman, the lawyer and socialist candidate for mayor of Los Angeles, who also served on the losing defense team, lost in a landslide election to his moderate rival, and the leftist cause in the United States never regained the same traction it had at the turn of the century.  It was one thing to blame anarchists for deadly bombings and targeted assassinations, because unionists didn’t have to necessarily be tied to those things.  But after the McNamara case, those who were on the fence about labor unions had all the information they needed to join in the chorus of anti-union rhetoric that claimed it was immoral, led by thugs who wanted to smuggle foreign ideas into the U.S. and destroy it from within.

Eugene Debs condemned the bombings, but also pointed out the double standards he saw at work in the American capitalist system:

If you want to judge McNamara you must first serve a month as a structural ironworker on a skyscraper, risking your life every minute to feed your wife and babies, then being discharged and blacklisted for joining a union.  Every floor in every skyscraper represents a workingman killed in its erection.  It is easy enough for a gentleman of education and refinement to sit at his typewriter and point out the crimes of the workers.  But let him be one of them himself, reared in hard poverty, denied education, thrown into the brute struggle for existence from childhood, oppressed, exploited, forced to strike, clubbed by the police, jailed while his family is evicted, and his wife and children are hungry, and he will hesitate to condemn these as criminals who fight against the crimes of which they are victims of such savage methods as have been forced upon them by their masters.

Debs also pulled no punches in his words about mainstream progressives, whom he claimed represented the jungle rule mentioned earlier.  In this view, capitalists have maimed and murdered exponentially more innocent people than unionists had, and he noted how complicit American society was in those crimes.  Again, while not advocating for violence, Debs challenges us to redirect our attention to the conditions in which the bombing at The Times occurred.  Implied in his words is the notion that the McNamaras were acting *in response* to the much more powerful structure of violence that worked against them every day, in open daylight for the whole world to see:

… Roosevelt, who morally is still in the jungle, says that “Murder is
Murder” in denouncing the McNamaras and congratulating Burns,
but murder is not murder when it is for capitalism, and killing is not
killing when it is for capitalist profit.

The capitalist owners of the St. Paul mine at Cherry, Ill., buried
nearly 300 miners two years ago, some of them surviving for over a
week. Compared with this heart-breaking catastrophe the Los Angeles
Times affair pales into insignificance, but this is not murder. The
coroner’s jury fixed the responsibility upon the capitalists, but they
are not guilty of crime.

The capitalist proprietors of the Bayless mill at Austin, Pa., as deliberately killed their employees in the dam disaster there, according
to the coroner’s inquest, as if they had placed dynamite under the
hovels, but this is not murder, and not one of them will be punished.
The capitalist mine owners of Pennsylvania had the sheriff and his
deputies massacre a body of miners who were marching peaceably
along the road near Latimer, with an American flag at the head of
their procession, but this is not murder.

Under the ethical code of capitalism the slaying of workingmen
who resist capitalism is not murder, and as a workingman I absolutely
refuse to condemn men as murderers under the moral code of the
capitalist state for fighting according to their light on the side of the
working class.

If the McNamara brothers had been corporation detectives and had shot dead 21 inoffensive union pickets, instead of placing dynamite under the Los Angeles Times, they would have been protected by the law and hailed by admiring capitalists as heroes.

Although Debs’ words were noted for their strength, they ultimately fell on deaf ears.  General Otis and his peers had won, and the McNamara bombings had ensured it.  Debs would later be arrested for speaking out against World War 1.  Job Harriman’s mayoral campaign failed, and the leftist movement across the nation failed to take flight.  It is important to note, however, that 1910 was the year young Franklin Delano Roosevelt entered politics in New York.  Surely he would have been influenced by the events in L.A. as he crafted his views towards labor unions, and while he was opposed to public sector unions, his support for unions in the private sector indicated at least some level of sympathy for the cause the McNamaras fought for.   Extremists often move the center, for better or worse, so it is possible to view the bombing campaign as being somewhat successful in its aims, if not immediately but in the long term.

As far as this particular battle, though, General Otis was the clear victor.  Not long after the ordeal, Otis handed the keys to The Times to his son in law, Harry Chandler, a dedicated eugenicist, who continued peddling anti-union rhetoric as well as the type of racist propaganda that inspired a young Adolf Hitler.  Chandler and his ilk led the charge in making California the foremost region in the U.S. for forced sterilization programs that worked in tandem with programs in Nazi Germany during the years leading up to World War II.

The L.A. Times therefore led the way in crushing unions as well as pushing the ideals presented in the Crystal Palace even further.  Now, humans had the power to modify not only the world around them to their liking, but also the world within them, through selective breeding practices.  The racial hierarchy presented at world fairs and the concept of ‘racial hygiene’ promoted globally as whiteness spread itself to the four corners was finally reaching its logical ending point, where new, even higher, levels of whiteness would be forged physically through the merging of its best stock into new healthy white bodies, and the destruction of its antithesis represented in the forms of Black and Brown bodies, those of people addicted to chemicals, and those of people with mental illness.  Early proponents of eugenics included David Starr Jordan, founder of Stanford University, Lewis Terman, creator of the IQ test, Ulysses Sigel Webb, Attorney General of California from 1902 to 1939, and a slew of other prominent Californian academics, politicians, and businessmen.

If unionists and leadership at The Los Angeles Times couldn’t agree on matters related to labor, they could at least agree on the accuracy of the racial hierarchy.  As will be explored in the next piece, capitalists across the nation played on the hierarchy like a harpsichord, pitting white unionists against Black laborers who were moving north and west during World War 1, fighting for any scraps they could get from the industry juggernaut created by the conflict.  Aside from the magnetic pull of Vulcan in a handful of southern industrial giants like Birmingham and Houston, Black workers moved out of the Deep South for better work to feed their families, even if they had to be exploited as strike breakers, because the pay was still better than the sharecropping conditions back home.  This phenomenon enraged white unionists and divided the working class when, under different circumstances, they might have united into one massive union and succeeded in bringing men like Otis to their knees.

As it stands, Harry Chandler and his dynastic family carried The Times on through the decades as a fiercely anti-union enterprise.  In 1935 The Times constructed its new headquarters, a now iconic art deco building that won a gold medal at the 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne (International Exposition of Art and Technology in Modern Life) in Paris.  The new building featured a massive bronze eagle on its roof, where it watched over and guarded “true industrial freedom” throughout the Chandler era.  It now sits in the lobby, a cultural relic now that The Times has finally moved itself once again into a new headquarters for the new millennium.

The Chandler era lasted until the 1980s, when General Otis’ great grandson, Otis Chandler, a political moderate and professional journalist in comparison to his ruthless and racist forefathers, finally handed the keys over to people outside the family for the first time.  The famous General had succeeded in keeping his hyper-capitalist ideology and physical progeny at the helm of his beloved newspaper for at least a few generations, a byproduct of the failed bombing campaign initiated by a few desperate union leaders in 1910.  But recent history would have him rolling in his grave, and perhaps trying to hire private mercenaries to confront his own newspaper’s employees. The Los Angeles Times staff formed its first union, the L.A. Times Guild, in 2018.

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Warning:  Extreme anti-Black violence

Note: this piece focuses on some of the national context surrounding the lynching of Will Brown in 1919 Omaha, with a particular focus on race and racism in early 20th century United States.  For an understanding of references made to the symbolism of the eagle, organ stops, and the Crystal Palace, please read The Lynching of Will Brown Part 2

“The way to right wrongs is to shine the light of truth upon them.”

-Ida B. Wells

Nestled along the Roanoke River just half an hour’s drive south of Lynchburg, Virginia, lies the Victorian-style house that is now home to the Avoca Museum.  Not far from its greenish facade lies a tree stump, the last remnants of an old black walnut tree that served as the birthplace of lynching.

During the tense summer of 1780, under the shade of this historical yet mythological tree, renegade revolutionary judge Charles Lynch tied men loyal to the British crown up by their thumbs, strung them into the air, and gave them 39 lashes from a cat o’ nine tails.   The lashes tore flesh from these men’s backs while Lynch forced them to utter the magic words, ‘Liberty Forever,’ the rallying cry of Patriots across the colonies.  Afterwards, they were forced into signing up to fight against the empire they had been loyal to only moments before.

While these tactics might seem obviously reprehensible to us today, they were barely scandalous at the time.  It was a time of war, after all, and Virginian Patriots had uncovered a Loyalist plot to sabotage lead mines used to produce revolutionary ammunition.  Then-governor Thomas Jefferson had ordered Lynch to transport the worst offenders to Richmond for trial but Lynch refused, preferring his own brand of vigilante justice, an act of defiance for which he was never reprimanded -the Virginia General Assembly had made sure to pass legislation shielding the vigilantes from any prosecution, just as Lynch knew they would.

Thus, ‘Lynch Law,’ the extrajudicial practice of stringing people accused of crimes into the air as punishment, became synonymous with American vigilante justice during our very conception as a nation.  Under the semi-watchful eyes of official authorities, this practice played out across the frontier and continues into present day.   Whether we like to admit it or not, ‘lynch mobs,’ as they came to be known, are as American as apple pie.  Thomas Jefferson himself, although he did not order it, also did not stop or condemn it.

Although people of all races and genders were lynched, Black men account for a vastly disproportionate amount of these atrocities, especially following the Civil War.  And while not all lynching has revolved around the issue of race, Lynch himself used the term in relation to race as early as 1782, when he wrote, “I am convinc’d a Party 36 the first lynchers there is who by Lying has Deceiv’d some good men to Listen to them—they are mostly Torys & such as Sanders has given Lynchs Law too for Dealing with the negroes &c.”

From the Reconstruction period on, these events mainly served to maintain white supremacy by oppressing other groups, evidenced by the overwhelmingly disproportionate racial numbers found in every major study on the topic.  Black men who were becoming too wealthy or powerful were viewed as threats to the traditional racial power structure, and lynchings were carried out largely to keep them from voting, seeking positions of power, or being too “uppity” (in other words, becoming financially successful.)  The boot of whiteness had to keep the soul of Blackness in its subservient position at all costs, and then blamed Black people for their own suffering.

But lynchings also often played the role of entertainment, providing a sort of carnivalesque atmosphere that worked in tandem with the political functions they served.  H.L. Mencken said, “lynching often takes the place of the merry-go-round, the theatre, the symphony orchestra, and other diversions common to larger communities.”  Crowds of thousands would gather together, sometimes with newspapers advertising the event days in advance, providing ample time for entire families to travel from neighboring areas to be there for the big day.  Vendors would arrive to sell food, drink, and chewing gum.  Children often witnessed and participated in the macabre spectacle along with these throngs of adults.  Photographers would show up and shoot the day’s proceedings.  Mayors and sheriffs frequently put up no fight whatsoever to stop any of it, if they didn’t outright endorse it.

Sometimes death would be delivered swiftly, but that would ruin the entertainment value of the event.  For maximum excitement, pleasure, and political impact, the torture and execution would often stretch over a period of several hours.  Even after the body had taken in its last breath, the corpse could be further mutilated -burnt, broken, dismembered.  In some instances, the bodies were dragged through Black neighborhoods in order to fully demonstrate the point, and in one case, a lynching victim’s severed head was thrown from a moving car at Black people walking down the street, a grenade of pure physical and psychological warfare.

Then these regular, all-American Toms and Susans would pose for a picture with their kill, like hunters do with their prey.  Items would be taken from the carnage and kept as family heirlooms or sold as souvenirs, including pieces of rope, articles of clothing, body parts, and any weapons that were used.  Then the photographs would be sold to postcard companies, who made fortunes re-selling the images of white supremacist Christian terrorists smiling, from ear to ear, over the corpses they so proudly annihilated.  In the face of such bald-faced disrespect of the law, grand juries rarely convened, and those that did rarely found reason to dig very deep.  The few indictments that arose would almost never lead to much, let alone guilty verdicts, and the still fewer guilty verdicts almost always led to pardons.

Such animalistic displays of pure, highly concentrated, premeditated violence and primal displays of racist dominance were then justified through an elaborate and sophisticated gaslighting process, whereby the supposed savagery inherent to Black people was cited as the very reason why it was morally necessary to carry out mob savagery against them.  The ends could always justify the means, especially when it comes to protecting the white angel from the Black beast.  South Carolina Senator Benjamin Tillman, speaking on the senate floor in 1900, claimed Black people and their progressive allies “wanted to put white necks under black heels and to get revenge” following slavery.  He went on to say:

In my State there were 135,000 negro voters, or negroes of voting age, and some 90,000 or 95,000 white voters. General Canby set up a carpetbag government there and turned our State over to this majority. Now, I want to ask you, with a free vote and a fair count, how are you going to beat 135,000 by 95,000? How are you going to do it? You had set us an impossible task. You had handcuffed us and thrown away the key, and you propped your carpetbag negro government with bayonets. Whenever it was necessary to sustain the government you held it up by the Army.

Mr. President, I have not the facts and figures here, but I want the country to get the full view of the Southern side of this question and the justification for anything we did. We were sorry we had the necessity forced upon us, but we could not help it, and as white men we are not sorry for it, and we do not propose to apologize for anything we have done in connection with it. We took the government away from them in 1876. We did take it. If no other Senator has come here previous to this time who would acknowledge it, more is the pity. We have had no fraud in our elections in South Carolina since 1884. There has been no organized Republican party in the State.

We did not disfranchise the negroes until 1895. Then we had a constitutional convention convened which took the matter up calmly, deliberately, and avowedly with the purpose of disfranchising as many of them as we could under the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments. We adopted the educational qualification as the only means left to us, and the negro is as contented and as prosperous and as well protected in South Carolina today as in any State of the Union south of the Potomac. He is not meddling with politics, for he found that the more he meddled with them the worse off he got. As to his “rights”—I will not discuss them now. We of the South have never recognized the right of the negro to govern white men, and we never will. We have never believed him to be equal to the white man, and we will not submit to his gratifying his lust on our wives and daughters without lynching him.

Here, Tillman might be credited for his honesty.  The quote lays bare the true motivation behind ‘literacy tests’ at the polling booths, as well as the real overall sentiment among many white people regarding the prospect of Black equality.  In this view, simply allowing Black people to participate in democracy represents the boot of tyranny over white people, indicating how frequently those who preach in support of democratic values are actually totalitarians hiding in democratic clothing.  It also reveals the gaslighting mechanism at work, with the statement that the more Black people “meddled with” politics, the “worse off he got,” which might be compared to the timeless line, ‘I’m only hitting you because I love you.’

Tillman went so far as to state he would “willingly lead a mob in lynching a Negro who had committed an assault on a white woman” and counted at least 19 lynchings in South Carolina under his watch.  Because of his willingness to state what so many white people thought and felt but were perhaps unwilling to say in public (Donald Trump?), the debate around lynching during this time frequently featured Tillman as a sought out voice in the matter.   His views were thus normalized and validated through mainstream American society.

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The mainstreaming of lynching played out in Pierce City, Missouri, in 1901, when a white woman named Gazelle Wild was found dead with her throat slit from ear to ear.  In a frenzy, a white mob located a Black man they thought was guilty named Will Godley and promptly lynched him, after which they shot into his body many times over, accidentally injuring several of their own and killing a young white boy in the process.  The mob supposedly also broke into the local Missouri National Guard armory (although it’s possible they were secretly granted access) and turned their sites on the Black section of town, where they shot Will’s grandfather French to death in his own home, and proceeded setting fire to Black houses and shooting at those fleeing for the trees, incinerating another elderly Black man in the process.

Will Godley was later discovered, as so many lynching victims were, to have been innocent.

The story out of Pierce City inspired Mark Twain to pen an essay called, ‘The United States of Lyncherdom,’ in which he takes aim at mob mentality and also gives credit to a handful of leaders who heroically prevented lynchings before they were able to occur.  Fearing how white American society would react, assuming it was unprepared for his scathing words, he shelved the essay and it was only released in its redacted version following his death.  The mob even had the power to silence the great, fearless wit Samuel Clemens.

While many white people shared Twain’s revulsion for the prospect of lynch mobs, those who were willing to speak openly on the topic, as the starting point for any dialogue, would often concede that they at least understood the reasoning behind the phenomenon, as a means of appearing the cool, rational centrist.  In August of 1903, an article written by Supreme Court Associate Judge David J. Brewer appeared in Leslie’s Weekly and was carried by newspapers across the nation.  Brewer argued in favor of abolishing appeals of criminal convictions entirely.  Brewer stated:

Our government recently forwarded to Russia a petition in respect to alleged atrocities committed on the Jews.  That government, as might have been expected, unwillingly to have its internal affairs a matter of consideration by other governments, declined to received the petition.  If instead of so doing, it had replied that it would put a stop to all such atrocities when this government put a stop to lynchings, what could we have said?

It is well to look the matter fairly in the face.  Many good men join in these uprisings, horrified at the atrocity of the crime and eager for swift and summary punishment.  Of course they violate the law themselves, but rely on the public sentiment behind them for escape from punishment.  Many of these lynchings are accompanied by the horrible barbarities of savage torture, and all that can be said in palliation is the atrocity of the offenses which led up to them.  For a time they were confined largely to the south, but that section of the country no longer has a monopoly.  The chief offense which causes those lynchings has been the assault of white women by colored men.  No words can be found too strong to describe the atrocity of such a crime.  It is no wonder that the community is excited.  Men would disgrace their manhood if they were not.  And if a few lynchings had put a stop to the offense, society might have condoned such breaches of its law; but the fact is, if we may credit the reports, the crime instead of diminishing is on the increase.  The black beast (for only a beast would be guilty of such an offense) seems to be not deterred thereby.  

What can be done to stay stay this epidemic of lynching?  One thing is the establishment of a greater confidence in the summary and certain punishment of the criminal.  Men are afraid of the law’s delays and the uncertainty of its results.  Not that they doubt the integrity of the judges, but they know that the law abounds with technical rules and that appellate courts will often reverse a judgement of conviction for a disregard of such rules, notwithstanding a full belief in the guilt of the accused.  If all were certain that the guilty ones would be promptly tried and punished the inducement to lynch would be largely taken away.  In an address before the American Bar association at Detroit some years since, I advocated doing away with appeals in criminal cases.  It did not meet the favor of the association, but I still believe in its wisdom.

Although Brewer was opposed to lynching, his widely published view was touted as a “good hard common sense” alternative between those who advocate lynching and those entirely opposed to it, in that it could potentially appease both sides of the debate.  Therefore, a judge working for the Supreme Court of the United States argued in favor of negotiating with terrorists by abolishing criminal appeals courts altogether, and this view was spread throughout the nation as the reasonable middle ground between two extremes.

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Meanwhile, the lynching continued.

Many of those fleeing the horror in Pierce City in 1901 ended up staying with friends or family 30 miles to the west in Joplin, Missouri, where in April of 1903, a young Black man named Thomas Gilyard was arrested on the accusation of killing a police officer.  In a repeat of the events just across the way only two years earlier, the mob snatched Gilyard from his jail cell, strung him up and shot into his dead body repeatedly.

Then in June, a prominent Black teacher and community activist in Bellevue, Illinois, named David Wyatt found himself in an argument with the county superintendent, Charles Hertel, over the renewal of his teaching certificate.  There are differing accounts of exactly why Hertel refused to renew the license, but Wyatt had been active in organizing Black people in the St. Louis area into political activism, something white authorities would certainly have been pressed on behind closed doors by groups of concerned white citizens.

At some point Wyatt reportedly shot Hertel and was immediately apprehended.  Rumors quickly spread that the shot had been fatal, although it was not.  According to J.J. M’auliffe of the St. Louis Dispatch, a mob formed around the jailhouse and, after some minor confrontation with local authorities, were granted access unopposed.  The mayor had ordered police not to fire on them, but apparently it took leaders of the mob two hours to “break through several steel doors” in order to gain access to Wyatt, while officers “mingled” with them.  In order to save face, local authorities would at least be able to say they didn’t hand over the keys directly.

The article continues:

…  as he crouched in his cell pleading for mercy… his body was dragged by means of a rope tied around his neck through the principal streets… he was then hanged from a telegraph pole, his body mutilated and parts of the flesh distributed to the fiendish mob as mementos of its unbridled passion, and… his bleeding and torn body was burned…

It might have been assumed at the time, as it is so frequently assumed today, that the mob represented only the worst fringe elements of the town, but those assumptions have always been based on nothing more than faith.  The evidence clearly indicates most people of the town either actively participated or sat back and watched as the mob leaders carried out the dirty work, and contributed to a code of silence when it came to holding anyone accountable in even the slightest ways for the crimes they committed in full view of police, and these people often photographed themselves smiling, posed at the murder site next to the murder victim, and carried body parts back to their homes to keep as family heirlooms for generations to come.

When M’auliffe starts probing local opinion on the lynching, he begins uncovering how this code of silence worked:

I was surprised to find that some men whose names are synonyms of good in the community feared to speak their minds.  Still more was I surprised to find that the man who could call the grand jury is waiting  for someone to request him to do so.  And still more I was surprised to find that State’s Attorney Farmer had “nothing to say.”

Then he goes into some details about his interactions with the mayor:

The mayor’s position is this: He expresses the opinion that a community which would not be “stirred to fury and resentment” by the unprovoked shooting of its superintendent of public schools, ‘would not be made of desirable or the right stuff.’

The mayor says he does not wish to condone the action of the mob, but he can readily see how it was fed on the flames of prejudice through a “negro agitator who has been busy in Belleville under the equal rights act.”

Then the feisty reporter set his sights on Circuit Judge R.D.W. Holder, who was spotted at the public square an hour before the lynching.

Asked about the circumstances around the lynching, Holder said, “I do not know much about it… except what I have hear.  Yes, I read the accounts in the St. Louis and Chicago papers.”

Asked about his opinion on the lynching, he said, “I have no opinion; a judge cannot have one.  I am glad I know so little about it as I do.”

Pressed on the matter, reminded a lynching had in fact occurred in his county and that some of the best citizens openly oppose lynching, he said, “I am willing to admit as much.  The people of this city believe in the law; nothing in the entire history of Belleville shows anything similar to what has happened.  Lynchings are bad things.”

Asked about calling a special session for a grand jury, he responded, “I have received no request to do so.”

Asked if he could convene a grand jury upon his personal request, he said, “I could, but I would not care to do so at this time… It would be hard on many of our farmers to ask them to leave their work now and the expense to the county would be considerable.”

Finally, when M’auliffe approached local businessmen, one of them said, “Please do not ask my opinion.  I am not bothered about it at all.  I have enough to do to look after my own business.”

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It is difficult to ascertain the true convictions of these prominent locals, since they appear to have either been truly confused, simply terrified, or some combination of both.   The fact that a news reporter was so breezily able to get a circuit judge to say “I have no opinion” on lynching and “lynchings are bad things” almost within a single moment seems to demonstrate an overriding fear which led to confusion, either feigned or authentic, when it came time to make some sort of moral judgement about the matter.

Feeling the same pressure as Mark Twain and perhaps with similar views, only without the privilege to have their thoughts written down and placed in a message in a bottle for posthumous discovery, the civilized white men of the heartland of America stumbled through answers on even the most basic questions regarding absolute human depravity.  The entire series of verbal diarrhea vomiting from these authority figures’ mouths reminds one of the questions posed by the 1946 trials in Nuremberg and the questions following the Stanford Prison Experiment a few decades later.  Autopsies on the physical remains of human victims are straight forward enough, but autopsies on the corpses of basic social decency are another task altogether.

Regardless of the complex questions lynching and similar phenomena pose, one thing can be certain: whatever the adults are doing in town, through it all, children are always watching.

Another St. Louis Dispatch journalist wrote of his trip to Belleville, Missouri (part of Joplin) following the lynching of David Wyatt, and painted a grim picture of just how normalized lynching truly was.  This report told of a new game, the “game of lynching” which “for the time being has eroded out baseball and jackstones, being vastly more exciting, and, if continued until fall, promises to deprive of some of its prestige the game of football.”

The journalist spared no detail in their description of this new game:

The children of the town, deducing from the light and airy manner in which many of their elders refer to the lynching of the negro Wyatt on the public square that the game is a proper and creditable one and deriving from the studied inactivity of the authorities the assurance that it is perfectly safe, have entered into the game with zest, and many of them have become adept at it. 

If the game takes its place on the year’s calendar of sports and “lynching time” recurs with the same regularity as “kite time” and “top time” the children will by the time they are grown by quite facile as lynchers.

The game starts with the intended victim, generally a boy, crossing in the weeds in a make believe cell in an imaginary jail.  The lynchers, boys and girls, gather under the nearest electric light and vow with great ferocity that “the n****r must die.”

With shouts as hoarse as they can make them the youngsters make a rush for the make believe jail and dance about it with an imitation of fury even more realistic than that of the crowd which surrounded the Belleville jail a few weeks ago.

Make believe policemen hang about, but make no attempt to disperse the mob.

A make believe mayor makes a speech studded with terrible adjectives, immediately following which a rush is made and the make believe front door of the imaginary jail is broken in.  The mob is driven back by an imaginary force of defenders.  The desperate mob withdraws a pace and confers.

The consensus of opinion is that the bastille can’t be taken because the defenders have weapons filled with injurious bullets, and they are all agreed that, while they are bent on killing the prisoner, they don’t want to run any risk in doing so.

Some try to convince the others that the authorities are their friends and would not harm them for the world, but still they hesitate.  After an imaginary wait of several hours a bold spirit creeps close up under the walls of the jail and comes running back in great joy.

“It’s all right, feller!” he shouts.  “They mayor has given orders to the guards that they are not to hurt us. Our revenge is at hand.”

They shout hoarsely and again rush upon the jail.  The guards are locked in the imaginary office and the back door is not defended. They break it in with imaginary sledge hammers, and in a little while the victim is pounced upon and dragged down the imaginary steps and out on the street.

Emulating the real mob, they are not content merely to take him to a telegraph pole and complete the imaginary hanging.  They pull and haul him over the sidewalk and street, shouting merrily the while.  It is such fun that by this time they have forgotten to be fierce.

Finally the victim is pronounced dead, and a piece of paper is set on fire to give the proper realism to the finish.  

Then they imagine it is the next day, and the leaders go around imaginary street corners telling what part they took in the make believe lynching.

The game ends with the make believe authorities reposing on a nearby lawn, complaining that they cannot ascertain the name of the lynchers and languidly announcing that they will call the attention of the grand jury to the lynching next year.

The cycle of lynching therefore played back into itself, a positive feedback loop that helped white Americans define themselves through the ritualistic act, through the telling and re-telling of the lynching narrative, to the point that each individual lynching followed the same typical plot line.  The reporter called it a ‘game’ but the more accurate label would be ‘theater,’ as there was no competition or goals by which players of the game might win or lose.  Rather, these kids took on characters playing sacred roles they viewed as being vital for the protection of their society from the forces of evil and savagery.  They were preparing themselves for the real thing, and a child of five in 1903 would have been 20 years old in 1919, the year Will Brown was mutilated in the streets of Omaha, as so many Black people were in the streets of cities across the nation.

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In 1903, as kids trained themselves in white supremacist terrorism through play, and prominent adults debated the morality of this terrorism, the triumphs of western civilization, global capitalism, and white supremacy continued brewing in the meticulous planning of more world’s fairs.

On the same day that Justice Brewer’s centrist views on lynching spread across the nation, another big story ran by its side: the next offspring of the Crystal Palace would sprout from the same soil that David Wyatt’s body had recently returned to, as  Missouri would host the next world’s fair in 1904.

The artwork for the fair was handled by Czech painter Alphonse Mucha, whose specialty was depicting beautiful, pure yet sensual women in the style of Art Nouveau.  The poster depicts a calm, regal, lily white woman who might be thought to represent Lady Columbia, or the ancient Roman goddess of Liberty that now stood to represent white, Christian, enlightened Western Civilization seated next to the gears of technology that pushed whiteness closer to godhood, separating it from the savage state of humankind in its primitive form.  Behind her, a docile Native American man reaches his arm around her, yet he is no longer a threat.  His face is defeated, his eyes gloomy, and his hand is embraced by Lady Liberty warmly – she is in control, and the final culmination of Manifest Destiny, the ideals pushed forth at the Crystal Palace, have successfully spread across the Great Plains to the West Coast, enveloping the New World in total dominance.

Vulcan, the Roman god of fire, volcanoes, the forge and metallurgy, made his appearance at the fair in the form of a colossal iron ore statue, which remains the largest cast iron statue in the world.  Vulcan is one of the oldest Roman gods, dating back to the Etruscan period, who survived in some form through Greek and Roman civilization and continued his presence through to the American empire.  In ancient Rome, he was celebrated for creating weapons, armor, and jewelry for the other gods.  Every year on August 23rd, when crops were dry and at most risk for catching on fire, festivals called Vulcanalia were held in honor of the fire god.  In these festivals, Romans threw animal sacrifices into massive bonfires, which were meant to placate Vulcan so he wouldn’t lay down his wrath upon Roman crops, cities, and citizens.

In our desperate attempts to control nature, humans created ritualistic cleansing festivals in the hope that civilization would not crumble.  When Rome burned in the Great Fire of 64 c.e., many placed blame on Nero, many on Vulcan.  When Mount Vesuvius erupted only 15 years later, vulcan’s wrath showed its full power by destroying Pompeii entirely.  Civilization is a fragile thing, so humans must perform sacrificial rituals in order to keep it afloat.

Many American lynchings involved fires and burning of corpses, or sometimes burning men alive.  When Ell Persons, an elderly Black man in Memphis, was accused of raping and decapitating a 15 year old white girl in 1917, a lynch mob formed and burned him alive on a bridge over the Wolf River.  Afterwards, his remains were scattered down Beale Street, a predominantly Black neighborhood.  It was Person’s head which served as the projectile launched at Black people walking down the street.

Person’s ‘trial’ revolved around the absurd claim that his image was imprinted into the eyes of the young girl’s corpse, an idea sprouted from pseudoscience gaining traction at the time, under the guise of biometrics.

In another 1917 incident in Waco, Texas, a Black 17 year old named Jesse Washington was accused of murdering a white woman and a kangaroo court quickly formed.  He confessed to the crime and was taken by a mob on is way out of the courthouse.  The mob beat him and tied a chain around his neck.  In front 15,000 people, including children, they doused him in oil, castrated him, and cut off his fingers and toes.  Then they started a fire, hoisted him to a tree so he dangled above the flames, and repeatedly lowered and raised him over the flames for two hours, in order to make him suffer maximum pain, and in order for the spectacle to reach the desired level of entertainment.  As with other lynchings of Black men, pieces of his body were taken as souvenirs.  One person ran off with the corpse’s penis.  Children cut out his teeth and sold them to the highest bidder.

The mayor and sheriff of Waco watched the proceedings, implying their blessing on the ordeal.  The town must cleanse itself of wickedness and throw its sacrificial animal into the fire, in order to protect Lady Liberty, to protect civilization, to defend everything upon which the light of reason and holiness stands. 

One might ask how these people slept at night, but they wouldn’t have understood the question in the first place.  How could they not sleep at night?  They had the law on their side, strength in numbers on their side, strength in technology on their side, strength in economic and political power on their side, strength of God himself on their side.  They were doing the dirty work in defending all that is righteous and decent in human civilization, and for this they ought to sleep better than anyone else.  The blood on their hands was spilled from holy actions, and if you don’t understand that, then you just don’t understand their way of life.

From their perspective, the lynch mobs of America also had science on their side.

In further effort to justify white supremacy, as well as global European and American imperialism, pseudoscientists at the St. Louis Fair continued showcasing the supposedly God-ordained and Darwin-approved superiority of the white race over darker skinned savages through various ‘living exhibits’ featuring Indigenous peoples from around the globe in what amounted to zoo displays.  This was more of the same, a pattern repeated throughout world’s fairs from their inception.

Ota Benga, the famous African Pygmy who was touted as the official ‘missing link’ between apes and human beings, was displayed in St. Louis.  It was following his display here that the Bronx Zoo took interest and took him into their oppressive clutch.

Indigenous Filipino people, recently taken under the wing of American imperialism, were also put on display.  The eagle of American civilization stood over these people, protecting them from the evil Spanish empire, which of course treated Filipino people much the same way as the American empire did – like subhumans not worthy of even basic levels of respect and dignity.  Their practice of eating dogs was of particular interest to the Westerners, who viewed it as a barbaric practice, even as they proudly slurped down pounds of ham and bacon, pigs being near equal, if not equal, to dogs in intelligence.

But this time the racist pseudoscientists would take things a step further.

As the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair hosted the first Olympic Games ever held outside Europe, organizers also green lit what they dubbed ‘Anthropology Days,’ in which Indigenous peoples from around the world would participate in athletic competitions, in an effort to study their capacity as humans through sport.

Dr. J.W. McGee, president of the newly established American Anthropological Association, was disappointed in the results, as many of the athletes either didn’t understand the rules, decided to purposely stray from them, or simply didn’t care enough to try.  When some of the Indigenous sprinters stopped short of the finish line in order to cross the tape together with their peers, rather than win first place, the organizers assumed they were incompetent as athletes.  But something deeper might have been at work, and the anthropologist’s premise that Indigenous people were as individualistic an e as Europeans likely entirely false: the sprinters might not have even desired to defeat their peers, but rather to share the communal bond that would come from finishing the goal together, which stood in direct odds with the value set mythologized through the displays inside the Crystal Palace half a century earlier.

In addition to these racist faux Olympic competitions, the St. Louis World’s Fair also hosted the largest pipe organ ever assembled, which the New York Times reported “is a church itself in size… as large as a four-story dwelling house, 30 feet wide and 63 feet long.”  Inside this massive structure, one could become “almost lost in the maze of stairways, ladders, pipes and bellows.”  Some of its pipes were 50 feet long and weighed 1,5000 pounds.  Its stops, however, were still sized for human hands.

Watching over the organ and the fair’s racist, imperialistic festivities, sat the companion piece – a bronze eagle weighing in at 2,500 pound by itself.  The project cost what today would translate to roughly $3 million, a cost that went over the projected budget by roughly $1 million in today’s currency, a cost that bankrupted its own patron, the Los Angeles Art Organ Company.

What came to be known as the Wanamaker Organ belted out its first earth-rattling vibrations, “causing little thrills to creep up and down the spines of the listeners,” as reported by the New York Times, at the exact moment in 1904 that King George V was crowned in England.

The tensions in Europe which led to World War 1 were brewing.

Fifteen years later, shortly after ‘the war to end all wars’ had finally come to a halt, in its new home inside a popular department store in Philadelphia, the organ delivered its messages of hope and beauty in the first of many popular ‘musician’s assemblies.’  The bronze eagle remained locked in its gaze upon the organ, and its stops, while the people of Omaha read news story after salacious news story, almost all of them false, about ‘Black beasts’ ravaging white women of the city.  At the same time, doughboys fresh from the trenches came home to cities into which Black people from the South had flooded in search for a better life, working jobs the white veterans felt belonged to them.  Black soldiers returned home to a nation of white supremacists who hated them more than ever.  Soldier of all races struggled with PTSD and miserable employment opportunities.

The confusion of World War 1 had made its mark on the world’s psyche, and that trauma had returned to the New World.  White vets sought and found a convenient scapegoat onto which they could unleash their terrified, confused, privileged rage and fury.

The war in Europe was over, but tension in the streets of Omaha was beginning to boil as it never had before…

 

 

 

Note: this piece focuses on some of the national context surrounding the lynching of Will Brown in 1919 Omaha, with a particular focus on race and racism in early 20th century United States.  For an understanding of references made to the ‘Crystal Palace,’ please read The Lynching of Will Brown Part 2

On July 4th, 1910, Tina ‘Tiny’ Johnson was hoisted up over a crowd of ecstatic friends, family, and neighbors, and carried from a car into her house in South Chicago.  Immediately a crowd of thousands gathered on her lawn demanding she show herself once again.  They wanted to revel in glory together with her.

When she finally stepped out onto the porch roof, she held up a life sized poster of her son, the first Black heavyweight boxing champion of the world, in one hand, and a bouquet of flowers in the other.  She led the crowd in singing ‘There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight’ until her voice gave out, and then streamed tears of joy.  Many in the crowd wept with her.

Their very own golden son, Jack, had just proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he was in fact the greatest boxer in the world, and that Black people can be not only equal in strength, talent, genius, and art, but can even surpass white people, something that flew against the prevailing worldview which placed humans into a racialized hierarchy with white people on top and Black people at the bottom.

Johnson, famous for smiling and dancing masterfully while swinging his fists into his opponents’ faces with force and dexterity unmatched in the annals of boxing, had just won the biggest match the sport had yet seen – the battle between human races fought in front of 20,000 people in the sweltering heat of Reno, Nevada, and broadcast across the world over radio waves.  Immediately after winning, Jack Johnson bought everyone a round at the bar, sipped his cold beer, and refused to talk much about what had just transpired.  He simply said, “I want to be with my mammy.”

When Johnson got back home, the joy and celebration would rise even further.  Nearly every Black South Chicagoan came together for this special occasion, catching a sense of communal freedom and release, if only for a moment, through their hero, the intrepid pugilist who had just proved white society wrong once and for all in its quest to assert itself the superior race.  Black people around the world were sparked to dance and sing and cry in the streets, expressing their shared sense of joy.

But only minutes after Jack Johnson’s victory over the supposedly invincible white titan Jim Jeffries, something more sinister was also brewing.  The crowds of white people had been left stunned into silence.  What was supposed to have been an opportunity for them to finally take back what they thought was rightfully theirs, namely supremacy in all things, including (back then) athletics, had turned into a moment of fear and loathing.

Had the ‘Black beast’ (as they called him) gotten a lucky hit?  He must have.  Scientists had recently been ‘proving’ the superiority of the white race and the imperialist history of the past few hundred years had clearly indicated what the racial pecking order was.  Current Literature had just published an article titled, ‘The Psychology of the Prize Fight,’ in which Jeffries was predicted to win due to his naturally given white intellectual prowess over the savage Johnson.  Max Balthazar of the Omaha Daily News asked if Jeffries could beat Johnson and “restore to the Caucasians the crown of elemental greatness as measured by strength of blow, power of heart and being, and withal, that cunning or keenness that denotes mental as well as physical superiority.”

Johnson answered Balthazar’s question loudly and clearly, leaving crowds of drunken white people feeling deflated and terrified while Black folks paraded through the streets oozing pure joy and confidence.  White fragility was about to have its say on the matter.

Only minutes after radio broadcasters announced Johnson’s triumph, violence broke out in cities across the nation, leaving thousands injured and dozens killed.  In one incident, a white man slit the throat of a Black man for cheering Johnson on.  In another, a white posse set a Black tenement on fire and then blocked the doors and windows.  These were full blown race riots throughout the nation, and they would not be the last.

Although the vast majority of reports indicate white mobs attacked and injured Black people (in many cases “the first n***er” they saw), the headlines often read in ways that implied Black people were to blame.  A typical story from July 5th, 1910, could read like a horror film with an invisible villain: “Henry Anderson, a negro, was killed and John Anderson, his father, died today from wounds.  An unidentified negro woman also died this morning, her tongue having been shot from her mouth, while shouting for Johnson.”

Who killed the Anderson men? And who shot this woman’s tongue out?  We aren’t told, even as headlines frequently spun the narrative in a way that conveniently flipped blame onto the victims, as was typical then and remains so to this day.

While all these attacks were occurring, shortly after sipping his beer and speaking warmly of seeing of his mother, Johnson found himself being heckled by a group of white ruffians who challenged him to fight all of them at once.  Some even threatened to kill him, something he was used to, but which also startled a couple of detectives enough to ride along with him as far as back as Omaha on his train ride home from Reno to Chicago.

Upon returning home, he received still more threats, including from a man who was caught standing in his yard, staring at the house with two firearms.  When police asked why he was there with his weapons, he said he thought he “might need them” but did not specify for what.  Letters flowed in to Johnson’s home from fans as well as potential murderers, who provided a steady stream of anxiety for him and everyone in his inner circle.

Yet Johnson maintained his fearless public image through it all declaring:

“If and suppose… two small words, but nobody has ever been able to explain them. One man falls out of bed and is killed, another falls from a fifty foot scaffold and lives. One man gets shot in the leg and is killed, another gets a bullet in the brain and lives. I always take a chance on my pleasures.”

It would appear the corollary is also true, as he took pleasures in chance as well.

At the turn of the century even more than today, any Black person excelling professionally was enough to make a lot of white people uncomfortable at least, and homicidal at most.  Jack Johnson not only proved himself to be the greatest boxer in the world, but he did it without conforming to how white society would prefer him to be.  He stuck his tongue out at the unwritten laws of the day, making him even more of a target for hatred and violence than a Black champion would have already been.

Rather than speak with humility, he spoke supreme confidence, a trait commonly perceived as charm in white men, arrogance in Black men. Rather than live modestly, he bathed himself in absolute luxury, with the finest and flashiest clothes, jewelry, and cars.  He never pretended to care what white people, or anyone else for that matter, thought of him as he fought his way through all the boxers who were supposed to take him down.  Perhaps most shocking, in the simple minds of his detractors, is that through it all… he continued smiling.

He smiled in 1908 as he pummeled then world champion, Candadian Tommy Burns, prompting police to break up the fight early, lest white society be forced to witness the further desecration of their king on his throne atop the boxing empire.  Following this startling upset, white society desperately needed a ‘Great White Hope’ to finally wipe that damn smile off Johnson’s face. In 1910, they dumped all their hope, and cash, into Jeffries, who had been retired from boxing as the undisputed champion of the world and taken up farming in California.

Novelist and boxing enthusiast Jack London wrote, “Jim Jeffries must now emerge from his alfalfa farm and remove that golden smile from Jack Johnson’s face. Jeff, it’s up to you. The white Man must be rescued.”  The golden smile refers to Johnson’s gold teeth, which he proudly beamed at heckling white crowds as he made quick work of his opponents.  This smile perfectly summed up the image of Johnson as the unrepentant savage who doesn’t know his proper place. A Black man was only supposed to smile in subservience to whiteness as he carried white luggage or shined white shoes, not as he methodically took chunks out of the very fabric of the established racial order of the world.

Johnson was also phenomenal at adding insult to injury.

Although he knew he had the massive Californian farmer right where he wanted him early in the match, he toyed with him for several rounds, to draw it out.  He was notorious for playing with his opponents the way a cat plays with a mouse, hoisting them back up as they fell, just to continue dancing around them, swinging his knuckles through their chins and into their eye sockets, talking his witty shit to throngs of white people as they called him every dehumanizing name they could muster, grinning his million dollar smile as he slowly robbed white men of their dignity in front their families, their women, the entire world.

In the 15th round of the Reno fight, a smiling, playful Johnson turned serious and decided to finally send his opponent packing.  Gracefully, he proceeded to knock the Great White Hope through the ropes, when Jeffries’ manager illegally pushed the dazed farmer back into the ring.  Jeffries’ people couldn’t help themselves, apparently. Within seconds, Johnson devastated him once again with a flurry of blows.  The crowd screamed for the referee to stop the match before Johnson could deliver the official knockout blows, and so the great battle of the races was ended early, in order to save the fragile white ego from further annihilation.

But there was another reason the match was called early.  Back in 1910, the early film industry was booming and people were paying to watch boxing matches in silent movie theaters.  Footage of the fight would serve as documented evidence in the case against white supremacy, and that concept was so terrifying that a law was made to ban the transport of boxing films across state lines.  After the 4th of July riots, people were also scared the repeated showing of the fight would continue escalating racial violence and therefore needed to be snuffed out.  The movement to ban these films was so strong that even the industry executives who stood to profit from them publicly advocated a hands off, states rights approach to allow people to decide if they wanted to show them or not.

Many states banned the film, which will appear at a normal looking speed here if you click on the settings icon at the bottom of the video to the right of closed captioning and change the speed to 0.75:

As a whole, the fight itself and the film of it were viewed by white society not as an achievement for Black people, but as a devastating blow to white supremacy which, half a century after the Civil War, was still the assumed premise for the United States in both the North and the South.  In the zero sum game of racial power, any victory for Black people was viewed as a loss for white people.  The Omaha Daily News stated, “in spite of occasional lynchings in the south, the social adjustment between the white and black races was coming to a better status when along came the Jeffries-Johnson prize fight and put the conditions back at least forty years.”

Meanwhile, Johnson continued being himself, pushing the boundaries of accepted racial boundaries with every step he took.  As if beating white men senseless in front of the world with a gold-toothed smile wasn’t enough, he openly flaunted his taste for white women, which shot overall white sentiment about him into another dimension of hatred.

White women have historically represented purity, angelic innocence, the light of God and reason, even liberty itself, that most sacred of all American concepts.  Lady liberty or Columbia brings light to dark, freedom to bondage, knowledge to ignorance, truth to falsehood, righteousness to evil.

The narrative of Manifest Destiny, that European people are God’s chosen few, whose projects of conquest and empire are part of a divine plan to bring Jesus and civilization to the untamed parts of the world, was embodied in the image of a white woman floating over the expansion of white colonial settlers westward towards the California coast.  She is the mother of all that is right in the world, subservient only to God himself, guiding humanity to the very light that shone through the Crystal Palace to display all that Western civilization had achieved.

Black men, on the other hand, represented the worst of savagery, violence, and the darkness of ignorance and sin.  He lurked in the shadows like Satan himself, a beast whose power must be contained and controlled at all cost, lest civilization itself be crushed by the forces of evil.  The idea of a Black man bedding a white woman has long been the most terrifying of all racial fears, and any white woman who has slept with a Black man has been considered damaged goods, a once-clean, now-defiled fallen angel who has brought eternal shame upon her family’s good name.

In the supposedly zero sum game of procreation, even one Black man with a white woman threatened the entire framework upon which civilization had been built.  This sexual color line between races was enforced from both ends, although often for slightly different reasons.  Mixed race babies, or ‘mulatto’  as they were called then, would have widely been viewed as  a step down the racial ladder for a white family, and largely as a step up for a Black family, especially because some mixed race people could live their lives ‘passing’ as white, enjoying the freedoms and privileges their whiteness afforded them.  Both situations would have brought scorn from society as a whole, and for that reason ‘race mixing’ was harshly frowned upon.  The major difference between the power dynamics at play here were that white parents wanted to keep their children from ‘lowering’ the family genetic line, while Black parents wanted to keep their children from being murdered in the streets.

When Johnson brought his first white wife, Etta Duryea, home for Christmas for a family photo just months after his big win in Reno, Tiny looked none too pleased with the situation.  She knew the weight of the situation and what people might do to her son.  Everyone knew, they just worried about it for different reasons, and to different degrees.

But mother’s displeasure was the least of Johnson’s concerns.

When news of Johnson’s romances with numerous white women became public, white supremacists everywhere went into a frenzy.  People crowded into the streets and hung him in effigy, the athletic champion’s Black body having come to symbolize all that is savage and terrifying and corrupting, that was coming to rob the white woman of her virtue, the white man man of his dignity.  The savage beast had escaped its cage and was coming to destroy civilization itself.  Left unchecked, it would have its own barbaric way.  The time had come to fight back, to show the strength of whiteness over the forces of darkness, to put the beast back in chains where it belongs, to confine it to its cage once again.

The contrast between the life size image of Johnson in his mother’s hand as she sang and cried tears of joy communally with the Black people of South Chicago and the effigies of him that white people hung in the streets downtown demonstrate the range of confusion Black people have had to feel existing in a white supremacist society.  Their mothers have nursed them and loved them as humans, yet the larger society around them has elaborate systems in place to destroy their sense of humanity at every turn.

It would have been fine and well for Johnson to think of himself as a real man personally, so long as he didn’t act as such in front of the white gaze.  Behind closed doors, a Black man could think whatever he wanted of himself.  It was Johnson’s open refusal to act as if he were a mere beast, a spectacle designed to maximize its entertainment value for white eyes, that set white people into such a mad frenzy.  He could have even challenged white supremacy and acted as a heel for a time, for dramatic effect, but if he didn’t go down in the end, giving whiteness its hero status back in the narrative, then he must be destroyed.

And so whiteness went to work using its vast tentacles of power in the task of destroying Jack Johnson.

If he couldn’t be destroyed inside the ring, he would have to be dismantled outside of it.  First and foremost, the film footage of the fight had been censored.  That was just an image, like an effigy, and white society could control an image.  But with the living, breathing Johnson riding around in his expensive cars, flashing that smile with white women on his arm, something else had to be done.  There had to be a way to cage the actual beast, not just his image.

In 1910, the same year Johnson knocked out the ‘Great White Hope’ Jim Jeffries, the federal government passed the Mann Act, which made it illegal to transport women across state lines for sex work or the decidedly vague “any other immoral purposes”.  While the aim of the bill was partially well intended, aiming at saving underage girls from being trafficked into what was called ‘white slavery,’ there was also a racist angle to it, since a lot of the criminal underworld was associated with night clubs where jazz music was performed and ladies of the night mingled with men of all races ready to gamble, drink, and pay for sex.

Because poverty and crime have always been intimately connected, and centuries of systemic racism has ensured a disproportionate number of Black people will be living in poverty, the criminal underworld was always associated with Blackness.  Jazz music served as the soundtrack to the seedy narratives that played out in red light districts across the nation, where men made and lost fortunes, where addiction and abuse was rampant, and disease spread from the streets into the homes of ‘respectable people.’

White society was terrified that its young women would be lured into this world of sin by the intoxicating music, drugs, and Black men who frequented these nightclubs.  In this setting, evil itself was thought to be festering on any given night, just a short drive away from nice homes where good, God-fearing white parents raised their children – where fathers watched over their angelic daughters and made sure to steer them on the path of righteousness, the path of light, the path of pure Christian whiteness.

In line with the modernist notion of progress at the center of the Crystal Palace, social scientists set out to study the inner workings of this underworld in order to find solutions, in order to take the 2+2=5 of vice and turn it into the 2+2=4 of an orderly society where crime and disease were things people only read about in history books.  In order to put theory to practice, local, state, and federal agencies were established.  The seeds of the FBI were thus planted with the stated aim of protecting women from coerced sex work, but which in practice also policed women’s sexuality, as not all sex work is coerced.  None of the studies or policies of this time placed focus on the johns, whose demand for sexual services paved the way for entire industries to thrive in red light districts.

When it came time to hammer Johnson with something, police attempted to use his own wife against him, although by this time he was with his second wife, Lucille Cameron.  Etta Duryea had shot herself in the apartment they shared above Johnson’s newly established Cafe de Champion, much to the delight of moral crusaders who preached that white women in the arms of Black men led to certain doom.  When Cameron’s mother came to police claiming Johnson had kidnapped her daughter, police pounced.  She told the press,”Jack Johnson has hypnotic powers, and he has exercised them on my little girl. I would rather see my daughter spend the rest of her life in an insane asylum than see her the plaything of a n****r.”  But when police tried to get Lucille to turn against the man she loved, she refused.

Then an anonymous tip led investigators to Belle Schreiber, a sex worker whom Johnson had favored years earlier.   She and a chauffeur testified that Johnson had transported her across state lines and had sex with her.  Although Schreiber had been (barely) of age and consenting, she had become angry with Johnson, and played ball with authorities as they used the vague language of the Mann Act to hit the world champion athlete with charges.

White Americans shrieked with joy.

Sandy Griswold of the Omaha World Herald wrote, “the wire brought the glad tidings last evening that at last a white hope had succeeded in landing a knockout wallop on Jack Johnson. His name is Uncle Sam and he not only knocked the big black blackguard out, but knocked him in also into the pen, and it is to be hoped for the limit – ten years.”

Johnson skipped out to Europe and later Mexico for several years, before eventually returning to serve a year in prison, his debt to society for being a Black man who slept with white women.  This would be as close as white American society would get to doing to the real man what they did to his effigy.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

In the meantime, while many states banned the film of Johnson systematically dismantling the Great White Hope, another film was in the works – one that would revolutionize cinema and become the first feature length Hollywood blockbuster that everyone simply had to see, and the first film to be screened in the White House for the president himself.

In 1915, D.W. Griffith’s ‘The Birth of a Nation’ reversed the narrative told in the Johnson vs Jeffries film.  This time, instead of being forced to watch the villainous Black beast win the day, white audiences would watch in elaborate detail as the Black beast threatens white womanhood and civilization itself, then be treated to a Great White Hope that comes along and vanquishes the beast at long last, providing the emotional release white folks had felt entitled to, and deprived of, five years prior which resulted in widespread anti-Black violence and murder.

The film depicts an ugly picture of Reconstruction, with newly emancipated Black people in the South acting like savages destroying white civilization, most notably by kidnapping and assaulting white women.  Upon being released from the chains of enslavement, Black men were coming to put white women in chains, in order to defile them.  In one particularly absurd scene, a lily white angel is chased right off a cliff by a Black man.  Of course, the film makers didn’t hire Black actors, opting to put white actors in Blackface instead.  

In the final scene, as the armed Black savages close in on a group of white folks holed up in a cabin, the representatives of Great White Hope are rushing to save the day on horseback.  Will they make it in time?  At the last second, the white saviors finally burst onto the scene, overpower the Black savages, and save the poor white victims.  As if to put a white supremacist cherry on top of this groundbreaking and grotesque film, its protagonists are none other than the Ku Klux Klan.

 

While the premise might seem ridiculous to us today, it became fairly mainstream in white American society at the time.  And while white Christian terrorist groups like the KKK are often spoken of as isolated pockets of extremists who have more bark than bite and whose impact is often overstated, they had millions of members who signed up to actually be officially linked to the Klan, and that doesn’t count the other millions who might not have signed up, but who supported their ideas.  The millions of official Klan members were the tip of the spear, while the shaft stretched throughout much nation, including through institutions of real power and influence. 

Chief Justice of the Supreme Court Edward Douglass White, a former member of the Klan himself, persuaded the entirety of the Supreme Court to see the film.  These were some of the most powerful people in the nation, together in a room watching white Christian supremacist propaganda films, and discussing its merits as real history. 

Thomas Dixon Jr., who wrote the book upon which the movie was based, said, “the real purpose of my film was to revolutionize Northern sentiments” and in a letter to Woodrow Wilson, wrote, “this play is transforming the entire population of the North and the West into sympathetic Southern voters. There will never be an issue of your segregation policy.”  When the film was screened in the White House, President Wilson surely enjoyed seeing himself quoted in one of the intertitles:

The narrative presented in the film was given credibility not only from President Wilson and the Supreme Court, but also from prominent historians such as Claude Bowers, whose work including the 1929 book The Tragic Era: The Revolution After Lincoln was favorited by Franklin Roosevelt, who would go on to oversee the repulsive imprisonment of Japanese civilians during World War II.  Bowers was keynote speaker at the 1928 Democratic National Convention and went on to serve as ambassador to Spain and Chile, an influential voice in FDR’s ear and a powerful voice in the telling of American history generally.  By placing the narrative told in ‘The Birth of a Nation’ into actual history books, Dixon’s racist propaganda thus came to be embedded into the official national psyche.

Dixon’s propaganda worked quickly.  During the scene where a Black man chases a white woman off a cliff, one man took out his gun and shot at the screen, feeling the urge to protect her.  This blurring of fiction and reality fanned long burning flames across the nation, providing fertile ground for whiteness to organize itself into a concerted effort to cage the Black beast, as the KKK did in the film, in order to free white women and white civilization itself from the bondage of sinful Black savagery.

Only months after the film was released, failed Methodist Minister William Joseph Simmons and a group of other bitter white men were inspired to walk to the top of Stone Mountain in the middle of Georgia and declare the revival of the long-defunct Ku Klux Klan, which had risen and fallen through the Reconstruction era.  Inspired by fraternal organizations and The Birth of a Nation, they dressed themselves in white robes and dunce caps, opened a bible and set a cross on fire, marking the first official cross burning ceremony and the official rebirth of the KKK, which Simmons hoped to make bigger and better than ever.

The white robes and cross burning ceremony were not a part of the original Ku Klux Klan – Simmons lifted those ideas directly from ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ where they first appeared.  Movie executives had hired men to dress up in the Klan’s white robes and ride on horseback at movie theaters as a promotional tool.   Again, fiction and reality blurred together, from film to real life.

If Jack Johnson represented the Black savage coming to defile white civilization and liberty herself, the Klan represented the Great White Hope that Jim Jeffries was not.  Whiteness would no longer have to see its potency diminished by a virile, dancing Black man flashing his golden teeth.  Now, dashing white Christian terrorists on horseback would save America by putting the Black beast back into the cage where it belonged.

At the same time, the narrative of clean, sparkling human progress in the Crystal Palace had been defiled by the insanity of World War 1.  If the story of humanity is one of progress, then how and why did it feel like everything was in ruins?  If we were supposed to have mapped out the path towards utopia, where human flourishing would be activated as simply as solving 2 + 2 = 4, then why did the calculator of history keep giving us 2 + 2 = 5?

The fear and confusion of war would not end when the bullets stopped flying, and whiteness would not immediately blame its own institutions for causing that confusion.  Upon returning home to a confused nation, white American soldiers joined the frenzied white masses to find their scapegoat in Blackness. White America then unleashed all the power and fury of the Klan, the tip of the spear, with much of the rest of white society as the shaft, to stab the Black beast into submission.  In their minds, the body of the Black man needed to be taught a lesson, and so they would have their way, finally, in carrying out their terrorist educational mission.

The image of the Black body Tiny Johnson held in her hand, which evoked so much pure communal joy to the Black people of South Chicago, which represented the hopes and dreams of a better world for Black people, also represented all that was wrong in the world in the minds of those white people wielding the keys to power.  After 1915, these white people had a film to assure them they were correct about the nature of the problem, and to sell them a solution in the form of white Christian terrorism.

Meanwhile, in Omaha, a cold and calculating mob boss was watching it all, and light bulbs were going off in his head.  He knew how he could silence his many critics once and for all.  The Omaha air was thick with tension, so all he had to do was push a few buttons to make it explode into madness.  Then the people of Omaha would realize they need him once again, to make things make sense once again…

 

 

 

Note:  This piece focuses on the international context surrounding the lynching of Will Brown in 1919 Omaha.  Themes explored here will appear in subsequent pieces.  For the introduction to this series, please read The Lynching of Will Brown Part 1

On New Years Eve 1918, nine months before a white mob would descend into madness in Omaha, a mass of young men crowded onto HMY Iolaire on the Scottish mainland.  Boisterous yet tired from years of war, they were headed for the northern port of Stornaway, Isle of Lewis, ready to once again embrace their families and friends, their lovers, the soil on which they and their ancestors had formed.

That night almost 300 men, mostly from the Royal Naval Reserve, cozied up on a boat designed for no more than 100, with two life boats and 80 life jackets.  Any fear left over from the Titanic disaster just four years earlier must have been washed away by the storms of World War 1.  These men had just lived through hell, so who would tell them to wait for another boat, another day, when home was so close and the New Year was right now?

Not two months earlier, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, the crackling shots and explosions of World War 1 had come to radio silence.  The gears of war had stopped churning at last, and morale was through the roof.  Like other war survivors, the men on Iolaire envisioned hugging their parents and siblings, kissing their nieces and nephews on their cheeks, gorging on their mothers’ home cooking for the first time in years.  They dreamed of sitting around fires, sipping beer and cracking jokes, sharing a story or two from their time serving in the War to End All Wars.  Some had engagement rings.

Families on the Isle of Lewis also anticipated glowing embraces and hearty reunion feasts, preparing for the occasion days in advance with decorations, warm beds, and clean clothes in the wait.  Like magic, the faces in the pictures they had stared at longingly, with such adoration and worry, would spring to life again before their eyes in an instant.

The boat, like the men it housed, had been displaced by the deadliest, most brutal conflict history had ever seen.  Originally built as a luxury yacht, the Iolaire (Scottish Gaelic for eagle) had served the Allied Powers well on submarine patrol, and now stood to transport hundreds of war-weary souls home at last, their final deployment.  Following years of carnage, boredom, and uncertainty, the men could finally be at ease.  Surely they would have found ways to turn the yacht from a vessel of war into more of a carnival cruise, it being New Years Eve and their ticket home.  Spirits would have been high and spirits would have been consumed, all in great relief over the prospect of starting their real lives, their peacetime lives in the Lewis countryside.

At roughly 2 am, lolaire cut through choppy waves generated from gale force winds in the pitch black night – mother nature was not smiling on these mens’ triumphant return home.  As the yacht made its approach into the port, it failed to slow down as it should have, officers likely miscalculating in the surging storm winds or the fog of whiskey, or both.  With lights from the port in sight, the ship smashed into a jagged rock formation called Biastan Thuilm, or ‘The Beasts of Holm,’ and began taking in water, tilting over just 20 yards from the rocky shore.

Of the roughly 300 men on board, about a quarter of them survived.

Some were rescued when a man swam towards shore with a rope in his hand and was lucky enough to wash up at a spot where he could latch onto firmly, providing an escape line from water to shore.  Another man clung to a mast all through the night, which stood barely perched above water, weathering the surging waves and violent gusts of wind for hour after hour.

Most weren’t so lucky.

As the bodies washed ashore that morning, families grieved.  One mother cleaned sand out of her son’s hair.  His face was blackened from being smashed against rocks as the water rolled him towards shore, then dragged him away again, repeatedly.  His fingernails had also been broken off, indicating he had tried with all his 27 year old might to reach onto a rock that he might use to escape the endlessly forceful waves.  A father reached into his son’s jacket to pull out the letter he had sent to his son just months earlier.

For these families, the only warm reconnection they would have with their loved ones would be through their tears spilling onto the ice cold bodies that had been laughing only hours before.  Young men who had survived the entirety of World War 1 died on their glorious ride home, drowned 20 yards from their beloved land.

The Iolaire disaster is perhaps the perfect embodiment of the horror the world experienced through World War 1.  The ‘war to end all wars,’ which was supposed to wrap up and be ‘over by Christmas,’ as was the popular phrase in August 1915, ended up dragging out for year after year, producing a scale of mass human slaughter previously unimaginable.  What was supposed to have been a quick prick to deliver the medicine of a great victory for humanity ended in years of physical and psychological torture.  What was supposed to have been a short, simple ride home on a nice yacht ended in much the same way in Scotland in the first hours of 1919.

The trauma from the war and the maritime disaster wreaked havoc on the people of Isle Lewis for generations, and is still felt to this day, 100 years later.   On a broader scale, it’s difficult to overstate how heavy the psychological toll of the war was on the world at large.

At the outset of war, after two centuries of rapid technological advancement, urbanization, scientific breakthroughs, and life expectancy on the rise, there was a sense that Enlightenment ideals were becoming realistic, that the human story is one of progress.  This modernist concept of human advancement past our medieval, primitive past was put on display through a series of ‘world’s fairs’ or ‘international expositions’ that continue to this day.

The first truly international fair was the 1851 ‘Great Exposition’ held in London, where the newest and greatest in human achievement was put on full display, including the latest art, architecture, science, technology, and industry.  Prince Albert wanted the fair to provide a “living picture of the point of development at which mankind has arrived, and a new starting point from which all nations will be able to direct their future exertions.”

The crowning achievement of the fair was the ‘Crystal Palace’ that housed the event.  Neither a palace nor made of crystal, the massive structure with 900,000 square feet of glass plates served as a metaphor for the enlightenment of humankind – the taming of nature, of savagery, of oppressive ignorance that stifled our evolution.  The gargantuan structure boasted nearly a million square feet of floor and was six times larger than St. Paul’s cathedral on the other side of the Thames.  St. Paul’s took 35 years to construct, while the Crystal Palace was finished in just five months.

News of this architectural feat and of the fair itself traveled far and wide.  In just five months, six million visitors from around the world strolled through it.  Over the next hundred years, almost one hundred world fair exhibitions would be held around the world, all built with the same intentions: to showcase humanity’s triumph over nature, the marvels of capitalism, white Christian Anglo-Saxon demi-divinity and evolutionary superiority, and the final stretch towards perfecting life through rational means.

Inside the doors of the Crystal Palace, sunlight penetrated glass and split into various directions, showering light down upon the signifiers of human progress so vividly embodied in objects like expertly crafted daguerreotypes, the world’s first fax machine, and the largest diamond then known on earth, Koh-i-Noor, stolen from the heart of India by British colonial settlers and displayed as a trophy of the empire.

The Crystal Palace also served as an intellectual prism, sending thinkers scattering into different ideological interpretations of what it meant.

To Prince Albert, the exhibition was an example of economic globalism bringing people from around the world together in harmony.  Quite an interesting take for a man who exercised near complete economic and military dominion over India, which already had a population of 200 million by 1851.  In a quote which accurately foreshadows Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ but doesn’t quite anticipate the coming Sepoy Mutiny of 1857, Albert states:

“Nobody who has paid any attention to the peculiar features of the present era will doubt for a moment that we are living at a period of most wonderful transition, which tends rapidly to accomplish that great end, to which, indeed, all history points—the realization of the unity of mankind… The distances which separate the different nations and parts of the globe are rapidly vanishing before the achievements of modern invention… So man is approaching a more complete fulfillment of that great and sacred mission he has to perform in this world…”

When the Great Exposition ended, the building was re-imagined and re-designed into a museum depicting the history of humanity going back to the earliest agricultural civilizations, and moved to another nearby location.

Russian socialist-utopia writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky marveled at the new Crystal Palace in an essay and later in his famous novel, ‘What Is To Be Done,’ where the protagonist dreams of an idealized future in which everyone lives in glass homes similar to the palace and share things communally, in the loving embrace of the eternal truths revealed by the Enlightenment.  He viewed the Crystal Palace as a great equalizer, a place where the lines between bourgeoisie and proletariat could be blurred, where humans of all stripes live their lives in tranquil peace and equality.

Directly influenced by the ideals of the French Revolution, Chernyshevsky was a true believer that in finding the workings of nature and living in accordance to reason, humans will rationally evolve into a society where work and leisure are intertwined into perfect harmony.  The Crystal Palace represented the culmination of humanity’s final goals, which are to figure out the puzzles of life through scientific and mathematical formulas, such as the ones used to design such an elegant yet massive iron and glass structure in such a short period of time.

The conservative-slavophile Fyodor Dostoevsky, on the other hand, was disgusted with everything the palace represented.  In his novella ‘Notes From Underground,’ the protagonist, the Underground Man, lives beneath and outside of society.  He observes society as a fly on the wall, one who never fits in precisely due to the fact that he understands so much clearer what the masses fail to even begin to grasp.  In his view, humans can’t be reduced to rational creatures, and will go to great lengths in order to continue being irrational.

When we are expected to say 2 + 2 = 4, we still might say 2 + 2 = 5 just to assert our freedom to do so.  When acting rationally is acting in our own self interest, and human behavior is mapped out for all our needs to be met, humans will act against our own self interests (poor white Republicans?) just to make a statement to the universe, that we are free to do so if we choose.  If humanity is reduced to formulas, he sees true free will as being undermined, making everything predictable and humans reduced to mere ants or bees in a hive.  He asks, “for what is man without desires, without free will, and without the power of choice but a stop in an organ pipe?”

The idea of humankind finding their final stage, in which all behavior has been mapped out, fitting into rational scientific and mathematical formulas, is terrifying to the Underground Man.  He points out that the cult of reason in France led to the Napoleanic Wars, which were no less insanely brutal than those of Attila the Hun.  The Crystal Palace is therefore both a triumphant finality to the human experiment, and the death of real life itself, which lies not in goals attained, but the process of attaining:

And who knows … perhaps the whole aim mankind is striving to achieve on earth
merely lies in this incessant process of achievement, or (to put it differently) in life
itself, and not really in the attainment of any goal, which, needless to say, can be
nothing else but twice-two-makes-four, that is to say, a formula; but twice-two-makes four is not life, gentlemen. It is the beginning of death.

While Dostoevsky was writing his novel, death ran rampant in the U.S. as the Union and Confederacy engaged in attrition warfare.  Many technological advances saw their start during this conflict, including those which would make World War 1 so exceptionally devastating.  Early submarines, torpedoes, mines, metal-plated warships, observation balloons, machine guns, and the railroad all saw their debuts in warfare.

Richard Gatling claims he was inspired to invent his early machine gun, patented in 1862, by a desire to make what was then modern warfare less deadly.  He thought if a few men with a few of his weapons could do the job of an entire army, it would reduce the number of casualties drastically at least, and make modern warfare obsolete at most.  Perhaps men would stop their endless cycle of war if they each held a weapon capable of killing so many so efficiently.  He called his patent, “Improvement in revolving battery-guns.”

Here, the idea of modernity is perhaps at its most absurd and profound.  In hindsight, we know the machine gun only served to intensify the scale of carnage in warfare.  Gatling’s vision of more efficient weapons leading to peace could also be seen as a precursor to the nuclear age, which Oppenheimer predicted would result in an era of peace through the concept of mutually assured destruction – no nuclear power will actually hit the red button because they know it would result in the destruction of great swaths of civilization, including their own, when the other side hits their red button in response.  The prediction rang true in the case of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but the nuclear age is still young.  There will be many more chances for humanity to stick out its tongue and declare 2 + 2 = 5.

Gatling’s gun and its variants saw very little actual use in the Civil War, instead finding itself on the giving end of imperialist ventures such as the Indian Wars, in which the U.S. government annihilated Native American warriors and civilians alike, and in the Zulu Wars, in which the British project spread itself though Africa.  At the Battle of Gingindlovu, the British were outnumbered 5,670 to over 11,000 but had two Gatling guns.  Suffering only 11 dead, the British mowed 1,000 Zulu warriors down.

It’s hard to think of these moments in history as actual wars, rather than exercises in cultural genocide.  People debate which events meet the definition of genocide, but there is no doubt that what the European settler colonialists did to Indigenous peoples around the world was always, at the very least, a form of cultural genocide explicitly intended to destroy entire ways of life that didn’t fit into the narrative presented at the Crystal Palace.

Imperialism ran through the fabric of the Crystal Palace and every other international exposition that followed it.  Implicit in the narrative was the religious concept of manifest destiny as well as the growing field of scientific racism, in which European pseudoscientists placed humans into a racial hierarchy based on Darwinian principles.

How would the British explain how and why it is their army can mow down 1,000 African warriors as easily as spreading butter over toast?  How would European Americans explain away their genocidal actions spreading west to California, breaking every treaty they signed promising some level of decency?  How would they explain away their mass scale  enslavement of African people, and subsequent racist apartheid state?  The answer was to create the racial hierarchy, placing white people on top, Black people on the bottom, and everyone else somewhere in between.

In this sense, the whitening of humanity could be viewed along the same lines as the industrial and artistic ‘progress’ displayed at the Great Fair.  Having mapped out racial evolution as a straight line towards whiteness, racial ‘hygiene’ could allow for people of color to more closely align themselves with whiteness, and therefore with the progress and evolution of humanity as a whole.

Scientists of the day pushed the racial hierarchy in books and lecture halls, but people could witness dehumanization in real time with ‘human zoo’ exhibits at P.T. Barnum’s circus.  Pygmy people from Africa were advertised as the ‘missing link’ between ape and human, and white people flocked to see them.  One of them, named Ota Benga, lived his life in the Brooklyn Zoo, where he was displayed with primates.

World fairs couldn’t help but dip their hands into this honeypot as well.  Fair organizers put together ‘living exhibits’ of human beings from exotic colonies such as the Philippines, where darker skinned people were supposed to have been grateful for the opportunity to be colonized by whiteness, thus giving them the chance to latch on to the progress of humanity and ride its coat tail to the heights of rational harmony so praised by Chernyshevsky and loathed by Dostoevsky.  With these ‘living exhibits,’ whiteness could pat itself on the back for doing the heavy work of civilizing the untamed savages while simultaneously ogling at them from a civilized perch, close enough to touch, yet safe within the confines of the exhibit.

Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’ summed up the attitude best – it is difficult work, forcing people in these wild parts of the world to give up their resources, convert to Christianity, cut their hair, and ‘get a real job’ like servicing white peoples’ every whim.  It’s a dirty job, cleaning up all the savages of the world, but somebody has to do it.

In the case of the United States, it was Alaska, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guam, and the Philippines that had recently been taken into the fold of American empire.  In keeping with the human zoo or living exhibition tradition, Filipino villages were set up where visitors could take a simulated tour through one of the newly acquired territories, watching Indigenous people prepare food and crafts in their primitive ways.  Through this tour, whiteness was able to position itself apart from and over the cultures and peoples it had taken under its powerful wings, the eagle both shielding them from other, apparently nefarious, white Christian nations such as Spain, and lifting them to the heights of Western civilization through the kindness of its heart.

Overseeing much of the colonial process for the United States, President William McKinley delivered imperialist speeches underneath the eagle, surrounded by nationalist pageantry with flags, parades, and bands, all pumped with military gusto from the newest major player on the world stage, the United States.

McKinley guided the U.S. into the new century under imperialistic dreams.  During a speech at the 1901 Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, he laid out his claims quite clearly:

To the Commissioners of the Dominion of Canada and the British colonies, the French colonies, the republics of Mexico and Central and South America and the commissioners of Cuba and Puerto Rico, who share with us in this undertaking, we give the hand of fellowship and felicitate with them upon the triumphs of art, science, education and manufacture which the old has bequeathed to the new century. Expositions are the timekeepers of progress. They record the world’s advancement. They stimulate the energy, enterprise and intellect of the people and quicken human genius. They go into the home. They broaden and brighten the daily life of the people. They open mighty storehouses of information to the student. Every exposition, great or small, has helped to some onward step. Comparison of ideas is always educational, and as such instruct the brain and hand of man.

The next day, against the advice of his personal secretary, he appeared at the Temple of Music building for a public meet and greet, where visitors would file in one by one and shake hands with the president, who actually enjoyed that aspect of his job.  He reportedly said, “No one would wish to hurt me.”  Extra security was added, including a dozen artillerymen who only ended up blocking the view of the Secret Service.  An American flag was draped behind him.

As the doors opened for the crowd, one of the largest pipe organs ever assembled blasted out ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’  Within that mass was a young man who must have felt like Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, who felt like an organ stop that needed to express its freedom to the universe, an anarchist named Leon Czolgosz.  In his right hand he concealed a .32 caliber Iver Johnson revolver.  As he approached the president, he squeezed the trigger twice aiming into McKinley’s abdomen.  The president fell backwards, caught by his confidants, and immediately ordered the crowd beating on the assassin to go easy on him, then gave instructions on how to break the news to his wife.  McKinley died a week later of gangrene in the lining of his stomach caused by the bullet.

Although the Pan-American Exposition itself was famously lit like Disneyland by incandescent light, the emergency room where the president was taken lacked such technology.  In a mad rush to show off progress, President McKinley and American society had failed to take basic safety precautions into consideration.  Even though a new invention called an x ray machine was being shown off at the exposition, and could have been used to locate the bullet causing the president’s body to swell with toxins, nobody thought to use it.  Doctors told everyone he would make a full recovery, so even then Vice President Roosevelt took off, assuming things would be fine.

The hubris of empire was thus on full display.  All the illumination of human reason could not provide the common sense application that would have saved the president’s life.

It was then, perhaps, fitting that the incident which sent the rational actors of white Anglo-Saxon imperial powers spiraling into the absolute chaos and depravity of World War 1 was sparked by another young anarchist who shot at close range a nationalist leader wearing green peacock feathers, parading around in an open vehicle in an area of his empire where the people despised him.  Archduke Franz Ferdinand represented the Austrio-Hungarian Empire, which Slavic peoples felt was oppressive and keeping them from their own national autonomy.  He wore this goddamned clownish hat in his visit to Sarajevo, a Slavic stronghold.

When World War 1 began, the hubris didn’t stop.  It was declared the ‘war to end all war’ and people cheered in ecstasy as they mobilized for a war they said was sure to be over by Christmas.  A war where young men would once again go to earn glory on the battlefield.  All the rationality and scientific measurement of the European imperialist powers had become so bottled up that it had to burst at the seems, spilling out through streams of blood and guts spread across hellscapes where shivering louse-infested men drank water from where bodies of their friends soaked, mixed with urine and feces of men and rats.  Where men lost their minds and shook uncontrollably enduring blast after blast after blast, day after day, week after week, in order to take a section of land the size of a football field, only to have it then taken back from them the next month by other crazed zombie-like shells of men.

 

During the war, 125,000 men trained for war within the walls of the Crystal Palace, dubbed HMS Victory VI by the Royal Navy.  Among the men who trained there were the men of the Iolaire.  The massive steel and glass prism of reason took bright eyed young men from Scotland into its walls, broke them down and built them up into nationalistic warriors, fighting for rivalries and alliances between men they would never know, made over colonies they would never see, and sent them off to witness the calamity of war.  Those same men, many of whom had survived the madness of the trenches, torpedo hits from enemy submarines, and the loss of their brothers before their eyes, ended up drowning 20 yards from their homeland, fighting for their lives as the waves bashed them against the same rocks they so eagerly anticipated.

Although Gatling had died in 1903 and his gun had become obsolete by World War 1, the hope that his machine would make modern warfare obsolete came true – although in the opposite form he had hoped for.  The machine gun became the signature weapon of trench warfare, and instead of sending less men into war because of how deadly it was, leaders of nations sent *more* men into the grinder and allowed them to be mowed down for years on end.  Gone were the days of two armies meeting in a battlefield, walking towards each other until they were close enough to stab one another, and then one side retreating after losing more of its men than the other side.  Battle used to be considered glorious because there was more of a sport to it.  Gatling’s vision brought an end to that era.

The technological seeds planted during the age of the Crystal Palace had finally sprouted into full bloom, and their power was inconceivable to those who planned and fought in the war.  Nobody could have predicted how the unleashed killing power of machine guns would end up putting armies into tactical stalemates and placing men into the position of animals, burrowing into the ground, perhaps reading Dostoevsky as the shells crashed around them, wondering along with the Underground Man how any of the madness of the war could be considered sane at any level, let alone rational.

The idea that warfare was somehow romantic and heroic was switched upside down with this new kind of conflict.  There is no way to paint the muddy, barren, shelled-out fields of no man’s land, littered with barbed wire and corpses, in a way that has a positive spin.

German machine gunner and modernist painter Otto Dix took breaks from mowing human beings down like insects to sketch and write in his journal.  After the war, he painted in a way that was simultaneously surreal and hyper-real.  Of the war, he said:

I had to experience how someone beside me suddenly falls over and is dead and the bullet has hit him squarely. I had to experience that quite directly. I wanted it. I’m therefore not a pacifist at all – or am I? Perhaps I was an inquisitive person. I had to see all that for myself. I’m such a realist, you know, that I have to see everything with my own eyes in order to confirm that it’s like that. I have to experience all the ghastly, bottomless depths of life for myself; it’s for that reason that I went to war, and for that reason I volunteered. 

After World War 1 and artists like Dix, the romanticized version of warfare would no longer monopolize the collective psyche of the world.

Following the war, the Crystal Palace became the Imperial War Museum, where it displayed the machines of war behind a flood of nationalistic pomp.  It had gone full circle from the prism of reason and human potential for creating peace and harmony between nations, to a graveyard of machines that served as the meat grinders of millions of young men who willingly threw themselves into them, under the impression they were contributing to a better, more peaceful world – Chernyshevsky’s dream of the future also flipped upside down.

Also at the end of the war, just a couple weeks after the Iolaire sank in the waters of Scotland, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson attended the Paris Peace Conference where the future of Europe and much of the world would be decided.  At this major crossroads of world powers, he continued the dream envisioned in the original Crystal Palace, trying desperately to solidify his post-war legacy by laying the foundations of the League of Nations.  The Wilsonian worldview advocates for global interventionism, the spread of capitalism, the spread of democracy, and the self-determination of all peoples.

Yet as the Declaration of Independence stated the ideal that all men are created equal but only referred to white men, Wilson’s concept of self-determination did not extend to anyone who was not white.  Young Ho Chi Minh, who had studied American history and admired Wilson, approached the gangly white supremacist in Paris and proposed to him that the French should leave Indochina, and allow the Vietnamese people self-autonomy.  He was promptly ignored.

Although Wilson correctly joined British economist John Maynard Keynes in opposing the harsh reparations imposed onto Germany, for fear of future troubles in Europe, he also signed the Treaty of Versailles -the U.S. Senate did not ratify it.  He then went home to a turbulent domestic picture, where the same white supremacist arrogance that caused him to ignore Ho Chi Minh would cause him to ignore the gunshots of race riots outside his bedroom window.

A few decades after the Treaty of Versailles set the stage for fascist clowns to take power in Germany, Otto Dix’s paintings went on to become part of the largest art gallery showing in history, when the Nazis placed it in with other ‘entartete kunst’ or ‘degenerate art’ for the German people to jeer at, before they hid or destroyed much of it.  Avant garde arts and music, especially jazz, were considered inferior stains on the human record, viruses that must be wiped out if humanity is to reach its peak potential.

Along with the burning of countless books, the Nazi regime destroyed priceless works of art that was bold enough to be free, to stick its tongue out, to say 2 + 2 = 5.

 

In 1936, the same year the Nazi hordes fooled much of the world by hosting the Olympic Games in Berlin, putting on a massive theater production that signified strength through peace and racial tolerance, the Crystal Palace went down in flames.  A random fire had started in a storage room, and the fire department could not save the beloved structure from the power of the flame, that ancient, jumpy, seemingly aimless and irrational force that can turn anything it wants into dust.

Winston Churchill, viewing the inferno, said it was the “end of an era.”  He was correct in more ways than one.  As the Treaty of Versailles and the Great Depression set the stage for yet another, even worse world war, the idealism present in the Crystal Palace and other international expositions would no longer be so widely accepted in its naive, child-like form.

If the Crystal Palace represented the final culmination in human achievement, its destruction in flames represented the hubris we had to ever entertain such a notion in the first place.

The luxury yacht Iolaire, like the Crystal Palace that had housed the same men, could not withstand the random, senseless forces of nature.  The sinking of the ‘unsinkable’ Titanic should have been enough warning for these boys to avoid boarding a ship without enough life boats and safety jackets, but World War 1 had beaten their rationality out of them.

It was New Years, the war was finally over, and they had families to get home to.  2 + 2 = 5 if we say so, tonight at least.  Sure the Titanic sunk in dark frozen waters, but if we have enough booze on hand to stick our tongues out at the ocean tonight, then that’s what we’ll do. 

As they broke their fingernails grabbing onto the jagged rocks, their faces being smashed into the cold sharp earth and pulled back out into the ocean once more, over and over again, the stars gazed down in absolute indifference.  There is no rationality to that, only calm, ancient indifference from the cosmos.

And so it is that the year 1919 began, at least for an island of people in Northern Scotland.  What does any of this have to do with the lynching of Will Brown, you might ask?  When I say all things are connected, and that is where the beauty lies, I mean all things.  We have spent this piece zoomed out on an international scale, so the next piece will zoom in to the national and local scale context of the horror that occurred in the streets of Omaha in September of 1919.

 

 

 

 

 

 

(Warning: Extreme anti-Black violence)

Every time my 9 year old son and I drive to the Missouri river, we pass the grave of Will Brown.

Every day on my commute to and from school, I drive past the grave of Will Brown.

Although he no longer speaks in the physical sense, I hear him every time I drive by.

He speaks softly of his life and of his loves, the music he wishes he could share with my high school students, the stories he could tell them, and underneath it all, he wails in anguish.

His body has been cut to pieces, his entrails spilled onto the cement in front of the courthouse downtown, in front of the cops and in front of the mayor, in front of the city of Omaha.  His arms and legs have been hacked off, pieces of his charred torso scattered across the city, dragged behind a car for hours in a whiskey-soaked orgy of whiteness that took its rage out onto this body of Will Brown, this now burnt vessel of anti-Black rage.

The body lies in a common grave somewhere under the hill at Potter’s Field, buried along with thousands of nameless souls who lacked means to pay for a proper burial.  The pauper’s graveyard sits adjacent to and separated from the granite mausoleums of a sprawling, expertly crafted set of curves and slopes at Forest Lawn Cemetery in North Omaha.

Here, the nameless dead physically sit in the shadows of master crafted architecture bearing names that money, power, and influence have insured will be remembered for centuries to come.

Potter’s Field, adjacent to Forest Lawn, with a few basic stone memorials and graves set up in the 1980s, a century after the first bodies were buried there

Forest Lawn, Nebraska’s Most Beautiful Cemetery, vast and full of marvelous stone work

The name Potter’s Field itself is almost nameless, a generic term historically used for any old proletariat grave site.  It stems from the Bible.  When Judas took 30 pieces of silver to betray Jesus, he fell into despair over the guilt he felt after hearing Jesus would be executed.  In the book of Matthew, he returns the money to the high priests, who call it blood money and refuse to use it for the church.  Judas hangs himself and the priests use the silver to buy a field with red clay soil, used by potters for their ceramics.  The priests then use the field to bury unknown bodies, as well as those of criminals and the poor.

(What does it say about a society, when we so breezily associate poor, nameless dead people with Judas and his blood money?  Another topic for another time…)

In Omaha’s Potter’s Field, roughly 4,000 bodies decompose under the soil, half of which are babies and toddlers under the age of 2.  While diseases such as influenza certainly took their toll on these young ones, Omaha’s early reputation as a city full of vice and young sex workers led to many little corpses found abandoned, unable to be cared for.

These thousands of babies share the dirt of Potter’s 5 acres with thousands of adult bodies found washed up in the river, in the endlessly muddy ditches of early Omaha, in our city’s filthy tenements, and with those who gave their lives working the railroads.  Most of these bodies were put into cheap wooden or even cardboard boxes, their bones now certainly scattered as the land shifts through passing centuries.

Like so many other thousands he lies with, Brown’s gravesite was left unmarked.  The county had a policy that made sure families of the dead here didn’t mark their loved ones with headstones, under a policy which stated, “if you can pay for the stone, you can pay for the funeral.”  It was in use from 1887 to 1957, after which it became overgrown and littered with beer cans tossed aside by drunken teenagers who got spooky kicks out of partying over the bones of the dead.  In the 1980s, when the community started seriously discussing clearing the land for development, a former Douglas County sheriff named Richard Collins raised $22,000 to restore the land and erect some small monuments which stand there today.

But it wasn’t until 2009, when Chris Hebert of Riverside, California, saw a documentary about actor Henry Fonda, that Will Brown was finally given a gravestone of his own.  Fonda’s father owned a business across the street from the courthouse.  From the window, young Henry watched Will Brown’s guts spill onto the cement that night.  He claimed it was the trauma from witnessing this event that gave him the well spring from which he acted so brilliantly in his films.  Herbert, having no connection to Omaha of his own, felt a kinship with Will Brown as a Black man living in the U.S., and spent $450 of his own money to purchase the gravestone.

From somewhere under this stone, Will Brown speaks to us.  He wants to tell us the story behind one of the most infamous photos in lynching history, the story behind how and why he ended up so grotesquely dismembered, so creatively violated and publicly humiliated, so purposefully used to terrorize the Black people of Omaha, so thoroughly forgotten for so long.

Others have heard his call, and I don’t claim to be the first to write about him.  I only seek to tell his story the way I hear it, which is to say, the way I think I’m hearing him tell it.  Even though he only speaks occasionally in faint whispers, and we have little autobiographical information to use, the details surrounding his death are a novel in themselves, and I plan on exploring this meandering river of social, political, psychological, and physical violence through as many nooks and crannies as can be found.

Through the narrative, I hope to humanize Will as best as possible, because the goal in telling these stories should always be to focus on the humanity of those oppressed people who have been left voiceless through the pages of history, even as images of their deaths have been spread to the four corners of the earth.

Faint though it is, his voice still carries through the wind and in the rustle of the leaves at Potter’s Field, for those with the right set of ears.  It’s time we stop what we’re doing, set aside a moment of our day, and listen.  We owe him at least that much, after all that was taken from him.

The other day I turned down the opportunity to live out my teenage dream.

The offer came to share a stage with my musical idol, a rapper I held up almost as a holy man, the shaman of my adolescence – Brotha Lynch Hung.

It wasn’t an easy decision. At first I even accepted the offer.  For artists, getting the chance to be associated with those who inspired us is one of the sweetest tasting fruits of our labor.

As a teenage fanboy in 1997, Getting the offer would have felt like I’d just hit the lottery, flown to the sun and touched it, been granted a wish from a magical genie.

But now I’m 35 and have adulting to do.  A son to raise.  A job to keep.  Several long strips of cement to clear whenever it snows.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ll still wreck the stage on a microphone.  Opening for Blackalicious last year at The Waiting Room (thanks Surreal) was one of the best nights I’ve had as an adult emcee with real life shit to handle the next day.

The issue is not with performing hip hop music in itself, but the content of the music I associate with.

Lynch kills and eats people, including babies, in his music.  Anyone with a chip on their shoulder or a desire to take me down professionally could potentially do so by linking me with that sort of art.

So I turned it down.

Instead, I’ll go to the show and hang out backstage, meet the man, and hand him a copy of my 2006 CD where I shouted him out on a track and defended his legacy.  I also feel the need to revisit Lynch from where I’m at now in life, by writing about him here.

Lynch grew up Kevin Mann in the Meadowview neighborhood of Sacramento California, same neighborhood where Levar Burton and Cornell West hail from.  As an adolescent, Lynch used to encounter another local emcee who would later become Gift of Gab, the lyrical mastermind behind Sacramento hip hop group Blackalicious, pictured above.

Sacramento and Omaha have been connected ever since the Transcontinental railroad, and I was blasting Sac Town hip hop in Omaha not long after it first started making national waves.  I surfed over the rhymes of Gift of Gab and Brotha Lynch, studying them in great detail as their loyal student.

But the two emcees couldn’t have gone in more opposite directions, which accounts for the opposite responses I had at the chance to warm up a crowd for them.

Both emcees are top tier lyricists, but only one makes music that might cause Tipper Gore to have a nervous breakdown.  Gift of Gab became famous for rhyming the alphabet, Brotha Lynch for rhyming about eating nuts and guts and slabs of human meat, motherfucker.

So I have to eat the fact I live in a conservative state where a lot of the white baby boomer gatekeepers of society probably think Run DMC is pretty edgy stuff.  Opening for Lynch wouldn’t be a good look to them.

Even though they probably grew up insisting to their parents The Beatles weren’t actually satanic forces from the pits of hell, this is hardcore rap music we’re talking about, not the British invasion, and Lynch is a rather odd looking Black man from Sacramento talking about cannibalism, not cutesy, mop-headed blokes from Liverpool telling a generation of screaming girls he wanted to hold their hand.

So maybe Paul and Ringo would get a pass for their own dalliance in disturbing baby imagery from the very people who would abhor Lynch’s work.  Hypocrisy abounds.

Far from the shores of the United Kingdom, the mean streets of Sacramento in the 1980s and 1990s were staging grounds for turf wars between rival gangs, including the Garden Blocc Crips, who claim Lynch as one of their own.

Through centuries of trauma and oppression, deindustrialization and waning career opportunities through the 1970s and 1980s, Black people in urban centers faced a bleak world with little hope for improved life conditions.  When crack entered the fray, all hell was unleashed as rival gangs fought each other to death in endless cycles of retaliatory shootings, competing for economic territory.

I’ve always viewed this sort of thing as a microcosm of what governments of nations do, fighting wars  in competition for territory and resources.  The only difference is the scale of the fighting and the fact that when you slap an official national endorsement onto the killing, it becomes legal and even heroic.

Any brief study of what the Reagan administration was doing in Nicaragua in the 80s will show how closely aligned the actions of the federal government were with Crips and Bloods in the drug game.  Substitute Crips and Bloods with capitalists and communists, put the turf warfare on a global stage, and you’ve got the same thing.

The realities of these turf wars run through Lynch’s early music consistently, with frequent references to his set and his familial connections with loved ones within that set, including his mysterious cousin, Q Ball, to whom he dedicated his 1995 classic, Season of da Siccness.

In the skit intro to the brilliant track ‘Liquor Sicc,’ Lynch swigs a 40 ounce while talking to his dead cousin at the grave.  He begs Q Ball to give him guidance, as Lynch feels there is no choice but to retaliate and that if he does, he will likely kill himself afterwards rather than spend his life locked up.

It’s a cinematic moment on an album I listened to thousand of times as a youth, one that gave this white kid in Omaha a glimpse into the side of gang warfare we don’t get from the news – the love gang members have for each other, which is exactly the type of brotherhood those in the armed forces describe feeling for their comrades in arms.  Band of Brothers, Crip style.

At the end of the day, Meadowview Bloods killed Q Ball of Garden Blocc, and the only retaliation came in the form of shots fired into the air by another legendary rapper from the area, C Bo.  Lynch felt confusion and frustration as to why this was the case, but didn’t know if he should escalate and risk losing or ruining his life.

At the end of the song, Lynch sings, more than raps, with almost trance-like calm, repeatedly, “there ain’t no fucking way… My cousins gonna lay up in a casket with no retaliation.” Genuine feelings from someone whose family was just killed, as any soldier who has lost a loved one in combat over foreign oil supplies can attest to.

In 1995, just before the age of the internet, the only image we had of Q Ball was a photo on the bottom of the inside CD sleeve.

But it’s possible we also saw Q Ball before and never even knew it.  It’s possible we had seen him threatened with death in our own living rooms, as we snacked on Doritos and sipped on our Crystal Clear Pepsi.

He was on Cops, the TV show.

In the segment, a smallish white woman officer suspects him of something or other and pulls up behind him as he parks in the driveway of a house.  As she searches him, he suddenly busts away, so the camera person takes us on a Chase, Grand Theft Auto style, through residential South Sacramento.

At gunpoint, the officer threatens to shoot him in the head if he doesn’t follow her orders, then calls for backup in order to make the arrest.  She obviously didn’t feel comfortable doing it on her own.  Then she proceeds to barrage him with gaslighting techniques, including telling him to stand up on his own while his hands are cuffed behind his back, and telling him he needs to get into better shape, as she pants incessantly like she’s grasping for her life to catch her breath.

Looking back in the post Trayvon Martin era, this clip is absolutely bonkers.  The man posed no threat, and this officer threatened to shoot him in the head execution style over the positioning of his body on the ground he already lay on, in submission to her deadly weapon.

The shit is ludicrous, yet it played out casually in the homes of millions of American viewers, a further dehumanization of Black men who see no other way to get ahead in life than to hustle and gangbang, the way all the men on their block with money did.  Such was the mood as the war on drugs escalated under Reagan, Bush, and Clinton eras.

It is perhaps worth noting that even with the disturbing power dynamics displayed in the interaction between Q Ball and the officer who threatened to murder him, I think he ultimately played her.  He probably only ran in order to ditch whatever stash he had in his pockets at the moment she pulled up on him.  She missed that part.

By all accounts, Lynch never ended up killing anyone in real life.  The Garden Blocc Crips didn’t mind him throwing their name out even if he strayed away from that life as his music took off.  They viewed it as a win win situation – he stays alive, out of prison, and making music, while they gain worldwide notoriety.

Along with the gangbanging themes in Lynch’s music is an omnipresent ultraviolence, cannibalistic serial killer tales woven as a tapestry though his song narratives.  Lynch holds a mirror to the human species and shows the worst elements of ourselves, as he commits acts of full scale brutality, including the killing and eating of babies.

Before you pass judgement on Mr. Lynch, please remember that infanticide is ordered by God in the Bible.  Lady Macbeth fantasizes about killing her baby in the Scottish play.  Hansel and Gretel is a children’s story all about a woman trying to eat children, who then kill the woman by burning her alive, and it’s *told to children.*

Lynch plays a villain in much the same way an actor plays one.  But because he’s Black and a rapper, society fears that his violent art will cause violence in real life.

Nobody blamed Wagner for the Holocaust, even though his music and anti-Semitic ass was right in the thick of the Nazi movement.

And yet, even a psychologically disturbed man on crystal meth was used as a vessel to blame Brotha Lynch’s music for a 1996 murder suicide:

The article goes on to explain that Gallegos was in the care of local youth minister Bryant, and that he had been hit in the neck by a sniper during hostage negotiations, and pronounced dead a half hour later:

Not Beaver Cleaver indeed.

So where are the news articles with people blaming Shakespeare or the Abrahamic God for murder?  Where are the articles blaming Wagner for the Holocaust?  You won’t find them, because mainstream society is selective in which violent art is deemed a threat and which belongs in the highest echelons of sophisticated human expression.

When Lady Macbeth speaks of smashing baby brains, it’s tragic art.  When Brotha Lynch speaks of the same thing, he’s Charles Manson in the flesh.  It might be said a decapitated head in Shakespeare is art imitating life, but with gangsta rap music, the reverse is said to be the case.   South Chicago violence is caused by Chief Keef, not 500 years of economic oppression.  World War II is caused by the great depression, not Wagnerian opera.

So here I am faced with an opportunity to live out something I used to dream of doing and the cold hard reality that rap music isn’t given a fair shake in a society like ours, built on anti-Blackness and narratives about Black male pathology.

As a history teacher, I’m expected to inspire kids to be engaged citizens, and I took great pride in seeing three of my young Black male students perform a diss track they made against President Trump on the most bourgeoisie stage in the city, in front of the mayor no less.  A local newspaper even covered the story, which has put wind into the sails of these boys who don’t necessarily have many sources of moving air steering them forward in life.   Many of my colleagues have expressed their support for that project.

At the same time, I feel the potential for another narrative to rise from my identity as a history teacher who also deals in hip hop.   Imagine one of the boys who performed that Trump diss ended up in a gang.  Or getting caught bringing narcotics or weapons to school.  Or robbing a store.  Or killing someone.

In this scenario, nobody would look to see if he’d been studying Macbeth in English class, or any other literature with violent themes for that matter.  But imagine if I had slipped them a copy of the Autobiography of Malcolm X. Now imagine I’d given them an N.W.A. CD.

A Brotha Lynch CD.

Lynch pushes the boundaries of what rap can be, and therefore what art can be, by exploring the limits of human depravity in shockingly gruesome detail.  But it’s all work of fiction, unlike Trump’s pussy grabbing or Obama’s drone strikes or Clinton’s three strike rule.

Far from being a mere shock factor novelty, Lynch finesses language with the best of them, with intricate wordplay and captivating song narratives.  He surely inspired another technically gifted emcee who went on to bring horrorcore to the masses, under the Ted Bundy guise of a handsome, charismatic white guy.

Of course I would never give my students a copy of anything Lynch ever made, but any association I might have with the man could potentially be used as leverage in a case against me as a teacher.  Because I teach from a Howard Zinnian approach to history, I’m already likely putting targets on my forehead from reactionary forces who listen to Donald Trump Jr. when he tells them public school teachers are losers trying to indoctrinate kids into socialism.

Give them a recording of me teaching students the United States is chock full of racist/imperialist fuckery and they could have it on Breitbart the next day.  I don’t mince words when I teach the history of race and racism.  Because of that, I must be wise in the way I present myself outside of class, especially with hip hop music.

I already erased my SoundCloud after some of my students found it and started spreading it around.  At age 22, I wasn’t writing the most school appropriate lyrics, and I love my job too much to risk anything.

I’ll continue making hip hop music, but I’m too aware of the double standards in society to closely associate myself with horrorcore rap music.  A hundred years ago, it was jazz.  Then Rock and Roll.  Now it’s hip hop music that’s terrorizing our society, and I have to navigate the waters as they come, not as I wish they could be.

In 50 years, rich white folks will be hanging out in art galleries, drinking wine and eating cheese, with Wu Tang playing in the background.

For now, I’ll have to sacrifice one dream in order to continue living another, which is to teach history the right way and plant seeds of critical thinking that hopefully sprout in ways that will benefit society in the future.

I must always be wary of the fact that others might not see these seeds for what they are, and might even view them as poison, and we all know what Socrates was made to do for corrupting the youth of Athens by teaching them the truth.   I seek no hemlock at this stage in life, thank you very much.

 

“Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me” is one of the most dangerous, destructive ideas in all of human history.

Words are symbols, as are flags, songs, and gestures. And I’d be willing to bet 99% of the people who still preach the gospel “words can never hurt” are the same folks who get in their feelings over quarterbacks standing or kneeling before the flag or the cross.

Words, images, and gestures can and do hurt people.  All of us.  This fact is so obvious we can hold it to be self evident, an axiomatic truth not worth a second of breath more, and yet somehow we still desperately need to have this discussion as a society:

Everyone can be hurt by symbols.

But since symbols are more subjective than, say, the much more conspicuous and universally recognized pain that comes from a broken bone, it becomes all too easy to scoff at people who tell you which symbols are hurting them when those same symbols don’t hurt you, and this is the sort of problem that can lead to unnecessary human suffering all the way to full on genocide.

Humans need to teach and learn empathy.

People with congenital analgesia, who can’t feel physical pain, can still take it on the advice of others that a flame to the skin feels astonishingly painful.  If we tell them knives stuck into our backs hurt us and cause harm, we can expect them to believe us.

Similarly, we can take other people’s word for it when they tell us things are hurting them, even when those things don’t hurt us the same way.

Even the act of silence, a lack of words, perhaps the most stealthy symbol of all, can be experienced as a jolt of physical pain.  Anyone who has ever been ignored by a person or group of people you wanted to be close to knows the feeling.  Even the most popular people have experienced some sort of social rejection in their lives.

Ostracism, the social kiss of death, is experienced like a kick to the gut at the physical level.  That’s because as hunter gatherers, which homosapiens evolved into over millions of years, ostracism from the tribe meant you literally are being left to die.  In the woods.  Or the tundra.  Or the savanna.  Left to die.  Alone.

That sort of silence can send shocks of real pain through the nervous system – the silent treatment, as we euphemistically say.  This reaction is hardwired into our brains, a vestigial operating system that we can’t shake no matter how hard we try.  As social creatures, even those of us introverts who choose to live solitary lives still experience the need to be invited to the party we didn’t want to go to in the first place.

Silence and ostracism are the stealthiest of painful symbols because it’s not about what’s said, but rather what’s left unsaid, that hurts so badly.

Which leads us to the least stealthy, most notoriously hurtful symbol in modern history – the swastika.  No other symbol seems to wield the same power to invoke negative feelings, ranging from mild discomfort to full on panic attack (or, if you’re a piece of shit, blue balls from a fascistic hard on).

You know what a swastika is and what it means to you, in the space and time you inhabit.  However, being an ancient symbol that existed thousands of years before Heinrich Himmler was a glare in his father’s eyes, its meaning can be subjective, dependant upon who you ask, and when and where you ask them.

If you asked a Boy Scout at the first ever national jamboree, held in 1937 Washington D.C. and attended by FDR himself, what the swastika on his tent meant, he would likely tell you it was an ancient symbol that symbolized well being and good fortune.  He wouldn’t have been wrong, although if you tried to explain the concept of cultural appropriation to him, he likely would have called the cops on you.  The swastika was, after all, official Scout shit.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Imagine seeing that logo slapped onto the packaging of thin mint Girl Scout cookies.

The reason it was used so loosely is because it’s been used in ancient cultures around the world for thousands of years, and the general meaning was universally positive.

In Asia, it was part of several religious traditions dating back to antiquity, including  Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism.  The word itself derives from Sanskrit स्वस्तिक, which translates to ‘conducive to well-being.’

 

 

 

 

Nobody knows precisely where and when it was originally created, but what is absolutely certain is that it spread across the globe and has been unearthed in archeological sites around the world, including in the Americas.

In the 19th century, white settler colonialists in Ohio plowed over and permanently destroyed one of the most significant archeological sites in North America, the Hopewell Mound near present day Columbus.  They also unearthed copper swastikas under them dating back roughly two thousand years.  The people who created them had vast trade networks all the way down to the Yucatan, where they traded for highly prized obsidian blades.  Further west on the continent, the swastika appeared in Hopi legends and on Navajo rugs.

There are many theories about how the swastika originally came into use, ranging from the ludicrous idea that it represented Atlantis survivors breaking up and spreading to the four corners of the earth, to the much more plausible idea that it represents the sun and four seasons, or Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) circling Polaris (the North Star).

If we traveled to an early Mesopotamian city and asked a Shaman what the swastika means, he would probably tell us something about the stars and the sacred cycles of life, although this is merely educated speculation.

Despite being ubiquitous, the swastika’s meanings and origins seem to have been been largely lost on Western culture for quite some time.

In 1907, popular writer and white supremacist Rudyard Kipling won the Nobel prize for literature.  Having grown up in India, he used the swastika as a sort of branding for all his books.  Surely people saw the symbols, but likely had no idea what they were.

Also in 1907, Mary Ogden Vaughan wrote a piece for the San Francisco Caller titled The ‘Swastika: The Most Widely Diffused Symbol in the World,’ in which she stated:

“In view of the widespread interest shown during the last few years in that oldest of all known symbols, the swastika, it is somewhat astonishing to learn that its very name was so comparatively unknown a little over a decade ago that it did not appear in Webster’s or Worcester’s dictionaries, in the Encyclopedia Britannica or in a dozen other standard works of reference by English and American authors.

Neither was it in works on art, archaeology, mythology, folklore and antiquities, where the student might naturally expect to find allusions to it.

And yet the symbol itself is found wherever the foot of man has trod, throughout the civilized and uncivilized world. Generally speaking, there is no nation and no tribe in the world around which has not made use of the swastika at some period of its history since the recorded beginnings of time–be those records in stone or clay, in base or precious metals, in pigment, papyrus or parchment, woven in tapestries or wrought in basketry.

The swastika is at the same time the oldest and the most widely diffused symbol in the world, and an interest in it once awakened one need never lack a fascinating object of study and pursuit. As a hobby one may ride it to the ends of the earth and back again without exhausting it, and a catalogue of the places visited on the way would be a geography of the earth’s surface.”

Ogden Vaughan’s words read cryptically today, like foreshadowing in a grisly true crime novel.

Near the end of the article, she writes:

“A few years ago I mentioned the swastika to an American dealer in oriental wares–a student and a man of education–and, to my greatest surprise, he confessed that he had never heard the word and did not know the sign. In a few moments I had pointed it out to him on a dozen different articles on his shelves, and thus there was opened to him a new field for research: a field in which he tells me he has since delved with the greatest zest.”

Implied in her framework is the notion that something acted as a catalyst for this new awareness of and appreciation for the swastika.

Enter Heinrich Schliemann, German con man and archeologist who successfully sold himself as the man who had finally uncovered the legendary city Troy, of Homer’s Iliad fame.  Although the guy was a real piece of shit, I’ll refrain from unloading a fuselage of bullets into his character here, for the purpose of brevity.  What’s important is that in 1872 he found what he claimed was Troy, people believed him, and under that top layer of earth in a remote spot in Greece, he found ancient terracotta swastikas.

 

 

 

Schliemann’s Discovery found its way into the hearts and minds of white folks across the globe, giving us an origin story as ancient as the Hindus, the Zoroastrians, and to some, connected to them as well.

Certain European thinkers began linking modern Germany to ancient India, with ancient Persia, Greece, and Rome as the middlemen, and thus was born the concept of an ancient Aryan race.  Because there are linguistic connections between ancient Sanskrit and modern European languages, the swastikas found buried in Greece gave these thinkers a symbolic representation of this connection.  They took it and ran with it.

Proto-Nazis in the 19th century German ‘volkisch movement’ used the swastika in their pagan festivals, which gave way to full blown Nazis in the 20th century, who used the swastika as their calling card, the symbol of all symbols, which to them stood for the very future of humanity and civilization itself.

If you took the boyscout in 1937 Washington D.C. and sat him next to a German Youth that same year, they would disagree about the meaning of the same symbol.  The Nazi boy would argue the swastika symbolizes the great Aryan race, the master race, which stretches through recorded history going back through ancient Rome and Greece, all the way back to the Aryans of ancient India, each group carrying the torch of  civilization itself.

He’d say the Nazis were simply carrying the ancient torch into a new and better future, and if that meant they needed ‘lebensraum’ (living space) in the Studentenland, then who was the little American boy to tell him otherwise?  He was, after all, living on space his white ancestors had taken from Indigenous people at gunpoint.  The entire concept of lebensraum was largely conceived from Hitler’s study of American history.

The American scout would have had little ground on which to stand, morally.

 

 

 

The Nazis put a lot of money and energy into their racist pseudoscience

They sent so-called scientists into the field to study humans beings and separate them into separate racial categories, similar to how we separate species of animals.

When Dr. Eva Justin was working on her thesis for her PHD, she was able to keep some Romani children from being deported while she studied them. She made sure to measure their skulls and their teeth and all that good scientific stuff, and when she was done with her research they were shipped off to Auschwitz where Dr. Mengle had his way with them.

Part of the methodology involved making plaster casts of human heads and teaching ‘racial hygiene’ in schools, precursors with direct links to the horrors of the Holocaust.

 

 

 

The Nazi machine even sent representatives to Tibet on a pseudoscientific expedition to find links to the Aryan race in the mountains.

And of course, they needed more measurements.

If you asked these doctors what the swastika meant to them, they might have said knowledge, efficiency, the glory of career exploits that further our knowledge of the world we inhabit.

These people were true believers, and the same cold, bureaucratic approach they took with their line of work here was amplified exponentially through the millions of Europeans who bought what the fascists were selling, loyal customers of the Nazi brand, whose logo was the swastika.

And we all know how this brand did its business.

If we asked the Nazi company CEO what the swastika symbolized, he would have likely said the same things as the Hitler Youth.  Nationalistic drivel for the media to spit back into the frothing fascist masses.

But in practice, the swastika symbolized Hitler himself wherever he couldn’t be in the Third Reich.  The ubermensch savior of all things holy to the Aryan race, the first heart throb, before Elvis, The Beatles, Justin Bieber, the man who could step onto a stage at any given moment and mesmerize the crowd into rabid, raving superfans, the CEO and rockstar and god of the future of civilization.  Omnipotent.  Omnipresent.

 

 

 

What does the swastika mean to a Jewish person in the year 1900?  In 1940?  In 2020?

What does it mean to a Romani person, or a Slavic person, or an autistic person, or for that matter anyone with any sort of special needs in any of those three years? The symbol presided over mass murder and genocide of not only Jewish people, but any group or individual not approved of by the machine.

We now know Hans Asperger, even as he championed the cause of high functioning autistic people, also signed off on sending more severely autistic people to be exterminated.

The horrors wrought under the swastika escape the confines of language.

How could any of us who didn’t live through it ever understand what it meant to those who did?

Which leads is back to the original point about symbols.

The swastika did not physically jump off the page and commit genocide, any more than a green light physically put pressure on the gas of your Ford Taurus.

But Henry Ford did use symbols to promote anti-Semitism by physically printing copies of his racist newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, during the 1920s.  And he sure did push anti-Semitic conspiracy theories through that paper, which reached almost a million people every issue, because he made Ford dealers sell it and meet quotas for promotion within the company.  And Hitler sure did get inspired by Ford, so much so that he had a picture (read: symbol) of him at his work desk, and ultimately took the assembly line concept and applied it to the goal of genocide.

And the Nazis sure did give him their most prestigious award, the grand cross of the German eagle, and that cross sure is surrounded by swastikas.

 

None of these symbols literally killed people.

All of them contributed directly to the killing of people.

Charles Manson used his vocal chords to make sounds that other people heard and processed to mean specific ideas, and then they acted on those ideas.  Did he not murder anyone?  Is he not responsible for the murder of anyone?

It has been said there’s no evidence of Hitler ordering the specific murders of anyone, and this will be the first line the neo-Nazi speaks into the ear of the impressionable youths he seeks to recruit.  “Can you show me where he ordered anyone to murder a single Jew?? If you can, I’ll give you my car and my savings account,” or some such bullshit.

And this is precisely where the asshole needs to be chopped down:

If symbols don’t cause human actions, then why are you using them right now to try to get this kid to become a Nazi?

He won’t have an answer, of course.

Which brings us to the final point…

Like all symbols, the swastika means different things to different people, in different places and times.  So what *should* the swastika mean to us, today?

If you’re in Asia today and you see an ancient swastika, it means what it’s meant there for thousand of years. If  you’re in Germany today and you see one, it is likely evidence of a crime.  After the war, the German nation decided the symbol is so powerful that they outlawed it.

During the 1930s and 1940s, various groups in the United States and elsewhere decided to stop making new materials with swastikas on them, out of respect for the millions who were being persecuted and slaughtered.

The Boy and Girl Scouts of America discontinued its use.  Rudyard Kipling stopped printing them on his books – white supremacist though he was, he didn’t stoop to the level of genocidal maniac.

Even the Navajo stopped making blankets with the symbol on it, which they didn’t even call a swastika – they called it a whirling log.

With that said, should Native Americans have censored their art to this degree?

As a white person it’s not my place to say.

I will add that art can be powerful swinging in good and bad directions, and it is possible to use the swastika against itself.

Swastikas made for the purpose of promoting Nazism are immoral to create and use.  Swastikas made for jokes at the expense of anyone other than Nazis and other white supremacists are immoral.  The swastika is not a toy to play with.

Swastikas made during the Nazi era were made and used immorally, but they should not be destroyed.  To the contrary, they ought to be preserved with care, and kept in museums where they can be used as a case study in how low human behavior can go, so we can hopefully avoid a repeat of that history.

We must recognize that words, images, ideas, can and do hurt, even if we don’t experience the pain others tell us they feel from these symbols.  If people don’t want to look at Nazi swastikas, they shouldn’t have to.

Lastly, I’ll leave you with a photo of something I have mixed feelings about.  It’s an advertisement in a New York Subway for the television series ‘The Man in the High Castle’ which portrays a United States controlled by fascists in an alternate reality where the Nazis won the war.  The series is decidedly not pro-Nazi.

The advertisement utilizes Nazi iconography but avoids the swastika.

People spoke against it.

It was pulled.

Did this advertisement go too far?  A cheap marketing gimmick to get people talking about the show, at the expense of people who might not feel comfortable surrounded by it?

There are few clear answers with these things.  But hopefully after reading this little piece, you have more symbols about this symbol within your range of vision.