Moments In America’s Racist History.

Whether it is Critical Race the­o­ry today or pre­vent­ing Enslaved African People brought to the Americas in chains from learn­ing to read, the objec­tive has always been the same.
Look, Black peo­ple, your future rests with you and no one else; under­stand that they are try­ing to stop you from vot­ing because vot­ing is pow­er, a pow­er that was hard-earned but many of you who are cit­i­zens of this great coun­try fail to appreciate.
Whatever you are going to have or get will be giv­en to you by you .…… not by any­one else. There is no they.…. only you.
At the pin­na­cle of the Federal Judiciary sits a man who was vehe­ment­ly opposed to the idea of one man one vote as a young Reagan admin­is­tra­tion lawyer.
Today the John Roberts Supreme court has all but destroyed the 1965 Voting Rights Law set­ting in motion the slate of anti-vot­ing laws that have been tabled across the coun­try, par­tic­u­lar­ly in Republican Run states and in states in which they hold pow­er in the legislature.
There is no appeal­ing to this Supreme court for Justice with its 6 – 3 Republican major­i­ty. Truth be told, the Supreme court has nev­er been a friend of Black peo­ple. It thought Slavery was Constitutional. It thought that African peo­ple were ³⁄₅ human beings. It thought Segregation was constitutional.
The Klan does not need to wear sheets any­more; they are wear­ing black robes on high courts, pros­e­cu­tors’ suits, and stilet­to heels, and they are damn sure wear­ing police uniforms.

If you are opposed to crit­i­cal race the­o­ry, it is because you know that what you did was not just shame­ful; you know that it is rep­re­hen­si­ble. You know that it was heinous; you know that your actions were not only inhu­mane, you know they made you sub-human.
Modern-day Racist want to keep you from learn­ing the truth; Arkansas Tom cot­ton, the wannabe cau­casian US Senator from Texas-no, not the corny one, I am refer­ring to Raphael Cruz, and oth­ers want you to for­get because igno­rance is bliss for them.
They would love for you to shut up, and they use all kinds of means to try to shut you up. ‘shut up and drib­ble’ by threat­en­ing to pull fund­ing from the University Of North Carolina.
Big shout out to the bril­liant Nikole Hanna-Jones, for telling UNC where to stick their tenure.
They tried lynch­ings as a means of ter­ror, arson, intim­i­da­tion, and the omnipresent shame­ful and cow­ard­ly hid­ing behind badges as police officers.

Real badass!!!

Civil rights activist Gloria Richardson, whose fear­less­ness was famous­ly immor­tal­ized in a pho­to of her push­ing away a National Guardsman’s bay­o­net dur­ing a 1963 protest, has died at age 99.
Tya Young, her grand­daugh­ter, told the Associated Press that Richardson died in her sleep Thursday. She was one of the few women with lead­er­ship roles dur­ing the civ­il rights move­ment, and as The Root report­ed back in 2015, her actions con­tin­ue to inspire var­i­ous Black activists to this day.
Richardson was born in Baltimore. Her fam­i­ly lat­er moved to Cambridge, Md., when she was six. She attend­ed Howard University at 16 and grad­u­at­ed with a soci­ol­o­gy degree in 1942. In the ear­ly 1960s, Richardson joined the Student Nonviolent Coördinating Committee and lat­er worked with oth­er com­mu­ni­ty mem­bers to start the Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee in 1962.
This orga­ni­za­tion focused on pub­lic-hous­ing dis­crim­i­na­tion health care access.

“Cambridge was built on the SNCC mod­el,” Richardson says. “It may have been 400 – 500 peo­ple who helped with the movement.”
But CNAC did dif­fer from SNCC in one key area: “We weren’t non­vi­o­lent,” Richardson says. “White folks would come there shoot­ing at your hous­es, and peo­ple responded.”
As the black com­mu­ni­ty became more vocal in demand­ing equal rights, ten­sion began to esca­late. In June 1963, busi­ness­es went up in flames as both blacks and whites took up arms, Richardson says. “It was like a lit­tle war, real­ly,” she says. “In a cer­tain peri­od of time, it was almost every night.”

The National Guard was even­tu­al­ly called in as a result of the vio­lence. Richardson met with then‑U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy and oth­er lead­ers to bro­ker the “Treaty of Cambridge” in July 1963, which ordered equal access to pub­lic facil­i­ties in the city. Richardson signed it but nev­er agreed to end the protests in Cambridge. The treaty ulti­mate­ly failed after the local gov­ern­ment demand­ed that a local ref­er­en­dum pass it.
That same year, Richardson was also on stage at the March on Washington as one of six women list­ed on the pro­gram. She was not allowed to speak.
The pas­sage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 slowed down the Cambridge move­ments, and even­tu­al­ly, the National Guard left the city. Richardson resigned from the CNAC in 1964, mar­ried her sec­ond hus­band, and moved to New York City – where she con­tin­ued to work out of the spotlight.

Richardson’s grand­daugh­ter Young told the AP that she didn’t seek recog­ni­tion for her actions in Cambridge.
This sto­ry orig­i­nat­ed @ the root.

Among the most heart­break­ing exam­ples of struc­tur­al racism’s sub­tle effects are accounts shared by black chil­dren. In the late 1970s, when Lebert F. Lester II was 8 or 9 years old, he start­ed build­ing a sand­cas­tle dur­ing a trip to the Connecticut shore. A young white girl joined him but was quick­ly tak­en away by her father. Lester recalled the girl return­ing, only to ask him, “Why don’t [you] just go in the water and wash it off?” Lester says., “I was so con­fused — I only fig­ured out lat­er she meant my com­plex­ion.” Two decades ear­li­er, in 1957, 15-year-old Minnijean Brown had arrived at Little Rock Central High School with high hopes of “mak­ing friends, going to dances and singing in the cho­rus.” Instead, she and the rest of the Little Rock Nine—a group of black stu­dents select­ed to attend the for­mer­ly all-white acad­e­my after Brown v. Board of Education deseg­re­gat­ed pub­lic schools — were sub­ject­ed to dai­ly ver­bal and phys­i­cal assaults. Around the same time, pho­tog­ra­ph­er John G. Zimmerman cap­tured snap­shots of racial pol­i­tics in the South that includ­ed com­par­isons of black fam­i­lies wait­ing in long lines for polio inoc­u­la­tions as white chil­dren received speedy treat­ment. This infor­ma­tion orig­i­nat­ed from @the Smithsonian.

Over half a cen­tu­ry lat­er, not only has American Police con­tin­ued to be the sin­gle great­est organ of oppres­sion of African-Americans and Native peo­ple, but they are also worse than what they were then.
Today Police are mil­i­ta­rized, ful­ly out­fit­ted with the lat­est state-of-the-art weapons of sur­veil­lance and warfare.
It is instruc­tive to under­stand that police are local mili­tias that oper­ate out­side the bound­aries of the laws and, in worse cas­es, are a law unto themselves.
Despite their abil­i­ties to kill and com­mit all kinds of atroc­i­ties, cit­i­zens in the Black and Native American com­mu­ni­ties have no say in how their tax dol­lars are dis­persed to pay for these ele­ments of oppres­sion that oper­ate in their com­mu­ni­ties against them…

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Mike Beckles is a for­mer Police Detective, busi­ness­man, free­lance writer, black achiev­er hon­oree, and cre­ator of the blog mike​beck​les​.com.