News — african america

While Donald Trump continues to make baseless claims of vote fraud following the elections, his successor Joe Biden is already at work as he announces a new COVID-19 task force to assist in the battle against the pandemic that has claimed lives in the U.S.

Among those listed for the newly formed advisory board include Yale School of Medicine professor Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, who will be serving as co-chair. Nunez-Smith, an associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management, will help lead the new administration’s fight against the coronavirus, the Biden transition team said.

“Dealing with the coronavirus pandemic is one of the most important battles our administration will face, and I will be informed by science and by experts,” Biden wrote in a statement. “The advisory board will help shape my approach to managing the surge in reported infections; ensuring vaccines are safe, effective, and distributed efficiently, equitably, and free; and protecting at-risk populations.”

With over 236,000 Americans losing their lives due to COVID-19 nationwide, and cases rising in more than 40 states, President-elect Biden recently said he will “spare no effort” in tackling the virus.

“Folks, our work begins with getting COVID under control. We cannot repair the economy, restore our vitality, or relish life’s most precious moments … all the moments that matter most to us, until we get it under control,” he said during his victory speech on Saturday.

Data show that Black and brown people, known as marginalized populations, continue to be disproportionately affected by the coronavirus, hence tapping a Black woman with skills in that field is ideal, analysts say.

According to her bio by Yale News, Nunez-Smith, the director of Yale’s Center for Community Engagement and Health Equity, the founding director of the Equity Research and Innovation Center, and the medical school’s associate dean for health equity research, studies disparities in healthcare access.

“She was one of the original Clinical and Translational Science Award scholars at the Yale Center for Clinical Investigations, and is now one of the program’s deputy directors,” according to the bio. It adds that she has also chaired the community sub-committee for Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont’s Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group, focusing on communities and groups most at risk for severe COVID-19.

The Yale School of Medicine professor, a native of the U.S. Virgin Islands, now joins 12 other people on Biden’s task force. Her fellow co-chairs are former FDA commissioner Dr. David Kessler, who is also a professor of pediatrics and epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco; and Dr. Vivek Murthy, the former Surgeon General under President Barack Obama who was instrumental in the fight against Ebola, Zika and the Flint water crisis.

Nunez-Smith, who has supported several chronic disease research projects in certain regions in the Caribbean, had already been advising the Biden campaign on the pandemic.

“Our country is facing an unprecedented time with COVID-19 cases accelerating nationwide,” Nunez-Smith was quoted by Yale News. “Everyone is affected by this pandemic, yet the burden is disproportionate. We know communities of color are grieving at high rates and are facing substantial economic impact. The transition advisory board is setting a course for everyone in our country to experience recovery. I’m honored to help lead on that work and thank President-elect Joe Biden for the opportunity to serve.”

There are two other Black people on the task force: Dr. Eric Goosby, an infectious disease expert and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and Loyce Pace, the executive director and president of the Global Health Council.

Over 100 million Americans had already voted before Tuesday, November 3 in what is expected to be on the record, the biggest number ever of Americans who have participated in an election.

In 2016, a record of 137.5 million Americans voted in the election that was won by incumbent President Donald Trump. Observers say that number will be broken this year by the time polls close nationwide on Tuesday.

Trump is seeking reelection for another four years after his surprise win against the former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton. But the president faces an uphill task in 2020 especially due to the challenges of managing the coronavirus pandemic as well as his conduct and scandals that have hit the administration.

The former vice-president and Democratic candidate, Joe Biden, has been favored in recent polls to win in certain battleground states including Pennsylvania, Michigan and Arizona. A Quinnipiac survey, released 24 hours to the election, even has Biden leading in Florida and Ohio, two states that were won by Trump in 2016.

Both Trump and Biden are desperately seeking support from racial minorities who historically vote Democrat. On Monday, Trump even took to Twitter to plead to America’s Hispanic populace in Spanish.

African-Americans, a key voting block that came out at a rate of 56.9% according to a Pew research in 2017, are expected to increase that percentage point in 2020.

Malawi says it will open an embassy in Jerusalem, the controversial capital of Israel, in the summer of 2021. This was made known by the country’s foreign minister, Eisenhower Mkaka, who is on a three-day trip to the Jewish state.

“Mkaka reiterated the intent of the Republic of Malawi to open a fully-fledged Embassy in Jerusalem,” according to an official joint statement signed by the visiting Malawian minister and his counterpart, Gabi Ashkenazi. In return, the statement added, Israel agreed to increase bilateral cooperation in the fields of agriculture, tourism, investment technology, education and trade.

Malawi’s President Lazarus Chakwera first announced his intention to open an embassy in Jerusalem in September. The move, if seen through, will make Malawi the first African country to currently have a diplomatic mission in the new Jewish capital. A number of African countries, including Kenya, Ivory Coast, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, once had embassies in Jerusalem, but they were closed following the 1973 Yom Kippur War.

Chakwera, an Evangelical, said his country was undertaking several diplomatic reforms, including the upgrading of the country’s Foreign Ministries and its embassies worldwide.

“The reforms will also include a review of our diplomatic presence, including our resolve to have new diplomatic missions in Lagos, Nigeria and Jerusalem, Israel,” he said, according to the Times of Israel. “I will be sharing more details about this in the near future.”

Chakwera’s decision to open an embassy in Jerusalem has incurred the wrath of the Palestinian authorities. Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, on Wednesday sent a letter of protest through a special envoy to the Malawian leader over the embassy move, according to Anadolu Agency.

Palestinians want East Jerusalem, seized in a 1967 Middle East war, as part of a future state while Israel considers the Holy City its eternal capital.

“Any step taken to establish a diplomatic mission in Jerusalem constitutes a violation of relevant United Nations resolutions,” the special envoy, Hanan Jarrar said. According to him, the UN Security Council Resolution 476 (1980) recently reaffirmed by Resolution 2334 (2016) does not recognize any action that seeks to alter the character and status of Jerusalem. 

“Under international law, East Jerusalem [including the Old City and its holy sites] are not legally part of Israel,” he said, adding that: “Since Israel’s establishment in 1948, the US and the international community have refused to recognize the sovereignty of any country to any part of Jerusalem in the absence of a permanent Arab-Israeli peace agreement.”

Also, the country’s opposition MPs have criticized the move but Chakwera insists establishing diplomatic ties with Israel was nothing new in Malawi. Currently, the 21-million majority Christian nation has no diplomatic mission in Israel. Meanwhile, Israel’s non-resident ambassador to Malawi is resident in Nairobi, Kenya. 

Another African country that has given a hint of opening an embassy in Jerusalem is Uganda. In February, President Yoweri Museveni told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would look into the possibility of opening an embassy in Jerusalem.

This was after Netanyahu suggested that Israel would open an embassy in Kampala if Uganda were to open an embassy in Jerusalem.

U.S. President Donald Trump in 2017 became the first world leader to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and relocated the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv there. Since then, Israel has taken steps to normalize relations with Muslim nations across the world.

Joe Biden has urged Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari and the Nigerian military to “cease the violent crackdown on protesters” in the country amid weeks of peaceful nationwide protests against police brutality.

The Democratic presidential nominee called on the U.S. to stand with Nigerians who have for the past two weeks led peaceful demonstrations to protest against a police unit, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), which has long been accused of having a reputation of abuse that includes extortion, rape, torture and extrajudicial killings, according to Amnesty International. 

Recent protests against SARS emerged after a video circulated online earlier this month allegedly showing officers of the unit shooting a man in the country’s southern Delta state, Reuters reported. Police have reportedly denied the shooting. The hashtag #EndSARS began trending internationally on Twitter this week in support of the movement to end police brutality. 

“The United States must stand with Nigerians who are peacefully demonstrating for police reform and seeking an end to corruption in their democracy,” Biden said in his statement. “I encourage the government to engage in a good-faith dialogue with civil society to address these long-standing grievances and work together for a more just and inclusive Nigeria.”

Last week, Buhari announced the government’s decision to disband SARS among other promises of police reforms, in response to widespread protests led by Nigerians in the nation and Nigerian diaspora communities across the world.

The move was met with skepticism, though, since the government has made promises to reform the unit a number of times in previous years to no avail. Furthermore, Nigerian citizens feared that SARS officers would be redeployed to other units.

On Tuesday night, after Governor of Lagos State Babajide Sanwo-Olu had imposed a 24-hour curfew which began at 4 p.m. local time, witnesses at a demonstration reported seeing shots fired at the Lekki Toll Gate located in Lagos, Nigeria. Protesters accused soldiers of the Nigerian army of firing into the crowd.

Piotr Cywinski, director of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, has written to the president of Nigeria requesting the pardon of a 13-year-old boy sentenced to 10 years in prison for blasphemy, Cywinski has tweeted.

"As the director of the Auschwitz Memorial, that commemorates the victims and preserves the remains of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where children were imprisoned and murdered, I cannot remain indifferent to this disgraceful sentence for humanity," Cywinski wrote in the letter dated September 25.

A copy of the letter to Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari in the matter of 13-year-old Omar Farouk was posted on the Auschwitz museum's Twitter account. In it, the museum director declared he was willing to serve part of the boy's sentence. "(...) if it turns out that the words of this child absolutely require 120 months of imprisonment, and even you are not able to change that, I suggest that in place of the child, 120 adult volunteers from all over the world, gathered by us - myself personally among them - should each serve a month in a Nigerian prison," he wrote.

Cywinski wrote that the boy "Should not be subjected to the loss of the entirety of his youth, be deprived of opportunities, and stigmatized physically, emotionally, and educationally for the rest of his life," arguing that Farouk was too young to be held responsible for his words.

The 13-year-old was sentenced to 10 years in prison with forced hard labour because during a fight with a classmate at school he used words considered blasphemy in reference to Allah. In 12 Nigerian states, mostly in the north of the country where sharia law is in force, blasphemy can be punished with the death sentence, despite the Nigerian government declaring a withdrawal from the punishment four years ago.

Farouk's case has drawn protests globally. On September 16, UNICEF's representative in Nigeria, Peter Hawkins, filed an official protest with the country's president, pointing out that Nigeria was a signatory to chid rights treaties that were breached by the sentence. 

Like most kids around the world last spring, João Pedro Mattos Pinto found himself on lockdown because of the raging coronavirus. Unable to go to school on May 18, the 14-year-old Black Brazilian joined his cousins at their house in a favela outside of Rio de Janeiro. When gunfire erupted in the neighborhood, he sent his mother a WhatsApp message: “I’m inside the house. Don’t worry.”

Suddenly, 10 police officers burst into the house, searching for a purported drug trafficker and firing off more than 70 shots. João Pedro was hit in the back. His relatives bundled the bleeding boy into a police helicopter, and he was airlifted away. The police barred family members from accompanying the minor and refused to provide the family with any more information. Police arrested no one in the operation.

João Pedro’s cousin, Daniel, put out a desperate message on Twitter, begging people for help locating him. The #procurasejoaopedro (find João Pedro) hashtag trended on Brazilian Twitter overnight. While more than 1,400 young Black men are killed by police every year in Rio, João Pedro’s disappearance grabbed the headlines. It took his family 17 hours to locate his body in a public morgue.

That was seven days before the world would see the haunting video of a Minneapolis police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd; before Black Lives Matter uprisings erupted across the United States, spreading quickly around the world. These two events helped to spark #VidasNegrasImportam (#BlackLivesMatter in Portuguese) protests in Rio de Janeiro and across Brazil, the South American country with the largest population of Black people outside Africa, just ahead of the United States. And in an ironic confluence of events—Joao Pedro’s death combined with the coronavirus—police in Rio were forced to stop almost all operations, at least temporarily, leading to a stark decline in fatal police encounters.

In a world without coronavirus, João Pedro’s death wouldn’t have trended on Twitter, nor would it have been front-page news. But the pandemic and subsequent protests forced Brazilians to focus on anti-Black police violence, which they had long ignored or normalized. Rio activists and lawyers, who had been working against such violence for years, filed an emergency petition asking Brazil’s Supreme Court to stop police operations during the pandemic. And one Supreme Court justice temporarily ruled in favor—with startling results.

One month after Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin’s June 5 order barring police operations in Rio—except in extreme circumstances—killings by police had dropped 70% compared to the previous 12 years. A study revealed that the suspension of police operations in Rio’s favelas could save more than 400 lives this year alone.

On August 3, a majority of justices on Brazil’s Supreme Court voted to uphold Fachin’s temporary ban on police operations in Rio—a decision that could have broader implications for addressing police violence across the country. The Supreme Court must still determine whether Rio’s state security policing needs to be aligned with national and international human rights standards.

“It is possible that if COVID hadn’t happened, we would not have had a [judicial] decision like we had,” said Wallace Corbo, a lawyer who works pro bono on behalf of the Educafro, an education and social justice nonprofit in Brazil. He started working on the Supreme Court case to stop Rio police operations last year.

“COVID and João Pedro changed everything,” Corbo explained.

The COVID-19 pandemic further unmasked the extent of racial inequities. Although it was the White and wealthy who brought the coronavirus to Brazil from their European holidays, the workers who live in favelas and periphery communities—the Black and poor—were dying at the highest rates. A recent study revealed that 80% of Rio’s coronavirus deaths were registered in the city’s most impoverished areas. And the hardest hit demographic group is older, Black, impoverished men. As of August 27, the country of more than 211 million people had registered more than 117,000 coronavirus deaths.

In many ways, Brazil has emerged as an almost mirror image of the United States, even down to the racial uprising that resulted from a police killing. It is second only to the United States in the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus. And like U.S. President Donald Trump, Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro downplayed the virus from the beginning of the pandemic, calling it a “little flu.” Between March and May, two health ministers resigned; their posts remain vacant. The country has yet to implement a national coronavirus plan.

Such lack of coordination and planning leaves favela activists such as Fernanda Viana Araujo, 40, scrambling to provide food and other basic necessities to people quarantined in tight quarters in these neighborhoods. Mothers who supported their families as domestic servants had to stay home. Fathers who earned a living as parking lot attendants had no work. Grocery store attendants continued to work, potentially exposing their families to the virus.

Araujo said her focus recently has shifted to providing COVID-19 testing to residents of Maré, a favela with the highest number of both COVID cases and deaths overall in Rio.

“We normally focus on building our community through culture, art, public policy, and education,” said Araujo, who works with the nonprofit Rede da Maré, which is in the Maré favela. “But we realized we needed to do something to help our people stay alive. And that means giving them food for their table.”

Governor Kay Ivey Ivey offered a "sincere, heartfelt apology" for the "racist, segregationist rhetoric used by some of our leaders during that time." Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey apologized to Sarah Collins Rudolph, a survivor of a Ku Klux Klan bombing that left her severely injured and killed four Black girls, including her sister, in 1963.

In a letter sent to Collins Rudolph's lawyers, Ivey offered a "sincere, heartfelt apology" for the "racist, segregationist rhetoric used by some of our leaders during that time."

Ivey said there should be no question that Collins Rudolph, who was 12 when Klan members bombed 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham 57 years ago, and the four other girls "suffered an egregious injustice that has yielded untold pain and suffering over the ensuing decades."

Lawyers for Collins Rudolph had said in a letter to Ivey this month that, while hard-line segregationist officials like Gov. George Wallace didn't place the bomb next to the building, they played an "undisputed role in encouraging its citizens to engage in racial violence."

Collins Rudolph lost her right eye in the bombing. Glass fragments remained in her left eye, her abdomen and her chest for years after, according to The Associated Press.

Her sister, Addie Mae Collins, 14, was killed. So were Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, also 14, and Denise McNair, 11.

"She has born the burdens of the bombing for virtually her entire life, and we believe her story presents an especially meritorious and unique opportunity for the State of Alabama to right the wrongs that its past leaders encouraged and incited," the letter to Ivey said.

The lawyers, who are from the Washington, D.C., firm Jenner & Block and are representing Collins Rudolph pro bono, had asked for an official apology as well as compensation.

Ivey's letter doesn't specifically address compensation, noting that the Legislature would have to be involved, and it says "other questions" raised by the lawyers will need to be reviewed.

"It would seem to me that beginning these conversations — without prejudice for what any final outcome might produce but with a goal of finding mutual accord — would be a natural extension of my administration's ongoing efforts to foster fruitful conversations" about race, Ivey said.

Rudolph Collins' lawyers, Ishan Bhabha and Alison Stein, said in a statement that they were "gratified" by the apology and that they looked forward to future talks about compensation.

Miracle J. Reese is the founder of one of very few Black-owned tea companies based in Birmingham, Ala. Her company, TasTea Wellness Blends (pronounced “taste tea”), is a premium loose-leaf tea company. Made of natural herbs and fruits, her blends are handcrafted with wellness in mind.

TasTea’s four flavor blends each have unique recipes to create a positive tea experience. Customers get to choose their mood while enjoying drinkable wellness. Miracle says her goal is to bring enjoyable solutions to health that are delicious. Her wellness teas deliver a clean and travel-friendly tea experience nationally with great tea benefits including skin rejuvenation, immunity boost and health.

The celebrity news website and its wildly popular Instagram page (currently at over 20 million followers and counting) have, since its founding by Nigerian American entrepreneur Angelica Nwandu in 2014, become an institution in the world of Black gossip. It is a part of the Black lexicon and the Black zeitgeist, mentioned in rap songs and TV shows. With a hodgepodge of posts including celebrity news, memes, politics, and inspirational messages, The Shade Room has cemented itself as a constantly evolving archive of Black pop culture.  

That’s what makes The Shade Room so intensely intriguing and addictive. It is relentless with content generation, adept at locking onto stories as they develop (a running joke is that The Shade Room seems to repost celebrity Instagram posts before the celebrities have even posted them). And it is powerful enough to not only follow the gossip but also to become the catalyst for it. On any given day, you’ll see Black celebrities, influencers, and reality television stars like Teyana Taylor, B. Simone, and Nene Leakes “step into The Shade Room” to refute, clap back or cut up in the comments with thousands of other followers. These comments from celebs usually get screencapped and made into their own posts, forming a never-ending, self-referential loop of tea. 

In a March 2019 profile for Marie Claire, Nwandu contended that she doesn’t think of The Shade Room as purely a gossip site but more of a cultural archive. “I think our site is about the culture,” she said, “All the things that make black culture beautiful.” To some extent, Nwandu is correct in that The Shade Room does provide a kind of snapshot of Blackness that, while not definitive, is most definitely key. But with the beauty, obviously, comes some of the ugliness.  

When rapper Tory Lanez released a 17-song album with several songs largely refuting accusations around him shooting Megan Thee Stallion this summer, The Shade Room made dozens of posts platforming and breaking down each song, line for line. In the comments on these posts, there were those who came to Megan’s defense, but there were also those who eagerly took the opportunity to bash her, question her and praise Lanez for sharing his “side of the story.”

There have, apparently, been efforts made to mitigate and challenge some of the rhetoric in the comments section in response to these kinds of stories, with Nwandu telling Marie Claire that around 2015 she and her team decided to create a more balanced, positive atmosphere on the site and on Instagram. “There was a time when I would go on the Shade Room and I would just feel, like, ugh. I remember thinking, If I feel like this, what am I putting out to the people who are reading this? They may be feeling like this too if they come on here every day and consume what we’re giving.”

So, it seems as if there is an awareness. But what else is being done? What else should be done when it comes to this kind of content? The potential for breeding toxicity is not isolated to The Shade Room, of course. It is a problem that comes up constantly in the world of gossip, especially internet gossip, on sites and Instagram pages like Baller Alert, Bossip, and World Star Hip Hop. And it’s definitely not just a Black gossip thing either.

In 1887, African-American cane workers in Louisiana attempted to organize—and many paid with their lives

On November 23, 1887, a mass shooting of African-American farm workers in Louisiana left some 60 dead. Bodies were dumped in unmarked graves while the white press cheered a victory against a fledgling black union. It was one of the bloodiest days in United States labor history, and while statues went up and public places were named for some of those involved, there is no marker of the Thibodaux Massacre.

Days after, a local planter widow Mary Pugh wrote, “I think this will settle the question of who is to rule the nigger or the white man for the next fifty years.” It was a far-sighted comment— black farm workers in the South wouldn’t have the opportunity to unionize for generations.

Years after the Thirteenth Amendment brought freedom, cane cutters’ working lives were already “barely distinguishable” from slavery, argues journalist and author John DeSantis. (His book, The Thibodaux Massacre: Racial Violence and the 1887 Sugar Cane Labor Strike, is an excellent and compelling account of the massacre.) With no land to own or rent, workers and their families lived in old slave cabins. They toiled in gangs, just like their ancestors had for nearly a century. Growers gave workers meals but paid famine wages of as little as 42 cents a day (91 cents per hour in today’s money, for a 12-hour shift).

Instead of cash, workers got scrip that bought basics at high prices at plantation stores.

But they had advantages that their counterparts in cotton areas lacked. Planters needed their labor, and growers living on thin margins failed to attract migrant laborers to replace local workers, especially in the crucial rolling season when the sugarcane needed to be cut and pressed in short order.

In the sugar parishes arcing through the southern part of the state from Berwick Bay to the Mississippi River, African-American men voted. The Republican Party, which supported black civil rights, was stronger in sugar country than anywhere else in the state. By the late 1860s, African-Americans became legislators or sheriffs, and black volunteer militias drilled, despite living and working conditions still bearing the marks of slavery.

In 1874, nine years after slavery ended in the United States, cane cutters demanded a second emancipation. They wanted a living wage, or at least the chance to rent on shares. Planters wanted to cut wages after the lean harvest of 1873-74 coincided with an economic recession, and while Louisiana growers produced 95 percent of the nation’s domestic sugar and molasses, they were losing market share to cheaper foreign sugars.

Sensing they were in a strong bargaining position, workers banded together in several sugar parishes, including St. Mary, Iberia, Terrebonne, and Lafourche, demanding cash wages of $1.25 per day, or $1.00 if meals were included.

But the growers refused, upset that African-American workers were demanding an end to their paternalistic work regime. So African-American leaders like Hamp Keys, a former Terrebonne Parish legislator, called a strike.

Keys led a march from Houma to Southdown Plantation in Terrebonne, rallying workers with a fiery speech. The sight of black protesters riled growers, and acting with their interests in mind, the parish’s African-American sheriff formed a posse of whites to face down strikers. Surprised at the opposition, Keys’s marchers retreated.

In the state capital of New Orleans (relocated to Baton Rouge in 1882), Republican Governor William Pitt Kellogg also backed growers. But he was under siege from the Louisiana White League, a paramilitary white supremacist group formed in 1874 to intimidate Republicans and keep African-Americans from voting. Despite Kellogg’s being a pro-growth moderate who favored low taxes, White Leaguers tried to oust him in a violent coup. The Battle of Liberty Place, as it was called, pitted white militiamen against federal troops and metropolitan police. Governor Kellogg was temporarily forced out of New Orleans. He returned under guard but would be Louisiana’s last Republican governor for more than 100 years.

America was retreating from Republican-led Reconstruction and abandoning civil rights. African-Americans in sugar regions kept the right to vote, but their influence in state elections was waning. As W. E. B. Du Bois put it in Black Reconstruction in America, “The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again into slavery.”

Sugar workers attempted another strike in 1880, and both growers and workers resorted to sporadic violence. But time was on the growers’ side. African-Americans were being disarmed and thrown out of office, and some were leased out to hard labor for petty and trumped-up crimes. With few options available by 1887, Terrebonne sugar workers reached out to the Knights of Labor.

The Knights was the biggest and most powerful union in America. It began organizing African-American workers in 1883 in separate locals (a local is a bargaining unit of a broader union). Despite segregation, the Knights organized women and farm workers. And it made strides against Jim Crow. At the Knights’ 1886 national convention in Richmond, Virginia, leaders risked violence by insisting that a black delegate introduce Virginia’s segregationist governor.

Across the states of the former Confederacy, whites viewed organized labor as agitation that threatened the emerging Jim Crow order. Even in the North and Midwest, the Knights fought an uphill battle against authorities who sided with railroad and mine owners. Several states called out militias to break strikes during the late nineteenth century, but the Knights was at its peak of popularity in the 1880s.

In Louisiana, the Knights organized sugar workers into seven locals of 100 to 150 members each. Hamp Keys joined former black leaders like ex-sheriff William Kennedy. In August of 1887, the Knights met with the St. Mary branch of the Louisiana Sugar Planters Association asking for improved wages. And again the growers refused.

So the Knights raised the stakes in October of 1887 as the rolling season approached. Junius Bailey, a 29-year-old schoolteacher, served as local president in Terrebonne. His office sent a communique all over the region asking for $1.25 a day cash wages, and local workers’ committees followed up, going directly to growers with the same demand.

But instead of bargaining, growers fired union members. Planters like future Supreme Court Chief Justice Edward Douglass White kicked workers off the land, ordering any who stayed arrested. Siding with growers, Democratic newspapers circulated false reports of black-on-white violence. “The most vicious and unruly set of negroes,” were at the Rienzi Plantation near Thibodaux, the New Orleans Daily Picayune reported. “The leader of them said to-day that no power on earth could remove them unless they were moved as corpses.”

As the cane ripened, growers called on the governor to use muscle against the strikers. And Samuel D. McEnery, Democratic governor and former planter, obliged, calling for the assistance of several all-white Louisiana militias under the command of ex-Confederate General P. G. T. Beauregard. One group toted a .45 caliber Gatling gun--a hand-cranked machine gun--around two parishes before parking it in front of the Thibodaux courthouse. An army cannon was set up in front of the jail.

Then the killings started. In St. Mary, the Attakapas Rangers joined a sheriff’s posse facing down a group of black strikers. When one of the workers reached into a pocket, posse members opened fire on the crowd, “and four men were shot dead where they stood,” a newspaper reported. Terror broke the strike in St. Mary Parish.

In neighboring Terrebonne, some small growers came to the bargaining table, but larger planters hired strike-breakers from Vicksburg, Mississippi, 200 miles to the north, promising high wages and bringing them down on trains. The replacement workers were also African Americans, but they lacked experience in the canebrakes. As they arrived, militiamen evicted strikers.

And Thibodaux, in Lafourche Parish, was becoming a refuge for displaced workers. Some moved into vacant houses in town, while others camped along bayous and roadsides. Reports circulated of African-American women gossiping about a planned riot. Violence broke out in nearby Lockport on Bayou Lafourche when Moses Pugh, a black worker, shot and wounded Richard Foret, a planter, in self-defense. A militia unit arrived and mounted a bayonet charge on gathered workers, firing a volley in the air.

But the strike was gaining national attention. “Do the workingmen of the country understand the significance of this movement?” asked Washington D.C.’s National Republican, pointing out that sugar workers were “forced to work at starvation wages, in the richest spot under the American flag.” If forced back to the fields at gun point, no wage worker was safe from employer intimidation.

In Thibodaux, Lafourche Parish District Judge Taylor Beattie declared martial law. Despite being a Republican, Beattie was an ex-Confederate and White League member. He authorized local white vigilantes to barricade the town, identifying strikers and demanding passes from any African-American coming or going. And before dawn on Wednesday, the 23rd of November, pistol shots coming from a cornfield injured two white guards.

The response was a massacre. “There were several companies of white men and they went around night and day shooting colored men who took part in the strike,” said Reverend T. Jefferson Rhodes of the Moses Baptist Church in Thibodaux. Going from house to house, gunmen ordered Jack Conrad (a Union Civil War Veteran), his son Grant, and his brother-in-law Marcelin out of their house. Marcelin protested he was not a striker but was shot and killed anyway. As recounted in John DeSantis' book, Clarisse Conrad watched as her brother Grant “got behind a barrel and the white men got behind the house and shot him dead.” Jack Conrad was shot several times in the arms and chest. He lived and later identified one of the attackers as his employer.

One strike leader found in an attic was taken to the town common, told to run, and shot to pieces by a firing squad. An eyewitness told a newspaper that “no less than thirty-five negroes were killed outright,” including old and young, men and women. “The negroes offered no resistance; they could not, as the killing was unexpected.” Survivors took to the woods and swamps. Killings continued on plantations, and bodies were dumped in a site that became a landfill.

 Workers returned to the fields on growers’ terms while whites cheered a Jim Crow victory. The Daily Picayune blamed black unionizers for the violence, saying that they provoked white citizens, suggesting the strikers “would burn the town and end the lives of the white women and children with their cane knives.” Flipping the narrative, the paper argued, “It was no longer a question of against labor, but one of law-abiding citizens against assassins.”

The union died with the strikers, and the assassins went unpunished. There was no federal inquiry, and even the coroner’s inquest refused to point a finger at the murderers. Sugar planter Andrew Price was among the attackers that morning. He won a seat in Congress the next year.

The massacre helped keep unions out of the South at just the moment it was industrializing. Textile manufacturers were moving out of New England, chasing low wages. And after textile factories closed in the 20th century, auto, manufacturing, and energy companies opened in southern states in part for the non-union workforce.

Southern black farm workers would not attempt to unionize again, until the 1930s when the Southern Tenant Farmers Union attracted both white and African American members. But it too was met by a violent racist backlash. The struggle for southern unions continued into the Civil Rights era. On the night before he was assassinated in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech supporting striking sanitation workers. He urged his audience “to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. ...You may not be on strike. But either we go up together, or we go down together.”