News — AntiRacism

We interviewed The Entreprenerial Sulaiman the Founder of BlackChild Promotions (@blackchildpromotions). In this Episode he explains the importance of Self Reliance, Racial Pride and a Family Structure inthe Blak Community! Filmed by @Thinkweike + @mrghostrain6 / Edited by @Thinkweike

In the face of disproportionate childbirth mortality rates, activists are fighting to make midwifery more available to Black mothers in the South.

In this episode of The Perspective, the influence community leaders discuss the question of which came first, racism or slavery? The guests share their opinions based on their experiences and understanding. They all represent different communities and interests. Their views really challenge the foundations and views laid around the concepts of racism and slavery. What comes out from the conversation is the importance of understanding the impact of both racism and slavery on the black community. What are your thoughts? Which one came first?

In this episode of The Perspective, the influence community leaders discuss the question of which came first, racism or slavery? The guests share their opinions based on their experiences and understanding. They all represent different communities and interests. Their views really challenge the foundations and views laid around the concepts of racism and slavery. What comes out from the conversation is the importance of understanding the impact of both racism and slavery on the black community. What are your thoughts? Which one came first?

Racism is a social construct and a system that has many layers. Therefore, when trying to determine whether someone can be racist, the individual should have the power to implement racism. So when the question is, can black people be racist, the answer gets quite complicated. In this podcast, the hosts try to answer this question. They cover race, racism, prejudice, discrimination, oppression, racial indoctrination, and structural and institutional racism as a systemic way of life. What do you think, Can black people be racist?

There is no questioning that the racial disparities in the US are evident in different areas of society. An excellent example is the attention black people versus white people get when they go missing. The media and police give more attention to the latter than the former. Dr. Whitehead calls this the “missing white woman syndrome.” She states that it goes back to slavery, where white women were lifted up, and the rest were crushed.  To some extent, the media plays a huge role in promoting this as they cover cases of missing white people more than missing black people. What do you think?

Martina Big has had injections to turn her into a black woman. Martina Big explains that she admires women of color, their skin, and their curves. She has had three melatonin injects costing 170 pounds each. Her skin color, hair color, and eye color have all changed to match those of a person of color. Her husband, Michael, is also taking the necessary steps to change his skin color. Martina has spent time in Africa to learn more about black culture and their way of living. She now identifies as 100% black. What do you think about Martina's choice?

The “Saltwater Railroad” refers to the coastal waterway followed by many enslaved people escaping from the Southern slave states into the British-controlled Bahamas. The saltwater railroad served a similar function as the Underground Railroad, a land pathway, that allowed enslaved people to flee to northern states and ultimately to Canada.

Movement to the Bahamas began as early as 1821. In 1818, future President Andrew Jackson, a supporter of slavery, invaded Spanish Florida which had previously served as a slave refuge. The official American takeover of Florida in the 1819 Adams-Onis Treaty prompted the flight of hundreds of blacks into the British-held Bahamas, beginning the four decades-long movement.

In the early 1800s, enslaved people from the deep South were limited in their options for escape: the northern states and British Canada, where slavery was either restricted or abolished by the 1820s, were thousands of miles away, making the Bahamas a more viable option.

The Bahamas were an attractive destination for numerous reasons. The majority of the population was black, a condition that allowed for slave resistance movements in the islands to take root. Free blacks in the Bahamas began to fight for rights not yet acknowledged in the slaveholding South. Black residents of the Bahamas could own land, marry and seek education. In 1825 the British government declared that anyone who traveled to British grounds, regardless of their prior status, was free and nine years later in August 1834, slavery was abolished throughout all British territories including the Bahamas. As an island chain which at some points was only 154 miles from Florida, growing numbers of black slaves sought and used the Saltwater Railroad to gain their freedom.

Fugitives who escaped Southern plantations took refuge on the beaches of Southern Florida. Those with money paid for their passage to the Bahamas on Bahamian boats, while those without embarked on the perilous journey in handmade canoes. Once in the Atlantic, runaway slaves faced recapture by pirates as well as ocean storms.

Those who made it to the Bahamas assimilated into a community populated by the Bahamian descendants of African slaves and “Black Seminoles,” runaway slaves from the deep South who first took refuge with the Seminole Indians in Florida, and then made their way to the Bahamas as the tribe was forced to Indian Territory on the Trail of Tears.

By the 1830s, an estimated 6,000 enslaved people had escaped to the islands. Notably, in 1841, a revolt on the Creole, a ship transporting slaves from Virginia to Louisiana, led to the liberation of over 100 people who sailed the ship to Nassau, Bahamas. Their escape inspired many other escapes, especially from Florida Territory.

Given the proximity of Florida (whose population in 1850 was 40% enslaved) to the British-controlled safe haven in the Bahamas, the potential for drastic losses led American officials to demand the return of fugitives from the United Sates. The British, however refused to returned fugitives but negotiations with U.S. diplomats led to the compensation of slave owners under the British Emancipation Act. The British-American relationship however remained strained by the saltwater migrations until after the Southern secession in 1861.

Today, the traditions and stories of the Southern runaway slaves and their journey on the Railroad are kept alive in the Adelaide and Gambier communities in the Bahamas, which are mainly populated by descendants of the early black escapees.

Sundown Towns are all-white communities, neighborhoods, or counties that exclude Blacks and other minorities through the use of discriminatory laws, harassment, and threats or use of violence. The name derives from the posted and verbal warnings issued to Blacks that although they might be allowed to work or travel in a community during the daytime, they must leave by sundown. Although the term most often refers to the forced exclusion of Blacks, the history of sundown towns also includes prohibitions against Jews, Native Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and other minority groups.

Although it is difficult to make an accurate count, historians estimate there were up to 10,000 sundown towns in the United States between 1890 and 1960, mostly in the Mid-West and West. They began to proliferate during the Great Migration, starting in about 1910, when large numbers of African Americans left the South to escape racism and poverty. As Blacks began to migrate to other regions of the country, many predominantly white communities actively discouraged them from settling there.

The means to announce and enforce racial restrictions varied across the country. In its most blatant form, signs were posted at the city limits. One in Alix, Arkansas, in the 1930s, for instance, read, “N—-r, Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On You In Alix.” Others stated, “Whites Only After Dark.” Many sundown towns used discriminatory housing covenants to ensure no non-white person would be allowed to purchase or rent a home. In the 1940s, Edmond, Oklahoma promoted itself on postcards with the slogan, “A Good Place to Live…No Negroes.” The town of Mena, Arkansas advertised its many charms: “Cool Summers, Mild Winters, No Blizzards, No Negroes.” In other cases, the policy was enforced through less formal norms and sanctions. Businesses that served Black customers or hired Black employees would be boycotted by the white townspeople, ensuring that Blacks had few, if any, job opportunities in those communities.

Racial exclusion in sundown towns was also achieved with violence. African Americans who lingered in sundown towns even during the daytime experienced harassment, threats, arrest, and beatings. It was not uncommon for Black motorists passing through these communities to be followed by police or local residents to the city limits. In extreme cases, hostility toward African Americans resulted in extrajudicial killing. The lynching of two Black teenagers in Marion, Indiana, in 1930, for instance, resulted in the town’s 200 Black residents moving away never to return.

The rise of sundown towns made it difficult and dangerous for Blacks to travel long distances by car. In 1930, for instance, 44 of the 89 counties along the famed Route 66 from Chicago to Los Angeles featured no motels or restaurants and prohibited Blacks from entering after dark. In response, Victor H. Green, a postal worker from Harlem, compiled the Negro Motorist Green Book, a guide to accommodations that served Black travelers. The guide was published from 1936 to 1966, and at its height of popularity was used by two million people.

Historians have found that most sundown towns deliberately hid the means by which they became and remained all-white. Apart from oral histories, there are often few archival records that describe precisely how sundown towns excluded Blacks. Laws and policies that enforced racial exclusion have largely disappeared, but de facto sundown towns existed into the 1980s, and some may still be in evidence today.

Following global anti-racism protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd in the U.S., monuments connected to slavery and colonialism became the target of Black Lives Matter protesters across the world. In Iceland, which is not free of racism, thousands of people attended Black Lives Matter meetings organized by African Americans to show solidarity with the issue in the U.S. and explore matters of inequality in its own society. While countries joined calls to remove statues of colonial-era figures from public spaces, in Iceland, Independence Party deputy MP Vilhjálmur Bjarnason proposed that his country erected one — a statue that would celebrate the life and legacy of Hans Jonatan, believed to be the first Black man to settle in Iceland.

Before achieving celebrity status in Iceland, Hans Jonatan (he had no surname) was a slave in Denmark. He fought in a war, lost a famous case on slavery, and escaped by fleeing to Iceland. His story was largely forgotten until recently when a major genetic study identified some 780 living descendants of him.

Born into slavery in 1784 on the Caribbean island of St. Croix, then under Danish colonial rule, Hans Jonatan’s mother was Emilía Regína, an enslaved African woman on a sugar plantation owned by a Danish-German family named Schimmelman. Hans Jonatan’s father is believed to be of European heritage.

“[Hans] lived as a house slave somewhat protected from the rough field sites, the dissent and rebellions in the fields and somewhat exposed to the nice sides of aristocratic life,” Gísli Pálsson, a professor of anthropology at the University of Iceland, said in an interview in 2019.

At age seven, the Schimmelmans took Hans Jónatan to Denmark, where he lived in Copenhagen for about ten years. While there, he began reading and engaging with the growing discourse in Copenhagen about colonies and plantations and freedom and slavery, according to Pálsson, who wrote a biography about Hans Jónatan called The Man Who Stole Himself.

Pálsson said Hans Jonatan’s growing desire for freedom was one of the reasons he enlisted in the Danish navy in 1801. He probably thought that showing his allegiance to the Danes might make him free. But after surviving the war – one of the major battles in Denmark’s history – he came back still a slave. His superior officers, who admired his bravery, later advocated on his behalf to Denmark’s crown prince and de facto ruler, the future King Frederik VI. The crown prince wrote in a letter that Hans Jonatan “is considered free and enjoys rights.”

But the Schimmelmans argued that Hans Jonatan was their property and they could sell him back to St Croix. Hans Jonatan went to court to assert his freedom, in what would become a famous case at the time. Unfortunately, he was not able to produce the letter from Prince Frederik and in 1802, the court dismissed his claim. He was subsequently ordered to return to the Schimmelmanns, who were ready to sell him in St. Croix.

But Hans Jonatan fled, sailed to Iceland, and settled in the small village of Djupivogur. Around 1802 when he arrived in the remote Icelandic fishing village, locals warmly welcomed him. “He lands before racism arrives from Europe,” Pálsson said. “Before that, you had friction of course between people and groups, but not necessarily a hint at something in their genes, or the colour, or the character.”

Hans Jonatan lived in Djúpivogur, first as the store keep in the trading post, and then later as a peasant, according to one account. He married a local woman, had children, and lived as a free man until his death in 1827 after suffering a stroke.

It would take years before authorities in Denmark were able to find out where Hans Jonatan had escaped to. In the early 2000s when they found out, the descendants of Hans Jonathan in Iceland were also exploring their roots. Researchers who had the idea to re-create Hans Jonatan’s genome had started work during that period. At the end of the day, their study was able to reconstruct 38 percent of Hans’ maternal genome in absence of any physical remains. They traced it back to West Africa, and researchers now say that Hans Jonatan’s mother may have come from Benin, Nigeria or Cameroon.

What is worrying is the fact that Hans Jonatan is still considered property. Kirsten Pflomm, a fifth-generation descendant of Hans Jonatan, in 2018, petitioned then Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen to declare Hans Jonatan, posthumously, a free man. But the prime minister replied in a letter back to her that he “cannot reverse time or the verdict of the past, no matter how incomprehensible it may seem.”

Denmark has however been taking steps recently to address its colonial past. In 2018, it unveiled its first statue of a powerful Black woman in its capital Copenhagen. The 23-foot statue of the Black slave rebellion leader, Mary Thomas, was created by Danish artist Jeannette Ehlers and Virgin Island native La Vaughn Belle. Mary Thomas, otherwise known as “Rebel Queen”, was a Caribbean woman who led a fierce 19th-century revolt against Danish colonial rule.

A statue to Hans Jonatan would not only be in recognition of his character, but would also honor his descendants and other enslaved people who fought for justice, said Pálsson. “He has a thousand descendants and their story is remarkable. Many of those in the second and third generation had to struggle with adversity. A monument would also honour these people and speak to the present moment that we are living in.”

June 18th, 1964, was a powerful yet little talked about moment in the history of the United States, and an especially important one in civil rights movement. 

On this day, a white hotel manager was photographed as he poured acid into a pool where white and black activists had integrated to protest segregation.

Together with the other protests and demonstrations in the summer of 1964  known as the St. Augustine Movement, this event at the pool in St. Augustine, Florida was so powerful that it changed the course of history, bringing more resolute action towards the plight of black people.

On June 11, 1964, a week before the event, civil rights icon, Martin Luther King, Jr. was arrested for trespassing at the Monson Motor Lodge after being asked to leave its segregated restaurant. According to historians, King used the “confrontation as an opportunity to publicize both the non-violent approach used by civil rights activists and the desperate discrimination against black people that persisted across the city”.

King’s arrest, his only time in the state of Florida, spurred a series of protests and confrontations between activists, police, and segregationists, one of which was a ‘swim-in’ demonstration. King and his two associated planned the ‘swim-in’ at the same lodge that refused to admit him at its restaurant. 

White activists paid for motel rooms and invited black people to join them as their guests in the “whites only” pool. The motel manager, Jimmy Brock, allegedly furious with King’s earlier protest and now the ‘swim-in’, poured a bottle of muriatic acid, an undiluted hydrochloric acid used to clean pools, into the pool, hoping the swimmers would become scared and leave.

Brock apparently exclaimed, “I’m cleaning [the] pool!” as he poured the acid, a move captured by journalists and photographers who had gotten word of the demonstration and were onsite.

NPR interviewed two of the “swim-in” protesters, J.T. Johnson and Al Lingo, when they were 76 and 78, respectively. The two recalled that the hotel manager, Brock had ‘lost it”.

“Everybody was kind of caught off guard,” J.T. said.

“The girls, they were most frightened, and we moved to the center of the pool,” Al added.

“I tried to calm the gang down. I knew that there was too much water for that acid to do anything,” J.T. said.

Historians say that one swimmer, who knew that the ratio of acid to pool water was too little to be a threat drank some of the pool water to calm the other swimmers’ fears. Though some of them were scared, they did not back out of their demonstration. In fact, a cop had to jump in to arrest the protesters.

“When they [dragged] us out in bathing suits and carried us out to the jail, they wouldn’t feed me because they said I didn’t have on any clothes. I said, ‘Well, that’s the way you locked me up!’,” J.T. explained.

The Aftermath Of The Swim-In

Historians say, “the aftermath of Dr. King’s arrest and the swim-in demonstration was both swift and powerful”. Once lawmakers and public officials saw images from the “swim-in” among other protest activities in the St. Augustine Movement, public outcry for action intensified and officials could no longer feign ignorance.

In fact, on the following day, the Civil Rights Act was approved, after an 83-day filibuster in the U.S. Senate.

“That had not happened before in this country, that some man is pouring acid on people in the swimming pool,” J.T. said. “I’m not so sure the Civil Rights Act would have been passed had [there] not been a St. Augustine. It was a milestone. We was young, and we thought we’d done something — and we had.”

On July 1, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, effectively making “discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin” unlawful.

A Black F-22 stealth fighter pilot and the great-nephew of a distinguished Tuskegee Airman recently revealed he had to quit the United States Air Force because of racial bias and discrimination.

In an interview with David Martin on CBS’ 60 Minutes, Major Daniel Walker said he had always felt relegated to the background because of his skin color during his 11-year service as an Air Force officer. Walker alleged his fellow White officers weren’t treated with the hostility that he received.

“The way you stand, the way you walk, the way you sit, the way you speak. In what is supposed to be an objective field, [they] are subjectively rating you to others in the sort of unofficial grapevine of evaluation,” he said.

Walker alleged he and other people of his race in the military have had to check their demeanor to mitigate the way they’re perceived by their fellow White officers, telling 60 Minutes that the unspoken perception that got into his head is: “You’re big, you’re Black, with a deep voice. You’re intimidating.”

Walker said that even before heading to pilot training after graduating from the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado, he was warned by Black veterans about the reception he’ll receive once there.

“They’re going to treat you poorly. When you wash out, they’re probably not going to keep you in the Air Force,” he recalled on what the Black veterans told him.

And though Walker said he persevered and performed impressively during his time at flight school, he was still viewed in a certain way because he was lively. “I got feedback at the end of this course, however, that it was very evident that I was having a good time, and maybe I shouldn’t have been. Or [that] I talked too much…,” he said.

Walker was eventually assigned to an F-22 squadron in Virginia after graduating flight school. Initially feeling welcome, Walker said he later started experiencing an ironic but similar reception because he was a bit more reserved as compared to flight school.

“He’s too quiet. It seems like he thinks he’s too good to be here or too good for this place,” he said about his Air Force counterparts’ sentiments.

Walker decided he had had enough and quit. There are currently less than 50 Black pilots in the U.S. Air Force, according to 60 Minutes.

Bias despite integration?

The United States Armed Forces may have been integrated over 70 years ago, but allegations of racial bias by African-American officers remain strife as they claim their White counterparts climb up the promotional rank faster than them, 60 Minutes reported.

A report conducted by the U.S. Air Force Inspector General on racial disparity revealed “2 out of every 5 [African Americans in the Air Force] do not trust their chain of command to address racism, bias and unequal opportunities” and “3 out of every five [Black Air Force service members] … believe they do not… receive the same benefit of the doubt as their White peers if they get in trouble.”