Last week I revealed the cover of my new book!   

Close Up on War: The Story of Pioneering Photojournalist Catherine Leroy in Vietnam is scheduled for release in early 2021. But it is available now for pre-order.

​Catherine Leroy spent most of her time in Vietnam in the field with U.S. troops. She rarely saw American women, even female journalists who were there at the same time.
 
Plenty  of military and civilian women went to Vietnam War during the war,  but their service and sacrifice was not always appreciated.​

​More than 6,000 military nurses, most of them female, served during the war. Eight women died.

I first learned of former army nurse Diane Carlson Evans when she wrote the forward for my book Pure Grit: How US Military Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific. She was instrumental the fight to get a Vietnam Veteran's Memorial constructed in Washington DC.
 
Diane had been born and raised on a dairy farm in rural Minnesota and moved to the city to attend nursing school in Minneapolis, after which she joined the Army Nurse Corps. She arrived in Vietnam in 1968, when she was twenty-two. The blast of heat and the smell of jet fuel hit me first, then the sight of GIs with MI6s and bandoliers of ammunition slung across their strapping chests. ​

Diane knew that her parents would be watching the war unfold on the nightly news. The saw the body bags, helicopters crashing into the jungle, napalm burning villages and civilians running from the flames.

But what they did not see were the nurses in helmets and flak jackets running to the hospitals and treating the men whose torsos and limbs had been ripped open by high-velocity weapons.
 
They did not hear the sound of mortar thuds and rockets piercing our billets and hospital roofs and walls or see us throwing mattresses on top of the patients to protect them from shrapnel.
 
They did not see us hanging blood bags, suctioning tracheotomies, and frantically evacuating patients from the hospital to allow more room for mass casualties.

In Vietnam, I was overwhelmed by the hundreds of our young soldiers, Vietnamese and Montagnard civilians who had been blown apart by heinous weapons of war.
 
I hadn’t realized how much loving the soldiers would make me hate the war. I wanted to know what they were dying for.
 
Two decades after her year-long tour, Diane  founded the Vietnam Nurses Memorial Project, later expanded to include all American women of the Vietnam War. She had no idea it would take seven years of testimony before three federal commissions and two congressional bills to gain permission for a memorial to honor the women she had served with in Vietnam.
 
One man represents the kind of attitude Diane and her fellow veterans encountered. Carter Brown led the federal Commission on Fine Arts, which they hoped to get on their side. But when the group approached him for support, he demurred. Brown said if the committee considered installing a statue honoring women, "then they might find themselves having to consider doing one for the dogs who served."

The 15-foot bronze, designed by sculptor Glenna Goodacre, helps serve the mission of the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Project Foundation, including to promote healing of the 11,000  women, including nurses, other military women and civilians who served.
 
The sculpture also helps educate the public about women's roles in the conflict and helps facilitate research into the after affects of their wartime experiences.
Sources
https://vvmf.wordpress.com/2013/03/20/women-in-wartime-a-nurse-remembers/
https://www.startribune.com/women-in-wartime/130437313/ 
Vietnam Women's Memorial: History of the Vietnam Women's Memorial
Foreword, Diane Carlson Evans, Pure Grit: How American WWII Nurses Survived Battle and Prison Camp in the Pacific 

This past week marked the anniversary of one of the most crucial moments in American civil rights history. February 7, 1942, African Americans launched the Double V Campaign.
 
It started with one man's question. "Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?"
 
And it burgeoned into a force for equal employment opportunity for blacks during World War II, and laid a foundation for the civil rights marches in the 1960s.

​Not Dovey Johnson, who'd grown up in Charlotte, North Carolina. When she tried to apply for the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps, nobody in Charlotte would give her an application.
 
She moved to Washington DC to get her hands on an application. After completed the segregated training, Dovey became one of the first black women commissioned an US Army Officer.
 
Was it coincidence Lieutenant Dovey Johnson was assigned to recruiting duties in Georgia, and North and South Carolina? Maybe, maybe not. But they sent one very determined woman south of the Mason-Dixon line.
 
Dovey feared the small gains black women had made in becoming officers in the army would be lost, unless more black women volunteered.

“That, I determined, would not happen—not on my watch, no matter how tough a sell I had on my hands in pitching a Jim Crow WAAC in the Deep South.” 
​
“Was that opportunity precisely, mathematically, documentable equal to that of whites? probably not. But the WAAC offered a chance I believed would never come again in quite the same way: the chance to advance, to train for careers, to build the kind of future we women wanted for our children, to stand behind the men who were fighting in Europe and North Africa and the Pacific. That mattered most of all. Our boys were dying for freedom, I pointed out in every speech I made. What was segregation compared to that?”

Across the country, many blacks did not share Dovey's enthusiasm. Popular V for victory signs had popped up to cheer the fight against race prejudice, aggression and tyranny in Europe and Asia.   
 
One black man, James G. Thompson, wrote a letter to a prominent black newspaper,
The Pittsburgh Courier.
 
Thompson wrote in part: Being an American of dark complexion and some 26 years, these questions flash through my mind: “Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?”  
 
“Will things be better in the next generation for the peace to follow?”   
“Will Colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been so heaped upon them in the past?”
 
These and other questions need answering: I want to know and I believe every colored American who is thinking, wants to know.
 
Thompson went on to suggest doubling the V for Victory.
 
The first V for victory over our enemies from without, the second V for victory over our enemies from within.  For surely those who perpetuate these ugly prejudices here are seeking to destroy our democratic form of government just as surely as the Axis forces.

The Pittsburgh Courier had swiftly drawn the connection in 1939, between treatment of blacks in the US and Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews.
 
President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked the Courier to tone down its rhetoric about racial discrimination. And the paper did let up. Until the US joined the war, and huge numbers of blacks were drafted for service.
 
The newspaper asked readers what they thought about this Double V. Hundreds of telegrams and letters inundated the newspaper's office voicing agreement.
 
The Courier established the Double V Campaign as "the true battle cry of colored America....the Double "V" war cry–[signifies] victory over...our enslavers at home and those abroad who would enslave us. WE HAVE A STAKE IN THIS FIGHT....WE ARE AMERICANS TOO!"

​By the summer 200-thousand black people had joined the Double V Campaign, each paying a nickel to the Courier, which continued to promote the slogan, dedicating close to 15% of its newspaper to the subject each week. 
 
Newspaper Historian Patrick Washburn describes the fervor. "You had women walking around with Double V's on their dresses. You had a new hairstyle called the Doubler where black women would weave two—;two V's in their hair. You had Double V baseball games, Double V flag waving ceremonies, Double V gardens. I mean it's just Double V this, Double V [that]....There was even a Double V song." 
 
But no amount of Double V's guaranteed progress against racism in America and skepticism ran deep. Civil Rights activists A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin knew that now, when the country was in crisis and needed them, it was time to demand equality.
 
They organized a massive March on Washington to pressure President Roosevelt.  The president had promised the US would become the “arsenal of democracy."  American industry and manufacturing would have to gear up as never before.
 
Randolph and Rustin organized tens of thousands of blacks to march on the capital demanding equal opportunity to the millions of high-paying jobs that would result.
 
Such a display of America's racial injustice would be embarrassing on the world stage. 
President Roosevelt asked Randolph to call off the demonstration promising an executive order to increase job opportunity for blacks. 
 
In June, 1941, Executive Order 8802 banned discrimination in defense industries and government and created the Fair Employment Practices Committee for enforcement. 

Luedell Mitchell and Lavada Cherry helping build an airplane in the El Segundo Plant of the Douglas Aircraft Company (Library of Congress)
Executive Order 8802 was the first time since Reconstruction that the federal government explicitly protected equal rights for African Americans. Though enforcement was not ideal, civil rights activists now had a tool in their "arsenal for democracy."
 
Despite the Double V campaign, segregation and racial injustice continued after the war. But it helped lay the foundation for 1960's protest marches in the fight for the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
 
If you enjoyed this story, Click and sign up here to get another every week in my author newsletter.
​
Sources
The Double V Campaign (1942-1945) (blackpast.org) 
First Person Oral Histories - Ray Elliot (mass.edu)
Executive Order 8802 - Teaching American History
http://explorepahistory.com/kora/files/1/2/1-2-F3C-25-ExplorePAHistory-a0k1v1-a_349.jpg

The U.S. Constitution has jumped into the limelight this election year, taking the stage in everyday conversation in a way I don't remember happening before. 

That is not going to change now that Amy Comey Barrett has been confirmed to the Supreme Court cementing an "originalist" majority on the court for the first time in nearly a century.  Originalists believe the court should decipher our Founding Father's precise meaning and intent and make sure it is carried out as the law of the land.

Others see the Constitution as a living document to be interpreted in light of changing thought and circumstance. This view has brought us labor rights and protections, equal rights for people of all colors, persuasions and genders. It's brought us social security, Medicare and, so far, allowed the Affordable Care Act to stand.

To shed more light on the Constitutional debate, I've invited author and friend Cynthia Levinson to tell you about her new kids' book and graphic novel Fault Lines in the Constitution.

​We’re all too aware these days of the connections between 2020-21 and 1918-19. Viruses will always be with us, and, alas, novel ones that threaten our health and well-being will very likely recur.
 
People have also seen similarities between autocratic leaders around the world today and those in the 1930s-1940s in Germany and elsewhere.
 
Similarly, for many years, my husband, Sanford Levinson, who is a constitutional scholar, has said, while looking at contemporary domestic political issues, “Follow the dots.” Follow them where? To our Constitution. 
 
To tell you the truth, although I had read all of his books, I didn’t fully understand what he meant until he and I wrote a book for young readers together.
 
That has now turned into two books--Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Framers, Their Fights, and the Flaws that Affect Us Today (Peachtree Publishers, 2017, updated in 2019) and​ ​Fault Lines in the Constitution: The Graphic Novel, illustrated by ​​Ally Shwed (First Second/Macmillan, 2020).

​
​Researching and writing the books, I realized he was right: many issues in the news today can be traced directly back to what the Framers of our Constitution set in motion in Philadelphia in 1787.
 
We’re careful not to criticize the Framers. The handiwork they wrought—the government they created out of their reading, their negotiations, and their imaginations—was a marvel for the time.
 
For better or worse—and, as you can tell from our title, we believe, often for worse—this document has remained largely unchanged. Let me give you some examples of ways that 1787 still reverberates in 2020 and, undoubtedly, beyond.

​One of the ways, which we actually wrote about, deals with an epidemic that nearly became a global pandemic.
 
To show the link between 1787 and now, every chapter starts with a story; most of the stories are recent.
 
In “At War with Bugs: Habeas Corpus,” we talk about an American nurse who treated ​Ebola patients in Sierra Leone in 2014.
 
She had the misfortunate of returning to the Newark, New Jersey airport the very day that state’s governor, Chris Christy, imposed an unnecessarily restrictive quarantine.
 
Kaci Hickox was incarcerated in a tent in a hospital parking lot, and she sued for the great writ—that is, the right to be released—as promised in the Constitution. 
 
For better or worse, our current federal government has not instituted national policies to stem the spread of COVID-19.
 
A future government might do so and would need to balance country-wide protections against a disease versus constitutionally guaranteed individual rights.
 
But, probably at the top of everyone’s list right now is the Electoral College. Why—WHY?!—do we have an Electoral College? No other country in the world has anything similar, and it wreaks havoc with our presidential campaigns and elections.
 
This really breaks down to two questions: Why did the Framers create it? And, why is it still hanging around?
 
How to elect the president—which was a novel idea at the time—hamstrung the participants at the Constitutional Convention for months. The method depended on what the executive’s duties would be and how he (they assumed it would be a he) would relate to Congress. Until they worked out these details, they couldn’t decide who would choose him—the people or the legislature. 

James Madison came up with the last-minute proposal of electors, which would allow far-flung voters who had barely heard of the candidates to choose the winner for them. His plan would also allow the House to pick the president and the Senate the vice president in case no one got a majority. 
 
As we say in the book, that worked fine as long as George Washington was president.
I won’t go into all the mayhem this arrangement has caused over the centuries, except to say that the Electoral College has chosen the less popular candidate five times, so far. 
 
So, why do we continue to tolerate its existence? Because of another fault line (my husband’s “favorite,” if favorite means most destructive)—the difficulty of amending the Constitution. It’s so complex and daunting, I’ll let Ally’s wonderful graphics lead you through the process.

Thanks to First Second, you can read all of Chapter 12: the college with no courses or credits: the electoral college AND Chapter 19: at war with bugs: habeas corpus right here! In all, we discuss twenty fault lines. Unlike habeas corpus, none of them deals with rights.
 
All of them address the structural underpinnings of our governmental system. For instance, while most of us tend to take such matters as our bicameral legislature, a Senate with two senators per state regardless of the size of the population of each state, and the president’s veto power for granted, all of these turn out to have deeply unjust ramifications.

Somehow, we skipped impeachment, which surely belongs in the next edition, if there is one. But, even if there isn’t, the book shows no signs of becoming obsolete. In fact, we blog updates and welcome responses every month at
www.faultlinesintheconstitution.com.
 
Please, join the conversation or add your own favorite fault line!
 
Thank you, Cynthia! Always great to have you on the blog. Some of you may remember a previous guest post by Cynthia Levinson.  You can learn more about Cynthia and see all her books here.

Here's a new book you'll want to put in the hands of young people you care about.
​ Guardians of Liberty: Freedom of the Press and the Nature of News takes an in-depth look at fake news. 

Though it has been several decades since I officially worked as a journalist, freedom of the press is bone deep in my body. So, I've invited author Linda Barret Osborn here today to tell us about her new book, including the part about people living on the moon! 

Praise for the book— 
"Deeply researched and beautifully written, Guardians of Liberty enlightens and entertains readers of any age."  — Michael Dirda, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post
 
Welcome, Linda. Tell us how you came to write this book.
 
In 2017, I became alarmed at the way President Donald Trump was disparaging the press and questioning its validity. 

I had some knowledge of the First Amendment, which reads, in part, “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press.”
 
But as with all my books for middle school and young adults, I learned a lot more about freedom of the press along the way than I knew at the beginning.
 
It seemed important that young people understand how today’s issues are connected to the beginning of our history as a country.  Actually, I wish more grownups understood this history too.
 
One of the most delightful things I found in my research was that in 1835 the New York Sun reported that men were living on the moon. 
 
These were no ordinary men.

“They averaged four feet in height, were covered . . . with short and glossy copper-colored hair, and had wings” like bats. Unicorns also roamed the moon. So did a strange kind of beaver that walked upright on two legs.
 
The Sun explained that a respected South African astronomer had made the discovery using a huge telescope. New Yorkers rushed to buy the newspaper and read each day’s installment. When the story was revealed as a hoax—a great entertainment—sales of the Sun continued to rise.
 
The Sun’s moon story was an example of actual fake news. The paper’s editor knew it was false when he published it.
 
Fake news is not, as President Trump sees it, press about himself that he just doesn’t like.

By attacking journalists, by undercutting the idea of factual reporting, it seems that President Trump was going against the intentions of the Founding Fathers who wrote that amendment.
 
Men like Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison envisioned a press that would be a watchdog against government abuses of power.
 
Remember, they were reacting to the British royal government’s treatment of the colonies.
 
They also believed that a democracy needs an active, vital press representing all points of view: a press that would encourage debate and open discussion of ideas to create an informed citizenry.
 
Because Americans do hold widely differing points of view, no president can count on only “good” press.
 
So from the early days of our country, the First Amendment put the president—no matter what his political party—and the press at odds with each other. No president likes negative press. 
 
Here was something else I wanted to explore and it soon became clear that combative, hurtful words about presidents are not new in our history. John Adams, Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama, as well as President Trump, have been ripped apart in the news. 
 
Even George Washington got bad press. Benjamin Franklin’s grandson wrote that Washington had encouraged “political iniquity and . . . legalized corruption."
 
Sometimes the presidents remained silent. Sometimes they fought back against their critics. Sometimes they let partisan newspapers fight it out for them.
 
But by 2017, the “press” did not just include printed papers. Radio, television, the internet, and social media had all changed the way the news was delivered.

And because the technology had changed, President Trump could bypass the press, using social media directly to reach the public. He could continually attack the press as often as he wished, tweeting many times a day.
 
Since I wrote Guardians of Liberty, people have asked me why I think Trump is different from other presidents and their attitudes towards the press. Nixon, after all, called the press “the enemy.” 
 
But only Trump has called the press “the enemy of the people."  "Don’t believe the crap you see from these people—the fake news,” he said to a VFW convention, pointing to the reporters. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
 
I think all press, no matter what the medium, has its biases.

In addition, more Americans get their news from social media. Much of that “news” is opinion. Some of it is definitely fake, though not in the way President Trump defines it. So we all need to become better judges of the accuracy of what we are reading.
 
In many ways, professional journalists, who have a standard of accuracy, are our best bet. But there are fairly easy ways to check anyone’s sources and statements. Tweets, press briefings, and speeches are on record. They are filmed and recorded. The White House itself posts the transcripts of speeches, so you can see what the president actually said and if and when he said the opposite.
 
Since the mid-twentieth century, the Supreme Court cases on press freedom I covered in my book have tended to uphold the First Amendment. The need for national security during war has been the biggest challenge to this freedom.
 
New technology has changed the nature of news. It should not change our belief in the importance of free expression in a democracy, the same belief the Founding Fathers held. I think we are at a turning point.
 
We can agree that disparaging and attacking the foundations of one of our most precious freedoms is acceptable; or we can believe, as a society, that freedom of the press is a principle we need to defend, practice, and value. 
 
Thanks so much, Linda!  

I'm going to be giving away several copies of Linda's book to middle school teachers. Sign up for my weekly newsletter to stay in the loop and find out how you can win.

In the early 1900s, some American women campaigned for suffrage, picketed, went to jail...
 
Other women formed a massive movement to erect monuments glorifying the Confederacy, re-write the history of the Civil War and indoctrinate children using a Confederate Catechism. (Link to catechism below.)

These women wrote and controlled history textbooks in Alabama, Texas, Louisiana and other southern states for three generations.
 
Textbooks that described a close friendship between "old massa" and slaves, picnics and barbeques thrown where slaves had a "great frolic," and stated how enslaved people sang as they worked in the fields, "the beat of the music and richness of their voices made work seem light."
 
Is it any wonder the confederate flag means so much to so many people? That Robert E. Lee is such a vaunted hero? They learned it in catechism! (See video after feature story below)
 
Today, Brandon Marie Miller, author of Robert E. Lee, the Man, the Soldier, the Myth, is here to help us separate fact from fiction. Welcome, Brandon!

I never thought my YA biography of Robert E. Lee would be so timely. But one way to fight racism and white supremacy is by accepting truths about our past. 150 years after his death, Lee remains in history’s spotlight.
 
Some people today still claim Lee did not own slaves, he hated slavery, he favored emancipation, and he promoted reconciliation after the Civil War. Let’s take a closer look. 
 
Lee and Slavery 
“Slavery as an institution,” Lee wrote his wife in 1856, “is a moral & political evil in any country.” Sounds good, right? But a sentence down in this same letter Lee explains “I think it however a greater evil to the white than to the black race.”  
 
Lee believed God approved slavery as a means to civilize Black people. Even the “painful discipline” inflicted was “necessary for their instruction as a race.” For Lee, Black people were morally unfit for freedom and not as capable of learning as whites.
 
Photo below: Selina Norris Gray, the enslaved housekeeper at Robert E. Lee's home, Arlington, shown with two of her daughters. (Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial.)

He felt slavery was messy, though, an inefficient system forcing “unwilling hands to work.” He disliked having to feed, clothe, and house people he found lazy and ungrateful.
 
Lee wrote his new bride about their household slaves, “you may do with them as you please…But do not trouble yourself about them, as they are not worth it.”

After his father-in-law’s death, Lee inherited around 200 enslaved people. They were to be freed within five years. But Lee petitioned a court to keep these men, women, and children in bondage while he made his father-in-law’s plantations profitable.
 
The enslaved sabotaged Lee’s efforts. They ran away, broke items, and stole things. Lee had people whipped or rid himself of troublemakers by hiring them out or sending slaves to Richmond to be “disposed of…to the best advantage.” ​

Although against secession, once war loomed, Robert Lee resigned the U. S. Army commission he’d held for nearly 35 years. Within days, he accepted a commission as major general of Virginia’s forces.

Lee knew the Confederacy existed to protect slavery and the right to expand slavery into the western territories. He had resented the North’s attempts to block the spread of slavery into the west which threatened, he wrote, the “equal rights of our [Southern] citizens.” “The South…has been aggrieved by the acts of the North” he told his son, “... I feel the aggression.” 
 
Did Lee believe in emancipation for enslaved people?
Lee believed in gradual emancipation which would only come when God decided, maybe not for thousands of years in the future. Lee did not free his family’s enslaved property until a court ordered him to obey his father-in-law’s will in 1862. Does that make him an emancipator?

Lee did approve one method for freeing slaves. In January 1865, three months before he surrendered, Lee advocated using slaves to fight for the Confederate Army.
 
However, across the trenches, tens of thousands of former slaves wore Union blue uniforms.
 
Lee needed soldiers and proposed giving “our negroes” freedom upon enlisting and freedom for their families at the end of the war, though this came too late in the war to matter. Does this make Lee an emancipator? 
 
Did Lee work for reconciliation after the war? 
Lee urged fellow Southerners to “promote harmony and good feelings” as the quickest means to regain voting rights for white men and rebuild southern prosperity.
 
After the war Lee served as president of Washington College where he implemented rigorous programs to educate and uplift young men of the South.

But Lee’s words of reconciliation gave way to anger as the “evil legislation of Congress” granted civil rights to the former enslaved. Washington College students harassed African Americans, destroyed a Freedman’s Bureau school, and nearly lynched a man.
 
The President's House that Lee designed and built at Washington College. (Special Collections Department, Washington and Lee University)  

Lee disciplined a few ring leaders but never spoke out publicly against the violence toward African Americans sweeping the South. His response emphasized instead how students disturbed “the public peace, or bring discredit upon themselves or the institution to which they belong.” 
​
Lee rejected this new world where “the South is to be placed under the dominion of the negroes.” Publicly he claimed he wished the former enslaved well, but privately Lee wrote, “Remember, our material, social, and political interests are naturally with the whites.”
 
In 1868 Lee signed a political statement known as the White Sulphur Springs Manifesto. The signers pledged to treat Blacks with “kindness and humanity,” while opposing any “laws which will place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race.”
 
This statement, and others, helped justify continued violence against African Americans for participating in the American political system.

How did the reality of Lee’s racism and white supremacy get turned around?
 
In June of 1870 Lee wrote a cousin he hoped to shape “the opinion which posterity may form of the motives which governed the South in their late struggle.”
 
He began reframing the war as a political quarrel-- the North strayed from the ideals of the Constitution while the South fought to maintain “those principles of American liberty.”
 
He’d fought for state’s rights, not the cause of protecting slavery, Lee claimed. He disregarded the fact that the state’s rights insisted upon in 1860 and 1861 had been the right to own slaves and spread slavery into the west.
In the decades after Lee’s death in October 1870, the handsome hero image of Lee grew to saint-like perfection. The ugliness of slavery could not tarnish this mythical man.
 
Over time, the myth that he didn’t own slaves and supported emancipation became truth in the South and the North. Lee became a symbol of a righteous South. For many white Americans the soothing myth of Lee as a kind, honorable, Christian Gentleman, was more important than the economic suppression, voting suppression, and murder of African Americans. 
Groups like the United Confederate Veterans (founded 1889) and The United Daughters of the Confederacy (founded 1894), worked tirelessly to vindicate the Old South, intentionally rewriting history.
 
The UDC distributed a booklet nation-wide to control what appeared in textbooks, shaping our Civil War memory for generations.

Among the reasons listed to condemn a book: “Reject a book that says the South fought to hold her slaves. Reject a book that speaks of the slaveholder of the South as cruel and unjust to his slaves. Reject a text book that glorifies Abraham Lincoln and vilifies Jefferson Davis….” 
 
Lee’s portrait graced thousands of Southern classrooms; many celebrated his birthday. Members of The Children of the Confederacy recited from A Confederate Catechism, first published in 1904.
 
It included lessons like this one: “What did the South fight for? It fought to repel invasion and for self-government, just as the fathers of the American Revolution had done.”
    As Jim Crow laws stripped civil rights from African Americans and sharecropping became a new form of slavery, statues of Confederate heroes rose in cities across the South.
 
Dedication ceremonies included parades, speeches, and hundreds of children arranged into “living” Confederate battle flags. The monuments reinforced white Southerners’ pride in the past, romanticized the Old South and slavery, and warned African Americans to keep to their place. 
I spent years researching and writing this book and have used Lee’s own words, and the words of his family and friends, to tell the story. I’m grateful ROBERT E. LEE, THE MAN, THE SOLDIER, THE MYTH was named a National Council of the Social Studies Notable Book and a Bank Street College Best Book of the Year. If you’d like to know more, order a copy from your favorite bookstore or online here...
 
Thank you, Brandon!  I'm so appreciative of you taking time to tell us about your new book, and to help us understand more about the roots of racial injustice in our nation and the concerted efforts to re-write history. 
 
Also thanks to author Claire Rudolf Murphy for alerting me to this video below about the women who helped distort the truth of the Civil War, construct a false legacy and indoctrinate children.

The 19th Amendment ratified 100-years ago, August 18, 1920, granted American women the right to vote, but indigenous people were not considered Americans.

The U.S. refused Native Americans birthright citizenship, and also allowed no process for them to become naturalized as immigrants could.

​​Zitkala-Ša (Red Bird) fought for native citizenship, which was finally granted by Congress in 1924, four years after women gained the right to vote.

But even as citizens, Indian women couldn't automatically vote, some were refused suffrage until 1962. Not a typo. 1962. Scroll down for more on that, but we'll get to it.  First, Zitkala-Ša.

This multi-talented woman was born on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota in 1876 (the year of the Battle of Little Big Horn, known to Plains Indians as the Battle of the Greasy Grass and historically as Custer's Last Stand).

She was eight years old when Quaker missionaries came to the reservation to get children for their boarding school. Zitkala-Ša would later write that her years at White's Indiana Manual Labor Institute were "both a revelation and a misery."

Check out this newspaper article heralding the success of the students at White's Institute.

​White's Institute, founded as an integrated school for all races had languished for twenty years, unable to attract boarding students, teachers and staff. Then in 1882, White's board of directors decided to contract with the U.S. government to educate native students.
 
The school devoted itself to assimilating them into white society. The newspaper reported: Twenty seven Sioux children arrived for a three-year course of study. They were unkempt, ignorant and coarse, and true to their natural instincts were as shiftless.
 
Below is a photo of the first class arriving at White's. Zitkala-Ša started at the school a year or two later. 

Photo courtesy: https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/photos-american-indians-whites-institute-wabash-indiana
 
Stripped of her native clothing and forbidden to speak her native language, Zitkala-Ša ran and hid the day she was scheduled to get her hair cut.
 
"Late in the morning, my friend Judewin gave me a terrible warning. Judewin knew a few words of English; and she had overheard the paleface woman talk about cutting our long, heavy hair.
 
Our mothers had taught us that only unskilled warriors who were captured had their hair shingled [cut] by the enemy. Among our people, short hair was worn by mourners, and shingled [cut] hair by cowards!...
 
I cried aloud, shaking my head all the while until I felt the cold blades of the scissors against my neck, and heard them gnaw off one of my thick braids," Zitkala-Ša remembered later. 
 
"Then I lost my spirit" 
 
"We’d lost our hair and we’d lost our clothes; with the two we’d lost our identity as Indians." remembered another former boarding student Francis LaFlesche. 
 
"Greater punishment could hardly be devised.” ­
 
The local newspaper reported: "Except in studies requiring close reasoning the progress made by the pupils after mastering the English language is as rapid as that of the average English student. They appear, however, unable  to arrive at logical conclusions and read deductions intuitively. Rarely, indeed, do they betray any sign of homesickness…"
 
Despite the indignities, punishment and being forced to pray as a Quaker, Zitkala-Ša
discovered great joy in learning to read and write English and to play the violin. 
​
Photo below  by Gertrude Kasebier, 1898. Smithsonian Institution, Public Domain

After several years at White's Zitkala-Ša went back to her home on the reservation, but discovered that she did not fit in there. She returned to the school and continued her education.
 
At her graduation ceremony she gave a speech calling for women's right to vote. Earning a scholarship to Earlham College, she excelled in her liberal arts studies.
 
At Earlham, Zitkala-Ša started her writing career, gathering Native American stories
and translating them into English and Latin. She evolved the skills that would make her a powerful activist, once winning a speech contest in the the face of a big poster calling her a "squaw".
 
Following Earlham, she studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music, once playing before President William McKinley.
 
While succeeding in white society, Zitkala-Ša remained anguished at her separation from Sioux culture. Hired at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania to teach music, she found herself face to face with students stripped of their Native identity as she had been. 
 
The rift inside her cracked wide when Carlisle sent her to Yankton to collected more students. She found the reservation swamped in poverty, her mother's home falling apart and white settlers violating Dakota lands in violation of federal treaties. 
 
By now, she was a published writer and her short stories published in Atlantic Monthly and Harper's portrayed the wisdom and generosity of her people, and belied the bigoted notions so commonly accepted by mainstream Americans. Her writing criticized Carlisle and other boarding schools for their assimilation practices. She was fired.
 
Zitkala-Ša connected with other Native Americans capitalizing on their formal education and flawless English to advance the rights of Indian People. She helped establish the National Council of American Indians and committed herself to working for citizenship for Native Americans. 
 
They made huge progress in 1924 when an act of Congress granted full citizenship to all of the approximately 125,000 of 300,000 indigenous people living in the United States. But the parameters of those rights would be drawn by individual states where legislators and voters harbored stubborn prejudices.
 
Native Americans registering to vote circa 1948. Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

​Arizona – home to part of the Navajo Nation and with the second-largest Native population in the country did not allow Native Americans to vote until the Supreme Court overruled the state's ban 1948. The State of Maine approved Native American Voting rights in 1953, with 25% of voters in opposition. Utah and New Mexico withheld the ballot box from Native Americans until 1962.
 
Like African Americans, Natives suffered continued hurdles to voting until the1965 Civil Rights Act, and their voting rights remain under attack today. Many will run into trouble voting in the upcoming presidential election.

 That's because in 2013, the Supreme Court extracted the teeth from the Civil Rights Act. In an Alabama case Shelby County  vs Holder, the court declared the strong arm of the law unconstitutional, the section that required states with a history of racial bias in voting to get federal permission before enacting new voting laws.
 
Since then a flurry of states and counties
have changed voting regulations to constrain Native Americans and people of color from voting. Two months ago, the Native American Voting Rights Coalition released details of an extensive research project.
 
Obstacles at Every Turn: Barriers to Political Participation Faced by Native American Voters lays bare the troubles Natives have in registering to vote, casting their votes and having their votes counted.
 
It's a disgrace.
 
Check these links for some of the latest state actions on Native American voting rights: Voter restrictions in North Dakota  and historic voter rights legislation in Washington.
 
Zitkala-Ša wrote stories and poetry, she was a teacher and a musician who raised her voice and worked for justice. Living and working on the Uintah-Ouray Reservation in Utah, Zitkala-Ša collaborated with a professor at Brigham Young University to compose The Sundance Opera, which premiered in 1913, the first Native American Opera ever performed.
 
Often Zitkala-Ša has not been credited for the composition, though it's believed she wrote the libretto and songs of the opera, which was based on a sacred Sioux ritual that had been prohibited by the federal government.

In this time of great division in the U.S. we truly need the spirit of Zitkala-Ša. She never denied the searing ache of two opposite ways of life, of two different modes of thinking. Somehow, she brought them together within herself and created great beauty, strength and hope.
 
Sources:
https://learninglab.si.edu/resources/view/48790#more-info
https://www.nps.gov/people/zitkala-sa.htm
https://build.headonwest.com/the-gifted-and-conflicted-life-of-lakotas-zitkala-sa/

In California Dreamin', the Mamas and the Papas sang of their longing on a winter’s day, to be safe and warm in L.A.

The tune launched the group, which became a defining voice in 1960's counterculture. Say the Mamas and the Papas time-traveled to 2020 and joined #BlackLivesMatter. Might they sing a lament for California dreams dying this way? 

Most recently, 18-year-old Andres Guardado, killed last week by Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputies. He was running away when he was shot dead, the third and youngest of three Latinos shot by California law enforcement this month.

In the heart of sunny SoCal, a virulent history of racism casts a cold, dark shadow. Making lives matter today requires understanding this long road of injustice we've been walking.

Ever hear of the Murder at Sleepy Lagoon? The 1942 case of José Gallardo Díaz?
Detectives had scant evidence and the murder was never solved. But that didn't stop police from arresting nearly 600 Latino men, a jury from convicting 17 of them and a judge sentencing them to San Quentin. 
 
Read on for that story below. But first, details on the heartbreaking death of Andres Guardado.

​"He was a baby, he was a baby," Andres' cousin Celina Abarca told CNN through her tears.
"I feel like I'm dead inside," said
his mother Elisa Guardado.
 
People who gathered to protest the killing on Sunday were dispersed by police using pepper spray and rubber bullets.
 
Andres worked as a security guard at an auto body shop. Speaking to CBS LA, Andrew Heney, owner of the shop said: "We had a security guard that was out front, because we had just had certain issues with people tagging and stuff like that.
 
And then the police came up, and they pulled their guns on him and he ran because he was scared, and they shot and killed him. He's got a clean background and everything. There's no reason." 
 
If police had bodycams running, the video has not been released. Andres' family alleges the deputy shot him in the back, but the sheriff refuses to release autopsy results for "security" reasons.
 
According to Lieutenant Charles Calderaro, here's how the shooting went down.
"Deputies observed the individual, at which point he observed the deputies. The individual then produced a handgun and began running southbound away from the deputies through businesses nearby. At some point, deputies contacted the suspect and that's when the deputy-involved shooting occurred."
 
Bullshit. Pardon my French.

Today the U.S. president uses various derogatory names for immigrants from south of the border. 
 
In the 1940s, they were simply referred to as “the Mexican problem.”
 
But young Chicano men in the border states baptized themselves pachucos.
 
In Los Angeles they dressed to stand out, wearing zoot suits featuring wide lapels and baggy pants pegged at the ankles.
 
Pachucos rejected assimilation into Anglo-American culture speaking their own slang derived from the Calo gypsy language of El Paso. The resisted prejudice and inequality with their unique style of jazz and swing music.
 
Yes, they had attitude. The pachucos subculture defied American racism and oppression. 
 
In 1942-43 some pachucos refused to yield to whites on the sidewalks and tried to bar them from their neighborhoods. Whites couldn't understand pachucos "secretive" language and grew suspicious because the pachucos didn't look and behave as they should. In the eyes of white citizens, they were trouble.
 
Police believed the zoot suiters were gang members and trouble-makers. L.A. officials believed the "Mexican problem" had to be solved.
 
The outbreak of WWII fired up fear and animosity that led Americans to distrust foreigners. Many experienced LA cops had gone off to war leaving locals uneasy about their safety.
 
In the fall of 1942, the “Mexican problem” appeared to be the only story newsworthy enough to make the front page alongside war updates in Los Angeles newspapers.

The death of a young Chicano man reported on August 2, 1942, in Commerce, California, created an opportunity for local law enforcement to crack down on the pachucos.  
 
Apparently, a fight had broken out at a birthday celebration near a swimming hole known as Sleepy Lagoon.
 
A party guest José Gallardo Díaz was found unconscious along side the road near the reservoir and abandoned gravel pit near Slauson and Atlantic boulevards.
 
An ambulance rushed Díaz to hospital, but the 22-year-old died without regaining consciousness.
 
An autopsy showed that he had been drinking heavily and suffered a fracture at the base of his skull. There was no evidence that proved what caused the fracture, which could have been the result of  Díaz falling and hitting his head, or an automobile accident.
 
Police swept through the Mexican American community, rounding up some 600 young men on charges related to Díaz' death. The way the newspapers told it, "the Mexican problem" had incited a juvenile gang war and the "Sleepy Lagoon Murder."
 
According to court records many of the pachucos taken into custody were severely beaten by police.

Los Angeles citizens and government officials wanted action to curb the alleged violence. A grand jury assembled to interview hundreds of Mexican-American teens and young adults, both witnesses and accused.

In addition, county sheriff’s officers defined the problem as they saw it, submitting a report to the Grand Jury titled "Statistics."
 
Capt. Edward Duran Ayres wrote the law enforcement document beginning with how Latino youth faced discrimination, lack of educational opportunity and poor job prospects.
 
But Ayres concluded his report with a nasty, racist attack on Chicano people in their entirety. Latinos were a different breed, he wrote, whose ancestors crossed the ice bridge from Asia to settle North America.

​Ayres continued, “The Indian, from Alaska to Patagonia, is evidently Oriental in background – at least he shows many of the Oriental characteristics, especially so in his utter disregard for the value of life.”
 
Even so, police had to cut loose hundreds of the young men they had arrested. The County Grand Jury indicted 23 youths for the alleged gang murder of José Díaz.

Prosecutors charged 22 of the young men in the largest murder trial in California history. Presiding was Judge Charles Fricke, known as "San Quentin” Fricke, due to his propensity to sentence defendants to the state's high-security prison.
 
In the People v Zammora, part of the prosecution's case rested on the “distinctive appearance” of the accused, arguing that their fondness for fashion and taste for jazz proved their social deviancy.
 
After the four-month trial, the jury found 17 of the young men guilty: three of first degree murder, nine of second degree murder and five of assault with a deadly weapon. Their sentences ranged from life in prison to one year in the county jail. Five were found innocent.
 
The defendants appealed their verdicts and two years later the appellate court threw out all 17 of the convictions, citing lack of evidence, coerced testimony, deprivation of the right to counsel and judicial misconduct. 
 
All accused were released.

Interesting to note, of the 10,000 people arrested across the nation during protests against police brutality in the wake of George Floyd's killing, Los Angeles led all cities in the number of people arrested.  More than a quarter of the arrests came in the City of Angels, many for low-level offenses like curfew violations and failure to disperse.
 
Back to the police shooting of 18-year-old Andres Guardado. The Los Angeles County Sheriff promises "transparency". He invited California's attorney general to oversee the his department's internal investigation.
 
Nu-uh! says the LA County Supervisor, mentioning a "trend" in the sheriff's office not to cooperate with outsiders looking into its business. The case needs an independent inquiry into Guardado's death. Let's hope it happens.
 
Another Latino man shot by California police earlier this month was kneeling with his hands above his waist when he was killed.

​An officer in Vallejo responding to a looting call shot 22-year-old Sean Monterrosa. He fired five times at Monterrosa through the windshield of his unmarked police car, saying he thought Monterrosa had a gun.
 
Family and supporters of Monterrosa have demanded
that authorities release body camera video of the shooting. They refuse. The police union has now filed for a restraining order to block release of the name of the officer who fired the shots. 
 
Four days after Monterrosa died, California highway patrol officers opened fire on the car Erik Salgado was driving in east Oakland, killing the 23-year-old and injuring his pregnant girlfriend.  
 
CHP says officers suspected a stolen vehicle and attempted to make a traffic stop, but that Salgado started ramming CHP vehicles. In response,
officers fired three shots. Salgado, who was unarmed, died at the scene. His pregnant girlfriend, shot in the stomach, was taken to the hospital. She survived, but miscarried the baby.
 
All three of these men killed by California law enforcement in the last four weeks were suspected of property crimes.
 
#Black, #Latino and #Native lives matter. These young men of color deserve to be safe in California and alive to pursue their dreams. 

​They showed no understanding of the need for structural change. They showed no understanding of white privilege.
 
One point brought up several times by the local leader of the NAACP, is the need to understand our history. To create structural change and a just future, we need to be clear about our past.
 
I jumped right on that. You know I believe this. That is a huge part of why I write this blog. 

One city that demonstrates this need to recognize that history matters and why structural change is needed: Tulsa, Oklahoma.
 
If you've heard of the 1921 "race riot" in Tulsa, wipe your mind clear. It was a massacre. 

Human Rights Watch released a 66 page document this past week demanding reparations for survivors and descendants of those caught in the 48-hour reign of terror in Tulsa.

In segregated, Jim Crow Tulsa, the Greenwood district, known as "Little Africa" grew into one of the most economically vibrant black communities in the U.S.

Thriving businesses lined its streets: banks, movie theaters, hotels, beauty shops, grocery stores, restaurants, as well as the offices of lawyers, realtors, doctors and other professionals.

Known across across the country, as "Negro Wall Street", the entire 35-square blocks including more than 12-thousand homes burned to ashes in two days, May 31-June 1, 1921. An estimated 300 black people were killed.

​The murder and devastation was deliberate, sparked by accusations that a black man assaulted a white woman.
 
According to witnesses, white mobs looted black homes and businesses before setting them ablaze.
 
“They tried to kill all the black folks they could see,” survivor George Monroe, recalled.
 
Law enforcement did nothing to stop the violence. In fact, witnesses say some officers participated in the looting and killing, including members of the Oklahoma National Guard.
 
Survivors told of seeing black bodies dumped into the Arkansas River and disposed of in mass graves.
 
“Many of the survivors mentioned bodies were stacked like cord wood,” says Richard Warner of the Tulsa Historical Society.

​The fires left 10,000 homeless, subsisting in tents provided by the Red Cross.
Incredibly, the black community of Greenwood regrouped, rebuilt, and restored their neighborhood by 1938. That despite the fact that insurance companies refused to compensate home owners and business for their losses.

Not a single person was ever held responsible for the murders and property damage. White Tulsans chose to pretend it never happened, actively suppressing the truth. Even privately, they did not speak of it. Newspapers of the time grossly under-reported the death tally, 
claiming 36 blacks died. Textbooks omitted this history completely.
 
Then after 77 years, evidence of the massacre started to surface. The Oklahoma Legislature appointed a commission to establish an historical record of the event. The commission brought in an expert to investigate possible sites where black bodies might have been buried.
 
Clyde Snow liked to say bones make good witnesses, never forgetting and never lying.

​Before his death in 2014, Clyde Snow was one of the world's foremost forensic anthropologists. He helped identify the remains of Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele and confirmed the identification of President John F. Kennedy after his assassination. He aided in the determination that more than 200 victims found in a mass grave in Yugoslavia had been killed in an execution style of ethnic cleansing.

In Tulsa, Snow investigated ground that had been a potters field in 1921. It was the suspected site of a mass grave where black bodies might have been buried after the massacre.
 
Using ground-penetrating radar, the forensic anthropologist discovered an aberration in the earth, which the commission report stated "all the characteristics of a dug pit or trench with vertical walls and an undefined object within the approximate center of the feature."
 
In addition, a witness came forward, a white man named Clyde Eddy who'd been 10 at the time of the massacre.  Eddy remembered seeing men dig a trench and prepare to bury wooden crates containing remains of black victims. 

Clyde Snow drew parallels between the violence in Tulsa and state-sponsored killings he investigated in other countries. The commission's evidence led him to believe the so-called Tulsa "riot" was an act of ethnic cleansing facilitated by the Oklahoma National Guard. 
 
In 2000, the Tulsa Race Riot Commission made a number of recommendations for moving forward, including further investigation of possible mass grave sites and cash reparations to survivors (149 were alive at the time) and descendants of those killed and of survivors.
 
The only action taken was by the State of Oklahoma which issued survivors decorative medals. 
 
Now, twenty years later it's possible Tulsa can begin to address its racist history. This last December archaeologists discovered further evidence of possible mass graves at two sites in the city. Excavations were to have started in February, but have been postponed due to COVID-19. 

And coincidentally with nationwide "Black Lives Matter" protests, Human Rights Watch issued a news call for reparations for blacks in Tulsa.
 
Human Rights Watch is a non-governmental organization that conducts research and advocacy on human rights around the world.
 
“No one has ever been held responsible for these crimes, the impacts of which black Tulsans still feel today,” says the report, titled “The Case for Reparations in Tulsa, Oklahoma: A Human Rights Argument.”
 
“Efforts to secure justice in the courts have failed due to the statute of limitations. Ongoing racial segregation, discriminatory policies, and structural racism have left black Tulsans, particularly those living in North Tulsa, with a lower quality of life and fewer opportunities.”
 
The community has higher rates of poverty and police brutality. Black Tulsans are subjected to physical force by police — tasers, police dog bites, pepper spray, punches, and kicks — 2.7 times more than whites, according to Human Rights Watch.
 
Today, the area once known as Black Wall Street is marked by a mural painted on the side of Interstate 244, which bisected the neighborhood in 1970.

While traffic roars through on the interstate, gentrification creeps into Greenwood. There's a minor-league baseball stadium, an arts district marketed to millennials, and a high-end apartment complex with a yoga studio and pub.
 
City Councilor Vanessa Hall-Harper says gentrification of the neighborhood is driven by the same greed that fed the fire of white violence 100 years ago.

​"There was economic jealously that caused them to destroy Greenwood...The stadium is like building a Whole Foods at the site of the Oklahoma City bombing."

"This is sacred ground," Hall-Harper said. "As developers are making decisions about the Greenwood district, the history is being ignored, and I think it is intentional. They want to forget about it and move on."
 
Not only forget, but whitewash.
Near the baseball stadium's entrance, the mural is signed "Tulsa Race Riot 1921."
 
Someone has crossed out "riot" and written "massacre." Someone else has crossed out "massacre" and left a scribble of black spray paint.

livia Hooker, the last known survivor of the 1921 racist attack in Tulsa, died two years ago at 103.
 
She was six 6 when the violence erupted, but never forgot how her mother told her and her three siblings to hide under their dining room table.
 
"She said, 'Keep quiet, and they won't know you are under here.'  The [whites who came in her house]
took everything they thought was valuable. They smashed everything they couldn't take," Hooker said.
This past week, Oklahoma offered a panel discussion on race, facilitated by Governor Kevin Stitts and his wife.
 
Black leaders criticized the governor for stacking the panel with folks who would not challenge him on his racial beliefs and biases, calling the event a  "superficial show of solidarity."
 
Two of the four panelists were law enforcement officers. There were no women, no Latinx or indigenous Oklahomans, no millennials, and no recognizable black activists or leaders from social justice groups.

At the panel in Spokane, the police chief made a point of saying his officers are good, caring people, and that George Floyd was killed in Minneapolis, not here. 
 
What he fails to understand is that "good" isn't good enough. Being "not guilty" of killing a black man is not good enough. Claiming not to be a racist is not enough. That's why we're hearing the term anti-racist.
 
Being anti-racist requires recognition of the privilege bestowed on us simply because we were born with white skin, reckoning with the fact that racism is systemic and taking action.
 
We can't sit on one side of the scale of justice and expect it to level on it's own. We must involve ourselves intentionally in day-to-day efforts to dismantle the racist structures in our schools, our cities and our country.

If not engaging, we are automatically, by default, perpetuating the problem.

​Sources:
https://thislandpress.com/2011/06/11/what-lies-beneath/
https://abcnews.go.com/US/tulsa-marks-grim-anniversary-1921-race-massacre-protests/story?id=71010791
https://ktul.com/news/local/tulsas-dark-secret-the-mass-graves-of-the-1921-race-riot
https://theblackwallsttimes.com/2020/06/08/bwstimes-gives-gov-kevin-stitt-2-out-of-10-on-race-conversation/
https://www.sapiens.org/news/tulsa-race-massacre/
https://www.hrw.org/news/2019/09/12/us-how-abusive-biased-policing-destroys-lives
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/tulsa-mayor-reopens-investigation-into-possible-mass-graves-from-1921-race-massacre/2018/10/02/df713c96-c68f-11e8-b2b5-79270f9cce17_story.html
​

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the day the National Guard fired on a student anti-Vietnam War demonstration at of Kent State University in Ohio.  For people of a certain age in America, May 4, 1970, was one of those days you never forget. 
 
Fewer people remember the equally horrific attack on college students eleven days later in Mississippi.

At Jackson State College, May 15, 1970, Jackson City Police and Mississippi State Troopers fired on a group of students, killing two and injuring 12.
 
That week more than 500 colleges across the country had been shut down as students protested the killings at Kent State, where the Ohio National Guard shot four and injured nine.

The shootings at Jackson State, now Jackson State University, erupted after a bottle smashed in the middle of the officers who had marched onto campus in riot gear.
 
Steve Vernon Weakly was shot in the leg. “So, the bottle is in the air; it’s as if it’s suspended in the air like forever." Weakly says, "It floated down and came in from behind [the police] and hit right in the middle of them and it burst,” says Weakly. “It was as if they just went crazy from there… they started shooting the guns immediately – immediately – and it was like all hell broke loose.”

​Students at the school, now Jackson State University, an historically black university in Jackson, Mississippi, experienced repeated harassment by whites.
 
The night before the shootings, white people had riled students by driving through campus shouting racist insults at black students and sexual slurs against black women students. Black students had responded by throwing rocks.
 
The next day students grew more agitated when a false rumor circulated  that Charles Evers, the brother of slain civil rights leader Medgar Evers, had been killed. Then, a non-Jackson State student set fire to a dump truck in the area, bringing fire-fighters and police to the scene.

A group of young people threw stones at the police, as they advanced through campus. Steve Weakly was hanging out with fraternity and sorority friends outside of the girls’ dorms when gunfire exploded.
 
“The carnage on that side of the street was just incredible,” he says. “The kids trying to get in [the dorm], everybody was screaming, and all of a sudden everything got eerily quiet. Then it started back again. It was like 10 times louder than it was before. People were screaming, girls were fainting, blood was everywhere.”
 
Police and state troopers fire 140 rounds in thirty seconds. 


​Two young black men died in the barrage of bullets. Philip Lafayette Gibbs, a political science student in his junior year, had planned to go to law school. The 21-year-old man was the father of an 18-month-old son.

Also killed, James Earl Green, a 17-year-old track star who was still in high school. The boy had planned to go to the University of California at Los Angeles. He was shot and killed behind the line of law enforcement officers.

​While the shootings at Kent State topped the news around the nation, word of the twelve students shot and injured and the two killed in Jackson did not travel far and wide. 

“There is always a different narrative to how the American media treats black activists and survivors versus how they treat white activists and survivors,” says C. Leigh McInnis, professor of creative writing at Jackson. 

Even today, American opinions differ on whether the deaths at Kent State increased opposition to the Vietnam War, or merely increased disillusionment with the power of protests to end the war.
 
Black Americans have less trouble understanding what happened after the shootings at Jackson State.
 
“Black folks did what black folks always do; they simply kept living,” says McInnis, “Returning to JSU in the fall for classes even with the bullet holes still fresh in the buildings, because ‘success’ and ‘revenge’ for black folks has always been survival, especially survival through education and self-determinism.”
 
It might be some progress to see a nationwide outcry at the murder of 25-year-old Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia this week. But still sickening that Ahmaud was shot, and that the the shooters were arrested two months after the killing, and only because a video of the event surfaced.

Let's add the faces of Philip Lafayette Gibbs and James Earl Green to the conversation, two young men who's killers were never held accountable. And let's remember the many students in the line of fire that night in Mississippi who went on to graduate, raise families, succeed in careers. They were young black people in a long line of African Americans who have continued on, survived and thrived in spite of obstacles white Americans cannot truly comprehend.

Sources:
https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/kent-state-jackson-state-survivors-talk-student-activism-629402/
https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/us/soundtracks-kent-state-jackson-state-orangeburg/index.html
https://www.wyso.org/post/remembering-what-happened-jackson-state-college-1970
https://libcom.org/history/jackson-state-shootings-1970

COVID-19 has disrupted all our lives. This uncertainty is scary, so I decided to take this time sheltering at home to focus on taking care of myself, and reaching out to help others via the web.
​
I'm offering a free workshop for students age 10-18, via Zoom or Skype. 

We'll look at how adversity enables a character's arc of change in both fiction and nonfiction stories.  Click here for more information or to schedule your free workshop. 

I'll see you in 2020.  Hopefully, sooner rather than later, but all my effort will be directed toward meeting my fast-approaching manuscript deadline. Here's why my blog is on hiatus for the New Year.

​They Called 1919 The Red Summer.

Much of the trouble in the summer of 1919 revolved around people trying to get decent work for a living wage. But underneath boiled and bubbled rampant white supremacist ideals and corporate greed.

Here's a look at conditions pervading the United States at the time.

• Government policies reflected a hyper-nationalist attitude prevalent throughout America 
• People demanding a more equal distribution of wealth, especially union strikers, were labeled far-left wing and denounced as un-American
• Immigration from Mexico was on the rise and African Americans migrated to the North in great numbers.
• Newspapers exacerbated fear and xenophobia 
• The anti-immigrant Sedition Act of 1918 and subsequent state statutes allowed deportation of people with undesirable politics, and gave police unspoken authority to physically harass or arrest anyone considered suspicious or thought to be causing trouble 

With the Great War at an end, the U.S. military discharged four million soldiers, promising them benefits which did not materialize. This is said to have been the spark that inflamed the violence in 1919, though it appears America seethed with enough hatred to breathe fire all on it's own.

Both black and white veterans went looking for jobs in a post-war economy. Employment couldn't be found in cities or rural America.
 
Labor strikes turned bloody when wartime price controls lifted and industrial companies tried to preserve wartime profit levels, often hiring blacks from the south to break strikes. You know that story if you've read my book Fannie Never Flinches.  

​At a time when most unions denied African Americans membership, Fannie was one of the few labor leaders to welcome blacks.
 
And she became one of the hundreds of Americans to die that bloody summer.
 
Fannie Sellins was shot to death late in the summer of 1919, when 
Allegheny Coal and Coke hired armed guards to badger strikers and provoke violence.
 
This year, to mark the 100th Anniversary of Fannie Sellins' death, folks in Western Pennsylvania and West Virginia will gather to remember her love of working people, her courage and the ideals for which she gave her life.  See News & Links below for my speaking schedule at these events.
 
Warning: Graphic images accompany the article below. 

​There was no justice for Fannie's killing. Authorities and jurors agreed she died as a result of a "riot" perpetrated by union strikers.
 
Even more atrocious—hundreds of black Americans killed in cold blood that summer—their killers never facing charges or trial. Their deaths blamed on "race riots" supposedly started by the blacks themselves.

​Major clashes between whites and blacks broke out in more than three dozen cities and towns across America, from Chicago to Washington D.C., from Bisbee, Arizona to Syracuse, New York. See a map of the deadly violence here...
 
In separate incidents, white supremacists lynched at least 100 African Americans. All this, with no repercussions for the killers, in fact they were sometimes aided in the murders by local law officers and U.S. Army troops called in to police the violence.

​Civil rights activist and author James Weldon Johnson called the time period Red Summer but the wanton killing went on from early 1919, through the spring, summer, and early autumn of that year.
 
The episodes of deadly violence often lasted for days. In Chicago, the killing and destruction of property in black neighborhoods went on for a week, as mobs tried to drive African Americans from industrial jobs and white neighborhoods. Often the excuse was the need to “protect” white women against the alleged assaults of black men.

​Denied protection of the law, African Americans took up arms to defend themselves. Especially in Chicago and Washington D.C., newly returned black veterans of World War I organized and carried out armed resistance against the white mobs.
 
This added fuel to the false accusations of "race riots" instigated by blacks.
 
The most heinous attacks, a racially-motivated massacre, took place over several days in Phillips County, Arkansas. In the area of cotton plantations, blacks, mostly sharecroppers, outnumbered whites ten to one.
 
African American sharecroppers attempted to unionize. When several whites showed up to harass a meeting of the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America.
Debate remains over who fired first, but a white man was killed and the deputy sheriff injured.

The next morning, a posse formed to arrest suspects in the shootings. Up to one-thousand white men from surrounding counties and as far away as Mississippi and Tennessee gathered in Elaine, Arkansas. 
 
The armed force met little opposition from the blacks in the county, but hysteria and an imagined black insurrection swept through the group. The mob started indiscriminately killing black men, women and children, and ransacking their homes. 
 
Federal troops  were sent in to "put down the rebellion" and joined the killing spree. 

An unknown number of African Americans were killed, though the black community estimated at least 240 dead in the largest known massacre of blacks in American history.
 
White newspapers reported the insurrection of blacks had been brought to heel with the deaths of five whites and approximately one-hundred blacks.
 
That's the way it happened with all the violence involving blacks and whites that year. White newspapers blamed the victims for starting the violence and reported false stories to justify the murders.
​
Image shows newspaper report following the massacre of blacks in Phillips County, Arkansas.

Similarly, 1919 headlines misrepresented legitimate labor strikes as crimes against society, conspiracies against the government and plots to establish Communism.
 
And so, history was written. The truth of what happened in Arkansas has only begun to be reported accurately in the last decade. And a look at most any U.S. history textbook, if it mentions the events of 1919 at all, calls the mob killings of blacks "race riots" and distorts the truth, giving short shrift to racism and efforts by African Americans to defend themselves, framing the violence as the fault of "both sides."
 
Looking clearly at our history is necessary to understand current events and to end the echoing of the dangerous words that twist the truth and manipulate us.

Sources: https://www.teenvogue.com/story/the-red-summer-of-1919-explained
https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-ushistory/chapter/the-transition-to-peace-1919-1921/
​https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=56186312471f47eca8aff16a8a990aa8
​https://www.zinnedproject.org/if-we-knew-our-history/remembering-red-summer

The stories of individual people make history real in our imaginations.
 
Norm Haskett strives to preserve those stories on his website The Daily Chronicles of World War II.
 
Norm has kindly agreed to help us remember D-Day, June 6th, a day that should live in our consciousness as an critically important military victory that came at a staggering human cost.
 
Norm gives us a brief overview of D-Day through photos and captions, and the story of the young men from Bedford, Virginia, part of the first wave of the historic invasion. 

Allied Naval forces crossed the English channel overnight  June 6, 1944. Soldiers started landing at 6.30am on the coast of Normandy, France.

Below: Coast Guard-manned flatbottom boat, better known as a Higgins boat, carries one of the first companies of U.S. solders to invade Omaha Beach.

As the boat approaches, smoke on the bluff-restricted shore most likely emanates from seagrass set on fire by naval shells.

Below: “Into the Jaws of Death” is the description of this image taken by Chief Photographer’s Mate Robert Sargent of the United States Coast Guard. Taken at 7:40 on the morning of June 6, it is one of the most widely reproduced photographs of the D-Day landings.

It shows troops of Company E, 16th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division departing their landing craft and wading through waist-deep water towards the “Easy Red” sector of Omaha Beach.

Earlier, U.S. Eighth Air Force heavy bombers were supposed to hit German defenses, and leave bomb craters to form instant foxholes, on the stretch of exposed beach, but the 13,000 bombs missed their target by 3 miles. 

The battle-hardened U.S. 1st Infantry Division joined by the untested 29th Infantry Division, advanced up Omaha Beach into 4 batteries of artillery, 18 antitank guns, 6 mortar pits, 35 rocket launcher sites, 8 concrete bunkers, 35 pillboxes, and 85 machine-gun nests. 

The two divisions suffered some 2,000 killed or wounded on Normandy beaches. Two-thirds of Company E, the soldiers seen in Sargent’s photograph, were among the casualties.

​German forward units reported to headquarters that the invasion had been halted at the water’s edge, though by 12:30 p.m. there were 18,772 men on Omaha Beach with thousands more arriving each succeeding hour.

​Among those soldiers in the first wave of the murderous assault on Omaha Beach were thirty-five young men from rural Bedford, Virginia. 

The men from Bedford had enlisted in the Virginia Army National Guard. When their unit was mobilized into the regular army the men were assigned to the untested U.S. 29th Infantry Division, Company A.
 
Only nineteen Bedford Boys survived as the first wave hit the beaches that dreadful day. Three lost their lives later in the campaign. Thirteen sons of Beford survived the war to come home to their small town after the war.
​
This is kind of personal story that helps us understand the war better, and that Norm shares on his website. Here he tells us how he the project started.

After thirty years as a history teacher and a technical writer, in retirement, freed of workplace demands, I chose to begin researching and writing on a subject that had long interested me: World War II.
 
My carrier aircraft designer father and his two brothers who served in the U.S. Army were part of that “greatest generation” who answered their country’s call and gave us the world we live in today.
 
Other people of that generation, in this country as elsewhere, lost their lives or survived, though millions were scarred mentally or physically by their wartime experience. Heroes, average Joes, victims, and villains—all these people had stories to tell us from the period—some still do. I decided I wanted to be a part in sharing them.
 
On my website, The Daily Chronicles of World War II, I strive to preserve the stories of those who lived through that watershed era. Every day of the year I share a different story from a different theater of war and year, stories heroic or tragic or both. Of course heroism and tragedy can commingle in the same narrative.

The Bedford Boys: One American Town’s Ultimate D-Day Sacrifice by Alex Kershaw, showed me a perspective on heroism I’d never considered before. He quoted the sister of one of the thirteen Bedford survivors:
 
“People say the men who died on the beach were heroes. I think the heroes are the ones who came back and had to live with it for the rest of their lives.”  
 
Soldiers who survived the Omaha beach landing faced  4 batteries of artillery, 18 antitank guns, 6 mortar pits, 35 rocket launcher sites, 8 concrete bunkers, 35 pillboxes, and 85 machine-gun nests.

George A. Taylor, commanding the 16th Infantry Regiment on Omaha Beach, encouraged his men, most of them traumatized crossing the killing ground, to move up on to the bluffs where the German positions were, stating perhaps the obvious: “Two kinds of people are staying on this beach—the dead and those who are going to die.”​

Below, assault troops of the 3rd Battalion, 16th Infantry Regiment, U.S. 1st Infantry Division survived, gaining the comparative safety offered by the chalk cliff at their backs. Here they take a breather before pushing inland.

Toward evening on D-Day itself the Omaha beachhead bustled with activity, having been reported safe for wheeled and tracked vehicles. Kitchens were set up and served beans and wieners and hash browns to the survivors of the nearly 40,000 men who were landed there that day.
 
D-Day was the largest seaborne invasion in history. More than 4,100 landing craft and ships were deployed to Omaha and the other four assault beaches that stretched across a forty-mile front. By D+26 the vessels had delivered one million troops, 566,648 tons of supplies, and 171,532 vehicles.

Below: With the beaches secured, badly needed tanks, heavy equipment, artillery, rifles and ammunition come ashore at Omaha Beach at low tide on D+3. Barrage balloons overhead were meant to deny German aircraft low-level airspace.

Many people who lived through World War II waited until their senior years to tell their stories; sadly, most of them took their stories to their graves, having shared little if anything beyond telling at the most a few people.
 
Like Kershaw and other students of history, I desire to rescue as many stories of World War II as I can by discovering and recording them and then playing them back to a new audience on my website.
 
My twin goals are to inspire this generation and caution its members about their responsibility to preserve and honor these legacies. It’s this desire that drives and energizes me every day.
 
Thank you, Norm!  I really appreciate the way you tell events day by day, including pieces from different perspectives and sources, all in one place. His website includes maps and photos, videos and books, as well as succinct snippets about the major campaigns and battles of the war.

Click here for a map and overview of Operation Overload, which went down in history as the D-Day invasion.

What if I told you there was a civil rights leader who mentored Rosa Parks years before the Montgomery Bus Boycott?
 
Who spent the early 1940s in small towns across the south, calling on barber shops, beauty parlors, grocery stores, churches, talking with sharecroppers, talking about how black people could fight Jim Crow.
 
And who convinced Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. that blacks needed a civil rights base in the south like the NAACP in the north, but more activist.
 
And urged an initially reluctant King, then a young minister, to capitalize on the momentum of the bus boycott and expand protest throughout the south.
 
You are probably guessing this is a woman. And you would be right.

Ella J. Baker was known as a difficult woman. She didn't care. 
 
Working for the NAACP 1940-1946, she encountered men who doubted women's capabilities and who wanted to hold tight to their hierarchical structure and middle-class membership.
 
Ella wanted to involve poor blacks and women, and she believed ordinary people could organize and lead themselves and change unjust structures in society.
 
She also didn't care that her accomplishments went unnoticed. She worked behind the scenes helping people empower themselves, saying "Strong people don't need strong leaders.”
 
In her years of grassroots work for the NAACP, Ella admitted the seemly endless small church meetings could often be  “more exhausting than the immediate returns seem to warrant, but it’s a part of the spade work....Give light and people will find the way.”
 
By 1946, Ella had become so fed up with the NAACP for it's resistance to grassroots organizing and lack of inclusion, she quit. Though she still participated in the local chapter where she lived in New York.
 
Ella Baker, standing third from the right with a group of girls at a fair sponsored by the NAACP, early 1950s, courtesy New York Public Library.

After the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a group of sixty black ministers gathered for a conference and founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to 
coordinate civil rights protest activities across the South.
 
It was Ella's idea. Not to sound like a school kid, arguing about who had an idea first, but leaving Ella out of the story of the SCLC is like forgetting you have a backbone. 
 
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. is lauded by everyone as the SCLC's first president. Google its founders and you'll find the names of Bayard Rustin, Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth and others. And others is Ella Baker.

In 1960, when the Greensboro Four staged a sit-in at a Woolworth's lunch counter, Ella had served two years as SCLC Executive Director. She saw the energy and commitment of the students staging sit ins. She saw their potential and wanted to support them.

Within three months she organized a conference of hundreds of college students.“[I] felt there had to be some contact between the various student groups which had sprung up, or they might peter out of a lack of the nourishment of ideas and sustenance of morale that come from such contacts.” 
 
Diane Nash attended. “We felt a real kinship with the students who were working in other cities, to bring about the same things that we were.”
 
Ella urged the students to see the sit-in movement as “bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized coke....[But as a movement to scourge America] “of racial segregation and discrimination – not only at lunch counters, but in every aspect of life.” 

From this gathering of students sprouted the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, pronounced "Snick." Built from the bottom up, SNCC turned the tide of the Civil Rights Movement to direct action. To protests, sit-ins, the Freedom Rides against segregation, the 1963 March on Washington and Freedom Summer voting registration drives in Mississippi.
 
Martin Luther King had wanted the students to become become an arm of the SCLS, but Baker urged them to form their own group, and to include women and the poor.
 
She clashed with King, pushing for more voices to be heard, and for more people to be empowered. "To be very honest, the movement made Martin rather than Martin making the movement." Ella said once. "This is not a discredit to him. This is, to me, as it should be."
 
Scholar Cornel West says Ella was like a jazz musician. "She's antiphonal, call and response, she's in conversation. She's not pontificating from above, she's having conversation on a horizontal level."

“I wasn’t one to say yes, just because [an idea] came from Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was not an easy pushover," Ella said. "It’s a strange thing about men,… if they haven’t ever had a woman say no to them, they don’t know what to do sometimes.”
 
Andrew Young articulated the feelings of the male leaders about Ella Baker. "The Baptist church had no tradition of women in independent leadership roles, and the result was dissatisfaction all around."
 
Ella resigned from the Southern Leadership Council to work with the SNCC young people, shock troops in the battle for equal rights.

“The young people were the hope of any movement…They were the people who kept the spirit going," Ella said, "the average Baptist minister didn’t really know organization.”
 
Perhaps the influence of Ella's enslaved grandmother helped her speak up and believe in fighting for equality. Her grandmother was offspring of a slave and master. And because of that, the day after her birth the jealous mistress of the plantation poisoned the newborn's mother.
 
Ella listened to her grandmother's stories of resilience and bravery, of being raised in slave quarters and put to work in the big house. "But at the point at which she was of marriageable age...the mistress wanted to have her married to a man whom we knew as Uncle Carter. He was also light. And she didn't like Carter. And so when she refused to concur with the wishes of the mistress, the mistress ordered her whipped, but the master, who was still her father, refused to have her whipped." 

Instead of the whipping, Ella's grandmother was forced to plow in the fields. When plowing began each year February, it was so cold she'd have to stop work to warm her hands on the horse's belly. Ella said, "I've heard her say that she would plow all day and dance all night. She was defiant."
 
The SNCC flourished with Ella Baker's guidance and encouragement. It grew quickly in the fertile soil of all that spade-turning Ella had done in the 1940s.

Diane Nash, (in photo) explained how Ella inspired her. “I could count on Miss Baker being truthful and she would explain many things very honestly to me, and I would leave her feeling emotionally picked up dusted off and ready to go.”
 
Another young woman who was there at the founding of SNCC, Bernice Johnson Reagon, took Ella's words and set them to music.
 
Struggling myself don’t mean a whole lot I come to realize.
That teaching others to stand up and fight is the only way my struggle survive
 
The anthem of freedom, Ella's Song, recorded by "Sweet Hone In The Rock" still rings true today.
 
We who believe in Freedom cannot rest until it comes
Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons
Is as important as the killing of White men, White mothers’ sons.

People called Ella Baker by the nickname Fundi, a Swahili word for someone who teaches a craft to the next generation. She continued to work for civil rights until her death on her 83rd birthday in 1986.
 
The more recent civil rights groups Occupy and Black Lives Matter Global Network embrace Baker's organizational ideals. Both have been criticized for their lack of leadership. Patrisse Khan-Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter responded by saying, "We are not a leaderless movement, we are a leaderfull movement." 
 
We shortchange ourselves when we overlook the leadership of Ella Baker. Yes, because she is an example of a powerful black woman, and a woman who maneuvered her way through gender stereotypes, but also because the work of her life demonstrates that successful enterprises need various kinds of leadership, that investing in a charismatic leader without cultivating a leadership base may jeopardize the cause.
 
Tell me what you think! Did you know all this about Ella Baker? Leave your comment below. I'm sure glad I stumbled on her name and dug deeper. It gives me pause now, to think how often I've longed for a charismatic leader to pull Americans together to work for justice, and to take climate change seriously.

Sources:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/long-lasting-legacy-great-migration-180960118/
https://snccdigital.org/people/ella-baker/
https://ellabakercenter.org/about/who-was-ella-baker
https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/baker-ella-josephine
https://ncwomenofcivilrights.wordpress.com/ella-baker/the-sclc-and-the-birth-of-sncc/