[Peace-discuss] Cui bono a rei publicae? Who profits from politics?

[David Green]

Thus an informative column such as Sundiata Cha-Jua published this morning,
with exactly the wrong conclusion:

SUNDIATA CHA-JUA: REAL TALK: A BLACK PERSPECTIVE

The Red Summer of 1919: The past as future?

The Association for the Study of African American History is commemorating two
of the most defining moments in African-American and United States
histories.

The first and most significant is the 400th anniversary of the forcible
importation, not immigration, of the first 20 Africans into what became the
United States.

The second is less known.

Yet it, too, marks a transformative moment.

This year is also the centennial of the Red Summer of 1919. That outpouring
of racial terrorism constituted the worse series of domestic disturbances
in U.S. history.

Its centenary should force a more sober look at U.S. society. We can learn
much from an analysis of the Red Summer. That bloodstained era offers a
biopsy of the white American body politic.

Indeed, given the character of contemporary politics and President Donald
Trump’s commitment to fomenting racial hatred, it is essential that we
revisit that bloody episode in U.S. history.

NAACP Field Secretary James Weldon Johnson coined the term “the Red Summer”
to highlight the goriness of that moment’s indiscriminate terrorist
assaults. The Red Summer extended beyond thesummer time frame. It began on
Feb. 8 and ended Oct 2. It was truly national in scope.

The orgies of racially motivated violence stretched from Connecticut to
Texas. Scholars count 43 African-Americans lynched and three dozen racial
pogroms during the Red Summer.

The racial pogroms were caused by multiple factors.

Some were due to longstanding structural elements, while others were
spontaneous and resulted from individual whites’ determination to humiliate
black individuals.

The era’s racial violence was sparked by racial oppression, rapid World War
I demobilization, economic competition over jobs, housing and access to
municipal services, labor struggles, discriminatory policing, perpetuation
of anti-black lies and stereotypes, fear of socialism, and racist
manipulation by politicians.

The assailants were predominately young white men, but assaulters crossed
class, generation and gender lines.

Mobs consisted of military personnel, police officers, businessmen,
laborers and politicians.

President Woodrow Wilson exasperated racial antagonisms. He labeled
returning black soldiers “un-American.”

In March 1919, at the beginning of the epidemic of racial terrorism, Wilson
alleged, “the American Negro returning from abroad would be our greatest
medium for conveying Bolshevism to America.”

The Wilson regime considered blacks’ struggles for justice a communist plot.

As rampaging white mobs assaulted black communities, the federal government
waged war on African-American racial justice organizations and media.

In Charleston, S.C., on May 10-11, the terrorist outburst was initiated by
a confrontation between a black civilian and a white sailor. Instead of
giving way as “southern etiquette” demanded, he shoved the white sailor off
the sidewalk. That confrontation culminated in white sailors shooting up
the black community, burning African-American-owned businesses, injuring 18
people and murdering one person.

Forty white men initiated the Port Arthur, Texas, pogrom (July 15) when
they attacked an African-American man on a streetcar for allegedly smoking
in the presence of a white woman. Twenty black men rebuffed the white mob.

The two worst pogroms occurred in Chicago and Elaine, Ark. The underlying
causes in Chicago included housing issues, labor struggles, political
manipulation and apartheid. Adult white men stoned Eugene Williams, a black
teenager, after his raft drifted across the invisible color line at the
beach. He drowned trying to reach the shore.

Chicago was a conflagration as African-Americans battled invading whites
throughout the city. Inaugurating the “drive by,” white gangsters
indiscriminately shot into black-occupied homes from speeding vehicles.
They systematicallyburned black neighborhoods, leaving 1,000
African-Americans homeless.

Overall, 38 people were killed, 23 African-Americans and 15 whites, and 537
people were injured, two-thirds of them black.

If Chicago was a battle, Elaine, Ark., was a massacre.

Veteran Robert L. Hill organized black tenant farmers, sharecroppers and
domestic workers into the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of
America. The PFHUA posed a simple question, “The union wants to know why it
is that the laborers cannot control their just earnings, which they work
for.”

PFHUA members injured a deputy sheriff and killed a security guard after
they fired on a union meeting on Sept.

30. In response, the sheriff unleashed a posse of about 1,000 white men on
black residents.

Claiming the PFHUA was “heavily armed” and was “spreading communism,” on
Oct. 2, Gov. Charles Brough sent 500 troops. Gov. Brough charged them “to
shoot to kill any negro who refused to surrender immediately.” The troops
joined the mob in indiscriminately massacring African- Americans. Nearly
240 blacks were slaughtered, 285 arrested, 12 executed and 65 incarcerated
for 21 years.

All of the racial pogroms resulted from anti-black racial animosity. All
were initiated by whites and involved white terrorist mobs invading,
plundering, raping, murdering and massacring black people in an orgy of
white supremacist violence.

Nonetheless, the Red Summer was transformative; it was a turning point for
African- Americans. It signaled the end to the era of accommodation. Claude
McKay’s poem “If We Must Die” urged armed resistance and launched the
Harlem Renaissance. Blacks’ staunch resistance prevented racial terrorism
from discouraging the Great Migration to the urban North.

The Red Summer reminds us that political leadership played a crucial role
in instigating mass racial terrorism.

Trump’s rhetoric not only echoes Wilson’s but is even more provocative. Are
we on the precipice of mass white supremacist violence?

Sundiata Cha-Jua is a professor of African-American studies and history at
the University of Illinois and is a member of the North End Breakfast Club.
His email is schajua@ gmail.com.

On Sun, Jul 21, 2019 at 5:06 AM C G Estabrook via Peace-discuss <
peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> wrote:

> A Facebook interlocutor observed this week that politics in America is now
> about sex and race.
>
> The people who run the country are glad of that of course, because it
> distracts from the more dangerous topics of war and the environment.
>
> The ruling class make their money from war and the environment (the
> military-industrial complex and industrial pollution), so they don't want
> them to be topics of debate and perhaps alteration. But they don't have so
> much invested - literally and figuratively - in sex and race. Let the
> battle rage.
>
> It's the triumph of identity politics over class politics that sees
> discrimination (of all sorts) to be the fundamental problem of our society,
> rather than exploitation (of people and land).
> From the point of view of our rulers, the former can be vigorously
> addressed; but not the latter.
>
> —CGE
> _______________________________________________
> Peace-discuss mailing list
> Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net
> https://lists.chambana.net/mailman/listinfo/peace-discuss
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.chambana.net/pipermail/peace-discuss/attachments/20190721/c420fdc3/attachment-0001.html>