Who Were More Violent: Black Civil Rights Protestors or White Supremacists?
Civil Rights

Who Were More Violent: Black Civil Rights Protestors or White Supremacists?

We had a recent comment on the somewhat peaceful protests organized by Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders during the tumultuous decade of the Sixties: “They were violent rioters, not peaceful protesters.” How violent were these protesters, and how violent where the white supremacists they were confronting? And […]

Jimmy Carter, Memories of Sharecropping, Civil Rights, and Life in Rural Deep South Georgia
Civil Rights

Jimmy Carter, Memories of Sharecropping, Hoboes, New Deal, and Civil Rights in Rural Georgia

“There was an issue that troubled my mother during my political years, when the news media began to probe our family’s history. One day she said to me, “Jimmy, one thing bothers me. Reporters have criticized your daddy lately about not being for racial integration. What they don’t recognize is that he died in 1953, when there was no such thing as integration, and nobody had ever heard of Martin Luther King or any civil rights movement. Your daddy always rejected all the racist organizations that degraded or persecuted black people, and both races always knew him to be fair and helpful. I was real controversial in the community sometimes, but he supported everything I did to help black people and to treat them well.” […]

Eugenics Under Jim Crow America and Nazi Germany: Sterilization, Euthanasia, Lynchings, and Holocaust
Civil Rights

Eugenics and Scientific Racism in the Jim Crow Deep South and Nazi Germany

Was there a similar Final Solution in America? True, there were no gas chambers in the Deep South, nor was there a similar system of systematic mass murder, but there were riots such as the Tulsa Riots where the homes, businesses, and churches of thousands of blacks were torched and looted, and many blacks were injured and murdered. In these riots, mostly occurring in many cities during the interwar years, on rare occasions when there were police arrests, they arrested the black victims who fought back. The major difference is that the Nazis murdered far more people much quicker, and their regime lasted only a decade, as opposed to the seventy-year reign of Jim Crow racism in America. […]

Moral Lessons Learned From Historical Black Leaders, Guest on BMK Podcast
Civil Rights

What Moral Lessons Can We Learn From Black Civil Rights Leaders? From the Brahim Kellon Podcast

Will the Civil Rights movement ever be fulfilled? It has not yet been fulfilled. But I can tell you when it’ll be fulfilled. It will be fulfilled when you make that last trip across the river, and you go to that place where everybody’s kind to you, and everybody’s nice to you, and where there is no discrimination. But once you go to that place, you’re not coming back. It’s a one-way trip, because when you are singing with Elvis, you know, you can’t come back.
Civil Rights is just an eternal struggle, the struggle for encouraging everyone to love their neighbor, and to be kind to their neighbor, which is really what the Civil Rights movement is all about. From the minute that President Nixon got elected, the Republicans have been trying to rollback civil rights, and the Republican Supreme Court justices have been pushing back against civil rights ever since. So, it is a never-ending, eternal struggle. It just never ends. […]

Atlantic Magazine Endorses Kamala Harris: Are Migrants To Blame? When Did Kamala Turn Black?
Current Events and History

Atlantic Magazine Endorses Kamala Harris: Are Migrants To Blame? When Did Kamala Turn Black?

Compare what he said when he announced his candidacy when going down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 to his infamous quote in the Presidential Debate:
Trump, 2015: “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with them. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump, 2024: “In Springfield, (the Haitians) are eating the DAWGS. The people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in our country. And it’s a shame.”
The Atlantic Magazine confirms this in another recent column, on how “The Trump Campaign Wants Everyone Talking About Race. The former president and his advisers’ strategy is to make white voters afraid, and they don’t care if they have to lie to do it.” […]

General Grant Post-Civil War and Reconstruction
Civil War and Reconstruction

General Grant Supporting Civil Rights and Reconstruction After the Civil War, and His Conflicts with Andrew Johnson

When the new Congress convened, the House Judiciary Committee voted by a 5 to 4 vote to impeach President Johnson. When the Senate overwhelmingly voted to restore Stanton as Secretary of War, Grant vacated his interim position. In the upcoming political struggle, as Chernow relates, “The worse things looked for Andrew Johnson, the brighter was the political future for Grant. In early February, the New York Republican Convention endorsed Grant for President.”
During the Senate trial, Grant argued privately with Congressmen on the need to convict Johnson, but he thought it would be inappropriate for him to appear during the Senate trial. Chernow puts it best: “During the war, Grant had learned that it was better to let power seek him rather than to pursue it; a good general waited to be summoned by his superiors.”
In the end, Johnson was acquitted by one vote. Seven Republicans in total voted to acquit, as they did not think that Johnson’s actions were not the high crimes and misdemeanors that the Constitution declared were needed for impeachment. Ulysses S Grant would handily win the 1868 Presidential election, and Grant’s Presidency will be featured in a future reflection. […]

States' Rights v Federal Power From the Nation's Founding to Civil War, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights Movement
Civil Rights

States’ Rights v Federal Power From the Nation’s Founding to Civil War, Jim Crow, and Civil Rights Movement

The Constitution was drafted to correct the many weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. Congressmen now swear allegiance to the United States rather than to their native states, as was done under the Articles. The Constitution grants the Federal government not only the power to levy taxes, but also to collect them, as well as sole control over trade and commerce. The Constitution establishes a Federal court system that can override state court decisions if there is a conflict. The US Congress, unlike the Confederation Congress, can pass routine legislation with a simple majority vote. […]

Can Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans refuse to seat validly elected Democrats to the House in 2025?
Current Events and History

Can Speaker Mike Johnson and the Republicans refuse to seat validly elected Democrats to the House in 2025?

Had the law surrounding this issue had not continued to evolve, this indeed would be a troubling precedent. But the issue did evolve, and in 1969 the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren decided that Congress could not deny any duly elected Representative their seat in Congress unless they did not meet the qualifications for office listed in the Constitution, that they be at least twenty-years-old, have been a citizen for seven years, and live in the district they represent. The House of Representatives had attempted to refuse to seat Adam Clayton Powell, a controversial black congressman who was embroiled in credible financial scandals. There was only one justice who dissented on technical grounds. […]

Martin Luther King, Bloody Struggles in Mississippi and Selma, Lewis’ Biography
Civil Rights

Martin Luther King, Bloody Struggles in Mississippi and Selma, Lewis’ Biography Chapters 8-9

After the Selma march, Martin Luther King delivered another rousing speech. “They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said we would only get her over their dead bodies, but all the world together knows that we are here and that we are standing” in “Alabama saying, ‘Ain’t goin’ let nobody turn us around.’” “Our whole campaign in Alabama has been centered around the right to vote.” “The threat of the free exercise of the ballot by the Negro and white masses alike resulted in establishing a segregated society. They segregated Southern money from the poor whites; they segregated Southern churches from Christianity; they segregated Southern minds from honest thinking, and they segregated the Negro from everything.” […]

Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott
Civil Rights

Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks, Montgomery Bus Boycott, Lewis’ Biography, Chapter 3

The biographer David Levering Lewis writes, “By here dignified bearing during her arrest and arraignment, and because of her impeccable reputation in the black community, Mrs Parks’ defiance compelled the city to charge her explicitly with the violation of the municipal ordinance governing racial accommodation on publicly owned vehicles, and not, as was usually the case, with the elastic offense of disorderly conduct.” […]