The terrorization of African Americans in America did not began when the FBI created the counterintelligence program Cointel Pro, people of African descent have been terrorized in the United States since their unwilling arrival to the country in the 17th century. Slavery in America directly depended on the agricultural work of African slaves. Africans were dehumanized and treated no better than cattle in the fields. They were unable to learn how to read and write and had no legal rights whatsoever. The 1857 Supreme Court case of Dred Scott v. Sanford denied citizenship and basic rights to all blacks- free or enslaved. White Americans robbed Africans of their cultures, religions, customs, and humanity in order to keep the Africans under total control. By the late 1700s, the agricultural labor demanded by slavery had been transformed into a racial caste system. The modern day socially constructed concept of race was created to make African Americans believe that they were inferior to the white race. This sense of white inferiority rationalized the enslavement of Africans. African women, men, and children were often raped, beaten, lynched, and even at times put to death to show the power and dominance the white master had over the slave. These violent acts were meant to frighten the African slave to often teach the other slaves a lesson of power and control and to let them know that if you disobey the master, this can happen to you also. Slavery eventually ended in 1963 with the Emancipation Proclamation, but it wasn’t fully abolished until 1965 with the 13th Amendment being passed in the US Constitution.
The freeing of the slaves constituted freedom de jure, but de facto slavery came into full effect in 1865-1866, when white sout...
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...as the actions of the United States government goes unnoticed, they will continue to infiltrate, disrupt, and terrorize any organization, or person that pose a threat to them.
Works Cited
"terrorism." Merriam-Webster.com. 2014. http://www.merriam-webster.com (8 May 2014).
Barnett, Ida B., and Ida B. Barnett. Southern horrors and other writings: the anti-lynching campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900. Boston, MA: Bedford Books, 1997.
Bloom, Joshua, and Waldo E. Martin. Black against empire: the history and politics of the Black Panther Party. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013.
Newton, Huey P.. Revolutionary suicide. [1st ed. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
FBI Secrets: An Agent's Expose. M. Wesley Swearingen. Boston. South End Press. 1995 http://www.cdc.gov/tuskegee/timeline.htm http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/cointel-pro-black-extremists
Wexler, Laura. 2003. Fire in a Canebrake: The Last Mass Lynching in America. Scribner; 2004. Print
According to the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum article, over 88% of the victims who were lynched in 1882 to 1951 were African Americans (“Resistance”). An activist and journalist named Ida B. Wells- Barnett sought a solution to lynching during the Reconstruction period. Throughout her writings, she expressed her beliefs about lynching and other cruel actions that were done to African Americans. Ida believed lynching was a horrible action that should not go unnoticed, so she publicized facts about racism that took place during the Reconstruction Period. Wells gained publicity about her writings, and many people became aware about the practices of lynching (“The Christian Broadcasting Network”). Therefore, Ida B. Wells is a hero in US history.
From the very beginning of time African Americans have been a culture of resistance. That is resistance from slavery, resistance from torture, and resistance from wrongdoing. Families were torn apart, women were raped, and children were tortured. In an article by Atlanta Blackst they list some of the ways African American slaves were tortures, and it’s horrifying. Some slaves were burned alive, lynched by meat hooks, castrated, and even Mutated. This is the easy part, as after being tortured they had many years of psychological suffering. They didn’t have family to turn to because they were most dead or sold to another slave
In the South, during the period 1880 to 1940, there was deep-seated and all-pervading hatred and fear of the Negro. There was an annual average of sixty-two lynchings for the years 1910 to 1919. However, beginning in 1923 lynchings bega...
When Ida B Wells wrote Southern Horrors, Lynch Law in All Its Phases, her journalistic efforts exposed corruption of the South’s actions and depicted the growing issue of racism in society during that time. As an African American women, Wells wants the public to know about the African American community`s burdens and uses journalism to her advantage to inform them of this societal issue. In Southern Horrors, Lynch Law In All Its Phases, Wells describes the case of eight African American men who are lynched based on false accusations for killing a white man and raping white women. These predispositions comes from the South`s tradition of prejudice and discrimination towards the African American community, which target and stereotype African American people as savages who should perish for their existence.
Ida B. Wells was born in 1862 in Holly Springs Mississippi to Elizabeth and James Wells. She is famous for her campaign against lynching. Ida set an example for all African – Americans to stand up for their rights in the late 1800’s. Through her tireless work on exposing the horrors of lynching, she almost single-handedly attacked and kicked off the beginning of the civil right movement and without her; there would have been a delayed start to the basic rights for African – Americans (man or woman). Eventually, her work inspired the feeling that every American can and must exercise their Civil Rights and responsibilities to make our country a better or more equal place to live.
Southern Horror s: Lynch Law in All Its Phases by Ida B. Wells took me on a journey through our nations violent past. This book voices how strong the practice of lynching is sewn into the fabric of America and expresses the elevated severity of this issue; she also includes pages of graphic stories detailing lynching in the South. Wells examined the many cases of lynching based on “rape of white women” and concluded that rape was just an excuse to shadow white’s real reasons for this type of execution. It was black’s economic progress that threatened white’s ideas about black inferiority. In the South Reconstruction laws often conflicted with real Southern racism. Before I give it to you straight, let me take you on a journey through Ida’s
Black Power has recently undergone a historiographical rebirth. Scot Brown's Fighting for US had a key impact to the evolving of Sixties. Centering on the US Organization and its frontrunner, Maulana Karenga, Brown contends that US was vital, although imperfect, part of the Black Power movement. The author uses the US Organization to show Black Nationalism as a diverse set of correlated principles, and he strives to change its history beyond the sectarianism that plagued the movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Brown presents a narrative that succeeds in recovering Karenga and US as key factors in twentieth-century Black politics.
In the words of Miss Ida B. Wells: The student of American sociology will find the year of 1894 marked by a pronounced awakening of the public conscience to a system of anarchy and outlawry which had grown during a series of ten years to be so common, that scenes of unusual brutality failed to have any visible effect upon the humane sentiments of the people of our land. She is depicting a period of time in American history stained with the blood of hundreds of free African American men, women and children. These people were unjustly slaughtered through the practice of lynching within the South. Wells was an investigative journalist and was involved in exploring, reporting, publishing literature on, and eventually campaigning against the tragedy that became lynching. Through initial research she became aware of these atrocities occurring as spectacle within an alarmingly large, and even more notably, segregated, population of the United States. She dedicated over a decade to her cause, publishing three pamphlets in eight years, while also traveling to England twice to gain support for her anti-lynching campaign. In reading her work, one may get the feeling that Wells really was a master of her craft. She became aware of an extremely barbaric aspect of society, and she utilized every asset available to her in order to expose the facts surrounding the half-truths and whole lies established to justify this inhumane act. She diligently gathered the truth and compiled her writing very carefully. Using reliable statistics employed to document the atrocious number of these occurrences and actual accounts of individual events used to precisely convey the gruesome details of the crimes, she put forth exceptionally convincing arguments an...
The Black Panther Party, which was co-founded by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale in 1966, was a political party that pushed to overcome social oppression. After the assassination of Black activist Malcom X, the Panthers decided they had enough of seeing their race be denied the freedom they deserved. Members of the Black Panthers were tired of a society that continued to consider them “niggers.” They were tired of not having the chance to get out of poverty and live comfortably. They were tired of not getting a quality education that public schools in America should’ve been providing them. They were tired of being beaten, harassed, and unruly discriminated against by police solely because of the color of their skin. They wanted to live in the beautiful nation that America appeared to be for Whites. They wanted freedom and equality for African-Americans.
Close your eyes. What image comes to mind when you think of the Black Panther Party? Many people today envision a male figure with association to violence: a powerful man with a gun in hand while wearing the Panther’s signature black beret. This image is formed through the thousands of posters and t-shirts once worn as a form of propaganda. The Black Panther Party may have been seen as a prominently male organization, but to everyone’s surprise it was two-thirds female.
In 1966, a national political organization was founded by two black men named Huey New. This document was mainly about a set of ten different requisitions the Black Panther , mainly fighting for Self-defense, established . These ten points are requirements that the Organization believed was necessary for the black community to be treated as equal and fairly. In the document, Newton addresses that they need ten basic things such as freedom, “Power to determine the destiny of the black and oppressed communities”( Newton, 1966). He also claims that they need employment, decent living conditions starting with safe and decent housings, education, health care and son on. This document is crucially important because it shows that in the mid 60’s the Black community started to affirm their social rights and needs more and with firmness.
The readings for the week of April 12th were The Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program a primary source and and Robyn Spencer’s Merely One Link in the Worldwide Revolution. The Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program is a list of demands that ways of operations for the party. The second reading links the Black Freedom Struggle to international events such as the decolonization of African countries and the Cold War. Throughout the texts and our in-class discussion we see the themes of communism, internationalism, racial capitalism and the human rights, civil rights struggle and their relationship with the Black Freedom Movement.
Terrorism has influenced civilizations throughout history and has even started wars. In 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, who was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in Sarajevo. They were killed by Gavrilo Princip, who was one of six assassins. Their goal was to have Austria-Hungary to create a South-Slav provinces and eventually turn it into a Greater Serbia or a Yugoslavia . These helped start World War I Terrorists are individuals or organizations that use violence as a tactic to achieve political goals. These terrorists are often involved in mass killings and have a trained military. In the our nation’s 237 year history, America has had its fair share of terrorist attacks, but how has terrorism affected American society, government, and international relations.
These struggles lead to the formation of the Black Panther Party. The Black peoples struggle for equality awakened American imperialism to its true hidden flaws throughout the 1960’s. giving Anti-imperialists groups with black, brown, yellow and white individuals who were in small sector of conscious, anti-revisionist