• The Associated Press wrote, “Five White Men Take Negro Into Woods; Kill Him: Had Been Charges with Associating with White Women!” This headline described a lynching in Shreveport, La.,

• The New York World Telegram wrote, “Negro Is Slain By Texas Posse: Victim’s Heart Removed After His Capture By Armed Men.” That headline appeared in 1933.

• The Atlanta Constitution wrote, “Negro and White Scuffle: Negro is Jailed, Lynched.”
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This week, Dr. Cynthia Tyson sent me a piece about Albert Einstein, the brilliant physicist who discovered the Theory of Relativity. While we all know about his work as a physicist, few of us know that he spoke out about racism, which he called the “American disease.”

It seems that in 1946, Dr. Einstein visited Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, a college located about 60 miles from the prestigious Princeton University. Dr. Einstein almost never spoke at universities, because he was too busy, because it seemed like a venue to be showy or arrogant, and because he was in frequent pain from an abdominal aneurysm, which eventually killed him.
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Andrew Jackson, who was President of the United States from 1829 to 1837, believed strongly that the Bible justified oppression of not only Black people, but American Indians as well. He passed himself off as one who really knew the Bible; he would boast that he had read three chapters of the Bible every day for 35 years prior to his election as President. Victories he had as a soldier he attributed to God; when his forces had defeated forces from Great Britain, then the “greatest nation on the earth,” none would deny, he would say, that the outcome had been providential. He rather viewed himself as “God’s right hand,” carrying out God’s ultimate will. Destruction of people who were not even people, he reasoned, was part of that ultimate will.

Forrest G. Wood writes in “The Arrogance of Faith,” that he considered his campaigns against Indians as … Holy Wars! He resented interference in his battles from the government because it was like the government was putting itself between him and God. At the Battle of Horseshoe Run, where loss of life amongst the Indians was great, Jackson said that it was “ Providence which was dispensing partial evil to produce general good.” In a court case, The Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) the then- President refused to enforce a U.S. Supreme Court ruling which had favored the Indians.
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I’ll never forget the day when, as a nursing student, I was learning how to do injections. There was a fairly extensive section in our textbook, teaching us the mechanics of giving injections, and then there was a section subtitled, “Cultural Considerations.” In that section, we were “taught” about the difference in skin texture of different nationalities. White people were said to have thin skin, Asian skin was a little tougher, but the skin of African Americans, the book read, was very tough and so added pressure had to be used when giving them injections in order to penetrate their skin!

Imagine my nervousness, then, the first time I had to give one of “us” an injection! I had practiced giving injections to oranges (we all did), and had given actual injections to white people, but now I was faced with giving an injection to a person whose tough skin we had been warned about. With fear and trembling, then, I wet her skin with the alcohol, said a prayer, and jabbed her as hard as I could so as to “make sure” the injection had been properly given.
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I received a book this week as a present about the music which was composed during the Holocaust in Nazi Germany, and for some reason, it piqued my curiosity about whether or not there were black people in Germany during the Holocaust and how they were treated.

Lo and behold, there were blacks in Germany during that time, and some of them ended up in concentration camps!

In an article I found on the Internet, it says that blacks were “beaten, brutalized, sterilized, and murdered.” Apparently, after World War I, Germany was stripped of its African colonies, and German soldiers, returning home, went home with angry, racist attitudes. There were Africans in Germany at the time, and after World War I, the Reichstag (German parliament) began to enact laws of apartheid, making it illegal for the races to mix and specifically, making it illegal for Germans to marry Africans in the African colonies!
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The Chicago Race Riot of 1919 began on July 27th and by the time it ended, 38 people had died, 537 were injured and about 1,000 people were homeless. The federal government deployed in excess of 6,000 troops to help quell the violence which was exploding in the Loop, but more so in the city’s so-called “Black Belt.”

What spurred the conflict? The summer of 1919 was extremely hot, and people, black and white, flocked to the beaches of Lake Michigan, seeking relief. Segregation was not law in Chicago, but it was practiced in the city, and there were “white” and “black” beaches. The beach on 29th Street was a “white” beach, but on the afternoon of July 27th, 1919, a group of African American men and women went to the beach, fully intending to exercise their right to be there. They were met with people throwing stone, shouting racial epithets, and threats, but they stayed the course until they were chased off the beach by angry whites.
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We have occasionally been incensed when the United States Supreme Court has intervened in matters we think don’t belong to it; many were bothered when the high court intervened in the 2000 elections when Al Gore was repudiating the vote count in Florida, and more recently, people were mad when the high court sought to intervene in the Terri Schiavo case.

Sometimes there is a fine line separating the interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, as the Court is mandated to do, and the making of laws, as it has sometimes been accused of doing. I’m not quite sure what Chief Justice Roger B. Taney did – make a new law, negate an existing law, or make a mockery of the Constitution, but it is clear that his ruling in the historic Dred Scott case caused the Court a stain which can never be erased.
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For the next few weeks, we will be watching the confirmation proceedings of people President Bush nominates as justices to the U.S. Supreme Court. As of this writing, John Roberts’ nomination as Chief Justice is set to go before the full senate. The nominations … and appointments … of judges have huge implications for us as African Americans, and always have.

Thurgood Marshall, the first African American to be named to the nation’s highest court, knew the confirmation process well. Mr. Marshall, who successfully argued the “Brown vs. Education” case in 1954, was nominated to the High Court by then-President Lyndon B. Johnson. He is credited with breaking a 178-year old color barrier on the Supreme Court, and his work did much to transform the lives of African Americans. He is credited with defeating segregation in the one place it really mattered: the courts.
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Last week, we learned about Hamilton Naki, a black South African, who, though he had never been allowed to study in medical school because of his color, was a brilliant surgeon and teacher, working with famed cardiac surgeon, Christian Barnard.

This week, we shift back to America; although apartheid in South Africa was heinous, truly racial apartheid had roots deep in American culture. Because of their color, Americans of African descent were denied all kinds of rights and privileges, including the right and the privilege to attend school.
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Just as Jewish children are taught the horrible atrocities of the Jewish Holocaust, so should African American children be taught the atrocities of racism in America.

And just as Jewish children know … and should know … about Auscswitz, so should African American children know about Emmett Till.

Emmett Till was a 14-year old boy who lived in Chicago. In August of 1955, his mother, Mamie Till, sent him to Mississippi to visit relatives.
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This week, some of the people who were displaced by Hurricane Katrina appeared before a Congressional sub-committee and shared their feelings about what happened, including their belief that racism played a big part in how they were treated and why they were ignored for so long. New Orleans residents compared the experience with the Jewish Holocaust, saying that their experiences were a Holocaust, too. The senators and representatives, it seems from news reports, were unmoved; one lawmaker reportedly said, “Not a single person was taken from New Orleans and put into an oven,” and another senator said he found it hard to believe that soldiers held guns to the heads of suffering people.

Such is the phenomenon of denial when it comes to racism, but the fact is, racist beliefs are imbedded deep into the psyches of Americans, and many of those beliefs have a religious origin! It was Christianity which said that Africans were subhuman; a Puritan minister named Dean Berkeley said to his parishioners that they were to “consider blacks as creatures of another species.” In order to experience the “rapture,” early Christians thought, both “man and beast had to be brought under control,” and that meant subjugating Africans and Indians. The only way this subjugation could be justified was by dehumanizing them. Christian ministers said the most amazing things about Africans and Indians, including the belief that Satan possessed Indians until they became beasts!
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A few years ago, I read Randall Robinson’s book, “The Debt,” and was stunned as I read his account of how slave labor built the White House and the Capitol.

Robinson said he stood in the Rotunda of the Capitol Building, and noticed how the frescoes, the walls, the other art work, didn’t say anything, didn’t show anything to the millions of people who visit annually about the work slaves did to make those two buildings a reality. According to Robinson and according to historical fact, had not slave labor been used, our two most treasured national buildings might not have been.
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When I was a young girl, I’d hear on television people talking about “Jim Crow,” and I asked my mother over and over who Jim Crow was? I knew he couldn’t have been a good person, because every time I heard “Jim Crow,” it was related to, or in reference to, something unkind or unfair which was being done to Black people.

Turns out Jim Crow probably was a person, a white slaveowner who is said to have owned a slave which inspired the term. In 1830, a white minstrel show performer, Mr. Thomas “Daddy” Rice, blackened his face with charcoal paste or burnt coal and danced a jig while he would sing,
“Weel about and turn about and do jis so
Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow”
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I recently read an amazing book called, “Lizzie Bright and the Buckminster Boy.”

A novel written by Gary Schmidt, it is based on a true story which shows the heinousness of racism in our country.

There is in Maine a place called Malaga Island, located near the city of Phippsburg. Phippsburg at one time had a thriving economy based on the shipbuilding industry, but, as is the case in any location whose economy is based on one thing, when the shipbuilding industry began to suffer, so did the city.
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The actions of Michael Eric Rudolph, bombing abortion clinics and gay establishments … brings to mind the fact that hate crimes have always been a part of life, as has terrorism. For African Americans, terrorism took the form of cross burnings and intimidation by members of white hate groups, and in the form of lynching.

Between 1882 and 1930, there are a documented 2,805 lynchings in ten southern states. The statistics indicate that, though some 300 white men and women were lynched in that time, the majority were African American men, women and children, and that on the average, a Black person was murdered once a week.
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The year was 1946.
George Dorsey was 28 years old and had fought in World War II. He had been home only six months. He, his wife Mae, 23, his sister, Dorothy Dorsey Malcom, 20, and Roger Malcom, 24, were out together. Dorothy was the wife of Roger.

The place was Walton County, Georgia, on the Moore’s Ford Bridge.
Roger had been accused of stabbing a white farmer during a fight, but he had been bailed out of jail by a white landowner. This same white landowner, Loy Harrison, was apparently driving the car holding the four black people when it was stopped and its occupants dragged out when the car got to the bridge. It is unclear why Harrison bailed Mr. Malcom out – if he was sympathetic to Malcom or if he was part of the Ku Klux Klan.
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It is the most amazing story.
This week, at the Haley Farm gathering of the Children’s Defense Fund(CDF), I was privileged to meet Ruby Bridges, the now-grown woman who, at age 6, integrated an all-white school in New Orleans, Louisiana.

She was introduced at the end of the morning Bible study. Marian Wright Edelman, the founder of the CDF, came to the podium and introduced her. It was an electric moment; the whole crowd was deafeningly silent for a few seconds, and then burst into tearful, thunderous applause.
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Last week, we talked about the nation’s first race riot, but one of the worst race riots in the history of this nation happened in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921.
Tulsa was a city in which African Americans thrived. The “Greenwood District,” located in Tulsa, was an area teeming with Black businesses. It was known across the nation as the “Black Wall Street,” because of its economic success.

Perhaps it was jealousy of this economic success on the part of whites which led to the Tulsa race riot of 1921. On May 31 of that year, 19-year old Dick Rowland, a Black shoe-shiner, was trying to get onto an elevator. Apparently, it hadn’t stopped even with the floor and when he tried to get on, he tripped and fell onto Sarah Page, 17, the white elevator operator. Sarah was taken aback and thought that Mr. Rowland was trying to assault her. She picked up her purse and began swinging at him, and he grabbed her arm to get her to stop, trying futilely to tell her that he had merely tripped and had not tried to harm her.
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