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Race Inquiry Digest (Feb 20) – Important Current Stories On Race In America

February 20, 2023

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Who’s Afraid of Black History? By Henry Louis Gates Jr. / NYT

No single group or person was more pivotal to “the dissemination of the truths of Confederate history, earnestly and fully and officially,” than the historian general of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, Mildred Lewis Rutherford, of Athens, Ga. Rutherford was a descendant of a long line of slave owners.

Of the more than 25 books and pamphlets that Rutherford published, none was more important than “A Measuring Rod.” Published in 1920, her user-friendly pamphlet was meant to be the index “by which every textbook on history and literature in Southern schools should be tested by those desiring the truth.” Rutherford wished for nothing less than the power to summon the apparatus of the state to impose her strictures on our country’s narrative about the history of race and racism. Mr. DeSantis has that power and has shown his willingness to use it. And it is against this misguided display of power that those of us who cherish the freedom of inquiry at the heart of our country’s educational ideal must take a stand. Read more 

Related: DeSantis vs. College Board: Part of larger battle over ethnic studies. By Alia Wong and Nirvi Shah / USA Today

Related: DeSantis’ attack on schools borrows from conservative think tanks. By Jeffrey Schweers / Orlando Sentinel

Related: As red states target Black history lessons, blue states embrace them. By Hannah Natanson / Wash Post

Political / Social

Georgia GOP senators push through installation of Clarence Thomas statue at state Capitol. By Stanley Dunlap / Georgia Recorder

The Georgia Senate passed a bill Tuesday after contentious debate that would place a statue of Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas at the state Capitol.

Atlanta Democratic Sen. Emanuel Jones called Thomas an Uncle Tom from the chamber’s floor, a derisive term for a Black person who betrays other Black people. “When we think about a person in the Black community who’s accomplished, but yet policies seek to subvert, some may even say suppress, the achievements and accomplishments of people of color; I couldn’t help but to think about that term in expressing my dissatisfaction with this particular legislation,” Jones said. Read more 

Sen. Tim Scott test drives a potential 2024 campaign message. By Allan Smith / NBC News

Sen. Tim Scott didn’t announce he is running for president here at the Charleston County GOP’s Black History Banquet on Thursday night. But at times, it sounded like he was already a candidate.

Scott, the first Black senator from South Carolina, spoke at length about his personal story of overcoming childhood poverty, his family’s perseverance through generations of racism and his entrance into politics, arguing that his experience is evidence that the country’s progress on racial issues outweighs modern-day racism. Scott also promoted the tenets of his agenda — promoting opportunity zones, conservative police reform, curbing federal spending and enacting school choice policies. Read more 

Related: Tim Scott Compares Anti-Black Racism To Treatment Of ‘Second-Class Citizen’ Republicans. By Zack Linly / Majic 94.5

Nikki Haley removed the Confederate flag. She sounds different as a candidate. By Dan Balz / Wash Post

She inveighs against suggestions that the United States is a racist nation, using that characterization as a foil to say that she instead sees an America that is “strong and proud, not weak and woke.”

When she highlights the tragic shooting at Mother Emanuel AME Church in her opening video, she speaks of her state’s turning to its basic values and religious faith for healing. Absent is any reference to what was one of the most courageous decisions she made as governor. Political campaigns are crude instruments for conversations about issues as complicated and searing as the United States’ racial history and its racial present. Haley has seen and experienced the issue her entire life. She views herself as emblematic of the country’s openness to members of all races. Whether she will address the issue with sensitivity, as she did with the Confederate flag, or instead push political hot buttons is for her to decide. Read more 

UFOs and CRT: Republicans are in a constant state of panic about the “other.” By Chauncey Devega / Salon

It’s all about scaring gullible, racist white people and feeding off of that dark energy as a way of holding power

As I watched how our national UFO panic threatened to become a repeat of the Battle of Los Angeles, I immediately thought about legal scholar and attorney Derrick Bell and his provocative science fiction short story “The Space Traders.” Published in 1992, “The Space Traders” explores racism and white supremacy and the very precarious citizenship and belonging that Black people are subjected to here in the United States. The book was also made into a 33-minute movie that was part of HBO’s now cult classic film anthology “Cosmic Slop” in 1994. Read more 

Related: In DeSantis’ Florida, Black residents sicker, poorer, less educated. It’s getting worse. By Wayne Washington / The Palm Beach Post

More Black Families Are Considering Home-Schooling — And It Shouldn’t Be A Shock As To Why. By Sage Howard / HuffPost

As Gov. Ron DeSantis demonstrated in Florida, the influence toxic conservative politics has over public education is getting a little too real.

In the past, the concept of home-schooling was synonymous with the stress of forgoing one whole household income, and potential stigma for the kids. But now, it could be a viable alternative to public education, and should function as an equitable resource for Black families raising children in working-class households. But censorship of their curriculum disrupts this equity. Now, I feel I may have a better chance at fostering success for me and my child by juggling home-school and work. Read more 

Related: More students apply to historic Black colleges and universities. By Joyce E. Davis / USA Today 

Racism takes a toll on the brain, research shows. By Richard Sima / Wash Post

The chronic stress of structural racism and discrimination damages brain circuits and mental health

Racism has negatively impacted generations of people, leading to discrimination, lost economic opportunities, racist policing and incarceration, and in many cases, death. But even when the impact of racism is not so apparent or in the headlines, the pernicious effects of racial discrimination and structural racism take a toll on the brain and mental health, emerging research shows. The data are already concerning. Experiences of racial discrimination are consistently linked with mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, substance use and PTSD, as well as physical ailments such as diabetes, hypertension and obesity. Black Americans, for instance, are about twice as likely as White Americans to develop dementia. Read more 

Related: Black cardiologists are rare, but vital for Black patients. By Adriana Diaz / CBS News 

Historical / Cultural

George Washington, Slavery, and Farming. By Rebecca Dudley / AAIHS

Slave quarters, Mount Vernon, Virginia, (Wikimedia Commons)

In Washington at the Plow: The Founding Farmer and the Question of Slavery, Bruce A. Ragsdale meticulously examines Washington’s activities in farming and managing enslaved laborers. A scholar of United States colonial and revolutionary history, Ragsdale creates a new portrait of Washington, based on the founder’s letters and personal library, that offers critical insight into Washington’s vision as an agriculturalist and his motivation in liberating, upon his death in 1799 and seemingly out of nowhere, the 123 people he held in bondage. Read more 

Related: Revisiting the painful past of slavery, one reporter shares what it was like to visit a plantation. By Curtis Bunn / NBC News 

From ‘Birth of a Nation’ to ‘Till’: Confronting Racism in the White House Screening Room. By Zolan Kanno-Youngs / NYT

“History matters,” President Biden said before showing a movie about Emmett Till, whose murder galvanized the civil rights movement.

In 1915, Woodrow Wilson gathered a small crowd in the East Room of the White House to show “The Birth of a Nation,” a film celebrating the Ku Klux Klan. More than a century later, in the same room, President Biden on Thursday convened families of people killed in hate crimes for a screening of the movie “Till,” about Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy whose murder in 1955 galvanized the civil rights movement. “History matters,” Mr. Biden said before the movie began, in front of an audience that included members of Emmett’s family, student groups and community activists. “We should know everything about our history, and that’s what great nations do.” Read more 

The ‘Mississippi Plan’ to keep Blacks from voting in 1890: ‘We came here to exclude the Negro.’ By Ronald G. Shafer / Wash Post

On a hot August day in 1890, delegates gathered at Mississippi’s Capitol Building in Jackson to begin work on a new state constitution. The overriding topic was the “suffrage question.”

The convention’s president, Solomon Saladin Calhoon, a White county judge, put the voting issue bluntly. “Let’s tell the truth if it bursts the bottom of the universe,” he said. “We came here to exclude the Negro. Nothing short of this will answer.” Delegates eventually adopted a literacy test and a poll tax geared to suppress the Black vote in a state with a Black majority. The “Mississippi Plan” became the model throughout the South, part of a raft of racially oppressive Jim Crow laws that ended Reconstruction. Read more 

‘Ax Handle Saturday’: The Klan’s vicious attack on Black protesters in Florida 60 years ago. By Sydney Trent / Wash Post

A Jacksonville police officer stands with Charles Griffin after he was attacked on Aug. 27, 1960, during a lunch counter protest by civil rights activists in Florida. (Florida Historical Society)

The Florida Klansmen had armed themselves with ax handles. It was Aug. 27, 1960 — a year of lunch counter sit-ins by civil rights activists. The opening salvo had been fired on Feb. 1, when four Black college students sat down at a Whites-only lunch counter inside an F.W. Woolworth five-and-dime store in Greensboro, N.C. By spring, sit-in campaigns led by young African Americans had been organized in cities all over the South — including Lexington, Ky., Little Rock, Baltimore, Richmond and Nashville. Surprised White onlookers spat and spewed racial epithets at the demonstrators and sometimes physically attacked them. But as spring blossomed into summer, white supremacists farther South, having watched the protests achieve success elsewhere, switched to high alert. Read more 

Racism denied Auburn’s first Black student a master’s degree. Then, at 86, he returned. By DeNeen L. Brown / Wash Post

Harold A. Franklin, the first African American student admitted to Auburn University, speaks at a Black History Month event on the campus in February. (Jonah Enfinger/Auburn University Photographic Services)

With his hair now salt-and-pepper gray, Harold A. Franklin wore a red-striped tie over an elegant black suit with a handkerchief tucked in the lapel as he walked across the campus of Auburn University. This was the same campus he’d integrated more than 50 years ago, the same campus that assigned him a wing of a dormitory where he lived alone as the only Black student, and the same campus that denied him the chance to defend his master’s thesis. “Each time, I would carry my thesis to be proofread, they’d find an excuse,” said Franklin, now 86. “Sometimes, I didn’t dot an ‘i.’ One of the professors told me: ‘Yours has to be perfect because you are Black, and people will be reading yours.’ Read more 

Inside the project to honor Japanese-American history. By Emilie Ikeda / Today

Japanese interment camp. c 1943

Eighty-one years ago, Executive Order 9066 authorized the incarceration of more than 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry living in the United States during World War II. Now, for the first time, researchers have compiled all of their names in one place, giving decedents a chance to honor their family history. NBC’s Emilie Ikeda reports for TODAY. Watch here 

73 years after winning first ‘Top Gun’ competition, Black pilots are honored. By Dave Kindy / Wash Post

Pilots of the 332nd Fighter Wing who won first place for propeller-driven aircraft in a fighter gunnery meet held in Las Vegas. From left, Capt. Alva Temple, 1st Lt. James Harvey III, 1st. Lt. Harry Stewart and alternate 1st Lt. Halbert Alexander. (U.S. Air Force)

In the spring of 1949, the 332nd Fighter Group — the unit of the Tuskegee Airmen — was in Las Vegas for the inaugural Continental Air Gunnery Meet, the U.S. Air Force equivalent of the U.S. Navy’s “Top Gun” school, which would be started 20 years later. This all-Black fighter and bomber group, which trained in Tuskegee, Ala., was one of the most decorated squadrons in the segregated military during World War II. After working day and night to keep the 332nd planes flying during the competition, a few members of the ground crew decided to blow off steam at the famous Flamingo Hotel. They didn’t get far. Security guards intercepted the men as they entered and ordered them to leave. The casino was for “Whites only,” they were told. Read more 

Black Music Sunday: On President’s Day, Lester Young will always be ‘The Prez’ of jazz. By Denise Oliver Velez / Daily Kos

Lester Willis Young, one of the most influential musicians in the history of jazz, was born on August 27, 1909, in Woodville, Mississippi. 

In the jazz world we have had a Duke, a Count, and a King, but there is only one artist who was given the moniker of president, often shortened to “Pres” or “The Prez.” That man was clarinet and tenor saxophone player Lester Young. Jazz vocal legend Billie Holiday, who Lester Young dubbed “Lady Day,” was quoted about him and the source of his nickname: “In this country kings or dukes don’t amount to nothing. The greatest man around then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was the president; so I started calling Lester the President. It got shortened to Pres.” Read and listen here 

Sports

Marvin Gaye’s iconic NBA All-Star Game national anthem: ‘He turned that thing into his own.’ David Aldridge and Marcus Thompson II  / The Atheletic

For one afternoon, America’s anointed theme song had a suede soul, velvety enough to be simultaneously sexy and spiritual.

For one afternoon, patriotism masqueraded as a Motown kind of cool. The Forum in Inglewood, Calif., was graced by a superstar’s serenade, stirring together hope and love, resilience and confidence, into a concoction delightful enough to be served on the rocks. For one afternoon, the time set aside to honor America became a historic homage to the rhythm and blues of Blackness, a tribute to the resilient genius of African American culture.  And after that afternoon in Inglewood, neither “The Star-Spangled Banner” nor the NBA would ever be the same.    Read more and listen here 

Eric Bieniemy going to Washington Commanders is embarrassing for NFL  By Mike Freeman / USA Today

What I want to do is focus on the bottom line. It is sad, and pathetic, that Bieniemy has to take this job. It is humiliating for him and embarrassing for the NFL.

On paper, Eric Bieniemy taking the Washington Commanders offensive coordinator position makes sense. He’ll call plays for the first time in his NFL coaching career and it will eradicate excuse No. 1.7 million on why he hasn’t been hired as a head coach. Of all the excuses used to not hire Bieniemy – he doesn’t interview well, Andy Reid is the true offensive genius. Bieniemy has coached in Super Bowls and he was Mahomes’ coordinator. In almost all situations, the offensive coordinator gets a nice share of credit for these things. But in the NFL coaching world, credit isn’t always given when you’re Black. Read more 

Related: A lost generation of Black coaching talent. By Dave Sheinin / Wash Post 

Howard University’s All-Black Swim Team Makes The Cover Of Sports Illustrated, A First For The Magazine. By Stephanie Holland / The Root

The program makes history as the first all-Black swim team to appear on the Sports Illustrated’s cover.

For HBCU athletic programs, it’s a constant struggle to even the playing field with their counterparts at predominantly white institutions. It’s a non-stop fight for recognition, money and top-level recruits. Now, Howard University is being recognized with an achievement usually reserved for big-money college basketball and football programs: its Swim and Dive Team is the first all-Black swim team to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Read more 

Tiger Woods Is Back. He’s Still a Work in Progress. By Alan Blinder / NYT

Woods shot a two-under-par 69 on Thursday and a 74 on Friday at the Genesis Invitational. Every stroke was research for the bigger ambitions that still linger.

The world’s 1,294th-ranked golfer arrived at the tee box on Thursday afternoon. The No. 2 player, Rory McIlroy, was there, too. So was Justin Thomas, ranked seventh. But the 47-year-old man wedged between William Nygard and Marcos Montenegro in the Official World Golf Ranking still believed, however fantastically, that he could win the Genesis Invitational, a tournament he had never conquered. Less than two years ago, the notion of Woods walking a course with Thomas, or anyone else, in PGA Tour competition seemed distant. Professional golf does not ordinarily pair well with a quick recovery from a car wreck, particularly a wreck that nearly cost one of the sport’s finest players a leg, and the physical toll of competition has appeared immense. Read more 

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