with them. www.rewindexhibition.com
. Online. Contact .... the Russian conquest of Central Asi
REWIND.
LEANING INTO THE SHARP EDGES
PROLIFERATION 2009
INTRODUCTION Contact Online
[email protected] www.rewindexhibition.com
Paul Rucker’s exhibition, “Rewind,” visually embodies America’s uncomfortable history regarding issues of social justice. Using text, video and sculptural installations, Rucker re-envisions and reimagines past historical events and alludes to their relationship with current issues of power and injustice in America. Created over many years, “Rewind” represents the largest collection of Rucker’s work to date
and is a powerful catalyst for community dialogue in light of the social violence that has recently permeated the news media. Rucker produced this newspaper as a companion piece to the show. It contains additional information about each work and is intended to be a resource. Viewers are encouraged to take a copy of the newspaper with them.
ARTIST CONTRIBUTORS
CREDITS
Paul Rucker
Aaron Bourget / Video Editing Joel Cain / Wood Fabrication Michelle de la Vega / Video, Fabrication Eric Dyer / Zoetrope Transfer & Editor Nathan Eyring / Animation, Video, Colorization, Concepts Evan Roche / Fabrication Margaret Rucker / Seamstress, Clothing Fabrication
INSTALLATION ASSISTANCE
Jeffrey Kent
CNC PRODUCTION
Sean Aydlott Evan Roche
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Shiva Nallaperumal Nathan Eyring
RESEARCH ASSISTANCE
Michelle de la Vega Janice Fournier Rose Heyer Nathan Eyring
COPY EDITOR VIDEO DOCUMENTATION PHOTO DOCUMENTATION & WEB DESIGN SPECIAL THANKS TO
Janice Fournier Lee Boot RaRah Willian G. Baker, Jr. Memorial Fund, creators of the Baker Artist Awards, Jane Brown, Neil Didriksen, Connie Imboden, Liz Lerman, Creative Alliance, staff and fellow artists inresidence at Creative Alliance, Leslie King Hammond, Samuel Hoi, Doreen Bolger, contributors to the Souper Fundraiser, Greater Baltimore Cultural Alliance, Pat and Melinda Hannigan, Eldora Rucker, Margaret Rucker, Martyca Champion, Jason Rucker, Perrin & Associates Fine Violins, Lania D’Agostino, and all the individuals and arts organizations that have supported my work over the years.
CONTENTS 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30
Forward The Middle Passage King Cotton Slavers Little Known Convict Lease, Separate But Equal, Segregation The Ku Klux Klan: First Klan The Ku Klux Klan: Second Klan The Ku Klux Klan: Third Klan, Current Klan, Storm In a Time of Shelter Eeny, Meeny, Miny, Moe, Birth of a Nation Proliferation, Density Soundless Series Soundless Series Soundless Series Soundless Series The Haunted Oak Using Science Final Words Final Words Excessive Use Excessive Use Police, Slave Branding Slave Patrol, Nat Turner Lynching Mother & Son, Leo Frank Story Runaway Slaves Classified Ads Stories From the Trees 1 & 2 One Less Thing To Worry About
1
Coca Cola donated to KKK event
FOREWORD Paul Rucker is an artist on a very determined mission not just to create compelling works of art but works that prod and provoke the mind, body, spirit and conscious of this ethically embattled world of the 21st century. The geographical focus of Rucker’s intellectual, moral and political concerns interrogate iconic images that signify terror and abuses to the civil rights of citizens of these United States of America. Every day issues of social justice are becoming increasingly critical to people from all walks of life and every sector of the world. In many ways, the artists in contemporary society find themselves acting as thought leaders and catalysts for change. Paul Rucker’s Empathy Project moved the MICA community to engage and to connect with another human being or situation alien to their own sense of being. REWIND is the next phase of this artist’s journey of discovery and engagement. Rucker’s work is not necessarily to be liked...the issues he selects through his aesthetic process are hard, difficult and uncomfortable. There is in Paul Rucker’s work ethic an important similarity to that of the philosopher Arthur Danto. In 2003 Danto observed that, “Even when I have reservations about the work I write about...my task is to give my readers something to think about - about art, about life, and about the relationships between them.” To that end, so too is the mission of the artist to raise the consciousness of the community about the meanings of art, life, relationships... and truth.
LESLIE KING HAMMOND, PhD Graduate Dean Emerita Maryland Institute College of Art Senior Fellow Robert W. Deutsch Foundation 2
MIDDLE MiddlePASSAGE Passage
STRING QUARTET String Quartet q = 80
Violin 1 VIOLIN I
Violin VIOLIN II 2
Violin VIOLIN III 3
Cello CELLO
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PAUL RUCKER PAUL RUCKER
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THE MIDDLE PASSAGE
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The “Middle Passage” was the transatlantic stage of the triangular trade in which millions of people from Africa were shipped to the New World as part of the Atlantic slave trade. It was considered a time of in-betweenness for those being traded from Africa to America. The total number of African deaths directly attributable to the Middle Passage voyage is estimated at up to two million. The duration of the transatlantic voyage varied widely, from one to six months depending on weather conditions. The journey became more efficient over the centuries; while an average transatlantic journey of the early sixteenth century lasted several months, by the nineteenth century the crossing often required fewer than six weeks. Typical slave ships contained several hundred slaves with about thirty crew members. The male captives were normally chained together
>X- X X X X Xj - >- > > > >
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in pairs to save space—right leg to the next man’s left leg—while the women and children may have had somewhat more room. The captives were fed beans, corn, yams, rice, and palm oil. Slaves were fed one meal a day with water, but if food was scarce, slaveholders would get priority over the slaves. Sometimes captives were allowed to move around during the day, but many ships kept the shackles on throughout the arduous journey. Disease and starvation due to the length of the passage were the main contributors to the death toll with amoebic dysentery and scurvy causing the majority of deaths. Additionally, outbreaks of smallpox, syphilis, measles, and other diseases spread rapidly in the close-quarter compartments. Most contemporary historians estimate that between 9.4 and 12 million Africans arrived in the New World.
1 Plan of the Lower Deck with the stowage of 292 slaves and 130 of these people were stowed under shelves (See 2). 2 Plan showing the stowage of 130 additional slaves around the wings and sides of the lower deck by means of platforms or shelves.
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1 8th Census of the United States (1860)
KING COTTON
“King Cotton” was a slogan used during the American Civil War by the Confederacy (1860–61) to support secession from the United States. The argument was that an independent Confederate States of America could prosper economically from cotton exports and, in the process, ruin the textile industry of New England. More importantly, cotton would also force Great Britain and France to support the Confederacy in the Civil War, because their industrial economies depended on cotton textiles. Senator James Henry Hammond of South Carolina made this famous boast in 1858: “Without firing a gun, without drawing a sword, should they make war on us, we could bring the whole world to our feet... What would happen if no cotton was furnished for three years? ...England would topple headlong and carry the whole civilized world with her save the South. No, you dare not to make war on cotton. No power on the earth dares to make war upon it. Cotton is King.” The American South is known for its long, hot summers and rich soils in river valleys, which makes it an ideal location for growing cotton. By 1860, Southern plantations supplied 75% of the world’s cotton, with shipments from New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, and a few other ports. The insatiable European demand for cotton was a result of the Industrial
2 Detail from the $100 Confederate bill.
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Revolution, which created the machinery and factories to process raw cotton into clothing that was better and cheaper than hand-made product. European and New England purchases soared from 720,000 bales in 1830, to 2.85 million bales in 1850, to nearly 5 million in 1860. Cotton production renewed the need for slavery after the tobacco market declined in the late 18th century. The more cotton grown, the more slaves were needed to pick the crop. By 1860, on the eve of the American Civil War, cotton accounted for almost 60% of American exports, representing a total value of nearly $200 million a year. When war broke out, the Confederates refused to allow the export of cotton to Europe. The idea was that this cotton diplomacy would force Europe to intervene. However, European states did not intervene, and following Abraham Lincoln’s decision to impose a Union blockade, the South was unable to market its millions of bales of cotton. The production of cotton increased in other parts of the world, such as India and Egypt, to meet the demand, and new profits in cotton was among the motives of the Russian conquest of Central Asia. The South blundered during the war because it clung too long to faith in King Cotton. Because the South’s long-range goal was a world monopoly of cotton, it devoted valuable land and slave labor to growing cotton instead of urgently needed foodstuffs. In the end, “King Cotton” proved to be a delusion that misled the Confederacy into a war it eventually lost.
“ NO POWER ON THE EARTH DARES TO MAKE WAR UPON COTTON. COTTON IS KING.” James Henry Hammond Senetor, South Carolina 1858
A slaver is a dealer in or an owner of slaves, which are people who are treated as property. Slavers have existed in many cultures and emerged before written history. (In many cultures, slavers still exist in a variety of forms.) In the United States the vast majority of slavers were of Euro-Caucasian descent, owning black slaves imported from Africa. They practiced the legal institution of chattel slavery that existed in the 18th and 19th centuries. Chattel slavery, also called traditional slavery, is thus named because people are treated as the chattel (personal property) of an owner and are bought and sold as if they were commodities. In the United States, slavers were commonly brutal, engaging in whipping and execution of slaves, and sexual abuse of women, including rape. Slavers feared slave rebellions and attempts at escape. Most slavers sought to minimize slaves’ exposure to the outside world in order to reduce the risk of rebellion. The desire was to eliminate slaves’ dreams and aspirations, restrict access to information about other slaves and rebellions, and stifle their
mental faculties. In some cases, slavers also prohibited religious gatherings without a white person present, for fear that such meetings could facilitate communication and lead to rebellion. By law, slavers could be fined for not punishing recaptured runaway slaves. Slave codes authorized or required violence. After the Revolutionary War, abolitionist laws and sentiment gradually spread in the Northern states, while the rapid expansion of the cotton industry after 1800 led Southern slavers to continue to depend on slavery as integral to their economy, and they attempted to extend it as an institution into the new Western territories. The United States was polarized into slave and free states along the Mason-Dixon Line, which separated Maryland (slave) and Pennsylvania (free). After 1820, in response to the inability to import new slaves from Africa following prohibition of the international slave trade, some slavers improved the living conditions of their slaves, in an effort to influence them not to attempt escape.
SLAVERS
3 $100 Confederate bill
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LITTLE KNOWN
IN THE SOUTH, CHILDREN ENTERED FIELDWORK BETWEEN THE AGES OF 8 AND 12.
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In the American South before the Civil War, half of all U.S. slaves were under the age of 16. Half of all slave children grew up apart from their father, either because he lived on another plantation, had been sold away, or was white. On large plantations, infants and very young children were supervised and cared for by adults other than their parents. Children as young as two or three might work at domestic chores, including childcare or collecting trash and kindling, toting water, scaring away birds, weeding, or plucking grubs off of plants. Generally, in the U.S. South, children entered fieldwork between the ages of eight and 12. During adolescence, a majority of slave youth were sold or hired away. Deprived of an adequate diet, slave children were very small by modern standards. Slave mothers suffered high rates of spontaneous abortions, stillbirths, and deaths shortly after birth due to chronic undernourishment. Half of all slave infants weighed less than 5.5 pounds at birth. In addition, slave children received harsh punishments, not dissimilar from those meted out to adults. Like children of the Holocaust, they played games that helped them cope with slavery’s oppressions, including mock auctions or games that included whipping. Through folk tales, such as the famous “Br’er Rabbit” stories, parents taught their children how to outwit more powerful adversaries. Their songs, too, helped them deal with slavery’s horrors. One song included the following lyrics that addressed the subject of family separation directly: “Mammy, is Ole’ Massa gwin’er sell us tomorrow? / Yes, my chile. / Whar he gwin’er sell us? / Way down South in Georgia.”
CONVICT LEASE SEPARATE BUT EQUAL
Convict leasing was a system of penal labor practiced in the Southern United States, beginning with the emancipation of slaves at the end of the American Civil War in 1865, peaking around 1880, and officially ending in the last state, Alabama, in 1928. It persisted in various forms until president Franklin D. Roosevelt abolished it during World War II; Mississippi State Prison was the last prison to end it in 1944. Convict leasing provided prisoner labor to private parties, such as plantation owners and corporations. The lessee was responsible for feeding, clothing, and housing the prisoners. Corruption, lack of accountability, and racial violence resulted in “one of the harshest and most exploitative labor systems known in American history.” Due to “vigorous and selective enforcement of laws and discriminatory sentencing,” African Americans, mostly adult males, made up the vast majority— but not all—of the convicts leased. Farmers and businessmen needed to find replace-
ments for the labor force once their slaves had been freed. Some southern legislatures passed Black Codes to restrict free movement of blacks and force them into employment with whites. If convicted of vagrancy, blacks could be imprisoned, and they also received sentences for a variety of petty offenses. States began to lease convict labor to the plantations and other facilities seeking labor, as the freedmen were trying to withdraw and work for themselves. This provided the states with a new source of revenue during years when they were financially strapped, and lessees profited by the use of forced labor at below market rates. The sole aim of convict leasing “was financial profit to the lessees who exploited the labor of the prisoners to the fullest, and to the government which sold the convicts to the lessees.” The practice became widespread and was used to supply labor to farming, railroad, mining, and logging operations throughout the South.
Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), is a landmark United States Supreme Court decision upholding the constitutionality of state laws requiring racial segregation in public facilities under the doctrine of “separate but equal”. In 1890, the state of Louisiana passed a law that required separate accommodations for blacks and whites on railroads, including separate railway cars. A group of prominent black, creole, and white New Orleans residents formed the Committee of Citizens dedicated to repeal the law. They persuaded Homer Plessy, a man of mixed race, to participate in an orchestrated test case. Plessy was born a free man and was an “octoroon” (seven-eighths European descent and one-eighth African). However, under Louisiana law, he was classified as black, and thus required to sit in the “colored” car. With cooperation of the railroad company which opposed the segregation law because it would require the purchase of more cars, the Committee of Citizens organized a scenario in which Homor Plessy would board a whites only car and be arrested by a detective planted and instructed by the committee. As planned, on June 7, 1892, the train was stopped, Plessy was taken off the train at Press and Royal streets, and Plessy was remanded for trial in Orleans Parish. In his case, Homer Adolph Plessy v. The State of Louisiana, lawyers argued that the state law which required East Louisiana Railroad to segregate trains had denied him his rights under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth amendments of the United States Constitution, which
provided for equal treatment under the law. However, the judge presiding over his case, ruled that Louisiana had the right to regulate railroad companies while they operated within state boundaries. The Committee of Citizens appealed the case to the state Supreme Court, where it was rejected and went on to a final appeal to the United States Supreme Court. In the seven-to-one decision handed down on May 18, 1896 (Justice David Josiah Brewer did not participate because of the death of his daughter), the Court rejected Plessy’s arguments based on the Fourteenth Amendment, seeing no way in which the Louisiana statute violated it. In addition, the majority of the Court rejected the view that the Louisiana law implied any inferiority of blacks, in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Instead, it contended that the law separated the two races as a matter of public policy. Plessy legitimized the state laws establishing racial segregation in the South and provided an impetus for further segregation laws. Legislative achievements won during the Reconstruction Era were erased through means of the “separate but equal” doctrine. The doctrine had been strengthened also by an 1875 Supreme Court decision that limited the federal government’s ability to intervene in state affairs, guaranteeing only Congress the power “to restrain states from acts of racial discrimination and segregation.” The ruling basically granted states legislative immunity when dealing with questions of race, guaranteeing the states’ right to implement racially separate institutions, requiring them only to be “equal.”
Racial segregation was a system derived from the efforts of white Americans to keep black Americans in a subordinate status by denying them equal access to public facilities and ensuring that blacks lived apart from whites. During the era of slavery, most African Americans resided in the South, mainly in rural areas. Under these circumstances, segregation was necessary because the boundaries between free citizens and people held in bondage were clear.
However, free people of color, located chiefly in cities and towns of the North and Upper South, experienced segregation in various forms. By the time the Supreme Court ruled in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857) that African Americans were not U.S. citizens, northern whites had excluded blacks from seats on public transportation, and barred their entry, except as servants, from most hotels and restaurants.
1 Handmade Judge gavel, circa 1860, Thomas R. Pickering.
SEGREGATION
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The Ku Klux Klan (KKK or The Klan) is the name of three distinct movements in the United States. 1 Press photographs of a Ku Klux Klan parade in 1925.
THE KU KLUX KLAN
THE FIRST KLAN
The first KKK began violence against African Americans in the South during the 1860s Reconstruction Era, and died out by the early 1870s. It was founded in1865 in Pulaski, Tennessee by six veterans of the Confederate Army. Members made their own, often colorful, costumes: robes, masks, and conical hats, designed to be outlandish and terrifying, and to hide identities. A secret vigilante group, the Klan targeted freedmen and their allies; it sought to restore white supremacy by threats and violence against black and white Republicans. They worked to curb the education and economic advancement
of blacks, as well as the right of blacks to vote and to keep and bear arms. It had no membership rosters, no chapters, and no local officers. There were never hierarchical levels or centralized headquarters, but the Klan spread into nearly every southern state, launching a “reign of terror against Republican leaders both black and white.” In 1870 and 1871, the federal government passed the Force Acts, which were used to prosecute Klan crimes and suppress Klan activity. Historian Elaine Frantz Parsons describes the membership: Lifting the Klan mask revealed a chaotic multitude of anti-black vigilante groups,
disgruntled poor white farmers, wartime guerrilla bands, displaced Democratic politicians, illegal whiskey distillers, coercive moral reformers, sadists, rapists, white workmen fearful of black competition, employers trying to enforce labor discipline, common thieves, neighbors with decades-old grudges, and even a few freedmen and white Republicans who allied with Democratic whites or had criminal agendas of their own. Indeed, all they had in common, besides being overwhelmingly white, southern, and Democratic, was that they called themselves, or were called, Klansmen.
2 Illustration from Thomas Dixon’s The Clansman: An American Drama (1905) that inspired D.W. Griffith’s film The Birth of a Nation (1915)
IN THE 1920S THE KLAN INCLUDED 4-5 MILLION MEMBERS 8
1 Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate fighter, slave trader, millionaire and the Klan’s first Grand Wizard (Leader)
2 Thomas Dixon, Southern Baptist minister and Playwrite who penned The Clansmen.
THE SECOND KLAN
The second Klan movement was a very large, controversial, nationwide organization in the 1920s. It was founded near Atlanta, Georgia in 1915 by William Joseph Simmons, with fifteen “charter members.” The second Klan adopted a modern business system of recruiting, and rapidly grew nationwide at a time of prosperity in the early and mid-1920s. During this time, the group adopted the standard white costume along with code words from the first Klan. (Sales of the costumes, together with initiation fees, financed the movement.) Cross burnings and mass parades were added. Its appeal was directed exclusively at white Protestants, preaching “One Hundred Percent Americanism.” The second Klan was a formal fraternal organization, with a national and state structure. At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation’s eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men.
The second Klan’s anti-black, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic agendas were reactions to new issues of urbanization, immigration, and industrialization. The massive immigration of Catholics and Jews from eastern and southern Europe and the Great Migration of African Americans to the North led to white Protestant fears about jobs, housing, and social competition. Most Klansmen were lower- to middle-class whites who were trying to protect their jobs and housing from the waves of newcomers to industrial cities. The cross had never been used as a symbol by the first Klan. The second Klan embraced the practice of burning a Latin cross primarily as a symbol of intimidation. It was loosely based on ancient Scottish clans’ burning a St. Andrew’s cross (X-shaped) as a beacon to muster forces for war. It was adopted as a 1920s Klan
ritual modeled after the film The Birth of a Nation, which inaccurately portrayed the first Klan practicing cross burning. Many groups and leaders, including prominent Protestant ministers such as Reinhold Niebuhr in Detroit, spoke out against the Klan, gaining national attention. Though most members of the KKK saw themselves as holding to American values and Christian morality, virtually every Christian denomination officially denounced the Ku Klux Klan. The formation of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People also effectively campaigned against the Klan and its agendas. Internal divisions, criminal behavior by leaders, and external opposition brought about a collapse in membership, which had dropped to about 30,000 by 1930.
3 White Supremacy and Negro Subordination by John H. Van Evrie, physician and defender of slavery.
4 Adverstisement for Forrest & Maples, the slave trading business that made Nathan Forrest a millionaire.
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THE KU KLUX KLAN
THE THIRD KLAN
Numerous independent local groups opposing the Civil Rights Movement and desegregation used the “Ku Klux Klan” name, especially in the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, they forged alliances with Southern police departments and governors’ offices and operated with impunity. To combat local and state support of the Klan, the government revived the Force Acts and the Klan Act from Reconstruction days, which federal prosecutors used effectively as a basis for investigations and indictments of Klan activities and members. Once African Americans secured federal legislation to protect civil and voting rights, the KKK shifted its focus to opposing court-ordered busing to desegregate schools, affirmative action and more open immigration. CURRENT KLAN
The current Klan manifestation consists of numerous small, unconnected groups that use the KKK name. They have all emphasized secrecy and distinctive costumes. All have called for purification of American society, and all are considered right wing. Today, many sources classify the Klan as a “subversive or terrorist organization.” Researchers estimate that there may be 150 Klan chapters with upwards of 5,000 members nationwide, with about two-thirds of KKK members concentrated in the Southern United States and another third situated primarily in the lower Midwest. Many KKK groups have formed strong alliances with other white supremacist groups, such as neo-Nazis, adopting the look and emblems of white power skinheads. For some time, the Klan’s numbers have been steadily dropping. This decline has been attributed to their history of violence, a proliferation of competing hate groups, their lack of competence in the use of the Internet, and a decline in the number of young racist activists who are willing to join groups at all.
STORM IN THE TIME OF SHELTER
This work is based on ‘Shelter in the Time of Storm,’ a hymn my mother knows from her experience as a church organist. (My mother is a living encyclopedia of church music.) One day in 1989, during a time when I was performing with the Augusta Opera Company, I ordered lunch to go because it was a beautiful afternoon. As I sat downtown, a reporter ran up and asked, ‘Do you know what’s going on?’ I told him I didn’t. He said, ‘There’s a Klan rally!’ I watched as the robed figures marched by—mostly white robes were used then. For this piece, I re-imagined Ku Klux Klan robes from my memories of rallies growing up in the South. The centerpiece is a charred cross inscribed with hymns that were common in my childhood. Some of these were sung by the KKK, such as ‘The Old Rugged Cross.’ A well-known photo easily found online shows a toddler dressed in a Klan robe face-to-face with a black state trooper. It made me ponder the learned aspects of fear, faith, hatred, and love. PAUL RUCKER
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1 Photograph by Todd Robertson
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1 Zoetrope from circa 1880 The Nigger and the Tiger - Made in England
EENY MEENY MINY MOE
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” is a children’s counting rhyme that has existed in various forms since well before 1820 and is common in many languages with similar-sounding nonsense syllables. Some versions of this rhyme had the word “nigger” instead of “tiger.” This version was similar to that reported as the most common version among American schoolchildren in 1888. Eeny, meena, mina, mo, Catch a nigger by the toe; If he hollers let him go, Eena, meena, mina, mo.
2 Zoetrope from circa 1880 The Nigger and the Tiger - Made in England
BIRTH OF A NATION
The Birth of a Nation is a 1915 American silent drama film directed by D. W. Griffith and based on the novel and play The Clansman, by Thomas Dixon, Jr. The film chronicles the relationship of two families in Civil War and Reconstruction era: the pro-Union Northern Stonemans and the pro-Confederacy Southern Camerons over the course of several years. The assassination of President Abraham Lincoln by John Wilkes Booth is dramatized. The film was a commercial success but was highly controversial, owing to its portrayal of black men (played by white actors in blackface) as unintelligent and sexually aggressive towards white women,
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3 Original poster for the film’s Seattle screening (1915)
and the portrayal of the Ku Klux Klan (whose original founding is dramatized) as a heroic force. There were widespread African American protests against the film in cities across the nation, such as in Boston, where thousands of white Bostonians flocked to see the film. The NAACP spearheaded an unsuccessful campaign to ban the film. The film portrays black Americans as political and cultural threats, utilizing intermarrying and voting to ultimately dominate white society. This stoked the worst fears of white Southerners of the time. In the narrative, the whites fight back by forming the Ku Klux Klan, even portraying a lynching. By the end of the
film on an election day, blacks find a line of mounted and armed Klansmen just outside their homes and are intimidated into not voting. A title card within the film states, “The former enemies of North and South are united again in defense of their Aryan birthright.” The film is also credited as one of the events that inspired the formation of the second era of the Ku Klux Klan at Stone Mountain, Georgia, in the same year. The Birth of a Nation was used as a recruiting tool for the KKK. Under Democratic President Woodrow Wilson, it was the first motion picture to be screened in the White House.
PROLIFERATION
Art can tell stories. For years I would talk about injustice by reciting numbers and statistics. When you say, “We have over 2.3 million people in prison,” it’s too large of a number to comprehend. During a residency around prison issues at the Blue Mountain Center in New York, I found some maps that I felt could help tell the story. This project shows the proliferation of the US prison system from a celestial point of view. Using different colors to indicate different eras, the viewer can clearly see the astonishing growth of this system over time. PAUL RUCKER Artist
“Paul Rucker has offered a timely commentary on the magnitude of mass incarceration and a powerful demonstration of just how new this phenomenon is. His work will help inform the national debate about the scope and wisdom of U.S. criminal justice policy. The human and fiscal costs of mass incarceration are obvious, but the sheer size of the prison population creates other, unexpected, problems. One such problem is the way that incarcerated people are counted in the Census. The Census Bureau counts people in prison as if they were residents of the communities where they are incarcerated, even though they remain legal residents of their homes. This transfers political clout to the legislative districts that host prisons, giving them a perverse incentive to defend punitive policies that experience has told us do not work. Paul Rucker’s film makes it clear that mass incarceration is a new phenomenon. And new phenomena, almost by definition, require recognition and response.” PETER WAGNER Executive Director, Prison Policy Initiative
1778 - 1900 1901 - 1940 1941 - 1980 1981 - 2005
DENSITY
Original slave density map (1860) based on the 8th Census of the United States. The highlighted red areas show slave densities of 50% or more. Along the Mississippi River, slave density was over 90% in many counties. The states of South Carolina and Mississippi had more enslaved people than free.
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SOUNDLESS SERIES SEPTEMBER 15, 1963 Birmingham Alabama
MARCH 24, 1931 Between Chattanooga & Memphis, Tennesse
January 1, 1919 -September 14, 1919 RED SUMMER
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1 September 15, 1963
Four girls—Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, and Cynthia Wesley—were killed in a bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alambama on September 15, 1963. Early that morning, four members of the United Klans of America—Bobby Frank Cherry, Thomas Blanton, Herman Frank Cash, and Robert Chambliss— planted a box of dynamite with a time delay under the steps of the church, near the basement. At about 10:22am, 26 children were walking into the basement assembly room to prepare for the sermon entitled “The Love That Forgives” when the bomb exploded. Addie Mae Collins (age 14), Denise McNair (age 11), Carole Robertson (age 14), and Cynthia Wesley (age 14) were killed in the attack, and 22 additional people were injured. A witness identified Robert Chambliss as the man who placed the bomb under
the steps of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. He was arrested but charged only with possessing 122 sticks of dynamite without a permit. On October 8, 1963, Chambliss received a hundred-dollar fine and a six-month jail sentence for having the dynamite. At the time, no federal charges were filed on Chambliss. The case remained unsolved until William Baxley was elected Attorney General of Alabama. He requested the original FBI files on the case and discovered that the organization had accumulated a great deal of evidence against Chambliss that had not been used in the original trial. In November 1977, the seemingly forgotten case of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing was brought to court. Chambliss, now aged 73, was tried again and was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Chambliss died in an Alabama prison on October 29, 1985.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The case included framing, an all-white jury, rushed trials, an attempted lynching, and an angry mob; it is frequently given as an example of an overall miscarriage of justice. On March 24, 1931, on the Southern Railway line between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, nine black youths were “hoboing” on a freight train with several white males and two white women. A fight began between the white and black groups, and the whites were kicked off the train. A posse in Paint Rock, Alabama, was given orders to “capture every Negro on the train.” The black teenagers were arrested for assault. The posse also encountered two white women, Ruby
Bates and Victoria Price, who said that the black teenagers had raped them. In the Jim Crow South, lynching of black males accused of raping or murdering whites was common, and word quickly spread of the arrest and rape story. Soon a lynch mob gathered at the jail in Scottsboro, demanding the youths be surrendered. The National Guard was called in to protect the jail. The cases were appealed and transferred back and forth between the state court and United States Supreme Courts several times. Eventually both women who had made the accusations of rape were proven to have lied. On November 21, 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted posthumous pardons to Weems, Wright and Patterson, the only Scottsboro Boys who had neither had their convictions overturned nor received a pardon.
The Red Summer race riots occurred in more than three dozen cities in the United States during the summer and early autumn of 1919. Between January 1 and September 14, 1919, white mobs lynched at least forty-three African Americans, with sixteen hanged and others shot; another eight men were burned at the stake. The states appeared powerless or unwilling to
interfere or prosecute such mob murders. The 1919 events were among the first in which blacks in number resisted white attacks. Following World War I, rapid demobilization of the military without a plan for absorbing veterans into the job market and the removal of price controls led to unemployment and inflation that increased competition for jobs. This, in addition to national media portraying returning black soldiers as Bolshevists, set the stage for the Red Summer Riots. The NAACP sent a telegram of protest to President Woodrow Wilson (who had segregated federal offices after his election and instituted discriminatory hiring):
3 January1, 1919 - September 14, 1919
“...the shame put upon the country by the mobs, including United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, which have assaulted innocent and unoffending negroes in the national capital. Men in uniform have attacked negroes on the streets and pulled them from streetcars to beat them. Crowds are reported ...to have directed
On May 18, 2000, the FBI announced that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing had been carried out by the Ku Klux Klan splinter group, the Cahaba Boys. It was claimed that four men, Robert Chambliss, Herman Cash, Thomas Blanton and Bobby Cherry had been responsible for the crime. Cash was dead but Blanton and Cherry were arrested, and both tried and convicted. Thomas E. Blanton, Jr. was tried in 2001 and found guilty at age 62 of four counts of murder and sentenced to life in prison. Bobby Frank Cherry was indicted in 2001 along with Blanton. Judge James Garrett of Jefferson County Circuit Court ruled “that Mr. Cherry’s trial would be delayed indefinitely because a court-ordered psychiatric evaluation concluded that he was mentally incompetent.” He was later convicted in 2002, sentenced to life in prison, and died in 2004.
2 March 24, 1931
attacks against any passing negro... The effect of such riots in the national capital upon race antagonism will be to increase bitterness and danger of outbreaks elsewhere. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People calls upon you as President and Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces of the nation to make statement condemning mob violence and to enforce such military law as situation demands.” W. E. B. Du Bois, an official of the NAACP and editor of its monthly magazine, published his essay “Returning Soldiers:” “We return from the slavery of uniform which the world’s madness demanded us to don to the freedom of civil garb. We stand again to look America squarely in the face and call a spade a spade. We sing: This country of ours, despite all its better souls have done and dreamed, is yet a shameful land.... We return. We return from fighting. We return fighting.”
4 June 12, 1963
James Byrd, Jr. was an African American who was murdered by three men, of whom at least two were white supremacists, in Jasper, Texas, on June 7, 1998. Shawn Berry, Lawrence Russell Brewer, and John King dragged Byrd for three miles behind a pick-up truck along an asphalt road. On June 7, 1998, Byrd, age 49, accepted a ride from Berry, Brewer, and King. Instead of taking Byrd home, the three men took Byrd to a remote county road out of town, beat him severely, urinated on him and chained him by his ankles to their pickup truck before dragging him for three miles. Brewer later claimed that Byrd’s throat had been slashed by Berry before he was dragged. However, forensic evidence suggests that Byrd had been attempting to keep his head up while being dragged, and an autopsy suggested that Byrd was alive during much of the dragging. Byrd died after his right arm
Medgar Wiley Evers was shot in the back in his driveway in by KKK member Byron De La Beckwith on June 12, 1963. Medgar was a black civil rights activist from Mississippi involved in efforts to overturn segregation at the University of Mississippi. After returning from overseas military service in World War II and completing his secondary education, he became active in the civil rights movement. In late 1954, Evers was named the NAACP’s first field secretary for Mississippi. In this position, he helped organize boycotts and set up new local chapters of the NAACP. Evers’ civil rights leadership and investigative work made him a target of white supremacists. In the weeks leading up to his death, the hostility directed towards him grew. His public investigations into the murder of Emmett Till and his vocal support of Clyde Kennard had made him a prominent black leader. On May 28, 1963, a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the carport of his home. On June 7, 1963, Evers was nearly run down by a car after he emerged from the Jackson NAACP office. In the early morning of June 12, 1963, just hours after President John F. Kennedy’s speech on national television in support of civil rights, Evers pulled into his driveway after returning from a
meeting with NAACP lawyers. Emerging from his car and carrying NAACP T-shirts that read “Jim Crow Must Go,” Evers was struck in the back with a bullet fired from an Enfield 1917 rifle; the bullet ripped through his heart. He staggered 30 feet before collapsing. He was taken to the local hospital in Jackson where he was initially refused entry because of his color, until it was explained who he was. He died in the hospital 50 minutes later. Mourned nationally, Evers was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, where he received full military honors before a crowd of more than 3,000. On June 21, 1963, Byron De La Beckwith, a fertilizer salesman and member of the White Citizens’ Council (and later of the Ku Klux Klan), was arrested for Evers’ murder. Juries composed solely of white men deadlocked twice that year on De La Beckwith’s guilt. The murder and subsequent trials caused an uproar. In 1994, 30 years after the two previous trials had failed to reach a verdict, De La Beckwith was brought to trial based on new evidence and convicted. He spent the rest of his life in prison. His murder and the resulting trials inspired civil rights protests, as well as numerous works of art, music, and film.
and head were severed when his body hit a culvert. The murderers drove on for another mile before dumping his torso in front of an African American cemetery in Jasper. Byrd’s brain and skull were found intact, further suggesting he maintained consciousness while being dragged. Brewer was executed by lethal injection for this crime by the state of Texas on September 21, 2011. King remains on Texas’ death row while appeals are pending, and Berry was sentenced to life imprisonment. Byrd’s lynching-by-dragging gave impetus to passage of a Texas hate crimes law. It later led to the federal Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, commonly known as the Matthew Shepard Act, which passed on October 22, 2009, and which President Barack Obama signed into law on October 28, 2009.
JUNE 12, 1963 Jackson, Mississippi
JUNE 7, 1998 Jasper, Texas
5 June 7, 1998
Three American civil rights workers— James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael “Mickey” Schwerner—were shot at close range on the night of June 21–22, 1964 by members of the Mississippi White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, the Neshoba County Sheriff’s Office and the Philadelphia, Mississippi Police Department. The three victims had been working on the “Freedom Summer” campaign, attempting to register African Americans to vote. At the time, most black Mississippians were denied the vote. The Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) wanted to address this problem by starting voting registration drives and setting up places called Freedom Schools, established to
educate, encourage, and register the disenfranchised black citizens. The workers’ murders sparked national outrage and a massive federal investigation, referred to by the FBI as “Mississippi Burning.” They found the bodies of the three workers 44 days after their disappearance, buried in an earthen dam near the murder site. After the state government refused to prosecute, the federal government charged 18 individuals but was able to secure convictions for only seven, who received relatively minor sentences for their actions. Public outrage over the deaths, however, assisted in the passing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
JUNE 21–22, 1964 Nashoba County Mississippi
6 June 21-22, 1964
The Groveland Four (or the Groveland Boys) were four young African-American men—Ernest Thomas, Charles Greenlee, Samuel Shepherd and Walter Irvin—who were accused of raping a 17-year-old white woman in Lake County, Florida in 1948. Thomas was killed by a posse after leaving the area. Greenlee, Shepherd, and Irvin were beaten while in jail to coerce confessions, but Irvin refused to confess falsely.
The three survivors were each convicted at trial by an all-white jury. Greenlee was sentenced to life because he was only 16 at the time of the event; Shepherd and Irvin were sentenced to death. A retrial was ordered by the United States Supreme Court after hearing their appeals, led by Thurgood Marshall of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. In 1951, Sheriff Willis McCall shot both
Shepherd and Irvin in November, 1951 while they were in his custody, saying they tried to escape. Shepherd died on the spot, and Irvin told investigators the sheriff shot them in cold blood. At the second trial, Irvin was convicted again and sentenced to death. His sentence was commuted to life by the governor in 1955. Irvin was paroled in 1968; he died in 1970 while visiting Lake County.
1948-1970 Lake County, Florida
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July 17, 2014 New York, New York
MAY 15, 1916 Waco Texas
MARCH 24, 1931 Between Chattanooga & Memphis, Tennesse
AUGUST 28, 1955 Money, Mississippi Tallahatchie River
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On July 17, 2014, Eric Garner died in Staten Island, New York, after a police officer put him in a chokehold. The New York City Medical Examiner’s Office concluded that Garner died partly as a result of the chokehold. New York City
they believed that Garner was breathing and that it would be improper to perform CPR on someone who was still breathing. He was pronounced dead on arrival at the hospital approximately one hour later. Medical examiners concluded that Garner was killed by “compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police,” though no damage to his windpipe or neck bones was found. The medical examiner ruled Garner’s death a homicide, indicating that his death was caused by the intentional actions of another person or persons. The designation of homicide by itself, however, means neither that the death was intentional nor that a crime was committed. On December 3, 2014, a grand jury decided not to indict Pantaleo. The event stirred public protests and charges of police brutality. Over 50 demonstrations have been held nationwide for Garner, while hundreds of demonstrations against police brutality in general have included Garner as a focus. The Justice Department has announced an independent federal investigation.
7 July 17, 2014
Police Department policy prohibits the use of chokeholds, and law enforcement personnel contend that it was a headlock and that no choking took place. After Garner expressed to the police that he was tired of being harassed and that he was not selling cigarettes, officers moved to arrest Garner on suspicion of selling “loosies” (single cigarettes) from packs without tax stamps. When officer Daniel Pantaleo took Garner’s wrist behind his back, Garner swatted his arms away. Pantaleo then put his arm around Garner’s neck and pulled him backwards and down onto the ground. After Pantaleo removed his arm from Garner’s neck, he pushed Garner’s head into the ground while four officers moved to restrain Garner, who repeated “I can’t breathe” eleven times while lying facedown on the sidewalk. After Garner lost consciousness, officers turned him onto his side to ease his breathing. Garner remained lying on the sidewalk for seven minutes while the officers waited for an ambulance to arrive. The officers and EMTs did not perform CPR on Garner at the scene; according to a spokesman for the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of the City of New York, this was because
Jesse Washington, a black teenage farmhand, was lynched in Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916 in what became a well-known example of racially motivated lynching. Washington was accused of raping and murdering Lucy Fryer, the wife of his white employer in rural Robinson, Texas. There were no eyewitnesses to the crime, but during his interrogation by the McLennan County sheriff, Washington signed a confession and described the location of the murder weapon. Washington was tried for murder in Waco, in a courtroom filled with furious locals. He entered a guilty plea, was quickly sentenced to death, dragged out of the court by observers and lynched in front of Waco’s city hall. Over 10,000 spectators, including city officials and police, gathered to watch the attack. There was a celebratory atmosphere at the event. Members of the
mob castrated Washington, cut off his fingers, and hung him over a bonfire. He was repeatedly lowered and raised over the fire for about two hours. After the fire was extinguished, his charred torso was dragged through the town and parts of his body were sold as souvenirs. A professional photographer took pictures as the event unfolded, providing rare imagery of a lynching in progress. The pictures were printed and sold as postcards in Waco. The lynching drew a large crowd, numbering 15,000 at its peak. The crowd included the mayor and the chief of police, although lynching was illegal in Texas. Sheriff Fleming told his deputies not to stop the lynching, and no one was arrested after the event. The sheriff’s actions may have been motivated by a desire to deal harshly with crime to help his candidacy for re-election that year. Mayor John Dollins
may have also encouraged the mob, owing to the belief that a lynching would be politically beneficial. As the lynching occurred at midday, children from local schools walked downtown to observe, some climbing into trees for a better view. Many parents approved of their children’s attendance, hoping that the lynching would reinforce a belief in white supremacy. Some white Texans saw participation in a lynching as a rite of passage for young men. Although supported by many Waco residents, the lynching was condemned by newspapers around the United States. Historians have noted that Washington’s death helped alter the way that lynching was viewed; the publicity it received curbed public support for the practice, and lynching became regarded as barbarism rather than as an acceptable form of justice.
The Scottsboro Boys were nine black teenagers accused of rape in Alabama in 1931. The landmark set of legal cases from this incident dealt with racism and the right to a fair trial. The case included framing, an all-white jury, rushed trials, an attempted lynching, and an angry mob; it is frequently given as an example of an overall miscarriage of justice. On March 24, 1931, on the Southern Railway line between Chattanooga and Memphis, Tennessee, nine black youths were “hoboing” on a freight train with several white males and two white women.
A fight began between the white and black groups, and the whites were kicked off the train. A posse in Paint Rock, Alabama, was given orders to “capture every Negro on the train.” The black teenagers were arrested for assault. The posse also encountered two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, who said that the black teenagers had raped them. In the Jim Crow South, lynching of black males accused of raping or murdering whites was common, and word quickly spread of the arrest and rape story. Soon a lynch mob gathered at the
jail in Scottsboro, demanding the youths be surrendered. The National Guard was called in to protect the jail. The cases were appealed and transferred back and forth between the state court and United States Supreme Courts several times. Eventually both women who had made the accusations of rape were proven to have lied. On November 21, 2013, the Alabama Board of Pardons and Paroles granted posthumous pardons to Weems, Wright and Patterson, the only Scottsboro Boys who had neither had their convictions overturned nor received a pardon.
Emmett Louis Till was a 14-year-old black boy murdered in Mississippi after reportedly flirting with a white woman. Till was from Chicago, Illinois, visiting his relatives in Money, Mississippi when he spoke to 21-year-old Carolyn Bryant, the married proprietor of a small grocery store there. Several nights later, Bryant’s husband, Roy, and his half-brother, J. W. Milam, arrived at Till’s great-uncle’s house where they took Till, transported him to a barn, beat him and gouged out one of his eyes before shooting him through the head and disposing of his body in the Tallahatchie River, weighting it with a 70-pound cotton gin fan tied around his neck with barbed wire. His body was discovered and retrieved from the river three days later. On September 23, 1955 the jury acquitted both defendants after a 67-minute deliberation; one juror said, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.” Whistle Boxes (Whistles every 67 minutes)
On March 25, 1965, Viola Fauver Gregg Liuzzo, a white Unitarian Universalist civil rights activist from Detroit, Michigan, was shot and killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan in Montgomery, Alabama. She was 39 years old. Liuzzo, a housewife and mother of five with a history of local activism, heeded the call of Martin Luther King Jr. and traveled to Selma, Alabama in the wake of the Bloody Sunday attempt
at marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge. A large part of Viola’s activism was due to a close friendship with a black woman, Sarah Evans, with whom she shared similar views and support for the Civil Rights Movement. In the aftermath of Liuzzo’s death, Evans would go on to become the permanent caretaker of Liuzzo’s five young children.
One of the four Klansmen in the car from which the shots were fired was FBI informant Gary Rowe. Rowe testified against the shooters and was moved and given an assumed name by the FBI. Liuzzo’s name is today inscribed on the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Alabama.
MARCH 25, 1965
Loving Vs. Virginia: In 1958 Mildred Loving, a black woman, and Richard Loving, a white man, were sentenced to a year in prison in Virginia for marrying each other and violating the state’s anti-miscegenation statute, the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, which prohibited marriage between people classified as “white” and those as “colored.”
marrying persons of another race could not be construed as racially discriminatory. The court ruled that Virginia’s anti-miscegenation statute violated both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. At the time that the decision was handed down, 17 states, all Southern, had such laws. Anti-miscegenation laws remained on the books in several states, although the Supreme Court’s decision made them unenforceable. The decision was followed by an increase in interracial marriages in the U.S. and is remembered annually on Loving Day, June 12.
JUNE 12, 1967
Based on an anonymous tip, local police raided the couple’s home at night, hoping to find them having sex, which was also a crime according to Virginia law. When officers found them sleeping in their bed, Mildred pointed to their marriage certificate on the bedroom wall. The certificate became evidence for the criminal charge
brought against them, “cohabiting as man and wife, against the peace and dignity of the Commonwealth,” punishable by a prison sentence of between one and five years. On January 6, 1959, the Lovings pleaded guilty and were sentenced to one year in prison, with the sentence suspended for 25 years on condition that the couple leave the state of Virginia. They did so, moving to the District of Columbia. On June 12, 1967, in a landmark civil rights decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Lovings’ convictions unanimously, dismissing the Commonwealth of Virginia’s argument that a law forbidding both white and black persons from
Vernon Ferdinand Dahmer, Sr. was an American civil rights leader and president of the Forrest County chapter of the NAACP in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Dahmer was light-skinned enough to pass as white, but chose to forgo the privileges of living as a white man in Mississippi at that time. In March, 1952, Dahmer married Ellie Jewell Davis, a teacher from Rose Hill, Mississippi. The couple had eight children. Dahmer was a member of Shady Grove Baptist Church where he served as a music director and Sunday school teacher. He became the owner of a grocery store, sawmill, planing mill, and 200-acre cotton farm.
On the night of January 10, 1966, the Dahmer home was firebombed. As Ellie and the children escaped the inferno, gunshots were fired from the streets and Vernon returned fire from inside the house. He was severely burned from the waist up before he could escape and died the next day. The Dahmer home, grocery store, and car were destroyed in the fire. Authorities indicted fourteen men, most with Ku Klux Klan connections. Thirteen were brought to trial, eight on charges of arson and murder. Four were convicted and one, Billie Roy Pitts, entered a guilty plea and turned state’s evidence. Three of the four convicted were pardoned within four
years. In addition, eleven of the defendants were tried on federal charges of conspiracy to intimidate Dahmer because of his civil rights activities. Former Klan Imperial Wizard Sam Bowers, who was believed to have ordered the attack, was tried four times, but each ended in a mistrial. Based on new evidence, the state of Mississippi reopened the case and in 1998 tried Bowers for the murder of Dahmer and assault on his family. The jury convicted Bowers, and the judge sentenced him to life in prison. He died in Mississippi State Penitentiary on November 5, 2006.
JANUARY 11, 1966
Matthew Wayne Shepard was a student at the University of Wyoming who was tortured and murdered near Laramie, Wyoming in October 1998. He was attacked on the night of October 6–7, and died at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado, on October 12 from severe head injuries. During the trial, it was widely reported that Shepard was targeted because he was gay. Shepard’s murder brought national and international attention to hate crime legislation at the state and federal levels. In 2009, his mother Judy Shepard authored a book, The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed. In October 2009, the United States Congress passed the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (commonly known as the “Matthew Shepard Act”), and on October
28, 2009, President Barack Obama signed the legislation into law. On the night of October 6–7, 1998, Shepard met Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson for the first time at the Fireside Lounge in Laramie, Wyoming. It was decided that McKinney and Henderson would give Shepard a ride home. McKinney and Henderson subsequently drove the car to a remote, rural area and proceeded to rob, pistol-whip, and torture Shepard, tying him to a fence and leaving him to die. According to their court testimony, McKinney and Henderson also discovered his address and intended to steal from his home. Still tied to the fence, Shepard was discovered 18 hours later, alive but in a coma, by a cyclist who initially mistook Shepard for a scarecrow. Shepard had suffered fractures to the back of his head and in front of his right
ear and experienced severe brainstem damage. There were also about a dozen small lacerations around his head, face, and neck. His injuries were deemed too severe for doctors to operate. Shepard never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at 12:53am on October 12, 1998 at Poudre Valley Hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. He was 21 years old. Henderson pleaded guilty on April 5, 1999 and agreed to testify against McKinney to avoid the death penalty; he received two consecutive life sentences. The jury in McKinney’s trial found him guilty of felony murder. As they began to deliberate on the death penalty, Shepard’s parents brokered a deal, resulting in McKinney receiving two consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
OCTOBER 12, 1998
On the evening of February 26, 2012, George Zimmerman observed Trayvon Martin as he returned to the Twin Lakes housing community after having walked to a nearby convenience store. At the time, Zimmerman was driving through the neighborhood on a personal errand. At approximately 7:09pm, Zimmerman called the Sanford police non-emergency number to report what he considered a suspicious person in the Twin Lakes community. Zimmerman stated, “We’ve had some break-ins in my neighborhood, and there’s a real suspicious guy.” He described an unknown male “just walking around looking about” in the rain and said,
“This guy looks like he is up to no good or he is on drugs or something.” Zimmerman reported that the person had his hand in his waistband and was walking around looking at homes. On the recording, Zimmerman is heard saying, “These assholes, they always get away.” About two minutes into the call, Zimmerman said, “He’s running.” The dispatcher asked, “He’s running? Which way is he running?” Noises on the tape at this point have been interpreted by some media outlets as the sound of a car door chime, possibly indicating Zimmerman opened his car door. Zimmerman followed Martin, eventually losing sight of him.
The dispatcher asked Zimmerman if he was following him. When Zimmerman answered, “yeah,” the dispatcher said, “We don’t need you to do that.” Zimmerman responded, “Okay.” Zimmerman asked that police call him upon their arrival so he could provide his location. Zimmerman ended the call at 7:15pm. After Zimmerman ended his call with police, a violent encounter took place between Martin and Zimmerman, which ended when Zimmerman fatally shot Martin 70 yards from the rear door of the townhouse where Martin was staying. A jury later found Zimmerman not guilty.
FEBRUARY 26, 2012
Montgomery, Alabama
Washington DC
Hattiesburg, Mississippi
Laramie, Wyoming
Sandford, Florida
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THE HAUNTED OAK
Pray why are you so bare, so bare, Oh, bough of the old oak-tree; And why, when I go through the shade you throw, Runs a shudder over me? My leaves were green as the best, I trow, And sap ran free in my veins, But I say in the moonlight dim and weird A guiltless victim’s pains. I bent me down to hear his sigh; I shook with his gurgling moan, And I trembled sore when they rode away, And left him here alone. They’d charged him with the old, old crime, And set him fast in jail: Oh, why does the dog howl all night long, And why does the night wind wail? He prayed his prayer and he swore his oath, And he raised his hand to the sky; But the beat of hoofs smote on his ear, And the steady tread drew nigh. Who is it rides by night, by night, Over the moonlit road? And what is the spur that keeps the pace, What is the galling goad? And now they beat at the prison door, “Ho, keeper, do not stay! We are friends of him whom you hold within, And we fain would take him away “From those who ride fast on our heels With mind to do him wrong; They have no care for his innocence, And the rope they bear is long.” They have fooled the jailer with lying words, They have fooled the man with lies; The bolts unbar, the locks are drawn, And the great door open flies. Now they have taken him from the jail, And hard and fast they ride, And the leader laughs low down in his throat, As they halt my trunk beside. Oh, the judge, he wore a mask of black, And the doctor one of white, And the minister, with his oldest son, Was curiously bedight. Oh, foolish man, why weep you now? ‘Tis but a little space, And the time will come when these shall dread The mem’ry of your face. I feel the rope against my bark, And the weight of him in my grain, I feel in the throe of his final woe The touch of my own last pain. And never more shall leaves come forth On the bough that bears the ban; I am burned with dread, I am dried and dead, From the curse of a guiltless man. And ever the judge rides by, rides by, And goes to hunt the deer, And ever another rides his soul In the guise of a mortal fear. And ever the man he rides me hard, And never a night stays he; For I feel his curse as a haunted bough, On the trunk of a haunted tree.
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PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR
USING SCIENCE 1 & 2 Illustrations from White Supremacy and Negro Subordination by John H. Van Evrie.
John H. Van Evrie (1814–1896) was an American physician and defender of slavery best known as the editor of the Weekly Day Book and the author of several books on race and slavery which reproduced the ideas of scientific racism for a popular audience. His thought, which lacked significant scientific evidence, emphasized the inferiority of black people to white people, defended slavery as practiced in the United States and attacked abolitionism, while opposing class distinctions among white people and the oppression of the white working class. In a 1949 article Sidney Kaplan wrote that Van Evrie “received a medical degree somewhere. Whether he practiced is problematical; most of his time seems to have been spent as a pseudo-scientific, screwball propagandist in New York.” Van Evrie believed black people were of “a separate species” from white people and that the boundaries between races were “absolutely impassable;” he brought this into line with the Bible’s account of
humanity’s origin by proposing “a supernatural imposition at some subsequent period.” He reinterpreted the Old Testament’s account of Adam and Eve as a story of the origins of white people, and suggested that black people had their own separate beginnings. After Josiah C. Nott developed his theory of polygenesis in his Types of Mankind, Van Evrie applied them to the debate over slavery in Negroes and Negro “Slavery.” There had been, in his view and that of Nott, not a single creation but rather multiple creations “in different places and of different forms to fit the needs of locality.” Similarly, he reinterpreted the Golden Rule through a racial lens, arguing that one need only treat another as one would like to be treated when the other is of the same race as oneself. Van Evrie believed that the greatness of the United States could be attributed to the fact that its white peoples had mixed one another while refusing to mix with black or Native people. He also be-
lieved that this meant that black people were permanently incapable of expressing emotion in the same way as white people. From this belief that black people could not express emotion, he concluded that they must also be unable to experience emotion to the same degree, and, as they were considered insufficiently sensitive to attain civilization, he believed that black people were bound to remain enslaved. He also argued that black people’s perceived inability to express emotions was proof of subhuman status. Van Evrie viewed white attitudes towards multiracial people as a central issue in the debate over slavery; his Negroes and Negro “Slavery” repeatedly warns of the dangers of “mongrelism.” Mixed people, he believed, were responsible for almost all crime and racial disorder and suffered a “diminishing vitality” and a “tendency to disease and disorganization,” which Van Evrie called “muleism.”
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FINAL WORDS
The murder of Kenneth Chamberlain, Sr., occurred on November 19, 2011, in White Plains, New York. After his Life Aid medical alert device was inadvertently triggered, police came to his home and demanded that he open his front door. Despite his objections and statements that he did not need help, the police broke down Chamberlain’s door, tased him, and then shot him dead. Chamberlain was a 68-year-old black retired former Marine, and a 20-year veteran of the Westchester County Department of Corrections. He wore the medical alert device due to a chronic heart problem.
John Crawford III was a 22-year-old black man shot to death by a police officer on August 5, 2014 in a Walmart store near Dayton, Ohio, while holding a toy BB gun. Crawford picked up the BB/pellet air rifle inside the store’s sporting goods section and continued shopping in the store. Another customer, Ronald Ritchie, called 911. According to Ritchie at the time, Crawford was pointing the gun at people walking by, including children, and loading pellets into the gun. Ritchie later recanted, stating “At no point did he shoulder the rifle and point it at somebody.” Two officers of the Beavercreek Police arrived at the Walmart shortly after their dispatcher informed them of a “subject with a gun” in the pet supplies area of the store, and Crawford was shot and killed.
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The shooting of Michael Brown occurred on August 9, 2014 in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Brown, an 18-year-old black man, was fatally shot by Darren Wilson, a white Ferguson police officer. Shortly before the shooting, Brown robbed a nearby convenience store, stole several cigarillos, and shoved the store clerk. Officer Wilson, notified by police dispatch of the robbery and the suspect’s description, encountered Brown and his friend, Dorian Johnson, as they were walking down the middle of the street. Wilson backed up his cruiser and blocked them. An altercation ensued with Brown and Wilson struggling through the window of the police vehicle until Wilson’s gun was fired. Brown and Johnson then fled, with Wilson in pursuit of Brown. Brown stopped and turned to face the officer. Officer Wilson fired at him twelve times; the last was probably the fatal shot. Brown was unarmed. The disputed circumstances of the shooting sparked widespread protests and civil unrest in the U.S. and abroad, and vigorous debate about law enforcement’s relationship with blacks and police use of force doctrine in Missouri and nationwide. After an extensive grand jury investigation and hearing, State of Missouri vs Darren Wilson, Prosecutor McCulloch reported in a 20-minute press conference on the night of November 24 that the grand jury had elected not to indict Wilson. On November 29, Officer Wilson resigned from the Ferguson police force with no severance, citing security concerns. He remains the subject of investigations by the Ferguson Police Department and the U.S. Justice Department.
On March 9, 2013, 16-year-old Kimani Gray was fatally shot by police in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. Of three civilian witnesses, two said that one of the officers shouted “Don’t move” and “Freeze.” Two also said they heard officers say, “What do you have in your hands?” A woman who witnessed the confrontation from her third-story window in a neighboring building stated, “I’m certain he didn’t have anything in his hands.” Another woman living across the street from the scene said that after the shots were fired, she saw two men, whom she believed to be plainclothes officers, standing over Gray, who was prone on the sidewalk, clutching his stomach. “He said, ‘Please don’t let me die’, ” said the woman. She said that one of the officers replied, “Stay down, or we’ll shoot you again.” In interviews around the neighborhood, many spoke of a police department that, in its aggressive pursuit of gangs and informal criminal crews, had sown distrust, especially among young men and women, who feel that their encounters with officers often have racial overtones.
On August 19, 2014, Kajieme Powell, a 25-year-old black man, was shot and killed by two St. Louis police officers several miles from Ferguson, Missouri in what police officials said a witness described as “suicide by cop.” The police initially issued a statement, based on witness reports, saying that Powell came within three or four feet of the officers holding a knife in an overhand grip. Subsequently, the police released a cell phone video filmed by bystanders showing that Powell was not as close as first reported and that he had his hands at his sides. Powell was advancing toward the officers with the knife, shouting “Shoot me, shoot me now” when he was shot multiple times, as documented in the video.
On March 24, 2012 in Pasadena, Califoria, 19-year-old Kendrec McDade was shot and killed by two police officers responding to a 911 call in which the caller claimed two teens had robbed him at gunpoint. The caller, Oscar Carrillo-Gonzalez, later admitted he lied, saying that the teens were armed so police would respond more quickly. He called 911 on his cell phone and said one suspect had a chrome gun. “Which one had a gun?” the dispatcher asked, according to a tape released later by police. “One of them, one of them, they just pointed it at me right now,” Carrillo said. “Do you remember anything about the gun?” the dispatcher asked a few seconds later. “Both have a gun, man,” Carrillo said. “They run away from me.” McDade was unarmed. The officers did not illuminate McDade with a flashlight or lamp before firing, and his hand didn’t move from his waistband during the time they watched him, Pasadena Police Lt. Phlunte Riddle said, though originally the officers reportedly said McDade’s hand was moving toward his waistband when they fired. The McDade family believes racial profiling was involved and has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit and a claim against the city of Pasadena and five officers. The two officers who shot McDade, Jeffery Newlen and Mathew Griffin, have been placed on paid leave pending four investigations, including one by the FBI.
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JANUARY 1, 2009 Oakland, California
FEBRUARY 4, 1999 New York, New York
AUGUST 30, 2010 Seattle, Washington
OCTOBER 4, 2013 Waycross, Georgia
NOVEMBER 22, 2014 Cleveland, Ohio
SEPTEMBER, 14 2013 Charlotte, North Carolina
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Oscar Grant III was fatally shot by Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) police officer, Johannes Mehserle in Oakland, California, United States, in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day 2009. Responding to reports of a fight on a crowded BART train returning from San Francisco, BART police officers detained
Grant and several other passengers on the platform at the Fruitvale BART Station. Officer Johannes Mehserle and another officer were restraining Grant, who was lying face down and allegedly resisting arrest. Officer Mehserle stood and, according to witnesses, said: “Get back, I’m gonna tase him.” Then Mehserle drew
his gun and shot Grant once in the back; Mehserle appeared stunned, put his hands to his head and exclaimed, “Oh, my God!” During his court testimony, Mehserle said that Grant then exclaimed, “You shot me!” Grant turned out to be unarmed; he was pronounced dead the next morning at Highland Hospital in Oakland.
Amadou Bailo Diallo was a 23-year-old immigrant from Guinea who was shot and killed in New York City on February 4, 1999 by four New York City Police Department plain-clothed officers: Sean Carroll, Richard Murphy, Edward McMellon and Kenneth Boss, who fired a combined total of 41 shots, 19 of which struck Diallo, outside his apartment at 1157 Wheeler Ave in the Soundview section of The Bronx. The four were part of the now-defunct Street Crimes Unit. All four officers were acquitted at trial in Albany, New York.In the early morning of February 4, 1999, Diallo was standing near his building after returning from a meal. Police officers
Edward McMellon, Sean Carroll, Kenneth Boss and Richard Murphy passed by in a Ford Taurus. Observing that Diallo matched the description of a since-captured well-armed serial rapist involved in the rape or attempted rape of 51 victims, they approached him. The officers were in plain clothes.The officers claimed they loudly identified themselves as NYPD officers and that Diallo ran up the outside steps toward his apartment house doorway at their approach, ignoring their orders to stop and “show his hands”. The porch lightbulb was out and Diallo was backlit by the inside vestibule light, showing only a silhouette. Diallo then reached
into his jacket and withdrew his wallet. Seeing the suspect holding a small square object, Carroll yelled “Gun!” to alert his colleagues. Mistakenly believing Diallo had aimed a gun at them at close range, the officers opened fire on Diallo. During the shooting, lead officer McMellon tripped backward off the front stairs, causing the other officers to believe he had been shot. The four officers fired 41 shots, more than half of which went astray as Diallo was hit 19 times. The post-shooting investigation found no weapons on Diallo’s body. The internal NYPD investigation ruled the officers had acted within policy.
John T. Williams, a 50-year-old seventh generation Nitinaht carver of the Nuu-chah-nulth First Nations, was shot four times (5 bullets fired) by a Seattle police officer Ian Birk on August 30, 2010. He died at the scene. His only crime appears to have been walking across the street carrying a carving knife and a chunk of cedar. The officer thought it was important to find out what was going on
and why this person had an open-blade knife in public. Seattle Police Departments Deputy Chief Nick Metz said Birk got out of his car, approached Williams from behind and ordered the woodcarver to drop the knife three times. When Williams failed to do so within four seconds, Officer Birk fired his weapon five times from a distance of 10 feet. Williams was struck by four bullets, including one
lethal shot to the chest wall, and died at the scene. In its initial statement to the press, SPD described Williams as having been “advancing towards” Officer Birk, who felt threatened and responded by firing his weapon. Over the next few days, eyewitnesses began stepping forward to dispute this version of events, and the police department quickly retracted its statement.
Jack Lamar Robertson was suffering from an adverse reaction to his diabetes medication in his home in Waycross, Georgia on Oct 4, 2013, when his fiancé called 911 requesting help. Instead of the emergency services she requested, police
arrived and opened fire at the 43-year-old Robertson, killing him. Police claimed that Robertson was holding a knife, but Robertson’s mother Diane and and fiancé Herron both witnessed the shooting and insisted he was unarmed. Herron says, ‘He didn’t
say nothing, the police didn’t say nothing, anything, it was like a silent movie.’ The couple’s 8-year-old daughter, Zelphia, was apparently also in the home at the time of the shooting. Police were exonerated.
The shooting of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, occurred on November 22, 2014 in Cleveland, Ohio. Two police officers, Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback, responded after receiving a police dispatch call describing a “young black male” brandishing a gun at people in a city park. A caller reported that a juvenile was pointing “a pistol” at
random people in the Cudell Recreation Center, and stated twice that the gun was “probably fake.” The officers reported that upon their arrival, Rice reached towards a gun in his waistband. Loehmann fired two shots, hitting Rice once in the torso. Rice’s gun was later found to be an Airsoft replica. Rice died on the day after the shooting. His death has been ruled
a homicide by the Cuyahoga County medical examiner. In the aftermath of the shooting, it was reported that Loehmann, in his previous job as a policeman in Independence, Ohio, had been deemed an emotionally unstable recruit and unfit for duty.
On September 14, 2013 Jonathan Ferrell, 24, was driving home at 2 a.m. in Charlotte, North Carolina. He crashed his car, and climbed out the rear window to escape. He then went to a nearby house and banged on the door for help. The white woman inside the house called 911. When police arrived, Ferrell ran toward
them to get help for his injuries. A white police officer fired 12 shots at him, hitting him 10 times at close range. Sufficient warning was not given. A North Carolina grand jury indicted Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officer Randall Kerrick on voluntary manslaughter charges in the shooting death of unarmed
Jonathan Ferrell, just days after a partial grand jury refused to do so. On August 21, 2015, a North Carolina judge declared a mistrial in the case after the jury reached a 4-8 deadlock.
EXCESSIVE USE
66-year-old Eleanor Bumpurs was a black woman who was shot and killed on October 29, 1984 by New York City police. The police were present to enforce a city-ordered eviction of Bumpurs from her apartment in the Bronx after she was four months behind on her monthly rent of $98.65. When requesting NYPD assistance, housing authority workers
told police that Bumpurs was emotionally disturbed, had threatened to throw boiling lye, and was using a knife to resist eviction. When Bumpurs refused to open the door, police broke in. In the struggle to subdue her, one officer shot Bumpurs twice with a 12-gauge shotgun. One pellet from the first shot struck her hand; all nine pellets from the second shot
struck her in the chest, killing her. After several indictments and a bench trial, Officer Sullivan was acquitted of the charges of manslaughter. Two supervisors in the city’s Social Services administration were demoted for failing to seek an emergency rent grant for Bumpurs and for not getting her proper psychiatric aid.
October 29 1984
On Nov. 29, 2012, Malissa Williams and Timothy Russell were shot and killed after a 22-mile high speed chase through Cleveland, Ohio involving 104 police officers. Russell was shot 23 times and Williams 24 times. The chase began about 10:30 p.m. when an officer thought he heard a gunshot from a car speeding by the police complex in downtown Cleveland. He jumped into his patrol car and radioed for help. When the chase finally ended in a middle school parking lot in East Cleveland, 13 officers had fired 137 bullets at Williams and Russell. When the bodies were removed from the car, police discovered the victims were unarmed. More than 30 percent of patrol officers violated at least one policy during the high-speed chase, either failing to follow a supervisor order to terminate the chase or by driving unsafely. Five police super-
visors were indicted for dereliction of duty. The officers who fired included 12 whites and 1 Hispanic. Both victims were black.
NOVERMBER 29 2012
The NAACP called the shootings unacceptable and avoidable and called on the U.S. Justice Department to investigate. The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio called for a special prosecutor without ties to the northeast Ohio law enforcement community. The ACLU also asked the attorney general to remove East Cleveland police and the sheriff’s department from the state probe because they were involved in the chase. After a year and a half and many investigations, one of the officers, Michael Brelo, faced two counts of voluntary manslaughter. After Russell’s car came to a halt, most officers stopped shooting. But officer Brelo started shooting again and
fired at least 15 shots, including fatal shots, down into the windshield into the victims as he stood on the hood of Mr. Russell’s car. Investigators found Brelo fired a total of 49 shots the night of the chase. Despite the initial belief that Russell or Williams may have fired at police, investigators never found a gun. The state attorney general says police were caught in their own crossfire. On May 23, 2015, Cuyahoga Common Pleas Judge John P. O’Donnell found Brelo not guilty of the charges. O’Donnell stated that while Brelo fired lethal shots at Russell and Williams, other officers did as well. O’Donnell also found Brelo not guilty of a lesser included charge of felonious assault, claiming that Brelo was legally justified in his use of deadly force.
The Sean Bell shooting incident took place in the New York City borough of Queens, New York on November 25, 2006, when three men were shot at a total of fifty times by a team of both plainclothes and undercover NYPD officers, killing one of the men, Sean Bell, on the morning before his wedding, and severely wounding two of his friends, Trent Benefield and Joseph Guzman. The New York Post reported that, according to an unnamed undercover officer, Joseph Guzman had an argument inside the club with a woman
and threatened to get a gun. One of Bell’s friends was heard to say, “Yo, get my gun” as they left the scene. Fearing a shooting might occur, African-American plain-clothed officer Gescard Isnora followed the men to their car while alerting his backup team, prompting the team to confront Bell and his companions before they could leave the scene. Isnora “held out his badge (by his account), identified himself as a police officer, and ordered the driver to stop.” Instead, Bell accelerated the car and hit Isnora, then hit an
unmarked police minivan. By all accounts, Gescard Isnora thought he saw Guzman reach for a gun while in the car, yelled “Gun!” to other police at the scene, and opened fire on the car. The other officers and detectives joined him in shooting at the car, firing 50 bullets in a few seconds. Three of the five detectives involved in the shooting went to trial on charges ranging from manslaughter to reckless endangerment, and were found not guilty.
NOVEMBER 25, 2006
Bronx, New York
Cleveland, Ohio
Queens, New York
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POLICE
A police force is a body of persons empowered by the state to enforce the law, protect property, and limit civil disorder. Policing has included an array of activities in different situations, but predominant among these are activities concerned with the preservation of order. In some societies, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, these developed within the context of maintaining the class system and the protection of private property. Police in the United States are prohibited from holding criminal suspects for more than a reasonable amount of time before arraignment (usually 24–48 hours); using torture, abuse or physical threats to extract confessions; using excessive force to make an arrest; and searching suspects’ bodies or their homes without a warrant that indicates probable cause. Powers of police include the legitimate use of force. Use of deadly force is often granted to law enforcement officers when the person or persons in question are believed to be an immediate danger to people around them, or when a person poses a significant threat to a law enforcement officer, usually when the officer is at risk of serious bodily injury or death. Most law enforcement agencies establish a use of force continuum, where deadly force is listed as a force of last resort. With this model, agencies try to control excessive use of force. Nonetheless there are a high number of killings by law enforcement officers, including killings of people who are unarmed, raising questions about widespread and ongoing excessive use of force. Other non-fatal incidents and arrests have raised similar concerns.
SLAVE BRANDING
Branding in American Slavery
Slave owners used extreme punishments to stop slaves from escape. Most slave owners used whipping to punish slaves, but at times they also used branding. They used a branding iron to mark slaves’ palms, shoulders, buttocks, or cheeks. In testimony from a Kentucky slave owner in 1848, a runaway slave is described as having “a brand mark on the breast something like L blotched.” In Louisiana, there was a “black code”, or Code Noir, which allowed the cropping of ears, shoulder branding, and the cutting of tendons above the knee as punishments for recaptured slaves.
2 18th Century Slave Branding Iron
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1 Baltimore Police Badge
South Carolina laws specifically described the punishments permitted for slaves. When a slave ran away, if it was a first offense, the slave could receive no more than forty lashes. A second offense warranted branding. The slave’s forehead would be marked with the letter “R,” signaling that they were a criminal and a runaway.
3 Slave Patrol Badge
4 Slave Patrol Badge 1858
Slave patrols were organized groups of white men who policed and disciplined black slaves, especially runaway or defiant slaves. The patrols began in South Carolina in 1704 and spread throughout the colonies, lasting well into the 19th century. As the population of black slaves increased, so did the fear of slave uprisings and resistance. Patrols began when other means of control failed to instill obedience among slaves. The biggest concern were the large populations of slaves on plantations. At first, tobacco and money were offered to whites as incentives for capturing runaway slaves. When this approach failed, slave patrols were formally established, and laws were enacted to regulate the activities of both blacks and whites. Black persons were subjected to questioning, searches, and other forms of harassment. Slaves found without passes were expected to be returned to their owners. Punishment for runaway slaves could be expected, and whippings and beatings were frequently administered to even compliant slaves. More than floggings and beatings, however, slaves feared being sold at auction. This meant being separated from their families, who were the primary support in coping with their treatment. The auction block was an appealing option for masters who no longer wanted to deal with disobedient slaves. Slave owners feared slave gatherings would allow slaves to plan revolts and uprisings. The duties of slave patrols included breaking up black assemblies,
Nat Turner’s Raid
Nat Turner (October 2, 1800 – November 11, 1831) was an African-American slave who led a rebellion of slaves and free blacks in Southhampton County, Virginia on August 21, 1831. Beginning with a small group of trusted fellow slaves, Turner and his followers traveled from house to house, gathering guns and horses, freeing slaves, and killing the white people they found. The rebels ultimately included more than 70 free and enslaved blacks. At the end of the rebellion, the group was accused of killing fifty white people. In the aftermath, the state quickly arrested and executed 57 blacks accused of being part of Turner’s rebellion. In addition,
apprehending runaways, randomly visiting and searching slave quarters, inflicting impromptu punishments, and suppressing insurrections as needed. Slave patrols were often equipped with guns and whips, which they used to exert brutal control. At times, blacks developed methods of challenging the patrols, occasionally fighting back violently. The American Civil War provided greater opportunities for black resistance against the patrols and made it easier for enslaved people to escape. In 1862-1863, an increasing number of white men were called to the militias of the South, and many slave patrols simply did not have enough men to be as active as they once were. As the Union army moved into local areas and communities, slaves could more easily flee to areas controlled by the Union. Docile and obedient slaves started to disappear in the night, running toward the north to give themselves to Union army commanders.
SLAVE PATROL
When the Civil War ended in 1865, Southern whites’ fears of blacks increased. Even though slavery and patrols were legally ended, the patrol system still survived. Almost immediately after the war, informal patrols sprang into action. During Reconstruction, old style patrol methods resurfaced and were enforced by Southern city and rural police officers and also by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan.
white militias and mobs beat and killed an estimated 200 blacks, many not involved at all with the revolt. Turner hid successfully for two months. When found, he was quickly tried, convicted, sentenced to death, and hanged. Across Virginia and other southern states, state legislators passed new laws to control slaves and free blacks. They prohibited education of slaves and free blacks, restricted rights of assembly for free blacks, withdrew their right to bear arms (in some states) and to vote, and required white ministers to be present at all black worship services.
4 Nat Turner
NAT TURNER 25
LYNCHING
Lynching is the practice of killing people by extrajudicial (delivered without legal authority) mob action. It occurred in the United States chiefly from the late 18th century through the 1960s. Lynchings took place most frequently against African-American men in the Southern US after the American Civil War and emancipation, and particularly from 1890 to the 1920s, with a peak in 1892, at a time of economic stress in the South and political suppression. Decades later, during the late stages of the Civil Rights Movement, violence erupted again, with attacks and murders of black activists throughout the South, and bombings in Birmingham, Alabama of homes of aspiring African Americans. In 1964 three Mississippi civil rights workers were lynched - abducted, shot and killed by KKK members including Neshoba County law enforcement. These galvanized national public support for federal civil rights and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 ending segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to enforce constitutional rights to vote. The Tuskegee Institute has recorded 3,446 blacks and 1,297 whites being lynched between 1882 and 1968. The major motive for lynchings, particularly in the South, was the white society’s efforts to maintain white supremacy after emancipation of slaves following the American Civil War. They punished perceived violations of customs, institutionalized as Jim Crow laws mandating racial segregation of whites and blacks, and second-class status for blacks. Economic competition was another major factor; independent black farmers 1 Illustration from the cover of the Soviet magazine Bezbozhnik from 1930 claiming a link between religion and racism in America. 2 See One Less Thing To Worry About (Back Page)
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or businessmen were sometimes lynched or suffered destruction of their property. In the Deep South, the number of lynchings was higher in areas with a concentration of blacks in an area dependent on cotton and at a time of low cotton prices, rising inflation, a predominance of Democrats, and competition among religious groups. After the lynching of an African-American farmer, the victim’s property would often become available to whites. In much of the Deep South, lynchings peaked in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as white racists turned to terrorism to dissuade blacks from voting in a period of disfranchisement. In the Mississippi Delta, lynchings of blacks increased beginning in the late 19th century as white planters tried to control former slaves who had become landowners or sharecroppers. Lynchings had a seasonal pattern in the Mississippi Delta; they were frequent at the end of the year, when sharecroppers and tenant farmers tried to settle their accounts. In the 1890s, African American journalist and anti-lynching crusader Ida B. Wells conducted one of the first thorough investigations of lynching; she found that black lynching victims were accused of rape only about one-third of the time. The most prevalent accusation was murder or attempted murder, followed by a list of infractions that included verbal and physical aggression, spirited business competition, and independence of mind among victims. Law-enforcement authorities sometimes participated directly or held suspects in jail until a mob formed to carry out the murder.
Laura and L.D. Nelson (born 1878 and 1897)[were an African-American mother and son who were lynched on May 25, 1911, near Okemah, the county seat of Okfuskee County, Oklahoma. Laura, her husband Austin, their teenage son L.D., and possibly their child had been taken into custody on May 2, 1911 after Deputy Sheriff George Loney came to their home to investigate the theft of a cow. The son shot Loney, who was hit in the leg and bled to death; Laura was reportedly the first to grab the gun and was charged with murder, along with her son. Her husband pleaded guilty to larceny and was sent to the relative safety of the state prison in McAlester. The son, L.D. Nelson, was held in the county jail in Okemah and the mother, Laura, in a cell in the nearby courthouse to await trial. At around midnight on May 24, a group of between
12 and 40 men kidnapped Laura and L.D. Nelson from their cells. The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said in July 1911 that Laura was raped before she and L.D. were hanged from a bridge over the North Canadian River. Sightseers gathered on the bridge the following morning, and photographs of the event were sold as postcards. The one of Laura is the only known surviving photograph of a female lynching victim. No one was ever charged with the murders of the Nelsons; the district judge convened a grand jury, but the killers were never identified. The Nelsons were among at least 4,743 people lynched in the United States between 1888 and 1968, 73 percent of them black, 73 percent of them in the South, around 150 of them women.
1 Photograph of the lynching of Laura and LD Nelson.
MOTHER & SON
2 May 25, 1911 Okfuskee County, Oklahoma
LEO FRANK STORY
Leo Max Frank was a Jewish-American factory superintendent whose murder trial and extrajudicial hanging in 1915 by a lynch mob planned and led by prominent citizens in Marietta, Georgia, drew attention to questions of anti-Semitism in the United States. An engineer and superintendent of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta, Frank was convicted on August 25, 1913, for murdering one of his factory workers, 13-year-old Mary Phagan. She had been strangled on April 26th, and was found dead in the factory cellar the next morning. A state physician conducting the autopsy indicated evidence of sexual violence. Frank was the last person known to have seen her alive, and there were allegations that he had sexually harassed her before. His trial became the focus of powerful class, regional, and political interests. Raised in New York, he was cast as a representative of Yankee capitalism, a rich northern Jew in contrast to the poverty experienced by Phagan and many working-class Southerners of the time. There was jubilation in the streets when Frank was convicted and sentenced to death. During the height of the summer Frank narrowly survived a prison attack after his throat was slashed. One month later, he was kidnapped from the penitentiary by a group of 25 armed men who
called themselves “Knights of Mary Phagan.” Frank was driven 170 miles from Milledgville to Frey’s Gin and lynched. A crowd gathered after the hanging; one man repeatedly stomped on Frank’s face, while others took photographs, pieces of his nightshirt, and bits of the rope as souvenirs. In 1982, Alonzo Mann, who had been Frank’s office boy for three weeks at the time of Phagan’s murder, told a journalist for the Tennessean newspaper, nearly 69 years after the trial ended, that he had seen Jim Conley alone shortly after noon in the factory carrying Phagan’s body through the lobby toward the ladder descending to the basement. This contradicted Conley’s testimony that he moved Phagan’s dead body to the basement by the elevator. Mann swore in an affidavit in the 1980s that Conley had threatened to kill him if he reported what he had seen. At the time of the events Mann was aged 14. After telling his family what he had seen, his parents made him swear not to tell anyone else. Mann explained that his statement was made in an effort to die in peace. He passed a lie detector test, and died three years later in March, 1985, at the age of 86. Frank was posthumously pardoned in 1986 which the Georgia State Board of Pardons and Paroles stated was “in an effort to heal old wounds,” without officially absolving him of the crime.
3 Resource books on the Leo Frank story.
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STORIES FROM THE TREES 1 Lynching Post Card, Stories From The Trees Part One
2 Animation Still Frame, Stories From The Trees Part One
STORIES FROM THE TREES
Stories from the Trees re-imagines vintage postcards of lynchings through animation and new musical composition. This project brings to life different scenarios of lynchings—events where communities, including women and children, gathered to proudly watch these atrocities. The images draw from postcards that were commonly made from photographs of lynchings. PART 1
Unknown lynching victim with children surrounding the body. PART 2
The lynching of W. C. or R. C. Williams, his body hanging from an oak tree, lower body covered with kitchen apron. Blood streaming down legs suggests castration. Onlookers include white men and young children. News Report of W. C. Williams Lynching: Lynch Law - Ruston, LA. 1 Lynching Post Card, Stories From The Trees Part Two
2 Animation Still Frame, Stories From The Trees Part Two
The shot riddled body of negro W. C. Williams hangs from the towering oak tree less than 150 yards from where the murder and assault for which he was killed were committed. A mob of 300 persons administered lynch law after Williams admitted that he had clubbed mill worker Robert N. Blair to death and criminally assaulted his girl companion. The mob took Williams from the posse which had captured him after a three day hunt, strung him up to the tree, then riddled his body with bullets. Lynching in America is a chapter in our history that seldom gets addressed. Based on one survey, 4,742 African Americans were murdered by lynching between 1882 and 1968. Others were lynched as well, but not nearly in the same numbers. These included people of Caucasian, Chinese, Latino, and Jewish descent. There are similarities between death by lynching and the flood of shootings and killings by other methods in present day America. In sync with the extrajudicial quality of lynching, today’s murders often go unprosecuted, or, if they go to trial, often end in acquittal of the accused. The psychological impact of lynching remains with us today. People of color fear vigilante justice. These crimes frequently go unpunished, whether committed by citizens or by the police.
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ONE LESS THING TO WORRY ABOUT
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This installation utilizes the image of a widely sold target that has been significantly modified to create the likeness of a hooded individual carrying Skittles and an Arizona-brand watermelon juice cocktail. The image has been rendered in the form of a throw blanket, typically used for comfort and warmth. The safe securely contains the artist’s concealed weapons permit, a Glock 22 semi-automatic pistol, and 3 full clips of ammunition (45 rounds). It is legal to own clips with capacity higher than 10 in Maryland, but not to sell them. The artist went through the process of obtaining a concealed weapons permit and buying a pistol in order to make works of art; he shot bullets through white paper targets, graphically illustrating the precise number of bullets shot through human bodies in cases of excessive use of force. Each of the throw blankets in the stack depicts the image of a lynching or killing. They capture experiences of extreme human atrocity in objects designed for comfort, warmth, and security.
