In The News #BigIsms #PoliceBrutality #EmmettTill #Tallahatchie #Freedmen
Digital records from 19th Century give Black families a glimpse of their ancestry
Curtis Bunn, September 17, 2021, NBC News
This month, the genealogy site Ancestry.com unveiled a Black family
lineage game-changer — 3.5 million records of previously enslaved Black
people, available for free.
It is believed to be the world’s largest digitized and searchable
collection of Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedman’s Bank archives. The
collection has Black genealogists and habitual researchers thrilled
because the descendants of the enslaved in America can learn more about
their families in a far easier way.
“This is very exciting and will help many researchers, historians and
ordinary people trying to learn more about their ancestry,” said Angela
Dodson, CEO of Editorsoncall, a company that provides editorial services
for writers. Dodson has done extensive work on researching her own
family tree.
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How the Origins of Epidemiology Are Linked to the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Jim Downs, September 2, 2021, Time
Since the outbreak of COVID-19, many have been frustrated by the ways in
which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
keeps changing its rules and response to the pandemic. What most
don’t understand is that the field of epidemiology is always like that.
Protocols about how to control an epidemic mostly develop in the middle
of crises. But those crises have not only been of the medical variety,
and knowing more about that history provides an important lesson for
those living through the pandemic today.
In fact, many of the tools that we are using to control the
pandemic—observation, surveillance and data collection—developed not
from scientific inquiry in isolated laboratories, but rather as urgent
responses to crises that arose due to the transatlantic slave trade and
the expansion of the British empire. That troubling past is a reminder
of how medical advances can occur on the backs of human beings with no
say in the matter.
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‘Truth-telling has to happen’: the museum of America’s racist history
Ed Pilkington, 19 September 2021, The Guardian
A 30 foot wave crashes over your head as you enter the museum, dragging
you instantly down into the roiling waters. The waves keep coming at you
in gunmetal grey surges, with nothing to cling to amid the loneliness
of the sea.
Across the giant screen in front of you, words start emerging that ask
you to reflect on the “the terrifying, tragic and deadly ocean journey”
which 12.7 million men, women and children were forced to make having
been kidnapped from their homes in Africa and sold into slavery. For
about 2 million of them, the voyage to the Americas would end “in a
watery grave at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean”.
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Critical race theory is an important tool in better understanding how religion operates in America
Tiffany Puett, September 15, 2021, The Conversation
The debate over critical race theory has played out in TV
studios, school board meetings and state legislatures across the U.S. It
has also found its way into churches.
The theory comprises a set of concepts that frame racism as structural,
rather than simply expressed through personal discrimination.
Scholars point to racial discrepancies in educational achievement,
economic and employment opportunities and in the criminal justice system
as evidence of how racism is embedded in U.S. institutions.
But as its critics tell it, critical race theory is a divisive ideology
that has infiltrated classrooms and needs to be stopped. By and large,
such depictions of critical race theory are inaccurate and
misconstrued, perhaps at times even intentionally so. But they have
nonetheless made critical race theory a “culture war” issue.
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Journalist William Huie Concealed Lynchers In Emmett Till Case And Got Away With It
Jill Collen Jefferson, September 1, 2021, Mississippi Free Press
Books, documentaries, and an FBI investigation detail the abduction,
torture and murder of Emmett Till 66 years ago, but one suspect in the
case has never been identified.
On the night of Emmett Till’s abduction, torture and murder, men and a
woman took him from his Uncle Moses Wright’s home. At least two Black
men kept him from jumping off the back of the 1955 green and white Chevy
pickup that transported him. At least four white men beat, pistol
whipped and shot the boy point blank in the head, killing him. They then
tied a cotton gin fan to his neck with barbed wire and threw his naked
body into a muddy bayou that spilled into the Tallahatchie River.
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Martin Luther King Knew That Fighting Racism Meant Fighting Police Brutality
Jeanne Theoharis, September 15, 2021, The Atlantic
In a lesser-known part of his March on Washington speech, Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed, “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality.”
Many people, upon hearing this, might assume that King was simply referring to the violence wreaked by the police department in Birmingham, Alabama, and its commissioner, Bull Connor, during the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s desegregation campaign that spring. But King understood that police brutality—like segregation—wasn’t just a southern problem.
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