Failures | Diets
Ida
B. Wells vs. Frances Willard: Getting to the truth of a failure to fight racial injustice
Leslie Harris and Lori Osborne, March 11, 2019, The Chicago Sun-Times
The
failure of the early Women’s Movement to incorporate black voices was
glaringly obvious in the clash between two Chicago-area titans of
women’s history: Ida B. Wells and Frances Willard.
Under Willard’s leadership, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union
increasingly became an advocate for broad social as well as political
change. However, in 1894 and 1895, Willard and anti-lynching activist
Wells fought a war of words in the international press
that leaders of today’s movements for equality would do well to bear in
mind.
Frustrated that white reformers such as Willard failed to stand with her
against the terrible violence being perpetrated by lynch mobs against
blacks in the South, Wells publicly called Willard to account. She
convinced an English newspaper to reprint a previously
published interview in which Willard had made racially charged
statements that supported the racial violence of southern whites against
African-Americans, and in which she called for only limited suffrage
for blacks and new immigrants.
“During all the years prior to the agitation begun against Lynch Laws,
in which years men, women and children were scourged, hanged, shot and
burned, the W.C.T.U. had no work, either of pity or protest; its great
heart, which concerns itself about humanity
the world over, was, toward our cause, pulseless as a stone,” Wells
wrote in The
Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States, a pamphlet she published in 1895.
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How
Enslaved Africans Influenced American Diet
March 15, 2019, Voice of America News

Do you like to drink Coca-Cola? You can thank enslaved Africans. They
brought the kola nut – one of the main parts of Coca-Cola – to what is
now the United States. West Africans chewed the nut for its caffeine.
Enslaved Africans also brought watermelon, okra, yams, black-eyed
peas and some peppers. These foods are commonly eaten in the U.S. today.
They show how Africans forced into slavery -- beginning in the 1500s --
influenced the American diet.
Frederick Opie wrote a book about some of the foods that connect Africa and America. The book is called
Hog and Hominy: Soul Food from Africa to America. Opie also teaches history at Babson College in Massachusetts.
He says, “If you know what people eat, you can find out where they’re from."
Opie explains that people who were bringing enslaved Africans to North
America wanted to keep them alive and earn a profit. As a result,
Africans on the slave ships were fed food they knew and liked. Those
foods landed along with the people.
Opie explains that fruits and vegetables brought from Africa grew well
in America. One reason is because enslaved Africans planted their own
gardens to help feed themselves.
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Think so?
absolute power depends on absolute control over knowledge, which in turn necessitates absolute corruption
Think about this
“Politicians, Priests, and psychiatrists often face the same problem: how to find the most rapid and permanent means of changing a man’s belief…The problem of the doctor and his nervously ill patient, and that of the religious leader who sets out to gain and hold new converts, has now become the problem of whole groups of nations, who wish not only to confirm certain political beliefs within their boundaries, but to proselytize the outside world.”
– William Sargant “Battle of the Mind”
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