discussion
Please tell us at least 1 thing you learned from each of the links below featuring some of the major issues of the 1950s and of the 1960s AND PLEASE WATCH KEN BURNS' PBS DOCUMENTARY ON THE VIETNAM WAR IN ITS ENTIRETY:
Henrietta Lacks:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03042-5
Baptist Street Church bombing:
https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/baptist-street-church-bombing
Construction of our first interstate highways in the 1950s during President Eisenhower's Administration:
More cities seek to redress widespread 20th-century destruction of Black neighborhoods
Descendants offered compensation for properties taken by eminent domain for freeways and other public projects
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8 min
By Troy McMullen
Today at 8:00 a.m. EST
Hattie Thomas Whitehead stands in front of Creswell Hall, a student dormitory at the University of Georgia that was built on land seized from Black families using eminent domain in the 1960s. (Elijah Nouvelage for The Washington Post)
More than 50 years ago, Santa Monica, Calif., used eminent domain to build the Interstate 10 highway, slicing an east-west swath to the Pacific Ocean that destroyed homes, businesses and churches and displaced more than 600 mostly Black families in the thriving Pico neighborhood .
Now residents affected by the construction project are set to get financial compensation. The city recently announced that it is offering affordable housing to those forced out by the freeway.
The program, initially open to about 100 displaced families or their descendants, will give priority access to apartments with rents well below open-market rates. After proving they or their families were displaced, and meeting income requirements, residents would receive preferential treatment on its waitlist for low-income apartments in the community.
City officials say the move recognizes the harm done to largely Black communities during the post-World War II era of freeway building and so-called urban renewal, a term associated with widespread destruction of neighborhoods for housing, highways and civic projects.
"This is an attempt to right a historic wrong," says Santa Monica City Council member Kristin McCowan, a second-generation Santa Monica resident who grew up in the Pico neighborhood. "We hope other communities see this and start making the same efforts to recognize the wrongs of the past."
All across the country, descendants of Black homeowners pushed out for similar projects are pressing for financial compensation to help make amends for the impact of past practices. They're being joined by activists and housing advocates who are calling for recognition of the harm done by government housing policies — including redlining — that disproportionately impacted the real estate fortunes of generations of Black Americans.
Advocates push nationwide movement for land return to Blacks after victory in California
The push for accountability is spreading as more cities reckon with the insidious ways structural racism in housing policies of the 20th century largely kept African Americans out of homeownership — a fundamental pillar of the American Dream.
The efforts of cities and states to raise awareness and atone for the past comes as Black homeownership rates continue to hover at their lowest level since the passage of the Fair Housing Act in 1968, landmark legislation outlawing housing discrimination. Black homeownership levels reached 46.4 percent in the third quarter of 2021 compared with 75.8 percent of White families, according to census data .
The Thomas family circa 1955 in Athens, Ga. (Hattie Thomas Whitehead)
Historian Richard Rothstein, a housing policy expert at the Economic Policy Institute , draws a direct line between discriminatory government housing policies of the 20th century and the low Black homeownership rates in the United States today.
" When you consider the decades of explicit government housing policies put in place to bar African Americans from many areas of housing there's little surprise that Black homeownership rates continue to lag far behind Whites in this country," says Rothstein, author of the book " The Color of the Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America ." "These are the long-term effects of racially explicit government housing policies."
In Baton Rouge, there's a $100 million football coach and everyone else
Loss of generational wealth
Interstate 496 in Michigan runs through downtown Lansing connecting tens of thousands of vehicles each week with the townships and communities that surround the state capital.
But for Diane Sulayman, a Lansing native whose family was displaced by the construction of I-496, the 11.9-mile ribbon of concrete has come to symbolize how eminent domain destroyed a thriving African American community.
Sulayman's parents owned one of the more than 800 homes and businesses demolished to make way for the roadway, which began construction in 1963. Through eminent domain — which gives jurisdictions broad power to seize private property to boost economic development — the government paid Lansing families to move, cutting checks that some critics say were far less than what the properties were actually worth.
The 1925 City of Athens map depicts a racially segregated landscape. (Warren H. Manning Offices/Center for Geospatial Research (CGR) at the Department of Geography, University of Georgia)
Under the agreement, the families had 60 days to leave their homes.
" What most people don't realize is that this was a thriving African American community," says Sulayman, 72, whose story is part of Pave the Way , a research project at the Historical Society of Greater Lansing that explores the impact of I-496 on the communities erased to build it.
For Black homeowners, a common conundrum with appraisals
"These were working-class families with well-paying jobs in the auto industry in a community where you had thriving local businesses," Sulayman adds. "That was all destroyed to build a highway."
Eminent domain's impact on Black communities stretched far beyond Lansing during the post-World War II era of freeway building in the country. Hundreds of neighborhoods were erased across the country to make way for roads and highways that federal and state officials say helped cities expand economic opportunities.
And while poorer immigrant neighborhoods with little political muscle were often the target, underserved Black communities largely bore the brunt of government wrecking balls and bulldozers, housing advocates and scholars say.
Many of these communities were populated by working-class Black families and small, minority-owned businesses, but the government considered them disposable, says Bill Castanier, president of the Historical Society of Greater Lansing . "The federal government called them ghettos," he says.
This photo was taken in 1965 in Linnentown during urban renewal. The newly constructed Brumby Hall dormitory in the background. (Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library/The University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries)
Though efforts were made to help with relocation, racial covenants at the time and redlining restricted areas where Blacks could live. Most were forced into apartments in less desirable parts of town with homeowners losing the ability to earn generational wealth that comes with owning property. Many of the small businesses never recovered.
Black people are about to be swept aside for a South Carolina freeway — again
"Historically speaking, eminent domain abuse was merely one of several legal maneuvers that disproportionately impacted Black and low-income communities," says Thomas Mitchell, a property law scholar and professor of law at Texas A&M University whose research on legal doctrines that deprive Black families of their property and real estate wealth has been used to amend laws in more than a dozen states.
"The most significant consequence of razing some of these communities — even in the name of economic development — is the impact it had on the economic livelihoods of the people who lived there and their descendants," he said.
Repairing the damage
The effort to rectify past actions is gaining steam across the country.
Evanston, Ill., announced plans to make reparations available to eligible Black residents for what it describes as harm caused by "discriminatory housing policies and practices and inaction on the city's part."
The Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program, believed to be the first of its kind in the United States, grants qualifying households up to $25,000 for down payments or home repairs. It is the first initiative of the city's $10 million reparations fund established to address historical wealth and opportunity gaps for Black residents.
In Georgia, the mayor of Athens issued a proclamation honoring Linnentown, a working-class Black community of more than 50 families in northeast Georgia that was razed in the 1960s to build parts of the University of Georgia.
The 'heartbreaking' decrease in Black homeownership
Using eminent domain, residents of Linnentown were given about $1,450 for their seized properties. The proclamation, which was read aloud outside City Hall by Mayor Kelly Girtz last February, promised to provide reparations for Linnentown descendants — the first such act in the state.
A 1947 parking plan for the University of Georgia. (Center for Geospatial Research (CGR) at the Department of Geography, University of Georgia)
Though plenty of hurdles still exist before it's determined if or how much the community will receive, Hattie Thomas Whitehead, who was in high school when her family's shotgun house was bulldozed to make way for college dorms, said the mayor's actions prove that progress can be made.
"I cried when the mayor read that proclamation," says Whitehead, 73. Part of a fourth generation of families living in the community, she joined the Linnentown Project, a group of fellow former residents and descendants of residents pushing the city to provide redress. "We asked for an apology and when I saw the document, tears actually began flowing from my eyes," says Whitehead, who chronicles the history of the community in the book " Giving Voice To Linnentown ."
Courtney Taylor's grandparent's South Minneapolis house was one of hundreds of homes and businesses razed in the 1960s to make way for Interstate 35W.
The highway was one of two major roadways built in the city in the 1960s using eminent domain to force residents to leave their homes. Eighty-two percent of the residents displaced for the projects were African Americans, according to research from " A Public History of 35W ," a project that examines how the construction of the interstate affected the mostly Black communities emptied to build it.
City officials last year passed the Minneapolis 2040 plan , housing legislation that includes "freeway remediation," a provision calling for compensating Black families and descendants impacted by the razing of communities of color to build highways.
"Rather than looking at the people who built the highways, the city is looking at the people who were affected by it," says Greg Donofrio, a professor of historic preservation and public history at the University of Minnesota who is leading the 35W project.
Taylor, 28, says her father often recounted how her grandparents were never bitter about displacement, preferring instead to see it as an upgrade. Her grandfather — who lived to be 100 years old — used the money from the government to build a new home from the ground up in a nearby neighborhood.
But like so many in her community, Taylor says she's pleased to see her grandparents' story now being told through research projects and exhibitions in Minneapolis like the 35W Project.
"Usually, when you think of Black history, the focus is heavily on the civil rights movement and the South and there's not much documented on what happened up North," she says. "It's great to learn that my grandparents had an important civil rights story of their own."
**Connection with I-45 expansion: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/04/01/dot-texas-highway-equity-478864
Chicano/Latino Civil Rights Movement:
UVALDE, TX MEXICAN-AMERICAN STUDENT WALKOUT IN PROTEST AGAINST RACIAL DISCRIMINATION AND SEGREGATION IN SCHOOL AND LACK OF POLITICAL REPRESENTATION:
https://depts.washington.edu/moves/Chicano_intro.shtml
1960s, 1970s Forced sterilizations of some Native American and Hispanic women, Latinas:
https://www.panoramas.pitt.edu/health-and-society/dark-history-forced-sterilization-latina-women (in Puerto Rico and California)
https://www.kent.edu/may-4-historical-accuracy
The Vietnam War:
**FULL NYT ARTICLE BELOW (ADDITIONAL REQUIRED ARTICLES APPEAR AFTER THIS ARTICLE).
THE PENTAGON PAPERS
The Secrets and Lies of the Vietnam War, Exposed in One Epic Document
With the Pentagon Papers revelations, the U.S. public's trust in the government was forever diminished.
June 9, 2021
Credit...Photo Illustration by Joan Wong. Photos: Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images; Associated Press; Bob Daugherty/Associated Press; National Archive/Newsmakers, via Getty Images
This article is part of a special report on the 50th anniversary of the Pentagon Papers.
Brandishing a captured Chinese machine gun, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara appeared at a televised news conference in the spring of 1965. The United States had just sent its first combat troops to South Vietnam, and the new push, he boasted, was further wearing down the beleaguered Vietcong.
"In the past four and one-half years, the Vietcong, the Communists, have lost 89,000 men," he said. "You can see the heavy drain."
That was a lie. From confidential reports, McNamara knew the situation was "bad and deteriorating" in the South. "The VC have the initiative," the information said. "Defeatism is gaining among the rural population, somewhat in the cities, and even among the soldiers."
Lies like McNamara's were the rule, not the exception, throughout America's involvement in Vietnam. The lies were repeated to the public, to Congress, in closed-door hearings, in speeches and to the press. The real story might have remained unknown if, in 1967, McNamara had not commissioned a secret history based on classified documents — which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.
By then, he knew that even with nearly 500,000 U.S. troops in theater, the war was at a stalemate. He created a research team to assemble and analyze Defense Department decision-making dating back to 1945. This was either quixotic or arrogant. As secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara was an architect of the war and implicated in the lies that were the bedrock of U.S. policy.
Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara addressing reporters at a news conference on Sept. 7, 1967. Two months earlier he had created the task force that would compile and write the Pentagon Papers.Credit...Associated Press
Daniel Ellsberg, an analyst on the study, eventually leaked portions of the report to The New York Times , which published excerpts in 1971. The revelations in the Pentagon Papers infuriated a country sick of the war, the body bags of young Americans, the photographs of Vietnamese civilians fleeing U.S. air attacks and the endless protests and counterprotests that were dividing the country as nothing had since the Civil War.
The lies revealed in the papers were of a generational scale, and, for much of the American public, this grand deception seeded a suspicion of government that is even more widespread today.
Officially titled "Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force," the papers filled 47 volumes, covering the administrations of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Their 7,000 pages chronicled, in cold, bureaucratic language, how the United States got itself mired in a long, costly war in a small Southeast Asian country of questionable strategic importance.
They are an essential record of the first war the United States lost. For modern historians, they foreshadow the mind-set and miscalculations that led the United States to fight the "forever wars" of Iraq and Afghanistan.
The original sin was the decision to support the French rulers in Vietnam. President Harry S. Truman subsidized their effort to take back their Indochina colonies. The Vietnamese nationalists were winning their fight for independence under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh, a Communist. Ho had worked with the United States against Japan in World War II, but, in the Cold War, Washington recast him as the stalking horse for Soviet expansionism.
American intelligence officers in the field said that was not the case, that they had found no evidence of a Soviet plot to take over Vietnam, much less Southeast Asia. As one State Department memo put it, "If there is a Moscow-directed conspiracy in Southeast Asia, Indochina is an anomaly."
But with an eye on China, where the Communist Mao Zedong had won the civil war, President Dwight D. Eisenhower said defeating Vietnam's Communists was essential "to block further Communist expansion in Asia." If Vietnam became Communist, then the countries of Southeast Asia would fall like dominoes.
This belief in this domino theory was so strong that the United States broke with its European allies and refused to sign the 1954 Geneva Accords ending the French war. Instead, the United States continued the fight, giving full backing to Ngo Dinh Diem, the autocratic, anti-Communist leader of South Vietnam. Gen. J. Lawton Collins wrote from Vietnam, warning Eisenhower that Diem was an unpopular and incapable leader and should be replaced. If he was not, Gen. Collins wrote, "I recommend re-evaluation of our plans for assisting Southeast Asia."
In 1957, South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem, center, visited San Francisco, arriving on U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower's private plane. Six and a half years later, the U.S. backed a coup that left Diem dead.Credit...Associated Press
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles disagreed, writing in a cable included in the Pentagon Papers, "We have no other choice but continue our aid to Vietnam and support of Diem.
Nine years and billions of American dollars later, Diem was still in power, and it fell to President Kennedy to solve the long-predicted problem.
After facing down the Soviet Union in the Berlin crisis, Kennedy wanted to avoid any sign of Cold War fatigue and easily accepted McNamara's counsel to deepen the U.S. commitment to Saigon. The secretary of defense wrote in one report, "The loss of South Vietnam would make pointless any further discussion about the importance of Southeast Asia to the Free World."
The president increased U.S. military advisers tenfold and introduced helicopter missions. In return for the support, Kennedy wanted Diem to make democratic reforms. Diem refused.
A popular uprising in South Vietnam, led by Buddhist clerics, followed. Fearful of losing power as well, South Vietnamese generals secretly received American approval to overthrow Diem. Despite official denials, U.S. officials were deeply involved.
"Beginning in August of 1963, we variously authorized, sanctioned and encouraged the coup efforts …," the Pentagon Papers revealed. "We maintained clandestine contact with them throughout the planning and execution of the coup and sought to review their operational plans."
The coup ended with Diem's killing and a deepening of American involvement in the war. As the authors of the papers concluded, "Our complicity in his overthrow heightened our responsibilities and our commitment."
Three weeks later, President Kennedy was assassinated, and the Vietnam issue fell to President Johnson.
He had officials secretly draft a resolution for Congress to grant him the authority to fight in Vietnam without officially declaring war.
Missing was a pretext, a small-bore "Pearl Harbor" moment. That came on Aug. 4, 1964, when the White House announced that the North Vietnamese had attacked the U.S.S. Maddox in international waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. This "attack," though, was anything but unprovoked aggression. Gen. William C. Westmoreland, the head of U.S. forces in Vietnam, had commanded the South Vietnamese military while they staged clandestine raids on North Vietnamese islands. North Vietnamese PT boats fought back and had "mistaken Maddox for a South Vietnamese escort vessel," according to a report. (Later investigations showed the attack never happened.)
Testifying before the Senate, McNamara lied, denying any American involvement in the Tonkin Gulf attacks: " Our Navy played absolutely no part in, was not associated with, was not aware of any South Vietnamese actions, if there were any."
McNamara, center background, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 20, 1966. "We should be proud of what we are doing out there for the people of South Vietnam," he told the committee.Credit...Henry Griffin/Associated Press
Three days after the announcement of the "incident," the administration persuaded Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution to approve and support "the determination of the president, as commander in chief, to take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression" — an expansion of the presidential power to wage war that is still used regularly. Johnson won the 1964 election in a landslide.
Seven months later, he sent combat troops to Vietnam without declaring war, a decision clad in lies. The initial deployment of 20,000 troops was described as "military support forces" under a "change of mission" to "permit their more active use" in Vietnam. Nothing new.
As the Pentagon Papers later showed, the Defense Department also revised its war aims: "70 percent to avoid a humiliating U.S. defeat … 20 percent to keep South Vietnam (and then adjacent) territory from Chinese hands, 10 percent to permit the people of South Vietnam to enjoy a better, freer way of life."
Westmoreland considered the initial troop deployment a stopgap measure and requested 100,000 more. McNamara agreed. On July 20, 1965, he wrote in a memo that even though "the U.S. killed-in-action might be in the vicinity of 500 a month by the end of the year," the general's overall strategy was "likely to bring about a success in Vietnam."
As the Pentagon Papers later put it, "Never again while he was secretary of defense would McNamara make so optimistic a statement about Vietnam — except in public."
Fully disillusioned at last, McNamara argued in a 1967 memo to the president that more of the same — more troops, more bombing — would not win the war. In an about-face, he suggested that the United States declare victory and slowly withdraw.
And in a rare acknowledgment of the suffering of the Vietnamese people, he wrote, "The picture of the world's greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one."
Johnson was furious and soon approved increasing the U.S. troop commitment to nearly 550,000. By year's end, he had forced McNamara to resign, but the defense secretary had already commissioned the Pentagon Papers.
I n 1968, Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election; Vietnam had become his Waterloo. Nixon won the White House on the promise to bring peace to Vietnam. Instead, he expanded the war by invading Cambodia, which convinced Daniel Ellsberg that he had to leak the secret history.
Daniel Ellsberg and Patricia Marx, his wife, center, at the Watergate hearings. Nine months before the Watergate break-in, the so-called plumbers had ransacked the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, in search of incriminating files.Credit...Mike Lien/The New York Times
After The New York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers on Sunday, June 13, 1971, the nation was stunned. The response ranged from horror to anger to disbelief. There was furor over the betrayal of national secrets. Opponents of the war felt vindicated. Veterans, especially those who had served multiple tours in Vietnam, were pained to discover that Americans officials knew the war had been a failed proposition nearly from the beginning.
Convinced that Ellsberg posed a threat to Nixon's re-election campaign, the White House approved an illegal break-in at the Beverly Hills, Calif., office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist, hoping to find embarrassing confessions on file. The burglars — known as the Plumbers — found nothing, and got away undetected. The following June, when another such crew broke into the Democratic National Committee Headquarters in the Watergate complex in Washington, they were caught.
The North Vietnamese mounted a final offensive, captured Saigon and won the war in April 1975. Three years later, Vietnam invaded Cambodia — another Communist country — and overthrew the genocidal Khmer Rouge regime. That was the sole country Communist Vietnam ever invaded, forever undercutting the domino theory — the war's foundational lie.
Elizabeth Becker is a former New York Times correspondent who began her career covering the Cambodia campaign of the Vietnam War. She is the author, most recently, of "You Don't Belong Here: How Three Women Rewrote the Story of War."
or
The Feminist (equal rights for women) Movement:
https://www.thoughtco.com/1960s-feminist-activities-3529000
U.S. Farm Workers of America Union, founded by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta:
Then, please tell us 2 new things you learned from watching Ken Burns' PBS documentary on The Vietnam War:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gC54k-lGYZs&list=PL70fOdiVs_1gOLhEloprGFTdbWJE1tasO