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crystallee83
reading1.docxAfter reading the first link about the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina coup, the related NYT article about The 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma ("Black Wall Street") Race Massacre, the article about Teddy Roosevelt's legacy, and the 2 links below about Henry Ford's attempt to Americanize his immigrant workers, about Ford's "paying them $5/day", and about the first bank created by a woman, please tell me 10 things you learned (2 items from each website):
1898 Wilmington, NC coup ( https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/us/joshua-halsey-funeral-wilmington-massacre.html )
NYT article in its entirety:
A Black Man Killed by a White Mob in 1898 Finally Receives a Funeral
The mob killed Joshua Halsey and up to 250 other people that day in the predominately Black city of Wilmington, N.C. Last weekend, city leaders and Mr. Halsey's living relatives honored him.
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Freemasons from the Grand Lodge of South Carolina took soil collected in honor of Joshua Halsey to his grave site last Saturday in Wilmington, N.C. Mr. Halsey was buried in an unmarked grave in 1898 after he was shot 14 times by a mob.Credit...Melissa Sue Gerrits/Getty Images
By Maria Cramer
Nov. 10, 2021Updated 11:24 a.m. ET
Joshua Halsey, a Black laborer and father of four girls, was asleep in bed on Nov. 10, 1898, when one of his daughters shook him awake.
He was deaf and hadn't heard the gunshots fired by a white mob advancing through the streets of Wilmington, N.C., then a predominantly Black city where residents owned businesses and occupied seats of power.
The mob was intent on overthrowing the municipal government, which was made up of Black leaders and their white allies.
Mr. Halsey, a well-liked 46-year-old whose family had lived in the city for 100 years, was one of their targets, according to historical accounts.
He ran out the back door, but the mob caught up with him about a block from his house on Bladen Street and shot him 14 times. He was buried hastily in an unmarked grave in a family plot at the Pine Forest Cemetery. Most of his family fled to New Jersey, part of a diaspora of Black residents, artisans and professionals who left the city after what became known as the Wilmington Massacre and Coup d'état of 1898.
On Saturday, nearly 123 years after his death, Mr. Halsey received a funeral that was attended by city leaders, hundreds of residents and his living relatives, who came from scattered parts of the country. Some of them said they had learned only in recent years that they were his descendants.
A horse-drawn carriage carried a coffin holding a jar of the soil taken from the site where he died. A headstone engraved with Mr. Halsey's name and the names of his wife, Sallie, and their four daughters was placed at his grave.
"It was unbelievable," said Gwendolyn Alexis, 65, a great-granddaughter of Mr. Halsey. "It was just so powerful."
Mr. Halsey was among 60 to 250 people who were killed that day. White supremacists at the time admitted to killing only him and seven other people, said John Jeremiah Sullivan, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a founder of the Third Person Project , a documentary research group based in Wilmington, NC.
Mr. Sullivan and other members of the group found Mr. Halsey's grave in October, after scouring the cemetery for his remains. Historical maps of the cemetery, where many prominent Black Americans are buried, were disorganized and chaotic.
Members of the Third Person Project had to analyze death certificates of Mr. Halsey's relatives, other public records and the research of previous historians to find the grave. Mr. Sullivan said the group was able to confirm which grave belonged to Mr. Halsey using ground-penetrating radar from the office of community engagement at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, a port city of about 120,000 people roughly 130 miles south of Raleigh, the state capital.
Hesketh Brown Jr., 58, a great-grandson of Mr. Halsey, said he hopes that the funeral will be part of a wider effort by the city to understand and confront its own history.
"That town needs closure," he said. "And the truth helps bring closure if we accept the truth."
In 2006, the state released a report by a commission that was created to establish a historical record of the massacre.
The 1898 Wilmington Race Riot Commission determined that the riot was a planned coup organized by white supremacists, who wanted to drive out Black elected representatives and their allies in the Republican and Populist parties from state government. At the time, the Democratic Party was made up almost entirely of white voters and white supremacy was a significant platform of the party's political leaders .
Democratic leaders used speeches and racist propaganda cartoons, while preying on unfounded fears that Black men posed a threat to white women, to sway white voters during that year's statewide election, according to the commission's findings .
Many Black people were also kept from the polls by paramilitary groups hired by the Democratic Party .
It worked. On Nov. 8, the Democrats swept the election, but in Wilmington, the Republican mayor remained in power. So did the board of aldermen, which included Black men.
On Nov. 10, a mob of armed white men marched to Wilmington and forced the mayor and the board of aldermen to resign.
The mob went to the office of The Daily Record, the local African American newspaper, and set it on fire.
They then stormed through the town, gunning down Black residents, including Mr. Halsey, and forcing others to flee into the Pine Forest Cemetery, where they hid, freezing in the swamps near the Cape Fear River. Many of them likely died of exposure, Mr. Sullivan said.
Ms. Alexis, who teaches at California State University in Fullerton and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, said she thought of those people during the funeral as she shivered in a coat and under a blanket.
"It took over me as I was sitting there, to feel what they must have felt just a little bit," she said. "They had nothing. They were just running for their lives, these human beings."
The insurrection laid the foundation for the Jim Crow laws and voter disenfranchisement that followed in North Carolina.
The events of that day were distorted by newspaper accounts at the time that portrayed Black residents as gun-toting instigators. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma, the Wilmington massacre was often glossed over in history books, if it was mentioned at all.
Linda Thompson, the chief diversity and equity officer for New Hanover County, said the funeral of Mr. Halsey was one of many events the county helped organize to create more awareness about the coup.
"There are so many people in our community who had no clue," she said. "They are certainly trying, wanting to know more."
NYT article on The 1921 Tulsa, Oklahoma Race Massacre:: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/05/24/us/tulsa-race-massacre.html
By Yuliya Parshina-Kottas , Anjali Singhvi , Audra D.S. Burch , Troy Griggs , Mika Gröndahl , Lingdong Huang, Tim Wallace , Jeremy White and Josh Williams May 24, 2021
Imagine a community of great possibilities and prosperity built by Black people for Black people. Places to work. Places to live. Places to learn and shop and play. Places to worship.
Now imagine it being ravaged by flames.
In May 1921, the Tulsa, Okla., neighborhood of Greenwood was a fully realized antidote to the racial oppression of the time. Built in the early part of the century in a northern pocket of the city, it was a thriving community of commerce and family life to its roughly 10,000 residents.
Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, Okla., was the pulse of the Black business community. Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
Brick and wood-frame homes dotted the landscape, along with blocks lined with grocery stores, hotels, nightclubs, billiard halls, theaters, doctor's offices and churches.
Greenwood was so promising, so vibrant that it became home to what was known as America's Black Wall Street . But what took years to build was erased in less than 24 hours by racial violence — sending the dead into mass graves and forever altering family trees.
Hundreds of Greenwood residents were brutally killed, their homes and businesses wiped out. They were casualties of a furious and heavily armed white mob of looters and arsonists. One factor that drove the violence: resentment toward the Black prosperity found in block after block of Greenwood.
The financial toll of the massacre is evident in the $1.8 million in property loss claims — $27 million in today's dollars — detailed in a 2001 state commission report . For two decades, the report has been one of the most comprehensive accounts to reveal the horrific details of the massacre — among the worst racial terror attacks in the nation's history — as well as the government's culpability.
Greenwood Avenue, for years a thriving hub, was destroyed by racial violence in less than 24 hours. Tulsa Historical Society and Museum
The destruction of property is only one piece of the financial devastation that the massacre wrought. Much bigger is a sobering kind of inheritance: the incalculable and enduring loss of what could have been, and the generational wealth that might have shaped and secured the fortunes of Black children and grandchildren.
"What if we had been allowed to maintain our family business?" asked Brenda Nails-Alford, who is in her early 60s. The Greenwood Avenue shoe shop of her grandfather and his brother was destroyed. "If they had been allowed to carry on that legacy," she said, "there's no telling where we could be now."
For decades, what happened in Greenwood was willfully buried in history . Piecing together archival maps and photographs, with guidance from historians, The New York Times constructed a 3-D model of the Greenwood neighborhood as it was before the destruction. The Times also analyzed census data, city directories, newspaper articles, and survivor tapes and testimonies from that time to show the types of people who made up the neighborhood and contributed to its vibrancy.
Opinion: Teddy Roosevelt's legacy, and complexities, are with us still
Workers remove part of a statue of Theodore Roosevelt outside the entrance to the American Museum of Natural History in New York on Jan. 20. (Caitlin Ochs/Reuters)By Editorial Board
January 24, 2022 at 2:20 p.m. EST
By last week, the time had finally come — in fact, it was probably well past due — to remove the bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt that had stood for 80 years at the entrance of New York's American Museum of Natural History, on Central Park West. It was made objectionable, as an unmistakably colonial paean to white supremacy, by the accompanying likenesses of two subservient figures on foot, an African man and a Native American man, that flanked Roosevelt's heroic figure, mounted in horseback.
Roosevelt, who did not want statues erected in tribute to him, remains among this country's most revered presidents, and among its most consequential. He was also flawed. A more felicitous site for that statue, to contextualize it along with the 26th president's breathtakingly rich array of achievements and shortcomings, is among the exhibits of a great museum or library, rather than as a street-facing figurehead.
And that's where the monument is headed — to the new $250 million Theodore Roosevelt Presidential Library, in the Badlands of North Dakota. The library, designed by a prominent architect , is scheduled to open to the public in 2026.
Roosevelt's stature should not be confused with that of other figures whose likenesses in bronze and stone have been removed, or pulled down, in recent years. Most of them were heroes of the Confederacy — traitors to the United States who dedicated their lives to a war intended first and foremost to preserve slavery.
By contrast, Roosevelt's legacy was infinitely more layered, hardly without sin but admirable on many levels. His list of firsts is impressive. Any American who has visited a national park or forest has been touched by one of his signature accomplishments. He also held racist views — genocidal, in the case of Native Americans — that were typical for White Americans of his time.
Judging by the library's initial publication, a 310-page "story guide" describing mission and values, it means to tell Roosevelt's story inclusively, intent on following Roosevelt's own dictum: "To learn anything from the past it is necessary to know, as near as may be, the exact truth."
That would mean acknowledging his groundbreaking initiatives in the White House. He was the first U.S. president to appoint a Jewish person to his Cabinet ( Oscar Straus , secretary of commerce and labor). The first to invite a Black man, Booker T. Washington, to dine at the White House, a move that ignited calls for impeachment. The first to visit a foreign country as president. The first to make environmental preservation a centerpiece of his administration, including by establishing five national parks and other reserves on more than 230 million acres of public land.
He was also a man of contradictions. Following his dinner with Washington, he did nothing to advance civil rights. In fact, he pandered to racist southerners by dishonorably discharging 167 Black soldiers in a U.S. Army regiment in Texas, including six Medal of Honor recipients, based on trumped-up charges. He rationalized the United States' colonial project by invoking what would now be seen as straight-up white power.
The library says it will humanize Roosevelt, not lionize him. That's the right way to approach a president whose legacy remains powerful, and powerfully complex, more than a century after he left office.
*The Washington Post article in its entirety is featured after the NYT article.
Here is the NYT article in its entirety:
A Mayor's Effort to Play Down Henry Ford's Anti-Semitism Backfires
Mayor John B. O'Reilly Jr. stopped distribution of a quarterly journal that included a story about Henry Ford's history of anti-Semitism.Credit...Danielle Duval/Jackson Citizen Patriot, via Mlive.com, via Associated Press
By Steve Friess and Adeel Hassan
· Feb. 2, 2019
DEARBORN, Mich. — Henry Ford is everywhere in Dearborn, Mich., his hometown, where more than 70 years after the famed industrialist's death, his name or likeness graces everything from the performing arts center to the manhole covers.
But Bill McGraw, editor of a local quarterly journal published by the city's historical commission, felt that residents could stand to learn more about the unflattering side of the man who founded Ford Motor Company and pioneered assembly line production in his factories. During the 1920s, Mr. Ford spread virulent anti-Semitism in his weekly newspaper The Dearborn Independent.
"In general, metro Detroit and its institutions tend to treat Mr. Ford gently when it comes to his dark sides," he wrote. "But his anti-Semitism is much more than a personal failing."
And so when the latest issue of Mr. McGraw's quarterly, The Dearborn Historian, arrived off the presses, it contained a special report on the extraordinary efforts by Mr. Ford to spread hate.
That's when the mayor of Dearborn, John B. O'Reilly, decided to bar the city-financed journal from distribution. Mr. McGraw's contract to edit the magazine was terminated.
Mr. O'Reilly said that given Dearborn's ethnic diversity now — it is about one-third Arab-American — it was irresponsible to present Mr. Ford's offensive opinions.
It was thought that by presenting information from 100 years ago that included hateful messages — without a compelling reason directly linked to events in Dearborn today — this edition of The Historian could become a distraction from our continuing messages of inclusion and respect," the mayor said in a statement released Friday afternoon.
Copies of the magazine were delivered to the Dearborn Historical Museum, which distributes them, but they have since been returned to the printers.
In protest of the mayor's decision, the city's historical commission unanimously passed on Thursday night a nonbinding resolution — with one abstention — that asks for the magazines to be mailed to the journal's 230 subscribers, all of whom are members of the museum.
Mr. McGraw, 67, who has lived in Dearborn for 31 years, was a longtime reporter and editor for The Detroit Free Press. He said that most educated people in southeast Michigan know that Mr. Ford was anti-Semitic. But the journal paints a clearer picture of the millions he spent on packaging his hateful message.
Readers learn of the large portrait of Mr. Ford hanging in Hitler's office in 1931, and Hitler's statement to a Detroit News reporter: "I regard Henry Ford as my inspiration."
The issue of The Dearborn Historian that was not mailed. The cover story was about the 100th anniversary of Ford's purchase of the weekly Dearborn Independent, which he used to attack Jews.
But Mr. McGraw also included in his report an article on how Mr. Ford's descendants have consistently supported Jewish charities and cultural organizations; a recommended reading list of more than a dozen books and articles; and a one-page essay entitled "Why Write About Henry Ford's Hateful Side?"
In the essay, he described the growing diversity of the Detroit region and the nation, and the backlash to it, which includes a well-documented rise in anti-Semitism.
"Ford's attacks on Jews were distributed around the world before and after World War II and, alarmingly, they influence budding neo-Nazis today. It's a subject worth talking about in Dearborn. Let the discussion begin."
While the mayor may have been trying to limit the reach of the journal, his decision has only spread word of its contents. Tens of thousands of users have read the bulk of it on Deadline Detroit , a web publication.
"It is just really important to emphasize that history is looking at the whole picture," Jonathon Stanton, the historical commission's chairman, said in an interview. "If we're only talking about the parts that make us proud, then what we're doing isn't really history."
Now, instead of Dearborn confronting its past, Mr. Stanton said, people are talking about how the city is reluctant to discuss history.
"We really agree with the mayor's views about the present and the efforts on inclusivity," he said. "Everyone on the commission is an admirer of the mayor, which adds to the confusion of why he made this decision. He's gone to the mat for our Arab-American and Muslim neighbors when there is racism. We definitely think of him as a man of consciousness and integrity."
At lunch at the Al Ameer Restaurant in a part of Dearborn renowned for its Middle Eastern eateries, Kareem Ali, 22, said young people in Dearborn rarely associated the city with Mr. Ford as much as they did with its fast-growing Arab-American and Muslim populations. He said that until this week, he had not been aware of Mr. Ford's anti-Semitic history, so he was glad the mayor's "wrongheaded" decision had led to so much media attention and publicity.
"It does nobody any good to censor this kind of thing," said Mr. Ali, who attends a local community college. "I'm against hate towards anyone, and it's important to remember history because it reminds us that just because you're rich and famous doesn't mean you're a perfect person. Everyone has flaws."
Felicia Calvo, a 45-year-old Dearborn native, said her father, who worked for the Ford Motor Company for 34 years, told her that as venerated as the company founder was, he "definitely had an impact on the trials that the Jewish community went through." She finds the mayor's actions odd, given that Ford's history of anti-Semitism is a piece of his biography that Dearborners grew up learning.
"This is not something that Ford Motor Company, or the Ford family have ever denied," said Ms. Calvo, who works in information technology. "I was also aware that Ford Motor Company took great steps to address the damage that Henry Ford had done. To me, there was nothing in this article that hasn't been shared before, that isn't publicly available. I'm sure the mayor is kicking himself, because the article never would have gotten this attention had he not banned it."
Daniel Markey, a 76-year-old retired high school chemistry teacher from Howell, Mich., who was taking his 4-year-old grandson to the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation, said he understood the mayor's instinct to protect Ford's legacy. But sugarcoating history, he added, is a bad idea.
"What does it accomplish to pretend that this isn't a part of Henry Ford's story?" Mr. Markey asked. "He should be respected for what he did and condemned for his shortcomings. Many geniuses were also terrible human beings. That's kind of a good lesson about people, isn't it?"
*Washington Post article in its entirety:
The first woman to start a bank — a black woman — finally gets her due in the Confederacy's capital
Workers place the statue of Maggie L. Walker in a plaza on Broad Street in Richmond. (Courtesy of Antonio "Toby" Mendez)
July 14, 2017
Maggie L. Walker started a newspaper. She was the first country's first woman to found a bank. She was a humanitarian, a teacher, an icon of her community in 1920s Richmond.
She was also the daughter of a former slave.
Walker's accomplishments in the face of racial oppression and segregation have never been honored in her hometown in the same way as the Confederate leaders whose statues are the focal point of downtown Richmond.
But on Saturday, 153 years to the day she was born in the former capital of the Confederacy, Walker will get her own monument, a towering statue of her as she lived — her glasses pinned to her lapel, a checkbook in hand.
"She's ready to work," said Antonio "Toby" Mendez, the celebrated Maryland sculptor who brought Walker back to life, 10 feet tall, in bronze. "She wasn't just raising the bar for her community. She was working to create opportunities."
Community leaders have for decades wanted to honor Walker, who was the first African American woman in the country to found a bank — St. Luke's Penny Savings, which gave loans to black business owners and residents at fair rates, then recycled the interest earned to keep building the community.
[ Uncovered boxes shed light on Maggie Lena Walker, an African American icon ]
Maryland artist Toby Mendez works on a model of a statue of Maggie L. Walker, the first African American woman to charter a bank. (courtesy of Toby Mendez)
"Let us put our moneys together," Walker said in 1901. "Let us use our moneys; let us put our money out at usury among ourselves, and reap the benefit ourselves. Let us have a bank that will take the nickels and turn them into dollars."
In addition to the bank, Walker also opened an emporium for African Americans to shop and sell their goods without being forced to use side doors. She refused to tolerate any oppression of people of color — enough was enough.
Now that she's being publicly memorialized, her admirers are overjoyed.
"Children and adults alike need to see the missing pieces of history," said Gary Flowers, a Richmond resident who helped lead the effort to honor Walker. "We are honored to see Mrs. Walker in her full glory."
But at the same time, Flowers said he and other community leaders are concerned about the future of the city's monuments honoring, as he put it, "a foreign nation that lost to the United States."
While New Orleans and other cities have removed Confederate monuments, Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, who is black, is moving forward with plans to recast signage and add context to the statues of Gen. Robert E. Lee and others along Monument Avenue.
The truth about Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee: He wasn't very good at his job
Instead of tearing down the controversial monuments, Stoney wants to add new ones devoted to the heroes who fought against slavery and championed civil rights . Those who have criticized New Orleans and other cities for dismantling Confederate history have lauded his restraint.
Others accuse him of dodging the issue and essentially sanctioning the continued celebration of slavery's proponents and defenders.
( https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/10/06/public-monuments-audit-mermaids-confederates/ )
"I think it really becomes a math equation," Flowers said. "For equal display of honor, we must add statues of African Americans who have been left out of the history books."
Mendez, the sculptor , was chosen in part because of his own history with projects honoring civil rights leaders.
His work includes statues of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall at the Maryland State House, Ernest Everett Just (a famous African American biologist) at a Prince George's County Middle School, and Indian independence and civil rights leader Mohandas Gandhi in Long Island, N.Y.
Mendez said he thinks the coming years will see more efforts like the one honoring Walker — not just honoring more African American figures in bronze, but female ones as well.
"These places bring people together," Mendez said. "They tell stories that should be told."
Please find below 2 optional, additional websites on the history of Ford's anti-Semitic beliefs: https://www.thehenryford.org/collections-and-research/digital-resources/popular-topics/henry-ford-and-anti-semitism-a-complex-story
