Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 30
They're Still Lynching Us
Happy Monday! I hope you all had a great weekend.
Some pieces worth checking out in today’s newsletter includes:
This must-read piece in the Washington Post that highlights 8 different cases of lynchings in Missippi since 2000. With the most recent one being in 2019. Which is featured in today’s Hot Takes section.
A piece in the Wall Street Journal that discusses how the median net worth of households for Black college graduates has declined dramatically in the past 30 years.
This piece that was published in the Davis Vanguard, originally commissioned by the Prison Journalism Project, by an incarcerated man named Dortell Williams, who gives his thoughts on reparations and makes the link between our prison industrial complex and chattel slavery.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
Wall Street Journal: College Was Supposed to Close the Wealth Gap for Black Americans. The Opposite Happened.
Forbes: How A Son Of Freed Slaves Became A Real Estate Tycoon
MLK50: When white children’s feelings matter more than Black children’s
Bloomberg: The Forgotten History of America’s Black Beach Resorts
The Soapbox: Cory Booker Wants Baby Bonds in the Budget Reconciliation Bill
Colorlines: For Black Farmers Who Choose Justice When the USDA is Not Enough
Davis Vanguard: A Response to the Reparations Hearing by an Incarcerated Person
Regional News
Washington Post: ‘Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped’
Washington Post: Mississippi’s history of lynchings haunts grieving mother
NBC News: Black New Yorkers strike back at city program that seized their properties for developers
LA Times: What critical race theory is — and isn’t — and why it belongs in schools
Pensacola News Journal: Plantation system of slavery spread across Antebellum Florida after 1821
Springfield News-Leader: Springfield superintendent: 'Critical race theory is not being taught'
Forbes: Misguided Attacks Shouldn’t Derail Tennessee’s Curriculum Momentum
Berkshire Edge: Misguided attempt at reparations
International News
The Globe and Mail: Indigenous leaders call for reparations from Catholic Church for residential schools abuses
Hot Takes
Washington Post: ‘Lynchings in Mississippi never stopped’
This Washington Post piece starts by saying, “since 2000, there have been at least eight suspected lynchings of Black men and teenagers in Mississippi, according to court records and police reports.”
All eight of the cases outlined in the article have officially been ruled suicides, but friends, family members, and victims' advocates dispute these claims.
DeNeen Brown did a deeper dive into one of the cases in a separate article. The story of Willie Andrew Jones Jr. is a sad but not unfamiliar story to come out of Mississippi.
Some stats from the Equal Justice Initiative on lynchings in the state:
Between 1877-1950, Mississippi had the most lynchings than any other state, with 654.
Of the 25 Counties With the highest rates of lynching (Per 100,000 Residents) in
southern states, from 1880 to 1940, Missippi had 3 of those counties.Mississippi had the highest per capita rates of lynching by African American population.
Jones's story follows a similar thread of the extrajudicial killings of the early 19th century. It involves a Black male, a white female, some sort of sexual angle, and a white male. Since the early days of slavery, the white fear of interracial sex or marriage “extended to any action by a Black man that could be interpreted as seeking or desiring contract with a white woman,” according to EJI.
In 1889, in Aberdeen, Mississippi, Keith Bowen allegedly tried to enter a room where three white women were sitting; the entire neighborhood lynched him. In 1894, William Brooks was killed after asking his employer for permission to marry the man’s daughter. In 1904, a Black man was lynched by a mob for knocking on the door of a white woman’s house. In 1913, Thomas Miles was lynched for writing letters to a white woman inviting her to drink with him.
“Whites’ fear of sexual contact between Black men and white women was pervasive and led to many lynchings. Narratives of these lynchings reported in the sympathetic white press justified the violence. Moreover, they perpetuated the deadly stereotype of African American men as hypersexual ‘brutes,’ a stereotype developed during slavery and perpetuated through minstrel shows that still lingers today.
This story reminded me of this Vox piece about how white women shaped slavery and the book that sparked the article. They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South.
I urge you to read the story in full, as it exemplifies how the core tenents of white supremacy have remained mostly the same.