“The old Jim Crow racism that was once accepted is largely discredited,” Bobo said during the evening’s discussion, titled “What Does the Resurgence of White Supremacy Mean for the Future of Race Relations?,” which drew an overflow crowd to Cross Campus in downtown Los Angeles.

But while surveys don’t yet show large backsliding in racial issues, he warned that Americans should not be complacent.

Bobo, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, pointed out how quickly American progress in representation for African Americans was reversed after Reconstruction. “Contrary to the American expectation,” he said, “things don’t always change for the better. Sadly, sometimes we take huge steps back.”

Responding to questions from the event’s moderator, L.A. Times columnist Sandy Banks, Bobo identified five aspects of today’s America that together pose a significant threat to American race relations and democracy.

As the country faces “a complicated moment,” he called attention to the rise of the “alt-right” on the Internet over the past two decades, and its advancing of extremist views that the white race faces extinction from Jews and non-whites. Second and third, he said, the alt-right’s rise has coincided with two larger trends—the greater diversity of the country, and the rise of inequality—in ways that have fueled discontent among some Americans.

Fourth, he added, it has become routine for our politics to be racially divisive—so much so that how Americans view racial equality “is now the heart of how you define political identities.”

And finally, he explained, these problematic trends afflict a country with a deep history of slavery and discrimination that is hard to overcome and is not well taught or understood by many Americans.

Citing a recent story from Calabasas where a man hung signs filled with racist slurs and anti-Semitic speech from his condo, Banks, the moderator, asked whether Americans today are more willing to champion racist views openly.

Bobo affirmed that polls show that most Americans see more racism and deteriorating race relations and noted that hate crimes—which are often underreported—are also on the rise, according to surveys. So, too, are incidents of racist language and use of racist symbols in schools, he added.

Asked why this might be, Bobo pointed to the country’s leadership—particularly President Trump’s frequent expression of racist and divisive views. “The office of the presidency confers extraordinary legitimacy on that occupant and his views,” he said. In light of Trump’s approving and constant comments, he said, “it’s not a surprise that elements on the far, far right … now feel they have the right to come forward.”

What should Americans do in response to these threats? Bobo cautioned that responding would not be easy or simple.

Americans need to insist that leaders in society “project the right values—the values of tolerance, the values of mutual respect, and mutual obligation to one another,” he said.

While noting that President Obama was often criticized for how he talked about race, Bobo made the case that the former president had come up with an effective three-part formula: First, Obama validated a grievance that white Americans might have. Then he talked about the real issue and concern on the part of African Americans or other groups about the subject. Having made both sides feel heard, Obama then offered “some variant of E pluribus unum”—urging people to work together to address these issues.

This blueprint, Bobo said, can foster a space “where people come together and work through these issues.” Americans, he added, should “carry ourselves with an openness to the positive and the good” and make sure politics and fears don’t lead us into conflict. At the same time, Bobo acknowledged that it’s important to engage with the issues at hand and realize that this moment represents a real threat.

During a wide-ranging question-and-answer session with the audience, Bobo was asked whether the American system constituted apartheid, about examples of times and places when people of different races overcome white supremacy to govern together (Wilmington, North Carolina, before an 1898 insurrection by racists, was cited), and about the connections between white supremacy and misogyny (they often go “hand in hand,” he said).

In response to a question about capitalism’s role in white supremacy, Bobo said that the country needs to work on many issues at the same time to address the challenge.

“If you make progress on getting better schooling, but if you haven’t broken down discrimination in jobs, if you haven’t broken down discrimination in housing … if voting right are curtailed,” then you won’t make much progress, the professor said. He added: “One has to think about articulating the case for a holistic inclusion that is multi-dimensional in its character.”

The post America’s Racial Progress Is Real. So Is the White Supremacy That Threatens It appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Mary Turner, the marker’s named victim, was eight months pregnant. The mob targeted her because she spoke out against the lynching of her husband Hayes. A crowd of several hundred watched the men hang, burn, and shoot Turner, then cut out her fetus and stomp it into the ground.

From 1998 to 2011, I researched and wrote a book about Mary Turner’s lynching. I examined the responses of activists, artists, writers, and local residents to this appalling act. Turner’s story has had a long, complex afterlife: a tangled mixture of shock, outrage, grief, shame, and, too often, silence. The ways we remember, forget, and erase the history of this lynching is an inescapable part of its story: Even the monument to Mary Turner’s death contains bullet holes from a Winchester .270, normally used for killing deer.

The horror of Turner’s lynching did not stay secret. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, the incident galvanized anti-lynching protest around the country. Writers and artists including Angelina Weld Grimké, Meta Warrick Fuller, Anne Spencer, and Jean Toomer saw the lynching as an example of how racial violence traumatizes individuals, families, and communities. Organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Commission on Interracial Cooperation (CIC) used Turner’s death in magazine exposés and informational pamphlets as evidence that lynching was less about punishment for black male criminality and more about the public performance of white supremacy.

The Anti-Lynching Crusaders, arguing that lynching was an attack on women as well as men, featured Turner as the centerpiece of a campaign to support federal legislation against mob violence. The Crusaders raised money and awareness for the 1922 Dyer Bill, sponsored by Leonidas C. Dyer, a Republican Representative from Missouri, which proposed to make lynching a felony. The bill passed the House but stalled in the Senate when Southern Democrats threatened a filibuster. Although Turner’s lynching was barbaric, more conventional excuses for mob violence—what Ida B. Wells called the “rape myth”—remained intractable.

In time Turner’s name became a historical footnote, as stories like those of the Scottsboro Boys, in 1931, and Emmett Till, in 1955, dominated headlines.

It was not until the late 20th century that writers and artists began to recover Turner as an example of how mainstream history marginalizes black women. The title of Freida High Tesfagiorgis’s 1985 painting about Turner, “Hidden Memories,” captures the sense of erasure that many others find in her story.

Since then, author Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has published short fiction and poetry about Turner, most notably the poem “dirty south moon” in her 2007 volume Red Clay Suite. Playwright Lekethia Dalcoe’s depiction of the incident, A Small Oak Tree Runs Red, was produced in Chicago (2016) and New York (2018). This February, artist Rachel Marie-Crane Williams brought original images from her graphic narrative in progress, Mary Turner and the Lynching Rampage, to Valdosta State University (VSU)—about 20 miles from where Turner died—for a monthlong display.

The historical marker is by the side of State Road 122 in Lowndes County, Georgia. Photo courtesy of Julie Buckner Armstrong.

For some locals, however, Turner’s story remains taboo—and an open wound. The “Lynching Rampage of 1918” occurred during a single week in mid-May and was spread out over two Georgia counties—Brooks and Lowndes. 11 victims were confirmed. Other bodies of African-American males were found but not identified, and others disappeared, never to be heard from again.

Walter White, who investigated the lynchings for the NAACP, publicly named 16 local mob ringleaders, but in fact a large swath of the population likely saw or took part in the events. Hundreds—from Brooks, Lowndes, and surrounding counties—witnessed Mary Turner’s murder, as well as those of Will Head and Will Thompson, two men accused of complicity in the death of the white farmer Hampton Smith. Hayes Turner’s body hung on a main road, just outside the town of Quitman, for a day before it was cut down. When Sidney Johnson, who killed Smith during a wage dispute, was finally captured and shot, the mob dragged his body the 20-plus miles from Valdosta to the small town of Barney, near the site of the present-day historical marker. How many people watched this terrible parade is unclear.

There is no question that the week’s violence affected victims, families, perpetrators, witnesses—and their descendants. Yet when I began researching Mary Turner and the Memory of Lynching in 1998, records were almost impossible to locate. People rarely, if ever, spoke publicly about what happened. Keepers of official civic memory claimed a history of positive race relations, even though Georgia had the second-highest rate of lynchings nationally (following Mississippi). Brooks and Lowndes Counties, because of the 1918 incident, had some of state’s highest numbers.

In the early 2000s, the Mary Turner Project, a small but dedicated group based out of Valdosta State, spearheaded a coalition to erect the historical marker, hoping to end the silence. The marker went up in 2010. Within a year, someone shot a bullet right through its middle.

The approaching 100th anniversary of “Lynching Rampage of 1918” prompts me to consider what I have learned since writing about Mary Turner.

And so much of my knowledge rides on that bullet.

My son found the casing. He was 10 at the time, an eagle-eyed hunter of lizards and bugs. We drove up from our Florida home via I-75, took Exit 29 to Highway 122 heading west, and pulled onto the gravel embankment of the Little River. The book had just come out, and I wanted to make peace with an emotionally difficult project that I had carried around for more than a decade.

I already had heard about the bullet hole. A graduate student passing through for a conference had put a flower in it and snapped a picture, to show me. When the marker went up, the area was nicely landscaped with perennials and mulch. By the time I visited, the flowers were dead. I poked my finger through the bullet hole; my son wandered around in the weeds that were taking over. “Hey Mom,” he said, holding up the casing. “Is this what you’re looking for?

Since then, the marker has been shot at least three more times.

The marker’s text was the result of negotiation between the local Mary Turner Project and the Georgia State Historical Society. Photo courtesy of Julie Buckner Armstrong.

Other historical markers for racial violence have met similar fates. In Florida, the marker depicting the 1923 Rosewood massacre has been repaired multiple times. On my last visit several years ago, chunks were blown out of its protective concrete frame. In 2017, two different Mississippi markers for the 1955 Emmett Till murder were defaced—one by bullets, another by a blunt object. The marker for the 1964 murders of Mississippi Freedom Summer workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner was vandalized multiple times and eventually stolen.

Some people actively try to destroy the past. Some erase more passively, waiting for amnesia’s weeds to take over.

Others refuse to let memory die. For the scholars, filmmakers, artists, and writers who continue producing work about Mary Turner, she symbolizes a double injustice. On one level is her brutal death. On another is the way that she ebbs and flows from historical memory.

One might see artist and activist response to Turner as a forerunner of the recent Say Her Name campaign, which attempts to make sure that women are included in public discussions of violence. Decades before the social media hashtag #SayHerName, Mary Talbert’s band of Anti-Lynching Crusaders circulated pamphlets featuring Turner’s story, trying to move women from the margins to the center of a male-dominated narrative.

Turner’s lynching, although gruesome and shocking, was hardly an isolated incident. While statistics vary, a recent attempt by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to quantify racial violence in the American South documented 4,075 lynchings between 1877 and 1950. The EJI’s report does not separate victims by gender, but University of North Carolina Wilmington criminologist David Victor Baker has confirmed there were 179 female victims. At least three pregnant women other than Turner were lynched. These numbers may be small, but they are significant.

The temptation, when reading stories such as Turner’s, is to think, “down there, back then, not me.” But that impulse is really the desire to silence: the need to place protective distance between our ideal selves and the reality that anyone can be witness, victim, or perpetrator.

Attacking pregnant women has a long and telling history. The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies documents multiple occurrences—from the Holocaust to more recent incidents in Bosnia, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)—of perpetrators singling out pregnant women for torture, mutilation, and removal of fetuses. The practice goes back to Biblical times. The book of Amos mentions God punishing Ammonites for cutting open pregnant women in Gilead during a border war. An Assyrian poem from c. 1100 B.C. glorifies a military battle where the victor “slits the wombs of pregnant women.”

Looking at Mary Turner within this long, international context reminds us that such violence can take place anytime, anywhere. The sudden ease with which a community can become a mob, or a society can degrade into political violence, is a frightening but sad fact of our shared humanity.

Shooting a hole in a marker does not change the history of Brooks and Lowndes Counties, or the long history of humanity either. Only by confronting—as individuals, communities, and societies—the truth of how we came to be the way we are today, can we make the world better for ourselves and for our children.

My son agrees. As our family drove away from the “Lynching Rampage of 1918,” he told me he hoped the shooter would one day feel remorse and try to make amends.

He said, “You don’t have to like the marker, but you should respect it.”

The post A Hundred Years After Her Lynching, Mary Turner’s Memorial Remains a Battleground appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

White racial resentment was still a critical factor at that point. But Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s unfavorable numbers were at least 25 points higher in 1968 than in 1963, and his faltering appeal over the final years of his life was also a consequence of appearing to fall behind his times in some respects even as he was leaping well ahead of them in others.

A day after returning home in December 1964 from a tour whose most important stop was Oslo, the Nobel Laureate for Peace joined a picket line at Atlanta’s Scripto Pen factory, where some 700 workers were striking for better wages for less skilled employees. Though it was a remarkably humble gesture for someone who had received such a lofty affirmation, King’s actions that day and his call for a nationwide boycott of Scripto products won him few friends in his hometown’s white, staunchly anti-union business community.

His picketing also foreshadowed a future in which King would move beyond the bloody battles against blatantly illegal state and local racial practices in places like Birmingham and Selma. Not content with the gains registered in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, he resolved to pursue a more expansive, aggressive, and (to white Americans, especially) unsettling socioeconomic and political agenda, one that would draw him into another fateful labor dispute some three and a half years later in Memphis.

While still involved in the Scripto affair, King sat for a Playboy interview with Alex Haley, in which he endorsed a massive federal aid program for blacks. Its whopping $50 billion price tag was, he pointed out, less than annual U.S. spending for defense. Such an expenditure, he argued, would be more than justified in “a spectacular decline” in “school dropouts, family breakups, crime rates, illegitimacy, swollen relief rolls, rioting, and other social evils.” Many poor whites were “in the very same boat with the Negro,” he added, and if they could be persuaded to join forces with blacks, they could form “a grand alliance” and “exert massive pressure on the Government to get jobs for all.”

King had made passing allusions to this possibility before, but a straightforward call for an active biracial coalition of have-nots was just as terrifying to white ruling elites, be they on Peachtree Street or Wall Street, as it had been when raised by the Populists in the 1890s.

King did nothing to quell these concerns when he later told David Halberstam that he had abandoned the incremental approach to social change of his civil rights protest days in favor of pursuing “a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values,” one which would “look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation.”

King’s vision of a “revolution in values” was not purely domestic. In April 1967, he denounced American involvement in Vietnam, once at his own Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and once at Riverside Church in New York before 3,000 people, on April 4, precisely a year before he was killed. He decried the hypocrisy of sending young black men “eight thousand miles to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia or East Harlem.” Beyond that lay the painful irony of seeing them join white soldiers, with whom they could “hardly live on the same block in Chicago or Atlanta,” in “brutal solidarity” as they torched “the huts of a poor village.” In this they were, however unwittingly, agents of a U.S. policy that destroyed and depopulated the countryside, forcing its former inhabitants to take refuge in cities teeming with “hundreds of thousands of homeless children” who were “running in packs on the streets like animals.”

Former Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee Chairman Stokely Carmichael observed that, in this case, King was taking on not a hapless, wholly unsympathetic villain like Birmingham’s Sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor, but rather “the entire policy of the United States government.” The consequences were swift and severe: An outraged President Lyndon Johnson cut off all contact with King. And a great number of black Americans—including many old allies and colleagues from the civil rights years—warned that his stance could have devastating consequences for their cause.

King hardly fared better in pursuing his domestic agenda. It was one thing to capture public sympathy nationwide when pitted against the raw hatred and brutality that seemed the peculiar province of whites below the Mason-Dixon Line. It proved quite another to persuade whites outside the South to share their neighborhoods and jobs with blacks, or to support expensive federal assistance programs dedicated to helping blacks overcome the historic disadvantages imposed on them by whites of earlier generations.

King had a better grasp of what he was up against after his 1966 open-housing campaign in and around Chicago, where he confronted white mobs he described as more “hateful” than any he had seen “even in Mississippi or Alabama.” In this context, his own stern insistence on strict adherence to the doctrine of nonviolence met with growing disdain among a younger generation of black leaders. Tired of relying on the excruciatingly slow process of peaceful protest and tedious negotiation, some mocked King’s ministerial oratory and called him “De Lawd.”

It was impatience with King’s doctrine of nonviolence that turned what would prove to be his last march, on behalf of striking sanitation workers in Memphis on March 28, 1968, into a riot. Some marchers quickly broke ranks to break store windows, and looting was soon underway. An aggressive police response, complete with tear gas and billy clubs, led some protesters to retaliate with Molotov cocktails. By the end of the confrontation, one person was dead and some 50 others wounded. Feeling repudiated and ashamed by this failure to prevent violence, King had to be pressured into returning to Memphis a week later for yet another march, one that a single assassin’s bullet on April 4 assured he would never lead.

When Stokely Carmichael originally scheduled a press conference for April 5, 1968, he had planned to use it as a platform for demanding the release of fellow black militant H. Rap Brown, who had been stuck in a Maryland jail for several weeks. Instead, he devoted but a few sentences to the plight of “Brother Rap” before declaring that “white America made its biggest mistake last night” by killing Dr. Martin Luther King.

King’s slaying meant the death of “all reasonable hope,” Carmichael warned, because he was “the only man of our race … of the older generation who the militants and the revolutionaries and the masses of black people would still listen to” even if they no longer agreed with what he had to say. There would be no more “intellectual discussions.” Black Americans would now retaliate for the murder of one of their leaders by seeking their justice not in the courtrooms but in the streets.

And so they did, in classically Pyrrhic fashion. Younger, more militant black spokesmen who had spurned King’s commitment to nonviolence and peaceful negotiation proceeded to stoke outrage over the slaughter of someone so un-menacing and well-intentioned. A week-long orgy of violence raged across more than 100 cities, leaving at least 37 people dead and many more injured and millions of dollars in property destroyed. This was a bitterly ironic sendoff for someone who had sacrificed his life to the cause of achieving social justice by peaceful means.

King’s view of the Vietnam War would approach the mainstream of American thought within a few years. And his condemnations of American militarism and gross disparities in wealth and opportunity still echo, though to little more effect than he was able to achieve 50 years ago.

Yet the basis for today’s approval rating north of 90 percent can be captured succinctly in carefully cropped newsreel footage of King’s countless confrontations with vicious, inflammatory bigots and his magnificent oratory that day in August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial when achieving his “dream” seemed largely a matter of rallying his countrymen against institutionalized racial persecution in the South. Overly narrow historical memories typically serve a purpose, and in this case it is far more comforting to focus on Dr. King’s success in making a bad part of the country better than to contemplate his equally telling failures to push the whole of America to become what he knew it should be.

The post Why Martin Luther King Had a 75 Percent Disapproval Rating in the Year of His Death appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Wilson rode home alongside the winding Mississippi River, where he was confronted by a group of armed white men on horseback. He was aware that freed people had been killed the day before, but wrongly assumed that the carnage had ended. The men ordered him to dismount, and one of them struck his jaw with the butt of a shotgun. Wilson was thrown into a wagon with other captive freedmen and transported to a makeshift prison.

Later that evening, Wilson and a few others were dragged out of their cells, lined up, and blasted with shotguns. Everyone was killed except Wilson, who somehow crawled into a nearby cane field and waited for three days until he felt safe. Over the next few days, white men tore through the parish, attempting to eliminate any further threats, leaving behind them a trail of black corpses. Estimates of the massacre range from 35 to more than 100 murdered.

Historically, this event has usually been labeled “the St. Bernard riots.” It should be termed the 1868 St. Bernard Parish Massacre—one of the most brutal episodes of racist violence in U.S. history, as well as one of the most forgotten. I first came across it while working as a Louisiana history teacher in St. Bernard Parish, looking for events that my students would be able to relate to their own lives.

What I discovered was that a murderous rampage had occurred in my hometown, and almost no one knew. The perpetrators never discussed their atrocities. Local records were lost due to numerous floods, including Hurricane Katrina in 2005. I researched these events for years, driving to and from work, down roads and past former cane fields that were once the bloody battleground of Reconstruction.

Not only did I live in the very parish where the massacre took place, but the surnames of the assailants and the victims matched those of some of my students, both black and white, who worked together, played sports together, and shared lunches. As I delved deeper into U.S. Congressional archives, I uncovered investigations commissioned by the Freedmen’s Bureau and the Louisiana State Legislature, and correspondence with then-President Andrew Johnson. But my most startling discovery was that several of my students were the descendants of those involved, victims and perpetrators alike.

The racial tension that sparked the massacre was not unique to St. Bernard Parish. By 1868, the South had lost the Civil War and was struggling to rebuild its battered economy, which had depended heavily on an enslaved population. Louisiana was under federal military occupation during Reconstruction, and black males had obtained the right to vote.

The stakes were high for Southern elites in the presidential election, the first since the end of the war. If they could solidify a win for Horatio Seymour, a “Copperhead” Democrat who had promised to roll back Reconstruction policies, they might regain some of the power they had lost. Seymour railed against “Negro supremacy” and proudly painted himself as the “White Man’s” candidate. Whites believed that a victory by Seymour’s Republican opponent, Ulysses S. Grant, former commander of the Union Army, would pave the way for racial equality, leading to the collapse of economic and political systems that favored whites in the South.

After the Civil War ended, many impoverished whites faced increased economic hardship. Wealthier whites exploited their fears and blamed freed blacks as the cause of their ills. Newspapers owned by these elites were full of anti-Republican and racialized propaganda. Many poor whites perceived Reconstruction as a form of government occupation that disadvantaged them while favoring freed people. Conditions were ripe for dangerous rhetoric to turn lethal.

Violence in St. Bernard Parish started a pre-election pro-Seymour rally on Sunday, October 25, 1868. As white marchers passed by Eugene Lock, a freedman, they yelled for him to “hurrah” for Seymour. Lock refused. Someone grabbed Lock to intimidate him into submission, but as Lock remained steadfast, the crowd grew increasingly agitated. One white man tried to stab Lock with a knife, while another shot at him, narrowly missing his target. Lock drew his own pistol and fired back, hitting the shoulder of the man who had fired at him. Outnumbered, Lock tried to escape, but was shot in the head and mortally wounded before finally being stabbed. As news of the altercation sped through the small community, men grabbed their arms and prepared for battle.

Yet there was no battle, only a one-sided rampage by marauding whites. Throughout the week, armed white militias hunted freed people like Louis Wilson, as if for sport. In his testimony to an agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau shortly after the tragedy, Wilson said of the parish that he once called home: “This is such a cold place, I am afraid I will die here.”

According to an 1868 report by the Freedmen’s Bureau and an 1869 report by the Louisiana General Assembly, white mobs broke into homes and shot residents at close range, conducted executions in the streets, and killed those who tried to intervene. They plundered former slave quarters and stole items they found useful, most notably registration papers. A black pregnant woman was hacked to death by men with bowie-knives next to the courthouse. A white police officer was murdered by mobs for trying to keep the peace. It was 19th-century terrorism.

And it succeeded. While countless numbers of freed people fell victim to the violence, one white man, Pablo San Feliu, was killed by freed blacks in retaliation. Any legitimate supervisor of the presidential election was jailed, executed, or fled. Grant received only one vote in St. Bernard Parish as Seymour swept the state. According to historian John C. Rodrigue, “Republicans captured the presidency in 1868, but white terror carried the day in Louisiana.”

Despite the federal investigation, no one was arrested for the killing of the freed people. Black survivors identified white neighbors as their assailants, but no justice was sought. Instead, more than 100 freed people were arrested by local authorities and vigilantes for the killing of Pablo San Feliu. Over time, the massacre faded into obscurity. To this day, its only physical reminder is the tombstone of Pablo San Feliu, located in St. Bernard Cemetery, which reads:

The inaccuracies on San Feliu’s tombstone misrepresent the circumstances surrounding his death. The incorrect date suggests that it was erected a significant amount of time after the massacre, perhaps memorializing his death as if he were a martyr. The engraver referred to the freed people as “slaves.” Most importantly, by placing blame on carpetbaggers, the derogatory term applied to Northerners and other outsiders who had migrated to the South during Reconstruction, the inscription implies that San Feliu was an innocent murder victim.

Headstone of Pablo San Feliu in St. Bernard Cemetery. Photo courtesy of Rhett Pritchard.

Nearly a decade after the massacre, Reconstruction officially ended. By 1877 Louisiana had returned to “home rule,” which meant that the black population was no longer protected by federal occupation. The new state government focused on suppression of black voters. The new state constitution allowed for arbitrary literacy tests and issued poll taxes, while also granting grandfather clauses that allowed white people to circumvent these obstacles to voting. By 1898, the black voting bloc had declined from 164,000 to a mere 1,342. By 1910, that number dropped to 730, less than a half-percent of eligible black men. Their political voice was silenced throughout Louisiana.

A massacre of this magnitude deserves a place in history. In researching a book on the incident, I sought the assistance of locals who were aware of the ordeal, some from oral histories. Subsequently, I incorporated the story of the St. Bernard Parish Massacre into my teaching curriculum, so that students could be made aware of their community’s history and its relevance today. Other teachers also have the book in their classroom and discuss it with their students, examining how dangerous rhetoric can lead to deadly actions and the dire consequences of racist scapegoating.

My students are often shocked when they learn about this chapter of their community’s history. But it provides opportunities to have open dialogue with one another about their roots, and to bring these conversations into their own homes.

I have been criticized by some in the community for unearthing buried history. Some have claimed that the timing was inappropriate, that it would worsen existing racial tensions. However, the overwhelming majority of people in the community have been supportive and eager to know more.

The progress that has brought my students closer together in the classroom can only be honored through a deeper understanding of history. These relationships epitomize how far race relations in Louisiana have advanced due to people pushing against barriers, from that lone man who voted for Grant in St. Bernard Parish to those who waged the nation’s first major bus boycott in Baton Rouge nearly a century later.

However, the reversal of many gains made by black Louisianans after Reconstruction reminds us that these advances are not inherently linear or permanent. The continuing problems of mass incarceration, police brutality, and educational inequity underscore the effects of the disenfranchisement of huge swaths of the black population.

Understanding complex historical events like the St. Bernard Parish Massacre shows how we can continue to bridge racial divides today. Communities should not hide from such history, but embrace it.

The post Unraveling a Forgotten Massacre in My Louisiana Hometown appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

“What do you call a black woman who’s had seven abortions? A crime fighter! … Now I’ve gotta do a Hispanic [sic] joke to even things out … How many Hispanics [sic] does it take to clean a bathroom? None! That’s a nigger’s job!” [Audience members groan, laugh, cheer, applaud.]

The jokes baffled me—how does Lampanelli, who is white, get away with performing these in front of a national audience without being booed off stage and being forced to enter the witness protection program? Lampanelli claims she’s not really a racist and has “good intentions.” But was that all there was to it?

Lampanelli’s routine aired only a few months after Michael Richards’ infamous Laugh Factory disaster, in which the former Seinfeld star unleashed a torrent of racial slurs and insults at a black audience member that lightly heckled his performance. His comments were recorded and soon broadcast around the world. Following his viral blunder, Richards swiftly apologized, noted he was “not a racist,” and also emphasized his “good intentions.”

At the time I watched these performances, I had recently decided to apply to graduate school to research the relationship between race and comedy. As a young man, I had heard the racist jokes told by fellow undergrads and was fascinated by the way they forged and broke social relations. Major public spectacles like these only confirmed my suspicion that this humor was part of a wider public problem. I took the Richards’ incident as a godsend. Well, not really. But examining these types of controversies, and comparing them to performances that didn’t draw as much ire, provided a revealing look into the changing nature of race-talk in American comedy.

Overall, there has been a significant shift in the acceptability of racist speech in public, including under the guise of humor, since the civil rights movement. Take, for instance, the roast of Whoopi Goldberg at the Friars Club in 1993 in which Ted Danson appeared in blackface, performed a series of black stereotypes, and made liberal use of the “n-word.” The performance horrified many in attendance, and the private club famous for its no-holds-barred celebrity roasts issued its first-ever public apology in response. It’s worth remembering that only a few decades earlier, blackface was one of the most popular forms of comedy in the country. The shift from “funny” to “racist” didn’t occur on its own. It took years of opposition and protest from the targets of such racial ridicule.

But in studying the evolution of race in humor, I’m seeing an increasing number of white comics “successfully” making use of racial stereotypes and slurs, despite complaints by some comics and critics who suggest that we’ve all become censoriously hypersensitive and have gone “too far” with all the “PC nonsense.” Think Lisa Lampanelli, Louis C. K., Neal Brennan, Nick Kroll, Amy Schumer, and Jeff Dunham. Sure, there are certain jokes that don’t fly and apologies sometimes follow, but there’s something that’s happening that is allowing these comics to get away with telling these jokes.

To better explore these new bounds in modern comedy, I decided to get my answers from the ground: I enrolled in comedy school. What I learned was incredibly revealing. Over the period of several months in 2008 and 2009, instructors at a reputable L.A.-based comedy school taught my classmates and I not only about the mechanics of comedy writing, but also the social rules that govern its practice.

One of the first things I noticed were the differences between how teachers coached white versus non-white comedy students on the subject of race. Unlike students of color, who were encouraged to use racial stereotypes frequently, uncritically, and unapologetically (at least as applied to their own groups), white students were taught to tread racial matters carefully and strategically. Since the Richards incident was fresh in our collective memory, our instructor—a white male—reminded white students not to make racial slurs and stereotypes central to their acts. But he also noted that the biggest payoffs in the industry often come from provoking the taboo without crossing the line, and didn’t steer students away from approaching controversial topics.

To do that, the teacher taught students to employ tricks like creating characters—a friend, a family member, a stranger—who would “tell” the joke with racial stereotypes or slurs for them. The character would serve as a buffer between the performer and the ownership of the statement. He also advised students to ridicule themselves and expose some of their own vulnerabilities before pivoting to material about those outside their own identity groups. For white students, this self-deprecation allowed them to become “equal opportunity offenders,” a common ploy used in comedy that relies on the defense that if you’re ridiculing everyone, you’re not really bigoted.

Pay close attention to any “successful” race-based comedy routine over the last five decades and you’ll see these strategies in action. From Don Rickles to Louis C.K., approaches like those taught in my comedy school act as a magician’s sleight of hand that go unseen by the untrained eye.

But does it really matter that comics can still get a laugh from some racist jokes? Sure, delivery and intent are mitigating factors, but the inescapable question is whether the jokes are pointing out the absurdity of their racist content, or in fact perpetuating it.

Take, for example, that Lampanelli quip where she “jokingly” equates black abortions with crime fighting. The joke told on stage isn’t one that simply remained in the comedy club. This laugh line, and variations of it, have turned up on multiple white supremacist websites, where it reinforces their racist ideas that African-Americans are naturally more prone to criminality. It also turned up in a 2015 Department of Justice probe, where it was one of several racist jokes found in emails circulating among police officers and court officials in Ferguson, Missouri.

The DOJ reported that this and other forms of racist humor served as evidence of “impermissible bias” among members of the city’s municipal courts and police force—an atmosphere that contributed to a pattern of unconstitutional policing in the community. Similar investigations of police departments across the country reveal a pattern of racist (as well as sexist and homophobic) humor circulating among officers. Though the jokes themselves don’t cause the bigotry, they certainly help justify and perpetuate these prejudiced belief systems. It is rather revealing that those who suggest we grow “thicker skins” and learn to “take a joke” tend to ignore such occurrences.

Not all comics are clamoring for a pushback to political correctness; some comedians are leading the charge against racist jokes. Reflecting on her own past reliance on racial humor, Sarah Silverman recently noted that some “racial jokes that were just trying to be absurd” have “less charm” given the current environment where our nation is confronting issues of police brutality against minorities.

The times continue to change, and comedy will continue to adapt. Those who challenge racist jokes aren’t waging a war against comedy. They are just recognizing that in a society still struggling to achieve basic justice and equality for racial and ethnic minorities, such jokes only add insult to injury.

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