Just came across this tragic story that speaks to deep, white racial animosity against African Americans in Austin, Texas. We've come a long way, thankfully, but we still have a long way to go—particularly in the context of the current, right-wing, neo-fascist administration (a.k.a. "Trumpism") that makes racism fashionable.

-Angela

A closer look at a 1919 Austin racial incident turns up the unexpected

Mob beat secretary of the NAACP, but who was he?

metro-state

By Michael Barnes - American-Statesman Staff

19

John R. Shillady, executive secretary of the NAACP, photographed in the 1910s. Contributed by NAACP Collection, Library of Congress

Posted: 11:00 p.m. Friday, April 21, 2017

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One of the most notorious incidents in the history of race relations in Austin occurred in 1919, when the executive secretary of the newly founded National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was attacked by an Austin mob and then run out of town.
John Shillady had traveled to Austin to work out a dispute between the state and the NAACP. He was confronted on a public street by Constable Charles Hamby, County Judge Dave Pickle and Ben Pierce. According to a newspaper report, they beat him “until he was bleeding from the face and howled for mercy.”
Houston author and public relations expert Patricia Bernstein covered the incident in her well-reviewed 2006 book “The First Waco Horror: The Lynching of Jesse Washington and the Rise of the NAACP.”
“There were rumors that the NAACP was stirring up racial unrest following a ‘race riot’ in Longview,” Bernstein wrote me recently. “And the Texas attorney general had subpoenaed the Austin NAACP branch’s records, trying to shut down all 31 branches across the state.”
Bernstein’s new history, “Ten Dollars to Hate: The Texas Man Who Fought the Klan,” contains 20 crucial pages on the Invisible Empire’s activities in our city. This immensely readable book provides a lot of background on the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan in the early 20th century. It focuses on Dan Moody, a future Texas governor who, as district attorney for Travis and Williamson counties, prosecuted one of the first successful cases against the Klan.
Back to the mobbed social worker, Shillady. One thing wasn’t always clear to this reporter: He was white. As were many of the founding leaders of the NAACP.
“Shillady never recovered and died in 1920, affected mentally as much as physically by his terrible experience,” Bernstein writes. “Gov. (William) Hobby was quoted as saying that Shillady got just what he deserved — and so would anyone else who interfered with Texas’ handling of its Negroes.”

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You can’t understand New Austin without delving into Old Austin. One digital avenue for that quest is Austin Found, a series of historical images of Austin and Texas published at statesman.com/austinfound. We’ll share samples here regularly.

'Now is a Time for Theology to Thrive': The Black Lives Matter movement offers a challenge to the church and an opportunity

'Now is a Time for Theology to Thrive': The Black Lives Matter movement offers a challenge to the church and an opportunity 

by Ryan Herring

'Now is a Time for Theology to Thrive'

The Black Lives Matter movement offers a challenge to the church--and an opportunity.

- See more at: https://sojo.net/magazine/septemberoctober-2015/now-time-theology-thrive#sthash.vXpj3RYo.dpuf

I am a fan of Jim Wallis and Sojourners Magazine. Great recent piece on the Black Lives Matter movement and how it offers the church an opportunity to thrive and be relevant in the world, as opposed to silent and useless.  Here's a great quote from within:

Theology happens when we offer our bodies in solidarity with the oppressed, disrupting systems that perpetuate oppression.

-Jorge Juan Rodriguez V, Union Theological Seminary.

As with Black Lives Matter and all of our movements—together with Pope Francis' call for a new kind of theology—they inspire a new theology that thrives and lives in the world, one that is messy, involved, and radical.

Continue reading here.

-Angela

Salim Muwakkil's concluding comment is ominous:

Indeed, it seems Republicans' sympathy for African Americans goes only so far. The GOP's neo-Confederate agenda is almost diametrically opposed to the interests of the black electorate. A glance at the platforms of the cavalcade of presidential candidates now lining up for the Republican primaries reveals a solid consensus behind the neo-Confederate agenda and little support for measures that strike at the heart of structural racism, like expanding voting access, creating more federal jobs and reforming criminal justice.

In light of the GOP's Southern dominance, the once-revered Confederate battle flag has served its purpose. The GOP elephant is the only totem now relevant. The flag is dispensable; the agenda isn’t.

-Angela

Jalaluddin Abdul Hamid shouts, ‘Take it down!’ in response to a pro-Confederate-flag demonstration outside the South Carolina State House on June 27. (Lexey Swall / Getty Images)

July 8, 2015

Our Neo-Confederacy

The flag may be wiped from state grounds and license plates, but its ideals live on in the GOP agenda

BY Salim Muwakkil

The modern Republican Party—with its voter suppression schemes, states’ rights fetish, and steep cuts to government jobs and services that most benefit black communities—has absorbed the Confederate message.

It is an irony that the symbol of the old Confederacy has become the most prominent victim of the June 17 massacre in Charleston, S.C., rather than the three men and six women who were slaughtered at church.
After photos surfaced of the shooter posing with the flag, a bipartisan chorus of politicians, including at least a dozen Southern Republicans, denounced the flag's display on state grounds and license plates.
Though the Stars and Bars served as the battle flag for the Confederate Army, it only became a totem of the South in opposition to the integrationist push of the 1950s and 1960s, when it was adopted by the Dixiecrats—Southern Democrats repelled by their party's embrace of civil rights.
Those disgruntled white Democrats were aggressively recruited by the GOP through Nixon's Southern Strategy, which was exceedingly successful in transforming the Dixiecrat South into Republican central. Alienated Republican Michael Lofgen, a former staff member of the House and Senate Budget Committee, told MSNBC's Chris Hayes in 2013 that the GOP has become, in the past few decades, “an insurrectionist, neo-Confederate party.” Or, as Paul Krugman put it in a June 22 column, “Race made Reaganism possible.”
Some see the Tea Party as the latest manifestation of the GOP's neo-Confederate march. Law professor Ian Haney Lopez, author of Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, argues that the Tea Party's appeal has much to do with its coded racist messaging. The modern Republican Party—with its voter suppression schemes, states’ rights fetish, and steep cuts to government jobs and services that most benefit black communities—has absorbed the Confederate message. Its platform is in line with the principles espoused by neo-Confederate white separatist groups like the Council of Conservative Citizens, which donated $25,000 to GOP candidates in the last election cycle.
There is little doubt that the ascension of the first black president has contributed to this neo-Confederate boomlet. Obama's election exacerbated anxiety among America's white majority about the demographic changes that will, according to the U.S. Census, render it a minority in the next three decades. According to a 2014 Bloomberg poll, most Americans believe black-white “race relations” have worsened since Obama's election. In its official statement responding to the massacre at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) noted that racist hate groups are on the rise. The Charleston shooting was “an obvious hate crime by someone who feels threatened by our country’s changing demographics and the increasing prominence of African Americans in public life,” said SPLC President Richard Cohen. The most prominent example is the presence of a black man in the White House.
Every week, it seems we're presented with new evidence (often videotaped) of ongoing racial turmoil in Obama's America, incidents so egregious they've sparked national protests and given birth to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Perhaps the savagery of a rampage in a sacred sanctuary will hasten some racist white Republicans to reappraise their views. The victims' families' expressions of Christian forgiveness won many whites' admiration; yet those conciliatory attitudes disquieted many black activists, a growing number of whom are increasingly militant—frustrated with the seeming acceleration of police abuse and the concomitant lack of racial progress on other fronts.
Indeed, it seems Republicans' sympathy for African Americans goes only so far. The GOP's neo-Confederate agenda is almost diametrically opposed to the interests of the black electorate. A glance at the platforms of the cavalcade of presidential candidates now lining up for the Republican primaries reveals a solid consensus behind the neo-Confederate agenda and little support for measures that strike at the heart of structural racism, like expanding voting access, creating more federal jobs and reforming criminal justice.
In light of the GOP's Southern dominance, the once-revered Confederate battle flag has served its purpose. The GOP elephant is the only totem now relevant. The flag is dispensable; the agenda isn’t.

Salim Muwakkil

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has worked since 1983. He is the host of "The Salim Muwakkil" show on WVON, Chicago's historic black radio station, and he wrote the text for the book HAROLD: Photographs from the Harold Washington Years.

The Bill Cosby Scandal Proves Why Black Women's Lives Still Don't Matter

Excellent analysis by Darnell Moore of power relations and their interwovenness with patriarchy and patriarchal power evidenced in the Bill Cosby affair.

-Angela

By Darnell L. Moore July 08, 2015

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After trailblazing black model and actress Beverly Johnson publicly alleged in an emotional and stirring Vanity Fair essay that she, too, had been sexually assaulted by Bill Cosby, she was ridiculed and discredited by many.

The backlash wasn't surprising. Devoted fans and celebrity friends of Cosby have long stood by the beloved symbol of (caricatured) black heterosexual manhood, even as the list of women accusing him of sexual assault has grown to include more than 40 names.

After Johnson's story ran, for example, black male commentator Cleo Manago postulated that Cosby might actually be the victim of an ostensible white-woman coup to take a good black man down, or of the "guilty until proven guilty" rhetoric historically aimed at black men. Boyce Watkins, a black scholar and social commentator, expressed similar views, noting that while his thoughts about Cosby were "deliberately mixed," the growing number of allegations were akin to a "modern day lynching" and "too consistent and orchestrated ... to believe that it's all happening by chance." Attorney Monique Pressley similarly questioned the "sheer volume of accusers" and stated "you'll have some people who will come forward and join the band wagon" during a News One Now Straight Talk episode with Roland Martin.

The support of Cosby by black men and women who might otherwise consider themselves freedom fighters in the struggle for black liberation has been perplexing at best and hypocritical at worst, especially when considering that some of Cosby's alleged victims were black, too. It reveals the dangerous limitations of a black politic of liberation that is concerned with white racial supremacy but not cued into the violent reality of intra-community misogyny and sexual assault. This lack of dual focus has harmed black women throughout history.

Source: David Livingston/Getty Images

To be fair, U.S. history provides much proof of the extent to which white people, and the state, have gone to protect white women from the archetypal dangerous black male. But Cosby's case should not be upheld as a contemporary example of white supremacy's attempt to take down a black man, especially not now that Cosby has admitted in court documents dating back to 2005 that he obtained prescription Quaaludes for women he wanted to coerce into having sex with him. Cosby is no Emmett Till.

Beverly Johnson, Lachelle Covington, Michelle Hurd, Angela Leslie and Jewel Allison are just some of the several dozen women Cosby allegedly abused. And they, just like those Cosby supporters who have claimed the sexual assault allegations are a consequence of white media's fascination with the demise of the black man, are black. In the case of those black people who publicly fight in support of Cosby, loyalty to race thus seems to also be an implicit allegiance to the cult of black patriarchy — black women's lives, well-being and safety be damned. 

 Cosby is no Emmett Till.

As Mic's Jamilah King wrote in reference to the allegations, "Sometimes it's hard to see patriarchy. And sometimes it isn't." Patriarchy is evident when the needs of alleged male perpetrators, like Cosby, rather than alleged victims remain centralized in conversations about sexual assault. Patriarchy is evident when female victims are cast as antagonistic troublemakers in the public eye, and the men accused are cast as prey. Patriarchy is evident when men — black, white or brown — push back against women's claims of rape even as their evidence continues to mount, even as the fact remains that an estimated 1 in 5 black women experience rape in their lifetime. 

"Rape is more protected in this country than black women," Jamilah Lemieux writes at Ebony in response to the Cosby allegations. The disavowal of black women's experiences is a problem whose roots can be traced back to the sexual assault of black women in slave master's bedrooms, and continues with the dismissal of black women's pain in contemporary courts of public opinion and law. 

Manago, Watkins, Pressley and others saw Cosby as a victim, but viewed the women who publicly shared painful stories of sexual violence as guilty of trying to take down a black man — one who, ironically, is notorious for disparaging black people. 

A black freedom fighter who claims to care for all black lives but supports alleged rapists who harm black women is not truly fighting for freedom. Black women deserve a black liberation ethos that also destroys male dominance, sexual violence, rape culture, sexism and patriarchy, especially when these show up within black communities. 

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Darnell L. Moore

Darnell L. Moore is a Senior Editor at Mic. He is also co-managing editor of The Feminist Wire. He thinks and writes about contemporary social issues from his stoop in Bedstuy, Brooklyn.

Follow @moore_darnell