George Floyd, 46, was lynched this week…
Lest we forget that by the mid 20th Century, 1954 to be exact, the United States Supreme Court reversed the “separate but equal” mandate of the 1896 Plessy vs. Ferguson decision in its Brown vs. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas that mandated desegregation of public schools “with all deliberate speed.”
A hard hearted South would not be moved; over the next few years, southern legislatures began spending sprees to “improve” segregated black primary and secondary schools and public Black Colleges and Universities in hopes of enticing Blacks to stop the push for integration.
Far more wickedly, southern legislators, local governments, the Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils doubled down on Jim Crow through vigilante violence in the form of rapes, beatings and lynching, and by incorporating the Confederate Battle Flag into state flags. Or, southern political figures began flying the Stars and Bars outright at football games, at statehouse and in counter-protest against non-violent black and white civil rights protesters.
Indeed, the Southern White Christian Hall of Shame includes:
“Dixiecrats” nominating former Democrat and future Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina for president in 1948
Or, Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett waving the flag proudly during an Old Miss football game in 1962
Or, white protesters waving the Rebel Battle Flag to harass peaceful black civil rights protesters during the 50s and 60s
Or, southern states incorporating the Confederate Battle Flag into their state flags to show defiance to the Supreme Court’s Brown decision
Across the south, signs greeted black would-be patrons at public restaurants that reminded them of their second class citizenship
Lest we forget the era of lynchings, where thousands of Black men, women and children were beaten, sexually assaulted, shot, stabbed, hanged and immolated–often with the help or approval of local law enforcement officials with the pictures of their charred, lifeless remains sold as postcards, like these ones:
We at Hobbservation Point remind of this history to counter the narrative that America’s tortured racial history is a result of issues from “both sides” because as I often remind, I challenge any reader to produce a picture or postcards of blacks lynching whites, or black politicians discriminating against whites based on race. No one can accept this challenge because it does not exist, and it is important to point out that America has had and still has a problem with angry white males who take the law into their own hands on a whim–while rarely being held accountable for their dastardly deeds by a legal system that was founded by white males for the continuing dominance of white supremacy.
