May 14

On this date in 1961 -- Mothers’ Day -- civil rights activists affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were attacked by white mobs in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, when they attempted to ride through the state on Greyhound and Trailways buses. Following the US Supreme Court’s decision in Boynton v. Virginia -- which ruled segregation on interstate bus lines unconstitutional -- black and white “Freedom Riders” decided to test the willingness of white Southerners to adhere to the law. Fewer than two dozen set out from the nation’s capital on May 4. They had dutifully sent their itinerary to the Justice Department. J. Edgar Hoover promptly forwarded it to state officials in Alabama, many of whom were known to have Klan affiliations.

The rides began in early May. Defying custom, white riders sat in the back while black passengers occupied the front seats. When the buses stopped, the CORE riders refused to observe the segregated conditions that were still observed in southern bus terminals; whites used “colored” restrooms and waiting areas, while blacks used facilities reserved for whites.

The rides encountered minor violence in Rock Hill, South Carolina, but everyone knew the worst was yet to come. As Martin Luther king, Jr., had warned the riders, “You won’t make it through Alabama.” Indeed, when the CORE buses crossed the Georgia state line on their way to Birmingham, they encountered ferocious resistance. At a rest stop in Anniston, the Greyhound passengers were attacked by local members of the Ku Klux Klan and nearly 200 of their closest friends. One of the riders, James Peck, wrote about the incident in his book Freedom Rider (1962):

They set about the vehicle, denting the sides, breaking windows, and slashing tires. Finally, the police arrived and the bus managed to depart. But the mob pursued in cars. Within minutes, the pursuing mob was hitting the bus with iron bars. The rear window was broken and a bomb was hurled inside. All the passengers managed to escape before the bus burst into flames and was totally destroyed. Policemen, who had been standing by, belatedly came on the scene. A couple of them fired into the air. The mob dispersed and the injured were taken to a local hospital.

By this point, Walter Bergman had been kicked until his brain hemorrhaged. He remained in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The reception in Anniston was not entirely unhelpful, though. A 12-year-old white girl named Jamie Miller brought a bucket of water to the riders, who were choking from smoke inhalation. Facing constant taunts and threats from other whites in the community, she and her family soon moved from Anniston.

When the Trailways bus arrived two hours later, Klansmen boarded as well, beat the Freedom Riders and forced them to the back of the bus for the two-hour ride to Birmingham. As they drew nearer to the city, Klansmen taunted and threatened the passengers. When the group arrived in Birmingham, the violence resumed with the complicity of the local police, who allowed the racist mob fifteen minutes of unimpeded access to the riders. Gary Thomas Rowe was among those who awaited the arrival of the civil rights activists. Years later, he described the event:

We made an astounding sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham on Sunday afternoon carrying chains, sticks, and clubs. Everything was deserted; no police officers were to be seen except one on a street corner. He stepped off and let us go by, and we barged into the bus station and took it over like an army of occupation. There were Klansmen in the waiting room, in the rest rooms, in the parking area.

When the bus arrived in Birmingham, the seven Freedom Riders were dragged from the vehicle, chased into the streets, punched and kicked into semi-consciousness. After 20 minutes, the mob dispersed.

Photographs of the assaults in Anniston and Birmingham were published nationwide and even overseas. When activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee joined the Freedom Riders to help them complete the journey, they were attacked as well in Montgomery, where one man was doused in gasoline and set on fire. The Kennedy administration, embarrassed and shocked by the violence, quietly negotiated with the racist governor of Mississippi, James Eastland, to have the riders arrested for their own protection when they crossed into his jurisdiction. As more riders entered Mississippi and as the arrests mounted, some of the activists were shipped off to Parchman Farm, a former slave plantation than had become one of the most notorious facilities in American history.

The Freedom Rides -- scores of them -- continued throughout the summer and into the fall of 1961. The Kennedy administration did as little as possible, blaming the activists themselves for causing international embarrassment to the US. In September, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a long-overdue order that put the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings into effect.

May 6

On this date in 1882, the Congress of the United States passed a bill insisting that “the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof.”

For decades, whites along the west coast had been agitating for greater regulation of Chinese labor. States like California passed openly discriminatory legislation against the Chinese from the early 1850s onward, while Chinese miners and railroad workers faced wage disparities and violence throughout the country. Meantime, anti-Chinese ideologues insisted in the press and from the pulpit that “Asiatics” represented an economic, political and moral hazard to the white republic. During the presidential campaign of 1880, the Democratic and Republican parties committed themselves to an exclusionary policy

To remedy this presumed affliction, this new law -- the so-called “Chinese Exclusion Act” -- effectively ended Chinese immigration for the next six decades by prohibiting the entry of all Chinese laborers into the US. Under the terms of the act, those who were not common “laborers” -- merchants, diplomats or teachers -- were permitted to come to the US provided that they received certification from the Chinese government assuring that they were not, in fact, common workers. Those Chinese workers already living in the US were allowed to stay but faced greater bureaucratic obstacles if they wished to travel abroad and return; the act also clarified that resident Chinese were ineligible for naturalized citizenship.

Opponents of the Chinese Exclusion Act were hardly silent throughout this period. In Congress, various Senators and Representatives argued that the proposed bill would violate America’s treaty obligations to the Chinese while needlessly alienating other Asian peoples; others insisted that the law would run contrary to the nation’s pluralistic values and that it would capitulate to racists and demagogues. Harper’s Weekly stated the latter case against the bill a month before its passage:

The coming of 230,000 or 240,000 Chinese in a quarter of a century, and the presence of 100,000 in the country at the end of that time, are not the precursor of an overwhelming invasion. The bill is founded on race hatred and panic. These are both familiar facts even in this country. It is not a very long time since one of the most familiar objections to the antislavery movement was that the fanatics wanted to free the "nay-gurs," who would immediately overrun the North and supplant the Irish. It was mere panic. We have always invited everybody to come and settle among us, because the chance of bettering his condition was fairer here than anywhere else in the world. If we now exercise our right to select new-comers, not upon great public considerations the truth of which is demonstrated, but because of race hatred, or of honest labor competition, or fear of local disorder, the movement will not stop there.

These predictions proved accurate. By World War I, the United States had passed an array of restrictive laws barring a variety of classes from immigration: people with certain diseases or handicaps, paupers, contract laborers, prostitutes or other “immoral” women, illiterates, anarchists, and convicted felons. No other law, however, targeted a single national group for exclusion. Meantime, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 had been reauthorized several times until it became permanent in 1902. It was not repealed until 1943, when Congress graciously permitted 105 Chinese immigrants to enter the United States each year.

In 1965 -- nearly a century after the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act -- racial quotas were at last removed from American immigration law.

March 25

On this date in 1931, a fight took place on a Memphis-bound train between a group of whites and a group of blacks, all of whom had hopped the train while traveling the region in search of work. In the course of the skirmish, several of the white youth were tossed from the slow-moving cars. When the train arrived at its next stop in Paint Rock, Alabama, nine black teenagers were arrested by a mob of armed whites. From there, they were removed to a jail in nearby Scottsboro, where they were charged with assaulting a group of white youth on a train earlier that afternoon. Most importantly, the young men were accused of raping two white women -- charges that would have resulted in their lynching that very night if the governor of Alabama had not intervened to prevent it.

Over the next five years, the defendants would endure multiple trials and rounds of appeals that brought the case to the Supreme Court and to the attention of the entire nation. Although the accusations against the so-called “Scottsboro Boys” were completely unsupported by physical or eyewitness testimony, eight of the nine received quick convictions and capital sentences in April 1931. As Hollace Ransdall noted in an unpublished report on the case, the white community of Scottsboro was absolutely convinced of the guilt of the accused.

They all wanted the Negroes killed as quickly as possible in a way that would not bring disrepute upon the town. They therefore preferred a sentence of death by a judge, to a sentence of death by a mob, but they desired the same result, and were impatient with anything that slowed up the conviction and death sentence which they all knew was coming regardless of any testimony.

They said that all negroes were brutes and had to be held down by stern repressive measures or the number of rapes on white women would be larger than it is. Their point seemed to be that it was only by ruthless oppression of the Negro that any white woman was able to escape raping at Negro hands. Starting with this notion, it followed that they could not conceive that two white girls found riding with a crowd of Negroes could possibly have escaped raping. A Negro will always, in their opinion, rape a white woman if he gets the chance. These nine Negroes were riding alone with two white girls on a freight car. Therefore, there was no question that they raped them, or wanted to rape them, or were present while the other Negroes raped them - all of which amounts to very much the same thing in southern eyes - and calls for the immediate death of the Negroes regardless of these shades of difference. As one southerner in Scottsboro put it, "We white people just couldn't afford to let these Niggers get off because of the effect it would have on other Niggers."

On appeal, the US Supreme Court overturned the initial verdicts, ruling that the young men had been offered incompetent counsel. (The original lawyers consisted of a staggering alcoholic and an elderly lawyer who had not tried a case in years.) Alabama quickly retried one of the defendants, Haywood Patterson, and though one of his accusers -- a young woman named Daisy Bates -- had recanted her testimony, the jury again found Patterson guilty and sentenced him to die.

By now, however, the judge in the Patterson trial harbored serious doubts about the guilt of the defendants. In a decision that ultimately ruined his career, Judge James Horton chose to set aside the verdict and ordered a third trial for Patterson. A more compliant judge presided over Patterson’s third trial, which ended in precisely the same manner as his first two. For the second time, the United States Supreme Court vacated Patterson’s conviction -- as well as that of his fellow defendant Clarence Norris -- on the grounds that the court’s deliberate exclusion of blacks from the jury pool had violated the constitutional rights of the accused.

By 1936 -- five years after the initial incident -- the fourth round of trials began. Patterson and Norris were again convicted, along with Andy Wright, Ozzie Powell and Charlie Weems. All received sentences of 20 to 99 years for crimes they did not commit. On July 24, 1937, the state dropped charges against Roy Wright, Eugene Williams, Olen Montgomery and Willie Roberson, all of whom had been in prison for nearly five years after their initial guilty verdicts had been overturned. Between 1943 and 1950, Alabama paroled four of the five convicted Scottsboro defendants; Haywood Patterson escaped from prison in July 1948 and fled to Michigan, which refused to extradite him after his capture two years later.

Although the case is universally regarded as one of the worst episodes in American legal history, Alabama never offered restitution to the young men who spent so many unnecessary years fearing for their lives in state custody.

March 7

On this date 1965, hundreds of civil rights activists walked across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which would have led them out of Selma, Alabama, toward the state capital in Montgomery. The marchers were determined to press their governor -- the atrocious George W. Wallace -- to reign in the state’s police and troopers, who had been brutalizing justice advocates for years.

In early 1965 Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had launched a voting rights campaign in Dallas County. Like many communities throughout the deep South, Dallas Country was dominated by the racist Sheriff Jim Clark who bragged that he had learned “never to his a nigger with your fist because his head is too hard.” In Dallas County, only 335 blacks -- out of a population of 15,000 -- were registered to vote, a percentage that was characteristic of Alabama as a whole.

The Selma protests quickly drew the official wrath of the state, which arrested thousands of civil rights activists during the first weeks of February. On February 18, a demonstration in nearby Marion had brought the death of Jimmie Lee Jackson, a 26-year old veteran and Baptist deacon whom a state trooper had shot at point-blank range during a police riot. Jackson -- who took a bullet to the abdomen while trying to protect his mother -- died from an infection on February 26. (His killer, James Bonard Fowler, was charged with murder a mere 42 years later.)

In response to Jackson’s death, the SCLC planned the Selma-to-Montgomery march for Sunday, March 7. After crossing the Pettus Bridge -- located on Jefferson Davis Highway (US 80) -- the marchers were greeted by a phalanx of Alabama Troopers. The subsequent assault was captured live by television crews and subsequently broadcast around the world. J.L. Chestnut, a young lawyer from Selma, recalled “Bloody Sunday” four decades later.

[W]hat I witnessed led me to believe America could not be saved and white people were not worth saving. One hundred fifty state troopers decked out in riot gear, tear gas, masks, and clubs the size of baseball bats, backed by fifty special deputy sheriffs mounted on nervous horses and armed with huge clubs, beat the young nonviolent people senseless in broad daylight . . .

People were left bloodied on the highway. [John] Lewis [of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee] was on his knees, suffering from two concussions and bleeding like a stuck hog. Women and even children were unconscious, others semiconscious, lying, sitting, trying to run, but literally being run over by horses -- and hearing their ribs and limbs cracking. It was the worst day of my life.

Over the next two weeks, continuing violence in Alabama brought further attention to Selma and the broader question of black voting rights. On March 9, a white Unitarian minister from Boston named James Reeb was beaten by segregationist thugs in Selma; he died from head injuries two days later. After a federal court ruled on behalf of the SCLC, thousands of marchers left Selma on March 21. Among the marchers was a housewife and mother of five named Viola Liuzzo. Liuzzo had watched footage of the “Bloody Sunday” confrontation from her home in Detroit. Horrified by what she saw, Liuzzo traveled to Selma less than two weeks later and participated in the final march, which successfully arrived in Montgomery on March 24.

On March 25, Viola Liuzzo was shot to death in her car by four Klansmen. A little over four months later, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act; Lyndon Johnson signed it into law.

Last year: The martyrdom of Felicitas and Perpetua

February 8

The epic, racist melodrama Birth of a Nation premiered 93 years ago today. It was shown to a Los Angeles audience at the lavish Clune Auditorium on 8 February 1915; the Los Angeles Philharmonic accompanied the film, which spanned 12 reels and was seen by 2500 people on its opening night.

The silent film was directed by David Wark Griffith, who had been born to a family of former slaveholders in Oldham County, Kentucky. During the Civil War, Griffith's father Jacob organized the 1st Kentucky Cavalry and eventually ascended to the rank of colonel. During the war, the Griffith estate was burned to the ground. When the young filmmaker discovered a 1905 novel by Thomas Dixon entitled The Clansman, he was inspired “to tell the truth about the War between the States. It hasn't been told accurately in history books. Only the winning side in a war ever gets to tell its story”

One historian whom Griffith believed had narrated the tale properly was President Woodrow Wilson, who had befriended Thomas Dixon while they were both students at Johns Hopkins University. Wilson’s five-folume History of the American People (1902) depicted the rise of the Ku Klux Klan -- the subject of Dixon’s novel and Griffith’s film -- as a necessary stage in the pacification and redemption of the South.

As Dixon himself described his novel,

In the darkest hour of the life of the South, when her wounded people lay helpless amid rags and ashes under the beak and talon of the Vulture, suddenly from the mists of the mountains appeared a white cloud the size of a man's hand. It grew until its mantle of mystery enfolded the stricken earth and sky. An ‘Invisible Empire’ had risen from the field of Death and challenged the Visible to mortal combat.

How the young South, led by the reincarnated souls of the Clansmen of Old Scotland, went forth under this cover and against overwhelming odds, daring exile, imprisonment, and a felon's death, and saved the life of a people, forms one of the most dramatic chapters in the history of the Aryan race.

On 18 February 1915, Birth of a Nation became the first film ever to be screened at the White House. Among the attendees that night was Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, Edward White, who had never seen a motion picture before. In Thomas Dixon’s biography, Southern Horizons, the novelist uses third person voice to tell the story of how he persuaded Justice Edwards to attend the White House screening.

”You tell the true story of the Klan?',” White asked.
“Yes - for the first time.”
White removed his glasses and pushed his book aside, as he leaned towards Dixon and said in a low tone: “I was a member of the Klan, sir. Through many a dark night, I walked my sentinel's beat through the ugliest streets of New Orleans with a rifle on my shoulder. You’ve told the true story of that uprising of outraged manhood?”
“In a way I'm sure you'll approve,” the Reverend replied.
“I'll be there!” said White.

After Griffith’s last film, The Struggle, flopped in 1931, he became a recluse. He died in the Knickerbocker Hotel in Los Angeles in July 1948, seven months after President Harry Truman desegregated the armed forces of the United States.

January 14

On this date in 1963, George Corley Wallace announced his triumphant arrival into the Alabama governor's office in Montgomery. In a loathsome ode to herrenvolk democracy, Wallace stoked the fires of white resentment against the modest gains of the civil rights movement, which had entered perhaps its most critical year to date:

Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South. In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever. . . .

Hear me, Southerners! You sons and daughters who have moved north and west throughout this nation . . . . we call on you from your native soil to join with us in national support and vote . . and we know . . . wherever you are . . away from the hearths of the Southland . . . that you will respond, for though you may live in the fartherest reaches of this vast country . . . . your heart has never left Dixieland.

And you native sons and daughters of old New England's rock-ribbed patriotism . . . and you sturdy natives of the great Mid-West . . and you descendants of the far West flaming spirit of pioneer freedom . . we invite you to come and be with us . . for you are of the Southern spirit . . and the Southern philosophy . . . you are Southerners too and brothers with us in our fight.

By the end of 1963, the March on Washington would take place; police officers in Birmingham would unleash German shepherds and fire hoses against unarmed men, women, and children; four young girls would be obliterated in a church bombing in that same city; Medgar Evers would be gunned down outside his home in Jackson, Mississippi; and John Kennedy -- who watched all of this with mounting dismay -- would have his brains scattered across the seats of a limousine in Dallas.

December 20

On this date in 1860, the state of South Carolina issued an ordinance to “dissolve the union” between itself and its 32 fellow states. The vote was 169-0. Summoned into existence by the South Carolina legislature on November 5 -- the day after Lincoln’s election to the presidency -- the “secession convention” gathered on December 17 and issued its infamous declaration three days later.

We, the people of the State of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do declare and ordain, and it is hereby declared and ordained, That the ordinance adopted by us in convention on the twenty-third day of May, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and eighty-eight, whereby the Constitution of the United States of America was ratified, and also all acts and parts of acts of the General Assembly of this State ratifying amendments of the said Constitution, are hereby repealed; and that the union now subsisting between South Carolina and other States, under the name of the "United States of America," is hereby dissolved.

At the bottom of South Carolina’s decision lay an unfounded concern that the federal government under Republican leadership might eradicate the institution of slavery, on which the plantation economy and the illusion of Southern white supremacy depended. No evidence existed to support such a conclusion, of course; the Republican Party was committed at the moment to nothing in principle except the exclusion of slavery from the Western territories. Without a federal amendment -- one that did indeed pass after 630,000 lives had been extinguished -- slavery in Lincoln’s America would have remained safely protected by a Constitution originally drafted with the interests of slaveholders at its heart.

The fire-eaters of South Carolina, however, looked upon the Republicans as a devious, sectional party that had risen to power for the sole aim of humiliating the South and threatening its “rights of property.” Four days after the secession ordinance had been issued, the state legislature clarified its decision by casting total blame upon the madmen of the North and their abolitionist minions.

Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

Describing the federal government as an “enemy” and proclaiming that the election of Lincoln amounted to a proclamation of “war” against slavery, the state of South Carolina chose to commit treason in defense of the principle of eternal black subjection.

December 5

Strom Thurmond, one of the US Senate’s greatest sexual profligates and enduring racist icons, was born 105 years ago today.

As the Democratic governor of South Carolina, Thurmond joined fellow Negrophobe Fielding Wright -- a Democratic Congressman from Mississippi -- in a protest campaign intended to unseat fellow party member Harry Truman from the presidency in 1948. Truman, hoping to keep liberal voters from migrating to Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party, had nudged the Democrats ever so gently away from its 19th century herrenvolk roots, mostly by establishing a presidential commission to investigate the condition of civil rights in the US. Fearful that Truman would devote a second term to more specific, concrete devaluations of white privilege, nearly three dozen party delegates left the Democratic convention in Philadelphia and recast themselves under Thurmond’s leadership as the States’ Rights Democratic Party.

Warning that civil rights was the first step toward the creation of a “Police Nation” in the US, Thurmond rallied the Dixiecrats, who insisted that the nation’s “racial integrity” be preserved through segregation and anti-miscegenation statutes. Warning that the “nigger race” would never be admitted into his theaters, swimming pools, homes and churches -- he of course had little to say about the rules of entry to his bedroom -- Thurmond called upon the federal government to cease its interference with “individual rights” by mandating equality, a principle the party adamantly rejected.

Although the States’ Rights campaign failed in 1948, it did manage to dislodge four states from the “solid South,” taking South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi and nearly tossing the presidency to Thomas Dewey. Over the next several decades, the 1948 Dixiecrat walkout would be duplicated on a wider scale. As the national civil rights movement crested with the support of Democrats like Lyndon Johnson, Thurmond himself switched to the GOP and campaigned for Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon. From the 1960s through the 1980s, disgruntled Southern white voters followed Thurmond and gradually migrated to the Republican Party, whose revanchist racial politics aimed to roll back the impact of a civil rights movement that Thurmond and others had been unable to prevent in the first place.

Over the rest of his career, Thurmond acquired an almost completely undeserved reputation as a convert to the mission of racial equality. Although he occasionally and vaguely congratulated African Americans for “developing” beyond the condition of menial servitude, he never actually repudiated his segregationist views, and his few moments of “enlightenment” -- voting, for instance, to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., with a federal holiday -- hardly compensate for his decades of sturdy labor on behalf of white supremacy.

During the summer of 2003, Thurmond at last ascended to the great Whites-Only swimming pool in the sky, several months after the most notorious birthday party in his unnecessarily long life.

November 15

As the second world war ground onward, Heinrich Himmler, commander of the Nazi SS, found himself increasingly preoccupied with the alleged presence of homosexuals in the elite paramilitary organization. In 1936, he had established the Reich Central Office for the Combating of Homosexuality and Abortion. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans were arrested for sexual crimes, and tens of thousands were sent to camps, where the policy of “Extermination Through Work” dominated. In early 1941, Himmler declared that the gay infestation had touched the strings of the Nazi party. “The party,” he announced, “with its branch organizations and the Wehrmach must proceed with ruthless severity against every case of homosexuality that appears in their ranks. If this happens, then the machinery of the state will remain clean, and it must remain clean.”

On November 15, 1941, Himmler’s philosophy was enacted in a secret document, signed by Hitler himself, titled “The Fuhrer’s Decree Relating to the Purity of the SS and Police.” The document announced that "to keep the SS and Police clean of vermin with homosexual inclinations," any SS member member or police officer "who commits unnatural acts with another man or lets himself be abused for unnatural acts shall be punished with death." Offenses deemed "less serious" would result in imprisonment or hard labor for six months or more. As for the number of SS or police officers subjected to these punishments, no reliable figures appear to exist.

Exactly two years later, Himmler issued an order dooming hundreds of thousands of Sinti and Romani people to the Reich's concentration camps scattered across Europe. The Romani and Sinti -- groups commonly known in English as Gypsies -- had been subjected to many of the same laws that pertained as well to Jews; although Nazi racial scientists distinguished between "pure" and "mixed-race" Gypsies, the former group was believed to consist of only about 10 percent of the overall population. During the early years of the Second World War, Gypsies were herded into ghettos or -- as happened more frequently in Eastern Poland and German-occupied Russian lands -- summarily shot by SS officers. Others were transferred to work camps. On November 15, 1943, Germany removed the distinctions between Jews and "nomadic" or "impure" Gypsies, who were henceforth "to be placed on the same level as Jews and placed in concentration camps." Where doubt existed as to the racial identity of a particular individual, "the police commanders will decide who is a Gypsy."

The porajmos -- "the devouring," as it has come to be known among the Romani -- ultimately consumed between 200,000-500,000 lives.

November 7

Although Illinois was technically a “free state” in the late 1830s, slavery continued to exist within its borders until 1845, when the state’s supreme court issued a ruling that effectively ended the “peculiar institution” for good. Nevertheless, like most northern states, Illinois maintained a ferocious commitment to white supremacy in both law and fact. Free blacks were denied the right to vote, hold office or serve in the militia, and they were obligated register their certificates of freedom with the state. After 1829, they were required to post $1000 bond before settling in a state that would eventually be known as the “Land of Lincoln.” In 1822, advocates for human bondage managed to secure a popular referendum on the question of rewriting the state constitution to fully legalize slavery. The measure lost, though it attracted more than 40 percent of the vote.

Most white citizens of Illinois -- even those who opposed slavery -- loathed blacks and wished them gone in one way or another. Thus, “colonization” societies sprouted throughout the state, encouraging the US to cleanse itself by transporting African descendants back from whence they had involuntarily come. Genuine abolitionists like Elijiah Lovejoy, the Maine-born editor of the Alton Observer, were hardly welcome; much of white Illinois wished people like him gone as well, and in November 1837 they received their wish. On November 7, several months of escalating confrontation in Alton resulted in Lovejoy’s murder at the hands of a white lynching party, who laid siege to his office, smashed his printing press -- the fourth one to receive such treatment since his arrival in Alton the previous year -- and filled his torso with bullets. Crying “Oh God, I am shot,” Lovejoy died within minutes.

He was buried on what would have been his 35th birthday, November 9, 1837. His wife Celia -- six months pregnant with their second child -- was too distraught to attend the funeral.

While abolitionists across the nation quickly praised Lovejoy as a martyr to the antislavery cause as well as to the principle of a free press, he was predictably cast as a villain throughout the Midwest and the South. The Missouri Republican, commenting on the episode shortly after the killing, condemned “mob violence” while placing the blame for Lovejoy’s death on his own actions:

[W]hen we see a man recklessly, wantonly, and mischievously persist in a course which others are sure to regard as an outrage on their feelings, which is sure to inflame the popular mind and lead to violence, we have but little sympathy for his sufferings. He who willfully excites the tempest should be the first to feel its violence.

More than twenty members of the mob were tried for the destruction of the press and the murder of Elijah Lovejoy. All were acquitted.

October 1

William Hubbs Rehnquist was flushed into the world 83 years ago today.

During his ascent toward the Supreme Court, where he would eventually serve nearly 20 years as Chief Justice, Rehnquist established himself as a vigorous defender of 19th century racial custom. While serving as a clerk for Associate Justice Robert Jackson in 1952, a youthful Rehnquist drafted an infamous, spritely memo in which he insisted that Plessy -- the 1896 case validating the constitutionality of segregation laws -- was “right and should be reaffirmed.” As he explained to Jackson,

in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are. One hundred and fifty years of attempts on the part of this Court to protect minority rights of any kind -- whether those of business, slaveholders, or Jehovah's Witnesses -- have been sloughed off, and crept silently to rest. If the present Court is unable to profit by this example it must be prepared to see its work fade in time, too, as embodying only the sentiments of a transient majority of nine men.

Rehnquist elaborated on this point in another memo the next year, when he informed the justice that “white people of the south don’t like the colored people,” and that the Court could only do so much to alleviate the burdens placed upon minority rights. (These observations, it should be recalled, came less than a decade after World War II had seemingly demonstrated the perils of racial majoritarianism. Then again, Rehnquist’s wartime duty was limited to stateside meteorology, and so his sensitivity to the war’s broader ideological meanings may not have been terribly well sharpened.)

Although Jackson and the eight other justices failed to accept his deference toward herrenvolk democracy, Rehnquist continued to fight the good fight as a private attorney in Phoenix. While the national civil rights movement pursued federal legislation with greater urgency, Rehnquist donated his time to “Operation Eagle Eye,” a voter-suppression effort organized by the state’s Republican Party. For several years, he and other GOP lawyers assembled themselves into flying squads that harassed south Phoenix voters -- most of whom were African American and Latino -- and challenged their credentials as they waited in line. Rehnquist’s goonery eventually helped earn him a position in the Nixon Justice Department and, before long, on the highest court in the land. Somewhat perversely, William Rehnquist was confirmed to the seat last occupied by John Harlan II, the grandson of Plessy’s lone dissenter and an important advocate for racial equality in his own tenure on the court.

In his 34 years on the bench, Rehnquist helped drag the court rightward, to such a degree that traditional judicial conservatives like John Paul Stevens eventually appeared liberal by comparison. He continued to take a dim view of individual (and especially minority) rights, interpreting the Equal Protection Clause in the sort of narrow terms that would have made his 19th century forebears proud. And in the Chief Justice’s waning years, the Rehnquist Court bequeathed to the nation the singular error known as the Bush Presidency, which -- among its other constitutional sins -- has presided over (arguably) the worst decline in civil rights since the second Cleveland administration.

All that said, we would be amiss in overlooking Rehnquist’s gift for music. At the annual 4th Circuit Judicial Conference, the Chief Justice used to lead friends and colleagues in rousing choruses of old-time American songs, including an enlightened ditty known as “Dixie.”

September 24

I consider, therefore, the prime mission of the ideal American commonwealth to be the perfection of the Aryan genius for political civilization, upon the basis of a predominantly Teutonic nationality[.] If such, in truth, be the transcendent mission of the American commonwealth, . . . what folly, on the part of the ignorant, what wickedness, on the part of the intelligent, are involved in the attempts, on the one side to sectionalize the nation, or on the other, to pollute it with non-Aryan elements. Both have tried, and both, thanks to an all-wise Providence, have failed; for both were sins against American civilization, and both were sins of the highest order.

— John Burgess, “The Ideal of the American Commonwealth”
Political Science Quarterly (1895)

Lou Dobbs turns 62 today.

The life of Lou Dobbs is a familiar rags-to-shithead fable. After growing up in small towns in Texas and Idaho, Dobbs managed to earn admission and a full scholarship to Harvard. During his sophomore year, he found himself "mesmerized" during a debate between Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman at MIT, and -- inspired by the evangelical, free-market warbles of the latter -- he soon chose a major in economics. By the mid-1970s, a series of meanders led Dobbs to journalism, and he eventually found himself with a job at CNN. Having toiled away the next two decades as a sycophantic financial correspondent, Dobbs -- like all fake populists -- eventually found glory by persuading himself that the republic faced coequal perils. In an era of Bush capitalism, Dobbs saw the nation's vitality sapped by venal, corporate aristocrats and their government abettors; at the same time, his viscera trembled as he watched a subproletarian army of gardeners, dishwashers and day laborers spill forth from Mexico and all points south.

These days, the ample jowls of Lou Dobbs can be seen every night of the week, undulating like two sacks of warm, curdled cheese as he charts the alien menace infiltrating our southern border. Dobbs, who once described the Minutemen as a "terrific group of concerned, caring Americans," decided over two years ago to turn his show into a karaoke machine for nativist misinformation and vigilantism; since then, he has addressed the subject of immigration with an angry, masturbatory zeal, warning his viewers of the economic rot, cultural disarray and biological pestilence that will presumably result from the endless, unthwarted flow of "illegals" to the United States. To lend "perspective" on these issues, Dobbs routinely offers air time to race-baiting trogs like Glenn Spencer of the American Patrol, Chris Simcox of the Minutemen, and Barbara Coe of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform. In one of Dobbs' finer moments of racist demagoguery, he actually ran a map sourced to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a group that promotes the baseless rumor that Chicanos wish to recapture "Aztlan," the Mexican territory lost to the US in 1848. To be sure, adherents to such beliefs are not difficult to find -- and even less so now that Fightin' Lou has offered their ressentiment a higher amplitude and an undeserved aura of legitimacy.

Nice work, Lou.

September 4

The pace of the Cold War accelerated in 1949; within a matter of months, the Soviet Union announced its first successful nuclear weapons test and victorious communist forces announced the formation of the People’s Republic of China. As their ancestors had done in the aftermath of World War I, self-professed American patriots stiffened with vigilance, rooting out internal subversives and arraying themselves in defense of the “American way of life.” Among other things, such defenses apparently required that hundreds of drunken yokels attack musicians and concert-goers at a picnic grounds north of Peekskilll, New York.

The “Peekskill Riots,” as they came to be known, actually began on August 27, 1949, when a benefit concert performance by Paul Robeson was pre-empted by several hundred men who -- expressing their dissent from Robeson’s political views by smashing chairs and pounding bystanders -- prevented the event from taking place. During the weeks prior to the event, local newspaper editorials had combined with the ululations of the local Ku Klux Klan to whip the community into an anti-black, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist frenzy. Hostility toward the concert organizers and performers only intensified when the event was rescheduled for the following week. On September 4 -- with private security drawn from the ranks of nearby unions -- Robeson took the stage with Pete Seeger and other musicians, performing without incident before a crowd of 25,000. After the concert was over, however, the previous week’s violence resumed.

In a ballad written and recorded the following week, Pete Seeger recalled the skirmish:

There were 900 police, deputies and state troopers at Peekskill. They allowed the mob to form along a four mile line of road, and directed all traffic down this only exit, and then stood by watching while the hoodlums threw rocks through the windows of cars and buses. Heads were bashed in, eyes were cut by flying glass. Cars were overturned, and the people in them dragged out and beaten! And the police stood by and laughed! Hoodlum gangs went on a night-long reign of terror all through Westchester County clear down to 210th Street and Broadway. Then the police moved! They moved into the picnic grounds to beat up the trade union guards.

Although no one died, several hundred injuries were sustained during the two battles, whose effects were reported across the globe. An official investigation, ordered by Governor Thomas Dewey, insisted that communists bore the ultimate responsibility for the violence in Peekskill.

August 17

Today is the anniversary of what was arguably the most famous lynching in US history.

On August 17, 1915, Leo Frank -- a Jewish pencil store manager from Atlanta -- was kidnapped from a Georgia prison farm and driven 150 miles to a spot just outside Marietta, where the 31-year-old man was strung from a tree. Frank had been convicted the previous year of a murder that he almost certainly did not commit; originally sentenced to die for the rape and strangulation of a young factory employee named Mary Phagan, Frank successfully appealed to Governor John M. Slaton for a commutation. Enraged (as many white Georgians were) by the commutation, a group of roughly 30 men who called themselves the Knights of Mary Phegan took matters into their own hands.

The crime, trial and subsequent lynching were seminal moments in the history of the New South. Frank’s trial had been a disgusting, racist spectacle, as the undisguised anti-Semitism of the prosecution was matched beat for beat by the insinuations of the defense lawyers, who insisted that only a black man would have been capable of such a brutal crime against the flower of white womanhood. After Slaton issued his commutation, Tom Watson -- Georgia’s most famous racist demagogue -- explicitly called for Frank’s extrajudicial killing. In a deranged rant published in his magazine, the Jeffersonian, Watson wrote that:

Our grand old Empire State HAS BEEN RAPED!

We have been violated, AND WE ARE ASHAMED! . . . .

The great Seal of the State has gone, LIKE A THIEF IN THE NIGHT, to do for an unscrupulous law firm, a deed of darkness which dared not bask in the light of the sun.

We have been betrayed! The breath of some leprous monster has passed over us, and we feel like crying out, in horror and despair,

Unclean! UNCLEAN!

Watson concluded that “Jew money has debased us, bought us, and sold us -- and laughs at us.” Agreeing with Watson that “lynch law” is “better than no law at all,” the Knights of Mary Phagan -- which included a former governor, a state legislator, the former and current mayors of Marietta, as well as other prominent lawyers and businessmen -- cleansed their “Empire” by administering the only form of law they truly respected.

Among other things, the lynching of Leo Frank -- which took place the same year as the release of Birth of a Nation -- helped inspire the rejuvenation of the Ku Klux Klan.

August 1

On this date in 1492 -- two days before Christopher Columbus commenced his first voyage to the Western Hemisphere -- Spain’s unconverted Jewish population lost its right to remain in the kingdom of Ferdinand and Isabella. According to the edict issued by the crown in late April, malingering Jews would be sentenced to death by hanging. According to the memoirs of an Italian Jew writing in 1495, Isabella was approached at the last minute by the Prior of Santa Cruz, who objected to the expulsion and pleaded with her to reconsider. The queen, unmoved, replied that

"The king's heart is in the hand of the Lord, as the rivers of water. God turneth it withersoever He will." She said furthermore: "Do you believe that this comes upon you from us? The Lord hath put this thing into the heart of the king."

Then they saw that there was evil determined against them by the King, and they gave up the hope of remaining. But the time had become short, and they had to hasten their exodus from Spain. They sold their houses, their landed estates, and their cattle for very small prices, to save themselves. The King did not allow them to carry silver and gold out of his country, so that they were compelled to exchange their silver and gold for merchandise of cloths and skins and other things

On August 1, 1933, Adolf Eichmann began training with an illegal paramilitary group known as the Austrian Legion. Nine years later, on August 1, 1942, Eichmann -- by then a captain and “Transportation Administer” in the SS -- ordered that all Belgian Jews be loaded onto trains destined for Auschwitz, Poland. That very day, Gerhart Reigner, director of the Geneva office of the World Jewish Congress, received a secret telegram from Germany detailing the use of Zyklon B gas in the numerous camps to which expelled Jews were being delivered. When Reigner passed word of the Final Solution to the United States Department of State, his reports were suppressed for months for fear that “interested groups” might demand action.

It is entirely possible that while Reigner stared in disbelief at the August 1 telegram, Anne Frank was composing the last sentence of her remarkable diary:

When everybody starts hovering over me, I get cross, then sad, and finally end up turning my heart inside out, the bad part on the outside and the good part on the inside, and keep trying to find a way to become what I’d like to be and what I could be if . . . if only there were no other people in the world.

Meir Kahane, racist founder of the Jewish Defense League and the terrorist Kach Party in Israel, celebrated his tenth birthday on 1 August 1942. Kahane, a New Yorker who emigrated to Israel in 1971, believed Arabs to be “strangers” in the Holy Land and advised that only their cleansing from Eretz Israel would assure his nation’s survival. On the subject of terrorism, Kahane wrote in 1979 that

[w]e cannot allow the situation to continue. Every victim is a beloved one who leaves behind loved ones and sorrow and tragedy. Every victim is a fellow Jew. Every death and outrage is a Hillul Hashem, a desecration of the name of the L-rd, G-d of Israel. Our apathy, our acceptance of the situation, only guarantees further and worse inflation of terror. It guarantees further deaths, cripples, and agony and anguish. It cannot continue, and it must as long as Arabs are allowed to live and wander freely in the Land. The solution is ultimately only one: The removal of the hostile and dangerous Arab minority from the Land of Israel . . . .

On 1 August 1967, Israel annexed East Jerusalem, contravening the Fourth Geneva Convention. Five thousand Arab residents were driven from the city, their homes destroyed to improve security access to the Wailing Wall.

This is a re-post of last year's entry

June 7

Nine years ago today, three white men from Jasper, Texas, used a chain to tie a 49-year-old black man named James Byrd, Jr., to the back of a gray pickup truck. Having already beaten him severely and having sprayed his face with black paint, the men the dragged Byrd for three miles before dumping his body -- by then missing a head and an arm -- outside Huff Creek Cemetery, where generations of African Americans from the small east Texas town had been laid to rest.

Lawrence Brewer, John King, and Shawn Berry encountered Byrd as he was walking home, drunk, from a party. Although Brewer and King were each known to be white supremacists whose hatred for blacks had been refined in prison, they offered Byrd a ride nevertheless. According to Berry’s version of events, King eventually drove the group to a secluded field, where he announced his intention to “scare the shit out of this here nigger.” After the assailants kicked and beat Byrd to near unconsciousness, King explained to Berry that “we’re starting the Turner Diaries early.” During the scuffle King dropped his lighter, which investigators later discovered. In addition to being engraved with his prison nickname, “Possum,” John King’s lighter also bore a neo-Nazi symbol.

Forensic investigators determined later that James Byrd was still alive -- and probably struggling to keep his head up -- as the pickup dragged him by his feet. Before the rim of a drainage ditch tore off his head and arm, Byrd lost his wallet, keys, shoes and dentures, all of which were scattered along Huff Creek Road.

Texas Governor George W. Bush declined to attend James Byrd’s funeral, explaining that his presence would be viewed as too “political.” Bush decided that hate crime legislation -- particularly a law named in memory of Jasper’s latest lynching victim -- would be too political as well, and so he refused to offer his support for the bill, which died in committee. For their part, Brewer and King were sentenced to death for the murder of James Byrd, while Berry received a sentence of 40 years to life.

May 14

On this date in 1961 -- Mothers’ Day -- civil rights activists affiliated with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) were attacked by white mobs in Anniston and Birmingham, Alabama, when they attempted to ride through the state on Greyhound and Trailways buses. Following the US Supreme Court’s decision in Boynton v. Virginia -- which ruled segregation on interstate bus lines unconstitutional -- black and white “Freedom Riders” decided to test the willingness of white Southerners to adhere to the law. Fewer than two dozen set out from the nation’s capital on May 4. They had dutifully sent their itinerary to the Justice Department. J. Edgar Hoover promptly forwarded it to state officials in Alabama, many of whom were known to have Klan affiliations.

The rides began in early May. Defying custom, white riders sat in the back while black passengers occupied the front seats. When the buses stopped, the CORE riders refused to observe the segregated conditions that were still observed in southern bus terminals; whites used “colored” restrooms and waiting areas, while blacks used facilities reserved for whites.

The rides encountered minor violence in Rock Hill, South Carolina, but everyone knew the worst was yet to come. As Martin Luther king, Jr., had warned the riders, “You won’t make it through Alabama.” Indeed, when the CORE buses crossed the Georgia state line on their way to Birmingham, they encountered ferocious resistance. At a rest stop in Anniston, the Greyhound passengers were attacked by local members of the Ku Klux Klan and nearly 200 of their closest friends. One of the riders, James Peck, wrote about the incident in his book Freedom Rider (1962):

They set about the vehicle, denting the sides, breaking windows, and slashing tires. Finally, the police arrived and the bus managed to depart. But the mob pursued in cars. Within minutes, the pursuing mob was hitting the bus with iron bars. The rear window was broken and a bomb was hurled inside. All the passengers managed to escape before the bus burst into flames and was totally destroyed. Policemen, who had been standing by, belatedly came on the scene. A couple of them fired into the air. The mob dispersed and the injured were taken to a local hospital.

By this point, Walter Bergman had been kicked until his brain hemorrhaged. He remained in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. The reception in Anniston was not entirely unhelpful, though. A 12-year-old white girl named Jamie Miller brought a bucket of water to the riders, who were choking from smoke inhalation. Facing constant taunts and threats from other whites in the community, she and her family soon moved from Anniston.

When the Trailways bus arrived two hours later, Klansmen boarded as well, beat the Freedom Riders and forced them to the back of the bus for the two-hour ride to Birmingham. As they drew nearer to the city, Klansmen taunted and threatened the passengers. When the group arrived in Birmingham, the violence resumed with the complicity of the local police, who allowed the racist mob fifteen minutes of unimpeded access to the riders. Gary Thomas Rowe was among those who awaited the arrival of the civil rights activists. Years later, he described the event:

We made an astounding sight . . . men running and walking down the streets of Birmingham on Sunday afternoon carrying chains, sticks, and clubs. Everything was deserted; no police officers were to be seen except one on a street corner. He stepped off and let us go by, and we barged into the bus station and took it over like an army of occupation. There were Klansmen in the waiting room, in the rest rooms, in the parking area.

When the bus arrived in Birmingham, the seven Freedom Riders were dragged from the vehicle, chased into the streets, punched and kicked into semi-consciousness. After 20 minutes, the mob dispersed.

Photographs of the assaults in Anniston and Birmingham were published nationwide and even overseas. When activists from the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee joined the Freedom Riders to help them complete the journey, they were attacked as well in Montgomery, where one man was doused in gasoline and set on fire. The Kennedy administration, embarrassed and shocked by the violence, quietly negotiated with the racist governor of Mississippi, James Eastland, to have the riders arrested for their own protection when they crossed into his jurisdiction. As more riders entered Mississippi and as the arrests mounted, some of the activists were shipped off to Parchman Farm, a former slave plantation than had become one of the most notorious facilities in American history.

The Freedom Rides -- scores of them -- continued throughout the summer and into the fall of 1961. The Kennedy administration did as little as possible, blaming the activists themselves for causing international embarrassment to the US. In September, the Interstate Commerce Commission issued a long-overdue order that put the Supreme Court's desegregation rulings into effect.

May 11

On 11 May 1970, a black Army veteran named Henry Marrow died outside a grocery store in Oxford, North Carolina. Marrow was beaten and then shot by three white men who objected to what they characterized as an inappropriate remark made by Marrow to a white woman -- a woman who happened to be the 18-year-old daughter-in-law of Robert Teel, the store owner. After a brief confrontation over the alleged remarks, the murderers -- Robert Teel, his son Larry and his stepson Roger Oakley -- chased Marrow from the store; as Marrow fled toward the highway, one of the men shot him in the leg, incapacitating him. The trio then pummeled Marrow with their rifle butts, fracturing his skull and breaking one of the guns in the process. One of the three then shot the near-unconscious man in the head as he pleaded for his life.

Marrow left behind a wife and twin daughters, with a third child only a few months from being born.

The killing of Henry Marrow occurred in open daylight, with multiple eyewitnesses. As the prosecutor later described it, “They shot him like a hog. They shot him like you or I would kill a snake.” Following Marrow’s death, the segregated black community of Oxford -- convinced that no one would ever be tried or convicted of the crime -- took out their anger on the business district of downtown Oxford, where two nights of rioting damaged nearly two dozen white-owned businesses. Rioters were unable, however, to pull down a local statue of a Confederate soldier. Meantime, local Klansmen armed with rifles and shotguns guarded the Teel house. Gun shops sold out of ammunition in the coming days, as Oxford’s white community prepared for an all-out race war that mercifully did not come.

An all-white jury acquitted Robert and Larry Teel on the implausible pretense that they were acting in self-defense. The killing of Henry Marrow and the acquittal of the Teels sparked a black boycott against white-owned businesses in the small town. By the end of the year -- six years after the passage of a federal civil rights law intended to prohibit racial discrimination -- the white community of Oxford agreed to desegregate the town’s commercial institutions.

May 2

Leopold II of Belgium formalized his rule over the "Congo Free State" -- surely one of the great misnomers in the history of imperialism -- on this date in 1885. During the previous six years, Sir Henry Morton Stanley had concluded a series of advantageous treaty negotiations with the tribal chiefs of central Africa, whose lands were given over to the king for his personal enrichment. Stanley, quite famously, observed that "the savage only respects force, power, boldness, and decision," advice that Leopold surely took to heart as he spent the next 20 years administering the destruction of millions of people whose homelands he would never visit.

The history of the Congo Free State amounts to one of the great mass murders in human history, as a familiar nexus of racism and economic exploitation was condensed into two decades of systematic atrocity carried out with only the barest pretesnse of "White Man's Burden." Leopold opened parts of the Congo to European entrepreneurs, who purchased the rights to exploit the land for rubber and ivory; in exchange for granting monopoly rights, the Belgian ruler asked only for a 50 percent share in the profits. In the regions of the "Free State" that the king ruled directly, he borrowed from 16th century Spanish conduct in the West Indies and demanded annual production and labor quotas from the locals. The quotas were more than mere recommendations. White deputies of the king, known as the Force Publique, brutalized the various Congolese tribes, enforcing the king's authority over nearly a million square miles of land; the FP also punished interference from Congolese or Arab traders who competed with European merchants. During the "rubber terror," recalcitrant or non-productive tribes were tortured, mutilated and shot. FP conscripts were allowed to submit baskets of severed hands to their commanding officers, "tributes" of a different sort than relieved them of responsibility for failing to extract the quotas from the subject peoples.

Villages were depopulated and burnt to the ground. One member of the FP later testified that in one episode,

[w]e fell upon them all and killed them without mercy ... [Our leader] ordered us to cut off the heads of the men and hang them on the village palisades, also their sexual members, and to hang the women and children on the palisades in the form of a cross.

Between five and fifteen million Congolese died during the 23 years of Leopold's rule, while the king himself absconded with 220 million francs in personal profit, an amount totalling more than a billion dollars in contemporary terms.

By the early years of the new century, word of Leopold's savagery leaked to the European public, who reacted in horror at the revelations of journalists like Edmund Morel or novelists like Joseph Conrad, whose Heart of Darkness was based on his observations as captain of a steamer on the Congo River. Writing about a decade before the king's death, Mark Twain declared that

Leopold has deliberately destroyed more lives than have suffered death on all the battlefields of this planet for the past thousand years. In this vast statement I am well within the mark, several millions of lives with the mark. It is curious that the most advanced and most enlightened century of all the centuries the sun has looked upon should have the ghastly distinction of having produced this moldy and piety-mouthing hypocrite, this bloody monster whose mate is not findable in human history anywhere, and whose personality will surely shame hell itself when he arrives there--which will be soon, let us hope and trust.

Investigations by European governments eventually persuaded the Belgian parliament to wrest control from Leopold in 1908. The damage, however, had already been done. Not only had Leopold destroyed tens of millions of lives while depleting the wealth of a continent, but his entrepreneurial imperialism accelerated the European quest for African lands -- a competitive cycle that would bring devastating consequences for hundreds of millions more, including Europeans themselves. By 1914, the bearers of "civilization" -- driven mad by nationalism and imperial competition -- paused for a moment and began slaughtering one another for a change.

Leopold II, sadly, was not around to witness the fruits of his effort to subdue the Congo. By the time the Germans occupied most of his country, Leopold had been dead for five years.

April 20

On this date in 1968 -- the anniversary of Hitler’s birth -- the reactionary British MP Enoch Powell delivered the most notorious speech of his career. Speaking at the West the West Midlands Conservative Political Centre in Birmingham, Powell discharged a lengthy tirade against an anti-discrimination bill being debated in Parliament.

Warning that immigrants from the British Commonwealth were overwhelming the resources of the UK while diluting its cultural integrity, Powell insisted that the nation was “insane” for permitting undesirable souls from pouring into the country. He likened it to watching a nation “heaping up its own funeral pyre.” Quoting Virgil’s Aeneid, Powell urged his countrymen not to allow the United Kingdom to go the way of the United States:

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding. Like the Roman, I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood'. That tragic and intractable phenomenon which we watch with horror on the other side of the Atlantic but which there is interwoven with the history and existence of the States itself, is coming upon us here by our own volition and our own neglect. Indeed, it has all but come. In numerical terms, it will be of American proportions long before the end of the century. Only resolute and urgent action will avert it even now. Whether there will be the public will to demand and obtain that action, I do not know. All I know is that to see, and not to speak, would be the great betrayal.

While the “Rivers of Blood” speech provoked much outrage -- and did nothing to halt the passage of the antidiscrimination law -- Enoch Powell became the George Wallace of his land, a hero to racists and xenophobes and a symbol of unrepentant, white supremacist defiance. Although he received tens of thousands of supportive telegams after the speech, Powell lost his position in the opposition Shadow Cabinet; his sacking led to protests on April 23 among dockworkers and other laborers in London and elsewhere. In due time, Powell’s fellow travelers began offering their support by wearing buttons and pins declaring that “Enoch Was Right.”

(Last year's post.)