An anonymous history professor at U.C. Berkeley has penned an open letter against the current narratives of racial injustice underpinning the BLM movement and ongoing protests over the death of George Floyd.
Its authenticity was confirmed by Kentucky State University Assistant Professor of Political Science, Wilfred Reilley, who says he was sent a copy of the letter along with Stanford University economist Thomas Sowell.
UC Berkeley History Professor’s Open Letter Against BLM, Police Brutality and Cultural Orthodoxy
Dear profs X, Y, Z
I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.
In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.
In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.
Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.
The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.
A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.
Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries.
And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.
If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam.
These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.
Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.
I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.
The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.
No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.
The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.
Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.
The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.
The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.
There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.
Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.
MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?
As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.
And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.
I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.
It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.
The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.
No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.
I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic. I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end.
I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.
/end
About the Author
No matter what you think about Mr. Floyd, he should not have been murdered. No matter what you think about black lives, racism is real. Dig a little deeper into black American History. I continue to see racism. It should be called out.
If someone says, “I can’t breathe”, what should you do?
NOBODY should be murdered, regardless of what color their skin might be.
That would include George Floyd.
And yes, racism is real because those with black skin keep making it real.
You are the one who should do some digging into black American history.
To help you out, start with “Remarks by President Obama to the People of Africa, Mandela Hall, African Union Headquarters, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on July 28, 2015, to wit:
THE PRESIDENT: Thank you. (Applause.)
Thank you so much. As parents, Michelle and I want to make sure that our two daughters know their heritage — European and African, in all of its strengths and all of its struggle.
So we’ve taken our daughters and stood with them on the shores of West Africa, in those doors of no return, mindful that their ancestors were both slaves and slave owners.
end quotes
It is okay for blacks to own other blacks as slaves and to sell them, as well.
That is history.
As to racism, go to the Wikipedia site for Madelyn Lee Payne Dunham, the American maternal grandmother of Barack Obama, where you will find this decidedly racist commentary, to wit:
Ann Dunham attended the University of Hawaii, and while attending a Russian language class, she met Barack Obama Sr. in 1960, a graduate student from Kenya.
Stanley and Madelyn Dunham were unhappy about their daughter’s marriage to Obama Sr. in 1961, particularly after receiving a long, angry letter from his father, who “didn’t want the Obama blood sullied by a white woman.”
end quotes
Sounds like some real sincere black hate to me there.
And how about Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr., the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa.
He envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure black racial purity.
YASSAH, keep out that hated white blood from the black races, says the black man who wanted to have it be so.
Marcus Garvey was a black dude who was a staunch believer in “black separatism,” a separatist political movement that seeks separate economic and cultural development for those of African descent in societies, particularly in the United States.
Black separatism is a subcategory of black nationalism, stemming from the idea of racial solidarity, and it also implies that black people should organize themselves on the basis of their common experience of oppression as a result of their race, culture, and African heritage.
Black separatism in its purest form, as a subcategory of black nationalism, asserts that black people and white people should ideally form two independent nations.
Black separatists generally think that black people are hindered in their advancement in a society that is dominated by a white majority.
Which makes them the victims of their own thought patterns.
Getting back to Marcus Garvey, although black, he collaborated with white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to advance their shared interest in racial separatism, the systemic separation of people into racial or other ethnic groups in daily life.
So there is the calling out of some racism for you, and that is barely the tip of the iceberg.
To close, I had a good friend, a very wise woman from Chicago with black skin then living in Massachusetts, near to where W.E.B. DuBois was raised.
It was her position as a black woman who wanted to be a vital part of society that she had to get as far away from black people who were white-hating racists, especially the men, as she could get.
Was she a racist, do you think?
As to the cops involved in the murder of George Floyd, check out the pictures of J. Alexander Kueng and Tou Thao.
According to the news, Kueng’s attorney described the rookie officer as a “young African-American from North Minneapolis” who “wanted to make that community a better place.”
So he stood there while George Floyd was being murdered as a way to make that happen, because not all black folks like other black folks.
And Tou Thao is Hmong.
So the murderers of George Floyd were multi-ethnic, while the Minneapolis police chief is black.
There is some history of racism in America for you.
Have fun sorting it out.
As to what to do when you see George Floyd saying he can’t breathe, you have to do what Tou Thao the cop told you to do when he was filmed interacting with onlookers and telling them to “get back on the sidewalk.”
Mag, let me say as a fellow American that I am very much for digging not a little, but a whole lot deeper into black American History, and when I do, what I find are these words of African-American spokesman and leader Booker T. Washington speaking before a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta on September 18, 1895, to wit:
In conclusion, may I repeat that nothing in thirty years has given us more hope and encouragement, and drawn us so near to you of the white race, as this opportunity offered by the Exposition; and here bending, as it were, over the altar that represents the results of the struggles of your race and mine, both starting practically empty-handed three decades ago, I pledge that in your effort to work out the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South, you shall have at all times the patient, sympathetic help of my race; only let this be constantly in mind, that, while from representations in these buildings of the product of field, of forest, of mine, of factory, letters, and art, much good will come, yet far above and beyond material benefits will be that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come, in a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law.
This, coupled with our material prosperity, will bring into our beloved South a new heaven and a new earth.
Wayne,
I think you need to change this article. The “authenticity” of this letter was not “confirmed” by any reasonable standard.
From Wilfred Reilly’s Twitter: “As re this “Berkeley History Prof letter,” I can confirm that the letter was sent to the e-mail addresses for multiple members of the UC History Dept., and cc’d to myself, Tom Sowell, and the UC Chancellor. I obviously can’t prove whether or not the sender is who he claims to be.”
What are the information sources that you used to make your claims about the letter?
Note: Somebody wrote it?? The Mirror publishes anonymous content all the time, Wayne usually takes the heat for it, but willingly does so to protect innocent people from being tarred and feathered by the angry mob….Update (06/13/2020): U.C. Berkeley’s history department has issued a statement regarding the anonymous letter, and instead of addressing – or inviting a vigorous debate over its content, Berkeley’s response validates one of the letter’s core claims that dissent outside “a tightly policed, narrow discourse” is not welcome.
“An anonymous letter has been circulating, purportedly written by a @UCBHistory professor. We have no evidence that this letter was written by a History faculty member,” the UC Berkeley History department tweeted Friday evening,” adding “We condemn this letter: it goes against our values as a department and our commitment to equity and inclusion.” However, which is interesting, this tweet confirms everything the letter rightly condemned. Astonishing that the department has been so thoroughly corrupted that it doesn’t care how this stance will be viewed by, well, history.
Right. I get that the letter itself was published anonymously. But the first two paragraphs of this post, the ones that incorrectly state that the letter’s “authenticity was confirmed by Kentucky State University Assistant Professor of Political Science, Wilfred Reilley [sic]” were written by Wayne Creed no? That’s just my impression based on the byline. If he didn’t write those paragraphs, he might want to make that more clear.
Love the editorial standard of “Somebody wrote it??” Did you go through and bold passages that you liked, or was that how you found it?
Note: Agreed, it is confusing. Here is the Reilley tweet. I found it because it was retweeted by Christina Sommer. https://twitter.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1271301272491171840. The letter was published as-is. The Mirror rarely if ever uses ctrl-b, sometimes ctrl-i. We use quote tags, and css boxes. As far as being critical of editorial standards, Wayne will gladly turn this whole operation over to you, that is if you are man enough to handle it. Email capecharlesmirror@gmail.com if you are interested. Be sure, our readers have expectations. They expect cahones, not poncey-ass Millenial drivel.
Austin, do you think for yourself and form your own opinions based on your reading of things, or do you think the way others would have you think?
What possible difference can it make or does it make who might have “bolded” certain passages?
Are you forced to accept something as either true or false because it is in bold print?
And who cares who actually wrote the piece?
Are we commenting on what we think about the author?
Or are we commenting on content?
I thought it was the latter, myself.
Was I somehow mistaken in that assumption?
Hi Paul,
I do tend to think for myself. That’s why after reading this piece, I looked up the original letter, and the twitter account of the professor who Wayne claimed had verified it. The bolded passages were just a difference that I noticed between the original letter and what was posted here. I wondered where that emphasis had been added. It didn’t really affect my understanding of the letter, but it could clear up questions I had about who was emphasizing what. Why might someone publishing a letter change certain phrases from normal to bold? I’m not claiming to be forced to accept anything.
I think it does matter who wrote the piece to an extent. Part of the argument this letter is making comes from the appeal to authority of having been written by a Berkeley History professor. A critique of academia would be more powerful having been written from inside of it, right? Have you read Confessions of a Former Bastard Cop? I think that the arguments made in that letter are diminished because it was published anonymously. And also think that if it wasn’t actually written by an actual former police officer, it wouldn’t have the same argumentative power, even if some of the points that it makes might be valid. The same kinds of thinking apply here.
I was commenting because I thought that the authenticity of the letter was being misrepresented, that’s all.
Cheers
Who reads headlines, looking therein for either truth or enlightenment?
Do you actually take headlines written in the New York Times or the Washington Post as the truth about anything?
And here is the offending headline in question displayed right before our eyes so we can dissect it, to wit:
Truth: U.C. Berkeley Prof trashes BLM movement
But wait, you didn’t say anything about the title, which I thought was quite catchy in terms of making the reader want to pause and see what the rest of the story might be about, which I think, and this is just me, is a talent the editorial staff of the Mirror has that makes the reader want to keep coming back for more.
What you said is as follows:
I think you need to change this article.
end quotes
To which I have to reply that that would be intellectually dishonest of the Mirror to do so, n’est-ce pas?
To clip and prune and trim to satisfy the tastes and whims of the subscribers, which the Mirror doesn’t have to do, since none of us have to negotiate a paywall to get to here?
Would you rather the Mirror did that, clipped and trimmed as you are suggesting with your admonition to the editor to change the article, as opposed to telling it like it is by leaving the article stand as it is, and then letting the mature, rational, lucid, adult reader to inform themselves and make up their own minds?
Same old ****, different day.
Almost 100 years ago, on January 16, 1923, Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr., the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist whose ideas came to be known as Garveyism, and who envisioned a unified Africa as a one-party state, governed by himself, that would enact laws to ensure black racial purity (nothing at all racist about that since it is a black man saying it), who collaborated with white racists such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) to advance their shared interest in racial separatism, published a political essay entitled “Who and What is a Negro,” which essay began as follo9ws, to wit:
The New York World under date of January 15, 1923, published a statement of Drs. Clark Wissler and Franz Boaz (the latter a professor of anthropology at Columbia University), confirming the statement of the French that Moroccan and Algerian troops used in the invasion of Germany were not to be classified as Negroes, because they were not of that race.
How the French and these gentlemen arrive at such a conclusion is marvelous to understand, but I feel it is the old-time method of depriving the Negro of anything that would tend to make him recognized in any useful occupation or activity.
end quotes
Here we can see from these words of Marcus Garvey in 1923, where he talks of the “old-time method of depriving the negro,” that this MLM narrative of blaming everyone else in the world for the troubles of the black folks has been going on for longer than any of us in here have been alive.
Getting back to the Garvey essay from 1923:
The custom of these anthropologists is whenever a black man, whether he be Moroccan, Algerian, Senegalese or what not, accomplishes anything of importance, he is no longer a Negro.
end quotes
Perhaps the answer is to simply ban college anthropology programs, which are obviously a huge part of the problem here.
Getting back to the essay:
The question, therefore, suggests itself, “Who and what is a Negro?”
The answer is, “A Negro is a person of dark complexion or race, who has not accomplished anything and to whom others are not obligated for any useful service.”
end quotes
With an attitude like that, no wonder almost 100 years later, the BLM crowd is singing the same refrain to the same old song.
Returning to Marcus Garvey, we have:
If the Moroccans and Algerians were not needed by France at this time to augment their occupation of Germany or to save the French nation from extinction, they would have been called Negroes as usual, but now that they have rendered themselves useful to the higher appreciation of France they are no longer members of the Negro race, but can be classified among a higher type as made out by the two professors above mentioned.
Whether these professors or France desire to make the Moroccans other than Negroes we are satisfied that their propaganda before has made these people to under-stand that their destiny is linked up with all other men of color through-out the world, and now that the hundreds of millions of darker peoples are looking toward one common union and destiny through the effort of universal cooperation, we have no fear that the Moroccans and Algerians will take care of the situation in France and Germany peculiar to the interest of Negroes throughout the world.
Let us not be flattered by white anthropologists and statesmen who, from time to time, because of our success here, there or anywhere, try to make out that we are no longer members of the Negro race.
If we were Negroes when we were down under the heel of oppression then we will be Negroes when we are up and liberated from such thraldom.
The Moroccans and Algerians have a splendid opportunity of proving the real worth of the Negro in Europe, and who to tell that one day Africa will colonize Europe, even as Europe has been endeavoring to colonize the world for hundreds of years.
end quotes
And here we need to throw in a bit of counter-Garvey cultural history concerning William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (February 23, 1868 – August 27, 1963), a black man who was an American sociologist, socialist, historian, civil rights activist, Pan-Africanist, author, writer and editor, who after completing graduate work at the University of Berlin and Harvard, where he was the first African American to earn a doctorate, became a professor of history, sociology and economics at Atlanta University, who rose to national prominence as the leader of the Niagara Movement, and who opposed the Atlanta compromise, an agreement crafted by Booker T. Washington, another black man, which provided that Southern blacks would work and submit to white political rule, while Southern whites guaranteed that blacks would receive basic educational and economic opportunities.
I wonder if this BLM crowd are aware that the Atlanta compromise was an agreement struck in 1895 between Booker T. Washington, president of the Tuskegee Institute, other African-American leaders, and Southern white leaders, which agreement provided that Southern blacks would receive basic education and due process in law, and that blacks would not focus their demands on equality, integration, or justice, while Northern whites would fund black educational charities.
Social impact[edit]
The compromise, which is no secret, given it is a part of the American history the BLM “RED GUARDS” are trying so hard to obliterate and/or change, was announced on September 18, 1895 at the Atlanta Exposition Speech.
The Cotton States and International Exposition Speech in its turn was an address on the topic of race relations given by Booker T. Washington on September 18, 1895, presented before a predominantly white audience at the Cotton States and International Exposition (the site of today’s Piedmont Park) in Atlanta, Georgia, which speech has been recognized as one of the most important and influential speeches in American history.
In the speech, Washington began with a call to the blacks, who composed one third of the Southern population, to join the world of work.
He declared that the South was where blacks were given their chance, as opposed to the North, especially in the worlds of commerce and industry.
He told the white audience that rather than relying on the immigrant population arriving at the rate of a million people a year, they should hire some of the nation’s eight million blacks.
He praised blacks’ loyalty, fidelity and love in service to the white population, but warned that they could be a great burden on society if oppression continued, stating that the progress of the South was inherently tied to the treatment of blacks and protection of their liberties.
He addressed the inequality between commercial legality and social acceptance, proclaiming that “The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house.”
Washington also suggested toleration of segregation by claiming that blacks and whites could exist as separate fingers of a hand.
end quotes
That is American history, as it actually happened, which brings us back to Marcus Garvey twenty-eight (28) years later in 1923, to wit:
The white world has always tried to rob and discredit us of our history.
Every student of history, of impartial mind, knows that the Negro once ruled the world, when white men were savages and barbarians living in caves; that thousands of Negro professors at that time taught in the universities in Alexandria, then the seat of learning; that ancient Egypt gave to the world civilization and that Greece and Rome have robbed Egypt of her arts and letters, and taken all the credit to themselves.
It is not surprising, however, that white men should resort to every means to keep Negroes in ignorance of their history, it would be a great shock to their pride to admit to the world today that 3,000 years ago black men excelled in government and were the founders and teachers of art, science and literature.
end quotes
If that was the case 3,000 years ago when EVERY student of history, of impartial mind, knows that the Negro ruled the world, when white men were savages and barbarians living in caves; what happened to them that they lost all that power?
Could it possibly be because they were making slaves out of each other to sell to the white men who were savages and barbarians living in caves?
ALL LIVES MATTER!! I thought blacks did not want to me seen as blacks, just human beings.