Racism

Black History Month

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Nina Simone on the march from Selma to Montgomery, with Harry Belafonte lower right.

Black History is about much more than emancipation and education. Beyond the basic rights to liberty and literacy, Americans have a right to pursue happiness. All year long, the national park service celebrates those who broke the barriers that denied black people their full rights as citizens.

The African Burial Ground predates our country, includes both free and slave, and is today a powerful symbol of the right to belong, be recognized and be remembered. New Philadelphia, Illinois, was the first town in American officially founded by an ex-slave in 1836. Camp Nelson became a focal point for escaped slaves during the Civil War, both as refugees deserving help and as soldiers with a right to fight in uniform. Nicodemus, Kansas, 1877, is the oldest black settlement west of the Mississippi, and it still lives. Jazz began before the turn of the century in New Orleans. In 1903, Charles Young, born a slave, became the first black national park superintendent, and in 1917 became the first black Army Colonel (surpassing Dr Alexander Augusta, Bvt. Lt. Col. during the Civil War). In 1911, Maggie Walker, daughter of a slave, became the first African American woman to found and run a bank, among her many civic accomplishments in Richmond, Virginia, and nationally. In April 1939 after being refused the right to sing elsewhere, Marion Anderson made national news singing at the Lincoln Memorial.

WWII brought new opportunities, including employment for African American women among the Rosie the Riveters who built our fleets and the Tuskegee Airmen who helped turn around the war by defending our bombers over Germany. Tragically, segregation in the military led to the Port Chicago disaster in 1944, which in turn led to desegregation in the military. 

Eisenhower was President in 1955, and America was a very conservative, 88% white, 95% Christian country. Still, when Mamie Till-Mobley’s boy was brutally murdered in Mississippi, she shocked the conscience of the nation with his open casket, sparking the Civil Rights Movement. In 1961, black and white Freedom Riders rode buses to integrate interstate travel, lunch counters and restrooms, but were attacked by “Citizens Councils for Racial Integrity”: the KKK. Despite school desegregation, Normandy Veteran Medgar Evers was denied law school admittance due to his race, so he worked with the NAACP on desegregation, civil rights protests and an investigation into Till’s murder. Returning home the morning after listening to JFK (below) promising to desegregate “hotels, restaurants, theaters, retail stores, and similar establishments”, Evers found his FBI protection detail had been suddenly withdrawn, and he was shot in his driveway, unintentionally desegregating the white hospitals of Mississippi shortly before dying.

That September, the KKK killed four young black girls by bombing a church in Birmingham. In November, JFK was assassinated. But the movement did not stop; it grew. In 1965, in Selma, Alabama, three times residents marched towards Montgomery to try to register to vote and to protest. First, they were beaten bloody and unconscious on the street by police on horseback. Second, they were stopped by legal action. And Third, they marched 54 miles to the capitol in Montgomery, joined by people from across the country, 25,000 strong, ultimately securing the Voting Rights Act a few months later.

The Reverend Dr Martin Luther King, Jr, who led that march and many others, gave his life for Civil Rights, along with many others. On 28 August 1963 in front of the Lincoln Memorial, he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Well, two of his children are now dead, and his youngest is 60. I believe we failed to achieve his dream in his timeframe. But we must not stop trying.

”One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves,
yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free.
They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice.
They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression.
And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts,
will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.” 

President John F. Kennedy, Televised Address to the Nation on Civil Rights, 11 June 1963

Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument

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”Let the people see what they did to my boy.”

Mamie Till-Mobley

The animosity against African Americans, especially in the Deep South, is hard to comprehend, but it is deep, real, persistent and extremely dangerous. Emmett Till’s mother warned him, but even she underestimated the risk. In late August of 1955, Emmett Till was kidnapped from his great uncle’s home by a shopkeeper’s husband and his half-brother, who accused Emmett of whistling at the shopkeeper, a white woman. From past midnight to pre-dawn, the two men, along with several others, held Emmett, aged 14, in the back of a pickup truck, drove around the county, terrorized him, tortured him, shot him and dumped his body in the river. Witnesses reported hearing Emmett’s screams all over town for hours. His great uncle reported the kidnapping, the men were arrested, and the body was found a few days later. His mother, saying “let the world see what I see”, insisted on an open casket at the funeral in Chicago. Jet magazine published photos of his brutalized body. His mother became a lifetime activist, author and motivational speaker on education, poverty and Civil Rights with the NAACP. Many consider Emmett Till’s killing to be the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, not least because Rosa Parks cited Emmett as the reason she kept her seat on the bus in Montgomery on 1 December 1955. 

The trial was a foregone conclusion. Outside the courthouse (below) stood a statue dedicated to the “Heroes” of the Confederacy. Inside there was no justice. Instead of jurors, police, court officers and elected officials defending the Law, the courthouse became the focal point of a deep criminal conspiracy, based on racism. Witnesses were intimidated, hidden, immunized and silenced. Emmett’s great uncle testified at the trial, pointing out the kidnappers and murderers, and then he left town immediately and went into hiding under a false name. And for many years afterwards, there has been a concerted effort to conceal the truth. Evidence lost. Signs have been repeatedly shot and torn down. Historic artifacts and structures intentionally left to ruin or demolished. One witness, in hiding for decades under another name, still received death threats demanding silence. The confederate statue still stands in front of the courthouse, just left of the photo. 

But despite the legacy of lies, terror and violence, people still work to tell the truth about Emmett Till. Especially if you’re exploring the new monument’s sites in Illinois and Mississippi, I recommend reading the darkly fascinating stories in the Emmett Till Memory Project app, after being introduced to it by one of the contributors at the Emmett Till Interpretive Center across from the courthouse in Sumner, MS. Emmett Till’s coffin is on display at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC. His name was given to the Anti-Lynching Act of 2022. And this new national monument was established by President Biden on 25 July 2023, on what would have been Emmett Till’s 82nd birthday. 

Gila River

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Despite not being on the West Coast, the US military evicted all American citizens from the southern part of Arizona during WWII as potential ‘navy base saboteurs’, if they had Japanese ancestry. The military’s arbitrary exclusion zone ran through Phoenix, so if you lived on the south side of the city, you wound up incarcerated while your family on the north side kept their homes.

Like Poston, most Japanese-Americans were taken from their homes in Southern California. The barracks in the background of the photo above comprised a small part of camp 2 or Butte Camp at Gila. The Gila River Tribal Community protested, but the military appropriated over 17,000 acres of their land anyway and concentrated roughly 15,000 people here according to their ethnicity. 

The tribal community had been struggling since the Gila River was diverted by white settlers beginning in the 1880s. In 1934, archaeologists dug up their ancestral burial grounds, and after they dug again in 1964, the government also created a national park site. Now that site is closed and the tribes don’t allow visitors there. 

Survivors of internment built a monument on the ‘internment camp’ site, but someone shot it up with a machine gun a few years back, and unless you’re family, you can’t visit the site now. Given all the tragedies and harm done here under the American flag, seems like folks might benefit from a government funded educational center explaining the history and the importance of respecting Constitutional rights. 

The Gila River Tribal Community runs the excellent nearby Huhugam Culture Center free museum, which contains a small display case of ‘relocation center’ artifacts, including two busts of young prisoners. The one pictured is Sayoko ‘Jean’ Kawamura, and the other has no name, forgotten to history. 

Heart Mountain

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Heart Mountain (above) is the site of an American Concentration Camp in Wyoming. One of the incarcerees left a bequest for ‘something to be done’, and now much is being done here to teach people about the injustice sustained here from 1942 until 1945. There is an original barracks, a guard tower ‘built to spec’, memorials, artwork, and a remarkably personal and revealing museum. Renovations, expansion, acquisitions and outreach are ongoing.

While most sites choose not to use the term “concentration camp”, due to its association with the Holocaust, one of the incarcerees in the film uses that term plainly, the then Governor used the term in arguing in favor, and that was the term used most commonly at the time. Many of the Americans who were sent there had never seen so many people of Japanese descent in one place at the same time. What else are you going to call a facility that literally concentrates one group of citizens based on racial/ethnic identity in a prison camp?

What makes the exhibits here better than other sites is that they go one or two steps deeper in describing the experience. When the site started, “it was like pulling teeth” to get incarcerees to talk about it, but then gradually the stories started coming out: a dog left behind that refused to eat and died alone, a beautiful older lady describing how she was spat on and called a slur as a child, and a family recounting the suicide of their father after being robbed and rejected by their community upon release with $25.

The museum pulls no punches in their descriptions, making it plain that these innocent American civilians had their rights abrogated and in many cases lost everything, due to racism. Instead of recognizing that we were at war with an enemy nation, our government and most Americans also declared war on a racial/ ethnic group of their fellow citizens. While J Edgar Hoover and Eleanor Roosevelt counseled against the program as ‘unfounded’ and ‘unjust’ respectively, FDR approved the military’s ‘relocation program’ recommendation for ‘sensitive military areas’, which the military interpreted as the entire west coast.

“The Japanese race is an enemy race
and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil,
possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized’,
the racial strains are undiluted.”
“A Jap is a Jap.”

Lt. Gen. John DeWitt,
architect and overseer of the American Concentration Camps

Tule Lake National Monument

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Sometimes the story is more important than the scenery, and Ranger Danny told it well. In April 1942, US citizens of Japanese descent on the west coast were given 2 days to pack 2 suitcases and check in to temporary relocation centers, losing their freedom and property in violation of the 4th Amendment. They were not given due process in violation of the 5th Amendment. FDR’s order was popular—especially among those who planned to take their property—, and the wartime Supreme Court partly upheld it, in the infamous Korematsu decision, while simultaneously partly dismantling it, in Endo. Reagan apologized and offered survivors small compensation.

Many Americans grew up either not knowing much about this or believing it justified by war. The Japanese military attacked Pearl Harbor without warning, after invading their neighbors, occupying Shanghai and committing atrocities in Nanjing. When FDR’s order went into effect, Japan had taken Hong Kong and Singapore, and they held several thousand American civilians as prisoners for the duration of the war, with insufficient food, forced labor and a high death rate. Americans did not want to prove themselves better; they wanted revenge.

And yet the Germans had acted similarly, with sneak attacks, invading neighbors and taking prisoners, but the US issued no similar order to imprison US citizens of German descent. Americans lost relatives in battle to both foes. Both aggressive countries employed spies. Japanese Americans do not appear different from other Asian Americans, so Japanese spies could still operate on the west coast. There is no justification for abrogating the rights of Japanese Americans, not expediency, not greed, and certainly not racism.

These ten American Concentration Camps were a failure of leadership, imagination, morality, of our government and of rational behavior. Having dispensed with our Constitution, the rules were arbitrarily made up on the fly. The US military defined a huge ‘exclusion zone’ from Washington state to New Mexico, fearing another naval assault in Arizona?!? Hawaii, despite being the location of Pearl Harbor, detained few Americans of Japanese descent. Japanese Americans who already lived in Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado or Arkansas witnessed their fellow citizens arriving in their states and being imprisoned for having the same cultural background as they did.

The US military still wanted to draft soldiers from the citizens they detained, so they created a loyalty questionnaire to invite them to fight in Europe. The government then started using the questionnaire to divide the incarcerated into loyal or not. The questions were convoluted, rewritten in some camps and many were misadvised on how to respond. Since Tule Lake only used the original version, they had a higher ‘failure’ rate, so they got a reputation for disloyalty. Inmates exercised their 1st Amendment right to protest, and the military sent in tanks. Then they had the inmates build a concrete jail inside the barbed wire, machine gun manned watchtower prison. One man was interrogated for 12 days because his mother accidentally played a borrowed radio. Many inmates here were pressured into renouncing their US citizenship.

One reason that most Americans don’t know much about this history, or have mistaken views, is that the US government intentionally misled the public about conditions here. The press was invited in to see the one barracks in Tule Lake where everyone was happy and would receive steak for dinner in return for cooperating, while the remainder of the massive camp was suffering from basic food & water shortages. The image of the ‘happy Japanese interns’ was amplified as propaganda, which some visitors still repeat today.

The highly recommended ranger tour is given on summer weekends out in the field (above) and in the jail, complete with jail cell bars saved by a local to preserve the real story. The camp is 10 miles outside town, per military requirement, and there are a few original buildings, the top of a watchtower and a stone monument, besides the small visitor center. The site is in the far northeast corner of California, in the reclaimed lake bed, quite close to Lava Beds. It’s remote, but important to visit.

Charles Pinckney National Historic Site

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Charles was a son of privilege. His father educated him in the law at the family firm, made him an officer in his town militia unit, and cooperated with the British during the Revolution to save the family plantation for his heirs. Charles, having participated in the failed attempt to keep Charleston out of British hands, was considered a patriot and became a young and successful politician. He participated in the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, made numerous significant contributions and signed the document, and he remained in public service as an elected representative for decades.

Today, he is best remembered for being an outspoken advocate of slavery, for insisting that the southern states would not ratify a Constitution that prohibited slavery or the slave trade, and for suggesting the 3/5ths compromise, which counted slaves as 3/5ths of a person to boost southern white representation in Congress, while counting not at all in terms of black citizenship or representation. At the end of his career, Charles voted against the Missouri Compromise, correctly predicting that it would overturn the original truce on slavery between the northern and southern states and lead to bloody civil war.

For many years, this site was financially sponsored mainly by Senator Strom Thurmond, who served 48 years in the US Senate as its most notorious modern segregationist. According to the ranger, the exhibits were a hagiography of Pinckney’s contributions to our Constitution and whitewashed his devotion to the institution of slavery. Today, the exhibits are new and improved in comparison with the hagiography still in place at Andrew Johnson’s site. But there’s still much work to be done.

According to a volunteer at Darrah Hall in a Reconstruction Era site, white visitors sometimes tell the African Americans who work there that “you people need to get over slavery”. And yet, to this day, white political pressure denies teaching the truth of racism and slavery to our children, censors books from libraries and creates lies to hide painful truth, as they have since the Civil War. On this ZCT adventure, I have seen the Confederate battle flag flown from Utah to Pennsylvania, while the presumptive Presidential nominee from Florida signed legislation preventing teachers from criticizing racism. So clearly, it is white people who “need to get over slavery”.

Port Chicago Naval Magazine National Memorial

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At 10:15 pm on 17 July 1944, 320 people were vaporized in a munitions explosion while loading two ships simultaneously. The blast registered 3.4 on the Richter scale, disintegrated the docks above, blew one ship into small pieces, threw other ships hundreds of yards away, and injured people on the other side of Suisun Bay above. Most of the victims were young African Americans, and the Navy blamed the poorly trained black workers rather than the white officers in charge. When 50 survivors refused to return to work, they were sentenced to 8 to 15 years in prison and others were threatened with firing squad for mutiny. Despite the efforts of Thurgood Marshall to defend them and focus the blame on the Navy’s negligence, the ‘mutineers’ spent the rest of the war in prison, and the story was lost to history until a Cal professor named Robert Allen found a pamphlet, interviewed a dozen survivors and wrote a book in 1989.

The story is powerful, and the ranger and volunteer did an excellent job of painting a detailed picture of racism, dereliction of duty (among the officers who bet on load rates), the lies that the enlisted workers were told (that the bombs were inert), and the trial. Photographs, oral accounts and actually visiting the spot where it happened, including touring the revetments where munitions were transferred from boxcars and out to the docks, bring the impact home. The volunteer, Diana, noted that the Navy suffered an even more deadly munitions loading accident less than 4 months later, when the USS Mt Hood exploded in New Guinea on 10 November 1944, obviously not learning the lessons of Port Chicago. The ranger, Eric, made a persuasive case that the negligence and racism uncovered and protested, while officially unpunished, likely prompted the Navy to be the first branch of the military to desegregate completely in February 1946, two years before the other branches.

This park unit is dedicated to preventing this unjust tragedy from being forgotten. Tours must be reserved at least two weeks in advance for Thursday through Saturday when the Army, who took over the base, allows visitors. Although the tour met at the Muir home, I was able to drive my EV to the site above. Fortunately, the park service is working on improving access by building a visitor center nearby.

Rosie the Riveter / World War II Home Front National Historical Park

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FDR said, “we can’t afford to indulge in prejudice now”, and with that, the “Rosie” in the lower part of the collage above suddenly was able to qualify for a job that previously hired neither blacks nor women nor LGBTQ+ nor any other minority. Note that she is riveting aircraft grade aluminum while wearing lipstick, nail polish, a large wedding ring and a classic “Rosie” red bandana. Many women were surprised how easy riveting was and didn’t understand why men said they couldn’t do it. By 1944, women were about 1/3 of the workforce, and 10,000 African Americans worked here in Richmond during the war along with all other minorities (except Japanese Americans). Leadership is required to change society’s prejudices and discriminatory practices, and once the door was opened, many women decided to continue working after the war.

The visitor center is next to the Ford Assembly Plant, which is still full of industrial activity. Check in at the gate on Harbor, then drive around back and all the way down to the right. There are ChargePoint stations in the lot, and a good restaurant next to the visitor center. The factory used to make tanks, and across Marina Bay was Shipyard #2 which produced a new ship every 4 days, loaded with tanks and sent off immediately. Walk a bit of the SF Bay Trail along the waterfront to a fine memorial to the Rosies in Marina Bay Park, next to the yachts and fancy condos. Shipyards #1 and #4 were up the channel on the other side, along with the Prefab Yard. And Shipyard #3 still has the SS Red Oak Victory Ship, launched in November 1944, with worthwhile tours. This was the beating heart of America’s “Arsenal of Democracy”, and it was a unified effort of all hands on deck which changed the course of labor and civil rights overnight.

Amache National Historic Site

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President Biden authorized this new park in March, but it will take time to become fully established. The local community is important in determining whether a park is created, how it will happen and when. In this case, the local Granada High School has been working on preserving the history here for many years and is largely responsible for the reconstruction of the guard tower above.

As with Manzanar and Minidoka, the image of a guard tower evokes the reality of the imprisonment of Japanese-American citizens during WWII. Each of the towers surrounding Amache was manned with a machine gun and a spotlight. But inside the camps, it is often the Japanese cultural touches that strike me, the rock gardens in Manzanar and the silk screen shop here. The silk screen shop was so good, that the incarcerated citizens made posters for the US Navy. Despite their incarceration and wrongful denial of their Constitutional rights, these citizens were proud of their country and many of the children joined the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts here.

There are various monuments and markers remembering the 31 killed in action fighting for our country in Europe while their relatives were imprisoned, for the over 1,000 US military veterans from this camp including many interpreters, and for the over 100 inmates who died here, some before their time. While many were later reinterred elsewhere, a few graves remain in a Japanese styled cemetery, along with a memorial stone and a photo of the original epitaph, written in Japanese.

Interestingly, Colorado citizens of Japanese ancestry were not incarcerated, because the governor, Ralph Carr, correctly believed the program to be unconstitutional, arguing that once a majority violates the rights of a minority, “then you as a minority may be subjected to the same ill-will of the majority tomorrow.” His principles likely cost him his next election. (If the nearby town of Chivington wants to replace its shameful name, they could rename their town Carr).

But the Japanese [Americans] are protected by the same Constitution that protects us.
An American citizen of Japanese descent has the same rights as any other citizen. …
If you harm them, you must first harm me.
I was brought up in small towns where I knew the shame and dishonor of race hatred.
I grew to despise it, because it threatened the happiness of you and you and you.

Colorado Governor Ralph Carr to a hostile audience in 1942

Andrew Johnson National Historic Site

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Somebody has gone to a great deal of effort to rehabilitate disgraced President Andrew Johnson. The hagiographic film is narrated by the late Tennessee Senator (and actor) Fred Thompson. The exhibits extol Johnson’s fidelity to the Constitution against the “radical” views in Congress that African Americans should be granted full citizenship rights. This may be the worst site for informing people about history in the park service.

In fact, Johnson was an inveterate racist, a slave-owner who got a special exemption from Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation to extend slavery in Tennessee. After Lincoln’s demise, Johnson reversed Reconstruction and vetoed the Civil Rights Act, paving the way for a campaign of terror by the KKK (also from Tennessee in 1865) and the collapse of all efforts to let freed slaves participate fully in elections. He was impeached (148-27), but escaped conviction by one vote. Johnson’s presidency was such a threat to the nation that Grant was pressured to run “in order to save the Union again”. A long-time historical favorite of racists, modern historians generally rank Johnson among the worst presidents. Nowhere at this historic site could I find any acknowledgement that it was morally wrong and anti-democratic to deny freed slaves the right to vote.

Johnson was a poorly-educated tailor who had the good fortune to be married by a relative of Abraham Lincoln.