How will/did you spend Martin Luther King Jr. Day?!? Last blog I was just learning my ancestors owned slaves. For MLK 2022 I’m sharing some facts of Black History I’ve learned way too recently, things this Old White Guy should’ve known way before now, but I just wasn’t paying attention:
1. My Great Great Grandparents, John & Elizabeth Pitney received slaves as wedding gifts in Ohio in 1834.
2. Giving slaves as wedding gifts was a thing in white supremacist culture.
3. George & Martha Washington owned over 300 slaves, treating them with the same violence as other holders.
4. The same law that gave my family free land in Oregon Territory, prohibited African Americans from living there.
5. Between 1877 and 1951, 4,400 men, women and children were murdered by lynching in these United States.
6. The 1902 lynching of Alonzo Tucker by white coal miners in Coos Bay is the only documented lynching in Oregon.
7. The Tulsa Massacre happened May 31, 1921, when a white mob burned to the ground 1,200 homes, 60 businesses, dozens of churches, a hospital, school and public library in the prosperous black community of Greenwood, Oklahoma. Called Black Wall Street at the time, it was completely destroyed. At least 300 people were killed.
8. Juneteenth (Federal Holiday) celebrates June 19, 1865, when General Granger arrived in Galveston, TX to inform more than 200,000 enslaved Black Americans they were free, over 2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation.
9. Emmett Till’s mother insisted on an open casket so the whole world could see. 100,000 came and saw.
10. The institution of lynching was created to terrorize blacks so they won’t vote.
11. The counties where lynching occurred are those where the lowest percentage of African Americans vote today.
12. Ahmaud Arbery was lynched Feb. 23, 2020 in Brunswick, GA. Feb. 21, 1891, two blacks, Wesley Lewis and Henry Jackson were hung from a tree near Brunswick, shot 1,000 times. At least 3,000 white residents drove out to see.
13. The creation of Citizen’s Councils in Southern communities was a way to dress up the KKK to look democratic.
14. Slaves were never told their birth dates because they were considered property.
15. Many slaves were given the Slave Bible (pub. 1805). Omitting Exodus, any word of equity, justice and freedom, it emphasized scriptures calling slaves to be submissive to masters (essentially the Bible of white Christian’s today).
16. The roots of modern policing in our country grew from the Slave Patrols and Night Watches of the early 1700’s, created to control the behaviors of African Americans and Native Americans and keep white families safe.
17. Strange Fruit was an Anti-Lynching Anthem of Jim Crow and black pain when Billie Holiday sang it April 20, 1939 in in NYC. Its singing was prohibited in many places. Columbia Records wouldn’t record it. But she sang on.
18. I remember, as a very young child, when our family stopped calling “Brazil Nuts” “N—-er Toes.”
19. Since 1877 the first year with no documented lynchings in the U.S. was 1952.
20. Our Great, Great Grandchildren will know better.
Things I Should’ve Known, Especially Today
My maternal grandmother thought she was being clever when she taught me that Brazil nuts were “Nigger’s toes.” My mother had other ideas and, for that, I am thankful.
My paternal grandfather was a member of the Klan in Oklahoma and Texas. While in Corvallis he served as chief of the campus police for Oregon State College. He once admitted to my mother that he did everything he could to make life difficult for black students on campus – he and his cadre of “good ole boys.” My mother did what she could to prevent his influence on his three grandsons.
Hi John, I can relate to your not learning these important facts until later in life. The history books most of us studied and the White-owned media helped obscure these facts so as not to offend White people. I grew up in Mississippi during the Civil Rights Era but knew little about what was happening in my own state during that time. I’ve since learned as an adult about things that went on during my childhood. Thanks for your post. On another note, I thought of you when I read that Bill Staines, who wrote “A Place In the Choir” died recently. My kids will adore you forever for teaching them that song! Blessings to you and Debbie.