Dr. D. Elisabeth Glassco

Professor and Public Historian l History and Sociology of American Media. Specialization: Culture and History of the Antebellum South, Civil War & Reconstruction l Collective Memory of Black Political Leadership, University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Author of The Architecture of Freedom: Black Power and the American Republic, 1777-1860 (forthcoming).

NO JUSTICE NO PEACE >> BLACK LIVES MATTER.

400 Years Newsletter: https://open.substack.com/pub/400years
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/d-elisabeth-glassco-ph-d-817bb111
Personal Website: https://debraglassco.wixsite.com/d-elisabeth-glassco

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Last Notes

2026-03-18 17:11:56 UTC

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The United States declared universal liberty in 1776 while sustaining a massive system of racial slavery.
After emancipation, the system reorganized itself through Jim Crow—disenfranchisement, segregation, and racial terror.
For nearly a century, American democracy functioned fully for some citizens and only partially for others.
2/14
Image: Each time word of a lynching reached the NAACP, a simple, somber flag flew outside the group’s offices at 69 Fifth Avenue in NYC. (Library of Congress).
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/251/283/571/302/913/original/62099ed2e7b798d5.png

2026-03-18 17:08:36 UTC

Both the United States and Israel were shaped by political systems built alongside racial hierarchy and contested citizenship.
Each proclaimed democratic ideals while simultaneously managing populations excluded from the full promise of those ideals.
They are both profoundly unfree and racially riven societies..
That shared history matters.
1/14
#iran #history #histodons #israel #blackmastodon
Image: Benjamin Netanyahu hugs Joe Biden at Ben Guirion Airport on October 18, 2023. AFP.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/251/266/056/282/051/original/d317c268d6766723.png

2026-02-21 18:14:43 UTC

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Still more websites …
New York Times Opinionator (archived). “When Douglass Met Lincoln,” by Daniel C. Maguire, August 9, 2013. Accessed February 8, 2026. https://archive.nytimes.com/opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/08/09/when-douglass-met-lincoln/.
Rare Historical Photos. “Abraham Lincoln Photos.” Rare Historical Photos. Accessed February 8, 2026. https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/abraham-lincoln-photos/.
University of Maryland, Freedmen and Southern Society Project. “The Military Act of 1862.” Accessed February 8, 2026. http://www.freedmen.umd.edu/milact.htm.
10/10

2026-02-21 18:13:25 UTC

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More websites …
———. “Frederick Douglass Home.” National Park Service. Accessed February 8, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/frdo/index.htm.
———. “When the American Civil War Came to Douglass’s Door,” video, 3:26, posted on National Park Service, n.d. Accessed February 8, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=4bbf994b-e1b7-42e8-8002-5b2850ad2bf6.
———. “Frederick Douglass and the Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” video, 2:18, posted on National Park Service, n.d. Accessed February 8, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/media/video/view.htm?id=e0ca43b0-0ee9-4841-8634-9d8690925859.
9/10

2026-02-21 18:12:19 UTC

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Websites
Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. “Men of Color to Arms: The 1863 Call for Black Soldiers.” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Accessed February 8, 2026. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/men-color-arms-arms-1863.
HistoryNet. “Abraham Lincoln Meets Frederick Douglass.” HistoryNet. Accessed February 8, 2026. https://www.historynet.com/abraham-lincoln-meets-frederick-douglass/.
National Park Service. “Confronting a President: Douglass and Lincoln.” National Park Service. Accessed February 8, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/frdo/learn/historyculture/confronting-a-president-douglass-and-lincoln.htm.
8/10

2026-02-21 18:11:25 UTC

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Still more ...
Oakes, James. The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics. New York: W. W. Norton, 2007.
Simpson, Brooks D., ed. The Civil War: The Third Year Told by Those Who Lived It. New York: Library of America, 2013.
Trudeau, Noah Andre. Like Men of War: Black Troops in the Civil War, 1862–1865. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1998.
7/10

2026-02-21 18:10:02 UTC

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More...
Foner, Philip S., ed. Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings. Adapted by Yuval Taylor. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999.
Glatthaar, Joseph T. Forged in Battle: The Civil War Alliance of Black Soldiers and White Officers. Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 2000.
McPherson, James M. The Negro’s Civil War: How American Blacks Felt and Acted during the War for the Union. New York: Vintage Books, 1965.
6/10

2026-02-21 18:07:02 UTC

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Intellectual Map
Secondary Sources
Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Cornish, Dudley Taylor. The Sable Arm: Black Troops in the Union Army, 1861–1865. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1957.
Emilio, Luis F. A Brave Black Regiment: The History of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, 1863–1865. Boston: Boston Book Company, 1891.
5/10

2026-02-21 18:05:50 UTC

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Lincoln defended delay, urged patience, promised equality later. Douglass left unsatisfied but sharpened. He resumed recruiting not because the system had changed, but because its limits were now visible. Douglass never mistook access for equality. He measured power by how much resistance it required to move—and kept pushing anyway.
4/10
Image: Detachment muster roll for Sylvester Ray, Company B, 2nd U.S. Colored Cavalry, first black soldier to refuse service until equal pay with white troops.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/109/924/886/212/110/original/7a25e0bd84ccc767.png

2026-02-21 18:00:06 UTC

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Ten days later, Douglass arrived in Washington carrying the war with him: draft riots, Fort Wagner’s dead, his own sons wounded and sick. Stanton listened, delayed, offered commissions that never came. Then Douglass walked into the White House—alone, the only Black man waiting. He expected hours. Two minutes passed. “Mr. Douglass!”
3/10
Image: Lincoln the day before meeting Douglass,, Carte de Visite. August 9, 1863: By Alexander Gardner.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/109/915/318/673/899/original/910062956f65a1c5.png

2026-02-21 17:55:33 UTC

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Douglass had urged Black men to fight for freedom hundreds of times before. Then he stopped. In "Douglass’ Monthly," he wrote that he could no longer recruit “with a whole heart.” Black soldiers were paid less, barred from promotion, and executed or enslaved if captured. This was not moral exhaustion. It was leverage—withdrawal as exposure.
2/10
Image: From a series of "Carte de Visites" produced from his visit to Hillsdale College on January 21, 1863, 9 months before meeting with Lincoln..
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2026-02-21 17:51:46 UTC

In August 1863, Frederick Douglass stopped recruiting Black soldiers. He forced the Union to confront its contradictions: unequal pay, denied rank…violence against Black troops. He walked into the WH, challenged Abraham Lincoln directly, and left unconvinced by policy but clear about power. He resumed speaking not because justice had been secured, but because pressure, not faith, is what moves a nation forward.
1/10
Image: Recruiting broadside endorsed by Douglass (Gilder Lehrman).
#history
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2026-02-12 21:39:33 UTC

Born 99 years ago on February 10 in Laurel Mississippi, Leontyne Price is one of the greatest opera singers who ever lived…and she’s still with us!
Long live Leontyne!
#music
Video: Leontyne Price singing singing the anthem for the United Negro College Fund in 1984. Sponsored by The Ad Council.
https://youtu.be/SufPT9HoU6Q?si=AesFTItyb2Kxy8zj
Video: Leontyne Price singing “Ave Maria” in Montreal in 1982.
https://youtu.be/30eNxYjmEqU?si=Q9CYfbBHWlF6mPVV

2026-02-06 19:40:58 UTC

The U.S. economy is sinking. 65 percent disapproval rate. ICE is falling. Inflation is high. Health care in danger for millions. Wall Street is tanking. Foreign leaders mocking him.
History shows that he will get more desperate.
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2026-02-01 16:17:56 UTC

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You’re absolutely right. Black women were living under the same violence as Black men with the added component of sexual coercion and constant surveillance that the law barely named but fully enabled. White women, meanwhile, were cast as people to be “protected,” something that helped justify patrol violence. Gender wasn’t separate from the system. It shaped how control worked and who it claimed to defend.

2026-02-01 15:39:53 UTC

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Final Sources
Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1975.
Woodard, Colin. American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America. New York: Viking, 2011.
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. Honor and Violence in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.
7/7

2026-02-01 15:38:51 UTC

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More sources
Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon Books, 1974.
Hadden, Sally E. Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001.
Merritt, Keri Leigh. Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.
6/7

2026-02-01 15:37:33 UTC

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Intellectual Map
Davis, David Brion. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.
Fischer, David Hackett. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.
Franklin, John Hope. The Militant South, 1800–1861. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956.
5/7

2026-02-01 15:36:34 UTC

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Patrols also disciplined whites. Poor, itinerant, noncompliant men were watched too. As Keri Leigh Merritt later shows, whiteness conferred privilege conditionally. Participation in coercion was one condition. By the 1830s, patrol laws expanded. Crisis didn’t invent repression—it exposed how foundational it already was. When secession came, the habits were ready.
4/7
Image: The Chinatown Squad in 1905.Photograph courtesy Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
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2026-02-01 15:31:31 UTC

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Patrols trained perception. Who walked too fast. Who hesitated. Which woods hid movement. How much pain controlled without killing. Violence wasn’t meant to be precise—it was meant to be ambient. White equality was rehearsed through Black unfreedom. Citizenship wasn’t just voted. It was practiced—at night, in motion, under color of law.
3/7
Image: 1851 Boston broadside warning Black residents to avoid police conversation (Library of Congress).n, 1851. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/2021771790/.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/996/087/180/282/451/original/b4dbe545894ff6b9.png

2026-02-01 15:29:36 UTC

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Slave patrols weren’t marginal or reactive. They were the state’s most regular point of contact with white men. Patrol duty crossed class lines. Men without office or wealth exercised sovereign, bodily power—backed by statute. This wasn’t vigilantism. It was the state stripped to essentials.
2/7
Image: Mississippi slave patrol illustration. 1863. Author unknown. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_patrol#/media/File%3ASlave_Patrol.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/996/080/169/776/953/original/03e671426cc0c94b.png

2026-02-01 15:23:49 UTC

To understand the modern American state, you have to look at what it learned to do at night. In the slave South, violence didn’t arrive as spectacle. It arrived on schedule. Names checked. Horses assigned. Lanterns lit. By law, patrols could stop, search, whip, detain—without warrant or cause. Suspicion was enough. This wasn’t chaos. It was governance.
1/7
Image: 1823 illustration by Johann Moritz Rugendas. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Capitao-mato.jpg
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2026-01-29 02:40:51 UTC

What makes this moment distinctive is not the violence, but the audience encountering it. When white Americans describe this behavior as “what dictatorships do,” they are not wrong but they are late in recognition. America has long depended on techniques commonly associated with authoritarian regimes, while insulating much of white America from their routine application. That insulation is now thinning. The shock is real. The surprise is telling. But neither is unprecedented.
#ice #history
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2026-01-19 20:57:54 UTC

More prescient today in America than “I Have a Dream.”
“I come to say to you this afternoon, however difficult the moment, however frustrating the hour, it will not be long, because truth crushed to earth will rise again.
How long? Not long, because no lie can live forever.
How long? Not long, because you shall reap what you sow.
How long? Not long: Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,
Yet that scaffold sways the future.”
1/2
#history #mlk
https://youtu.be/NwdHeylre6c?si=r64lplqgjDfubK4i

2026-01-11 15:01:51 UTC

Silverio Villegas González…murdered by ICE 5 months ago in Chicago at a traffic stop after dropping his children off at school.
A man is dead and his family is forever changed.
He was a human being.
#ICE
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2026-01-10 19:21:16 UTC

Renee Nicole Good. She was a human being.
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2026-01-08 20:08:54 UTC

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Poor white Southerners marched not for abstraction, but for an order they believed kept them from the bottom. Slavery placed a floor beneath them. Without it, they were told, they would fall—into schools, courts, homes, beds—into proximity with those they had been trained to fear.
2/10
Image: The two Confederate soldiers at left and center, Columbus C. Taylor and Jas. D. Jackson, were killed at the Battle of Malvern Hill in July
1862. Bettmann/Time.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/861/269/588/411/989/original/cd5c5b53d6589366.png

2026-01-08 20:03:30 UTC

Nearly 1 in 4 white Southern men died. 260,000 to 300,000. The Confederacy was not only a slaveholders’ republic; it was a racial state sustained by mostly those who owned little but their whiteness. When the war ended, that grammar did not disappear. It reorganized—into law, violence, and resistance—long after the uniforms were gone.
1/10
#history
Image: A group of Confederates pose in Richmond, Va., before the Battle of First Bull Run (Manassas) in July 1861. Time/Granger Collection
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2025-12-29 20:02:29 UTC

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As with African societies, European observers equated civilization with hierarchy, fixed borders, and coercive power, so these decentralized or consensus-based systems were dismissed as weak, anarchic, or not political at all. What’ was erased were forms of governance that distributed authority, constrained domination, and refused the state model empire expected to see.

2025-12-29 20:02:11 UTC

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Meanwhile, many others slip into the background—like the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek, whose political life centered on councils, towns, and federated authority rather than kings; or the Houma around what became New Orleans; or California nations whose governance was local, seasonal, and deeply ecological.

2025-12-29 20:00:37 UTC

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Interestingly, we can observe similar inclinations in the legibility of American Indian societies: in the European mind, groups like the Apache, Comanche, Lakota, and Cheyenne become historically “visible” because they fit a colonial narrative of recognizable leadership, warfare, mobility, and confrontation with empire.

2025-12-29 19:59:37 UTC

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We still privilege domination over deliberation, hierarchy over horizontality, empire over community. What gets lost is that Africa didn’t just have different nations; it had different political philosophies about what power was for and where it should live.

2025-12-29 19:57:59 UTC

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These were forms of governments that worked precisely because they resisted permanent concentration of power. Colonial administrators saw those systems through their own biases and called them “anarchic” or “primitive,.” This was not because they lacked order, but because they didn’t look authoritarian enough to count as “civilization.” And you’re right to say this logic hasn’t disappeared.

2025-12-29 19:57:15 UTC

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You’re exactly right, and it’s a point that doesn’t get made often enough. Our historical minds are trained to look for states that resemble Europe—kings, capitals, armies, monuments. So, centralized polities like Ethiopia or Mali get spotlighted, while decentralized societies are treated as non-consequential. But many African societies were deliberately non-centralized, organized around councils, age grades, kin networks, rotating authority, & communal land systems.

2025-12-28 21:53:04 UTC

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That’s a fair point. Maps like this are blunt tools. They’re trying to show linguistic or cultural patterns, not lived reality. Historically, people across Africa have been far more mixed, mobile, and interconnected than any color-coded map suggests—through trade, migration, intermarriage, multilingualism, and shifting political ties.

2025-12-28 18:10:14 UTC

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The singular came through administration. Borders were drawn. Kingdoms split. Maps flattened complexity into paperwork. Knowledge followed power: history gave way to classification. Africa became “manageable” once it could be spoken of as one place.
3/7
Image: Map showing the colonization of Africa by European countries in the early 1900s. Source: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Timeline-of-the-European-Colonization-of-Africa#/media/1/2271296/281547
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/798/523/298/625/202/original/b72bd0a1583eb9c1.png

2025-12-28 18:06:38 UTC

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Long before Europe’s maps, Africa governed itself in plural. Nile states taxed grain and time. Nubia ruled Egypt. Ethiopia traded with Rome and India. Mali controlled gold routes; Timbuktu kept archives. Power moved through institutions, not absence.
2/7
Image: al-Idrīsī's 1154 map of the northern part of the continent —rivered, city-dense, sophisticated trade routes---a connected space, not container. No modern nation-states. No colonial color blocks. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al-Idrisi%27s_world_map_Rotated_180_degrees.JPG
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2025-12-28 18:00:10 UTC

They were many. Not just rulers, but households, elders, children—lives lived inside systems of memory, labor, belief, and power that did not require a single name. So, to say “Africa is a country” is not a cartographic error. It is the residue of training—what remains after empire leaves but its grammar stays.
Africa moved as many worlds. It still does.
1/ 7
#history #blackmastodon
Image: Map of the ethnic diversity of Africa, overlaid with country borders. Source: National Geographic.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/798/444/027/789/058/original/d5b74f4e3351d51f.png

2025-09-30 22:13:33 UTC

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Final Useful Sources
Democracy and Civil Society
Snyder, Timothy. On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Crown, 2017.
Parker, Christopher S., and Matt A. Barreto. Change They Can’t Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013.
17/17

2025-09-30 22:12:07 UTC

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Still More Useful Sources
January 6 Insurrection
January 6th and Contemporary Crisis
House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. "Final Report of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol." Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2022.https://democrats-cha.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/democrats-cha.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/2025_01_06_January_6_Report_CHA.pdf
Ben-Ghiat, Ruth. Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. New York: W. W. Norton, 2021.
16/17

2025-09-30 22:09:24 UTC

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More Useful Sources
Watergate
Kutler, Stanley I. The Wars of Watergate: The Last Crisis of Richard Nixon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990.
Woodward, Bob, and Carl Bernstein. All the President’s Men. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974.
Dean, John W. Blind Ambition: The White House Years. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1976.
15/17

2025-09-30 22:08:05 UTC

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Useful Sources:
Reconstruction
Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1935.
Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper & Row, 1988.
Hahn, Steven. A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003.
14/17

2025-09-30 22:06:51 UTC

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Reconstruction was not “Negro rule = chaos.”
Records show schools, laws, governments led by freedpeople.
Watergate was not mere partisanship. Nixon’s tapes proved obstruction.
January 6th was not a stolen election. Courts rejected the claim—over sixty times.
13/17
Image: David B. and Margaret Simons. He was a teacher the Black community in Sharpsburg, Maryland during Reconstruction. He taught the Tolson's Chapel school from 1874-1877.
Courtesy of the Sharpsburg Museum of History.
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2025-09-30 22:02:24 UTC

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But beware the metaphor.
A Rorschach test suggests all interpretations have equal weight.
Democracy is not a therapist’s page. It is laws, institutions, facts.
And not all interpretations are equal.
12/17
Image: Donald Trump answers questions from reporters outside the White House in November 2018. (Win McNamee/Getty Images).
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2025-09-30 21:59:08 UTC

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Today brings new inkblots: voter suppression, Supreme Court rulings, disinformation.
They will not tell us what they mean. We will tell ourselves.
The peril is whether America can still see the same shapes at all.
11/17
Image: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. canceled $500 million of funding for research on mRNA vaccine technology. He’s seen here at a Sept. 4, 2025, hearing before the Senate Finance Committee in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Image).
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2025-09-30 21:56:57 UTC

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The danger isn’t just the events. It’s the widening gap in interpretation.
A Rorschach test reveals the psyche of the patient.
America’s psyche, revealed again and again, is fractured.
10/17
Image: This symbol and slogan has become an emblem of QAnon. BBC.
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2025-09-30 21:55:10 UTC

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Three crises. Three centuries. One pattern.
Reconstruction. Watergate. January 6th.
The republic presents an inkblot.
One half sees freedom and law.
The other sees conspiracy and betrayal.
9/17
Image: A large crowd of rioters at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
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2025-09-30 21:50:45 UTC

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The gallows could be seen as symbol, or threat.
“Stop the steal!”—defense of democracy, or its destruction.
Even Congress split. Some certified the election. Others voted to overturn.
The inkblot reached the nation’s core.
8/17
Image:Rep. Jason Crow comforts Rep. Susan Wild. Credit: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty.
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2025-09-30 21:47:26 UTC

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And then came January 6th. Flags through broken windows. A noose raised outside the Capitol. Lawmakers fleeing. To many, it was insurrection—the violent rejection of an election. To others, it was protest. Even patriotism.
7/17
Image: Kevin Seefried holds a Confederate flag in the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images.
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2025-09-30 21:44:59 UTC

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Even Nixon’s helicopter ride divided opinion.
To some, disgrace.
To others, dignity.
Watergate offered no single meaning. Only a choice.
6/17
Image: Richard Nixon flashes his trademark V signs before boarding Marine One and leaving the White House grounds on August 9, 1974. The night before, he had announced that he would resign as president because of the Watergate scandal.Oliver F. Atkins/National Archives.
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2025-09-30 21:00:50 UTC

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For some, Watergate proved democracy’s strength: Press exposing corruption. Congress investigating. Courts demanding compliance. A resignation that showed no man was above the law. For others, it was only a witch hunt.
5/17
Image:Tourists reading President Nixon resignation news, 8 August 1974. Photograph: Bettmann/Bettmann Archive.
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2025-09-30 20:57:53 UTC

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A century later came Watergate. A burglary, small at first. Then the gravest constitutional crisis since the Civil War. What Americans saw depended on what they were prepared to believe.
4/17
Image: In this Nov. 17, 1973 file photo, President Richard Nixon speaks near Orlando, Fla. to the Associated Press Managing Editors annual meeting. Nixon told the APME "I am not a crook."
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2025-09-30 20:52:04 UTC

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The Freedmen’s Bureau? Lifeline—or corruption. The 14th & 15th Amendments? Democracy perfected—or perverted. Reconstruction was not a single meaning. It was a national test.
3/17
Image:The House Joint Resolution Proposing the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, June 16, 1866; Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789-1999; General Records of the United States Government; Record Group 11; National Archives.
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2025-09-30 20:49:17 UTC

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Reconstruction was the first great inkblot. The war was over. The Union preserved. Slavery abolished. To freedmen, it meant democracy fulfilled: citizenship, schools, the vote. To white southerners, it meant humiliation: Black men in office, white supremacy shaken. The same moment: freedom, or tyranny.
2/17
Image: Union soldier representing the Freedman's Bureau / Drawn by A.R. Waud, 1868. Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/item/92514996
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2025-09-30 20:46:03 UTC

American democracy keeps facing the same test. Reconstruction. Watergate. January 6th. Each was an inkblot: some saw freedom and law, others tyranny and betrayal.
The danger isn’t just the crisis—it’s perception unmoored from fact. A lie, repeated often enough, creates its own inkblot. Not to reveal the viewer. But to control them.
1/17
#history #blackmastodon #histodons #blackandwhite #photo #photography #politics #democracy #fascism #civilwar
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2025-09-15 19:22:27 UTC

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What lingers is not the blast, but what it left behind: an empty dress, lace sleeves folded with no one inside.
The nation remembers marble monuments, speeches, and victories.
But progress was never free. It was bought—again and again—with lives cut short.
2/5
Image: The preserved Sunday dress of Denise McNair, youngest victim of the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, 1963. Source: Birmingham Civil Rights Institute Collections; Smithsonian NMAAHC (Collection ID: 2010.4.2).
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2025-09-15 19:20:22 UTC

62 years ago today—September 15, 1963—four girls in Birmingham were murdered by a bomb in their church. Two boys were murdered in the chaos that followed.
Six children, gone before sundown.
This is what resistance to equality looks like.
Image: The children, Denise, Carole, Addie Mae, Cynthia , Johnny, and Virgil, killed in Birmingham on September 15, 1963, Source: The Birmingham News (Sept. 1963).
#history #histodons #blackandwhite #blackmastodon #photgraphy #birmingham #alabama
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2025-08-24 20:16:07 UTC

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What fascinates me is how, in America, those forms collided with Black spirituals, field hollers, and work songs to create something distinct. Even some of the English spirituals made their way into the black church—like “Nearer, My God, to Thee”

2025-08-24 20:15:51 UTC

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Good point. I will clarify that I meant I was tracing the American folk lineage. The English and Celtic folk traditions you speak of are absolutely foundational too, and indeed, much of it crossed into the U.S. I’m thinking of ballads, fiddle tunes, seafaring songs.

2025-08-24 19:50:32 UTC

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Clarence Clemons made this plain. On the cover of "Born to Run," Springsteen leaned on him—literally. Clemons’s horn was no ornament; it was the sound of transcendence. Without Clemons, there was no Springsteen. And without the blues, there is no folk, no rock and roll.
9/15
Image: The original cover of Springsteen's “Born to Run” from 1975. Photographer, Eric Meola.
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2025-08-24 19:48:23 UTC

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And yet, the music itself complicates. "Tunnel of Love" revealed a Springsteen stripped bare, confessional, fragile. Not mythic America, but human longing. He leaned closer to gospel wail than bar-band chant. It was sincerity, not invention, that carried him.
8/15
Video: Bruce Springsteen, Tunnel of Love (Columbia Records, 1987).
https://youtu.be/T8xq0j57VPc?si=FLvd1qoDt3LCoFZmAlt t

2025-08-24 19:46:42 UTC

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For a Black listener, the paradox is sharp. One hears the idioms of survival—gospel cadences, blues refrains—but carried by a white bard. The authenticity others celebrate is borrowed from black inheritance, black sorrow turned anthem for another crowd.
7/15
https://youtu.be/yC3_ONtSEiU?si=0IQV6wwDazONAHdLVideo
Video: "Hoe, Emma, Hoe," Slave songs performed by Larry Earl Jr., Christina Lane and Willie Wright, Part of the The Music of Washington's World series, Mt. Vernon, 2015.

2025-08-24 19:45:10 UTC

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The folk revival claimed this current but canonized it white. Seeger, Dylan, the Weavers—borrowing Black idioms while naming Guthrie saint. When Springsteen appeared rasping Guthrie, he sealed the line: white troubadour as vessel of grievance built on Black song.
6/15
https://youtu.be/TxMORIhbFl4?si=9i-mZYGgAfUFSjl2Video:
Video: Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings perform "This Land is Your Land," Jimmy Kimmel, October 30, 2012.

2025-08-24 19:43:52 UTC

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This music—the “changing same” Amiri Baraka named—flowed into blues hollers, gospel moans, Delta cries. Guthrie absorbed it in migrant camps: "Take This Hammer," "John Henry," cotton-field chants. Black cadence became the grammar of American protest.
5/15
https://youtu.be/0SMfDbOJlqE?si=Za5tnKZm05lIai9DVideo:
Video: Blind Lemon Jefferson, "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean," Recorded in Chicago, IL, circa February, 1928.

2025-08-24 19:42:18 UTC

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To understand this inheritance you must go back: to ring shouts, hush arbors, the “sorrow songs” Du Bois called the nation’s greatest gift. Spirituals that bore weight and coded escape—"Wade in the Water," "Swing Low," "Steal Away." They carried endurance in bent notes.
4/15
Image: Postcard of Black American prisoners leased to build the railroad in Asheville, North Carolina, January 2, 1892, Photographer T.H. Lindsey.
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2025-08-24 19:40:40 UTC

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But, Springsteen's roughness was its own refusal. His voice did not beautify; it refused to sand down America’s broken promises. Guthrie appealed to him because the older man's ragged tone carried protest, not polish—an inheritance of lament closer to the wail than to the hymn.
3/15
Image: Black and white poster announcing Woody Guthrie performance at Towne Forum, Los Angeles, 1941. Photo by Seema Weatherwax.
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2025-08-24 19:38:43 UTC

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In 1985, Springsteen was in a Guthrie documentary. He rasped through Ain’t Got No Home. My reaction was instant: that guy can’t sing. I was raised on gospel and soul, where truth meant clarity. Sam Cooke, Aretha, voices polished by fire.
https://vimeo.com/15502521.
2/15
Video: Folkways: A Vision Shared – A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly. Directed by Jim Brown. 1988.

2025-08-24 19:37:13 UTC

On the surface, Bruce Springsteen is the workingman’s troubadour—the bard of highways and mill towns. But for a Black listener, his voice carries another weight: it echoes the sorrow songs, borrows from Black survival, & exposes the fracture at America’s core.
1/15
#history #photography #music #blackandwhite #blackmastodon #histodons #newjersey
Image: Bruce Springsteen Up The River with Clarence Clemons, Dec 31, 1980, Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum, Uniondale, NY, Photographer: Brooks Kraft.
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2025-08-16 17:55:55 UTC

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Robert Williams died in 1996. His story resists the neat shift from nonviolence to Black Power. Both grew from the same soil: Jim Crow’s violence, state complicity, the refusal to be victims. The rifle his grandmother gave him was never just a weapon—it was a covenant.
12/19
Image: Robert Franklin Williams, Date: 1/5/1995, VALICIA BOUDRY Charlotte Observer file photo.
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2025-08-16 17:51:53 UTC

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From Cuba, with Castro’s backing, he broadcast Radio Free Dixie into the South. In China, he met Mao. Negroes with Guns shaped the Black Panther Party. Malcolm X said he was “a couple years ahead of his time.”
11/19
Image: Robert Franklin Williams, in 1969, the year he returned to the U.S., and settled in Michigan where he worked to clear false kidnapping charges from 1961 in Monroe. The charges were dropped in 1975. Charlotte Observer archives.
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2025-08-16 17:49:56 UTC

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Aug 27, 1961: the Klan came in daylight. Williams’s men met them with fire; the Klan broke off. In the confusion, he saved a white couple from a mob—only to be accused of kidnapping. The police chief told him: “In 30 minutes you’ll be hanging.” He left Monroe for good.
10/19
Image: Ku Klux Klan demonstrators march down Franklin Street in Chapel Hill on 14 June 1987. Photograph by Jerry Cotten. North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Library.
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2025-08-16 17:48:04 UTC

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King believed the nation could be shamed into justice. Williams believed Monroe had proved otherwise: “When the Klan is shooting at you, you are justified in shooting back.” The NAACP suspended him; his chapter became known for its militancy.
9/19
Image: Floyd B. McKissick, Martin Luther King, Jr. and Stokely Carmichael participate in a voter registration march after its organizer, James H. Meredith, was shot and wounded, 1966.
Lynn Pelham / The LIFE Picture Collection.
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2025-08-16 17:45:44 UTC

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In 1958 came the “kissing case.” Two boys, seven and nine, were arrested after a white girl kissed one during play. Beaten, terrorized, sentenced to fourteen years—they were freed after an international outcry. The governor offered clemency, but not apology.
8/19
Image: The young boys James Thompson and David Simpson with Kelly Alexander of the NAACP in Wadesboro, North Carolina, in January 1959. Jet Magazine.
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2025-08-16 17:43:34 UTC

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When the Klan attacked NAACP member Dr. Albert Perry’s home in 1957, the defenders fired back. No one died. The night rides stopped. The white press was silent; the Black press carried it to readers in Baltimore, Norfolk, Chicago.
7/19
Image: Dr Albert Edwin Perry Jr. Photograph via Patricia Poland.
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2025-08-16 17:41:16 UTC

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The war took him first to Detroit in 1943, where white mobs killed Black citizens, then into a segregated Army unit. In 1947, he married Mabel Robinson, who shared his refusal to bow. By the late ’50s, as NAACP president, he fortified homes, armed men, and ended the Saturday night rides.
6/19
Image: White men pull a Black man from a streetcar during the Detroit Riots, June 20-22, 1943. . 44 people killed. Bentley Historical Library: U-M Library Digital Collections.
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2025-08-16 17:39:14 UTC

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At eleven, Williams saw Sheriff Helms Sr. beat a Black woman, drag her through the street, lift her dress before a watching crowd. It was not simply an arrest; it was a demonstration of power. And the boy saw that in Monroe, law and humiliation worked hand in hand.
5/19
Image: Senator Jesse Helms Jr. as a young boy (Right). Source :https://jessehelmscenter.org/senator-helms-biography
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2025-08-16 17:36:07 UTC

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Williams’s grandparents had lived in a different order—briefly. His grandfather Sikes had been a Reconstruction Republican, organizing Black voters, printing The People’s Voice. Before her death, his grandmother Ellen gave him Sikes’s rifle. The lesson was wordless but absolute: survival is secured, never granted.
4/19
Image: A Harlem newsboy stands in front of a poster for a series in The People's Voice (May 1943). Photographer: Gordon Parks.
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2025-08-16 17:34:02 UTC

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Signs reading “Whites Only” marked the library, the pool, the waiting rooms. The Klan’s night rides—convoys of cars firing into Black homes—were not the collapse of order but its enforcement. The Helms family embodied it: father the sheriff, son Jesse bound for the U.S. Senate.
3/19
Image: US Sen Jesse Helms Jr. circa 1973.
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2025-08-16 17:30:27 UTC

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Aug 27, 1961—Monroe, NC. The Freedom Riders came believing Jim Crow’s lines could be erased. The Klan came in daylight, believing in perpetual white supremacy. Cars of armed racist thugs flooded the Black district. Behind sandbags, Robert F. Williams’s men answered with rifle fire. The Klan broke off. By nightfall Williams was in exile—labeled a kidnapper, but remembered as the man who would not break.
2/19
Image: A bus ridden by Freedom Riders on the outskirts of Anniston, Ala., in 1961.
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2025-08-16 17:24:15 UTC

“When an oppressed people show a willingness to defend themselves, the enemy, who is a moral weakling and coward is more willing to grant concessions and work for a respectable compromise. Psychologically, racists consider themselves superior beings and they are not willing to exchange their superior lives for our inferior ones. They are most vicious and violent when they can practice violence with impunity.”
—Robert Williams, "Negroes With Guns"
1/19
Image: "Wild Kingdom," by artist Lynd Ward.
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2025-08-09 21:23:42 UTC

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unfortunately it wasn’t an unusual situation in the years after reconstruction. These events were considered festive. There are many photographs of people looking upon lynching as a picnic. Many children and the photographs, laughing and playing. Souvenirs taken from the body. Truly awful.

2025-08-09 20:11:56 UTC

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While the fire burned, their sisters—ages 14, 17, and 20—were “held for protection” in the county jail. There, they were beaten, stripped, and raped by 20 white men. No masks. No arrests. In Paris, a white man’s word could erase the law in an instant.
6/16
Image: White men and boys pose beneath the body of Lige Daniels shortly after he was lynched on August 3, 1920, in Center, Texas. Equal Justice Initiative.
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2025-08-09 20:09:24 UTC

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The brothers fled but were betrayed by a man they knew, arrested in Oklahoma, and brought back. On July 6, 1920, a mob in Paris overpowered the jail. Thousands gathered at the fairgrounds. Herman and Irving were tied to a stake and burned alive. They never cried out.
5/16
Image: A thousand people gathered to watch the lynching of Henry Smith in Paris, Texas, on February 1, 1893. Source: J. L. Mertins/Library of Congress Prints.
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2025-08-09 20:06:31 UTC

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Hodges broke the custom—ordered them to work Sunday. The Arthurs refused. Confrontations followed. Hodges and his son came armed; violence escalated. In the final clash, Will Hodges allegedly fired first. The Arthurs returned fire. Both Hodges men were killed.
4/16
Image: A group of black sharecroppers in the early twentieth century. Image courtesy Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin.
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2025-08-09 20:04:59 UTC

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Herman, 28, had served in France with the U.S. Army engineers. Irving, 17, lived with him in their parents’ cabin on John Hodges’ land. Sharecropping bound them to a cycle of debt, but one custom was clear: no work after Saturday noon, and Sunday was a day of rest.
3/16
Image: Paris Texas in the early 1900s. Source:
City of Paris Texas.
https://selectparistexas.com/live-in-paris/our-history/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/000/595/128/149/390/original/4d92aca4b3de1fe2.png

2025-08-09 20:02:41 UTC

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Paris, Texas, summer 1920. At the courthouse square stood a Confederate monument—stone proof that the Civil War had ended on paper, not in policy. Streets radiated outward: to the railroad depot, the shops, the fairgrounds, and, beyond, the Black district and sharecropper cabins.
2/16
Image: Confederate Veteran Memorial Statue on the courthouse lawn in Paris,Texas. Photograph by Jim Bell, November 13, 2008. The Portal of Texas History.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/000/584/323/928/482/original/3ddd3aa55ab18d1e.png

2025-08-09 19:59:44 UTC

There is a photograph. Chicago’s Polk Street Depot, Sept. 1920—8 figures against a plain wall, 2 battered suitcases between them. Weeks earlier in Paris, TX, 2 sons were lynched, their sisters raped, the family driven out. The image endures as proof: of flight, of what drove it, and of how long the fight for the smallest measure of human decency can take.
1/16
#history #BlackAndWhite #Photography #Texas
Image: The Arthurs at Chicago Polk Street station, Sept. 4, 1920. Source: Chicago Defender.
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2025-07-31 20:22:15 UTC

They called it the old country. Not some distant ancestral land in Africa passed down in myth or memory—but Mississippi. Georgia. Alabama. The South. Before the first Great Migration, Black families who left that soil for the North spoke of it the way European immigrants spoke of Ireland or Poland: a place left behind, a place remembered, a place escaped.
1/4
Image: Family Chopping weeds from cotton in White Plains, Ga, in 1941. Jack Delano, LOC.
#BlackAndWhite #Photography #History
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2025-07-25 18:45:28 UTC

On August 21, 194 years ago in less than a month, Nat Turner led a revolt. Dozens died. But what haunted white Southerners wasn’t the blood—it was the intention. The reading. The prophecy. The belief that enslaved people could think, lead, and judge.
#histodons #History #BlackMastodon #Photography #BlackAndWhite #photo
1/19
Image: Emancipation and Freedom monument at Brown’s Island, Richmond, Virginia.
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2025-07-07 19:28:51 UTC

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2025-07-06 22:47:27 UTC

America has always called it redemption:
Men wept for Lee but left the freedmen to starve.
They built statues to defeat but none to repair.
They praised the Union, then walked away from Reconstruction, as if justice had already spoken.
We are a nation that learns through fire and then forgets the flame.
Not all pain is redemptive. Not all suffering is equal.
#history
Image: Flooding, Kerrville, TX, July 4, 2025. Eric Vryn/ Getty.
Image: Detention Camp, Everglades, FL. AP/R. Blackwell.
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2025-07-05 20:08:25 UTC

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Primary Sources
Bynum, Victoria, James M. McPherson, James Oakes, Sean Wilentz, and Gordon S. Wood. “Letter to the Editor.” NYT Magazine, December 2019.
Hannah-Jones, Nikole. “Our Democracy’s Founding Ideals Were False When They Were Written. Black Americans Have Fought to Make Them True.” The NYT Magazine, August 14, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/black-history-american-democracy.html.
Harris, Leslie M. “I Helped Fact-Check the 1619 Project. The Times Ignored Me.” Politico, March 6, 2020. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/06/1619-project-new-york-times-mistake-122248.
10/13

2025-07-05 20:07:00 UTC

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A nation’s story isn’t just about what happened. It’s about who gets to say what it meant. That’s why 1619 was intolerable. It refused to defer. It refused to flatter the founding. It did not erase 1776. It completed it. And in doing so, It crossed a line. Invisible to many, But real.
9/13
Image: An 1847 ad placed by Nautilus Mutual Life Insurance (later renamed New York Life Insurance) offering insurance on enslaved people. The Daily Democrat,. Source: EJI, https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/new-england/#industries-reliant-on-enslaved-labor
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/802/426/586/311/983/original/c825e0619b67b139.png

2025-07-05 20:05:14 UTC

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State legislatures called it dangerous. Editorial boards called it dishonest. But what they meant was something else: It was unsanctioned. It had spoken with authority—Not granted, But claimed.
8/13
Image: A sculpture by Kwame Akoto-Bamfo at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Source: Equal Justice Initiative, https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/new-england/#a-trafficking-based-economy
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2025-07-05 20:03:59 UTC

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Its power wasn’t just in the content. It was in the placement. It didn’t whisper from the margins. It declared, from the nation’s most visible paper, that slavery wasn’t a footnote. It was structure. Not deviation. Design. That was the rupture.
7/13
European slavers arriving on African Shores. Equal Justice Initiative. Source: https://eji.org/wp-content/uploads/2005/11/transatlantic-report-PDF-web.pdf
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2025-07-05 20:02:26 UTC

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So when the 1619 Project arrived—Not from Harvard. Not from Oxford. But from the New York Times—from the mouths of Black folk—it wasn’t an aberration. It was an inheritance.
6/13
Image: An advertisement for the sale of roughly 250 enslaved people trafficked into Boston on the Bante Island ship, ca. 1700. Source: https://eji.org/report/transatlantic-slave-trade/boston/#the-port-of-boston
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2025-07-05 20:01:18 UTC

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Even John Hope Franklin—Calm. Measured. Commanding in the archive—Was treated as the exception, never the peer. He was let in. But reminded: The invitation was conditional.
5/ 13
Image: John Hope Franklin in 1956. Source: Associated Press.
Image: Reconstruction After the Civil War, 1st Edition. Source: https://archive.org/details/reconstructionaf00fran
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2025-07-05 19:54:57 UTC

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It happened again in 1935. Du Bois published Black Reconstruction. Meticulous. Monumental. The academy called it too moral. Too political. Too polemic. Not objective. The truth, they said, came too soon.
4/13
Image: W.E.B. Du Bois by James E. Purdy, 1907, gelatin silver print, Source: the National Portrait Gallery. (https://npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.80.25) Gelatin silver print.
Image: Black Reconstruction in America, 1st Edition cover. Source: https://archive.org/details/blackreconstruc00dubo/mode/1up
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2025-07-05 19:53:43 UTC

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It had happened before. In 1913, Congressman John Roy Lynch published The Facts of Reconstruction. He had lived it. Fought for it. But James Ford Rhodes—white, distant, unbloodied—was called “objective.” Rhodes' version prevailed. That was enough.
3/13
Image: Congressman John Roy Lynch before 1920, Source: Library of Congress.
Image: Lynch, John Roy. The Facts of Reconstruction. New York, The Neale Publishing Company, 1913. Pdf. https://www.loc.gov/item/14000471/
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2025-07-05 19:51:31 UTC

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This claim did not pass unnoticed. Some objected to the evidence. Some debated the footnotes. They questioned whether the Revolution was driven by slavery. Whether capitalism owed its shape to sugar, cotton, and debt. Fair questions. The Project invited them. But that wasn’t the backlash. The problem wasn’t the claim.
It was the claimant.
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Image: Nikole Hannah-Jones, Source: Alice Vergueiro/Wikimedia Commons.
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