Prejudice
-
See a related poster for American men on this blog, one of them Black, captioned “Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis. Not bondage!" ↩︎
-
“The Unrestricted Dumping Ground,” via The New York Public Library, https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/c146bf32-7fda-68d3-e040-e00a1806693f. This page includes a high resolution TIFF download option, which is what I used to examine the detail. ↩︎
Joe Stieb has posted some good history recommendations to help counter Hegseth’s bizarre scrubbing of Department of Defense webpages of race, gender, sexuality, and other content verboten by Trump. https://archive.ph/zLEcs
📽️ “Conclave,” dir. Edward Berger (USA/UK, 2024), is one helluva good movie. Made differently, the same story could have yielded a drama, but here it is a thriller, driven by dialog, cinematography, and sound—with superb use of space, ceremony, and costumes.
Good piece on the role of Black children and youth in the civil rights movement: “Hidden Herstory: The Leesburg Stockade Girls” by Tulani Salahu-Din, National Museum of African American History and Culture, nmaahc.si.edu….
An Example of White Terror Depicted in WPA Art
“South” by Philip Reisman. “Executed for the Public Art Works Project, 1934."*
The South here is portrayed as a place of white terror: lynching, cross burning, Ku Klux Klan. Note, too, the figures on the left: men in chains working at gun point, modern-day slave labor powering industry. The prisoner whose face is visible is Black, the armed guard white. (Click to enlarge for detail.)
I’ve always avoided posting such images, but the history whitewashing of the current administration is making me think differently. This art, at least, is respectful. It depicts the humanity of the victims, unlike the grizzly souvenir postcards circulated by the terrorists.
* Source: NYPL Digital Collections, image 5179787.
The federal government is now using force to suppress knowledge of the history of violence against Black people. Remembering the past is too painful for these weak tyrants, so they tyrannize the brave who would teach or learn it.
Intersections: three photos of Ernestine Eckstein in a 1965 picket line outside the White House protesting Federal discrimination against gay people in civil and military service and their obtaining security clearances. Her sign reads, “DENIAL OF EQUALITY OF OPPORTUNITY IS IMMORAL.” Eckstein was a Black woman, whereas most of the other picketers appear to have been white men. Another lesbian activist, white, is visible in one photo: Barbara Gittings. The photographer was Gitting’s white partner, Kay Tobin.
Photos via the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs Collection, NYPL Digital Collections, images 1605765, 1605764, and 1605766
“Daisy Bates takes a walk – Activist Daisy Bates picketing with placard: ‘Jailing our youth will not solve the problem in Little Rock. We are only asking for full citizenship rights.'” Ca. 1957.
Via NYPL, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Demonstrations Collection, image id 1953728.
World War Two Poster Marking the Dignity and Humanity of Black Women on the Home Front
The American Front for Victory – This poster from World War Two operates on two levels. First, it emphasizes the contribution of “The American Front” to the victory for which the nation was fighting. American front because this was about the home front, the people, many of them women, contributing to victory in industry, in agriculture, through service, and with their savings. Second, the name makes an important statement about the women it pictures working. They are Black. In large parts of the country, racist Americans cast the fitness of Black people as American citizens in doubt, to say nothing of questioning their very humanity.1 Here, by contrast, four Black women are depicted doing dignified work for the national cause.
Moving clockwise from the top, one woman, wearing some kind of civilian uniform, is holding a bucket marked “save” and is participating in either the sale or purchase of “Defense Bonds”; another is working a potato field with the words “strong bodies” underneath; there is a woman in a nurse’s uniform above the label “volunteer service”; and a woman can be seen working on an airplane, perhaps installing its propeller. This is a poster proclaiming the importance of the home front and the dignity and honor of the Black women fighting on it.
Source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_061.
Bonds and justice will smash the Nazis, not bondage!
World War Two poster – The word "bonds" can work three ways here: the bonds or chains pictured here as broken, the bonds that unite us, and U.S. war bonds. The second of these offers the most powerful contrast to "bondage."
Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, NYPL, image id psnypl_scf_065.
“Air Force says recruits will again learn about Tuskegee Airmen” by Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express-News, January 26, 2025.
The head of the service’s San Antonio-based training command said a video about the famed Black aviators would remain in the Air Force basic training curriculum. The course had been shut down in response to President Trump’s DEI ban.
Apparently overly zealous interpretations of executive orders can be turned back in some cases. It’s a small win for military training and tradition building, but it also suggests that military professionals can get through, at least on something like this. Trump’s pardon of war criminals in his first term tell a different story, however.
“Heeding Trump, Air Force won’t teach recruits about Tuskegee Airmen” by Sig Christenson, San Antonio Express News, January 24, 2025, expressnews.com….
A video describing the exploits of the groundbreaking African American airmen, who flew combat sorties during World War II, has been removed from the instructional curriculum for new recruits at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland, the hub of Air Force basic training.
Now that I’m more than 20 years older than Martin Luther King, Jr., ever had a chance to become, his youth at the time of his murder is much clearer to me, much starker. It makes his achievements seem that much greater and his death all the more painful.
Pictured above: photos of two buttons and a poster from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library, image IDs 57281864, 57281854, and 58250348.
Sherrilyn Ifill, “It Is MLK Day. Do Not Despair. This Year Especially, We Have Work To Do.” sherrilyn.substack.com…
In 1921, white Tulsans murdered hundreds of residents of Greenwood, burned their homes and churches, looted their belongings, and locked the survivors in internment camps. Until this day, the Justice Department has not spoken publicly about this race massacre or officially accounted for the horrific events that transpired in Tulsa. This report breaks that silence by rigorous examination and a full accounting of one of the darkest episodes of our nation’s past. This report lays bare new information and shows that the massacre was the result not of uncontrolled mob violence, but of a coordinated, military-style attack on Greenwood.
– Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, quoted in press release, “Justice Department Announces Results of Review and Evaluation of the Tulsa Race Massacre,” January 10, 2025.
One of the 8-inch M110 self-propelled howitzer crews I served on in the mid 1980s was majority Puerto Rican. If I recall correctly, two of us were white, two Black, and six Puerto Rican. I feel richer for having had such experiences than the orange role-playing garbage man will ever be.
'The Unrestricted Dumping Ground' (1903 Cartoon)
This color cartoon by Louis Dalrymple appeared in Judge magazine in 1903.1 It linked immigration to national security by portraying Italian immigrants in ways that prefigured Trump’s despicable, racist rhetoric about “bad hombres” and pet-eaters in the present presidential race. The federal government, personified here as Uncle Sam, comes off as old and ineffectual.
At least, that’s what I see. Here: Old Uncle Sam stands at the ramparts of fortress America, bounded by the sea. The smoke from his pipe forms a wreath to his left. In that appears the late President William McKinley, assassinated in 1901 by the Polish-American anarchist Leon Czolgosz. Uncle Sam has an arm and hand around the flagpole and a cane in the other hand. Rats, monkeys, and other immigrating vermin emerge from the water, clamber up the rampart, and scurry away.
Some of the dehumanized immigrants are armed with a knife or pistol, and they wear a floppy, broad-brimmed hat or a bandana in anarchist red or the Italian tricolor. Their weapons and head apparel read “Socialist,” “Anarchist,” “Murderer,” “Assassination,” and “Mafia.” More inhuman riffraff falls from a garbage chute marked, “Direct from the slums of Europe daily.” There is also a cluster of regular gray rats in the harbor.
The message is clear. The immigrants, in this case Italians, are criminal, radical, or just socially undesirable. They are other, vermin, and their presence threatens the country.
Photo of “African American demonstrators outside the White House, with signs ‘We demand the right to vote, everywhere’ and signs protesting police brutality against civil rights demonstrators in Selma, Alabama” by Warren K. Leffler, March 12, 1965. Source: U.S. News & World Report Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014645538/.
“Ku Klux Klan Rallies in Worcester” – 100 years ago saw the biggest Klan rally in New England for a mass induction of new members. Immigrants and the sons of immigrants weren’t having it, and a riot ensued that night, putting an end to this mass Klan activity in the region. (HT @JimWald)
The contrast between VP Harris’s performance in this NABJ interview and the other guy’s is stark. The first part, on economic issues, is familiar. Then the tough questions begin, and the VP has a lot to say, getting more eloquent when pressed. https://www.youtube.com/live/I3ZV5Ea3xro