Black History is Every Month: Malcolm X Would Have Been 94 Today – Here Are Related Teaching Resources; NPR podcast: White Li
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"In 1965, civil rights supporter James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister, was murdered in Selma, Ala. Three men were arrested, tried and acquitted. No one was ever held to account.
More than 50 years later, we return to the city where the attack happened and set out to find the definitive story of who killed Reeb. We reconstruct what happened the night Reeb was beaten and hear the harrowing story of a survivor of the attack. And with a contemporary civil rights activist as our guide, we get to know modern Selma — a place where the city's civil rights history hangs in uncomfortable balance with its Confederate ghosts.
For a visual narrative of NPR's investigation into the murder of James Reeb and its aftermath, visit npr.org/whitelies."
"Enslaved women and girls ran away as soon as they set foot in the Americas. Some escapes were collective, others were individual. While some newly arrived women escaped immediately, others did so within a few weeks of arrival and others escaped months later. On June 16, 1733, fifteen-year-old Juno arrived on the slave ship Speaker in Charleston, SC. She had arrived from Angola along with 316 other enslaved men and women (out of 370). Two weeks after being sold to a planter from Dorchester, she escaped. Colonial Black resistance in the form of self-emancipations constituted forms of abolitionism. In “mining the forgotten” women and girls who appear in runaway slave advertisements, historians recover Black resistance in the form of truancy and escape as central components of abolitionism. In her study of abolitionism, The Slave’s Cause, Manisha Sinha has advanced new perspectives on Black abolitionism that challenge the idea that white philanthropy and free labor advocates were responsible for the abolitionist movement. Key to her book is the argument that “slave resistance, not bourgeois liberalism, laid at the heart of the abolitionist movement.” Sinha revives the early perspectives advanced by scholars such as C.L.R. James and Benjamin Quarles who viewed the runaway slave as the “self-expressive presence [without whom] antislavery would have been a sentiment only.”1
As discrete communities based on shared transatlantic pasts, slave societies in America were linked by regional origins, American destinations, and New World cultural developments. Throughout the New World, enslaved Africans perceived themselves as part of a community that had distinct ethnic and national roots. Randomization was not a function of the Middle Passage. Although slave ships traversed the coast of Africa to secure Africans, in some instances, slave ships also drew their cargo from only one principal port. These ports included Gorée, Bonny, Calabar, Elmina, and the Biafra ports. Slave ships bound for Georgia included captive Africans who shared a similar linguistic heritage, for example, Mande speakers such as the Malinke and Soninke. To a large extent, the transatlantic Middle Passage in the North Atlantic defined and shaped African perceptions of kinship, ethnicity, and community.
The Middle Passage can be characterized as a space of “in betweeness” with its links to the origins of captive Africans. As a voyage through death, the Middle Passage paradoxically asserted life through its destructive process. Through the marginal spaces of slave ships, captive Africans forged bonds of kinship and created forced transatlantic communities under desperate conditions. Captive Africans such as Lempster, James, Peter, Fanny, and Silvia, who may have arrived on the same slave vessel, survived the Middle Passage and labored on the Georgia rice plantation of James Read. Identified as Gola slaves, they maintained ethnic and kinship ties through their forced migration, settlement, and collective escape from slavery. The ethnic and cultural make-up of the African supply zones for the Georgia Lowcountry in the late eighteenth century included the Fula, Igbo, Gola, and Mande speakers such as the Malinke, Bambara, and Mende."2
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"Cases like Ingram’s revealed the deeply undemocratic practices in the United States which became a liability in its ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The CRC and the CPUSA were only too happy to exploit these cases in an effort to prove that equity was an impossibility in a capitalist state. In one article linking Mack’s case to Rosa Lee Ingram’s (no relation), the Party mocked the US’s claims to being “the land of the free.” Both Ingrams, one falsely accused of sexual assault, and one, Rosa Lee Ingram, accused of murder for protecting herself from sexual assault, exemplified the dangers of white America’s investments in policing Black sexuality. Both cases showed that white women’s sexuality was used as a weapon to criminalize Black bodies and limit sexual freedom. The article spelled out the stakes in the Cold War by arguing that the only thing the US could offer “people of the East and Africa” was subjugation to America’s “white ruling class.”2
Mary Frances Berry argues that the Party’s interference in the Ingram case, however, was more hurtful than helpful. Particularly in the case of the Party’s North Carolina organizer Junius Scales. Scales immediately denounced the “white supremacist outrage” in Yanceyville and urged the governor to do a “house cleaning” of the “legal machinery” in that county. Scales mocked Boswell as a “supposed victim” and claimed that some had begun to talk of lynching Ingram. Scales argued that Yanceyville’s justice system was merely a “white supremacist instrument” to control the local Black population. Little of what Scales said was wrong, and arguably not overstated, but international press often repeated the charges in The Daily Worker forcing the State Department to issue rebuttals and putting NAACP lawyers on the defensive. The lawyers complained that the CRC’s and the CPUSA’s publicity harmed their defendant and prejudiced the local population against him. The NAACP saw the attacks on the local justice system as solidifying resistance to the defendant and increasing local intransigence, not to mention compromising the NAACP’s own efforts to distance themselves from communists.3
Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Congress continued its attacks and cited Mack Ingram in its We Charge Genocidepetition to the United Nations later that year. With the additional attention and the NAACP defense attorneys, Ingram was eventually exonerated. But his life and the life of his family was forever changed. The family struggled throughout the years of the trial and after. Boswell’s accusations led to the family’s ostracism. Black farmers would no longer hire him for fear of retaliation from the white community, and the family felt uncomfortable entering Yanceyville so they had to travel to a nearby town to do their shopping. Eventually, Ingram had to sell his mules because he could not maintain their upkeep."
