Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

The true origin story of America is intriguing enough without embellishment, a tale that includes cannibalism, cross-country adventures, and the type of brazen incompetency that almost doomed this experiment in thievery. But of course, to save face and maximize profits, the story was revised until we ended up with the swashbuckling blockbuster that we now know, filled with idealistic, barrel-chested white saviors who immaculately conceived of a brand-new kind of democracy with nothing but a few muskets and an abundance of Caucasity.

On July 30, 1866, angered by newly issued provisions that disenfranchised Black voters, a group of freedmen, including hundreds of Black veterans, gathered on the steps of the Mechanics Institute in New Orleans to protest during the Louisiana state constitutional convention. Expressing their outrage in the Blackest way possible, they paraded to the assembly with a marching band to show their displeasure with the exclusionary laws that would become known as the “Black Codes.” As they marched, a mob of white supremacists, policemen, and ex-Confederates brutally attacked the demonstration, until the marchers sought refuge inside the Mechanics Institute, where, as Ron Chernow explained in Grant, The whites stomped, kicked, and clubbed the black marchers mercilessly. Policemen smashed the institute’s windows and fired into it indiscriminately until the floor grew slick with blood. They emptied their revolvers on the convention delegates, who desperately sought to escape.

Some leaped from windows and were shot dead when they landed. Those lying wounded on the ground were stabbed repeatedly, their skulls bashed in with brickbats. The sadism was so wanton that men who kneeled and prayed for mercy were killed instantly, while dead bodies were stabbed and mutilated.

David Walker was killed because he spoke disrespectfully to a white woman, a no-no in 1908 Hickman, Kentucky. The mob riddled Walker’s wife, Annie, and infant child with bullets as they fled their burning house. The men shot three more of Walker’s children because they might tell. The oldest son stayed in the house, so the night riders set it on fire, just in case. See?

If Ida B. Wells had one gift, it was that she was born with what scientists have now identified as the genetic marker IDGAF. Wells’s uncompromising stance, combined with her inability to accept even the slightest hint of racism and discrimination, is what made her one of the fiercest truth-tellers in the history of America. With her relentless reporting and unwavering advocacy, she became the undisputed leader of the anti-lynching movement. She didn’t just call out white violence, either; Wells also fought for women’s suffrage, children’s rights, and labor reform. She called for peace and armed self-defense. She was Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. And Oprah. And Beyoncé. Using a combination of statistical data, investigative techniques, and fearless truth-telling, she revolutionized journalism, and during her time, she was arguably the most famous Black woman in America, period.*

While Southern Horrors and The Red Record would define how the NAACP and various other agencies approached racial terrorism for a century, Ida B. Wells is scarcely mentioned in the NAACP’s early literature. Much of her newspaper reporting has been lost to time. There is not a single copy of the Memphis Free Speech in existence. Still, Ida B. Wells remains the standard to which every Black journalist in America aspires, myself included.

I once saw a recipe that said “season to taste” and finally understood why white people’s chicken tastes like a crisp fall breeze blowing an American flag at a Toby Keith concert.

As you can see, it wasn’t the Democrats who opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Republicans who favored it. Everyone supported the Civil Rights Act except representatives from the South. Southern politicians from both parties voted against the legislation; and even further, every poll for the era shows that Southern whites opposed the law.

In 1964, Republicans nominated Barry Goldwater, an Arizona senator and GOP chairman who showed his adherence to white supremacy by voting against the Civil Rights Act. Goldwater chose New York congressman William E. Miller for a running mate, who warned against Democratic candidates being “soft on crime”—a reference to civil rights protesters staging demonstrations in cities across the country. The tactic didn’t win the election, but the party of Lincoln made significant inroads in the South for the first time since the Civil War. Not only were the pro-segregationist states the only states they won, but literally, to this day, the Democratic Party has never regained control of the South.

The next morning, about five hundred white Wilmingtonians went to the armory, armed themselves, and burned down the office of Manly’s newspaper. By the time they reached the Black section of town, the mob had grown to around two thousand. After killing a few Black people on the way, they forced the Fusionist mayor, police chief, and aldermen to resign at gunpoint. As Blacks fled the city, the terrorists dragged the most prominent Black businessmen to the train station and, in front of a crowd of applauding white people, forced them to board the train. Since 1898, Wilmington has been a majority-white town ruled by a white majority.

The fact that his tenure as head of state did not reverse four hundred years of entrenched white supremacy shows that he was just a president. But while there are valid criticisms of Obama’s two administrations from Black and white, liberal and conservative, perhaps his most important legacy is that the result of his presidency proved that there is nothing wrong with Black people. There is something wrong with America.