Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America

by Michael Harriot

MARCH 18, 1919: When the NAACP asked Florida governor Sidney J. Catts to prosecute the mob who lynched Bud Johnson, he replied, “This would be impossible to do as conditions are now in Florida, for when a Negro brute, or a white man, ravishes a white woman in the State of Florida, there is no use having the people who see that this man meets death brought to trial, even if you could find who they are: the citizenship will not stand for it.”14 APRIL 4, 1919: Residents of Blakely, Georgia, were so “unsettled” by the appearance of Private Wilbur Little’s army uniform, they asked him to stop wearing it. Because he had no other clothes to wear, he ignored them. He was found beaten to death. His death was announced, in the Chicago Defender, on his twenty-second birthday. No one was ever arrested.15 APRIL 5, 1919: Daniel Mack, a Black veteran, brushed up against a man on market day. They sentenced him to thirty days on a chain gang. A white mob broke into the jail and took him to the edge of town, beating him all the way there. Mack survived by playing dead. No one was ever arrested, and it never made the newspapers because—as it turns out—the people of Sylvester, Georgia, “rioted” all the time.16 JUNE 7, 1919: In Macon, Mississippi, a white mob beat a principal, a businessman, and other prominent Black people because they heard that Black workers had asked for better working conditions and brought up a crazy idea called a “minimum wage.” They whipped all the Blacks and literally...