By Joseph Patrick Kelly, College of Charleston 
and David Cason, University of North Dakota 

Donald Trump is the third U.S. president to pardon a large group of insurrectionists. His clemency toward those convicted of crimes related to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection – including seditious conspiracy and assaults on police officers – was different in key ways from the two previous efforts, by Andrew Johnson in 1868 and Ulysses S. Grant in 1873.

But they share the apparent hope that their pardons would herald periods of national harmony. As historians of the period after the Civil War, we know that for Johnson and Grant, that’s not what happened.

When Johnson became president in 1865 after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, he faced a combative Congress. Though Johnson had opposed the secession of the Southern states before the Civil War began, he agreed with former Confederate leaders that formerly enslaved people did not deserve equality with White people.

Further, as a Southerner, he wanted to maintain the social conventions and economic structure of the South by replacing enslavement with economic bondage. This economic bondage, called sharecropping, was a system by which tenant farmers rented land from large landowners.

Tenants rarely cleared enough to pay their costs and fell into debt. In effect, Johnson sought to restore the nation to how it was before the Civil War, though without legalized slavery – and sought every avenue available to thwart the plans of the Radical Republicans who controlled both houses of Congress to create full racial equality.

Johnson signed an amnesty that gave a blanket pardon to all former Confederate soldiers. However, he required formerly high-ranking Confederate officials to individually seek pardons for their involvement in the rebellion. These officials faced permanent disfranchisement and could not hold federal office if they did not seek a pardon.

When Congress was in recess, Johnson vetoed two bills that had been passed: one to help find homes for formerly enslaved people who could no longer live on the property of their enslavers, and the other to define U.S. citizenship and ensure equal protection of the laws for Black people as well as White people.

Johnson also told Southern states not to ratify the 14th Amendment, whose purpose was to enshrine both citizenship and equal protection in the Constitution.

When Congress came back in session, it continued its effort of Reconstruction of the former Confederate states – reforming their racist laws and policies to comport with the liberty and equality the Union was committed to – by overriding Johnson’s vetoes and requiring former Confederate states to ratify the 14th Amendment as a condition of readmission to the Union, but Congress could not override the pardons the president had granted.

This continued political warfare resulted in Johnson being impeached – but not convicted or removed from office. But the back-and-forth also stalled Reconstruction and efforts toward racial equality, ultimately dooming the effort.

Nathan Bedford Forrest was not covered by Johnson’s general amnesty. As a former Confederate general, he had to apply for a personal presidential pardon, which Johnson granted on July 17, 1868. Two months later, Forrest represented Tennessee at the Democratic Party’s national convention in New York City.

He also took command of the Ku Klux Klan, the unofficial militant wing of the Democratic Party. Forrest initiated the title “Grand Wizard,” a bizarre title derived from his Civil War nickname, “Wizard of the Saddle.” He became a leader of former Confederates who resisted Reconstruction through violence and terror.

After his pardon, Forrest perfected a rhetorical technique for his extremism. His biographer Court Carney described it as a multistep process, starting with, “Say something exaggerated and inflammatory that plays well with supporters.” Then, deny saying it “to maintain a semblance of professional decorum.” Then, blur the threats with “crowd pleasing humor.” It proved an effective way of threatening violence while being able to deny responsibility for any violence that occurred.

Under Forrest’s leadership, membership in the violent, racist Ku Klux Klan spread almost everywhere in the South. Records are sketchy, so it’s impossible to say how many people were lynched, but the Equal Justice Initiative has documented 2,000 lynchings of Black Americans during Reconstruction. Black women and girls were often raped by klansmen or members of its successor militias.

It’s also not possible to say how many pardoned ex-Confederates participated in the lynchings. But the violence was so widespread that just about everyone, North and South, thought the political violence was a resumption of the Civil War.

In the Piedmont of the Carolinas, klan violence amounted to a shadow government of White nationalists. Grant ordered the U.S. Army to apprehend the klansmen, and a newly minted Department of Justice prosecuted the insurrectionists for violating Civil Rights guaranteed by the 14th and 15th amendments.

After several trials that proved to be what the federal judiciary’s official history calls “dramatic spectacles,” federal judges handed down conviction after conviction.

The federal government’s decisive action allowed for a relatively free presidential election in 1872. Black voters helped Grant win in eight Southern states, contributing to his landslide victory.

But after his reelection, Grant appointed a new attorney general, who dropped the pending klan cases. Grant also pardoned klansmen who had already been convicted of crimes.

Grant hoped his gesture would encourage Southerners to accept the nation’s new birth of freedom.

It didn’t. The pardons told former Confederates that they were winning.

John Christopher Winsmith, an ex-Confederate who embraced racial equality and whose father had been shot by the KKK, wrote to Grant in 1873, “A few trials and convictions in the U.S. Courts, and then the pardoning of the criminals” had emboldened what he called “the hideous monster – Ku Kluxism.”

And a new gang arose, too: the Red Shirts, who began to murder Black people openly, not even in secret as the klan did. Two of the Red Shirts were later elected to the U.S. Senate.

Paramilitary groups established anti-democratic one-party rule in every former Confederate state, imposing discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow, which were enforced by lynchings and other forms of racial violence.

The federal government took no substantive action against this for a century, until the 20th century’s Civil Rights Movement sparked change. And it wasn’t until 2022 that Congress passed an anti-lynching bill.

Joseph Patrick Kelly is professor of literature and director of Irish and Irish American Studies, College of Charleston, and David Cason is associate professor in Honors, University of North Dakota 

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By Kate Clifford Larson

Harriet Tubman was barely 5 feet tall and didn’t have a dime to her name.

What she did have was a deep faith and powerful passion for justice that was fueled by a network of Black and white abolitionists determined to end slavery in America.

“I had reasoned this out in my mind,” Tubman once told an interviewer. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”

Though Tubman is most famous for her successes along the Underground Railroad, her activities as a Civil War spy are less well known.

As a biographer of Tubman, I think this is a shame. Her devotion to America and its promise of freedom endured despite suffering decades of enslavement and second class citizenship.

It is only in modern times that her life is receiving the renown it deserves, most notably her likeness appearing on a US$20 bill in 2030. The Harriet Tubman $20 bill will replace the current one featuring a portrait of U.S. President Andrew Jackson.

In another recognition, Tubman was accepted in June 2021 to the United States Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. She is one of 278 members, 17 of whom are women, honored for their special operations leadership and intelligence work.

Though traditional accolades escaped Tubman for most of her life, she did achieve an honor usually reserved for white officers on the Civil War battlefield.

After she led a successful raid of a Confederate outpost in South Carolina that saw 750 Black people rescued from slavery, a white commanding officer fetched a pitcher of water for Tubman as she remained seated at a table.

A different education

Believed to have been born in March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was named Araminta by her enslaved parents, Rit and Ben Ross.

“Minty” was the fifth of nine Ross children. She was frequently separated from her family by her white enslaver, Edward Brodess, who started leasing her to white neighbors when she was just 6 years old.

At their hands, she endured physical abuse, harsh labor, poor nutrition and intense loneliness.

As I learned during my research into Tubman’s life, her education did not happen in a traditional classroom, but instead was crafted from the dirt. She learned to read the natural world – forests and fields, rivers and marshes, the clouds and stars.

She learned to walk silently across fields and through the woods at night with no lights to guide her. She foraged for food and learned a botanist’s and chemist’s knowledge of edible and poisonous plants – and those most useful for ingredients in medical treatments.

She could not swim, and that forced her to learn the ways of rivers and streams – their depths, currents and traps.

She studied people, learned their habits, watched their movements – all without being noticed. Most important, she also figured out how to distinguish character. Her survival depended on her ability to remember every detail.

After a brain injury left her with recurring seizures, she was still able to work at jobs often reserved for men. She toiled on the shipping docks and learned the secret communication and transportation networks of Black mariners.

Known as Black Jacks, these men traveled throughout the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic seaboard. With them, she studied the night sky and the placement and movement of the constellations.

She used all those skills to navigate on the water and land.

“… and I prayed to God,” she told one friend, “to make me strong and able to fight, and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since.”

Tubman was clear on her mission. “I should fight for my liberty,” she told an admirer, “as long as my strength lasted.”

The Moses of the Underground Railroad

In the fall of 1849, when she was about to be sold away from her family and free husband John Tubman, she fled Maryland to freedom in Philadelphia.

Between 1850 and 1860, she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland about 13 times and successfully rescued nearly 70 friends and family members, all of whom were enslaved. It was an extraordinary feat given the perils of the 1850 Slave Fugitive Act, which enabled anyone to capture and return any Black man or woman, regardless of legal status, to slavery.

Those leadership qualities and survival skills earned her the nickname “Moses” because of her work on the Underground Railroad, the interracial network of abolitionists who enabled Black people to escape from slavery in the South to freedom in the North and Canada.

As a result, she attracted influential abolitionists and politicians who were struck by her courage and resolve – men like William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Susan B. Anthony, one of the world’s leading activists for women’s equal rights, also knew of Tubman, as did abolitionist Lucretia Mott and women’s rights activist Amy Post.

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years,” Tubman once said. “and I can say what most conductors can’t say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

Battlefield soldier

When the Civil War started in the spring of 1861, Tubman put aside her fight against slavery to conduct combat as a soldier and spy for the United States Army. She offered her services to a powerful politician.

Known for his campaign to form the all-Black 54th and 55th regiments, Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew admired Tubman and thought she would be a great intelligence asset for the Union forces.

He arranged for her to go to Beaufort, South Carolina, to work with Army officers in charge of the recently captured Hilton Head District.

There, she provided nursing care to soldiers and hundreds of newly liberated people who crowded Union camps. Tubman’s skill curing soldiers stricken by a variety of diseases became legendary.

But it was her military service of spying and scouting behind Confederate lines that earned her the highest praise.

She recruited eight men and together they skillfully infiltrated enemy territory. Tubman made contact with local enslaved people who secretly shared their knowledge of Confederate movements and plans.

Wary of white Union soldiers, many local African Americans trusted and respected Tubman.

According to George Garrison, a second lieutenant with the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, Tubman secured “more intelligence from them than anybody else.”

In early June 1863, she became the first woman in U.S. history to command an armed military raid when she guided Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina Colored Volunteers Regiment along the Combahee River.

While there, they routed Confederate outposts, destroyed stores of cotton, food and weapons – and liberated over 750 enslaved people.

The Union victory was widely celebrated. Newspapers from Boston to Wisconsin reported on the river assault by Montgomery and his Black regiment, noting Tubman’s important role as the “Black she Moses … who led the raid, and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted.”

Ten days after the successful attack, radical abolitionist and soldier Francis Jackson Merriam witnessed Maj. Gen. David Hunter, commander of the Hilton Head district, “go and fetch a pitcher of water and stand waiting with it in his hand while a black woman drank, as if he had been one of his own servants.”

In that letter to Gov. Andrew, Merriam added, “that woman was Harriet Tubman.”

Lifelong struggle

Despite earning commendations as a valuable scout and soldier, Tubman still faced the racism and sexism of America after the Civil War.

When she sought payment for her service as a spy, the U.S. Congress denied her claim. It paid the eight Black male scouts, but not her.

Unlike the Union officers who knew her, the congressmen did not believe – they could not imagine – that she had served her country like the men under her command, because she was a woman.

Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote that he bore “witness to the value of her services… She was employed in the Hospitals and as a spy [and] made many a raid inside the enemy’s lines displaying remarkable courage, zeal and fidelity.”

Thirty years later, in 1899, Congress awarded her a pension for her service as a Civil War nurse, but not as a soldier spy.

When she died from pneumonia on March 10, 1913, she was believed to have been 91 years old and had been fighting for gender equality and the right to vote as a free Black woman for more than 50 years after her work during the Civil War.

Surrounded by friends and family, the deeply religious Tubman showed one last sign of leadership, telling them: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Kate Clifford Larson, Brandeis University

Read more:

• Harriet Tubman: Biden revives plan to put a Black woman of faith on the bill
• Faith made Harriet Tubman fearless as she rescued slaves
• Harriet Tubman film does not deserve the Twitter hate

Kate Clifford Larson received funding from the National Park Service and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Department of Tourism 

Feature Image: A portrait of Harriet Tubman in 1878.
Library of Congress/Getty Images

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The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.

The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.

The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.

As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.

There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the
United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.

In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did.

As historians have long documented, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.

In fact, based on my research, emancipations were actually designed to force Blacks and the federal government to pay reparations to slave owners – not to the enslaved – thus ensuring white people maintained advantages in accruing and passing down wealth across generations..

Reparations to slave owners

The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense.

The first, arguably the most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.

The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.

The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on various forms of debt in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.

In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.

Emancipation myths and realities

On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule.

The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.”

At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.

After that first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.

Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday.

All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.

Emancipation Day came to Connecticut and Rhode Island on March 1, 1784. On July 4, 1799, it dawned in New York, and on July 4, 1804, in New Jersey. After 1838, West Indian people in the United States began commemorating the British Empire’s Emancipation Day of Aug. 1.

The District of Columbia’s day came on April 16, 1862.

Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.

Emancipation Day dawned in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864. In the following year, emancipation was granted on April 3 in Virginia, on May 8 in Mississippi, on May 20 in Florida, on May 29 in Georgia, on June 19 in Texas and on Aug. 8 in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Slavery by another name

After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities.

The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 allowed for the enslavement of incarcerated people through convict leasing.

The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 permitted incarcerated people to be denied the right to vote.

And the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 failed to explicitly ban forms of voter suppression that targeted Black voters and would intensify during the coming Jim Crow era.

In fact, Granger’s Order No. 3, on June 19, 1865, spelled it out.

Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”

Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

The meaning of Juneteenth

Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery.

On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom.

They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule.

Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.

At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “Juneteenth,” noted Black author Ralph Ellison called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?”

The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Kris Manjapra, Tufts University

Read more:

• Juneteenth: Freedom’s promise is still denied to thousands of blacks unable to make bail
• There was a time reparations were actually paid out – just not to formerly enslaved people
• African Americans have long defied white supremacy and celebrated Black culture in public spaces

Kris Manjapra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The post Juneteenth: Celebrating the history of emancipation appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

(**) 

It’s like someone set a house on fire, then hid behind a bush to see what the crowd’s reaction would be. 

28 Days Later was a shocking and terrifying zombie film. Credit director Danny Boyle and actors Cillian Murphy and Naomie Harris for putting pure fright in that nightmarish, post-apocalyptic tale. But the real kudos must go to screenwriter Alex Garland for the premise, execution and climax of a very thrilling movie. As a director Garland is most known for the sci-fi/thriller Ex Machina. His latest project, Civil War, takes him back to his “world is going to hell in a hand basket” roots. It’s a well he’s gone to too many times. 

America is in turmoil and complete chaos. Texas and California and other states have seceded. (Does that make sense? Is this to avoid throwing just the southern states under the bus? History books note that that region seceded from the union. Newspapers note that some of those states still threaten to do so, today. Is this kind of political haziness meant to make the film feel like it isn’t taking sides?  If so, it’s one of the film’s weak points—but there are others.

Word is out that the White House and its president will soon be under siege, as rebel factions head to DC to put the Commander in Chief’s (Nick Offerman) head on a chopping block. (Think Marie Antoinette, France and the guillotine).

The press hangs out in a hotel, as they’re known to do, contemplating next steps. Lee (Kirsten Dunst), an acclaimed war photographer, wants that big photo of the president in his final hours, real bad. Joel (Wagner Moura), an investigative reporter, wants his last interview. Danger is in the cards: “They shoot journalists on sight at the capital.” 

As they mull over tactics, travel routes and goals, the older intrepid reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) chimes in. A young photojournalist wanna be, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), worms herself into the quartet. Lee chides the novice: “There isn’t any version of this that isn’t a mistake.” The plan? Head to the nation’s capital in a bright white SUV with the word “Press” plastered on the side. Try to avoid being shot by militias along the way. Survive impending mayhem, crossfires and bombs to get that career-defining story. 

Not a bad setup. Road trips have a natural momentum. This excursion does too. Watching the battle scenes, skirmishes with police, snipers on roofs and urban combat is intriguing. The action is broken up with black and white photos of the conflict. Like you’re seeing what the photographer sees, shoots and will print. Initially it’s an alluring device. As the film progresses, this ploy wears thin. Though it’s not nearly as frustrating as the script’s characters. 

Lee, a respected veteran, is on a mission to expose the truth. The war, terror and upheaval Americans see on TV in other countries is now taking place in the U.S., propagated by citizens. Not the “those people.” This time it’s the “us people.” The very lascivious Joel invites a young woman, who has the looks and maturity of a highschooler, on a very dangerous trip for ulterior motives. The second he hits on her; his character becomes a repulsive lech. Jessie is ambitious, reckless and so callous to Lee, her ultimate protector, it’s easy to dislike her. In fact, for most of them a vulture-like vibe overpowers any altruistic notions. It’s an alienating, miscalculation that lingers. 

The script and direction, like in the old days when filmmakers didn’t know any better, kill of the POC characters, first. Tony (Nelson Lee) and Bohai (Evan Lai), two carefree Asian journalists, are added to the caravan. In a particularly repulsive and excessive scene, the whole group encounters white racist nationalists who’re led by one devil (Jesse Plemons) who has a specific grudge. He asks them, “What kind of American are you?” He’s also interested in where they’re from. Jessie, “Missouri.” Lee, “Colorado.” Tony, “Hong Kong.” The fiend shoots Tony in the chest point blank, just for cheesy shock value. This kind of excess, in an already incendiary film, verifies that the filmmakers have lost their way. 

The time in between the skirmishes is dull. The characters aren’t that interesting. Their relationship dynamics shallow and weak. The more you get to know them, the more likely you are to feel that they’re no more than cunning ambulance chasers. Clearly, as a writer/director and thinker, Garland is better with movement, predicaments, fight scenes, violence and shock than he is with viable drama. His screenplay and direction try to be profound, but have the depth of a zombie movie, without the zombies. 

The sets (production designer Caty Maxey), costumes (Meghan Kasperlik) and cinematography

(Rob Hardy) are not in question. The editing (Jake Roberts) is judicious with action scenes, not with what’s in-between. The musical score (Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury) and playlist are sometimes galvanizing. Sometimes completely counterintuitive. 

Dunst wears her emotions on her face. She underplays her character perfectly and does the best she can with what’s on the page. However, Rosamund Pike, as New York Times war journalist Marie Colvin in Private War, had greater material, played a better developed character and left a more indelible impression. Henderson, and any mob he can gather, should forcefully ask the writer/director why he killed Sammy him off so soon. Lee and Lai display the right amount of friskiness and horror. Moura and Spaeny’s performances, as despicable characters, aren’t impressive.  

This hollow, dystopian nightmare ends after 1h 49m. Its ten-minute finale is far more interesting than the 1h 39m that precedes it. Which has the shallow depth of generic films like White House Down or Netflix’s gloomy Leave the War Behind. Nothing deeper. 

When the fire created by Civil War goes out, it’s easy to feel you’ve been manipulated. Like a house was burned down to the ground just to provoke a reaction. Nothing more. 

Visit Film Critic Dwight Brown at DwightBrownInk.com.

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Hello fellow moviegoers. The weekend is finally here and like always, we got you covered.

There is only one wide release this weekend, and it is Alex Garland’s “Civil War.”

It certainly looks like a divisive movie, so we’ll see if audiences embrace it.

MOVIES (In Theatres)

CIVIL WAR (Now in theaters)

About: A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.

However, if you do not feeling like venturing to the theaters this weekend, it’s cool. There are plenty of streaming options to enjoy in the confront of your own home.

MOVIES (Streaming)

THE GREATEST HITS (Streaming now on Hulu)

About: A love story centering on the connection between music and memory and how they transport us, sometimes literally.

WOODY WOODPECKER GOES TO CAMP (Streaming now on Netflix)

About: After getting kicked out of the forest, Woody thinks he’s found a forever home at Camp Woo Hoo — until an inspector threatens to shut down the camp.

TV SHOWS

CHUCKY (Season 3 — Part 2 on USA Network, SYFY, and Peacock)

About: In Chucky’s unending thirst for power, season 3 now sees Chucky ensconced with the most powerful family in the world — America’s first family, inside the infamous walls of the White House. How did Chucky wind up here? What in God’s name does he want? And how can Jake, Devon, and Lexy possibly get to Chucky inside the world’s most secure house, all while balancing the pressures of romantic relationships and growing up? Meanwhile, Tiffany faces a looming crisis of her own as the police close in on her for “Jennifer Tilly’s” murderous rampage last season.

FALLOUT (Streaming now on Prime Video)

About: In a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, citizens must live in underground bunkers to protect themselves from radiation, mutants and bandits.

GOOD TIMES (Streaming now on Netflix)

About: The Evans family must manage the challenges of contemporary life, like social issues.

What are you watching this weekend?

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By Andrea Vale

Stacker News

In many Americans’ recollections, the Emancipation Proclamation was a landmark piece of legislation that officially abolished slavery in the United States. But, like many important historical moments, the truth is more complicated.

Jan. 1, 2024, marks 161 years since the day the Emancipation Proclamation was announced by President Abraham Lincoln in 1863. At the time, the Civil War had been raging for three years. Lincoln’s declaration was a watershed moment in the war, which up until then had been formally fought with the central goal of keeping the Confederacy from seceding from the Union. The Emancipation Proclamation changed that, however, and explicitly redirected the struggle toward ending slavery in the United States.

However, the language of the Proclamation was limited in scope. Although it famously declared that “all persons held as slaves … are, and henceforward shall be free,” this didn’t apply to all states and was conditioned on a Union victory in the Civil War. Ending slavery began with the Emancipation Proclamation—but it would be years before former enslaved people gained citizenship, suffrage, and the ability to hold public office.

Stacker used historical records, academic commentary, and political reporting to describe the key events following the Emancipation Proclamation that led to the full abolition of slavery. In reality, the road to freedom was a years-long process of political legislation and cultural shifts; history, however, tends to remember dramatic moments the best, especially those with such moving and empowering language as the Emancipation Proclamation contained.

Though the events covered here end with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, the advancement of emancipation continues far beyond this—even more so when one broadens the concept of “freedom” to encompass the larger freedoms of African Americans in general.

For instance, at the same time that formerly enslaved people were first being granted basic rights in society, the Ku Klux Klan emerged in 1865 with the agenda of squashing these efforts. It wasn’t until 1870 that Hiram Revels was elected to the Senate as America’s first Black senator. It took nearly a century after that for the Supreme Court to rule that “separate but equal” schooling policies inherently denied African Americans equal protection under the Constitution.

Read on to discover what it took beyond the Emancipation Proclamation to make formerly enslaved people full, recognized members of the United States.

1863: The Emancipation Proclamation is issued

On Jan. 1, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation—but despite popular cultural opinion, it did not actually end slavery in the United States. This was partially because of its limited wording: Though it stated that “all persons held as slaves … are, and henceforward shall be free,” this only applied to states that had seceded from the Union. Loyal states and some members of the Confederacy the Union had captured were exempt.

Perhaps most importantly, the promised freedom of enslaved people was conditional. It would only be granted if the Union won the Civil War, which, at the time of the Proclamation, was in its third year.

The Emancipation Proclamation also stated men of color would be allowed to join the Union army, an invitation they gladly accepted. By the end of the Civil War, nearly 200,000 Black men had fought as soldiers for the Union.

1863: Lincoln meets with Frederick Douglass

Famed freedom champion Frederick Douglass, a formerly enslaved man, had a particular gripe concerning the abolition of slavery: He believed enslaved people could only find full liberation by participating in the Civil War.

After the Emancipation Proclamation was declared, Douglass finally had the go-ahead to begin recruiting the first official regiments of Black soldiers into the Union Army, including his two sons. During the war, many of these soldiers faced torture and reenslavement by the Confederate army. Douglass was so enraged he publicly criticized President Lincoln for neglecting to protect them, resulting in the two meeting at the White House for the first time on Aug. 10, 1863.

The meeting went reasonably well. Though Lincoln couldn’t address Douglass’ grievance on equal pay for Black soldiers, he agreed to sign any commission for Black soldiers the secretary of war recommended.

Douglass was invited to the White House at least three more times by Lincoln and was present at the president’s swearing-in for his second term, during which he publicly declared that slavery was “one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come.”

1863: The Conkling letter

Just a few weeks after meeting with Frederick Douglass, a letter from Lincoln to old friend James C. Conkling was read publicly at a mass meeting of Unionists in Springfield, Illinois. The location was timely and deliberate: Lincoln knew Union Democrats and Republicans were becoming concerningly polarized in Illinois, divided over varying opinions on the cause of the Civil War and the emancipation of enslaved people. The Conkling letter addressed this directly and bluntly, defending the Emancipation Proclamation in no uncertain terms.

In it, Lincoln wrote, “You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union. I issued the proclamation on purpose to aid you in saving the Union. Whenever you shall have conquered all resistance to the Union, if I shall urge you to continue fighting, it will be an apt time then for you to declare you will not fight to free negroes.”

Reception to the public reading was enthusiastic and widespread: The entire letter was printed in its entirety in national letters in the days following, and it sparked a rally of over 50,000 in Springfield who met Lincoln’s words with cheers and tears.

1863: The Gettysburg Address

On Nov. 19, 1863, Lincoln delivered a remarkably short but undeniably impactful speech at the cemetery’s dedication at Gettysburg, the site of the deadliest battle of the Civil War. Lincoln’s speech followed the words of famous orator Edward Everett, who spoke for more than two hours beforehand. He later lamented that he failed to have as much impact as Lincoln achieved in just two minutes.

In his speech, Lincoln famously remarked that the “great task remaining before us, that from these honored dead we take increased devotion” to ensure “this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom.” Though he only referred to slavery opaquely as it fell under the umbrella of ‘freedom,’ the speech still marked the first time he noted the abolition of slavery as a stated goal of the Civil War.

His speech resulted in mixed reviews from papers that both panned and praised this speech. While Republicans (Lincoln’s party) mostly stayed loyal to the president, more radical Democrats felt Lincoln’s words reframed the justification for war, not to keep states from seceding but to free enslaved people.

Just a year after Lincoln publicly delivered the Gettysburg Address, a version of it was published and spread nationally in “Autograph Leaves of Our Country’s Authors.” It is remembered as one of America’s most pivotal speeches.

The post The Emancipation Proclamation in practice: A timeline – Part 1 appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

Memorial Day has a deep historical connection to the African American community in the United States.
The holiday, which originated as Decoration Day, initially began when formerly enslaved individuals and their descendants gathered to honor and decorate the graves of Union soldiers who fought during the Civil War.
“Oddly, that’s a fact that I wasn’t fully aware of,” former U.S. Ambassador Andrew Young told the Black Press.
“It’s not surprising, though,” said Young, an American civil rights leader and hero.
Indeed, on a day when picnics, family outings, and other leisurely pursuits occur, the founders of Memorial Day meant for the occasion to honor African Americans newly freed from enslavement, and those who lost their lives fighting for freedom, said actor Wendell Pierce.
“We will never forget those brave and honorable souls,” Pierce stated.
Famous DJ Donnie Simpson called the occasion “very different for me.”
“While we honor those who gave their lives in service for this country, I can’t help but think of those African Americans who were massacred in Tulsa 100 years ago,” Simpson wrote on Twitter.
Author Christina Coles deadpanned, “The Civil War was over, and African Americans had founded Memorial Day in a ritual of remembrance and consecration. They were the true patriots.”
Ben Gold, a historian and founder of the real estate investment firm Recommended Homebuyers, said recognizing Black soldiers,’ and their families’ sacrifices and bravery is essential because it acknowledges their often-overlooked role in shaping the nation’s history.
“Commemorating Memorial Day with Black heroes in mind serves several critical purposes. First and foremost, it ensures that their stories are included and preserved within the broader narrative of the holiday,” Gold insisted.
He said that by highlighting Black service members’ courage, resilience, and contributions, America pays homage to their sacrifices and honors their memory.
Moreover, Gold asserted that it fosters a sense of inclusivity, promotes diversity, and enriches our collective understanding of the complex tapestry of American history.
“In my experience as an investor and developer, I have witnessed firsthand the power of recognizing and celebrating diversity,” Gold said.
“Just as the real estate industry thrives when it embraces inclusivity, so does our society when we acknowledge and appreciate the diverse perspectives and experiences of all those who have served our country.
“By featuring the stories of Black heroes in Memorial Day commemorations, we not only educate and inspire, but we also contribute to a more inclusive and united nation.”
Indeed, as noted in a Washington Informer editorial, the significance of African Americans in the holiday’s development and the numerous ideas regarding its origins may not be widely known.
Although the origins of Memorial Day trace back to the period following the Civil War, when some 620,000 soldiers lost their lives, the precise origins remain a source of controversy.
Several cities have staked claims to be the first to celebrate Memorial Day.
Still, a different narrative, perhaps more accurately, says that African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1865 were the true founders of the holiday.
Renowned historian David Blight, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author and American history professor at Yale University recounted a poignant commemoration in Charleston on May 1, 1865.
Organized by formerly enslaved people and white missionaries, Blight determined that the event occurred at a former racecourse that had served as a Confederate prison for Union soldiers during the war’s final year.
At least 257 prisoners had perished there, primarily due to disease, and were buried in unmarked graves.
Eventually, two dozen African American residents of Charleston meticulously rearranged the graves into orderly rows.
They erected a three-meter-tall white fence around them, creating what they called the ‘Martyrs of the Racecourse’ memorial.
“After the Confederate evacuation of Charleston Black workmen went to the site, reburied the Union dead properly, and built a high fence around the cemetery,” Blight documented.
“They whitewashed the fence and built an archway over an entrance on which they inscribed the words, ‘Martyrs of the Racecourse.’”
He continued:
“The symbolic power of this Low Country planter aristocracy’s bastion was not lost on the freed people, who then, in cooperation with white missionaries and teachers, staged a parade of 10,000 on the track.”
The gravesites were transformed into a breathtaking “sea of flowers,” as described by the New York Tribune, and the event was hailed as a procession of mourning and remembrance, unlike anything South Carolina or the United States had witnessed before.
Despite documented evidence about this event, the narrative of African Americans being the founders of Memorial Day essentially went untold.
“That’s the surprising part,” said Ambassador Young, a civil rights icon who also served as mayor of Atlanta from 1981 to 1990.
“It’s history I want to read and know more about, and everyone else should as well.”

African Americans Andrew Young Black soldiers Civil War graves Memorial Day origins “Controversy”

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By Daniel Thorp

Associate Professor of History at Virginia Tech   

Reprinted with permission     

The commemoration of Black History Month affords an opportunity to explore the rich history of Black communities in Appalachia between the end of the American Civil War and the beginning of the Jim Crow era. Daniel Thorp, an associate professor of history at Virginia Tech, has dedicated his research toward this aim.

Q: A widespread misconception about southern Appalachia maintains slavery didn’t exist in the region, thus there was a sparse Black populace. What was the reality?

“If a time traveler were to arrive in Southwest Virginia in the late 1800s seeking African American/Black communities, he or she would find dozens of rural Black communities and Black neighborhoods in almost every town in the region. Thousands of enslaved men and women lived in Southwest Virginia when slavery ended, in 1865, and many of them stayed in the region for years after gaining their freedom. Few had the resources to move immediately, and this is where their family and friends were; so they stayed.”

Q: How did African American communities come together in post-Civil War Appalachia?

“Almost immediately they began to establish dozens of independent Black churches, and with the help of the Freedmen’s Bureau and northern philanthropic societies they opened dozens of schools. These churches and schools often became the nuclei around which Black communities grew.”

Q: How did the people in these communities support themselves?

“Rural Blacks were mainly farmers, though some men combined farming with work on the railroad.  In towns, Black men were often laborers, though small numbers worked as craftsmen or shopkeepers, and by the end of the century a very small number of Black lawyers and doctors had begun to appear. Black women living in towns often worked as domestic servants.”

Q: Did any of them have a say in regional politics?

“Throughout this era Black men participated in politics. Few were elected to office in Southwest Virginia, but Black men voted in large numbers until the early 20th century, when a new state constitution made it almost impossible for them to do so.”

Q: What caused modern misconceptions about Black communities in Appalachia to take hold?

“Racism became more pronounced in Southwest Virginia at the turn of the 20th century. Lynching became common during the 1890s, and after 1900 segregation became more widespread and a new state constitution disenfranchised Black men almost entirely. These changes, combined with the difficulty of making a living in Southwest Virginia, led more and more African Americans to leave the region and move to southern cities like Roanoke or Charlotte, to coal fields in West Virginia, Ohio, and Iowa, or to northern cities like Chicago. Today few of these Black communities or neighborhoods still exist and few Whites, at least, even remember them.”

Daniel Thorp is an associate professor of history in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. Shortly after he joined the faculty, Thorp noticed that the prevailing story that slavery was mostly unheard of in Appalachia did not match the historical evidence and began researching further. He advocated for the dedication of Vaughn-Oliver Plaza, named after Virginia Tech’s first known Black employee. 

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The racially-charged tone-deaf tweet does not take into account, among other things, that the United States fought a civil war in the 1860s after a group of southern states tried to secede from America.

By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has said the quiet part out loud. The Georgia congresswoman, like some of her peers, doesn’t want to live anywhere near people of color.

Greene has called for the U.S. to be separated by red and blue states and for a shrinking of the federal government in a tweet on President’s Day, the two-term congresswoman’s latest in a string of controversial statements.

“We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government,” said Greene, R-Ga, in the tweet. “Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.”

The racially-charged tone-deaf tweet does not take into account, among other things, that the United States fought a civil war in the 1860s after a group of southern states tried to secede from America.
Greene’s tweet received thousands of responses on her timeline, most of which called her out for her racism.

“And what you are requesting in only to get dumb people riled up,” sports card enthusiast Tony Posnanski responded to Greene. “You aren’t even a joke because jokes are funny. You are just trash.”

Added strategist and former Democratic Chair Chris Jackson, “If someone would have said something like this 15 years ago, they would be deemed unstable and laughed out of politics. Today, it is embraced by the Speaker of the House. That says it all.”

Still, others noted how Greene and all members of Congress swore under oath that they “do solemnly swear to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that [they] will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that [they] take this obligation freely.”

Greene continues to openly support the insurrectionists from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and American Democracy.

As NBC News noted, many know Greene for her controversial statements.

For example, she has said that Jewish space lasers could start wildfires if they were put into the right place. She has also said that Muslim congresswomen could not be sworn in properly.

But she has been trying to rebrand herself as someone who can bridge the divides in her party as she angles to be Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate, NBC News reported last month.

Green is not the first Republican to call for a line of succession, and support for a separate country has been growing since the 2020 elections.

A June 2021 poll by Bright Line Watch and YouGov found that 66% of Southern Republicans supported leaving the U.S. and forming a new country.

Support was also high among Democrats in the West, where 47% supported a division.

“Please cease from calling for a ‘Civil War’ under the guise of ‘National Divorce,’” attorney and activist Gerald Griggs wrote to Greene.

“You swore an oath to the United States of America and the state of Georgia to represent us. Please represent all the people.”

The post Unhinged Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Says Quiet Part Out Loud: She Wants Pre-Civil War United States Where Whites Dominated Enslaved Black People appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

Provided

Juneteenth is a day filled with pride and heritage for many African Americans. It’s the combination of the words June and 19th which marks the day in 1865 when Union Soldiers landed at Galveston, Texas. It signified the end of the Civil War and that enslaved people were free.

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