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Review of Carceral Apartheid: How Lies and White Supremacists Run Our Prisons, by Brittany Friedman (2025).

When Brittany Friedman began researching the formation of the Black Guerilla Family, a prison-based organization affiliated with the Black Power Movement, many people questioned the relevance of her project. Friedman recalled one interview with a former California Department of Corrections (CDC) official who, upon learning of her research topic, laughed and asked, “Why would you do that?”[1] From the perspective of state officials, this story had been written decades ago. The CDC and other government agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), had generated thousands of pages of documentation and reports on the Black Guerilla Family and other “Black Extremist” organizations. What more could a new study possibly add?

In fact, the resultant book, Carceral Apartheid, reveals a much more complex story. Friedman, an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Southern California, conducted over forty interviews with the founders of the Black Guerilla Family, CDC officials, and members of other race-based prison organizations such as the Aryan Brotherhood. Friedman describes her approach as historical ethnography. She uses these interviews to “invigorate and triangulate” traditional archival sources including prison administration documents, surveillance records, and personal correspondence.[2] Together, these sources paint a troubling portrait of the conditions that precipitated the creation of the Black Guerilla Family in California’s San Quentin Prison in 1970.

Popular narratives reduce the Black Guerilla Family (BGF) to a prison gang involved in criminal activity and the contraband economy. However, in tracing the group’s origins, Friedman argues that the founding of the BGF was a response to the system of carceral apartheid that structured—and continues to structure—life behind bars in the United States. California prison officials used racial classification systems to create divisions within the prison population and relied on white prisoners, especially those affiliated with white supremacist groups like the Aryan Brotherhood, to maintain the prison’s hierarchy. Officials fostered interracial conflict by spreading rumors, supplying weapons to white prisoners, and failing to intervene when violence broke out. In this way, the CDC was able to maintain a strict system of racial segregation that operated without any formal policy in place. Many of the people Friedman interviewed joined race-based groups such as the Mexican Mafia, Aryan Brotherhood, or the Black Guerilla Family out of fear. Traversing racial lines was often met with violent repercussions. This extralegal violence was not only sanctioned but encouraged by prison officials. As Friedman acknowledges, carceral apartheid relies on this relationship between state-sanctioned legal controls and extralegal violence and intimidation.

*Chester County (PA) Prison main cell block, 1960. Source: Wikimedia Commons.*

It was within this context that the BGF emerged. Drawing from her extensive interviews with founding members, Friedman argues that this group differed from existing prison gangs in two ways. First, the group was formed defensively to protect Black prisoners from the pervasive violence that they were subjected to by other prisoners and guards. Second, the BGF adopted a political stance that was influenced by organizations including the Black Panther Party (BPP) and the Black Liberation Army (BLA). Members were expected to engage in political education, develop skills in martial arts and hand-to-hand combat, and take an oath modeled after that of the Kenyan Mau Mau, who challenged British colonial rule through armed rebellion. Over time, the BGF would spread outside of California. In the process, it became less politically oriented and more closely connected to the prison’s illicit economy. As Friedman writes, this was largely due to the increase in membership and the CDC’s crackdown on political activity.

A poster of the Black Panther Party, 1971.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Carceral Apartheid offers a nuanced study of the BGF and a compelling framework for understanding the U.S. prison system. It also points to some areas for further research. Friedman focuses entirely on men’s prisons, which seem particularly conducive to the kind of violent policing of racial segregation that she documents. But what might a study of “carceral apartheid” in women’s prisons reveal? Regional differences represent another route. While the book focuses on California, Friedman notes that this system of governance was not unique to the state. Prisons across the country adopted similar strategies for managing their populations. The Texas prison system is an excellent example. Historian Robert Chase has written at length about how the state’s building tender or “trustee” system granted certain prisoners enhanced power and privileges that gave way to rampant sexual violence.[3] It would be interesting to explore how these practices differ from place to place.

While the book does contain some disciplinary jargon that may be off-putting to those outside of the academy, Friedman’s interviews—which she quotes at length throughout the book—and her rich narratives anchor the text. In a study that is largely focused on organizational structures and dynamics, Friedman takes care to center the voices of people impacted by these systems. This commitment is also evident in her work as a Principal Investigator of the Captive Money Lab. Founded by Friedman and her collaborators, April Fernandes and Gabriela Kirk-Werner, the Captive Money Lab conducts research and engages in advocacy around the “pay-to-stay” fees that many city, county, and state governments impose on incarcerated people. These findings have informed public policy and signal an ongoing need for research on the criminal legal system.

Carceral Apartheid is an excellent contribution to this literature and offers important context for understanding prisons in the twenty-first century.

Sarah Porter is a Ph.D. student in the Department of History at the University of Texas at Austin. She studies twentieth-century social movements, policing, and mass incarceration in the United States.

[1] Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid, 153.

[2] Brittany Friedman, Carceral Apartheid, 166.

[3] Robert Chase, We Are Not Slaves: State Violence, Coerced Labor, and Prisoners’ Rights in Postwar America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

15 Minutes History – Black Labor in Boston

The historian Henry Adams once wrote that, “the American boy of 1854 stood nearer the year 1 than to the year 1900.” Changes during that period were indeed profound in Adam’s home town of Boston. And yet, for the majority of the city’s black men and women, life and work in 1900 were not that different from the 1850s — despite Boston’s proud progressive history.

We’re joined today by Professor Jackie Jones, whose new Pulitzer Prize-winning book “No Right to An Honest Living” traces the Struggles of Boston’s Black Workers in the Civil War Era. Professor Jones’ book not only reconstructs black life — and indeed white hypocrisy — in compelling detail, it also shows the incredible value that labor history furnishes us with for understanding the past.

“Free Walter Collins!”: Black Draft Resistance and Prisoner Defense Campaigns during the Vietnam War

On December 10th, 1970, Dara Abubakari led a delegation of activists to Washington, D. C., where they visited the Department of Justice, the Selective Service headquarters, and the White House.[1] Activists representing a range of civil rights, Black nationalist, and anti-war organizations, including the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Republic of New Africa (RNA), and the National Association of Black Students (NABS), participated in the December demonstration. Outside the Department of Justice, one group posed for a photo with signs, which read “Free Collins!” The delegation appeared on behalf of Abubakari’s son, Walter Collins, who had been imprisoned a few weeks earlier. Convicted of refusing induction into the U.S. military based on his opposition to the Vietnam War, Collins was facing five years in prison, even after numerous appeals. With few remaining avenues available for challenging Collins’ sentence in court, his supporters presented their case to individual government officials, and the broader public, in hopes of arousing concern.

A December 1970 photograph of pro-Collins demonstrators outside the Justice Department's headquarters in Washington, D. C. — *A December 1970 photograph of pro-Collins demonstrators outside the Justice Department’s headquarters in Washington, D. C.* *Image courtesy of the author.*

Collins’ legal predicament was not unique. Hundreds of thousands of Americans avoided compulsory military service during the Vietnam War by filing exemptions as conscientious objectors, seeking medical deferments, leaving the country, or simply failing to report for induction—practices broadly categorized as draft evasion or resistance. Of those who refused induction or committed other draft violations, around 9,000 were convicted, and over 3,000 were imprisoned.[2] However, Collins’ legal case and the popular movement that developed around it offer particularly vivid examples of political repression and collective resistance during the Vietnam War era.

Between his sentencing in 1969 and his release from prison in 1972, Collins, his legal team, and his supporters worked tirelessly to appeal his sentence, publicize his case, and mobilize people on behalf of other draft resisters and political prisoners. They petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court, organized public demonstrations, and distributed literature across the country and abroad. Instead of stifling resistance, Collins’ imprisonment actually spurred the development of new campaigns and organizations tailored to advocate for Black political prisoners.

Campaigns around the cases of Black draft resisters like Collins also reveal the particular ways in which civil rights activists engaged in anti-war organizing. Collins’ supporters constructed a large and diverse coalition, and in the process, they developed a critique of the draft as a weapon against movements for social and racial justice. Their campaign blurred the line between foreign policy and domestic politics, revealing how thoughtfully Black civil rights activists situated themselves on the world stage during the 1960s and 70s.

From Civil Rights to Draft Resistance

Walter Collins was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. His family had a long history of involvement in the Southern Black Freedom Struggle. His maternal grandparents, Arthur and Izama Young, were active in the fight to abolish the poll tax, and they helped establish a school system for Black students in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana. They belonged to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), one of the nation’s earliest civil rights organizations, and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a group founded by Marcus Garvey on a platform of racial pride and economic self-sufficiency.[3] These groups offered the Youngs and other African American families important organizational structures for challenging discrimination in employment, voting, and education.

Civil rights organizers leading a column of participants in 1963's March on Washington. — Civil rights organizers leading a column of participants in 1963’s March on Washington up Constitution Avenue in Washington, D. C. Martin Luther King, Jr. is situated in the middle of the first row of marchers. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Collins’ mother, born Virginia Young, followed in her parent’s footsteps. She engaged in activism surrounding voting rights, reparations, and police violence, and she participated in landmark events, like the March on Washington in 1963. She held leadership positions in organizations including the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), an interracial civil rights group, and the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women (UAEW), a Pan-African organization founded by Audley “Queen Mother” Moore. During the late 1960s, she became a regional vice president of the Republic of New Africa (RNA), a Black nationalist organization, and she adopted the name Dara Abubakari around this time.[4]

Walter Collins’ career as an activist began in the early 1960s, when he participated in the New Orleans sit-in movement as a high school student. During the following years, he attended Louisiana State University in New Orleans and worked with groups like SCEF and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to organize communities across the Deep South around issues including voting rights, working conditions, and public education. At the time of his arrest, Collins was active in SCEF’s Grass Roots Organizing Work (GROW) project in Laurel, Mississippi, where he and his colleagues provided support to a local woodcutter’s union.[5]

Over the course of the 1960s, as the Vietnam War escalated, Collins became more deeply involved in anti-war activism. In this respect, he was not unique. While the popular imagery of the 1960s and 1970s anti-war movement typically centers on white students, activists involved in civil rights and Black Power organizing were among the most vocal critics of the war. Many viewed American intervention in Vietnam as an imperialist project, and they objected to the enormous financial cost of the war, which undercut domestic programs. The draft also became a major issue, as Black men were overrepresented as draftees and among wartime casualties.[6] Leading civil rights organizations and activists issued statements and delivered speeches condemning the war.[7]

In April 1967, for instance, Martin Luther King Jr. deplored American militarism in a powerful speech entitled “Beyond Vietnam.” Speaking at Riverside Church in New York City, King directed criticism toward the draft, which took “black young men who had been crippled by our society and [sent] them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”[8] Sharing many of these concerns, Collins joined the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors (CCCO). He also began providing informal draft counseling to Black students in New Orleans, quickly gaining a reputation for his knowledge on the subject.[9]

Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at an April 1967 rally against the Vietnam War on the campus of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. Source: Wikimedia Commons/Minnesota Historical Society. Image reproduced under the terms of Creative Commons’ Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License.

Black women like Dara Abubakari also played critical roles in anti-war and anti-draft organizing. They published news articles, created and distributed literature, and established organizations, including the National Black Anti-War Anti-Draft Union (NBAWADU). Some of these women framed their activism in gendered terms and relied on their positions as wives or mothers to claim authority on the subject.[10] Gwendolyn Patton, a NBAWADU founder and SNCC member, laid out this logic in an article published in 1968. She wrote: “If there has ever been a time when we want to know what we can do for the revolution, we can begin now by not allowing this system to draft our sons, our loved ones, our men.”[11] Abubakari consistently used her position as the mother to spark conversations about the war with other women and to advocate on behalf of Collins and other draft resisters.

The Draft as Political Repression

In January 1967, Draft Board 156 in New Orleans reclassified Collins as 1-A, meaning that he was eligible for military service. When he initially registered with the Selective Service System in 1963, Collins received a student deferment. He supplied the required material to confirm his status as a full-time student between 1964 and 1966, but failed to provide this evidence in January 1967, leading to his reclassification. Over the next three years, Collins’ conflict with the draft board intensified. In August 1967, they attempted to send him an induction notice, but it was delivered to the wrong address. After receiving the second notice in September, and learning that he no longer had a student deferment, Collins tried to register as a conscientious objector. While draft officials supplied the required paperwork, they informed him that it was too late to submit it because he had already received an induction notice. Between September and the following March, Collins received four additional notices and failed to report for induction each time. On two occasions, he actually appeared at the induction center, but officials turned him away for wearing an anti-war pin and carrying anti-war literature.[12]

While Collins’ student deferment may have legitimately expired, many of his SCEF colleagues believed his civil rights and anti-war activism had factored into the draft board’s decision. As SCEF Executive Director Anne Braden recounted, Collins’ “trouble with the draft started in the fall of 1966, just after he [had] spent the summer organizing opposition to the Vietnam War in New Orleans.”[13] Many civil rights and anti-war groups experienced heightened government surveillance and repression during the 1960s. Through initiatives like the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) and the Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Operation CHAOS, government officials illegally surveilled, infiltrated, and discredited civil rights, Black Power, and anti-war organizations. For activists like Collins, it seemed that draft boards were performing a similar function. Numerous activists associated with groups like SCEF and SNCC were drafted during this period. In June of 1967, for instance, SNCC reported that seventeen members had already been indicted for draft resistance.[14] Others were arrested for holding anti-war demonstrations at induction centers.[15] Within this context, Collins’ supporters understood his being drafted as a form of political repression. They viewed him as a draft resister and a political prisoner.

"The enemy is racism": two graphics combining antiwar and pro-civil rights messaging. — *“The enemy is racism”: two graphics combining antiwar and pro-civil rights messaging.*
*Source:* *Flo Kennedy, “Harlem Against the War,”* The Movement 3, no. 5 (May 1967).

On June 18, 1968, Collins was indicted on six counts of refusing induction. His case came before the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana in July 1969, and the jury found him guilty of five counts of draft evasion. Judge Edward Boyle sentenced Collins to five years for each count—to be served concurrently—and issued a fine of $2,000.[16] Following his sentencing, Collins and his legal team brought the case before the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans. They focused their case on two key issues. First, the composition of Draft Board 156 violated Section 10(b)(3) of the Selective Service Act. Four of the board’s five members were not residents of the area that it covered, and the chair was not even a resident of Orleans Parish. Other draft resisters had successfully appealed their sentences on this basis. Second, Collins and his attorneys took the argument further by claiming that, regardless of residency, the all-white draft board could not be representative of the majority Black population that it covered. This was a major issue across the country and particularly in the South. In Louisiana, along with a handful of other Southern states, there were no Black members serving on draft boards as of 1966.[17] Despite these efforts, however, Collins’ appeal was unsuccessful.

After the Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals refused to overturn Collins’ sentence in April 1970, his attorneys turned to the U.S. Supreme Court. They filed three petitions in August, November, and December of 1970, but the court ultimately declined to hear the case. Authorities arrested Collins in his home in New Orleans in November 1970 and placed him in Parish Prison.[18] There, he awaited transfer to the federal prison in Texarkana, Texas.

“Free Walter Collins and All Political Prisoners!”

Although Collins’ appeals failed, his supporters continued advocating on his behalf. They circulated petitions, published articles, and organized demonstrations to publicize his case. Drawing from prior experience organizing defense campaigns, Abubakari worked with colleagues in SCEF and other groups to spearhead a popular campaign on Collins’ behalf. In addition to financially supporting his legal defense, SCEF coordinated a publicity campaign around the case in hopes that public protest would pressure officials to reverse his sentence. Articles about Collins frequently appeared in the group’s monthly publication, the Southern Patriot, and in its news briefs. The organization also distributed fliers with information about his case. One flier from 1970 titled “An Enemy of the People” characterized the draft as “a weapon to jail young men who are active in movements against social injustice.”[19] The author urged readers to actively support Collins and other political prisoners by writing to Judge Boyle and contributing funds to the legal defense. SCEF also circulated petitions that accumulated almost 20,000 signatures.[20]

An article about Collins published by the Southern Patriot, the official publication of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), in October 1970 — *An article about Collins published by the* Southern Patriot, *the official publication of the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF), in October 1970.*
*Image courtesy of the author.*

While SCEF provided an important base for organizing on behalf of Collins, Abubakari also worked to create a more permanent organization dedicated solely to defending Black draft resisters. On the weekend of March 5, 1971, just a few months after the December demonstrations in Washington, D.C., Abubakari and other delegates reconvened in the national capitol. They congregated at the NABS headquarters and founded the International Committee for Black Resisters (ICBR). The founding members, who included notable activists like Ella Baker and Queen Mother Moore, laid out the following program:

International support for Black resisters and political prisoners;
Opposition to apprehension of Black men into the military or into jail for refusing the military;
Research and communications on the international level about the cases of Black resisters and political prisoners;
An international Legal Resistance Network;
Black draft counseling and programmatic planning for high school students;
“Free Walter Collins” campaign.[21]

In Abubakari’s words, the ICBR aimed to “internationalize the struggle for Black draft resisters and to generate international and national support for their release.”[22] As her statement suggests, ICBR members not only worked to free Collins but also supported larger campaigns to provide amnesty to all Black draft resisters. Collins’ supporters also looked to international forums to publicize the case, and they distributed petitions abroad through organizations like Amnesty International. They understood their project as global in scope and explicitly sought international support for U.S. political prisoners. Although there are few traces of ICBR activities in the historical record after this founding meeting, the group’s platform, and their particular emphasis on the status of Black draft resisters, represented an important intervention within the anti-war movement.

Following the meeting, Abubakari embarked on a cross-country tour with Carl Braden, a longtime civil rights activist and SCEF director. They visited college campuses, churches, and community centers in over forty states to publicize Collins’ case. Abubakari delivered speeches in cities across the United States, including New York, Chicago, Louisville, Austin, and Los Angeles.[23] When asked about her upcoming plans in November 1971, Abubakari emphasized her determination to free her son. She responded, “I’ll finish a whole year of touring and if Walter’s not out of prison by then, I’ll start all over again.”[24]

*One of the petitions circulated by the SCEF during its campaign to free Walter Collins.*
*Image courtesy of the Georgia State University Library’s Special Collections Division.*

While Abubakari mobilized activists across the country on his behalf, Collins translated his organizing skills to a new context—the federal prison in Texarkana, Texas. While imprisoned, Collins allied himself with fellow inmates to protest mail censorship, corporal punishment, and the lack of adequate medical care in the facility. Firsthand experience with long-term incarceration not only solidified his understanding of his predicament as political repression, but it also brought him face-to-face with the issues that incarcerated people across the nation—from San Quentin to Attica—raised through legal suits, popular protests, and uprisings. During the spring of 1972, Collins became involved in a hunger strike and work stoppage at Texarkana.[25] Although the strike lasted less than a week, newspaper reports reveal that almost five-hundred men participated in the protest. They compiled a list of grievances addressed to Warden Connett and elected a group, which included Collins, to serve as a negotiating team. In response, prison authorities transferred many of the leaders to other facilities and temporarily placed Collins in solitary confinement.

During the fall of 1972, Collins’ parole board recommended an early supervised-release based on “good time” he had accrued while incarcerated. Although Warden L. M. Connett initially refused to free Collins, based on his participation in the strike earlier that year, he eventually complied due to public pressure. After spending two years in prison, Collins was paroled in December 1972.[26] He joined his SCEF colleagues in extending his gratitude to supporters: “Protests from across the nation and around the world helped the warden to change his mind about keeping Collins in prison for an extra five months and voiding his chances of parole. . . . Walter Collins joins the board and staff of SCEF and the editors of The Southern Patriot in thanking all of those who supported him and his fellow prisoners while he was at Texarkana.”[27]

*Walter Collins imprisoned at the federal penitentiary in Texarkana, Texas after his conviction for refusing induction.*
*Image courtesy of the author.*

Following his release, Collins remained active in campaigns to free draft resisters and other political prisoners. In 1977, President Jimmy Carter granted full pardons to any person who had violated the Selective Service Act between 1964 and 1973. Collins went on to serve as an Executive Director of SCEF and a coordinator for the National Moratorium on Prison Construction in Atlanta, Georgia. During the late 1980s, he returned to New Orleans, and in 1995, at the age of fifty, he passed away after being diagnosed with cancer.[28]

Conclusion

Walter Collins was one of many political prisoners whose legal cases captured national attention and inspired widespread protest during the 1960s and 1970s. Although the individuals and organizations involved in this campaign did not achieve all of their goals—Collins’ eventual release was based on procedure rather than a landmark court case and the ICBR seems to have had only a brief existence—they were able to construct coalitions and develop strategies that could be used in future organizing. Both Abubakari and Collins continued to participate in campaigns to free draft resisters and political prisoners, and they shared the skills they developed with other activists. They led workshops on movement building, spoke at demonstrations, and provided organizational support for other campaigns.

Studying defense campaigns allows historians and community organizers to think more expansively about social movements and their relative success. Defense campaigns were not only logistical solutions to political repression but also represented important sites where participants articulated larger ideas about freedom and justice. Collins’ supporters did not only object to the drafting of conscientious objectors, but to the draft and the war more generally. They understood all draft resisters, and particularly Black draft resisters, as political prisoners, and they used the campaign to free Walter Collins as a space to organize around these issues. By engaging seriously with the ideas that activists involved in defense campaigns put forward and exploring the various strategies that they developed, we can think more critically about their impact over time, while also identifying tools that might be useful in present struggles for racial and social justice.

[1] “Widespread Support Builds For Black Draft Resisters,” Southern Patriot 28, no. 10 (December 1970): 8; Fred Shuttlesworth and Carl Braden to SCEF Board, Advisory Committee and Staff, November 18th, 1970, Anne and Carl Braden Papers, Box 76, Folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society; “News from Southern Conference Educational (SCEF),” December 11th, 1970, GI Press Collection, 1964-1977, Wisconsin Historical Society, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/25229.

[2] David Cortright, Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 165.

[3] Ashley Farmer, “Mothers of Pan-Africanism: Audley Moore and Dara Abubakari,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4, no. 2 (Fall 2016): 276, 286.

[4] “SCEF Blasts Hoover On ‘Justice’ Remark,” Chicago Daily Defender, November 27th, 1968, 10; “Orleanian Named VP of Republic of New Africa,” Louisiana Weekly, April 19th, 1969, 1; “Women taking deeper look at cause of war,” Daily World, July 19th, 1969, 10; “Republic New Africa’s New Executive Council,” New York Amsterdam News, April 25th, 1970, 3; “Mrs. Collins Is Delegate To Women’s Congress,” Louisiana Weekly, July 25th, 1970, 2; Ashley Farmer, “Reframing African American Women’s Grassroots Organizing: Audley Moore and the Universal Association of Ethiopian Women, 1957-1963,” Journal of African American History 101, no 1-2 (Winter/Spring 2016): 87-89.

[5] “SCEF Worker Convicted For Refusing Draft,” Southern Patriot 27, no. 7 (September 1969): 4; “Cancel Summer Vacations For Ballot Fight,” Louisiana Weekly, June 22nd, 1963, 1; Bob Zellner, “Report, Evaluation, and Proposals for the Future,” November 13th, 1970, Civil Rights Vertical Files, Box 159-13, Folder 11, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Walter Collins, interview by Kim Lacy Rogers, Part 6, May 20th, 1979, Box 4, Side 2, Kim Lacy Rogers Civil Rights Oral History Collection, Tulane University, New Orleans, Louisiana, https://digitallibrary.tulane.edu/islandora/object/tulane%3A83107; Kim Lacy Rogers, Righteous Lives: Narratives of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement (New York: NYU Press, 1993), 20.

[6] Office of Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense, “Negroes and the War in South-East Asia,” Anne and Carl Braden Papers, Box 76, Folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society.

[7] See, for instance: Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, “MFDP and Viet Nam,” July 31st, 1965, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/pr/650731_mfdp_pr_vietnam.pdf; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Statement on Vietnam,” January 6th, 1966, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/snccviet.htm; Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, “Report on Draft Program,” 1966, https://www.crmvet.org/docs/6608_sncc_draft-resist.pdf; Diane Nash Bevel, “Journey to North Vietnam,” Freedomways 7, no. 2 (Spring 1967): 118-128, https://www.crmvet.org/info/67_nash_vietnam.pdf; Flo Kennedy, “Harlem Against the Draft,” The Movement 3, no. 5 (May 1967): https://www.crmvet.org/docs/mvmt/6705mvmt.pdf; Huey P. Newton, “Message on the Peace Movement [1969],” in The Black Panthers Speak, ed. Philip S. Foner (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 1995), 67-70.

[8] Martin Luther King Jr., “Beyond Vietnam—A Time to Break Silence,” April 4th, 1967, https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm. King’s longtime associate Vincent Harding wrote the original draft of this speech.

[9] “On the Military: Interview with Walter Collins,” Southern Exposure 1, no. 1 (Spring 1973): 6; “SUNO Students To Strike If 10 Demands Are Not Met,” Louisiana Weekly, April 12th, 1969, 1, 7; Marcus S. Cox, “‘Keep Our Black Warriors Out of the Draft’: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement at Southern University, 1968-1973,” Educational Foundations (Winter/Spring 2006): 123-144, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ751764.pdf.

[10] Ashley Farmer, “’Heed the Call!’ Black Women, Anti-Imperialism, and Black Anti-War Activism,” Black Perspectives, August 3rd, 2016, https://www.aaihs.org/heed-the-call-black-women-anti-imperialism-and-black-anti-war-activism/; Rhonda Y. Williams, Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (New York: Taylor & Francis, 2014), 143-146; Lauren Mottle, “‘We Resist on the Grounds We Aren’t Citizens’: Black Draft Resistance in the Vietnam War Era,” Journal of Civil and Human Rights 6, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2020): 26-52.

[11] Gwen Patton, “Black Militants and the War,” Student Mobilizer, January 1, 1968, GI Press Collection, 1964-1977, Wisconsin Historical Society, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/34169.

[12] United States v. Collins, 426 F.2d 765 (5th Cir. 1970).

[13] Annie Braden, “Southern Group Launches Campaign,” Baltimore Afro-American, October 11th, 1969, 18.

[14] “New SNCC Leaders Outline Their Plans,” Southern Patriot 25, no. 6 (June 1967): 1, 6; “Fred Brooks Refuses Draft,” Southern Patriot 25, no. 11 (December 1967): 4; “‘You Can’t Do This To Me’: Draft Evader Gets 5 Years,” Miami Herald, April 28, 1968, 22-A; “Black Draft Resisters: Does Anybody Care? A Fact Sheet,” undated, Anne and Carl Braden Papers, Box 76, Folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society.

[15] “SNCC Workers Indicted,” The Movement 3, no. 5 (Spring 1967): 4.

[16] United States v. Collins, 426 F.2d 765 (5th Cir. 1970); “Orleans Man Indicted On Draft Charges,” Shreveport Journal, June 19th, 1968, 12; “Louisiana Man Indicted On Draft Charges,” Daily Advertiser, June 19, 1968, 12; “Collins Is Free On Bond Pending Appeal of Term,” Shreveport Journal, July 10th, 1969, 20; “Sentenced To 5 Years In Draft Case,” Louisiana Weekly, July 19th, 1969, 1; “Jail Black Activist As A Draft Evader,” Michigan Chronicle, July 26th, 1969, 15.

[17] United States v. Collins, 426 F.2d 765 (5th Cir. 1970); “‘Bias’ Charged In New Orleans Draft Case,” Chicago Daily Defender, August 8th, 1970, 20; “US Argues against Collins Appeal,” Southern Patriot 28, no. 9 (November 1970): 5; News Release, Office of Public Information, Selective Service System, December 16th, 1970, Anne and Carl Braden Papers, Box 76, Folder 2, Wisconsin Historical Society, 6.

[18] United States v. Collins, 426 F.2d 765 (5th Cir. 1970); Walter Collins v. U.S., 400 U.S. 919 (1970); “Court Upholds Charges Against Walter Collins,” Louisiana Weekly, May 9th, 1970, 9; “Court Rejects Challenge Of Draft Board Alignment,” Town Talk, November 16th, 1970, 4; “Judge Boyle Refuses To Cut Draft Resister’s Term,” Louisiana Weekly, February 27th, 1971, 5; “Nab La. Activist on draft dodge rap,” Chicago Daily Defender, December 1st, 1970, 4; “24-year-old draft activist arrested to serve 5 years,” Baltimore Afro-American, December 12th, 1970, 16.

[19] Southern Conference Educational Fund, “An Enemy of the People,” GI Press Collection, 1964-1977, Wisconsin Historical Society, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/61302/rec/148.

[20] Southern Conference Educational Fund Revenue and Expense Operating Fund, June 30th, 1970, Civil Rights Vertical Files, Box 159-13, Folder 11, Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Southern Conference Educational Fund, “An Enemy of the People,” GI Press Collection, 1964-1977, Wisconsin Historical Society, https://content.wisconsinhistory.org/digital/collection/p15932coll8/id/61302/rec/148; “20,000 petition Nixon for black,” Chicago Defender, February 17th, 1971, 27.

[21] “International Black Draft Resisters Committee Formed in Washington,” Sun Reporter, March 20th, 1971, 13; “Draft Resisters Group Formed,” Los Angeles Sentinel, March 25th, 1971, A2; “Draft Resisters Organize in Washington,” Sacramento Observer, March 25th, 1971, C10; “Group organized to aid black draft dodgers,” Chicago Daily Defender, April 10th, 1971, 14.

[22] “International Black Draft Resisters Committee Formed in Washington,” Sun Reporter, March 20th, 1971, 13.

[23] “Lawman Guest Speaker,” New York Amsterdam News, April 17th, 1971, 28; “Freedom for draft resisters,” Chicago Daily Defender, October 23rd, 1971, 18; “Foe of draft to speak,” Courier-Journal, May 16th, 1971, 24; “Interracial Officials Due at UT,” Austin Statesman, June 14th, 1971, 8; “Prisoner’s Mother Guests,” Los Angeles Sentinel, November 11th, 1971, B6.

[24] Jean Murphy, “Lifelong Battler in Struggle to Free Jailed Draft Resisters,” Los Angeles Times, November 14th, 1971, D3.

[25] “Inmates End Strike At Texarkana Prison,” Corpus Christi Times, April 12th, 1972, 11; “Men Strike in Texarkana,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 5 (April 1972): 6; “News from the Southern Conference Educational Fund (SCEF),” May 10th, 1972, 1; “Collins Letters on Revolt,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 5 (May 1972): 6; “Federal Prisoners Protest,” San Antonio Register, July 7th, 1971, 7.

[26] “Walter Collins’ Parole in Doubt,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 8 (October 1972): 8; “Collins Wins Release,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 9 (November 1972): 8; “Draft Resister Freed One Month Late,” New Pittsburgh Courier, January 6th, 1973, 22.

[27] “Collins Wins Release,” Southern Patriot 30, no. 9 (November 1972): 8.

[28] “New executive director of SCEF is named,” Courier-Journal, December 12th, 1973, 12; ; “Statement of Walter J. Collins, Coordinator, National Moratorium on Prison Construction,” in Hearing Before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Government Operations, House of Representatives (Washington, D.C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1983), 125, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/88401NCJRS.pdf; Jeanne Friedman, “Fallen Comrades: Walter Collins,” http://www.vvaw.org/veteran/article/?id=305.

Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World By Jessica Marie Johnson (2020)

By Tiana Wilson

Many recent studies on chattel slavery in the Atlantic World have decentered the voices of the colonizers in an effort to creatively reimagine the inner lives of Black people, both enslaved and “free.” However, narrating the complex ways race, gender, and sexuality played out in a colonial setting beyond violence has proven difficult due to the brutal, inhumane conditions of enslavement. At the same time, the drastic imbalance of power raises questions about consent within sexual and intimate relationships. While most scholars of slavery have tended to shy away from such a contentious and messy topic, historian Jessica Marie Johnson presents a compelling analysis of how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and live out freedom in the eighteenth century.

She demonstrates how the legal status of free, manumission from bondage, or escape from slavery did not protect Black women from “colonial masculinities and imperial desires for black flesh” that rendered African women as “lecherous, wicked, and monstrous” (14). Slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials attempted to exploit Black women’s bodies (enslaved or legally free) for labor. In return, Johnson argues, Black women defined freedom on their own terms through the intimate and kinship ties they formed.

Focusing on Black women in New Orleans, Wicked Flesh takes readers from the coast of Senegal to French Saint-Domingue and from Spanish Cuba to the US Gulf Coast areas in order to tell the varying experiences of Black women across the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival material written in multiple languages dispersed across three continents and uses a method that historian Marisa Fuentes describes as “reading along the bias grain” to offer an ethical historical analysis of her texts. Although the majority of sources Johnson utilizes were produced by colonial officials and slaveholding men, this methodology allows Johnson to carefully and innovatively piece together archival fragments, providing readers insight into the everyday intimate lives of Black women during this era. Intimacy, as Johnson explores, encompassed the “corporeal, carnal, quotidian encounters of flesh and fluid” and was the very thing that tied Black women to white and Black men. It was through these connections that women of African descent simultaneously endured violence and resisted colonial agendas. Wicked Flesh seriously consider the ways Black women fostered hospitable and pleasurable spaces on both sides of the Atlantic.

Johnson begins her narrative in West Africa between the geographical region of the Senegal River (north) and the Gambia River (south), also known as Senegambia. Senegal’s Atlantic coast saw Portuguese-Dutch-French-Wolof trade alliances and their struggle for power, but by 1659, the French drove out the Dutch from the northern area and founded the comptoir (administrative outpost of Saint-Louis. It is in this locale, comptoir, that Johnson introduces readers to free African women like Seignora Catti, Anne Gusban, and Marie Baude, who all actively engaged in networks with European and African men.

Throughout chapters one and two, Johnson demonstrates the different ways free African women cultivated freedom in efforts to seek safety and security. This included participating in grand gestures of hospitality for French officials or marring European men, but rejecting their Catholic practices. These practices impacted three groups, free African women who has intimate ties with European and African men, captifs du case (enslaved people who belonged to comptoir residents), and Africans forced onboard of slaved ships set to travel to the Americas. Chapter three examines the latter, including Black women’s and girl’s horrific experiences on the long middle passage and how this forced migration produced a “predatory network of exchanges” that attempted to “dismantle their womanhood, girlhood, and humanity” (123).

Chapters four and five shifts to the Gulf Coast region and encourages readers to reconceptualize the price of manumission for people of African descent that extended beyond the material world. Through the lives of figures like Suzanne, the wife of a New Orleans “negro executioner,” Johnson further illustrates just how bound Black women’s freedom was to their intimate relations and kinship ties with men in power who were acting on behalf of the French colonial regime. When Suzanne’s husband, Louis Congo, initially entered in a contractual obligation with slaveowners or Company officials, he requested freedom for Suzanne too. However, French colonists rejected his demand and instead, only allowed Suzanne to live with her husband, if Louis agreed to grant the Company full use of his wife when the Company needed her. While one scholar may read this account as an example of a Black woman gaining her freedom through her husband’s occupation, Johnson critically assess Suzanne’s lack of control over her own body and movement.

Diving deeper into the intricate ways women of African descent navigated French colonial power in New Orleans, Johnson’s fifth chapter follows girls like Charlotte, the daughter of a French colonial officer, who demanded manumission for herself. It is in this section that Johnson introduces the concept of “black femme freedom” that “points to the deeply feminine, feminized, and femme practices of freedom engaged in by women and girls of African descent” (260). Scholars of Black and other women of color feminists use the term “femme” to describe a queer sexual identity that is gendered in performances of femininity. Johnson finds this term productive in the context of eighteenth-century New Orleans, because strands of resistive femininity and intimacy between women was present during this time. Black femme freedom details a type of liberation that went beyond masculine and imperial desires. It describes the importance of reading Black women’s intimate decisions to privilege themselves and each other in a world that violently privileged the position of slaveowners and husbands. An example of this Black femme freedom lies within Black women’s efforts to create spaces for pleasure, spirit, and celebration against French and later Spanish censorship of their behaviors. This included hosting night markets and wearing headwraps. The last chapter explores the shift in colonial powers and how free women of African descent used this change to claim kinship ties through registration of their wills and testaments.

Wicked Flesh is a well-researched, beautifully written text that is an essential read for anyone interested in the intersections between Slavery, Gender, and Sexuality. Following in the tradition of historians like Stephanie Camp, Jennifer Morgan, and Marisa Fuentes, Johnson’s work is a superb addition to these groups of scholars who are shifting the field of Atlantic History to critically engage with definitions of freedom for enslaved and legally free women of African descent during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Graduate students including myself can (and likely will) use Johnson’s work as a model for problematizing white colonial sources, while ethically utilizing contemporary theoretical frameworks to imagine and retell the lives of those silenced by institutional archives.

Image credits

Banner image – Ndeté-Yalla, lingeer of Waalo, Gallica, bnf.fr – Réserve DT 549.2 B 67 M Atlas – planche n °5 – Notice n° : FRBNF38495418 – (Illustrations de Esquisses sénégalaises) Image from Wikimedia Commons

TIANA WILSON is a Ph.D. Candidate in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Sword and The Shield: A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part II)

In this conversation, Dr. Peniel Joseph discusses his new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders. This is part II of the conversation. Part I can be seen here. The Not Even Past Conversations Series was born out of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes the form of an interview held informally (usually at home) over Zoom with leading scholars and teachers at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. The following is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Adam Clulow and Peniel Joseph.

AC: You talk about the suffocating mythology that sometimes surrounds Dr King and Malcolm X. One of the parts of your book that’s so striking is your discussion of the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Can you talk about this moment and that speech?

Is that the case immediately? The speech has a huge impact and it’s very widely publicized and reported but I get the sense that very quickly people are focusing in on those parts that we all know and the rest of the speech is elided. Is that the case, that this understanding comes into being very quickly? Or is there a moment when the speech as a whole is considered?

PJ: I think the speech gets a Janus-faced treatment. The Black press treats it in a very holistic way. The white press is going to focus on ‘I Have a Dream’. John F. Kennedy says ‘I Have a Dream’ as soon as he meets King. It’s important to remember that the Black press, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier the New York Amsterdam News, Los Angeles Herald Dispatch, this is how most of the 16, 17, 18 million Black people got their news. You know, Black people were rarely written about in say The New York Times. King is an exception. Most of the time Black people were written about in major newspapers was for having committed some kind of crime. So the Black press really gets what he’s trying to say. And even the march on Washington, the Black press gives it its full title. It’s the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. So that economic aspect is really there for the Black press. But I would say that the mythologizing starts, yes, early and often when we think about the mainstream.

AC: So you talk about this kind of “children’s bedtime story” version of Civil Rights that is sometimes told. And it’s often told as a singularly American story. What really struck me in the book is the global dimensions of this story. You talk about Dr King and Malcolm X bestriding the global age of decolonization. They meet with Ben Bellah, the first President of Algeria and both travel across the world. Malcolm X travels repeatedly and is welcomed, you say, as America’s Black Prime Minister. So is Dr King. Can you say more about these figures as global icons in a much wider process of decolonization?

PJ: Yes, definitely. They’re both hugely impacted by this global age of decolonization. There’s been great work on Black internationalism done by Penny Von Eschen and Brenda Gayle Plummer and Thomas Borstelmann, Mary Dudziak, and Gerald Horne, whose whole career has focused on Black Internationalism with dozens of books. When we think about Malcolm and Martin, both of them are global figures. They converge at the intersection of anticolonialism and human rights, both of them.

Malcolm X, 1963 by Gordon Parks -Exhibition label: “Gordon Parks photographed Malcolm X on a New York City sidewalk as he sold a special issue of Muhammad Speaks, the official newspaper of the Black separatist group Nation of Islam.”(National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution)

Malcolm, I would argue, is even more interested in the global stage because in a lot of ways he’s able to get more global support than he is domestically. I think King is interested in the global stage but as his domestic reputation swells, he really utilizes global support to impact the domestic struggle. Whereas Malcolm is really trying to utilize the world stage to push for anti-racism and the defeat of white supremacy in, for example, the United Nations, and also to have coalitions in the Organization of African Unity that will censor the United States for its mistreatment of African-Americans. In a very specific, granular way they both in the 1950s take trips overseas. So King goes to Ghana in 1957 and is able to witness Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah. When we think about Nkrumah he is such an important figure. He’s really the post-war avatar of Pan Africanism as a nation state building project on the continent of Africa. He makes mistakes. But symbolically, he is this unbelievably important figure. Malcolm X meets him in Harlem. Martin meets him in Ghana. Malcolm later meets him in Ghana.

So King gets to Africa first. In 1957. King spends a month in India in 1959. The India trip is crucial. King’s India trip and seeing all that poverty and the caste system in India makes King understand that he has been put on Earth not just to defeat racism and white supremacy, but actually to defeat poverty globally. These are massive ambitions that most humans will never have, He really believes it. That’s what’s so extraordinary and exciting about studying these figures. Malcolm visits the Middle East in 1959, spends five weeks there, visits Saudi Arabia, visits Khartoum, Egypt, all these different places. He meets up with Anwar El Sadat, the vice president of Egypt, the future president, Egypt.

Malcolm starts making critical alliances with Middle Eastern and African diplomats in the 1950s. Malcolm had such good alliances, that one of the little known facts I talk about in the book, is that Malcolm X has an office at the United Nations. He’s got it through the connections with African and Middle Eastern diplomats. So Malcolm goes in and out of the UN all the time with a briefcase. And he’s an extraordinary figure in this sense.

So as the 60s progressed, you see Dr. King with Ben Bella. King becomes this figure for anticolonial activists who especially are interested in human rights, but especially interested in also pressuring the United States to recognize their activism as something that’s good and virtuous, even as the United States has this ultimate contradiction of not just Jim Crow segregation, but really utilizing state violence against Black people.

In 1964, Malcolm goes overseas for about 25 weeks. He goes to the Hajj pilgrimage in Mecca. He goes to Nigeria. He goes to Tanzania. He goes to Ghana. Malcolm is in Ethiopia. He’s in Cairo. He’s in London. And Birmingham. And Smethwick. And Oxford. He’s in Paris. So what Malcolm is trying to do is, one, he really becomes a statesman who is giving the global audience, the world audience, a firsthand account of his experiences as a Black man and as a Black person in America.

He’s telling Africans about the depth and breadth of racism and white supremacy. He’s repudiating the State Department’s notion that things are getting better. Malcolm is actually even harsher globally than King is. By 1964 when King travels overseas, he travels to Scandinavia to accept the Nobel Peace Prize. So in a way, King is always giving, until he’s coming out against the Vietnam War, etc, he’s giving a more optimistic vision.

Malcolm finds some optimism in the fact that anticolonialism has worked and he wants help. Malcolm meet with Fidel Castro in Harlem September of 1960, and he’s telling Fidel that your struggle is our struggle and our struggle is your struggle. Malcolm is telling that to Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere in Tanzania. What’s so interesting about Malcolm is that so many African revolutionaries respect Malcolm. He is willing to speak truth to power. So the global component is really important for both of them. I would say that Malcolm really tries to cultivate that global component even more than King. And I think it’s out of necessity.

But it’s also because Malcolm is this revolutionary Pan Africanist and also a global Islamic figure. You know, I make an argument that he’s always Muslim, both within the Nation of Islam and then when he becomes an Orthodox Muslim. So just because he’s in a different sect doesn’t mean that he doesn’t believe he’s a Muslim.

They are secular, but these are two faith leaders. They bring this real morality to what they’re doing. And it’s not a cheap morality that we have in our society today about who’s sleeping with whom. It’s the morality of: does human life matter? Should we protect children? Should we protect communities? Should we not torture people? At any time? Any place? Should we be, and this is where King’s very important here, a society that is nonviolent but we are not morally equivocating about that nonviolence.

“No Apartheid – Wall of Justice Revival” by Mario Torero. (UC Santa Barbara, Library, Department of Special Research Collections)

King believes in nonviolence. Whether it’s white sheriffs who are attacking Black people or it is people in Vietnam who are considered the enemy. The United States is dropping napalm. And again, these are crimes. These are crimes against humanity that the United States is committing. No matter what we do, we can never take back these acts. Right. And so King is saying that, right. And that’s when King, I argue, April 4th, 1967 becomes a revolutionary because there’s no turning back after that. There’s no handshakes with President Johnson and President Johnson doesn’t come to his funeral.

AC: Malcolm X and Dr King exist in a global moment of decolonization. Do you see a parallel between that moment and what’s happening now with Black Lives Matter? Because one thing that’s been so striking is the way these protests have gone global in a way that could not have been predicted two years ago. Do you see parallels between the years you discuss in the book and the global Dimensions of Black Lives Matter which have has swept across the world in unprecedented and unpredictable ways and galvanized people in many different countries?

PJ: Absolutely. I think there’s parallels and I think we’re at another crossroads. I think the parallels are, again, also between the global north and the global south, because as we’ve seen, the underdevelopment of the global south and really the exploitation of the global south has continued with a different kind of colonization. And that colonization is a kind of economic colonization. Right. Because of these unfair distributions of wealth created by globalization. Globalization, that in and of itself is not a bad thing, just like gentrification. But we have made sure that the distributions or the supply chains of power and privilege versus the supply chains of misery and greed are distributed along racial and economic lines, ethnicity lines, different lines based on identity and geography.

So in a way, even as indigenous groups got rights of political self-determination – probably our biggest global example after King and Malcolm’s time is going to be Nelson Mandela in South Africa. Yes, the ANC absolutely got political power in South Africa, but without connected economic justice and equality. The segregation, the economic impoverishment has actually increased even though now we have Black billionaires and African billionaires in South Africa, too. So the whole world is absolutely in the throes of a rebellion against this inequality that is organized around anti-black racism, but it’s organized around intersectional injustice based on your race, class, gender, sexuality, how you identify.

So we’re seeing this. And I think that King and Malcolm actually anticipated this crisis, and that’s why they were interested in thinking of human and civil rights as a Human Rights movement, this bigger movement that was going to guarantee redistribution of wealth and guarantee citizenship for, yes, Black people, but for all people.

AC: We’re going to return to Dr King in a second but you can say more about how Malcolm X changes and evolves? He’s often presented in a very limited way that does not encompass the complexity of the individual, but also just how much he changed across this period. Although you cover their whole lives, the book really focuses on a relatively compressed space of time and he travels a remarkable road in this period.

So let’s talk about the last two chapters of the book, the Radical King and the Revolutionary King. And so we talked about the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Let’s talk about the Riverside speech, in 1967. This is an extraordinary speech that is very different from popular understandings of Dr. King. It’s stunning in its repudiation of US involvement in Vietnam. You write in the last years of his life that Dr King was transformed “into a revolutionary dissident vilified in quarters that once feted him.” Do you think he anticipated the strength of this backlash?

PJ: I would say he didn’t anticipate how big the backlash would be because I think that he thought what would protect him was the mainstream accolades that he had gotten before. So he was a Nobel Prize winner, was somebody who had been a leader of a social movement, who was on par with Presidents of the United States. And people knew that King was a serious, sober person politically. He wasn’t prone to making wild eyed statements. And when you read the speech, the speech is very sober. I mean, it’s very critical. But it’s not even his most critical speech against the war. That’s going to start really at the end of that month, because he’s going to do a speech on April 4th, April 15th. He’s at the spring mobilization, which is the largest anti-war demonstration up until that time. 400,000. Two years later is going to be marching with over a million. That’s in Central Park with Benjamin Spock. Harry Belafonte.

But then April 30th is when he does the speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church, where Stokely Carmichael is in the front row. He says he’s not going to study war no more. It’s a much more stinging indictment. And Stokely leads the standing ovation for that speech. So the Riverside speech, I mean, I think one of the things he talks about when he says America is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world is very, very important, because I think that speech is very similar to what Malcolm X is saying when he says the chickens have come home to roost.

And one of the things that King starts to channel, I argue in the book after Malcolm’s assassination, is really Malcolm’s framing of structural racism and white supremacy and imperialism and racial violence and this idea that the United States being a deployer of that kind of violence is always going to have some kind of karmic payback. For Malcolm, he was talking about the Kennedy assassination, for King the reason why he breaks with Lyndon Johnson. He’s saying, look: we’re immorally killing all these people in Vietnam, and the Great Society is failing now. In a television interview in 1966, he says, your money goes where your heart goes. And the president’s heart and the country’s heart is in Vietnam. And he was right. I mean, all that money, we know retrospectively, we should have poured that into urban cities and poured that into rural areas and anti-poverty and employment and guaranteed basic income. We could have given everybody health care and income and not murdered all those people. So, again, what’s interesting about King is he takes that weight on for himself. So he feels the weight of the US’s morally reprehensible actions in a way, I think that elected leaders should because that would prevent you from doing it. So King feels that enormous psychic weight.

And he feels that about poverty. He feels that about violence. And so he becomes this very clarifying figure. But he starts to use nonviolence as a political sword in the way that Malcolm X had talked about. And King starts speaking truth to power, saying Congress, the halls of Congress are running wild with racism. In 1967 before the American Psychological Association, he’s saying the roots of urban rebellions are white supremacy, and white racism is producing chaos. And the media says that there would be peace if Black people stopped rebelling. And King says it’s the white people who are producing the chaos.

This is King. One of the most interesting symmetries between Malcolm and Martin is the fact that Malcolm X, who I argue is Black America’s prosecuting attorney, was always charging white America with a series of crimes. We have the videotape of King talking to poor Black people in Marks, Mississippi. There’s a point where Andy Young says King is in tears listening. This is terrible. Marks, Mississippi. King says the way you are living right here in America, it’s a crime. That’s what King says.

Martin Luther King, Jr (1967) by Benedict J. Fernandez. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Eastman Kodak Professional Photography Division, the Engl Trust, and Benedict J. Fernandez

So we go from Malcolm saying this is a crime. He’s that revolutionary. King’s our good guy. Right? So he’s the bad guy. And King is saying this is a crime. And King is talking about white people getting access to land through the Homestead Act. And Black people not getting their reparations, their 40 acres and a mule. And yet people are telling Black people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. And so he says, we’re coming to Washington to get that check. Right. So this is extraordinary what happens in terms of the symmetry between both of these individuals. Both while they’re living but then certainly during the last three years of King’s life.

AC: So a final question. Before becoming a university professor, I taught high school history. And the question I have is, how should we teach about these two figures in a way that does more justice to their lives.

PJ: I think we should teach about them together. So this is really a dual biography. Whenever you tell students about one, you tell them about the other. It’s pretty simple to do because they live parallel lives. Malcolm’s born in 1925. King in 1929. Malcolm’s killed in 1965. King in 1968. So there’s not a lot of mental shuffling you have to do. And so I think you show students the way in which they interpret race and democracy differently based on the life experiences that they have. So you look at King: Morehouse College, had his father in his life. Malcolm: father was killed, trauma, foster home. While he’s in college, Malcolm is in prison. While King is in seminary, Malcolm’s in prison and they both come out and they’re activists, both men of faith. They become faith leaders. But then you look at how, how and why both of them imbibe this revolutionary moment in different ways. And then why do they start to converge? How and why they converge.

AC: Thank you for sharing your thoughts on two remarkable lives and a remarkable book.

Part I in this series is available here.

PENIEL JOSEPH holds a joint professorship appointment at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and the History Department in the College of Liberal Arts at The University of Texas at Austin. He is also the founding director of the LBJ School’s Center for the Study of Race and Democracy. His career focus has been on “Black Power Studies,” which encompasses interdisciplinary fields such as Africana studies, law and society, women’s and ethnic studies, and political science. His newest book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., was published in March 2020 and is available now.

More from Dr. Joseph on Not Even Past:

Consider reading as well:

Featured Image Credit: MalcolmX and MLK, Jr., mural, E. W. alley view, N. of Manchester Ave. towards Cimarron, Los Angeles, California, 2010. (Vergara, Camilo J. Vergara Photograph Collection. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.

The Sword and The Shield: A Conversation with Peniel E. Joseph (Part I)

This is Part I of a conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph. In this conversation, Dr Joseph discusses his new book, The Sword and the Shield: The Revolutionary Lives of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. This dual biography of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King upends longstanding preconceptions to transform our understanding of the twentieth century’s most iconic African American leaders. The Not Even Past Conversations Series was born out of the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic. It takes the form of an interview held informally (usually at home) over Zoom with leading scholars and teachers at the University of Texas at Austin and beyond. The following is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Adam Clulow and Peniel Joseph.

AC: Thank you so much for joining me today. You start the book with a meeting that takes place on March 26, 1964, between Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Remarkably, and as you write, this is the only time they actually met. Can you tell us about this meeting and how it came about? And the bigger question that runs through the whole book is how should we characterize their relationship? You use a few different terms. You talk about them as political partners, kindred spirits, and alter egos. How should we understand this meeting and their relationship more generally?

And do you think at that moment in March 1964, they’re aware of this partnership? They’re clearly thinking about each other. They’re reading each other’s writing. They’re listening to each other’s speeches now. They’re intertwined in all sorts of fascinating and productive ways but at this moment of meeting, is there an awareness of this partnership or do you think that lies ahead?

PJ: I think there’s an awareness. I think King is very careful until Malcolm X’s assassination. King utilizes Malcolm for leverage in the political mainstream. Malcolm X represents for white Americans, including elected officials the alternative to King. So if you think King is too militant, King is too radical. Then you’ve got Malcolm X to deal with, someone who is the boldest critic of white supremacy of his generation. And so I think that Malcolm and King realize what the other is doing for them.

But because King is so mainstream, Malcolm is the person who’s more willing to be seen with King. And that makes sense, right? Because when you think about King, it’s almost like when you think about a corporation that’s too big to fail. Now Malcolm, as we see by 1963, becomes this international figure as well. Starting in 1959 but especially in 1963-64, he’s traveling overseas. He spends 25 weeks in Africa, the Middle East. The famous Oxford Union debate. So he’s really becoming more of a global figure.

But the person who is a global leader, who’s really been given the imprimatur of the world, of mainstream politics, is the Nobel Prize winner. For these reasons, King is less interested in a formal partnership with Malcolm X. And Malcolm would be more interested because King has more to lose. But by the time Malcolm is assassinated and as we see with Watts in a lot of ways what’s going to happen to King, is that he loses his alter ego. Yes. Stokely Carmichael and King. But King loses that Malcolm X figure. And King is going to be forced to become further radicalized. And I argue really, in the later chapters, for the radical King, the revolutionary King.

Martin Luther King and Malcolm X waiting for a press conference by Marion Trikosko. 1964. (via Library of Congress)

AC: You talk about these two intertwined but different notions of radical black citizenship and radical black dignity that stand at the center of the book. Can you explain in more detail what you mean?

In this book, you argue for a more expansive understanding of these two remarkable figures. In particular, you talk about rescuing them from the suffocating mythology that surrounds them. I was so struck by was this phrase, how conventional images do no justice to these complex and changing figures. Does this apply equally to both of them or is the mythology more restrictive for Malcolm X or Dr King?

PJ: You know, I think it restricts both of them. So for Malcolm, this idea of being this black warrior really takes away from who he is. We’re not allowed to see the vulnerability, the sense of humor, the fear at times that he has, the shortcomings. Ossie Davis, the late Ossie Davis, an extraordinary actor and activist, has this great eulogy for Malcolm X, saying he was our living Black manhood, our shining Black prince. And there’s positives there, positives to have Malcolm as this kind of role model. But there’s negatives as well when he becomes somebody that’s impenetrable. Any figure, every leader has faults and flaws, man or woman, because they are human beings like the rest of us. So, Malcolm, when we take him out of that mythology, one, we see what a truly extraordinary figure he was. Because, and I say this in the book, Malcolm experiences racial trauma at a very early age. His father is murdered. His mother is institutionalized. His father is murdered by Black Legion white supremacists. He has this wayward youth that he admits in his autobiography, committing crimes, working odd jobs. He’s arrested for crimes he did commit and given a rather harsh sentence and spends 76 months in jail. And then he really becomes this person who is this intellectual, who is this political leader, this deep thinker, and then this great organizer. And so I think when you label Malcolm as just a warrior, you lose something. I think it hurts Black men because of this idea that Black men don’t have the full range of emotions. You know, it hurts you there.

Malcolm X, half-length portrait, facing right / World-Telegram & Sun photo by Ed Ford. 1964. (via Library of Congress)

Two. You’re unable to see what a truly, extraordinarily supple mind and diplomat Malcolm is, because he transforms from a prosecuting attorney into a statesman by 64. What’s so interesting is in Europe and the Middle East and Africa – even though Malcolm speaks at Harvard, at Yale – they see that intellect and embrace him more eagerly than Americans. Right. That’s why he’s at Oxford Union. And they see this brilliant man. Even when people disagree. Because the thing about brilliance and ideas, as you know, is that, of course, we’re not going to all agree on everything. The extraordinary nature of ideas is that we can disagree, hopefully civilly. Right? Well, we learn from each other in those disagreements. Right. And so Malcolm speaks at Middle Eastern universities, African universities, European universities. And they’re interested in him not only because he’s a political activist, but because of his brilliant mind. So he suffers in the standard mythology.

And then King suffers in ways at times on a bigger scale, because King is still a larger, more global figure. When you think about the holiday, when you think about the annual celebrations, when you think about it, King is virtually the only Black American figure accorded this monument in Washington. I mean, you know, we haven’t done that for other Black figures. You know, Harriet Tubman. Sojourner Truth. There’s people that we could pick. Ida B. Wells just won a Pulitzer Prize posthumously from Columbia University for her journalism against lynching in the late 19th, early 20th century. So we have these truly extraordinary figures. But King is the exceptional one. The two most well-known Black figures in American history are King and now Barack Obama. And when we think of King’s suffocating mythology, we don’t want to talk about how much of a revolutionary Dr. King was. We don’t want to say that Dr. King was interested in social democracy, that Dr. King had a criticism against capitalism, that Dr. King remained nonviolent, but the reason Dr. King was assassinated is because Dr. King was using nonviolence to coerce the country into doing things it doesn’t want to do, namely Black citizenship and dignity.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., half-length portrait, facing front] / World Telegram & Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico. 1964. (Via Library of Congress)

And so King is this anti imperialist, anti-war revolutionary and King becomes a fire breather. What’s so extraordinary is how you can be that radical. And he’s not cursing. He’s not threatening violence. And he’s trying to use the moral force of the witness. Right. John Lewis does the same thing. Congressman John Lewis, when you’re saying you’re going to reveal to the world the opponent you’re up against is using immoral tactics just through your witness. And if the police commit acts of violence, we’re going to roll ourselves up into a ball and let the world watch and the world will decide. Is this the land of the free and the home of the brave? That’s who Martin Luther King Jr becomes.

And the interesting thing about Malcolm and Martin is Malcolm had criticized the march on Washington as the Farce on Washington because he said they didn’t paralyze the city. By 67, 68, as early as 65, Dr. King says that’s the next step. We’re going to use nonviolence to paralyze cities in his essay Beyond Los Angeles. So the two start to have a meeting of the minds. Even though Malcolm is no longer alive by February 21st, 1965. So it’s truly extraordinary.

Part 2 of this conversation with Dr. Peniel Joseph is available here. The banner image comes from Malcolm X and MLK, Jr., mural, E. W. alley view, N. of Manchester Ave. towards Cimarron, Los Angeles, California, 2010. https://www.loc.gov/item/2015647507/

More from Dr. Joseph on Not Even Past

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Violence Against Black People in America: A ClioVis Timeline

The brutal killing of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis this summer marked a key event in the history of violence against Black Americans. But it was just one of many acts of violence that have been committed in American history. In order to put Floyd’s killing into a larger historical context, our Digital History intern, Haley Price, created four ClioVis timelines to help herself and others learn more about such violence. Alina Scott, a graduate student in the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. William Jones, a recent Ph.D. from Rice University, also worked on the timelines, adding relevant scholarship to many of the events to assist readers who want to learn more. Below, Haley, Alina, and Will introduce the timeline by telling us how the timelines were compiled, what they learned in making them, and how they think the timelines can serve as a resource for others. While the timelines are not comprehensive, they provide viewers with a sense of the historical forces at play across time and illustrate how the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 fits into a larger pattern of historical violence.

As readers will see, there are four timelines. We originally started making one timeline. But, as the number of events grew, we decided to break the larger timeline into three separate timelines. You now see an “Overview” timeline that includes 153 events. We then divided the overview timeline into three thematic timelines: “Slavery in America,” “Jim Crow to Civil Rights,” and “Police and Civilian Brutality.”

Introduction
By Haley Price

The purpose of these timelines is to visualize the history of Black Americans and to connect the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests to their historical context. Even as a History and Humanities major, this part of US history was still very new to me. I had learned about “Jim Crow Laws,” “The Great Migration, and “The March on Washington” in my entry-level U.S. history classes, but they were often tacked onto the ends of units, a footnote in a whitewashed version of our past. Black history is not given its rightful space in the American history curriculum. It is no wonder many Americans feel unprepared to fully understand the June 2020 protests.

Making this timeline was a way for me to educate myself, but much more importantly, I hope it will be a helpful resource for others to do the same. If you take one look at this timeline and feel overwhelmed, I encourage you to push past that feeling. Pick one event that you recognize and start there. See what caused that event and then look at its impact. Take things slowly, learn a little bit at a time, and then share with a loved one who wants to learn, too.

What I Did:
As I added events and eras to the timeline, I filled in their dates and wrote descriptions, added images, connections to other events, and more. I predominantly used information from websites like history.com, blackpast.org, and recent news articles. These sites fall into the category of popular history, so they are accessible to all kinds of learners. I was encouraged to find so much information through simple web searches because that means that viewers who want to go beyond the timeline will be able to do the same.

To Use ClioVis timelines:

Click on points, connections, and eras to read about specific events and people.
View in presentation mode to navigate the timelines chronologically.
Zoom in and out of periods to see how historical events are connected to each other.
Drag your mouse left and right to navigate the timeline manually.

View “Overview: Context for the 2020 BLM Protests” in full screen here .

I. Slavery in America

View “I. Slavery in America” in full screen here.

What I Did:
By Dr. William Jones

I edited the timeline for content, grammar, and punctuation, focusing on the years before 1860. I also added academic sources that both substantiate the descriptions of the events and point viewers to additional reading. In choosing representative scholarship, I attempted to stick to academic sources that are comprehensive narratives published recently or considered classics. I found that describing the events themselves and finding sources for them was less difficult than deciding what should be included on the timeline. I always felt an internal tug between comprehensiveness, legibility, and simplicity.

A wide geographic perspective is often crucial for understanding the colonial era because all the European colonies in North America were part of larger empires, which included colonies in the Caribbean and South America. Yet I was also afraid of adding too many events to the timeline and making it illegible. For some events, I decided to include geographically broad connections in the descriptions rather than enter them onto the timeline. For instance, the authors of the South Carolina Slave Code of 1691 based that code on Jamaica’s code of 1684, which itself was based on Barbados’s code from 1661; this information (and sources to substantiate it) is only available on the timeline in the description of the South Carolina code. In other instances, I did not mention how historical developments outside the United States influenced a specific event on the timeline, but viewers who consult the readings will find that information. For instance, the nineteenth-century Atlantic slave trade in the Spanish Empire, sugar production in Cuba, and Great Britain’s attempts to police the slave trade on the west African coast are all background elements of the Amistad case, but none of that appears on the timeline. Finally, I felt like I needed to include some events (the Haitian Revolution, in particular) that occurred beyond the geographic boundaries of the United States because they influenced a great deal of the history of slavery and race.

II. Jim Crow to Civil Rights

View “II. Jim Crow to Civil Rights” in full screen here.

What I Did:
By Alina Scott

“My role in the project was to edit the period after 1860 for content and source material to ensure that Black voices and scholarship were included in the dialogue. The Black radical tradition and the movement for Black lives have a rich legacy of cultural, political, and historical contributions so incorporating novels, critiques, and histories by Black authors was not difficult. I also wanted to incorporate sources that are accessible to an audience outside academia by including e-books, podcasts, and documentaries available online.

As noted above, we divided the “Overview” timeline into three sections for the sake of user readability, though the timelines are best read together. A key goal of the project is to show the continuity of antiblackness from the highest levels of government to state leaders and local organizations. The project also shows the continuous resistance and resilience of Black people to systemic oppression.”

III. Police and Civilian Brutality

View “III. Police and Civilian Brutality” in full screen here.

“While revising, I was struck by the way the timeline highlights protest, legislation, and presidential power as key themes. While it includes a large number of important individuals, organizations, and events, the timelines is incomplete. Overall, the timelines do a tremendous job highlighting key dates in Civil Rights activism and legislation even if it was not possible to include all historical actors and events. They make an excellent tool for teaching and learning about the political genealogy of the historic moment we are currently in. The movement for Black Lives is bigger than politics and legislation and we encourage others to make their own timelines. For instance, how might this timeline overlap with another on Black life, joy, and healing practices? Or a timeline centering Black Women and their role as intellectuals, in community building, religious life, and organizing? Or a timeline on Black Internationalism, international BLM movements, or coalition-building in the African Diaspora? There is potential, with a tool like ClioVis, to digitally show the many ways Black people have advocated for our lives and liberated ourselves in a way that is historically accurate, representative, and educational.

We hope you find thatthe timelines a useful building block for teaching and learning history.”

If you would like to know more about using these and other timelines or use ClioVis in your classroom, contact admin@cliovis.org.
Visit ClioVis.org for more information on how to create an account, view tutorials, and other sample projects.

Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution by Ada Ferrer (2014)

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Cuba was profoundly shaped by its proximity to and multi-layered relationship with Haiti, or Saint-Domingue as it was called before the 1803 Haitian Revolution. In the decades leading up to Saint-Domingue’s 1791 slave revolt, Cuban planters looked with envy on the booming sugar economy of their neighbor to the southeast and sought to emulate its success. After the revolution in Haiti, Cuba was able to take advantage of the implosion of Saint-Domingue’s sugar industry. Sugar production machinery and human expertise vanished from Saint-Domingue and reappeared in Cuba. Within twenty years of the first Haitian slave revolt, Cuba had surged ahead to become the largest sugar producer in the Caribbean. Necessary to that, of course, was human capital in the form of enslaved Africans or Afro-Caribbeans, some of whom may have been captives from Haiti. Between 1791 and 1821, slaves were imported into Cuba at a rate four times greater than in the previous thirty-year period. As a result, Cuban elites were forced to confront the growing probability, and then actual occurrence, of slave revolts.

Ferrer shapes her narrative around the “mirror,” or reversal, of historical processes: the collapse of one colony’s sugar economy and the rapid growth of another’s; the liberation gained by slaves on one island and the expansion of slavery and entrenchment of enslavement structures on the other; revolution and independence in one place and colonialist counterrevolution in the other; fears of re-enslavement on the part of former slaves and fears of revolt on the part of the elites. She argues that for Cuba, the Haitian Revolution in 1791 served as a temporal “hinge” between the “first and second slaveries.” The second slavery distinguished itself from the first in its larger scale and in its existence alongside a growing “specter” of abolitionist political movements and the reality of enslaved people successfully claiming and obtaining their own freedom.

Nineteenth-Century Photograph of Enslaved People Drying Bagasse in Cuba via University of Miami Digital Collections

The first half of Freedom’s Mirror takes the reader up to Haitian independence and victory over Napoleon’s forces in 1804. These chapters trace the evolution of Cuba’s “sugar revolution,” Cuban attempts to deter the import of negros franceses – Saint-Domingue slaves who might foment rebellion — and a short-lived alliance between the Spanish army based in the city of Santo Domingo (including soldiers from Cuba) and the Haitian rebels. The second half of the book showcases the conflicts resulting from the rise of coffee plantations in lands occupied by communities of runaway slaves, the 1808 turmoil in Cuba caused by Napoleon’s installation of his brother on the Spanish throne, featuring discussions of independence and slavery abolition, and the 1812 Aponte Rebellion.

Map of Haiti via Digital Public Library of America

Freedom’s Mirror, however, is not just a story about the causal relationship between the Haitian Revolution and Cuba’s transformation, and Ferrer does not confine her investigation to economic or political factors. What interests Ferrer are the “quotidian links – material and symbolic – between the radical antislavery movement that emerged in Saint-Domingue at the same time that slavery was expanding in colonial Cuba” (11). In particular, she tracks the circulation of knowledge, rumor, conversation, religious symbolism, anxieties and hopes that mapped onto infrastructures of commerce, slave-trading, government activity, and military action.

Toussaint L’Ouverture via New York Public Library

In 1801, for example, Toussaint Louverture’s forces occupied Santo Domingo and issued public proclamations. These were carried by ship crews and disseminated in Cuba, as were first-hand accounts of Spanish refugees from that occupation who had fled to Cuba. This, according to Ferrer, is the mechanism by which Cubans came to know of the events of the rebellion and the “spectacular ascent” of Toussaint Louverture (153). Eleven years later, images of the coronation of the Haitian King Christophe appeared in the prison holding suspects from Aponte’s revolutionary movement in Cuba. In the tradition of Lynn Hunt’s treatment of the “invention” of human rights, Ferrer uses her sources—city council minutes, port registers, trading licenses, letters, confessions of revolutionaries on the eve of their executions, and printed images of Haitian leaders—to document that this circulation of information and rumor transformed the interior experiences and decision-making of historical actors and ordinary people in both Cuba and Haiti.

Freedom’s Mirror situates Cuba in a regional history, primarily the interactions between Cuba and Haiti. Ferrer is fundamentally attuned to the circulation of knowledge, symbolism, and ideas. In bringing those into the light, she shows us that economic, political, and military realities never cease to shape, and be shaped by, subjective perceptions and individual actions.

Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

by Jaden Janak

On May 31, 1921, Greenwood, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma crafted by Black business people and professionals, burned to the ground. After a young white girl accused Dick Rowland, a Black elevator attendant, of sexual assault, mobs of white vigilantes attacked this Black community and its citizens for what the white rioters perceived as an injustice against their women. Conservative estimates claim that by the melee’s conclusion some 1,000 homes were destroyed, dozens (if not hundreds) of lives were lost, and a remarkable number of businesses gone. One of the businesses razed in the chaos of the Tulsa Race Massacre was the Tulsa Star—the city’s first Black newspaper, established in Tulsa just seven years earlier. In 1936, E.L. Goodwin, a local Black businessman, bought the rights to the Tulsa Star, renaming it The Oklahoma Eagle.

The Tulsa Star, November 9, 1918 (via Newspaper.com)

Intertwined with the story of the The Oklahoma Eagle is my own story. My family moved to Oklahoma when I was an infant, so that my father could attend law school at the University of Tulsa. After graduating in 1999, my father’s first job was as a law clerk at Goodwin & Goodwin, Attorneys at Law. I grew up listening to the stories of Jim Goodwin, the son of E.L. Goodwin, and playing with his beloved Westie aptly named Justice. In the same building where E.L. Goodwin and his staff worked to publish, The Oklahoma Eagle, — at the time the only Black newspaper in the city of Tulsa — my father and Jim Goodwin toiled away at civil rights cases for indigent clients. These efforts to publish the paper were not without struggle. Four years before my father began working at Goodwin & Goodwin, it looked like the Goodwins were going to lose control of The Eagle.

A framed article discussing the Eagle’s financial struggles that hangs on the wall at The Oklahoma Eagle.(via author)

With determination and the support of local benefactors, The Oklahoma Eagle survived these financial struggles. In remembrance of the hard times and the faith that carried them through, the Goodwins constructed a hanging altar of sorts known as the “Wall of Faith,” which sits outside where my father’s office once was.

“The Wall of Faith” located at The Oklahoma Eagle offices (via author)

Many years later and after my father went into private practice, I returned to The Oklahoma Eagle in 2016, this time as a staff writer and legal intern with my father’s former partner, Jim Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin assigned me to cover local and national criminal justice matters because of my background in community organizing and newspaper writing with Saint Louis University’s student newspaper, The University News. That summer I wrote about topics ranging from the police murder of Ollie Brooks to the Orlando Massacre. However, these articles are not available online. As I discovered during my time at The Eagle, the paper lacked the infrastructure to enable digitization of the paper’s archive and current issues. To begin solving this problem, I worked with then-editor Ray Pearcey to create social media and a proper website for the paper. Still, I worried about the paper’s growing archive and how to preserve it. The Tulsa City-County Library had already microfilmed some of the older copies of The Eagle in the 1980s, but the vast majority of the paper’s near 100-year old archive remained either missing or in grave condition. After some quick research, I realized digitization is an expensive endeavor and certainly not one I could accomplish as a rising junior in college. So, I left The Eagle at the end of that summer and returned to school.

Fast forward another few years to the summer of 2019 and I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Goodwin approached me earlier this year and requested I return to The Eagle one last time to complete his dream of digitizing the paper. I had no previous experience with physical archives, much less with digitizing archives, but I have always enjoyed a challenge. When I arrived at The Eagle offices, I was not sure what to expect as I had never before seen the physical volumes of the paper’s archive. The room where the archives rest do not contain the conditions archives typically do such as climate-control, archival boxes, and an ordering system. Rather, the archive room has clear water damage and the papers lay unboxed with the thin protection of trash bags covering those that are not simply left open to the elements. Mr. Goodwin and his family have fought vigorously to keep the paper alive and in the meantime, some upkeep has fallen by the wayside. After seeing the condition of the archive, I knew we needed to act fast and protect this important resource of Black Oklahoma history.

From left to right: Ray Pearcey, former editor of The Eagle, pictured with Jim Goodwin and Chad Williams. (via author)

Immediately, I scoured the internet and consulted my colleagues about how to proceed. Eventually, I located an existing partnership between the University of North Texas and The Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) to digitize old Oklahoma newspapers. I sent an email to the Director of the OHS’s Newspaper Digitization Program, Chad Williams, proposing we form a partnership. Williams responded enthusiastically and said the OHS had been waiting for The Oklahoma Eagle to approach them. I thought my work had been accomplished just two days into my summer-long stay at the Eagle. This was not the case. I had not anticipated the deeply emotional process necessary for Mr. Goodwin to let go of the paper, his father’s enduring legacy and ultimately, his own. For the remainder of the summer, we debated back and forth about everything, from the expense necessary to digitize the paper ourselves to the changing role of newspapers in society. Indeed, newspapers are a dying form—one more likely to lose than to make money. Mr. Goodwin wanted to find a mechanism for him to sell his archive, produce income to sustain the paper, all while maintaining control of it. Disabusing him of this as a way forward proved to be one of the most difficult tasks of my burgeoning career.

Ultimately, Mr. Goodwin agreed to the OHS’s offer to digitize The Oklahoma Eagle for free while allowing us to maintain copyright privileges. During the process of signing this agreement, we discovered that someone from the paper (this person’s identity is still unknown) had been sending a copy of The Eagle to the OHS for forty years. The OHS, unbeknownst to the paper, had been microfilming issues for all that time. This has made the digitization process much easier than expected. In August, Williams along with a team of researchers gathered the remaining physical volumes of the paper and have begun work to digitize them. They will be returning the physical copies in archival boxes, so that the copies might survive longer. According to the agreement, the digitized version of The Oklahoma Eagle’s archive will be made publicly available on The Gateway To Oklahoma History by 2021, the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As Lead Archivist on the project, I am still working with both The Oklahoma Eagle and the Oklahoma Historical Society to ensure the seamless nature of this partnership.

Final agreement between the OHS and The Oklahoma Eagle (via author)

As the Greenwood community prepares for the centennial anniversary of the Race Massacre, the city of Tulsa is finally reckoning with its dark history of displacement and genocide. In 1997, the city of Tulsa first convened a commission to lead an excavation of suspected mass graves containing the bodies of those killed during the Massacre. For political reasons, that search never happened. Now, a second commission has formed and has been tasked with leading the search. This time, however, the Mayor and the Tulsa Police Department have labeled this work a homicide investigation. Working with a team of archaeologists, historians, local activists, and government officials, the Mass Graves Commission hopes to locate the bodies of those deliberately discarded and forgotten. The history of The Oklahoma Eagle and the history of the Race Massacre are part and parcel of one another. Hopefully, as the 100-year anniversary approaches, the work of the Commission and the work of the OHS can meaningfully pay homage to the lives and intellectual history lost to this tragedy. The Oklahoma Eagle stands as a testament to Greenwood’s rich legacy of endurance as the paper quite literally rose from its ashes.

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Digital Resources – “The Reddest of the Blacks”

By Sean Guillory

Lovett Fort-Whiteman was born in Dallas, Texas in 1889 and died in a Stalinist labor camp sometime after 1938. The son of a former slave, a graduate of Tuskegee University, Fort-Whiteman became one of the most important African American Communist activists and organizers of the 1920s and the only known African American to be a victim of the Stalinist Terror. How did the Dallas native, dubbed “The Reddest of The Blacks,” by Time Magazine in 1925, wind up a victim of Stalinist violence in Soviet Russia? Sean Guillory has made this short video to recount his fascinating and moving story. The video was originally posted on Guillory’s excellent podcast and blog page, “Sean’s Russia Blog” and we re-post it here with his permission.

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