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The past is never dead. It's not even past

Not Even Past

Violence Against Black People in America: A ClioVis Timeline

By Haley Price, William Jones, and Alina Scott

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.


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Black Women in Black Power

by Ashley Farmer

One has to only look at a few headlines to see that many view black women organizers as important figures in combating today’s most pressing problems. Articles urging mainstream America to “support black women” or “trust black women” such as the founders of the Black Lives Matter Movement are popular. Publications, such as Time, laud black women’s political leadership—particularly when they mount a challenge to the status quo such as Stacey Abrams’ victory in the Georgia Democratic Governor primary. At the core of these sentiments is the recognition that black women have developed and sustained a liberal democratic politics that is conscious of and responsive to the interconnected effects of racism, capitalism, and sexism and that their approach can offer insight into current socio-political issues. The media often frames these and other women’s efforts as a manifestation of the current political moment divorced from the longer tradition of black women agitators and organizers to which they belong. Many of the black women making headlines today for their work in advancing civil rights and social justice ideals draw from these earlier traditions, including from the Black Power Movement of the 1960s and 70s.

Portrait of Angela Davis spray-painted on a wall.

Portrait of Angela Davis (Photo: Thierry Ehrmann / Flickr)

Although often thought of as civil rights’ “evil twin,” in the words of historian Peniel Joseph, Black Power was a diverse and diffuse collection of organizations, activists, and ideas. This movement spanned the political spectrum, states and continents, and stretched into both the grassroots and national arenas. Despite these variations, activists across the globe were united in support of the central pillars of Black Power—black community control, black self-determination, and black self-defense—broadly defined. In the latter half of the twentieth century, a bevy of organizations ranging from the Black Panther Party to the All-African People’s Party supported and advanced these principles.

Black women were at the epicenter of this movement. Some joined national organizations and served in both rank-and-file and leadership roles. Others found a way to enact ideals like community control and self-determination through local neighborhood or welfare rights organizations. Whatever avenue they chose, female Black Power activists were not only vital to the infrastructure of the movement, they also advanced gender-specific interpretations of its governing axioms. Complicating common assumptions about their marginalization in the movement, black women activists fought for more inclusive understandings of Black Power, ultimately causing many organizations to adopt a more radical critique of racism, sexism, and capitalism.

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance marching in NYC in 1972 with a banner reading Welfare Rights Organization (Credit: Luis Garza).

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance in NYC in 1972 (Credit: Luis Garza).

Women in the Black Panther Party exemplified this gender-conscious ethos. Huey Newton and Bobby Seale founded the party in October 1966 in Oakland, California in response to rampant police brutality. However, the Black Panther Party quickly became a collective with a more expansive vision that included defending the black community, developing community programs to increase self-sufficiency, and fostering political education—albeit with a masculinist framing. Women joined the group a year after its founding, participating in all aspects of its programming and endorsing its principles. The first female member, Tarika Lewis, participated in political education classes, attended rallies, and was an artist for the party newspaper, The Black Panther. As the party developed, other women including Ericka Huggins and Elaine Brown joined the group. By the 1970s, Huggins edited the newspaper and Brown ran the party. Indeed, women became Panthers in droves, eventually comprising about two-thirds of the rank-and-file across forty chapters. As they organized, they challenged their male counterparts to rethink their commitment to patriarchal ideas of leadership, activism, and revolution, openly debating sexism within the movement and developing artwork and articles that framed black women as the consummate political actors. Their efforts worked. The Black Panther Party, often thought to be an exemplar of Black Power sexism, adopted more egalitarian polices toward women in both name and practice.

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance in NYC marching in 1972 and carrying a banner that reads "Hands off Angela Davis" (Credit: Luis Garza)

Members of the Third World Women’s Alliance in NYC in 1972 (Credit: Luis Garza)

Other women, such as members of the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), chose to engender and re-gender Black Power through what historian Stephen Ward calls, “Black Power feminist” groups. This organization originated as a women’s caucus within the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which, by the late 1960s, advocated for globally-minded, anti-imperialist politics expressed through Black Power principles and positions. As it developed it became a collective of “black and other third world women” fighting “all forms of racist, sexist, and economic exploitation.” Through their newspaper, Triple Jeopardy, members developed an ideological platform and activist agenda that interpreted Black Power principles through this global, gender-specific, and intersectional lens. Articles about anatomy and reproductive rights fostered gender-specific understandings of self-determination; images of black and brown women arming themselves supported a capacious understanding of self-defense. These publications, as well as their collaborations with other Black Power era groups, helped produce more nuanced understandings of Black Power. Their multi-faceted approach to liberation also laid the groundwork for what we now call intersectionality.

Female Black Power organizers’ diverse organizing efforts are visible in activism today. The grassroots networks that progressive candidates like Abrams used to win the primary, as well as her endorsement of universal pre-K and affordable housing, build on the efforts of women such as Huggins and Brown, who dedicated much of their lives to developing capacious forms of community control. More radical organizers, such as the three women founders of the Black Lives Matter movement, carry on TWWA-like traditions of global anti-imperialist solidarity, intersectionality, and black self-determination through self-definition.

My new book, Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era, examines these and other women activists in order to better understand black activism past and present. It centers on black women’s ideas and organizing in order to foreground how they might help us rethink the historical and historic uses of Black Power in addressing all facets of oppression. Understanding the historical activism of black women organizers can reveal new sites of theoretical and organizational possibilities and shine light on the ways that we might move toward different and more equitable worlds today.

Ashley D. Farmer,  Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era

“Online roundtable on Ashley Farmer’s Remaking Black Power,” in Black Perspectives, the blog of the African American Intellectual History Society, April 13, 2018.

For more on black women and Black Power, Prof. Farmer recommends these.

Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland (2016).
A great book for anyone looking to learn more about the gender politics of the Black Panther Party. 

Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, Komozi Woodard, Want to Start a Revolution? Radical  Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (2009).
A
 strong collection of essays that explore black power and black radicalism from its origins to its apex.

Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1988, 2001)
The life story of Assata Shakur, her journey into activism, membership in the Black Panther party, and her arrest and her current exile in Cuba. 

Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power: A Black Women’s Story (1993).
A great autobiography that describes Brown’s journey to becoming a leading Black Power activist and leader of the Black Panther Party 

Nico Slate ed. Black Power Beyond Borders: the Global Dimensions of the Black Power Movement (2012)
A collection of essays that speak to the global scope and reach of U.S-centered ideas of Black Power. 


Featured image photo credit:  Black Panthers at a rally in Oakland, Calif., in 1969, from the documentary “The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.” (Photo: Pirkle Jones and Ruth Marion-Baruch).

Why I Ban the Word “Feminism” from My Classes

by Jacqueline Jones

In each of my graduate seminars, at the beginning of the semester, I caution students not to use certain words I consider problematic; these words can actually hinder our understanding of a complex past.  Commonly used—or rather, overused—in everyday conversation as well as academic discourse, the banned words include “power,” “freedom,” and “race.”  I tell my students that these words are imprecise—they had different meanings depending upon the times and places in which they were used– and that today we tend to invoke them too casually and even thoughtlessly.

Oh yes, and there is another word I ask my students to avoid—“feminism.”  Students often greet this particular injunction with surprise and dismay. Does it mean that their instructor believes that women should stay at home and not venture into the paid labor force?  If so, why is she standing in front of a classroom now?  So I have to be sure to make a case about the pitfalls related to the use of the word.  Even the broadest possible definition is problematic, as we shall see.

Protesters at the 2017 Women’s March (via Wikimedia Commons).

The purpose of the massive march on Washington held on January 21, the day after President Trump’s inauguration, was to protest his election.  It was called the “Women’s March,” and as we all know, sister marches took place all over the country and the world the same day.  A group of women initiated the idea of the protest, and took care of all the logistics; many participants wore pink “pussy hats” to call attention to the President’s demeaning remarks about grabbing women’s genitals captured on the infamous Access Hollywood videotape.  The hand-held signs at the rally covered a whole range of issues, including abortion and reproductive rights, equal pay, sexual harassment, Black Lives Matter, protection for undocumented immigrants, public education, and women’s struggles for fair treatment and equality generally.   Presumably, Trump’s election had prompted an historic level of anger and frustration among women. Many news outlets, participants, and observers suggested that the march represented a remarkable display of re-energized, twenty-first century feminism, with the word itself suggesting a kind of transcendent womanhood bringing together women of various ages, races, classes, and ethnicity.

Protesters at a sister rally in 2017 (via Pixabay).

Well, not exactly.  Although only 6 percent of African American women voted for Trump, 53 percent of white women did.  We can safely assume, then, that many white women not only stayed away from the march, but also objected to it in principle: the pink-pussy-hat contingent did not speak for them.  So we might ask, which groups of women did not march?  Here is a possible, partial list: devout Catholic women who believe that birth control, abortion, and gay marriage are sins against God; former factory workers who were fired from their jobs when their plants were shipped overseas; the wives and daughters and mothers of unemployed coal miners; anti-immigrant activists; women of color who saw the march as dominated by white women; and pro-gun rights supporters. Missing too were probably women who found Mr. Trump’s video sex-talk disgusting but chose not to see this as the defining issue in the 2016 Presidential campaign–just as some liberal women might have disapproved of Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky but did not let that affair diminish their support for him when he was president.  In both these cases, the pro-Trump and pro-Clinton supporters expressed less solidarity with the men’s victims and more support for other elements of the men’s politics.  In other words, these women eschewed any putative “sisterhood” in favor of other political issues.

Suffragists parade down Fifth Avenue, 1917 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Another way of looking at this issue is to challenge the view that feminists had as their greatest priority a woman president.  How many self-identified feminists were eager to see Sarah Palin run for president in 2012?  Again, for many women, their overriding concern is not womanhood per se but a wide range of political beliefs and commitments. As we learned soon after U. S. women got the right to vote in 1919, different groups of women have different politics; in the 1920s, the suffragists were astonished to find that women tended to vote the way their husbands did, according to a matrix of ethnic and class factors.

Delegation of officers of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, 1917 (US National Archives via Flickr).

The example of the Women’s March suggests that, for all the talk today of “intersectionality” (the interconnectedness of certain social signifiers such as class, religion, “race,” and gender) “feminism” promotes a very specific political agenda, one that does not necessarily reflect the priorities and lived experience of a substantial portion of the female population. In essence, the word “feminism” is too vague to have much meaning within a society where women have multiple forms of identity, and gender might or might not be the defining one at any particular time.  Even the broadest possible definition—feminists are people who seek to advance the interests or the equal rights of women—has its limitations.

As an historian, I would suggest several reasons why students should avoid the use of the word “feminism”–unless they encounter the word in a primary text; then they should try to figure out what the user meant by it.

  • The word itself did not appear in common usage until the 1920s. Therefore it would be a mistake to apply it to people before that time, or to people since who themselves have not embraced the label; otherwise we risk imposing a term on historical actors who might or might not have used it to describe themselves.
  • Throughout history, various waves of the so-called “women’s” or “feminist” movement were actually riven by intense conflicts among women. Around the turn of the twentieth century, leading white suffragists went out of their way to denigrate their black counterparts and express contempt for immigrant and working class men and women. The early organizers of the National Organization for Women feared that association with lesbians and militant black women would taint their drive for respectability.  Organizers of the 2017 Women’s march debated whether or not anti-abortion women could or should be included in the protest: could one be a feminist and at the same time oppose reproductive rights for women?

Two Lowell mill workers, ca. 1840 (via Wikimedia Commons).

  • Often in history when we find solidarity among women it is not because these groups of women sought to advocate better working conditions or the right to vote for all women; rather, their reference group consisted of women like themselves. In the 1840s, Lowell textile mill workers walked off the job and went on strike not as “feminists,” but as young white Protestant women from middling households—in other words, as women who had much in common with each other.  Religion, ethnicity, lineage, and “race” have all been significant sources of identity for women; when a particular group of women advocates for itself, it is not necessarily advocating for all other women.
  • Similarly, we are often tempted to label those strong women we find in history as “feminists,” on the assumption that they spoke and acted on behalf of all women. Yet they might have believed they had more in common with their male counterparts than with other groups of women.  Female labor-union organizers probably felt more affinity with their male co-workers than with wealthy women who had no experience with wage work.  In other words, the transcendent sisterhood that feminism presupposes is often a myth, a chimera.
  • The word not only lacks a precise definition, it also carries with it a great deal of baggage. Indeed, some people have a visceral, negative reaction to the sound of it. It is difficult to use a term with such varied and fluid meanings.  And feminism meant something different to women of the 1960s, when they could not open a credit-card account in their own name or aspire to certain “men’s jobs,” when they debated the social division of labor in the paid workplace and in the home, compared to young women today, who at times see feminism through the prism of music lyrics, movies, fashion, and celebrity culture:  Is the talented, fabulously wealthy Taylor Swift a feminist?
  • Finally, a personal note: In the 1960s, I was a college student and caught up in what was then called the “feminist movement” as shaped by Betty Friedan’s book The Feminine Mystique and the newly formed National Organization for Women.  My mother disapproved of my emerging priorities in life; she had gotten married right after World War II, and she believed (rightly, as it turned out) that the movement denigrated her choice to stay home full-time with her children.  I was puzzled and distressed that my mother could not appreciate my choices; but now I am also puzzled and distressed that the movement could not appreciate her choices.  Coming of age during the war, she feared that she would never marry and have a family, and when she finally had that opportunity, she was happy—for the most part—to embrace it, despite the considerable financial sacrifice for the household that her choice entailed.

Women’s March 2017 (Backbone Campaign via Flickr).

Perhaps, with very few exceptions—equal pay for equal work?—there are few issues on which all women everywhere can agree.  My own view is that, we can pursue social justice in ways that advance the interests of large numbers of men as well as women, without having to defend the dubious proposition that “feminism” as constructed today speaks to and for all women.  It doesn’t.  For the historian, that fact means that we have to come up with other, more creative ways of discussing forms of women’s activism and personal self-advancement that took place in the past, and, in altered form, continue today.

Also by Jacqueline Jones on Not Even Past:

The Works of Stephen Hahn.
On the Myth of Race in America.
History in a “Post-Truth” Era.

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