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Photo by Kacey Montgomery.
At the demonstration against Avelo Airlines rendition flights on Monday May 12, and at other similar events, I have often heard the question “who are these people” voiced about those who wear masks and no name badges, abduct people off streets, shackle them like animals, and march them onto a plane for writing an op ed or having a tattoo. Who are these people who wrest screaming babies from their mother’s arms? Who are these people who send a child on cancer treatment out of the country without medication?
We know who they are. They are the same people from the 1400-1700s who dunked women with knowledge and widows with property into water and if they died, they were innocent and if they lived, they were guilty and burned alive. They are the same people who ran the Jews out of Spain in the 1400s and murdered 6 million of them in industrial style 500 years later in Nazi Germany. They are the same people who from the 1600’s to today bought and sold Black bodies, lynched thousands of innocent people, burned Black people alive, brought their children and wives to the site to watch with a picnic lunch, cut off fingers and toes to sell as mementoes, took photos and turned them into postcards to send around the country, screamed and threatened death to a 6-year-old girl on her way to school, and surrounded and berated a 14-year-old girl school books in hand on her way to class.
They are the same people who kneel on a person’s neck for 9 minutes until he is dead, who drive their cars into protesters, who march with tiki torches claiming they will not be replaced, who chase a jogger down in their trucks and murder him, who shot a 12-year-old because he had a BB gun, who murder a woman in her bed and a man in his living room for no reason but the color of their skin. It’s those people. They have always been with us. They just haven’t always directed their behavior at us. So we pretended we didn’t know.
Monday at the demonstration someone said they had never seen such horrible behavior before. Others around acquiesced. I looked at a Black man lugging a camera and said they have been killing your people for centuries. He nodded. Surely, we know this. There is nothing new here.
It’s George Wallace barring the door to the university, it’s Lester Maddox with an axe handle to keep Blacks from voting, it’s Willam Rehnquist here in AZ who planned and directed a poll watching program to keep Hispanics and Blacks from voting. Unfortunately, like the poor, these people have always been with us.
Thirty thousand Ku Klux Klan members marched in Washington, DC on August 8, 1925 – 100 years ago. The Scopes trial about banning books and teaching evolution in schools was in July 1925. The current administration has supercharged this group and told them their bigotry and violence are acceptable – and here we are again.
They are the same people who bombed Black communities in the U.S. – not once but twice. On May 12, 1985 the Philadelphia Police Department bombed a residential building in an attempt to force out members of the Black activist organization MOVE, for whom police had warrants for charges ranging from parole violation to illegal possession of firearms and making terroristic threats. The bombing and resulting fire killed 11 people, including five children, and destroyed 61 homes.
Mike Africa Jr. was 6-years old then, but he remembers it. The group eschewed modern ways in a back-to-the-land movement and engaged in non-violent protests at pet stores and zoos among other places. The mayor, then Frank Rizzo, declared them a “terrorist group” justifying violent acts against them by law enforcement. Sound familiar?
Violent assaults by the police followed and the group fought back. Wilson Goode, the first Black mayor, oversaw the actual bombing two years later on Mother’s Day. First, they towed away the cars, then they shut off the electricity, then they ordered MOVE out, then the guns started – police fired over 10,000 rounds. Twenty-four hours later, the police dropped a bomb from a helicopter onto the roof. The fire started spreading and people fled into the street only to be shot.
Animal and human bones were lumped together and at first the city claimed they were cremated but later said oh no, they still had them and claimed to have returned them in 2021 until they found the remains of two missing children. Thirty-five years after the bombing, the homes were rebuilt.
In 1990, the city paid $2.5 million in wrongful-death settlements to the families of the children. In 1991, Birdie Africa received a settlement of $840,000 and lifetime annuity. He died in 2013. In 1996, Ramona Africa received $1.5 million from a federal judge. But the people were still dead. The movement was destroyed as intended.
That wasn’t the first time the government bombed a Black community. They also bombed “Black Wall Street” the Greenwood district of Tulsa, OK in 1921. The attacking white mobs were deputized and armed by the city. Regular deputies led them. Firebombs were dropped from small privately owned planes. Marshal law was declared to end the attack.
Between 75 and 300 Black Americans were killed, hundreds more were injured, and the homes of 5,000 were destroyed. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals, and as many as 6,000 black residents of Tulsa were interned in large facilities, many of them for several days.
About 10,000 black people were left homeless, and the cost of the property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $39.66 million in 2024). The city, real estate, and insurance companies refused to pay claims. The victims never received compensation, and the case of the oldest living victim was just dismissed by a federal court.
Residents who stayed in the city, regardless of race, largely kept silent about the terror, violence, and resulting losses for decades. The massacre was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories for years. People who went to grade and high school in Tulsa had never heard of it. This is what the current administration wants to do to our history today.
So when you say in astonishment, who are these people, these are those people. They never left us. This is why it is important to know our history. We can’t know where we are going if we don’t know where we came from. This legacy of racism, slavery, colonialism, genocide, and patriarchy is where we came from. Unfortunately, we haven’t gotten very far.
So what do we do? Double down on being kind. Double down on ending racism and sexism. Double down on creating the country we want, not the one we have. That means speak up and act. Courage is contagious. I learned my lesson early. In May at the end of grade school, I filled out my enrollment form for high school and signed up for shop. When I got there in August, they had put me in home economics, which was more like finishing school for a proper wife. I protested but without my parents’ support, I got nowhere.
Early on the teacher asked how many girls washed their faces with a washcloth. I did not. We did not have money for washcloths. I used my hands as I still do today. But everyone else in the class raised their hand. I was astonished that I was the only one. Then the teacher asked who used their hands. I said nothing. But then, she said we should not use a washcloth but use our hands because bacteria gathers on a washcloth. I mentally kicked myself then for not speaking up – and never did it again – often to my detriment.
In my 30s, I was a newbie lawyer at a seminar on something human rights. I was sitting in the back of the room with a large crowd and lots of Native and African Americans. One of the speakers said something racist. I couldn’t believe it being at a seminar on human rights. I looked around for someone to say something. I thought, why aren’t one of the Native or African Americans speaking up? Then I thought, why aren’t YOU speaking up? So I did.
I raised my hand and when called on stood up and said that what the speaker had said was racist and I wanted an apology. I noticed that every Native and African American put their heads down as if it wasn’t happening. The speaker was stunned of course and said he didn’t mean it to be racist. I said, I’m sure that was true, but nevertheless, it was racist, and he needed to apologize. He started getting very agitated and said IF I offended anyone, I’m sorry. I responded, no that is not good enough. You DID offend someone – you offended me and I’m someone. Just say I’m sorry. By then smoke was coming out his ears. But he said, I’m sorry and I sat down.
No one spoke to me the rest of the day. At lunch and breaks, people detoured around me so as not to come near. One tall white guy walked up to me and said – good job. It was Bob McWhirter. At the end of the day, as we were all crowding out of the room, one Native American man came up beside me and said, “thank you” and was gone.
The same thing happened years later when I was in my 50s and at a conference on prostitution in an eastern European country. I had flown there from Russia and since many of the participants spoke either Russian or English or both, I could communicate and had spoken with many women from various countries. I was appalled at the speakers and when one got up and spoke about a “rating system” featuring prostituted women online and how this was consumer choice for buyers to check the quality of the product I lost it.
I stood up and went into a harangue about how women were not products in commerce, and prostitution was not victimless, and men were not buyers but abusers etc. I was shunned for the rest of the conference, and no one spoke one word to me again.
But we must live our values. If we create the world we want, then the dystopian world the administration wants has no room to grow. Don’t retreat, expand. One sure thing you will gain from it is the love and respect of the one person you have to sleep with every night for the rest of your life – you.
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