A Short Historical View of America's Racist Political Leadership

[RWalker]

What is America's leaderships' contribution to racial justice. Here is a sample


George Washington said about the contradiction of proclaiming liberty and freedom in the American Revolution and defending the holding of Africans in slavery :

"This may seem a contradiction, but … it is neither a crime nor an absurdity. When we profess, as our fundamental principle, that liberty is the inalienable right of every man, we do not include madmen or idiots; liberty in their hands would become a scourge. Till the mind of the slave has been educated to perceive what are the obligations of a state of freedom, the gift would insure its abuse."

http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/henrique...615/gwslav.htm

Jefferson, that hypocrite wrote that African women were commonly involved in sex with orangutans, a slur that has been recently revived in some "journalism" purporting to report from East Africa. In his work Notes on the State of Virgina, he states that Black people are physically ugly, thus leaving Black men to desire to mate with white women in the same way the orangutan desires the Black woman over female orangutans.

"...the preference of the Oranootan (sic here he means Orangutan) for the black woman over those of his own species."

and in that same work, Jefferson remarks of African people
"In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection. To this must be ascribed their disposition to sleep when abstracted from their diversions, and unemployed in labour. An animal whose body is at rest, and who does not reflect, must be disposed to sleep of course. Comparing them by their faculties of memory, reason, and imagination, it appears to me, that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull tasteless, and anomolous (sic - here he is referring to the word :anomalous. )

The essence of this quote will later be echoed in the theories of Negritude prevalent among people such as Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Houphet Boigny.

Abraham Lincoln, the president who most outspoken against the institution of slavery, was not so because of his belief in the equality of the African and the European. He did so because he was backed by northern industrialists, railroad concerns, bankers, and other interests, such as the Medills and McCormicks of Illinois, that wanted the end to forced labor in the south because they saw that there was the necessity to employ free labor if they were going to compete with industrialized Britain and other parts of Europe.

Lincolm makes his clear his view on the question of the equality between Africans and Europeans in one of the famous Douglas-Lincoln debates:


"I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in anyway the social and political equality of the white and black races - that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race. I say upon this occasion I do not perceive that because the white man is to have the superior position the negro should be denied everything." President Lincoln from The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln edited by Roy P. Basler, Volume III, "Fourth Debate with Stephen A. Douglas at Charleston, Illinois" (September 18, 1858), pp. 145-146.
http://home.att.net/~rjnorton/Lincoln78.html


The "great" Progressive president, Woodrow Wilson was nothing more than a tool of the Ku Klux Klan, a man who was dedicated all his life to the goal that the south will rise again and the vindication of Jefferson Davis and the rest of the Confederacy. Look at this excerpt:

"He told one protesting black delegation that "segregation is not a humiliation but a benefit, and ought to be so regarded by you gentlemen." When the startled journalist William Monroe Trotter objected, Wilson essentially threw him out of the White House. "Your manner offends me," Wilson told him. Blacks all over the country complained about Wilson, but the president was unmoved. "If the colored people made a mistake in voting for me," he told The New York Times in 1914, "they ought to correct it." "

"Wilson appears to have perceived his presidency as an opportunity to correct history, and to restore white Americans to unambiguous supremacy. That is apparently the reason he embraced the poisonous message of D.W. Griffith's 1915 film, The Birth of a Nation; it offered a congenial narrative. "

"Griffith's notorious film portrays the overthrow of debasing black rule in the Reconstructionist South by the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. The film's black characters (most of them white actors in blackface) are either servile or savages; Klan members are represented as both heroic and romantic. The movie was based primarily on The Clansman, a novel written by Thomas Dixon in 1905. Not only was Dixon a personal friend of Wilson's, he had been pushing for a Wilson presidency for years, and Wilson regarded himself as being in Dixon's debt. "

"Wilson discharged that debt by helping Dixon and Griffith publicize their movie. He arranged for preview screenings for his cabinet, for Congress, and for the Supreme Court, and he gave Dixon and Griffith an endorsement they could exploit. "It is like writing history with lightning," Wilson said of this KKK celebration, "and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true." The first half of Wilson's endorsement is still affixed to prints of the film that are screened for film students studying Griffith's advances in editing. "

http://reason.com/links/links121802.shtml

Speaking of that film here are some of the other tributary words of Wilson that were seen by all who watched the film

"The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation....and at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southerm country." (Wilson quote used on the opening sequences / screen of Birth of a Nation)

The Wilson administration was the administration of bloody summer 1919 remember?


Is it any wonder that the subsequent leadership of this country has been no better?

It is said that Warren Harding, Wilson's successor was inducted into the Klan in the White house. FDR allowed Africans in Detroit to be massacred at the hands of European mobs, even after his wife asked him intervene to step in and stop the attacks.

Eisenhower mandated the killing of Lumumba. The Kennedys spied on Dr. King, continued US policies against the Congo and actively worked against the liberation of Africans at home and here in the guise of their liberal concerns. LBJ regularly used the term nigger in his conversation, continued the aggression against the Congo and invaded the Dominican Republic. Nixon and Kissinger did everything they could to maintain the dominance of the apartheid state in southern Africa and Africa generally, and of course are well known for benign neglect in this country. We know the racist duplicity of Clinton, and also, in an earlier and tamer version, Carter; the Reagan and Bush I and II "regimes" need no elaboration, and if any is necessary we can point to the attacks on Grenada, Panama, Haiti and New Orleans.

Our solutions clearly lie outside of the American political system. We need to be looking to Presidents such as Nkrumah, Ture, Castro, as our models.

Black Power - Long Live the Highest Form of Black Power - Pan-Africanism

[Ozellh20]

Interesting read: wasn't surprised at all...