The Red Stories

"Terrorists As Heroes"

      These are stories of America's shame - of simple abuse of privilege to enforce the will of the powerful, whether or not the majority.   In  every instance of  such abuses, both vigilante and legal,  the  end games was the transfer of wealth from victim to perpetrator.  Victims' recourse through settled law  did not exist  as Justice forcefully asserted it was not  blind ......to color.

Click on a book cover below  to browse  reviews or order the book (new or used) on-line

ROOT SHOCK

How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America and What We Can Do About It

by Mindy Thompson Fullilove, M.D.

Editor's comments
This is another must-read for black Roanokers. Professor Fullilove interviewed aged black Roanokers that we all know and respect who experienced first hand  the city's forced  transformation of vibrant, stable and productive black communities into wasteland  in the 1960's  This was all done on the promise of improving Roanoke to the benefit of black  home and business owners.   The reality was just the opposite - the net worth of white and blue collar African-Americans diminished significantly.  The city first withdrew basic services from the desired black neighborhoods, thereby driving  down black property values. Then, using its power of eminent domain, the city then confiscated  targeted black properties at bargain basement prices.  Entire black communities including churches, schools , businesses and homes were destroyed in the city's blattant collusion with white developers and communities.  Black land  and home ownership  diminshed drastically. They became predominantly renters of vacated  white homes.  All the benefits of their land confiscation went to white developers  who colluded white officials to not only transform Roanoke's Gainsborough and Northeast landscapes but to transfer wealth once again from black  to white citizens. Black Roanoke has never recovered from  wounds it suffered from this all too familiar expression of white privilege. The fact that Professor Fullilove's book documents similar destruction of  black communities during the same era in cities such as Washington, DC and Pittsburgh, PA suggests that, like other historical  assault on African-American communities was neither random nor isolated.                --- Thomas R. Dudley

From Booklist
*Starred Review* As a professor of clinical psychiatry and public health at Columbia, Fullilove brings a perhaps unconventional but ideal resume to an understanding of the cultural devastation, or "root shock," that urban renewal has brought upon the African American community. By the author's estimate, some 1,600 black neighborhoods nationwide were demolished by urban renewal in the 1950s and 1960s. In their place were erected interstate highway networks, sports stadiums, office towers, woeful public housing, and vast public-works projects--which wiped out black neighborhoods altogether, split them apart, or isolated them from the rest of their communities. Focusing on specific black neighborhoods in Pittsburgh, Newark, Philadelphia, and Roanoke, Virginia, the author brings together a patchwork of oral histories, aerial photographs, charts, and personal narrative to connect the dots between a pre-war black community that was richly complex and mutually supportive and a twenty-first-century community at violent odds with itself. "How easy it is to hurt each other," one interviewee explains, "because we are not that close anymore. We are not family anymore." Solutions are not easy, of course, but Fullilove puts forth an aesthetic of true "urban renewal" from which urban planners and thinking citizens can draw inspiration. Notwithstanding its shortcomings of East Coast bias and loose organization, Root Shock brings transformative insights to this American dilemma. --- Alan Moores
 

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Roanoke, Virginia, 1882-1912 : Magic City In The New South

by Paul Rand Dotson, Jr.

Editor's comments
 While reading "A Murder In Virginia" in 2002, I learned about the 1893 lynching in Roanoke of Thomas Smith. I searched remotely via the internet for any information about that lynching without success. Oddly, my search for reading material on that lynching inf Roanoke's library system yielded  nothing and for many months, my search for was stalled.  About two years later, I stumbled on a doctoral dissertation by Paul R. Dotson, a graduate  student  at Louisiana State University, that proved to be a bonanza of information on Roanoke's early history. The Smith lynching was described

in horrific detail.  That Roanoke's  government , libraries and surviving businesses are embarrassed  by this shameful  episode in the city's past is evidenced by the fact that most senior citizens who lived threre their entire lives have no knowlege.  Until the publication of Dotson's thesis and subsequent publication of his book, records of that despicable event were simply not accessible.  Since Dotson's book is both expensive and extensive -  covering 30 years of the city's early history , I suggest downloading a free copy of his graduate thesis.  

Free Download of Paul Dotson's Dissertation

Book Review

This is a top notch piece of history; obviously exhaustively researched and painstakingly put together. I live in Roanoke (my office is on the former, notorious Railroad Avenue), so it held a great deal of interest for me, but the book is worth reading for anyone interested in the postwar "New South." Roanoke has nothing to do with "Old Virginia," instead it is a rust-belt town based on the railroad, real estate speculation, and manufacturing. Many other Southern cities, Dotson points out, have similar histories-- Birmingham is the one most often mentioned. Dotson very adeptly demonstrates that Roanoke's image of itself as purely a "railroad town" is false; it was a center for printing, manufacturing, and even beer brewing.

Dotson also does a terrific job with the social movements of the late Victorian/ Edwardian era in the US. Roanoke's first battles were over paving the streets, closing the open sewers and running the cattle out of town. Later, the prohibition/temperance movements, the systematic disenfranchisement of blacks and poor whites (accomplished in Virginia by the state constitution of 1900), are covered. Most importantly, Roanoke had severe issues with racial tension, including riots and lynchings, which were often abetted and fanned by the local newspapers.   

One other thing-- Dotson really does a hell of a job putting the idea of "economic boosterism by the city fathers" into historical context. Today there is a fair bit of controversy when local governments subsidize new businesses, either with tax breaks or handouts or both. Dotson conclusively proves that this is nothing new; Roanoke was founded on a handout ($10,000 plus all the real estate the N&W and its parent firm could eat), and most of its industries were brought in with "tax free for 15 years" deals. Anyone who bleats about the "good old days" when business came in without incentives will be sorely disapointed.

This is an excellent book and I highly recommend it.

--- Mark  K. Cathey, Roanoke,, Virginia

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A Murder in Virginia

 by Suzanne Lebsock

Editor's Comments

This book is a fascinating read for many personal reasons. My grandmother, Ethel Sears Dudley was born near Farmville in 1895; the book details scenes of concerned black farmers in the Farmville area surrounding the courthouse where three black women charged with murdering a wealthy white  woman were being held. Their aim was to protect the three women from the anticipated angry white mob determined to lynch them.  The Governor of Virginia was equally determined to protect the women from the same  "enraged white justice"  that occurred in Roanoke with the 1893 lynching of black Roanoker Thomas Smith. That same year my grandfather, Harvey G. Dudley Sr. was born  on Campbell Avenue, not far from   jail where seven marauding whites were killed by police as they assaulted the jail to capture Smith. This book had a chilling  effect on me as it  vividly described the pressures and threats of Virginia's repressive white super-culture on its black citizens - a world that my own grandparents were born into and had to cope with all their lives. Although long at 407 pages, I consider this a must read for black Virginians.              --- Thomas R. Dudley

Book Review

Using court documents, newspaper accounts, and letters, Bancroft Prize-winning historian Lebsock brings to life the 1895 murder trial of a black man and three black women accused of murdering a white woman in Virginia. Lebsock presents in incredible detail the gruesome murder of Lucy Pollard and the robbery of her wealthy and stingy husband, the trial, and the crusade to free the women who were widely believed to be innocent. In its haste to blame the crime on blacks and exact prompt "justice" via lynching, the town runs afoul of a governor determined to rid the state of the savagery of lynching and its threat to the rule of law. Lebsock is particularly adept at portraying the individuals and interests involved: the accused murderers, the unsympathetic widower, the crusaders, the vested interests of those who supported the lynchers, and the fierce newspaper rivalries fueled by the trial. She also explores the social and racial undercurrents in the small town, which signified the changed relationship between blacks and whites in the post-Civil War era.                - Vanessa Bush

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One Dies, Get Another

by Matthew J. Mancini

Editor's Comments

In a male dominated culture, a repressive white super-culture cleverly and callously invented yet another entirely  legal , but totally unconscionable, way to transfer wealth from its oppressed blacks to its exploitive whites.  In a cruel collusion between private sector busineses, both large and small, and  southern governments. both state and local,  adopted the practice of arresting unsuspecting black men as ''vagrants'' for the sole purpose of financial gain all participating white parties. Local jurisdictions would fine the arrested men sufficient amounts to ensure they could not pay, dictating  jail time instead.  Once jailed, they would then be leased to white businesses willing to pay a a daly fee to the state for their slave labor.  Private businesses,  such as U. S. Steel  in Alabama , were allowed to use their 'leased convicts' as they saw fit, without government oversight or concern for their treatment.  Accordingly, businesses routinely pushed their black slave laborers beyond human limits, thus giving rise to the books title. Those that  became malnourished,  injured, or gravely ill could be allowed  to die.  The firm need only inform the supplying local jurisdiction that one leased convict had died, and they required a replacement.  If there was no available candidate in the jail, the official would simply go out on the street to locate another black 'vagrant' abd repeat the process.  This practice permeated virtually all southern states from its  inception  shortly after the Civil War.   At it's peak, it was the primary source of income for most southern states.  The practice curtailed in all states between 1910 and 1914.  As a result, thousands of black men died while enslaved, never  returning to prior roles as providers to poor. destitute black families.

Book Review

In his seminal study of convict leasing in the post-Civil War South, Matthew J. Mancini chronicles an institution of unrelieved brutality. Devastated by war, bewildered by peace, and unprepared to confron the problems of prison management, Southern states sought to alleviate the need for cheap labor, a perceived rise in criminal behavior, and the bankruptcy of their state treasuries. Mancini describes the leasing of convicts to corporations and individuals as a policy that, in addition to reducing prison populations and generating revenues, offered a means of racial subordination and labor discipline. He identifies communlities that, despite the seemingly uneven enforcement of convict leasing across state lines, bound the South together in reliance on one of the harshest, most exploitative labor systems in American history.

Examining the practice from both regionwide and state-by-state perspectives, Mancini explores convict leasing in Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia. He describes prisoners' daily existence, profiles the individuals who leased the convicts, and reveals both the inhumanity of the leasing laws and the centrality of race relations in the establishment and perpetuation of convict leasing. He takes issue with the widespread notion that convict leasing was an aberration in a generally progressive history of criminal justice and offers a convincing explanation for the institution's dramatic demise.   

                               - University of South Carolina Press

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Buried In The Bitter Waters

by Eliot Jaspin

Editor's Comments
The first several chapters of this book were horrific. Despite my avid love of American history, I had not anticipated learning of the number and degree of successful acts of white destruction of African-American neighborhoods and homes that proliferated across a country that continues to promote itself as the world's premier  democratic and freedom-loving homeland. The ugly racial past of  town after town in state after state is revealed by Jaspin's thorough research of newspaper and municipal archives.

Questions must be asked.  What is the difference between  white Germans confiscating Jewish assets and killing Jews and white Americans freely and openly confiscating black assets and klilling blacks in instance after instance?  How many black men lost their homes  and/or their families and/or  their own lives  to marauding whites? How many survivors of such atrocities were subsequently sent required to fight and die in Europe defending white allies  from their white enemies?        --- Thomas R. Dudley

Book Description

"Leave now, or die!"
From the heart of the Midwest to the Deep South, from the mountains of North Carolina to the Texas frontier, words like these have echoed through more than a century of American history. The call heralded not a tornado or a hurricane, but a very unnatural disaster--a manmade wave of racial cleansing that purged black populations from counties across the nation.

We have long known about horrific episodes of lynching in the South, but the story of widespread racial cleansing above and below the Mason-Dixon line--has remained almost entirely unknown. Time after time, in the period between Reconstruction and the 1920s, whites banded together to drive out the blacks in their midst. They burned and killed indiscriminately and entire counties clear of blacks to make them racially "pure." The expulsions were swift-in many cases, it took no more than twenty-four hours to eliminate an entire African-American population. Shockingly, these areas remain virtually all-white to this day.

Based on nearly a decade of painstaking research in archives and census records, Buried in the Bitter Waters provides irrefutable evidence that racial cleansing occurred again and again on American soil, and fundamentally reshaped the geography of race. In this groundbreaking book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Elliot Jaspin has rewritten American history as we know it.

Book Review

Regrettably, there is a great deal in our country's history of which we are now ashamed. Surely the years between 1874 and the 1920s in America saw some of the most deplorable events. During that period of time racial cleansing took place over a wide geographical area. This was cruel, senseless and more to our disgrace these actions were condoned at the time and glossed over today.

Author Jaspin is twice a Pulitzer Prize winner, and is a reporter for Cox Newspapers. Years of prodigious research were poured into his book which presents clear evidence of what took place. Yet we hear of what was an apparent whitewash by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution: "Editors ignored clear conflicts of interest while editing the racial cleansing series. Procedures designed to protect the integrity of the reporting process were dispensed with. And finally the head of the company's newspaper division overrode the judgment of editors in Austin and Washington and ordered that a different term be substituted for 'racial cleansings.' It is a cautionary tale about the lingering shame that trumps honest discussion of the full history of America's racial cleansings."

How sad that racial cleansing did occur - sadder yet that some will not acknowledge our misdeeds.

The apt title for Jaspin's book comes from the pen of Zora Neale Hurston: "Ah done died in grief and been buried in de bitter waters, and Ah done rose agin from de dead lak Lazarus. " For those who heard "Leave now, or die!" their lives were overturned in mere hours as they fled carrying what possessions they could. Those were the lucky ones - countless others were killed, their homes burned as blacks were driven from entire counties. Thus, even today some of these areas are still "lily-white."

According to the courts blacks were not considered citizens. Thus, it was quite literally leave or die. Jaspin bases his information on countless interviews, census records, and archives. It is a tragic story but a true one.

Actor Don Leslie offers an accomplished reading of Buried in the Bitter Waters, clearly stating facts and movingly relating the words of those interviewed.

Highly recommended.

--- Gail Cooke
 

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Fort Pillow:  A Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory

by John Cimprich

Editor's Comments

While I have not read this book, I know well the history and details of the Fort Pillow massacre.  In western Tennesee during the troops under Confederate Civil War  hero, General Nathan Bedford Forest reportedly massacred  hundreds of surrendered United States Colored Troops. Multiple ironies flow from the Union military's inquest into the charges that outraged the North.  Indignant that ex-slaves were joining forming USCT  infantry units in  ever increasing numbers, Forrest publicly announced that black Union soldiers would never be taken prisoner by his men. Subsequently , when the opportunity presented itself when Bedford's divisions captured Fort Pillow, defended by hundreds of USCT troops and white troops, a slaughter ensued. Virtually all of the USCT troops were killed, many long after they had surrendered, according to white troops who survived the slaughter.    Worth noting was the fact that, after the Civil War, 

Forrest was instrumental in forming the Ku Klux Klan and becoming its leader. 

                                                                                                                                    --- Thomas R. Dudley

Book Description
At the now-peaceful spot of Tennessee’s Fort Pillow State Historic Area, a horrific incident in the nation’s bloodiest war occurred on April 12, 1864. Just as a high bluff in the park offers visitors a panoramic view of the Mississippi River, John Cimprich’s absorbing book affords readers a new vantage on the American Civil War as viewed through the lens of the Confederate massacre of unionist and black Federal soldiers at Fort Pillow.

Cimprich covers the entire history of Fort Pillow, including its construction by Confederates, its capture and occupation by Federals, the massacre, and ongoing debates surrounding that affair. He sets the scene for the carnage by describing the social conflicts in Federally occupied areas between secessionists and unionists as well as between blacks and whites. In a careful reconstruction of the assault itself, Cimprich balances vivid firsthand reports with a judicious narrative and analysis of events. He shows how Major General Nathan B. Forrest attacked the garrison with a force outnumbering the Federals roughly 1500 to 600 and a breakdown of Confederate discipline resulted. The 65 percent death toll for black Unionists was approximately twice that for white Unionists, and Cimprich concludes that racism was at the heart of the Fort Pillow massacre. Fort Pillow, a Civil War Massacre, and Public Memory serves as a case study for several major themes of the Civil War: the great impact of military experience on campaigns, the hardships of military life, and the trend toward a more ruthless conduct of the war. The first book to treat the fort’s history in full, it provides a valuable perspective on the massacre and, through it, on the war and the world in which it occurred.

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Reconstructing The Dreamland

The Tulsa Riot of 1921: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation

by Alfred L.  Brophy

Editor's Comments

While I have not read Brophy's work, I am thoroughly familiar with other accounts of the Tulsa riot if 1921 - a tragic black nightmare perpetrated with callous indifference  by white officials and citizens.  The end result was an estimated 150-300  black men, women and children murdered, many defending or hiding in their homes.   Thirty square blocks of   Greenwood, an upsale black business / reside comnunity was destroyed.  The atrocities were committed against black citizens  entirely innocent of any actions other than self-defense of their businesses and homes from marauding, crazed white mobs typical of Oklahoma's informal white justice system. Encouraged by local newspapers, local officials and the National Guard disarmed and arrested blacks  thereby  leaving black homes populated with terrified  indigents, women and  children at the complete mercy  of unrestrained white "terrorists'" who they themselves had arrmed.  The outcomes were equally immediate,  shocking and unjust.  Oklahoma's formal white justice system proved to be as efficient as its vigilante counterpart by placing the guilt on black victims,  ensuring that no whites were held accountable and that black financial losses would never be recovered.        --- Thomas R. Dudley                                     

Book Review

In the spring of 1921, black Oklahomans seeking economic and political equality collided with a white society bent on keeping them down. The result was a devastating attack on the African American quarter of Tulsa called Greenwood, in which hundreds of buildings were destroyed and unknown numbers of people were killed. Legal scholar Alfred Brophy pieces together some of the puzzles surrounding this event, which many Oklahoma officials did their best to hide from history. Indeed, as he remarks, "Tulsa has denied the tragedy for so long that it is easy to forget it ever happened." Brophy examines the role of the police and National Guard in assisting the white attackers, that of the courts in exonerating them and instead attaching blame to the victims, and that of the media in whipping up ethnic hostility. He also asks what can be done, so many years after the fact, to redress past wrongs and "the complete breakdown of the rule of law," and he concludes that reparations are in order. Students of modern American history and of civil rights law will find much to ponder in Brophy's measured account of this shameful episode.                                                          --Gregory McNamee, Amazon.com

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The Slaughter: An American Atrocity

by Carroll Chase

Editor's Comments
 

Book Description
The book that break a news story... what is arguably the worst single racial atrocity in American history

From the Publisher
The American people have a right to hear this story. On August 27, 1998, as a direct result of this book's publication, a member of Congress, the Honorable Bennie G. Thompson, called for a full investigation of the atrocities outlined in The Slaughter.

From the Inside Flap
Here, after more than fifty years of secrecy, the terrible truth is revealed. It was the uncertain midpoint of World War II. The United States was embroiled in an all-out fight abroad for its very survival. But back on American soil - at an Army base in southwestern Mississippi - the unthinkable occurred. They were U. S. soldiers. They were defenseless. They were black.

What the Army tried so desperately to hide, Carroll Case has managed to uncover through thirteen years of intensive research, chance encounters, recently declassified government documents, death threats, hard work and determination. While president of a bank in south Mississippi, he met the first of many eyewitnesses to the atrocity. What he heard launched him on a search for the truth and a mission to tell it.

It is not a story the world wants to hear. But it is a story that must be told. Finally, the truth is exposed, in all its horror.

Part I chronicles Case's efforts to uncover the incident and explains in detail what actually occurred. The declassified government documents themselves are included.

Part II is The Evangeline File, a fact-based novel set in present-day south Mississippi. As Case poignantly writes, It is such a terrible, ugly tragedy, and there is an innate human hesitance to admit what actually happened. By putting it in a vehicle of fiction, it somehow makes it easier to face the truth.

The Evangeline File effectively communicates the essential elements of the historical incident while creating compelling characters - Clay Brady, the reporter who uncovers the story; Parker, his investigative partner; and Khaki, the woman Clay cannot resist, but should. It is riveting and suspenseful, as Clay unravels the secret and discovers it reaches to the highest levels of the government. While unearthing what is perhaps the worst racial crime in the country's history, he must battle the racism which, to this day, still poisons American society.

From the Back Cover
The shocking expose of a racial crime of unprecedented proportions in American history.

The victims: over one thousand black men.

The perpetrator: the United States Army.

Here in graphic detail is the true story, finally revealed after more than fifty years of government cover-up.

I beg of you to please, from my heart, please do something for the fellows and myself who are among the unfortunate to be in this State of blood -- Negro blood -- that is constantly flowing in the streets. Corporal Anthony J. Smirely, Jr. Co. H, 364th Infantry Camp Van Dorn, Mississippi May 31st, 1943.