Juneteenth

Most of you know that Juneteenth is our newest national holiday, added by President Biden in 2021 to commemorate Major General Gordon Granger’s issuance of Special Orders 3 after he arrived in Galveston, Texas in June 1865, two months after Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox. By the way, all slaves were not freed…

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White Supremacy

Slavery, racism, and genocide, America’s horrors, are seldom discussed in the “manifest destiny,” of our “shining beacon on a hill.” It is difficult, nearly impossible, to separate the phenomenon of slavery from racism and white supremacy since both of the latter were used to justify permanent enslavement of African Americans. Nor is this a sectional…

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Why does Black Lives Matter Keep Demonstrating???

In its June 2020 issue, Time magazine observed: “the slightest and smallest level of alleged misconduct or suspicious behavior is suitable to justify the police killer’s unreasonable fear.” Often, the killing of unarmed blacks is justified by describing past misconduct. Many believe that victims of summary execution somehow deserve their fate. Policing is a dangerous…

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Black Confederates Revisited

Continuing to research and rewrite my forthcoming book, African Americans in American History, I found a lot more material on the topic of black Confederate soldiers. So much, in fact,  that I made the topic a separate chapter instead of an add-on to US Colored Troops. The Confederates clearly recognized the efficacy of the 200,000…

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The Buffalo Soldiers

Six black regular army regiments were authorized by an act of Congress in 1867, two cavalry, the 9th and 10th, and four infantry regiments, the 38th through 41st. About half of the regiments’ strength were veterans of the US Colored Troops and provided most of the regiments’ non-commissioned officers. Two years later, budget cutbacks reduced…

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White Supremacy and Racism

Sadly, white supremacy and racism are much in the news these days. Our president recognized “good people” among the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and similar groups in Charlottesville in August 2017, encouraging them.   The greatest paradox of America has been the existence of castes of people excluded from the Declaration of Independence’s central premise…

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Kirkus Review of Collective Amnesia: American Apartheid

COLLECTIVE AMNESIA: AMERICAN APARTHEID African Americans’ 400 Years in North America, 1619-2019 Eugene DeFriest Betit Xlibris (502 pp.); February 14, 2019 BOOK REVIEW An accomplished American historian explores the roots and effects of the mistreatment of African Americans in the United States. Much of the history in Bétit’s (War’s Cost, 2016, etc.) carefully researched and…

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Cause of the Civil War

According to official Confederate mythology, states’ rights, not slavery, was the issue that caused the brutal war that went on so long, as if either issue would have meant much to most of the illiterate Southern yeoman farmers who constituted the bulk of Southern soldiery. In fact, there were a number of counties that refused…

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Black Heroism; Delayed Recognition

The 93rd Division’s 369th Regiment was the first American unit to see combat, deployed to the front in mid-April 1918 and assigned a four-and-a half-mile sector by the French. At the time, the regiment comprised less than one percent of American troops in Europe, yet it held twenty percent of the territory defended by American…

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