Ida B. Wells-Barnett, in A Red Record (1895), about the bloody murders of Black people at the hands of white people, lists three “excuses” white people gave for the wholesale murder of Black people by whites.

The excuses are:

…the necessity of the white man to repress and stamp out alleged “race riots.”

In a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people,” the Negro’s vote became an important factor in all matters of state and national politics.  But this did not last long [1870-1877].  The southern white man would not consider that the Negro had any right which a white man was bound to respect, and the idea of a republican form of government in the southern states grew into general contempt.  It was maintained that “This is a white man’s government,” and regardless of numbers the white man should rule.  “No Negro domination” became the new legend on the sanguinary banner of the sunny South, and under it rode the Ku Klux Klan, the Regulators, and the lawless mobs, which for any cause chose to murder one man or a dozen as suited their purpose best.

Negroes had to be killed to avenge their assaults upon [white] women.

Most crimes, including rape, are intra-racial.  Nearly all of the miscegenation that happened in America was the rape of Black women by white men.  “The Rape of the Negro Girl” by Christiaen van Couwenbergh captures the unadulterated lust in the eyes of three white men as they assault (rape)  a Black female.  This painting is not based on a fantasy, but on the evidence, the progeny of miscegenation (the rape of Black women by white men).

As Wells-Barnett outlines in A Red Record, white people came up with one excuse or another to rationalize their violence against Black people.  The “rape excuse” is the most enduring one, till this very day. Wells-Barnett points out that during the Civil War, when white men went off to war, there are no documented cases of Black men raping their “unprotected” white women.

Nonetheless, because we are in a political season that some people believe will be the test of the resiliency of American democracy, it is worth revisiting Excuse Number 2, how when Black men in America first got the vote in 1870 with the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, political violence began and was unabated for nearly 100 years.  (Think of the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968.)  The political violence continued with the January 6^th Insurrection, and Trump and his coconspirators, including Rudy Giuliani, the man once erroneously dubbed “America’s Mayor,” targeted two Black women election workers in Georgia in what they (thieves) framed as “Stop the Steal.”

For those who think voting does not matter, then read A Red Record.  Wells-Barnett continues:

It was a long, gory campaign; the blood chills and the heart almost loses faith in Christianity when one thinks of Yazoo, Hamburg, Edgefield, Copiah, and the countless massacres of defenseless Negroes, whose only crime was the attempt to exercise their right to vote.

But it was a bootless strife for colored people.  The government which had made the Negro a citizen found itself unable [unwilling] to protect him.  It gave him the right to vote, but denied him the protection which should have maintained that right.  Scourged from his home; hunted through the swamps; hung by midnight raiders, and openly murdered in the light of day, the Negro clung to his right of franchise with a heroism which would have wrung admiration from the hearts of savages.  He believed that in that small white ballot there was a subtle something which stood for manhood as well as citizenship, and thousands of brave black men went to their graves, exemplifying the one by dying for the other.

The white man’s victory soon became complete by fraud, violence, intimidation, and murder.  The franchise vouchsafed to the Negro grew to be a “barren ideality, “and regardless of numbers, the colored people found themselves voiceless in the councils of those whose duty it was to rule.

Voting mattered in 1895 and matters even more in 2024, where the presumptive Republican candidate is under indictment in many states, a Republican candidate that proudly muses out loud that he’s been indicted more times than the Roarin’ 20s gangster, Al Capone, and says that a fictional serial killer, Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, is a “great” man.

I wish I were making this stuff of!  This is not American Fiction.  This s the real deal, where history is written in blood, and thus a Red Record.

In my next blog I will continue this theme, and the writing of poetry based on the Equal Justice Initiative’s “A History of Racial Injustice.