It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, May 30, 2020
Racial inequality in Minneapolis is among the worst in the nation
The typical black family in Minneapolis earns less than half as much as the typical white family in any given year. And homeownership among black people is one-third the rate of white families
As a result, many black families have been effectively locked out of the prosperity that the city’s overwhelmingly white population enjoys.
The median black family income in Minneapolis was $36,000 in 2018, according to Census Bureau data. Though that figure compares favorably with black families in many other U.S. metro areas, it is a far cry from the nearly $83,000 a typical white family in the city would earn. The $47,000 difference is one of the largest such gaps in the nation.
In percentage terms, the typical black household earns only 44 percent as much as the typical white one. Of the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas, only Milwaukee in neighboring Wisconsin has a larger gap between black and white earnings.
Because families must make money to save money, Minneapolis’s black-white income gap is mirrored in wealth data — in this case homeownership rates because homes are the primary component of middle class wealth.
Roughly one-quarter of black families in Minneapolis own their home, which is one of the lowest black homeownership rates in the United States. The city’s white families, by contrast, have one of the nation’s highest rates at 76 percent. The resultant gap works out to more than 50 percentage points. Only Madison, Wis., and Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Pa., have larger gulfs.
The roots of these disparities run deep: In the first half of the 20th century, for instance, real estate transactions in many Minneapolis neighborhoods were bound by provisions that limited ownership to white families. “The said premises shall not at any time be sold, conveyed, leased, or sublet, or occupied by any person or persons who are not full bloods of the so-called Caucasian or White race,” as one common provision put it.
Slide 1 of 50: Protestors rally against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, in Detroit , Michigan, U.S., May 30, 2020. REUTERS/Emily Elconin
In Minneapolis, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, died after he was pinned down by police officer Derek Chauvin. The video of the handcuffed man dying while Chauvin knelt on his neck sparked a fresh furor in the US over police treatment of African Americans. The video shared online showed Floyd pleading that he couldn't breathe. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey fired four police officers following the death in custody of George Floyd. Chauvin has been charged with third-degree murder and manslaughter. Demonstrations are being held across the US demanding justice for Floyd.
(Pictured) Protesters rally against the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd, in Detroit, Michigan, on May 30.Slideshow by photo services
Before these covenants, “Minneapolis was not particularly segregated,” according to the authors of the University of Minnesota’s Mapping Prejudice project. But “as racially-restrictive deeds spread, African Americans were pushed into a few small areas of the city. And even as the number of black residents continued to climb, ever-larger swaths of the city became entirely white.”
The city’s black communities were suppressed in other ways, too. In the 1950s and 1960s, city planners devastated the historically black Rondo neighborhood by running Interstate 94 down its main thoroughfare. “One in every eight African Americans in St. Paul lost a home to I-94,” according to the Minnesota Historical Society, and “many businesses never reopened.”
The devastating disparities in the Twin Cities are well-known and much discussed, but addressing them has proved challenging.
“One only has to look at the faces of the African Americans living in impoverished neighborhoods, attending failed schools, over represented in a broken criminal justice system, and suffering from covert and overt employment discrimination on a daily basis to see that not everyone is enjoying the prosperity of Minnesota,” as the state NAACP presciently warned in a report in December. “If the growing disparities, in education, economics, criminal justice are not addressed immediately our children will not have a future.”
That same sense of despair is etched on the faces of demonstrators in Minneapolis, where Floyd died Monday, as protests raged into Friday. Similar scenes also have played out in Washington, Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Detroit and beyond, resulting in widespread property damage, numerous injuries and at least one death.
“In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard,” as Martin Luther King put it. “And what is it that America has failed to hear?”
The protests that have spread across the nation in the wake of the murder of George Floyd have attracted a diverse group of supporters that go beyond local Black communities and national organizations. At events in Washington, New York, Minneapolis, and elsewhere, community activists have been joined by allies, by groups supporting Latinos, Indian groups, and even groups of Mennonite farmers speaking out in support and showing up for protests.
But, with dozens of buildings burned and Donald Trump preparing to bring in the military, there’s a growing sense that the violence in many cases isn’t originating from within the local Black community. In multiple instances, there have been incidents that seemed to spring up on the periphery of peaceful protests, leading to violent confrontations and property destruction. And increasingly, there are reports that these events are not originating organically from the protests or from confrontations between protesters and the police. There is a very real feeling that white supremacists are using this moment to create incidents designed to justify still more violence and suppression.
With dozens of protests across the nation, not every event is the same. For example, it’s not hard to see what sparked this incident Atlanta, where a police officer slams a bicycle into a Black woman for having the audacity to wave a finger at him while saying “Don’t touch me.” It’s clear that the violence in this particular moment originated direct from the police.
But in some of the most publicized incidents across the nation, there seem to be a singular nature to some of those involved, as in this recording in which what appears to be a young white man in camo pants and military boots paints graffiti on a federal building.
The protest then headed to in front of the White House. A protester was taken by the USSS in front of Pennsylvania Ave into an adjacent federal building. Unclear what he did.A couple men then splintered off from the group and spray painted “F*ck Trump†on the building. @cbsnewspic.twitter.com/OVwPu0PF6X— Fin Gomez (@finnygo) May 29, 2020
Or this group which is, reportedly, shown attempting to smash store windows in Minneapolis, with the group initiating this action appearing to be led by a number of white people
And those on the ground reported similar events at other protests in many locations.
I was at Downtown Oakland protests a little while ago. Let me say something; the people breaking glass, breaking into windows & starting fires were WHITE men wearing all black. They had hammers and walkie talkies. They were organized. BLM protestors did not start the violence! pic.twitter.com/I2HOdzFoHd— Asia (@AsiaJannelll) May 30, 2020
Repeatedly, from eye witnesses and from officials, have come claims that violence in the protests is originating not with those who live in the community, but with others who have appeared to take advantage of this moment.
Remarkable info coming out of this presser: Gov. Tim Walls, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter and now MN attorney general Keith Ellison ALL alleging outside forces, domestic and possibly foreign, have post-Tuesday infiltrated the state, and are— Joy Reid (@JoyAnnReid) May 30, 2020
And, as Vice reports, far right extremists are trying to use this situation in hopes of bringing about their much-desired “race war.” That effort involves both showing up at protests with guns, initiating violence, and taking to computers to urge everyone involved toward more tragic confrontations. Even the Hawaiian shirt-wearing “Boogaloo Bois” have appeared at some of the protests. The possibility of using these protests as a precipitating incident, and calls for white supremacist militias to confront protesters, are dominating discussion boards and social media for these groups.
This is also generating some genuinely bizarre events.
Atlanta has deployed a child militia at Lenox Mall fitted with riot shields and batons. What the actual fuck is going on? pic.twitter.com/zTtmw5mDTN— Fox Wound (@foxwoundband) May 30, 2020
The extent to which those trying to instigate more widespread violence are behind the incidents of property damage and physical clashes remains unclear. What is absolutely clear it that white supremacists are hoping to leverage yet another example of violence against an individual Black man as an excuse to carry out a campaign of expanded violence against the entire Black community.
Following closely on the heels of the police murder of Breonna Taylor and the recorded lynching of Ahmaud Arbery—as well as decades in which police violence has been repeatedly excused—there’s no doubt of the weight of grief in the Black community, or the justified anger. But there are definitely those who are seeking to turn this moment from one in which those suffering injustice are finally heard, to one in which that injustice is “justified” and made worse.
And with Donald Trump calling Nazis in Charlottesville “very fine people” and protesters in Minneapolis “thugs,” there seems little doubt about which side he is ready to join.
vjr7121 Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.) Saturday May 30, 2020 · WE ALL CAN’T BREATHE
Our nation is being choked by the events that may seem recent but are rooted in the history of our nation. This year we all have learned that the most frightening symptom of the coronavirus is its ability to take over the respiratory system and restrict breathing. Frightening and deadly, it became the virus’ trademark. Hospitals rushed to find ventilators to ease the breathing of affected patients, Doctors intubated those whose lungs were so infected that breathing became impossible.
Then we have the cases of Eric Garner and more recently George Floyd whose breath was taken away by the force of renegade police officers who took it upon themselves to choke the life out of a fellow human. Caught on tape, these murders can best be explained as racism. Neither Garner nor Floyd were vicious criminals---Garner was selling contraband cigarettes on a Staten Island street corner, Floyd may or may not have passed on a counterfeit bill in a transaction at a convenience mart in Minneapolis. Neither man was armed. Neither was a mortal threat to the arresting officers. Both received the ultimate punishment allowed by law in 30 states, none of which are Minnesota or New York whose death penalty sentence has been made inactive. The use of deadly force, however, when black men are involved goes far beyond choking. Young men of color must live with the realization that at any time, for whatever reason, whether they have committed a crime or not, their ultimate judgment would not be issued in a court of law, but can be meted out in the street. Ask Eric Garner, or Michael Brown, or Abner Louima, or Amadou Diallo, or Walter Scott, or Freddie Gray, or Laquan McDonald, or Philando Castile, or Terence Crutcher, or Antwon Rose II, or O'Shae Terry, or Kelly Thomas, or Oscar Grant, or…..George Floyd. None of these black men had committed a crime that would have been considered serious. Some had committed no crime. All were executed by police officers on the street. SOME OF THESE THINGS AREN’T LIKE THE OTHERS
Dylann Roof was a young white supremacist who walked into Emanuel AME Episcopal Church in Charleston killing 9 black participants including their pastor. He hesitated firing on the group because after inviting him to join them, they treated him so kindly. He, too, was on the run and armed when captured, again without incident:
Dylann Roof was caught after 11 a.m. ET following Wednesday night's massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. He was arrested about 245 miles north in Shelby, North Carolina, during a traffic stop, Charleston Police Chief Gregory Mullen said at a news conference.
Shelby police received a tip about a suspicious car in the area and arrested Roof without incident, Mullen added.
"I am so pleased that we were able to resolve this case quickly ... so that nobody else is harmed by this individual who obviously committed a tragic, heinous crime in the city of Charleston," Mullen said.
I am not advocating for Roof or Peter Manfredonia to have been treated like the young black men above---only that their lives be valued as worthy as that of any person under the law---that justice is meted out in a courtroom and not on the street.
I am reminded of the opening of The National Memorial for Peace and Justice last year. As you may recall the museum sponsored by the Equal Justice Initiative recounts the era between 1877 and 1950---an era in which the practice of lynching was most active in America. In that period more than 4400 human beings had the life illegally choked out of them. They, too, died because they couldn’t breathe. They, like the young black men noted above, were the victims of what can only be called endemic racism that remains America’s abiding shame---our self inflicted national wound. The death of George Floyd is nothing more than our own perpetuation of, and acceptance of the stain left upon our founding documents by slavery. Back then as it remains today, given a choice between human lives and the economy, the economy wins. How ironic that these same themes collide in the course of our national affairs again---even more ironic that the document that purported to recognize the equality of all men is now being used to deny it to some. There is a straight line connecting the kind of martial lawlessness we are witnessing today and the history of racism in America. It started with a choice that was deemed an imperative.
Gorge Floyd was sitting in his SUV along with two friends. He was pulled out of the vehicle and handcuffed. Everyone who witnessed the encounter insisted that Floyd didn’t resist. Even the store owner who accused him of trying to pass a twenty-dollar counterfeit bill agreed that there was no resistance. Officer Chauvin didn’t use a rope, just his knee. No, and he wasn’t wearing a white hooded robe, he wore blue. And in case you are wondering why this matters, or why we should care, if you cannot understand the anger in the black community even as you refuse to condone the carnage, remember the words of Jacob Frey whose reaction stands in stark contrast to the judgments of our current president:
“What we've seen over the last two days ... is the result of so much built-up anger and sadness. Anger and sadness that has been ingrained in our black community, not just because of five minutes of horror, but 400 years.” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey
Reacting to the destruction of his third precinct building, he noted that a building is not worth the loss of one life.
GIVING LICENSE TO KILL
The anger in the black community grows in direct proportion to the indifference of a nation that refuses to confront its demons. On May 22, in Glynn County, Georgia, a 25-year-old black man was out for a jog. He was accosted by two white men, one a retired police officer, and was shot to death because he stopped to look at a home under construction. The murderers acted under the cover of law by first calling 911 to suggest a crime was being committed. Then, like the hooded vigilantes before them, they hunted their prey. There was no crime, no reason for the altercation. The only explanation that makes any sense is that Ahmaud Arbery was black and his assailants were white. In what world would anyone expect there not to be anger and fear among those in the black community? In what world would we expect a national leader to choose to inflame the situation with tweets thumbed from the safety of the White House advocating the shooting of more young black men?
Mark this moment in time as we are witnessing 21st-century lynchings in a nation whose leadership seems willing to purchase the rope.
I believe tweets like this are Trump’s and Putin’s greatest fear:
After stoking the fires of white supremacy and racism your entire presidency, you have the nerve to feign moral superiority before threatening violence? ‘When the looting starts the shooting starts’??? We will vote you out in November. @realdonaldtrump— Taylor Swift (@taylorswift13) May 29, 2020
Here it is one more time as a screen capture, just to be sure everyone can see it:
As a fellow Kosack just pointed out to me, even with Putin’s lord-knows-how-many bots, Trump himself has never gotten more than 300K likes for a tweet, whereas Taylor’s, above, is already at almost a million likes.
Big kudos to Ms. Swift for bringing the truth and courage to criticize someone whom surely some of her fans support. Not only that, but she ends her tweet with an implicit encouragement to VOTE in November. Perfect!
We should embolden and encourage more American megastars (there aren’t that many of them) to tweet or otherwise broadcast their outrage against Trump and to get people to vote. It would do a world of good.
As Taylor said, we will vote Trump out in November.
UPDATE Sat. May 30, 10:55pm EDT:
From Forbes Magazine:
During a week in which President Trump’s war with Twitter was at the center of the national conversation, it might actually be a Tweet by a pop star that changes the outcome of the 2020 presidential campaign.
On Friday morning, Taylor Swift, one of the world’s biggest musical superstars, shared a 38-word Tweet admonishing President Trump for his provocative comments about the riots in Minneapolis. In doing so, she put the President on notice.
Denise Oliver Velez Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.) Saturday May 30, 2020 ·
Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, of Ohio, gasping after being pepper sprayed
Congresswoman Joyce Beatty, Columbus City Council President Shannon Hardin, and Franklin County, Commissioner Kevin Boyce, were all pepper-sprayed today, during a protest outside the Ohio Statehouse, where people were peacefully demanding an end to police brutality and marching for justice.
Beatty, who has represented Ohio’s Third Congressional District since 2013, was at the protest, which is now in it’s third day in downtown Columbus, to help de-escalate a tense situation in the city, where the Governor, Mike DeWine, has just called out the Ohio National Guard.
Columbus Dispatch photojournalist Kyle Robertson posted this tweet depicting the incident. Here is a 38 photo sequence of what happen this morning with Joyce Beatty, Shannon Hardin, Kevin Boyce, protesters and Columbus Police. pic.twitter.com/ZZEd6MfJCh— Kyle Robertson (@KRobPhoto) May 30, 2020
Council President Hardin tweeted a video with Rep. Beatty saying that they are okay, and called on people on both sides of the protest to remain calm. Beatty said in an interview later Saturday that the pepper spray was “prolific.”
“I don’t remember hearing anyone saying, ‘Move or we’re going to pepper spray,’” Beatty said. “Councilman Hardin got the brunt of it and he was in the middle of the sidewalk.” She added that she didn’t think the pepper spray was necessary. “I heard no warning,” she said. “Obviously if someone had said and held up a pepper spray and said, ‘I’m gonna pepper spray,’ we would have moved. Nobody wants to be pepper sprayed, trust me.”
A spokesperson for Beatty told NBC4 that while the protest was underway, someone started scuffling with police. Police took that person down, which made other protesters angry. Beatty stepped in to try and calm the situation when police started spraying. Hardin and Boyce pulled Beatty out of the fray.
Beatty has been advocating for non-violence, while actively supporting the protests and castigating Donald Trump.
“We adopt the means of nonviolence because our end is a community at peace with itself. We will try to persuade with our words, but if our words fail, we will try to persuade with our acts.†- MLK #JusticeForAllpic.twitter.com/rXwT8FtXZN— Joyce Beatty (@RepBeatty) May 30, 2020
Glad she, Hardin and Boyce are okay —and I thank them for their service. I’d also like to say thanks to all those who are out in the streets today, across the nation, demanding justice.
A Minneapolis auto-parts store whose windows were broken out by a suspicious white man earlier in the day Friday was set afire by protesters later.
The specter of white supremacists surreptitiously participating in protests surrounding the death of George Floyd, the black man killed in the custody of Minneapolis police last week, became more substantive than earlier vague rumors when Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday told reporters that neo-Nazis—along with members of Mexican drug cartels—appear to be involved in inflaming the violent riots that have struck Minneapolis, as well as other cities around the country.
“The situation in Minneapolis is no longer in any way about the murder of George Floyd,” Walz said today. “It is about attacking civil society, instilling fear and disrupting our great cities.”
“We have seen things like white supremacist organizers posting on platforms about coming to Minnesota,” Minnesota Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said at the same press conference, adding that a potential connection to organized crime is also being investigated.
Harrington added that white nationalists are posting messages on social media, according to Joy Reid, that urge fellow extremists to go to Minneapolis to “get our loot on” and create mayhem. He told reporters that authorities will investigate people attempting to use public outrage over Floyd’s death as a “cover” for illegal activity.
Walz told reporters he was aware of rumors that white supremacists were involved in some of the looting surrounding the protests and that “based on my suspicions and what I've seen on this,” he found them credible.
"It gets worse than that," he added. "The cartels, who are wondering if there was a break in their drug transmissions, are trying to take advantage of the chaos. That's why this situation is on a federal level."
Walz and other officials also claimed that 80 percent of the rioters were from out of state.
“Those folks who are agitating and inciting are taking advantage of the pain, of the hurt, of the frustration, of the anger, of the very real and legitimate sadness that so many of our community members feel, to advocate for the destruction of our communities,” St. Paul Mayor Melvin Carter said.
Suspicions were initially fueled in part by videos shared on social media that appeared to show masked white men engaging in violent destruction, and ignoring black protesters who attempt to get them to stop. One video in particular showed a masked man carrying an umbrella while smashing windows at a Minneapolis auto-parts store, then running away when confronted about the behavior by black protesters. The store was later burned down.
The behavior initially aroused claims that the man was a police officer in disguise, creating mayhem that could be blamed on protesters, and one widely shared tweet appeared to identify him as a Minneapolis police officer. However, police said that the identified officer was not the person in the video, and he had an airtight alibi: “We spoke with his supervisor, who was with him. We spoke to his colleagues, who were with him,” said Steve Linders, public information officer for the St. Paul Police Department.
White supremacists and other extremists have been talking among themselves on social media about how best to exploit the racial tension arising from the Floyd killing, which they see as creating an extremely fragile situation in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, they see their long-simmering hopes for a race war coming to fruition.
The most active discussion has come among so-called “Boogaloo Bois,” the pro-Trump civil war enthusiasts who have been leveraging anti-stay-home-order protests into recruitment and agitation opportunities. A number of “Boogaloo” pages on Facebook have featured memes indicating solidarity with black protesters, since many of the participants in the movement are mainly interested in opposing police operations and law enforcement.
The “Boogaloo Ranch” Facebook page featured a meme showing the office building that houses the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, urging protesters to target it as “part of a banking cartel that is the primary source of oppression in the United States … and they have money!” Elsewhere, the same page includes a post listing the locations of all the anti-police protests currently taking place.
Some “Boogaloo” enthusiasts took photos of themselves in Minneapolis with black protesters, as Jordan Green reported at Raw Story. However, a fellow participant in the Big Igloo Bois thread on Discord warned: “This is not the time for boog, this is how a race war starts.”
“It’s a right-wing thing; it’s a neo-fascist thing,” warned veteran antifacsist Daryle Lamont Jenkins in a Twitter video. “And they’re trying to use what’s happening in Minneapolis as a jump-off. Do not let them. They are not our friends.”
Last night protests over the cold-blooded police murder of George Floyd erupted in D.C., with protesters marching around the White House to express their anger. Secret Service agents were dispatched to cordon off the perimeter of the People’s House, enforcing a “lockdown” just inside its gates. Apparently Trump and his minions were peering out the windows, like rats holed up in their bunker. Today, Trump Tweeted out his praise of this taxpayer-funded protective cocoon spun around him, mocked and threatened the protesters, and summoned his hateful followers to assault them this evening.
A day after claiming he didn’t mean to suggest that law enforcement officials should shoot people who were part of the unrest in Minnesota, President Trump said on Saturday that the Secret Service had been prepared to sic the “most vicious dogs” on protesters outside the White House gates on Friday night.
For those who may have been concerned about Trump’s personal safety, he emphatically reassured them that he “couldn’t have felt more safe.” He also painted the Secret Service as his own personal Einsatzgruppen, claiming they were essentially straining at the leash to kill those Americans exercising their right to protest outside the White House.
Trump claimed that Secret Service agents told him they were clamoring for engagement with the protesters. “We put the young ones on the front line, sir, they love it, and good practice,” he claimed he had been told. Finally, in a final act of thumbing his nose from behind his protective walls, Trump called on his Neo-Nazi supporters to join the protests this evening. The clear implication is that he wanted to see blood spilled.
He also appeared to invite his own supporters to amass outside the White House on Saturday to counter the protesters, despite a ban against gatherings of more than 10 people in effect in Washington amid the coronavirus pandemic.
“Tonight, I understand, is MAGA NIGHT AT THE WHITE HOUSE???” he tweeted.
If this country is to survive, this monster needs to go.
Exposing the Invisible Empire
Klansmen Gather in the woods in Stone Mountain
AFTER A WHITE SUPREMACIST gunned down nine black worshippers at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, last June, reporters at The Post and Courier, where I work, filed hundreds of stories on the shooting and its aftermath. One of my pieces, about questionable financial dealings by the church’s interim pastor, elicited a threatening email. As I scanned it on my laptop at home, one line chilled me: “If you’re reading this tomorrow morning it’s probably too late.”
My kitchen table sits next to a bay window that overlooks a wooded easement. It has no curtains. I’d never needed any here in Charleston, a famously charming city that is home to some of the country’s best restaurants and most beautiful people, according to organizations that rate those sorts of things. But now the darkness beyond felt ominous. I stepped away from the window and called my editors.
I was reminded of that moment recently as I read about W. Horace Carter, the 29-year-old founder of the Tabor City Tribune, who watched a line of cars cruise down the main drag of his North Carolina town one hot July night in 1950. His newspaper covered a border area with South Carolina, and back in Carter’s day, Jim Crow notions of segregation ran especially thick and deep in both states. The motorcade carried 100 white-robed, hooded, armed men who tossed out pamphlets before rumbling down a dirt road toward the town’s black community.
Carter bent to pick up a leaflet. “Beware of association with the niggers, Jews and Catholics in this community,” it read. “God didn’t mean for all men to be equal.”
Four days later, the native North Carolinian published “An Editorial: No Excuse for KKK.” It was the first of many in which Carter challenged the Klan’s habit of meting out vigilante justice to whomever they thought deserved it, sans judge or jury. “In every sense of the word, they are endeavoring to force their domination upon those whom they consider worthy of punishment,” Carter wrote. “It is not for a band of hoodlums to decide whether you or I need chastising.”
A fearless and wiry war veteran who had nearly become a Christian missionary, Carter also publicly doubted that KKK members who espoused religious orthodoxy to justify their violence actually practiced the faith they preached. “If you had church attendance slips for those persons, it’s our opinion that not five percent of them entered any church of any denomination on Sunday morning,” Carter wrote.
Willard Cole, a newspaper editor in Lumberton, North Carolina, types at his desk. Cole, who won a Pulitzer for his crusade against the KKK, could only type with his right arm after a stroke in 1961, so he made alterations to his typewriter so he could type one-handed, 1964. (Associated Press )
He and his family awoke the morning after tha first editorial was published to a threatening note stuck under one of Carter’s windshield wipers. Two more waited under the door to his newspaper office, says Utah State University journalism professor Thomas C. Terry, who has researched Carter for more than a decade.
Soon after, a larger Klan motorcade hit Myrtle Beach and Atlantic Beach. This time, its members shot at a popular black nightclub and savagely beat its owner. And as Carter’s newspaper wrote more than 100 editorials and stories over the next three years, the local grand dragon visited twice to warn him that the KKK would put his newspaper out of business. He received more than 1,000 death threats. His dog was kidnapped. His 4-year-old son asked: “The Klan gonna come and get you, Daddy?”
They didn’t. Instead, the words of Carter and a friend and colleague named Willard Cole, editor of the much larger Whiteville News Reporter nearby, prompted action. In 1952, the FBI arrested 10 KKK members, triggering a tide of other arrests. Eventually, almost 100 Klansmen were tried and convicted. The two newspapers shared the public service Pulitzer in 1953 for their campaign, “waged on their own doorstep at the risk of economic loss and personal danger.”
“He acknowledged being scared, especially for his family,” Carter’s son Russell later told The New York Times. “But he was a newspaperman.”
These days, we tend to think that even those who tackle the most sensitive public service journalism in the US are mostly safe from physical harm. That isn’t always the case, but the author of the threatening email I got last year surely hadn’t infiltrated my local police department. He probably didn’t live next door, or run businesses I frequent. I doubt he worked for the mayor or city council. The challenges journalists face exposing race and hate crimes today generally—though not always—pale beside the ongoing terror editors like Carter and those before him felt while challenging the KKK, whose insidious tendrils reached far deeper into the communities where they lived than hate groups do today.
Despite those risks, a spate of Jim Crow-era newspaper campaigns exposed racists like accused Emanuel AME shooter Dylann Storm Roof, albeit shrouded in white hoods back then. Their coverage of racial injustice also shaped and molded the public service Prize, the most revered journalism award today.
The pattern of awarding Pulitzers for Klan coverage began almost immediately after the gold medal’s birth in 1918. Several exposés and editorials challenging the KKK won Pulitzers throughout the 1920s, when the secretive group enjoyed a revival, and again in the 1950s, when the seeds of the Civil Rights movement rooted in the South.
That winning journalism, with its enormous risks and impact, embodied what Joseph Pulitzer intended to celebrate when he created the awards, and what his awards have come to honor a century later: courage, persistence, empowering the powerless. It also had a lasting impact on race relations in America, as individual journalists like Carter risked the fury of their communities to fight for change.
JOSEPH PULITZER ADVOCATED for quality newspapers. However, his name once was most closely associated with the yellow journalism of the 1890s, spouted from his own New York World in an effort to trump fellow New York newspaper owner William Randolph Hearst.
A key motivation for creating his Pulitzer Prizes? “To put that era behind him,” says Roy J. Harris Jr., who has chronicled all 100 years of the public service awards in his book Pulitzer’s Gold: A Century of Public Service Journalism.
Shortly before creating the Prizes, Pulitzer crafted a platform that still could guide the best J-schools and newsrooms. It’s a lot to jam onto a conference room whiteboard today, but Pulitzer declared his newspapers would “never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”
Carter received more than 1,000 death threats. His dog was kidnapped. His 4-year-old son asked: “The Klan gonna come and get you, Daddy?” They didn’t.
During his last decade of life, Pulitzer came up with an idea that would push these ideals of public service beyond his own newsrooms. He planned a series of prizes aimed at elevating journalism to one of the great intellectual professions, a status it didn’t enjoy at the time. As the notion gelled, he decided to bequeath $500,000 to Columbia University for the Prizes as part of his $2 million endowment to fund a journalism program at the school.
Pulitzer died in 1911, and six years later, his Prizes were born. No public service Prize was given in 1917, the Pulitzers’ inaugural year. Instead, the gold made its debut the following year, when The New York Times won for its coverage of World War I.
But what exactly did “public service” mean back then? Newspaper journalists didn’t have much to go on, says Harris. “There really had not been a model for this in 1917 when they were first handed out.” That quickly changed.
THE FIRST MAJOR EXPOSÉ outing the Invisible Empire, as the KKK was known, sprang from the pages of Pulitzer’s own New York World, then an industry powerhouse whose staff worked out of the planet’s tallest building. Pulitzer felt strongly that journalists had a duty to victims and underdogs, “and clearly that would apply in the case of blacks being tortured and lynched,” Harris says.
Beginning on Sept. 6, 1921, the World’s newsroom embarked on a 21-day series that revealed the inner workings of the hate group, which had been enjoying a largely unencumbered resurgence. Klansmen had revived their ranks during World War I using new recruitment tactics—like adding Jews and Catholics to their targets—and attracted hundreds of thousands of new members. They infiltrated state and local governments across the country and set their sights on other powerful institutions, including the Army and Navy.
After a three-month investigation, the World’s reporters did what good reporters routinely do today: They challenged the hate group and gave a voice to its victims.
The first story appeared with an all-caps, 1A headline whose size might make today’s copy editors cringe: “SECRETS OF THE KU KLUX KLAN EXPOSED BY THE WORLD; MENACE OF THIS GROWING LAW-DEFYING ORGANIZATION PROVED BY ITS RITUAL AND THE RECORD OF ITS ACTIVITIES.”
A front-page photo showed two men standing in the woods shaking hands in front of a cross and an American flag. One wore the KKK’s telltale white robe, mask, and pointy hood. The other man’s face wasn’t covered, and the caption named him: Col. William Joseph Simmons, emperor of the Invisible Empire, though after this series it wouldn’t be invisible any longer.
Hooded members of the KKK meet for a demonstration in Baltimore, Maryland, 1923. (Transcendental Graphics / Getty Images)
After months of investigation, “in the performance of what it sincerely believes to be a public service,” the newspaper promised to dig deep into “as extraordinary a movement as is to be found in recent history,” the opening story avowed.
Tapping documents and insider sources, including dozens of former KKK members, the World exposed everything from the Klan’s money-making schemes to its secret oaths and terrifying violence, including floggings and tar-and-feather terrorism. “Oath-bound secrecy, bolstered with the trumpery device of a ghostly sheet and pillow slip regalia, is the very lifeblood of Ku Klux, Inc.,” one story said.
When the predictable threats arrived, the World responded by reprinting letters that called its journalists “nigger lovers,” and one that warned: “You will have the pleasure to receive the necessary punishment for the publication of your series of articles regarding the secrets of our powerful and holy order.”
Eighteen other newspapers nationwide ran the World’s series, including such titans as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Boston Globe, the Times-Picayune, the Houston Chronicle, and The Milwaukee Journal. The series drew two million readers nationwide. New Yorkers stood in line for copies. And the Justice Department and several congressmen promised to investigate the group, all reactions journalists hope to see today from our own work.
The World won the public service Prize in 1922, the fourth year it was given. At the time, the Prize “for the most disinterested and meritorious public service rendered” came with a gold medal worth $500.
IN THE EARLY 1920S, the Pulitzer Prizes weren’t the top-dog awards they are today. After Pulitzer died, his two sons’ longtime service on the board ensured their father’s principles would guide the Prizes—and in turn, American journalism. But they faced an arguably self-imposed hurdle to attracting top journalists: Pulitzer’s own papers fared quite well, perhaps too well, in the early competitions. During the 1920s, the Pulitzer-owned World won the public service Prize alone three times.
“The board members—and especially the Pulitzer brothers—certainly had not intended for the Prizes to favor the Pulitzer newspapers,” Harris writes in Pulitzer’s Gold. But perceived favoritism threatened their goals. So, the brothers withheld entries from their newspapers in 1930, 1931, and perhaps other years as well, Harris says.
Still, the long-term impact of those early Prizes remains clear.
“For all the perceived questions about favoritism, the Public Service Prize had at least been defined in the 1920s,” Harris writes. The Prizes demonstrated the critical need for courageous coverage, giving voice to victims, and a willingness to take on those in power. Pulitzer board members “knew that racial hatred was a national scourge of the kind Joseph Pulitzer hated.” They wanted to keep the issue prominent.
The fight against the KKK didn’t stop—couldn’t stop—in New York. The mantle was passed to local journalists in KKK-laden states who would suffer the brunt of retaliation for taking on Klan members, some of whom held high posts in their communities, and had deep advertising pockets.
The next major anti-KKK campaign was launched from the southern city of Memphis, where Klan recruiters had arrived in 1921 and quickly boasted 10,000 members. A year after the World’s series won the Pulitzer, The Commercial Appeal launched a two-pronged attack against the hooded order’s alarming local influence.
The KKK had expanded beyond promoting racial and religious hatred. It had become a sort of moral police force that . . . doled out violent punishments as its members saw fit.
By then, the KKK had expanded beyond promoting racial and religious hatred. It had become a sort of moral police force that singled out alleged drunks, adulterers, bootleggers, and the like, and doled out violent punishments as its members saw fit. The Commercial Appeal’s 1923 crusade was as much a battle against the Klan’s attempt to mete out vigilante justice and control local elections as an effort to support racial equality.
Indeed, the newspaper hadn’t always been known as a crusader for the fair treatment of black residents. Just six years earlier it had published the scheduled lynching time of Ell Persons, a black man accused of raping and killing a white teenager. Thousands of people turned out to watch a man who hadn’t been convicted be burned alive and dismembered.
But now, the newspaper’s editor, C.P.J. Mooney, condemned the Invisible Empire, dubbing it a money-making scam that was terrorizing residents. He took particular offense to Klansmen meting out their own version of religious and criminal justice.
“The law is the soul of the nation,” Mooney wrote, arguing the group had no right to assume the role of the police and court system.
His newsroom didn’t rely on words alone. Cartoonist J.P. Alley crafted searing front-page depictions that ridiculed the KKK as cowards behind bed sheets. One portrayed a man lashing a woman across her back and proclaimed: “His ‘noble work,’ done in the dark!” When KKK members sent Alley threats, he used them as fodder for more cartoons.
The newspaper’s drubbing of the Klan escalated until it became central to the 1923 municipal elections. After the city’s mayor refused to join the KKK, the hooded order supported opposing candidates for mayor and city commission. In an effort to intimidate its journalistic opponents, Klansmen set up their campaign headquarters right across the street from the newspaper’s building and invited national KKK leaders to visit, American University journalism professor Rodger Streitmatter writes in Defying the Ku Klux Klan.
The Commercial Appeal hammered on. Tension built to Election Day. As voting ended, 400 Klan members demanded the ballots be counted in public.
They were defeated easily. When the mayor paraded triumphantly through town, he stopped at the newspaper building “and directed the band to serenade the newspaper in honor of its decisive role in the election,” Streitmatter writes.
The year after the World won for its KKK coverage, the Memphis paper won “for its courageous attitude in the publication of cartoons and the handling of news in reference to the operations of the Ku Klux Klan.”
THE JOURNALISTIC BATTLE soon spread to other cities in the South where Klansmen freely roamed halls of power. In 1925, two years after The Commercial Appeal’s Pulitzer win, the brutal murder of a mentally ill black man sent an irate Georgia newspaper owner to hammer on his typewriter. Julian LaRose Harris, a WWI veteran and son of writer Joel Chandler Harris (of African-American folklore’s Uncle Remus fame), had purchased a controlling interest in the Enquirer-Sun and become its general manager.
When he moved to town, the local Klan met on the second floor of the police station “with the tacit support of city officials,” Gregory C. Lisby wrote in his 1988 article, “Julian Harris and the Columbus Enquirer-Sun: The Consequences of Winning the Pulitzer Prize,” published in the industry journal Journalism Monographs.
On Sept. 24, 1925, the front page headline in the Enquirer-Sun read: “Lynching a Lunatic the Latest Infamy Added to Georgia’s Long List of Disgraces.”
“The human mind cannot conceive of a crime more malicious, more despicable, or more inhuman than that of the cruel and cowardly group of Georgians who lynched this negro lunatic—a poor, mindless creature who, before the law, stood on the same plane with an infant!” the story declared. It went on to describe how the mob “beat the miserable lunatic’s head to a jelly with the pick-axe handle which he used in his insanity to strike down his victim.”
An FBI agent drives along a North Carolina road during an investigation into KKK members, who were accused of abducting and flogging residents, both Caucasian and African American, 1952. (Robert W. Kelley / Getty Images)
It wasn’t what most readers in the state where the KKK launched its resurgence expected to read in their hometown Bible Belt paper—not that they didn’t have warning. Harris had been one of the few southern newspaper editors to run the World’s initial series exposing the Klan. He had wanted to print it so badly he’d begged to use the content for free because he couldn’t afford to pay for it. Although he was born in Savannah, Harris was a progressive who ran a box in his newspaper promising that it “seeks to reflect the best thought and sentiment of the public but will not cater to passing public opinion.”
On Dec. 31, 1925, to wrap up the year, Harris asked on his front page: “Is it great to be a Georgian?” The article condemned those who supported “a cowardly hooded order,” including the state’s governor and other officials.
The consequences for Harris and his newspaper were swift. The Enquirer-Sun’s machinery was vandalized. It lost 20 percent of its circulation—about 1,000 subscribers—after KKK members demanded a boycott, Lisby wrote.
Yet Harris never changed his four-block path home at night. And a few fellow southern newspapers supported him. Alabama’s Montgomery Advertiser called Harris “one of the two or three most useful Georgians living.”
The Pulitzer Board agreed. His newspaper won the 1926 gold medal for “its brave and energetic fight against the Ku Klux Klan.” It was only the second southern newspaper—and the first small daily—to win the prize. H.L. Mencken called it “the most intelligent award the committee has yet made.”
Sadly, national accolades didn’t pay Harris’ bills. In 1929, he sold the newspaper and, saddled with debt, left the city.
But Harris didn’t leave his ideals behind in his newsroom. He joined the Pulitzer Prize Advisory Board and later The New York Times staff.
Several years later, in 1928, the Indianapolis Times also received the public service Prize for an anti-corruption crusade that exposed public officials, including the state’s governor and former treasurer, for their KKK ties. “Both the governor and former treasurer were indicted, in part because of what the Times wrote,” Pulitzer Prize historian Roy Harris says.
It was the fourth gold medal awarded for Klan coverage in the 1920s alone, and this time, the Pulitzer Board overruled jurors who had recommended awarding the Prize to a campaign to improve farming methods.
THE PULITZER BOARD’S SELECTION of so many anti-Klan crusades set a bar for public service journalism, which was now expected to battle injustice and uphold the rights of its victims, regardless of risk.
“Recognizing the importance of these stories so early on in the ’20s into the ’50s was truly remarkable,” Pulitzer historian Harris says. “You always had the Pulitzer family looking out for their benefactor’s original plan and his philosophy. The Pulitzer Prizes helped guide journalism in the direction of public service.”
Had newspapers not exposed the Invisible Empire early in the 20th century, KKK ranks might be considerably more robust than they are today. Editors like Carter in the Carolinas changed their hometowns. “He drove the Klan out, the FBI came in, and the largest mass trial in North Carolina history was held,” says Terry, the Utah State University journalism professor. “He was a leader in it, a pioneer.”
The Klan remains a stubborn threat. 892 hate groups were active in 2015, up from 784 the previous year. Boosts among KKK sects fueled that surge. They numbered 190, up from 72 in 2014.
Yet even today, with the 100th Pulitzer Prizes just awarded, racial hatred persists.
Look no further than Emanuel AME Church. Accused killer Dylann Roof didn’t belong to an organized hate group like the Klan. Police have dubbed him a “lone wolf” killer, today’s more alarming threats because they form hate-filled ideologies by reading online rants rather than joining organized groups that can be tracked and monitored.
The Klan, too, remains a stubborn threat. In recent months, the Southern Poverty Law Center released its latest analysis of hate groups and found 892 were active in 2015, up from 784 the previous year. Boosts among KKK sects fueled that surge. They numbered 190, up from 72 in 2014.
Klan ranks grew after South Carolina lawmakers removed the Confederate battle flag from their statehouse grounds last summer in response to the Emanuel church shooting. Klan and like-minded groups then held at least 364 pro-Confederate flag rallies in 26 states and Washington, DC, last year, the Southern Poverty Law Center report says.
That might not be as alarming as it sounds. One of those rallies, held at the South Carolina Statehouse last July, drew about 50 members of the Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan.
Tempers predictably flared when counter-protesters arrived. Yet the worst threat that day turned out to be the suffocating midsummer heat, and one of the most memorable moments came not from violence, but from a gesture of human kindness captured in a news photo.
It shows South Carolina’s black director of public safety, clad in his police uniform, gently helping a wrinkled and frail neo-Nazi suffering from heat exhaustion into an air-conditioned building.
