Saturday Reads

Happy Saturday and the day after Juneteenth!

Juneteeth is the largest holiday celebrating the end of slavery in the US. It has an extremely interesting history.  As most of us know, Texas is a particularly stubborn and bothersome state.  Texas either deliberately ignored or “accidentally” missed hearing about the Emancipation Proclamation, so slaves there were held in bondage illegally for more than two years.

Juneteenth is the oldest known celebration commemorating the ending of slavery in the United States.  Dating back to 1865, it was on June 19^ththat the Union soldiers, led by Major General Gordon Granger, landed at Galveston, Texas with news that the war had ended and that the enslaved were now free. Note that this was two and a half years after President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation – which had become official January 1, 1863. The Emancipation Proclamation had little impact on the Texans due to the minimal number of Union troops to enforce the new Executive Order. However, with the surrender of General Lee in April of 1865, and the arrival of General Granger’s regiment, the forces were finally strong enough to influence and overcome the resistance. Later attempts to explain this two and a half year delay in the receipt of this important news have yielded several versions that have been handed down through the years. Often told is the story of a messenger who was murdered on his way to Texas with the news of freedom. Another, is that the news was deliberately withheld by the enslavers to maintain the labor force on the plantations. And still another, is that federal troops actually waited for the slave owners to reap the benefits of one last cotton harvest before going to Texas to enforce the Emancipation Proclamation. All of which, or neither of these versions could be true. Certainly, for some, President Lincoln’s authority over the rebellious states was in question   For whatever the reasons, conditions in Texas remained status quo well beyond what was statutory.

The images on today’s post are froms celebrations of Juneteenth. Many of them occured around the turn of the 20th century.

The one thing that I’ve learned from watching far too many seasons of “Criminal Minds” is that serial killers that kill for ideology tend to leave manifestos around.We saw this clearly in the 2011 mass shootings in Norway by Anders Brevik. Ted Kaczynski–known as the unabomber--wrote an extensive manifesto.  We have vast social media networks today, so finding Dylann Roof’s manifesto was only a matter of time as he stuck true to the form of this classic FBI killer profile.  He appears to have been obsessed with Rhodesia.  I took a Colonial Africa history course when I was an undergrad and wrote the semester’s thesis on that very country. I found it striking that he had a picture of the former country’s flag. It’s now Zimbabwe and is still one very messed up little sub-saharan country.

This is a brief description from the Daily Beast.

A website that appears to have been created by Dylann Roof was found Saturday morning. The “Last Rhodesian” was registered in February 2015. (On his Facebook account, Roof wore a Rhodesian flag in a photo taken before his alleged attack Wednesday on a Charleston black church.) Photos of Roof hosted on the website were taken this spring, according to metadata. The writer of the text says he was “not raised in a racist environment,” and that the shooting of Trayvon Martin led him to investigate what he called “black on white crime” through the webpage of local hate group Council of Conservative Citizens. “I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country,” the author writes. “We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.” The site includes references two films, Romper Stomper (in which Russell Crowe plays a neo-Nazi) and Himzu, a Japanese film in which the protagonist “attempts to improve society by killing ‘bad’ people.” The Daily Beast’s Shane Harris reports that the Federal Bureau of Investigation says it is aware of the website but has no further comment at this time.

As you know, there are still active KKK chapters all over the country. I’m not exactly sure what makes a 21 year old feel so disenfranchised that he has to go above and beyond their existent presences in our country after
all these years, but it does bear some discussion.   It lets us know that not all of them are dying off.  How many heads does this Hydra have?  I had figured he’d been active in the various white supremacist websites and that sooner or later we’d dig stuff up on him. 

In one picture, Mr. Roof is shown posing with wax figures of slaves. In others, he posed with a handgun that appears to be a .45-caliber Glock. He had a .45-caliber Glock in his car when he was arrested Thursday, the police said.

Mr. Roof is alone in all the photos, which appear to have been taken at a slave plantation and at the Museum and Library of Confederate History in Greenville, S.C. He has the same gloomy look in many of the photos — no one else is shown — but others depict nature scenes and what appear to be vacation photographs.

Several photos show him with the number 88 or 1488 written in sand. The numbers are well-known white supremacy codes.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center’s glossary of skinhead terms, “Fourteen stands for the ‘14 words’ slogan coined by David Lane, who is serving a 190-year sentence for his part in the assassination of a Jewish talk show host: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.’” The letter H is the eighth letter of the alphabet, so 88 is a known code for “Heil, Hitler.”

The website’s links contain several passages of long racist rants, saying Hispanics are enemies and “Negroes” have lower I.Q.s and low impulse control. The writings are not signed.

Watchdog groups that track right-wing extremism say the language of the manifesto reflects the rhetoric found in white supremacist forums online and dovetails with what has been said about Mr. Roof thus far, including that he had self-radicalized, and that he did not belong to a particular hate group.

“It’s clear that he was extremely receptive to those ideas,” said Mark Pitcavage, the director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “At the same time, he does not have a sophisticated knowledge of white supremacy.”

So, he is the typical lone wolf shooter.  But, his particular brand of motivating hatred has deep cultural roots that are alive many places throughout this country.  There have been two significant peaks in the activity of these kinds of shooters.  The last peak was during the Clinton administration.  Of course, this current binge is due to the Obama presidency.   Here’ is Sheila Kennedy’s take.

America’s inability to overcome our deeply entrenched racism, however, is at the top of that list.

I’m seventy-three years old. I’ve seen overt racism decline substantially over my lifetime. We passed civil rights laws. Nice people stopped telling racist jokes at cocktail parties. Intermarriages increased and disapproval of those unions decreased. We prepared to elect a biracial President. It seemed that the arc of history was–in Martin Luther King’s words–bending toward justice.

Then Barack Obama was elected, and overt racism came roaring back.

All the old white guys (and let’s be honest, plenty of old white gals) who’d been trying to cope with the fact that their lives hadn’t turned out the way they’d hoped, who’d been getting up each morning to a world in which they were no longer automatically superior simply by virtue of their skin color, suddenly had a black President. And they just couldn’t handle it.

The rocks lifted. The nastiness, the resentment, the smallness oozed out.

The internet “jokes,” the Fox News dog-whistles, the political pandering that barely tries to camouflage its racial animus–they’ve all contributed to a new-old social norm in which racism is winked at, and if noticed at all, justified with urban legends about African-Americans and outright lies about the President.

Every inadequate excuse for a human being who has forwarded a vile email about the President and his family, every gun nut claiming that people wouldn’t have been killed if only the pastor had been armed (in church!), every snide “commentator” who has spent the last six years making a nice living by playing to racist stereotypes–every one of them created the culture within which this terrorist acted. Every one of them is a co-conspirator in this mass murder.

And don’t get me started on a culture that lets any man insecure in his masculinity–no matter how mentally ill, no matter how demonstrably violent– substitute a deadly weapon for that missing piece of his anatomy.

I think that social media and the ability to get at metadata has made it much easier to find these folks out.  Most overt racists are not likely inclined to massacre people in a church, but they exist and do damage from all kinds of places.  Take the judge, for instance, who has just heard Roof’s illegal weapons charge.  When I heard he told every one to remember the shooter’s family as well as the victims I heard the long, slow blare of the good ol’ boy dog whistle.  Sure enough, some intrepid journalist found these things.

Charleston County Magistrate James B. Gosnell began Friday’s bond hearing for mass-murderer Dylann Roof by declaring that the killer’s family members were victims as well.

At least he did not repeat an opinion that he offered in another proceeding a dozen years ago.

“There are four kinds of people in this world—black people, white people, red necks, and n—rs,” Gosnell advised a black defendant in a November 6, 2003 bond reduction hearing.

If you really want an eye-opener, try googling KKK membership and police officers. The most recent news is from an Alabama City.

Josh Doggrell is a Lieutenant on the force. He is also the founder and chair of his area League of the South chapter. The League of the South (LOS) is a white supremacist organization that calls for southern states to secede and establish a Christian theocratic state run by “Anglo-Celtics.” Doggrell has belonged to the group since 1995.

During a 2013 LOS meeting, Doggrell told the gathered crowd that his supervisors at the department were not only aware of his racist affiliations, they actively agreed with them.

“The vast majority of men in uniform are aware that they’re southerners,” Doggrell said from the podium. “And kith and kin comes before illegal national mandates.”

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the concept of kith and kin comes from “an explicitly racist ideology called ‘kinism,’ which calls for “laws against racial intermarriage, an end to non-white immigration, expelling all ‘aliens’ (‘to include all Jews and Arabs’), and restricting the right to vote to white, landholding men over the age of 21.”

“I went in and told the chief last year,” Doggrell told the assembly of white supremacists, in recounting his no-secrets policy at work about his LOS affiliation, “I’m not going to sell out my position with the League, as something I believe in strongly. If it came down to it, I’d choose the League.”

“Is there anything you want to ask me?” Doggrell wanted to know of his supervisor.

“You just answered every question I have… We pretty much think like you do,” Doggrell’s chief reportedly replied.

Doggrell’s colleague, Wayne Brown, attended the LOS meeting as well and also currently serves as a Lietuenant with the Anniston police.

The Southern Poverty Law Center recently learned of video footage from the 2013 meeting, which the Southern Nationalist Network originally posted two years ago. The civil rights advocacy group promptly alerted the Anniston police, who referred the matter to the city manager, Brian Johnson. Johnson said a police officer shouldn’t be fired for belonging to a hate group, even if they belong to the Ku Klux Klan.

“I do not believe that someone could be terminated solely based on their private sector membership in a properly formed legal organization,” Johnson says, “as hateful as the KKK might be.”

On the League of the South’s website, Doggrell’s biography says he has been a “peace officer in his home city/county for sixteen years.”

Yes, League of the “South” is probably one of those clubs that loves to fly the Confederate Flag and claim pride in culture.  When will elected officials in the south see this as something other than simple tribal pride?  Dylann Storm Roof is the tip of the iceberg here. Almost a year ago, two Florida cops were found to have KKK membership.

Echoing the once-segregated South, a Florida deputy police chief has resigned and an officer has been fired after the FBI reported that both belonged to the Ku Klux Klan

Fruitland Park Deputy Chief David Borst has denied involvement with the notorious white-hooded hate group that emerged after the Civil War and continued to terrorize and murder blacks through the mid-20th century.

The 49-year-old Borst, a department veteran of more than 20 years, was also fire chief for the Lake County city of 5,000, about 40 miles northwest of Orlando. He resigned both posts Thursday after being confronted with the FBI report.

Officer George Hunnewell, who was demoted last year over performance and attitude complaints, was fired Friday by Chief Terry Isaacs.

The state attorney’s office is reviewing every arrest made by the officers and giving particular scrutiny to cases involving minorities, Isaacs said.

It is the second time in five years that Klansmen have been found in the Fruitland Park Police Department. In 2009, Officer James Elkins resigned after photographs showed him in a white robe and pointy hood, and he later admitted he was a leader of the local KKK.

In the current cases, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement gave Isaacs a summary of an FBI investigation based on information from a confidential source who linked both officers to the Klan. No criminal wrongdoing was found, and the FBI said no other officers were linked to the white supremacists.

Chief Deputy State Attorney Ric Ridgway, whom Isaac contacted for advice, told the Orlando Sentinel that the report contained “a lot of fairly substantial evidence that tends to support” Borst’s and Hunnewell’s Klan membership.

But he pointed out that it’s not illegal to belong to the KKK “even if you are the deputy chief.”

“It’s not a crime to hate people. It may be despicable, it may be immoral, but it’s not a crime,” he said.

It may not be a crime to hate people and it may not be illegal to belong to the KKK but it certainly is a feature that would twist the actions and thoughts of some one policing a diverse community.  Five years ago, The Orlando Sentinel interviewed an Imperial Wizard who boasted that many police officers were members of the KKK.

The Imperial Wizard of the United Northern and Southern Knights of the Ku Klux Klan is guarded about discussing his organization’s membership.

But this much Cole Thornton openly shares: Florida cops belong to his Klan group because he said they like its rigid standards and its adherence to a strict moral code.

“They [police officers] like the fact that we support law enforcement,” said Thornton, who is based in the Gulf Coast community of Englewood. “These guys are out there putting their lives on the line, and we back them.”

He would not name those law-enforcement officers, but Thornton said he thinks that being a member of a “traditional Klan” group “makes them a better cop.”

Thornton’s comments come in the wake of the firing of an Alachua County corrections officer who acknowledged he was a member of Thornton’s Klan organization. Wayne Kerschner was fired Dec.29.

A year ago, the Fruitland Park Police Department investigated one of its officers who was linked to Klan groups. James Elkins denied he was associated with a Klan chapter and resigned.

Florida ranks third nationally, behind California and Texas, in the overall number of identified hate groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based group that provides tolerance-education programs, offers legal representation against white supremacists and tracks hate groups. The center defines a hate group as one that states other groups or people are somehow lesser or inferior.

Mark Potok, director of the center’s Intelligence Project, which investigates such groups, said membership in organizations such as Thornton’s have swelled in recent years.

However, Potok has found no evidence that Klan membership by police officers in Florida — or any other state — is on the uptick. He knew of one other case, in Nebraska, of an officer being removed because of his Klan affiliation.

Dylan Storm Front is quite deluded if he thinks that the Klan is just a group of chat buddies on the web. He’s also less dangerous than folks that appear to take them seriously.  Raise your hand if you still believe the Steve Scalise didn’t know what he was doing when he attended a convention of white supremacists or when he and other Louisiana Republican politicians went after David Duke’s mailing list?

How Rep. Steve Scalise, the third-ranking Republican in the House, came to speak at a white supremacist rally in 2002 —  or right before it — remains a confusing controversy as Congress returns for its new session on Jan. 6.

Conflicting accounts and the fog of time have all clouded the events of May 2002, when the European-American Unity and Rights Organization held a conference in the New Orleans area. The group, identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group with anti-semitic and racist writings, was headed by David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and prominent Louisiana politician.

Readers first tipped us off to Scalise’s alleged involvement with the Duke group on Dec. 29, 2014, hours after a Louisiana blogger first broke the story. Later, Scalise, a Louisiana Republican and House majority whip, admitted, to a degree, that he spoke at the rally, though he also said he doesn’t remember doing so and denounced the group. An organizer for the event now says Scalise didn’t even attend. So far, we’ve found no videos or photographs from the event.

Republican leaders have stood by Scalise, and he isn’t in danger of losing his leadership position when the new Congress begins.

Scalise was given the benefit of the doubt. But, the fact remains that there are very active white supremacist groups in Louisiana and they are able to get access to nearly anyone.  I always link to the Southern Poverty Law Center because it openly monitors these groups. Right Wing Watch–affiliated with People for the American Way–is also a good watchdog of these extremists.

My point in all of this is not to take away the focus on Dylann Storm Roof who massacred 9 Black Americans in a church with historic connections to abolition. My point is to say that how many police offers with ties to the KKK exist for every one Dylann Storm Roof?  How many judges with obvious sympathies?  How many right wing Republicans with staff, connections, and voters that identify thusly?  After all, why is it so damned hard to get that flag put into the same category as the Nazi Swastika?   Lindsay Graham is a long serving US Senator and he continually defends the use of the flag of slavery, treason, and oppression.

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina came to the defense of the South Carolina Confederate flag display yesterday, describing it as an integral “part of who we are”

While Graham did admit to CNN that the flag has been “used in a racist way” in the past, he argued that “the problems we have in south Carolina and the world are not because of a movie or a symbol, it’s about what’s in people’s heart.”

He added that South Carolina’s “compromise” of having both a Confederate War memorial and an African American memorial at the state capitol “works.”

Other Republican supporters include Mike Huckabee and Rick Perry.

During his last presidential campaign, Rick Perry came under scrutiny for his efforts to oppose the removal of the Confederate flag from display at the statehouse when he was lieutenant governor of Texas. In a March, 2000 letter to the Sons of Confederate Veterans obtained by the Associated Press, Perry wrote, “Although this is an emotional issue, I want you to know that I oppose efforts to remove Confederate flag to remain on government buildings and public property.

It’s an incredible coincidence that the day of the slaughter also saw a Supreme Court that decided a Texas License Plate lawsuit over the confederate flag.  It’s an incredible shame that we still have to remind people of what that flag stands for.  There are way too many symbols that are allowed to carry on with explicit sanction by State and Local Governments.  That’s the bigger issue here.  So many so-called leaders want to believe that this is just an expression of “southern pride” and not the history it truly represents.  Individual citizens can certainly display bigoted views and objects as is their right.  But when it looks like a governmental sanction of hatred, the community should draw the line and draw it boldly.   It’s pretty obvious when even this Supreme Court recognizes it as “government speech”.  I’d also just like to say it’s a damned shame that the black man that sits in Thurmond Marshall’s seat is the only dissenter.

The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that messages displayed on specialized license plates are a form of government speech and Texas is free to reject a proposed design that features the Confederate flag.

Justice Clarence Thomas, the court’s only African American justice, split with fellow conservatives and joined the court’s liberals in the 5-to-4 decision. The majority held that the design proposed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans would not simply reflect the views of the motorist who purchased it, but implicate the state in speech it did not want to endorse.

No more confederate flags flying over government institutions!  PERIOD!  It’s time to recognize it for what it is all over the country.

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?