sydneyflapper:

wonderfinch:

unhistorical:

Victorian-era portraits of African-Americans, 1899 or 1900; from a collection assembled by W.E.B. Du Bois for the Exposition Nègres d’Amerique of the1900 Exposition Universelle. 

Library of Congress

Fuck everyone who says black people look wrong in period clothing or would not have had access to this sort of clothing. Just seriously fuck you.

William Edward Burghardt “W. E. B.” Du Bois is a fascinating and inspiring figure, an uncompromising civil rights activist (literally uncompromising - he rejected Booker T Washington’s Atlanta Compromise, an unwritten deal struck with Southern leaders in the aftermath of the Reconstruction era, in which African-Americans would submit to.discrimination, segregation, lack of voting rights and non-unionized employment and in return Southern whites would “permit” blacks to receive a basic education, some economic opportunities, and justice within the legal system; Du Bois called for nothing less than full equal rights.)

Du Bois and Booker T Washington, who together organised the Exposition Nègres d’Amerique, worked with Washington’s friend Frances Benjamin Johnston (a pioneering female photographer and photojournalist) to take photos of students at the Hampton Institute. The photographs were specifically compiled to counter stereotypes and the predominant white narrative about African-Americans, showcasing their success and diversity. The exhibition won several awards.

crackerhell:

many-worlds:

[Image: The Mississippi flag, which features the Confederate flag prominently within it. Text: On Feb 7th, Mississippi finally, officially, ratified the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery. That’s Feb 7th, 2013. Apparently it was an “oversight” but when you spend most of your time attacking women’s rights, some stuff is gonna slip through the cracks.”] End.

crackerhell:

whycantipickafuckingurl:

You can read about this here

ahahahahahahaha

This sort of obscures the point that what Mississippi spends most of its time doing is fucking over Black people and Black people’s rights, whether they are women or otherwise. That’s the lesson in them not getting around to officially ratifying the 13th Amendment: that white people of any sex are their priority, not that men are.

bold

biomedicalephemera:

Bone saws from the 17th and 18th centuries

Bone saws were some of the most commonly-used medical instruments during the Renaissance, as amputation was one of the most common surgical procedures performed.

Unfortunately for the patients, just like so much else during the 17th and 18th centuries, style and status was a huge thing for the surgeons, like so many other elites in society. Since the surgeries were often performed in surgical theaters, a great way for surgeons to show off their status was with ornately decorated surgical instruments - and the bone saws were often the most ornate of all.

Aside from being uncomfortable to hold, the gilt or carved cedar or ebony handles, and the ornately-embellished frames, were perfect places for bacteria to fester, and to transfer from patient-to-patient. The more elite the surgeon, the fancier the saw - and the deadlier the consequences.

Models located at Science Museum London, originally created ca. 1650-1780.

littlemissmutant:

aninvisibleman:

1. Parks had been thrown off the bus a decade earlier by the same bus driver — for refusing to pay in the front and go around to the back to board. She had avoided that driver’s bus for twelve years because she knew well the risks of angering drivers, all of whom were white and carried guns. Her own mother had been threatened with physical violence by a bus driver, in front of Parks who was a child at the time. Parks’ neighbor had been killed for his bus stand, and teenage protester Claudette Colvin, among others, had recently been badly manhandled by the police.

2. Parks was a lifelong believer in self-defense. Malcolm X was her personal hero. Her family kept a gun in the house, including during the boycott, because of the daily terror of white violence. As a child, when pushed by a white boy, she pushed back. His mother threatened to kill her, but Parks stood her ground. Another time, she held a brick up to a white bully, daring him to follow through on his threat to hit her. He went away. When the Klu Klux Klan went on rampages through her childhood town, Pine Level, Ala., her grandfather would sit on the porch all night with his rifle. Rosa stayed awake some nights, keeping vigil with him.

3. Her husband was her political partner. Parks said Raymond was “the first real activist I ever met.” Initially she wasn’t romantically interested because Raymond was more light-skinned than she preferred, but she became impressed with his boldness and “that he refused to be intimidated by white people.” When they met he was working to free the nine Scottsboro boys and she joined these efforts after they were married. At Raymond’s urging, Parks, who had to drop out in the eleventh grade to care for her sick grandmother, returned to high school and got her diploma. Raymond’s input was crucial to Parks’ political development and their partnership sustained her political work over many decades.

4. Many of Parks’ ancestors were Indians. She noted this to a friend who was surprised when in private Parks removed her hairpins and revealed thick braids of wavy hair that fell below her waist. Her husband, she said, liked her hair long and she kept it that way for many years after his death, although she never wore it down in public. Aware of the racial politics of hair and appearance, she tucked it away in a series of braids and buns — maintaining a clear division between her public presentation and private person.

5. Parks’ arrest had grave consequences for her family’s health and economic well-being. After her arrest, Parks was continually threatened, such that her mother talked for hours on the phone to keep the line busy from constant death threats. Parks and her husband lost their jobs after her stand and didn’t find full employment for nearly ten years. Even as she made fundraising appearances across the country, Parks and her family were at times nearly destitute. She developed painful stomach ulcers and a heart condition, and suffered from chronic insomnia. Raymond, unnerved by the relentless harassment and death threats, began drinking heavily and suffered two nervous breakdowns. The black press, culminating in JET magazine’s July 1960 story on “the bus boycott’s forgotten woman,” exposed the depth of Parks’ financial need, leading civil rights groups to finally provide some assistance.

6. Parks spent more than half of her life in the North. The Parks family had to leave Montgomery eight months after the boycott ended. She lived for most of that time in Detroit in the heart of the ghetto, just a mile from the epicenter of the 1967 Detroit riot. There, she spent nearly five decades organizing and protesting racial inequality in “the promised land that wasn’t.”

7. In 1965 Parks got her first paid political position, after over two decades of political work. After volunteering for Congressman John Conyers’s long shot political campaign, Parks helped secure his primary victory by convincing Martin Luther King, Jr. to come to Detroit on Conyers’s behalf. He later hired her to work with constituents as an administrative assistant in his Detroit office. For the first time since her bus stand, Parks finally had a salary, access to health insurance, and a pension — and the restoration of dignity that a formal paid position allowed.

8. Parks was far more radical than has been understood. She worked alongside the Black Power movement, particularly around issues such as reparations, black history, anti-police brutality, freedom for black political prisoners, independent black political power, and economic justice. She attended the Black Political Convention in Gary and the Black Power conference in Philadelphia. She journeyed to Lowndes County, Alabama to support the movement there, spoke at the Poor People’s Campaign, helped organize support committees on behalf of black political prisoners such as the Wilmington 10 and Imari Obadele of the Republic of New Africa, and paid a visit of support to the Black Panther school in Oakland, CA.

9. Parks was an internationalist. She was an early opponent of the Vietnam War in the early 1960s, a member of The Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and a supporter of the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit and the Jeannette Rankin Brigade protest in D.C. In the 1980s, she protested apartheid and U.S. complicity, joining a picket outside the South African embassy and opposed U.S. policy in Central America. Eight days after 9/11, she joined other activists in a letter calling on the United States to work with the international community and no retaliation or war.

10. Parks was a lifelong activist and a hero to many, including Nelson Mandela. After his release from prison, he told her, “You sustained me while I was in prison all those years.”

This is so great to know and I knew absolutely none of it before reading this post. Should be taught in schools.

hominisaevum:

After many weeks of anticipation, it is now officially safe to state that these are the remains of Richard III.

Richard Buckley (aptly named) announced that “beyond reasonable doubt the individual exhumed at Grey Friars on September 12th is indeed Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England”. 

A detailed description of wounds found on the skeleton, as well as other interesting evidence can be found in The Guardian. The page is updated by the minutes, so stay tuned.

archaeologicalnews:

The body of the lost and vilified English king Richard III has finally been found.

Archaeologists announced today (Feb. 4) that bones excavated from underneath a parking lot in Leicester, “beyond reasonable doubt,” belong to the medieval king. Archaeologists announced the discovery of the skeleton in September. They suspected then they might have Richard III on their hands because the skeleton showed signs of the spinal disorder scoliosis, which Richard III likely had, and because battle wounds on the bones matched accounts of Richard III’s death in the War of the Roses.

The announcement comes a day after the archaeologists had released an image of the king’s battle-scarred skull.

To confirm the hunch, however, researchers at the University of Leicester conducted a series of tests, including extracting DNA from the teeth and a bone for comparison with Michael Ibsen, a modern-day descendant of Richard III’s sister Anne of York. Read more.

pbsthisdayinhistory:

January 17, 1893: The End of the Hawaiian Monarchy

On this day in 1893, Queen Lili’uokalani of Hawaii was overthrown by local businessmen and US Marines and forced to surrender the Hawaiian kingdom to the United States.

This was in retaliation of Lili’uokalani’s attempts to implement a new constitution that would restore power to the throne and restore the voting rights of the Hawaiian people. 

In 1898, Hawaii was annexed into the United States, and a year later, it became a US territory. 

 For more on Lili’uokalani, dive deep into American Experience’s timeline of Hawaii’s last queen.

mehreenkasana: farahjoon:

african goon: Today solidified why despite being unabashedly pro-choice, I will never bring myself to join hands with western feminism’s version of “abortion freedom”.

rivertrash: farahjoon: eastafrodite:

Today solidified why despite being unabashededly pro-choice, I will never bring myself to join hands with western feminism’s version of “abortion freedom”.

I went to a feminist meeting with a friend on her campus (she invited me) and the issue of “overpopulation” comes up and displays women from various nations (particularly Somalia, Ethiopia and India) in which they seem to be struggling to take care of their children and the slideshow insinuated, “if these women had an opportunity to get an abortion, they would”. That message is not only patently false, but it’s also incredibly offense and disingenuous.

Misogyny is a huge issue in many of these nations, no doubt and reproductive rights are deeply stifled and neglected, as well as prenatal care. It’d be foolish to deny such a reality. But, to showcase women with five, six, up to ten children, as somehow being oppressed by their circumstances and painting huge families as leeches and parasites to the well-being and livelihood of women in the third world is dishonest, hyperbolized and frankly, bullshit propaganda. It suggests that women of the third world have absolutely no agency and are somehow forced to have these children (which thereby means that every large family is the cause of rape, essentially), which is demeaning to every woman’s advocacy movement that have taken place in the aforementioned regions. In addition, it portrays brown and black children as a nuisance, something that the world needs less of, which is disgusting, racist and directly aligns with neoimperialist initiatives.

Also, as someone who comes from an African country where the average family bears 4-5 children, I know firsthand that children are assets to their family, above anything. From my experience, women tend to have more children as sort of a safety net; arguably husbands are more likely to die first, so the more children a woman has, the chances of her being taken care of and accounted for are higher. In face the of heightened risks of early death, disease, poverty, war, etc. this is a premeditated move, an action of resistance to ensure one’s survival. In Eritrea, there are children (up to eight years old) who sell gum, tissues and other small merchandise after school to help provide for their families and continue to do so into their teenage years. This, as unpleasant as it may seem, is the reality. Children serve a purpose. They’re an ecomonic resource to their families.

To assert with pictures which provide no nuance, that mothers with their children are helpless, needy and their families repress them is a gross misconstruction of the realities that these women face and it does nothing but assert that western feminism, in all of its narcissism, will ignore and distort context to appeal to its own agenda.

^ so fucking important

this “ABORTIONS FOR ALL” rhetoric is reckless, ethnocentric nonsense

let’s talk about EUGENICS

let’s talk about the United States’ legacy of EUGENICS

let’s talk about the exploitation of working-class communities of color

let’s talk about the Nixon administration’s 1970 establishment of “family planning services” which target inner-city populations

let’s talk about Madrigal v. Quilligan, the policing of fertile bodies of color by fascist white professionals, and the naturalization of non-consensual, coercive sterilization practices

let’s talk about the acute colonization of Puerto Rico and the ways in which Puerto Rican women have been corporeally subjugated, not only becoming receptacles for American contraceptive experiments yet also being rendered completely infertile via tubal ligation (reproductive justice activist and professor Elena R. Gutiérrez notes that “By 1965 about 35 percent of the women in Puerto Rico had been sterilized, two-thirds of them in their 20s.”)

let’s talk about the year 1973

let’s talk about how, while affluent, white, second-wave feminists were still celebrating Roe v. Wade, Relf v. Weinberger was happening

let’s talk about the Relf sisters and the intersection of race, class, gender, and ability

we can no longer afford to ignore these histories

we can no longer afford to let people, however unwittingly, promote the co-optation of “choice”

feminisms cannot survive and evolve and grow richer and stronger without a deep recognition of the myriad fictions of liberation

“The progressive potential of birth control remains indisputable. But in actuality, the historical record of this movement leaves much to be desired in the realm of challenges to racism and class exploitation.” -Angela Davis

reblogging to add that an acquaintance of mine is working on a dissertation for her Ph.D in Hawaiian Studies that details early eugenics programs forced on Hawaiian women when white missionaries showed up

also the Hyde Amendment, how “the movement” didn’t give a shit enough about poor women and women of color to fight that shit. which is one of the most damaging things in contemporary abortion/women’s health access and a big reason women can’t afford terminations and clinics have a hard time staying open.

Read.

oxfordcommas:

10 Things You Should Know About Slavery and Won’t Learn at ‘Django’

Consequently, here’s my top-10 list of things everyone should know about the economic roots of slavery.

1) Slavery laid the foundation for the modern international economic system.
The massive infrastructure required to move 8 to 10 million Africans halfway around the world built entire cities in England and France, such as Liverpool, Manchester and Bordeaux. It was key to London’s emergence as a global capital of commerce, and spurred New York’s rise as a center of finance. The industry to construct, fund, staff, and administer the thousands of ships which made close to 50,000 individual voyages was alone a herculean task. The international financial and distribution networks required to coordinate, maintain and profit from slavery set the framework for the modern global economy.

2) Africans’ economic skills were a leading reason for their enslavement.
Africans possessed unique expertise which Europeans required to make their colonial ventures successful. Africans knew how to grow and cultivate crops in tropical and semi-tropical climates. African rice growers, for instance, were captured in order to bring their agricultural knowledge to America’s sea islands and those of the Caribbean. Many West African civilizations possessed goldsmiths and expert metal workers on a grand scale. These slaves were snatched to work in Spanish and Portuguese gold and silver mines throughout Central and South America. Contrary to the myth of unskilled labor, large numbers of Africans were anything but.

3) African know-how transformed slave economies into some of the wealthiest on the planet.
The fruits of the slave trade funded the growth of global empires. The greatest source of wealth for imperial France was the “white gold” of sugar produced by Africans in Haiti. More riches flowed to Britain from the slave economy of Jamaica than all of the original American 13 colonies combined. Those resources underwrote the Industrial Revolution and vast improvements in Western Europe’s economic infrastructure.

4) Until it was destroyed by the Civil War, slavery made the American South the richest and most powerful region in America.
Slavery was a national enterprise, but the economic and political center of gravity during the U.S.’s first incarnation as a slave republic was the South. This was true even during the colonial era. Virginia was its richest colony and George Washington was one of its wealthiest people because of his slaves. The majority of the new country’s presidents and Supreme Court justices were Southerners.

However, the invention of the cotton gin took the South’s national economic dominance and transformed it into a global phenomenon. British demand for American cotton, as I have written before, made the southern stretch of the Mississippi River the Silicon Valley of its era. The single largest concentration of America’s millionaires was gathered in plantations along the Mississippi’s banks. The first and only president of the Confederacy—Jefferson Davis—was a Mississippi, millionaire slave holder.

5) Defense of slavery, more than taxes, was pivotal to America’s declaration of independence.
The South had long resisted Northern calls to leave the British Empire. That’s because the South sold most of its slave-produced products to Britain and relied on the British Navy to protect the slave trade. But a court case in England changed all of that. In 1775, a British court ruled that slaves could not be held in the United Kingdom against their will. Fearing that the ruling would apply to the American colonies, the Southern planters swung behind the Northern push for greater autonomy. In 1776, one year later, America left its former colonial master. The issue of slavery was so powerful that it changed the course of history.

6) The brutalization and psychological torture of slaves was designed to ensure that plantations stayed in the black financially.
Slave revolts and acts of sabotage were relatively common on Southern plantations. As economic enterprises, the disruption in production was bad for business. Over time a system of oppression emerged to keep things humming along. This centered on singling out slaves for public torture who had either participated in acts of defiance or who tended towards noncompliance. In fact, the most recalcitrant slaves were sent to institutions, such as the “Sugar House” in Charleston, S.C., where cruelty was used to elicit cooperation. Slavery’s most inhumane aspects were just another tool to guarantee the bottom line.

7) The economic success of former slaves during Reconstruction led to the rise of the Klu Klux Klan.
In less than 10 years after the end of slavery, blacks created thriving communities and had gained political power—including governorships and Senate seats—across the South. Former slaves, such Atlanta’s Alonzo Herndon, had even become millionaires in the post-war period. But the move towards black economic empowerment had upset the old economic order. Former planters organized themselves into White Citizens Councils and created an armed wing—the Klu Klux Klan—to undermine black economic institutions and to force blacks into sharecropping on unfair terms. Isabel Wilkerson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Warmth of Other Suns”, details the targeting of black individuals, as well as entire black communities, for acts of terror whose purpose was to enforce economic apartheid.

8) The desire to maintain economic oppression is why the South was one of the most anti-tax regions of the nation.
Before the Civil War, the South routinely blocked national infrastructure protects. These plans, focused on Northern and Western states, would have moved non-slave goods to market quickly and cheaply. The South worried that such investments would increase the power of the free-labor economy and hurt their own, which was based on slavery. Moreover, the South was vehemently opposed to taxes even to improve the lives of non-slaveholding white citizens. The first public school in the North, Boston Latin, opened its doors in the mid-1600s. The first public school in the South opened 200 years later. Maintenance of slavery was the South’s top priority to the detriment of everything else.

9) Many firms on Wall Street made fortunes from funding the slave trade.
Investment in slavery was one of the most profitable economic activities throughout most of New York’s 350 year history. Much of the financing for the slave economy flowed through New York banks. Marquis names such as JP Morgan Chase and New York Life all profited greatly from slavery. Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street’s largest firms until 2008, got its start in the slave economy of Alabama. Slavery was so important to the city that New York was one the most pro-slavery urban municipalities in the North.

10) The wealth gap between whites and blacks, the result of slavery, has yet to be closed.
The total value of slaves, or “property” as they were then known, could exceed $12 million in today’s dollars on the largest plantations. With land, machinery, crops and buildings added in, the wealth of southern agricultural enterprises was truly astronomical. Yet when slavery ended, the people that generated the wealth received nothing.

The country has struggled with the implications of this inequity ever since. With policy changes in Washington since 1865, sometimes this economic gulf has narrowed and sometimes it’s widened, but the economic difference has never been erased. Today, the wealth gap between whites and blacks is the largest recorded since records began to be kept three decades ago.

Definitely didn’t know a bunch of this.

alostbird:

Black Pioneers: An Untold Story By William Loren Katz

Out of a past little noted in history texts comes this tale of African American pioneers in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys. These pathfinders were slaves, poets, runaways, missionaries, farmers, teachers, and soldiers. For these African Americans, the frontier meant freedom, and from the earliest times, some seized liberty by joining Indian nations.

As Southern slaveholders tried to pass laws to make slavery legal in the West and territorial legislatures wrote “Black Laws” that limited basic rights to white settlers, African American pioneers became freedom fighters. From Ohio to Kansas they battled slavehunters and developed Underground Railroad stations. Black families built their own schools and churches and created unique forms of protest to ensure their advancement.

Historian William Loren Katz reveals a frontier saga that has often been buried, glossed over, or lost.