Eighty-seven years after a black janitor at the University of Missouri at Columbia was lynched before he could stand trial on rape charges, local and state officials have taken steps to publicize the ugly episode in the town’s history and correct the record, the Associated Press reports. The death certificate for the janitor, James T. Scott, who maintained that he had been a victim of mistaken identity, now states that he died of “asphyxia due to hanging by lynching by assailants.” The document also notes that he was “never tried or convicted of rape.” Mr. Scott, who was 35 and married, was arrested in April 1923 for the alleged rape of the teenage daughter of a German-literature professor. Within days, he was hanged by a mob that included university students and leading citizens. The professor, Hermann Almstedt, pleaded with the mob to stop, but was said to be threatened with a second lynching—his own.
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The facts of white violence against blacks in America are as long and vicious as Germany’s treatment of Jews in World War II. Many of the white people who participated in these acts or enabled them are still alive to this very day and they pass on their ignoble bigotries to future generations. Just like the murder of six million Jews in WWII, Americans and the world should be reminded of the outsize crimes against African-Americans perpetrated by vicious, ignorant, hateful whites (and, yes, the slave trade was BEGUN, funded, and facilitated chiefly by white Europeans from a variety of countries from Queen Elizabeth backward and forward; we do not say that Jews on mass caused their own murder when we note that there were a few Jews who collaborated with the Nazis to survive or for their own gains; thus we should not ignore the overwhelming evidence of primary, fundamental European CAUSE, planning, genocide, and profiteering from the Atlantic slave trade of Africans and the complex system of systemic white bigotry that continued through the era of lynching, through JIM CROW, through the dismantling of Civil Rights gains in the 1960s and 70s, through to the rise of white flight, black poverty, and the kinds of ills that even a black president cannot ameliorate.
Well put Johnny!
If you believe “the slave trade was BEGUN, funded, and facilitated chiefly by white Europeans from a variety of countries from Queen Elizabeth backward and forward” you don’t know very much about the history of slavery in Africa.
For scholarly support of 11221748′s implying that Africans sold Africans, go to http://www.ama.africatoday.com/complicity.htm. A sample statement: “. . . why did Africans (or rather African rulers, merchants and other decision makers) sell slaves to Europeans when it was so obviously immoral and harmful, is in fact a central problem and one that ought to be addressed seriously. It needs to be taken at least as seriously as why Europeans did the buying and transporting of slaves.”
John Thornton
Unfortunately no society, race, group or culture involving people seems to have existed that didn’t have some example of humans being inhumane to others in one form or another. Lack of respect has know no barrier of time, place or gender.