Citizenship has remained illusive and elusive to many black people. Many have sought "civil rights," to test the accessibility of citizenship.
"Citizenship" had been deemed to be for "whites," exclusively; "white" means not black. "Black" meant the antithesis of "white" in all material things . It meant descended from the imported African descendants. It meant oppression; being innately inferior indeed to white supremacy in anything of value, however small!
Blacks were purposefully denied citizenship as a gravamen, a tenet, of the United States Constitution. They were deemed to be chattel , equivalent to livestock, inhuman.
Blacks were deemed 3/5s of a man in Article I, sec.2. Article IV denied any slave escaping to a free state, the benefit of any law in that state freeing them ; instead, the fugitive was to be offered up to its alleged owner. It required their capture and return. This fact was reinforced as early as 1842, by the United States Supreme Court to black people, in "Prigg v. Pennsylvania," by myriad assorted contrivances and means.
In Prigg, a Maryland slave catcher had violated Pennsylvania laws, against such, when he and others entered, captured and returned a black woman to Maryland, whence she earlier had escaped. He was prosecuted under Pennsylvania state law and was convicted of violating its laws. But the Supreme Court freed Prigg based on its federal laws. Chief Justice Roger Taney, of Dred Scott infamy, did not author the "Prigg" decision. But Taney freed Prigg, along with the majority, in the first case to address blacks' status, directly, on high .
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prigg_v._Pennsylvania
As the 1840s-1860 witnessed the Underground Railroad, 1940-1960 evidenced its overground siblings. Mass migrations were flights from oppression, from killings still being waged, vengefully, by terroristic whites, who escaped prosecution!
"All around the state, the pace of deadly violence steadily increased as the councils grew . In Belzoni, the county seat of Humphrey's County, Reverend George Lee and Gus Counts, a grocer , organized an NAACP branch in 1954. Its membership grew rapidly . The following year, just a few days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court 's 'Brown' decision , Lee was driving home from an RCNL meeting. A car pulled up beside him and someone inside shot him to death . Sheriff Ike Skelton suggested that Lee somehow lost control of his car and that the lead pellets found in what was left of his jaw might be teeth fillings. As the "Jackson Clarion-Ledger," Mississippi's only daily newspaper , headlined Lee's murder: 'Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident.' Six months later, Counts barely escaped death when a car pulled in front of his grocery store and the occupants opened fire . Bullets hit Counts in the left arm and stomach . Shortly thereafter, he left the state for Chicago.
"With all the levers of power in white hands, and with stepped-up anti -black terrorism being encouraged by the state governments and largely ignored by the federal government, civil rights advancement has essentially come to a halt in the Deep South. Black voter registration which had been showing modest increases in the first half of the decade, declined sharply in the second half as white intimidation intensified. In 1955, before Counts was driven out of Belzoni, a Citizens Council member showed him a list of ninety -five black registered voters and told him that everyone on the list who failed to remove his or her name from the voter lists would be fired...
"Counts was by no means the only black leader to flee Mississippi ...."
P. 135, "I Wasn't Being Nonviolent,"
THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF 'LL GET YOU KILLED: HOW GUNS MADE THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT POSSIBLE, by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. (2016)
Perhaps nice legal distinctions and definitions between citizenship and civil rights are meaningless where blacks' lives are concerned, given the resolute legal indifference by which black people have been, and are now being regarded by state governments' white police power whose purveyors of death to them, are justified by the Supreme Court.
Sunday, November 5, 2017
NONVIOLENT STUFF, EXCERPT
Citizenship has remained illusive and elusive to many black people. Many have sought "civil rights," to test the accessibility of citizenship.
"Citizenship" had been deemed to be for "whites," exclusively; "white" means not black. "Black" meant the antithesis of "white" in all material things . It meant descended from the imported African descendants. It meant oppression; being innately inferior indeed to white supremacy in anything of value, however small!
Blacks were purposefully denied citizenship as a gravamen, a tenet, of the United States Constitution. They were deemed to be chattel , equivalent to livestock, inhuman.
Blacks were deemed 3/5s of a man in Article I, sec.2. Article IV denied any slave escaping to a free state, the benefit of any law in that state freeing them ; instead, the fugitive was to be offered up to its alleged owner. It required their capture and return. This fact was reinforced as early as 1842, by the United States Supreme Court to black people, in "Prigg v. Pennsylvania," by myriad assorted contrivances and means.
In Prigg, a Maryland slave catcher had violated Pennsylvania laws, against such, when he and others entered, captured and returned a black woman to Maryland, whence she earlier had escaped. He was prosecuted under Pennsylvania state law and was convicted of violating its laws. But the Supreme Court freed Prigg based on its federal laws. Chief Justice Roger Taney, of Dred Scott infamy, did not author the "Prigg" decision. But Taney freed Prigg, along with the majority, in the first case to address blacks' status, directly, on high .
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prigg_v._Pennsylvania
As the 1840s-1860 witnessed the Underground Railroad, 1940-1960 evidenced its overground siblings. Mass migrations were flights from oppression, from killings still being waged, vengefully, by terroristic whites, who escaped prosecution!
"All around the state, the pace of deadly violence steadily increased as the councils grew . In Belzoni, the county seat of Humphrey's County, Reverend George Lee and Gus Counts, a grocer , organized an NAACP branch in 1954. Its membership grew rapidly . The following year, just a few days before the anniversary of the Supreme Court 's 'Brown' decision , Lee was driving home from an RCNL meeting. A car pulled up beside him and someone inside shot him to death . Sheriff Ike Skelton suggested that Lee somehow lost control of his car and that the lead pellets found in what was left of his jaw might be teeth fillings. As the "Jackson Clarion-Ledger," Mississippi's only daily newspaper , headlined Lee's murder: 'Negro Leader Dies in Odd Accident.' Six months later, Counts barely escaped death when a car pulled in front of his grocery store and the occupants opened fire . Bullets hit Counts in the left arm and stomach . Shortly thereafter, he left the state for Chicago.
"With all the levers of power in white hands, and with stepped-up anti -black terrorism being encouraged by the state governments and largely ignored by the federal government, civil rights advancement has essentially come to a halt in the Deep South. Black voter registration which had been showing modest increases in the first half of the decade, declined sharply in the second half as white intimidation intensified. In 1955, before Counts was driven out of Belzoni, a Citizens Council member showed him a list of ninety -five black registered voters and told him that everyone on the list who failed to remove his or her name from the voter lists would be fired...
"Counts was by no means the only black leader to flee Mississippi ...."
P. 135, "I Wasn't Being Nonviolent,"
THIS NONVIOLENT STUFF 'LL GET YOU KILLED: HOW GUNS MADE THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT POSSIBLE, by Charles E. Cobb, Jr. (2016)
Perhaps nice legal distinctions and definitions between citizenship and civil rights are meaningless where blacks' lives are concerned, given the resolute legal indifference by which black people have been, and are now being regarded by state governments' white police power whose purveyors of death to them, are justified by the Supreme Court.