8,807 words

Cornel West
Race Matters
New York: Beacon Press, 1994

Cornel West’s Race Matters is about the black experience in America, much as one might expect. (more…)

1,457 words

1970’s Halls of Anger is low-budget, tense, sensational, but real. Calvin Lockhart plays Quincy Davis, an ex-basketball star who’s happy teaching in a suburban high school until integration comes and he’s reassigned to a ghetto school, as are several white students. The principal, Boyd Wilkerson (John McLiam), couldn’t care less about his students; he wants more federal money (from integration) and a chance to get elected to the school board. (more…)

1,255 words

On Sunday, August 9, 2020, five-year-old Cannon Hinnant, a white child set to start kindergarten later this month, was shot in the head outside his home in Wilson, North Carolina, while riding his bicycle in front of his sisters. Cannon was shot at close range by his black neighbor of several years, Darius N. Sessoms. (more…)

4,912 words

Part 1

Senator Bilbo excerpts from a compilation of fourteen essays by black notables in one of the recent egalitarian books, What the Negro Wants, edited by Rayford W. Logan (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). He identifies one of the authors, W. E. B. DuBois, (more…)

4,280 words

Theodore G. Bilbo
Take Your Choice: Separation or Mongrelization
Poplarville, Mississippi: Dream House (1947)

The final political testament by Senator Bilbo of Mississippi, Take Your Choice, is a useful opportunity to see how well old documents stand in the light of the present day. (more…)

“I’ve a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

3,923 words

I’m not going to claim that I have been totally 1488 from day one or that I came goose-stepping out of the womb. But I think I have always been instinctively and intuitively a race realist. Or at least, I have been since around the age of 8. The first black person I ever met was this kid named Scooter when I was in kindergarten. This would have been in the early 80s. (more…)

1,482 words

On the 15th of September, 1938, UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously flew across the English Channel (overcoming his fear of flying) for the monumental purpose of meeting Adolf Hitler at the Berghof in order to avert the Sudetenland crisis, and hopefully (yet futilely) avoid plunging Europe into a Second World War. Upon his departure, he gave an impromptu speech to the British press in which he offered his favorite childhood self-motivating pep talk, (more…)

2,307 words

G. M. Flanders
The Ebony Idol
New York: D. Appleton & Company, 1860

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the founding example of white guilt agitprop. Several books were written in response, including a work by Mrs. G. M. Flanders, The Ebony Idol. This obscure genre of counter-propaganda often is called plantation literature, though in this case, the main setting is an idyllic northern town, and effectively, it is more a critique of integration than of abolitionism. (more…)