By The NOI Research Group
Betsy Ross was credited with creating the first American flag, but that is doubtful. If there was any sewing going on—and there was—it was a Black woman doing it. The notorious stars-&-stripes was adopted in 1777, with its 13 stripes and circular array of thirteen 5-pointed stars.
The Confederate flag was raised in 1861 by White slave-owners in their violent attempt to preserve Black slavery. We are then told that Abraham Lincoln, having come to the decision that slavery was immoral and inhumane, “emancipated” the Black man, an action that intensified the Civil War.
This popular account may be good for Steven Spielberg’s White supremacist standards, but not for ours. A few historical realities stand in the way of this American fairy tale. Let us look at a few of Lincoln’s actions under the ol’ “RED, WHITE & BLUE”:
• While still engaged in the war, Lincoln placed his troops at the disposal of the governor of Maryland to repress a rumored slave insurrection.
• In 1861, when General John C. Fremont freed all slaves in the state of Missouri, Lincoln fired him. When General David Hunter freed the slaves in three states, Lincoln cancelled and then reversed the general’s order.
• Lincoln’s military camps were closed to runaway slaves, and some poor Black souls were actually captured by Union soldiers and returned to their rebel owners!
• Lincoln had no intention of establishing “integration” and in 1862 sent 450 “freed” slaves to an island off the coast of Haiti in an ill-fated colonization scheme. The navy had to be sent to retrieve the beleaguered Blacks.
• Lincoln publicly voiced support for the Fugitive Slave Law, which made every American citizen—North and South—responsible for catching runaway slaves.
The lifespan of the Confederate flag was but four years, and it could have been defeated a full two years sooner had not a Jewish banker named Emile Erlanger breathed life back into the Confederacy with a $7 million loan (about $125 million in today’s money), without which the South would have been unable to pay or arm its troops. This little-known act of treachery may have cost 300,000 white lives and enabled the slave trade to continue for even longer.
Nevertheless, the Star Spangled Banner won out—and that’s when the misery of the Black, the Brown, and the Red accelerated. Ask the Native Americans whether they see any difference between the two flags. The MASSACRES that have been recorded since the Confederate flag was retired in 1865 are what put the red in the stripes of the AMERICAN flag:
• Circleville Massacre (16 dead)
• Aquarius Mountains (23 dead)
• Campo Seco (33 dead)
• Washita Massacre (140 dead)
• Marias Massacre (173 dead)
• Kingsley Cave Massacre (30 dead)
• Camp Grant Massacre (144 dead)
• Skeleton Cave Massacre (76 dead)
• Cypress Hills Massacre (20 dead)
• Sappa Creek Massacre (27 dead)
• Big Hole Massacre (89 dead)
• Fort Robinson Massacre (77 dead)
• Stronghold (76 dead)
• Wounded Knee Massacre (250 dead)
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| The Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 |
With Lincoln dead, and the terrorist leaders forgiven, Whites reunited under the American flag, their first order of business was to establish white supremacy for all time. The Ku Klux Klan formed under the AMERICAN flag—not the Confederate flag—and much of its violence occurred in the north. They even had a chapter at Harvard University. Slavery was over, but the United States economy was still dominated by cotton production. In the so-called “Compromise of 1877,” Whites determined that bloody violence was essential to force the ex-slaves back onto the plantation in a new form of slavery called sharecropping; thus, the Reconstruction era was literally an American Orgy of anti-Black Terror & Violence.
Wholesale killings of Blacks occurred across the South with alarming frequency and shocking depravity. Most of these open racial slaughters resulted from attempts by Blacks to assert their citizenship rights, such as by voting or seeking political office, by setting up businesses, or by acquiring land or education. But much of it was just pure race hate. As one scholar wrote of postwar Whites: “They loathed the Negro and…were ready to hunt him like an animal.” So many Blacks were slaughtered in one genocidal incident in a Texas county that “vultures became a nuisance.” Think about that.
Here are a few instances in the “proud heritage” of White America.
• In Memphis, Tennessee, in 1866, a mob of Whites was said to have exhibited “a deadly hatred of the colored race” as it joined police officers in murdering at least 46 innocents and injuring 285. Rampaging Whites raped Black women and burned four Black churches and twelve Black schools.
• In New Orleans, Louisiana, that same year, White mobs murdered 34 and injured more than 200. Similar incidents occurred in Pulaski, Tennessee; Opelousas, Louisiana; Eutaw, Alabama; Laurens, South Carolina; and Camilla, Georgia.
• In 1871, every schoolhouse for Black children in Winston County, Mississippi, was burned, and in Meridian thirty Blacks were killed.
• In 1868, Whites began a killing spree in Shady Grove, Louisiana, and indiscriminately murdered up to 200 innocent Blacks.
• On Easter Sunday of 1873 in Colfax, Louisiana, the bloodiest single instance of racial carnage occurred when 280 Blacks were left for dead, sixty of them “terribly mutilated” and strewn throughout the countryside. Thirty-four others had been taken to a riverbank and shot through the head. Authorities tried none of the perpetrators, claiming the massacre was “a justifiable assertion of white supremacy.”
• Several Black men were murdered by a mob of 300–400 White men in an 1874 massacre in Coushatta, Louisiana.
• In 1874–75, after years of violence, White Mississippians overthrew the legally constituted interracial government. As many as 300 Blacks were murdered in Vicksburg in two separate incidents in 1874 when Whites on a killing spree swept the county.
• Between 35 and 50 Blacks along with radical White leaders were slaughtered in Clinton, Mississippi, in September 1875.
• In 1874, a murderous mob of 400 armed Tennessee Whites stormed the Trenton Jail and massacred all 16 of the Blacks confined there. Their bodies were found at the bottom of a river a mile away.
• In 1876 in Hamburg, South Carolina, Whites forced their way through a group of parading Black militia. Two dozen of the Blacks were arrested and five were murdered while in custody—they were told to run and then shot in the back.
• In Ellenton, South Carolina, federal troops helped local Whites slaughter at least 40 Blacks, including a legislator in the state’s House of Representatives.
• In 1884, a White mob murdered 56 people in Cincinnati, Ohio, and burned down the city’s courthouse.
• In 1887, in what has become known as the Thibodaux Massacre, Louisiana Whites slaughtered as many as 300 Black sugar plantation workers because they were organizing for better conditions.
• In 1890, a North Carolina mob of 400 White men, “led by prominent citizens and public officials,” killed and wounded an untold number of Blacks.
And this is merely a sample of the documented violence against Blacks. By 1893, almost thirty years after “emancipation,” Blacks in the South were being murdered at a rate of at least one every 40 hours.
Today this violent and oppressive “Jim Crow” history is represented in popular culture as no more than the mere inconveniences of water fountain and lunch counter discrimination. But this masks the real purpose and devastating effects of the many violent acts of White supremacy: the destruction of any Black aspirations for economic self-development, the confinement of the African to forced plantation and domestic labor, permanent political subjugation, and perpetual societal inferiority.
This all ends on October 10, 2015, in Washington D.C., when the “false flags” of Jim Crow, the FBI’s COINTELPRO, the anti-Asian concentration camps, the anti-Mexican wall-builders, police brutality and militarization, the mass incarceration of Blacks, the racist unemployment and discrimination all come crashing down. A new flag will be hoisted over a people who are determined never to be slaves again. Be there when The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan hoists the flag of God Himself—the one that will say forever “with Freedom and Justice for ALL!”
