We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. ibid. Martin Luther King, essay Loving Your Enemies
Within a matter of weeks, freedom riders are boarding buses all over the South. The riders are harassed and jailed, sometimes they are beaten by angry crowds of whites while southern sheriffs look the other way. ibid.
The American Civil War was over. Enslaved people were now free people. Though the chains of physical bondage were gone, new ways were found to restore the pre-war social order to keep black people down and subjugate them. Racist Jim Crow bylaws for example were enacted in the South long before South Africa institutionalised them as Apartheid … Not all men were created equal; in Black America the struggle continued. 400 Years of Taking the Knee II, Sky 2020
William E B Du Bois, 1903, condemned Washington’s program of industrial education, conciliation of the South, and submission and silence at their political rights. ibid.
Marcus Harvey was described by Du Bois as, ‘The most dangerous enemy of the Negro in America and in the world.’ ibid.
100 days after Emmett Till was lynched, in December 1955 Rosa Parks was to initiate the year-long Montgomery bus boycott. ibid.
‘We can’t solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with non-violence.’ ibid. King
Rosa Parks’ bus boycott eight years earlier had its parallel in Bristol in the west of England. Paul Stephenson, the city’s first youth black officer … The Bristol Bus Boycott was organised: it took just 60 days to succeed. ibid.
Muhammad Ali’s boxing career took a turn towards social activism in 1966 when he refused to be drafted into the military, publicly declaring his opposition to the Vietnam war. ibid. King
A post-Civil War nightmare … Reconstruction: throughout every Southern state, the Reconstruction period is marked by racial massacres, vigilante violence against all races, and the rise of Confederate paramilitary groups like the Ku Klux Klan, America’s first terrorist organisation. Aftershock: Beyond the Civil War, History 2006
The violence suffered by blacks during this time is often perpetrated by Southern land owners attempting to keep their black labor in the fields. ibid.
Lincoln calls for a reconstruction of the county, a rebuilding of trust and of dedication to peace. ibid.
The Civil War claims the lives of nearly 260,000 Southern men. Those that were able, returned home to utter devastation. Thousands starved to death. ibid.
Anti-black violence erupts throughout the South … Memphis, Tennessee: a mob butchers 50 former slaves and burns close to 100 black homes and churches to the ground. ibid.
The New Orleans Massacre of 1866 is just the first of five street battles to break out in the city during Reconstruction. ibid.
After several more skirmishes, [B P] Upham is able to suppress the entire Arkansas Klan … This of course is only temporary as the Ku Klux Klan will re-emerge and reinvent itself time and again throughout American history. ibid.
Henry’s band includes his brothers and cousins, ex-Union soldiers and some ex-slaves. They become known as the Lowrie Gang and are about to unleash a torrent of violence against White Supremacists in North Carolina. The gang would become some of the most wanted men in the country. ibid.
Local authorities form a county militia to combat the Lowrie Gang. The leader is a former Confederate military commander Colonel James Wisher … He arrests the wives of the Lowrie gang members … Lowrie leads an ambush attack against the militia … ibid.
Henry Berry Lowrie vanishes and is never seen in North Carolina again. Many believe he heads West with the reward money, eventually making a new name for himself as a gunslinger. ibid.