Thread by @matthewstoller

1. I see that #BlackWallStreet is trending. There's a reason that the massacre of black independent business people in 1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma isn't widely known. It's because history matters, and so does covering it up. The late 1910s/1920s were a decade of near-fascism.

2. Just six years earlier, the first movie blockbuster, Birth of a Nation, came out. Birth of a Nation portrayed Lost Cause history, a fake neo-confederate view of history invented by plutocrats to demonize multi-racial Reconstruction era governments.

3. Lost Cause history was invented in the 1870s and 1880s at Johns Hopkins and Columbia University, it was designed to ridicule the idea of black equality, and support the emergence of a "new South" designed around cheap labor organized by Northern monopoly capital.

4. For thirty years after the Civil War, American political leaders debated the "Negro problem." In 1895, southern racial oligarchs and Northern monopolists cut a deal based on Lost Cause history. This deal became known as Jim Crow.

5. Booker T. Washington, a conservative black leader and the most important black leader since Frederick Douglass, accepted this deal in a speech known as the Atlanta Compromise. Importantly, Washington *accepted* Lost Cause history.

6. Washington fought for the best deal he thought he could get. Economic rights as farmers and industrial workers, 'industrial education,' in return for foregoing the vote and political power. John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie then lavishly funded Tuskegee.

7. Let's be 100% clear about something. The Jim Crow regime was fascism. Straightforward. When people say 'it can't happen here,' yes, it can. And it did. Jim Crow was a terror-based economic regime.

8. Much of the new legal apartheid system and its violent extra-legal terrorist enforcement mechanisms were, as economist @drlisadcook shows, targeted at black economic power. She traces the collapse of black patents and newspapers after 1896 and 1900. econpapers.repec.org/article/kapjec…

@drlisadcook 9. Though blacks bore the brunt of the violence, Jim Crow was a fascist regime designed to subjugate both poor whites and blacks to planters. And it did. Large numbers of poor whites were stripped of the vote throughout the South after Jim Crow. Blacks faced horrific violence.

@drlisadcook 10. W.E.B. Dubois and a host of progressives - both black and white - formed the NAACP in 1911 to repudiate Booker T. Washington's framework and argue for social equality. The organization got its first major boost protecting Birth of a Nation.

@drlisadcook 11. Race relations are intimately tied up with the rise of corporate America. The great election of 1896, where the question was J.P. Morgan's power to structure corporate goliaths, happened the same year as Plessy. Albion Tourge was the lawyer for Plessy, and an anti-monopolist.

@drlisadcook 12. From 1901-1920, Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson promised reform, great reform. New Nationalism, New Freedom. Idealism. The Great War shattered all of these illusions of progress. The Tulsa massacre of #BlackWallStreet in 1921 was the nadir of American democracy.

@drlisadcook 13. The Federal Reserve was intimately involved, both unleashing a massive boom in 1919. In late 1919 and early 1920, inflation was running at 25 percent annually. Then it hiked rates to crush the economy. Corporate America attacked labor viciously at this moment.

@drlisadcook 14. Said one Treasury official, “If a panic in New York should break out, he would be glad of it.” Prices fell at the fastest rate ever measured. Unemployment went from 4% in 1920 to 12% in 1921, industrial production dropped by a quarter, and over five hundred banks failed.

@drlisadcook 15. U.S. Steel refused to recognize a union. 365,000 workers went on strike. To contain them, the company used 25,000 private security guards in Pennsylvania alone, with martial law in the steel town of Gary, Indiana. Twenty people died in the strike.

@drlisadcook 16. An agricultural depression induced a boom in the KKK, which was a *for-profit Amway style corporation* that sold robes. The mayors of Portland Maine and Portland Oregon were both KKK.

The Tulsa massacre of #BlackWallStreet was part of this wave of violence and fascism.

@drlisadcook 17. This history is hidden from us. It isn't just the racism, it's also the *deal* of Jim Crow underpinning all of it, an economic deal about who has power and who can harm who. Who governs? We the people? Or a small group? Who controls history matters.

@drlisadcook 18. Du Bois:

"For a brief period—for the seven mystic years that stretched between Johnson's "Swing round the Circle" to the Panic of 1873, the majority of thinking Americans of the North believed in the equal manhood of Negroes… They simply recognized black folk as men…"

@drlisadcook 19. Du Bois discussed the depression of 1873.

"Then came in 1873-76 sudden and complete disillusion not at Negroes but at the world—at business, at work, at religion, at art. A bitter protest of Southern property reenforced Northern reaction..."

@drlisadcook 20. "...and while after long years the American world recovered in most matters, it has never yet quite understood why it could ever have thought that black men were altogether human."

He wrote this in 1935 to reclaim our history. Because Du Bois knew history matters.