Thread by @michaelharriot

This tweet is hilarious

No one has EVER said they wanted to eat, shop and live around white people. In fact, the TRUE origin of legalized segregation has to do with something that NO ONE (aside from @sullydish) wants to talk about truthfully:

Fear of a Black penis.

A thread.

https://twitter.com/BrushfiresTeam/status/1414772717555908609

See, for years, white people have believed, for some reason, that Black men find white women irresistible. No one knows where it came from. But it is a thing that a LOT of white people believe.

It's has shaped American history in ways we don't talk about.

I know it sounds lewd, but let's see:

When white people first came and stole the land, they said the people & children "which shall happen to be born within...any of the Limits and Precincts of the said several Colonies and Plantations.. "

...shall HAVE and enjoy all Liberties, Franchises, and Immunities... as if they had been abiding and born, within this our Realm of England, or any other of our said Dominions."

Why is this important?

Because English law had a concept called "pater familias"

Basically, it means the status of a child is determined by the father.

But when Black people showed up in Virginia, they crated some bullshit called "partus sequitur ventrum," meaning "that which is born, follows the womb."

The Virginia law explains it well:

That's right: If a white man raped a Black woman, the child was a slave, but the white dude was fined or banished.

But if a WHITE WOMAN had sex with a Black man, the fines were double (about $5,000 in today's money) or she became an indentured servant.

But if they both produce mixed race children, what's the difference?

There's no logical explanation except to say that Black penis was considered WAY SCARIER than white ones. Even the founding Fathers thought so.

Take rapist Thomas Jefferson, for instance.

Historians LOVE to note that Jefferson wrote that slavery was wrong, and he did. But in his entire life, there is not a single record of Jefferson ever freeing a slave. Of Jefferson, Abolitionist Moncure Conway said:

"Never did a man achieve more fame for what he did not do.”

But there's no mystery as to why Jefferson didn't think Balck people should be free. Somewhere, some white man is about to comment on how he had to appease Southerners and compromise for the sake of America.

That's bullshit.

We can actually READ WHAT HE SAID.

In "Notes on the State of Virginia," after opining why Black people and "Indians" are intellectually inferior savages, Jefferson admitted that he could be wrong. He compared American slavery to Roman slaves, noting ONE DIFFERENCE that prevented Black people from ever being free

"Among the Romans emancipation required but one effort. The slave, when made free, might mix with, without staining the blood of his master. But with us a second is necessary, unknown to history. When freed, he is to be removed beyond the reach of mixture."

That damn race-mixing

It's important to note that this wasn't a white thing. It was a WHITE PEOPLE IN AMERICA thing. When Spain controlled Florida, race-mixing was not illegal. There were a lot of free people of color in Haiti & New Orleans

This wasn't a secret, though. Lincoln campaigned on it.

It wasn't even controversial. It wasn't cited as reason not to emancipate enslaved people.

It was one of the reasons cited for the Civil War. It wasn't even the most controversial thing in W.E.B Du Bois' "Black Reconstruction"

In 1881 a Tony Pace, a Black dude, and Mary Cox, a white woman, was sentenced to 2 years in prison for living "in a state of adultery and fornication." The Supreme Court ruled that fear of Black penis was perfectly fine because no one had been discriminated against.

How?

Because they sent the woman to jail, too!

But the CRAZIEST case happened in 1898 in majority-Black Wilmington, NC when feminist, Rebecca Felton, spoke about white women's #1 problem:

Black men be tryna rape them.

So Alfred Manly, a Black reporter, tore Becky a new asshole in an editorial! He went off on how all these white women were yelling rape ONLY when they got caught red-handed (or white handed, if you will). Then he said it was white men who rape (which, statistically was true)

The Black folks told Manly: "Bruh, you know they're gonna be mad, you might wanna leave town for a while." True to form, a committee of white leaders told them to hand over Manley by election day.

When they didn't, the "SECRET NINE" issued a "White Declaration of Independence"

They overturned the election results, went to the armory, and a mob of 2000 white folks dragged the Black leaders & businessmen to the train station and forced them on a train at gunpoint

Then the Secret Nine rewrote the NC constitution, disenfranchising Black voters for 50+ yrs

Wilmington NC would remain majority white until this day.

THIS is what led to Jim Crow being constitutionally established in NC. It was used to justify segregation. And it wasn't even a taboo topic.

I don't think they made these signs WITH MAGIC MARKERS.

And the crazy thing about it was that, no matter how often white people were shown irrefutable proof, they still wouldn't accept it.

It even led to one of the greatest beefs of all time:

Ida B. Wells vs. Frances Willard.

Just think Biggie vs Pac.

Now multiply it by 10.

Ida B. Wells was basically the Oprah of her time. She was born a slave, was an educator, reinvented investigative journalism and was THE anti-lynching activist.

When she died, it is arguable that Ida B. Wells may have been the most famous who ever lived.

She was always against Black people getting killed by mobs, but when her "best friend" Thomas Moss was lynched by a white mob for essentially owning a black-owned grocery store that was better than the white-owned one, she became the most prominent anti-lynching crusader.

Frances Willard was a white feminist who headed the Women's Christian Temperance Union.

During a tour of England, Willard said the best argument against outlawing alcohol was that it would stop Black men from raping & "the colored race multiplies like the plagues of egypt."

Now, no one messed with the WCTU because, after all, they were the most protected group in America. Even the most radical negroes knew not to mess with them.

but Ida was born with the genetic marker IDGAF.

But she didn't say anything. She waited until SHE was touring England and told the newspapers she would do interviews on one condition: You gotta reprint that fuckshit that WIllard said, even though WIllard insisted she didn't have "an atom of race prejudice."

At the end of the tour, Ida was supposed to speak at the WTCU conference. They warned her that they wouldn't let her speak if articles about Willard came out in the papers.

When Ida met Frances face to face, the whte lady acted like she was SO sorry and laughed to her friends

After Ida gave her speech, Willard discovered that Ida had postponed the release of ALL HER INTERVIEWS until after the speech. SHe dragged Frances name across England.

But Frances kept saying the fuckshit.

At the 1894 WCTU convention, Frances praised Ida but then said that she heard from a lot of southerners that Black men do like to rape white women in their spare time, so it turns out she was right.

Ida didn't respond.

A few months later, Ida B. Wells released "The Red Record"

It was perhaps the most detailed analysis of lynching ever produced. Frederick Douglass wrote the foreword. It dispelled all the myths about Black men raping but also concluded that appealing to white people's sense of justice and kindness would not work.

That armed resistance was the only way to stop lynching bc white folks never actually believed "the old threadbare lie that Black men rape White women"

It's hard to explain the importance of the Red Record. Imagine if Black people complained about a kind of brutality for years.

And then, all of a sudden, there was video evidence.

Kinda like that.

The Red Record is historic. EVERY chapter has data, numbers and reports. But no one mentions one part but I think the 8th chapter of The Red Record is one of the pettiest and most gangsta moves in history:

That's right. She devoted an ENTIRE chapter to clapping back at Frances Willard.

Aside from being so gangsta, this shows that the subject wasn't even taboo. It was a thing that white people, even the pure white woman, talked about openly.

And the idea that Black people wanted ANYTHING white people had , their women, their neighborhoods, their schools, was borne out of this idiotic notion.

Its why I take issue with folks who say "integration hurt us."

Black people have NEVER fought for white things

Brown vs. Board of education was about black kids who had to walk PAST the white schools built with THIER TAX dollars to catch a bus to the Black school. The other case, Briggs v. Elliot, was because the district was MAJORITY BLACK but the Black schools didn't even have buses

The first sit-in is said to have taken place at Royal Ice Cream in Durham NC on June 23rd 1957.

Royal Ice Cream was a white-owned business, but it was located in Durham's Hayti district, which was majority-Black. The protesters refused to be segregated IN THEIR NEIGHBORHOOD.

Hayti had another nickname, though:

Black Wall Street.

No one wants white folks shit, including their women. We just want y'all to stop kicking up dust and leave us alone

If this is offensive, Aside from the profanity, there was a young college radical who said the same thing: