Kamilah Moore, Esq. Profile picture
Jan 10, 2023 18 tweets 10 min read Read on X
The Rise of the Lost Cause Myth (across U.S. + California):

“After Reconstruction ended, white southerners created the myth of the Confederate “Lost Cause” in order to downplay the horrors of enslavement and terrorize African Americans.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow

(🧵⤵️) A crowd of European American Confederates gather around a to
“Southerners who opposed Black civil rights falsely argued that the Civil War had little to do with enslavement.

The Lost Cause myth claims that the Confederacy had fought a heroic war to save the southern way of life from being destroyed by the North.”

#ReparationsNow
“This untruthful history also claims that the Confederacy lost the Civil War only because the more populated, industrialized North overpowered white southerners, not because enslavement or the Confederate cause was wrong.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“The Lost Cause is not just a story that white southerners tell.

It is a weapon of terror against African Americans and a rejection of the southern defeat in the Civil War and Black civil rights.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“At the end of the 1800s and the start of the 1900s, white southerners began building thousands of monuments and statues all over the South to celebrate famous Confederates, and to name important buildings after Confederate figures.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“In the 1910s, the Ku Klux Klan, which the federal government had broken up during Reconstruction, re-emerged and began terrorizing and murdering African Americans.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“The combination of violence against African Americans and the constant sight of monuments celebrating the enslaving Confederacy were terrorist tactics meant to silence African Americans and keep them from challenging white supremacy.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“Lost Cause symbols became especially important to white southerners who tried to stop the Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

White southerners who opposed African American civil and human rights beat and murdered Black (and some white) civil rights activists.”
“They also began regularly flying versions of the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (the Confederate “Stars and Bars,” popularly known as the “Confederate Flag”) to threaten civil rights activists and to show that they were determined not to give equality…”
“Even though defenders of the Lost Cause have argued that Confederate monuments and flags stand for “heritage, not hate,” and they claim that removing them erases history, this argument ignores the true history of these objects.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“White southerners have used them [lost cause symbols] strategically as symbols of terror to try and keep African Americans from fighting for full equality.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“In California, white Americans popularized the Lost Cause mythology with national audiences.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“The Hollywood film industry was responsible for bringing the Lost Cause to movie screens and making it popular with many white Americans, North and South, during the first half of the 1900s.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“D.W. Griffith’s blockbuster film, The Birth of a Nation (1915), falsely showed members of the Ku Klux Klan as heroes who were protecting white women and southern honor against violent African Americans (mostly played by white actors who painted their faces black).”
“This film was the main factor behind the revival of the KKK in the early 1900s. Gone with Wind (1939) celebrated the pre-Civil War South by showing a world of kindly enslavers, loyal and happy enslaved people, and heroic Confederates fighting for the southern way of life.”
“White Californians also built Confederate monuments across the state.

For example, a plaque honoring Confederate President Jefferson Davis, set up by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, stood along a Bakersfield, California, highway for almost 80 years.”

#ReparationsNow
“A monument in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, California, built in 1925, celebrated all Confederates who died on the Pacific Coast.”

#Reparations #ReparationsNow
“Although both of these monuments have now been removed, their existence reminds us of California’s complicity in the United States’ long history of enslavement, white supremacist terrorism, and systemic racism against African Americans.”

More: Oag.ca.gov/ab3121/reports

(End🧵)

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More from @KamilahVMoore

May 31
🧵 Excited to share updates on California’s 16 slavery/lineage based-reparations and racial equity bills aimed at addressing historical and ongoing injustices faced by descendants of slaves. These bills are a significant step towards reparatory justice. Let’s break them down: Image
2/ 📜 SB 1403: Establishes the California American Freedmen Affairs Agency to administer all future reparations, laying the foundation for a comprehensive reparations program.

SB 1403 passed on the Senate floor, and now heads to the Assembly!

#CALeg #CRTF #AB3121 #KamilahMoore
Image
Image
3/ 📜 SB 1050: Provides restitution for Californians who lost homes or had their land taken without fair compensation due to racially-motivated use of eminent domain.

SB 1050 passed on the Senate floor, and now heads to the Assembly!

#CRTF #AB3121 #ReparationsNow
Image
Image
Read 19 tweets
Sep 13, 2023
1/📊 In the latest August 2023 Berkeley IGS Poll, California voters were asked about their support for cash payments to descendants of slaves in California:

52% of “strong Democrats” were in favor, while 33% opposed.

92% of “strong Republicans” opposed, while 6% were in favor. Image
2/ A substantial 62% of respondents said they had heard about the California Reparations Task Force (CRTF), with 73% of Black respondents being aware of it. Notably, Republicans, property owners, higher education, & higher income groups were more likely to have heard about CRTF. Image
3/ Respondents were also asked about the state’s efforts to ensure fair chances for Black residents. Across counties, most believe the state is doing *too little* for Black residents, including white respondents.

📊 Tabulations: #CALeg #ReparationsNow escholarship.org/content/qt6385…
Image
Read 10 tweets
Jan 26, 2023
🧵The California Reparations Task Force meets this Friday and Saturday in San Diego!

Agenda: oag.ca.gov/system/files/m…

Join virtually on oag.ca.gov/ab3121 or via @EtmMedia’s Youtube for a live chat option!

Public comment (9:10am-10:10am):
•844-291-5495
•Code: 3968101
Missed the December 2022 hearing in Oakland? Review the meeting minutes here: oag.ca.gov/system/files/m…

#AB3121 #CRTF #ReparationsNow #Reparations
What’s on the agenda for Jan 2023? Well, for one: Tax Law Considerations!

The task force has invited three tax law experts to provide expert testimony on the intersection between reparations and tax.

Timely considering this latest article from @business: bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Read 8 tweets
Jan 10, 2023
My 3x great grand parents, Victor Theophile Haydel (1835-1924) and Marie Celeste Becnel (1840-1885) were both born enslaved on the @WhitPlantation. The couple who would become the ancestors of the African American Haydel family. #DESCENDANTChallenge @Participant @HGMedia
“Victor was the son of an enslaved woman (Anna), who was herself a mulatto. Victor was fathered by Antoine Haydel, the brother of Marie Azelie Haydel. Celeste was a daughter of Francoise, the enslaved cook of Marie, and was fathered by Florestan Becnel, Marie’s brother-in-law.”
“It is known that each of these men was married, and that refusing to engage in sexual relations with a white man was not an option available to either of these women.”

#DESCENDANTChallenge

Honored to descend from such survivors: whitneyplantation.org/history/the-bi…
Read 4 tweets
Jan 9, 2023
🧵 “Rose Cannon’s (@Reparationist_1) family moved to Evanston in 1919, when her father and his family arrived from Tennessee and settled in the 5th Ward.” #reparations #ReparationsNow

1/

washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01…
“As her family prospered, in the early 1960s, when Cannon was in high school, they moved into their dream home, a brand new house in the historically White 2nd Ward neighborhood.” #reparations #ReparationsNow

washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01…

2/
“They were unable to secure a conventional mortgage and resorted to a contract for deed, she said, referring to a predatory financial agreement commonly required for Black people in the 1960s.”

3/

washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/01…
Read 7 tweets
Jan 9, 2023
The Destruction of Reconstruction:

“African Americans fought for and took advantage of many new legal rights during Reconstruction, but this time period of growing legal equality was short.”

A THREAD 🧵: 1/
“White supremacist terrorist groups, first the KKK and then later militias such as the White League of Louisiana and the Red Shirts of South Carolina, eventually overthrew the Reconstruction governments that Black and white Republicans had established together in the South.”

2/
“White southern Democrats, who wanted to keep African Americans working on plantations and out of politics, retook control of the southern states.”

3/
Read 14 tweets

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