THREAD: When white supremacists stormed the Capitol waving confederate flags, they followed a long history of racial terror and state sanctioned violence. Erasure of this domestic terrorism has upheld white supremacy and will do so until we confront it. Black political participation and economic independence has been a threat to white supremacy and met with racial violence & repression since Reconstruction. State sanctioned violence & white vigilantism have long been a tool of social & political control.
nytimes.com/2021/01/09/opi…

Today @coty_montag joins @foodandwater and @BmoreRightToH20 in Baltimore to support the Water Accountability and Equity Act that addresses the racial disparities in water access, rising prices and failing infrastructure that caused it. TMI’s 2019 report #WaterColor details the harmful, disproportionate impact skyrocketing water bills have on Black communities, leading to housing insecurity and declining Black homeownership.
tminstituteldf.org/publications/2…

In July of 1944, an explosion at the Port Chicago Naval Base in California took the lives of 320 men. Subsequently, 50 Black sailors were charged with mutiny for not continuing to work under unsafe conditions. #VeteransDay .@NAACP_LDF Founder Thurgood Marshall sat in on the proceedings and witnessed the court sentence all 50 men to prison. In his notes on the proceedings, he said, “This is not 50 men on trial for mutiny. This is the Navy on trial for its whole vicious policy toward Negroes.”

54 years ago, Constance Baker Motley was appointed to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, marking the first time in history a Black woman was appointed to the federal bench. #OTD Before Motley’s appointment to the federal bench, she was an attorney at the @NAACP_LDF where she led LDF’s education docket. Often risking her own safety, she ventured into the deepest parts of the South to work on school desegregation cases.

In the early morning of July 23rd, police raided an unlicensed bar known as The Blind Pig. This raid would be the spark that caused one of the bloodiest riots in American history, the #Detroit Race Riot of 1967. #OnThisDay Detroit experienced over three days of unrest that resulted in 43 deaths, 1000 people injured, 7200 people arrested, and hundreds of families displaced from their homes. While the raid ignited the riot, the underlying causes went much deeper.