I would go a bit further to say Ida B. Wells was the most fearless investigative reporter in US history. Her short book, Southern Horrors, in a must reader for everyone and if you have spent an hour to read it, do so now.
Contextualizing history is very important and shouldn’t be understated. These articles are excellent steps in the daily struggle gaining steam to do so, and Wells is a top example. She was so influential that the first bill introduced into Congress on that subject was America’s first anti-lynching bill in 1900 introduced by the last elected black congressman left in the House, George White, who retired in early March 1901. That bill, or a variant of it, voted on for 200 times, finally past in 2022. It should have been called the George White and Ida B. Wells Anti-Lynching Bill. Their names represent heroic acts of pro-democracy, but instead it got named after a victim of lynching whose white male murderers an all white jury of their peers acquitted and who admitted the following year openly that they did it. Although Mr. Till probably was a wonderful human with unfulfilled promise contained in his heart and his mother was brave in releasing the photo (under advice from civil rights leader Medgar Evers), the name of those fighting fearless for democracy is honorable. She then inspired a thorough book Lynch’s Law in 1905 which details the backstory of the evolution lynching in America.
But I would go further in saying re-contextualizing is far from being dragged into the light. FDR passed The New White Deal. He envisioned handouts to jobless whites lasting for three years and canceling it. Social Security was for white collar white mangers. White banks were reinsured so that they then could lend low cost mortgages to whites in non-risk non-relined white areas in 1934, effectively nationalizing the intention behind the sundown towns in mostly Democratic rural counties outside the South, partly a political strategy to turn them “Solid South” blue. That bill did arguably more damage to black Americans in order to build wealth than any damage done before it. Whites of course turned him into a hero of sorts, when he segregated the navy under serving for Wilson.
He was Bourbon Democrat, the kind who bought votes in Louisiana in the 1880s, the MAGA conservative wing of the Democratic Party, not of the Republican Party. In short a racist. He told the head of the NAACP in his office that he didn’t have time to pass the anti-lynching bill because he didn’t want to upset the Southern White Solid South Democrats as he needed their votes as a block and they ran the Congress. In other words, white conservative southern votes of the strongest lynching mob whites were more important that saving repressed black American voters in the South from being killed by passing a bill that would make a moral statement by the leader of the “free World” that simply stated, “Please do not kill negroes you Southern whites in my party.”
He also prevented with their any unionization of black American “agriculture workers” (slavecroppers working for debt or anti-wages) and “domestic workers” (negro housemaids for whites), stopping millions of black Americans in the Solid South from congregating to fight for fair wages. White workers in the North, Midwest and West got that power to get better pay and working conditions through collective (white) bargaining. In other words, he nationalized whiteness, bringing “ethnic” whites together to fight for better wages and get new homes in new suburbs, in a last step from the last hundred years to make whiteness bland but dominant and a unified feeling that some of us are trying to break in half (since as the author correctly points out the moderate white liberals are always being courted by the modern Democrats, a party that start in 1964 as pointed out.
If black Americans wrote history, FDR would rank high among supremacists who harmed them, inflicting economic damage through housing denial and keeping them in a neoslavery context by denying unionization. He was not friend of black Americans. Far from it. Keep recontextualizing and perhaps at least black Americans can keeping waking up to over this whitewashing of heroism assigned to presidents.
THANKS FOR YOUR WORK!