What to do but shake your head?
Mmm Mmmm Mmmmm…
Welcome back to the This Day In Esoteric Political History newsletter. Each week, a member of our team (or a friend of the show) gathers together bits of America’s past and attempts to find a throughline that might add a little understanding to our current moment.
Today, you’re in the steady hands of This Day host Kellie Carter Jackson!
P.S. Read to the bottom for some more amazing sound from Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial performance.
A quick look at the week ahead in American history.
April 11
1962 : Ads are appearing in Louisiana newspapers offering one-way bus rides to northern cities for Black southerners
1968: President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act of 1968, prohibiting discrimination in housing
April 12
1861: The American Civil War begins at Fort Sumter
1945: Franklin D. Roosevelt dies at 63 years old.
1961: Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space.
1964: Malcom X delivers his “The Ballot or the Bullet” speech in Detroit.
April 13
1810 : A new canal is being built in Washington, DC in an attempt to give a little logic to the topography of the nation’s capital
1873: More than 60 black men are murdered on Easter Sunday in Louisiana’s Colfax Massacre.
1953: CIA director Allen Dulles launches the mind-control program Project MKUltra.
April 14
1775: The first abolitionist society in the U.S., the Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage, organizes in Philadelphia
1865: Abraham Lincoln is assassinated while attending a special performance of the comedy, "Our American Cousin"
1999: Jack Kevorkian is sentenced to 10 to 25 years in prison for the assisted suicide of a person who had Lou Gehrig's disease.
April 15
1912: The Titanic sinks
1947: Jackie Robinson breaks MLB's color barrier while playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers
1959: Fidel Castro visits the United States, four months after leading a successful revolution in Cuba
2013: More than 260 people are injured in the Boston Marathon bombing
April 16
1862: Slavery is abolished in the District of Columbia
April 17
1492: Christopher Columbus receives a commission from Spain to seek a westward maritime route to the Americas
1861: Virginia secedes from the Union
1945: A balloon bomb explodes over Omaha, Nebraska, one of thousands of Japanese devices sent over the Pacific Ocean jet stream
In which we take the above collection of events and find themes, throughlines, rabbit holes and more.
Often on This Day, listeners will hear me give the ultimate SMH, “Mmm Mmmm Mmmmm…” I shake my head and sigh, usually when I see the same tragic patterns repeating over and over again—particularly when it comes to oppressed and marginalized people. Something I have been addressing in my own work is the ways that Black people, nationally and globally, struggle to find places to be and belong.
In 1962, Louisiana residents put out advertisements that offered one-way bus tickets for African Americans to move to Northern cities. The idea being, “We don’t want Black people here.” The South was no longer satisfied with segregation, they now wanted a white utopia. The scam was flawed and short-lived for a number of reasons, but it draws from the well of anti-Blackness that seems endless.
When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1968 to prohibit housing discrimination based on race, it dismantled many of the housing covenants and contracts that prohibited homeowners from selling to Blacks, Jews, or Asians. These practices perpetuated segregation and redlining throughout the country and especially in the North. Once again, Black people were not wanted in the communities they often worked. Their hard earned dollars would not afford them a home or location of their choosing. Today housing discrimination is illegal, but predatory banking practices continue.
Sometimes the push against Black citizenship and belonging is violent. In April of 1861, the Southern Confederacy fired its first shots on Fort Sumter. Its secession documents made it clear that the South was committed to preserving slavery. The assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 was largely motivated by an unwillingness to concede freedom, citizenship, and suffrage to Black men and women. In 1873, during the Colfax massacre in Louisiana, members of the Klu Klux Klan killed at least 60 African American men over their access to democracy and fair elections.
My next book examines the life of Joseph Laroche, notably known for being the only Black passenger on the Titanic. I don’t question why Laroche died, the odds were not in his favor. I do question why he was on the boat. While living in France, Laroche faced chronic racial discrimination that kept him either underemployed or unemployed. He boarded the Titanic because he was in search of other opportunities for his family. Racism forces people to move. It shoves them out white spaces and boxes them in ghettos or seeks to subjugate or eradicate them altogether. Mmm Mmmm Mmmmm…
So, on April 12th 1964, when Malcolm X gives his “Ballot or the Bullet” speech in which he says the only effective solution to racial inequality is Black economic and social separatism … well … he understood the long history of being Black and not belonging.
— Kellie Carter Jackson
A little more esoterica
As we mentioned on the show, there’s some amazing material online from Marian Anderson’s Lincoln Memorial concert, like this complete audio recording. Makes for some great dinner music!
As you could see above, this week happens to be a momentous one in Civil War history, encapsulating the first battle of the conflict in 1861 and what might be considered the final shot, which killed Abraham Lincoln days after the surrender of Robert E. Lee in 1865. We’ve gathered some of our favorite episodes from that tumultuous period here.
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