Tag: Black Lives Matter

Removing the White Supremacy Marker at Colfax, Louisiana: A 2021 Success Story

Removing the White Supremacy Marker at Colfax, Louisiana: A 2021 Success Story

On May 15, 2021, state officers, parish officials, and private citizens gathered in Colfax, Louisiana to watch local contractors remove an historical marker in front of Grant Parish Courthouse. Erected on June 14, 1951, the sign’s bold white letters announced that a civil disturbance claimed the lives of “three white ...
Read More
Gettysburg and July 4, 2020: Four Historians Respond

Gettysburg and July 4, 2020: Four Historians Respond

After the gathering of armed militia at Gettysburg National Military Park on July 4, 2020, JCWE editors asked four historians to respond, three of whom have especially intimate connections with the park, one of whom had expressed his outrage to us. Their responses are below in this special Muster post ...
Read More

Gettysburg National Military Park and July 4, 2020: Personal Reflections

To be surrounded by men and women in festive patriotic attire and jungle fatigues, and holding a range of rifled weaponry was not how I expected my protest to end on July 4th. For much of the day my conversations with members of the Alt Right were uninteresting and largely ...
Read More

All The Stars Aflame

It is pleasant and sunny on this Ohio morning in mid-July 2020.  The temperature is still in the low 70s:  a good time for my 8-year old daughter Chloe and me to weed the flower beds in our backyard.  “Tell me a story,” she says, as she often does. “About ...
Read More
Ground Zero: The Gettysburg National Military Park, July 4, 2020

Ground Zero: The Gettysburg National Military Park, July 4, 2020

Seven score and seventeen years after the roar of Union artillery and Confederate rifle fire fell silent on the Gettysburg battlegrounds, Adams County endured another invasion. This one, on July 4, 2020, brought a Civil War-sized company of right-wing extremists, some heavily armed, onto the nation’s most hallowed ground in ...
Read More
Fear of a Black Planet (Part I)

Fear of a Black Planet (Part I)

In 2013, the Confederacy returned to Gettysburg’s battlefield. In 2015, the Confederacy took the town of Gettysburg. In 2016, the Confederacy occupied the Peace Light Memorial on the battlefield. In 2017, the Confederacy pledged allegiance to their flag on the Union side of the battlefield. In 2019, like each November, ...
Read More
kaepernick1

Fighting for Every Yard: Colin Kaepernick and Patriotism in African American History

In recent days, Colin Kaepernick’s peaceful protest about the treatment of people of color in the United States has garnered both applause and condemnation across the fifty states. Lately, he has been joined by a teammate, a college teammate, an opponent, and soccer star Megan Rapinoe in kneeling or sitting ...
Read More
The Battle of Ft. Pillow, a lithograph from Kurz and Allison. Image from Blackpast.org, accessed July 14, 2016.

Witnessing Racial Violence: Public Awareness and the Battle of Ft. Pillow

In 2014, bystanders’ video evidence of Michael Brown and Eric Garner’s deaths at the hands of police thrust racial bias and police brutality against people of color into the national spotlight. Black Lives Matter subsequently became both a rallying cry and a movement, with followers asserting that the deaths of ...
Read More