What It Feels Like to
Terrorize Negroes
Black
Legion: American
Terrorists
Killers of Silas Coleman &
Malcom X's Father
By Amin Sharif
|
Detroit--Dayton Dean,
confessed triggerman for the Black Legion*, asserted
here that a Negro World War veteran was taken out and
shot to thrill six Black Legion members. It was the
second killing blamed on the vigilante organization by
Dean.
The slain man was Silas Coleman, 42, who was shot
on the night of May 1935, according to Dean.
Dean told police that Coleman was shot because
“Colonel” Harvey Davis, now held on murder charges
in connection with the slaying of Charles Poole, 32, WPA
worker, wanted “to see how it felt to shoot a
Negro.”
Dean named six men, including himself, as being
present at the shooting. Three of them besides Dean
already are in custody, charged with the murder of
Poole.
The Black Legion members huddled in a group by
one car while the Negro remained in another. Finally,
according to Dean,
Davis said:
“The colored fellow came around the rear of the
car, wondering to see what was doing around there and
just as he came around and faced us, Davis took his .38
and he shot first. Then, the others shot.”
A bullet must have struck Coleman in the lung,
because he made an articulate sound and began running,
Dean said. “And” the statement continued, “he run,
oh, he must have run like a deer down there and when he
started running they says, “don’t let him get
away.”
Dean said they chased Coleman into the marsh,
firing at him as he ran.
Source: The Washington
Tribune, May 1935 |
They say that the death of any man diminishes
all of humanity. I believe this. As a Muslim, I was taught by
the Prophet’s (PBUH) revelation that the act of slaying a
human, for the one who commits the crime, shall be as though he
killed all of humanity. Killing, when it must be done, most only
be committed in self-defense. The article above is short, only a
few paragraphs. Yet it makes clear what black life was like in
1935
I found this article concerning the death of
Silas Coleman among a group of papers that Rudy Lewis
(Chief-editor of ChickenBones: A Journal) gave to me. We
at CBJ are always looking to add to our files and post
interesting things about Black people on our site. As I
mentioned, among these papers, was this article. It is
remarkably short. Yet, it contained the story of the death of a
human being killed on a whim. The act was committed simply, for
the sake of knowing what “it felt like to shoot a Negro.” It
was not my intention to write an immediate commentary on the
small article. But, the article nagged at me. And whenever I
started working on any other files, the article always seemed to
be on the top of the pile begging for my attention. Perhaps, it
was more than begging for my attention. The article was
demanding my attention.
Last summer, I was given something else by
Rudy to review. It was a book about Blues and the tradition of
violence that attended the development of the Blues in the Southland.
The book, Seems Like
Murder Here, is filled with tales of lynching. And, its effect
was to deeply traumatize me on the subject of violence and Black
people. I found I couldn’t write the review. It was literally
the first time in my life that I could not find something to say
on the subject.
The death of Silas Coleman at the hands of
some racists in 1935 is nothing new. Black men and women have
been slain on whims ever since they came to America. But, in
this small article, I somehow find that all these murders—all
of these senseless deaths—are contained (made real to me) in
this one incident. The murderer says that Coleman ran for his life
before he was shot down. In his heart, mind, and soul, Coleman
in Detroit must have felt like an African running from the Arab
slavers in Africa or a slave from the hounds of a plantation
owner in the South.
One wonders if Coleman had time to think of
his loved ones before he died. Or was the primal desire to
escape injury and death so overwhelming that he had little time
to think of anything but running for his life? When I read this
article, I always feel as though I am Coleman—the African or
Black slave—running for his life. I feel myself drop to the
ground as white death overtakes me as it did Coleman. I look up
at the grinning faces of white humanity and ask why, for what
reason was I killed. And the only answer that I can find is that
I was given Black skin by my Creator.
Coleman’s death haunts me. And, it will
probably haunt me unto death. I only hope that his soul has
found peace. As I hope that some day, America will find the
strength to put the insanity of racism behind her.
* * *
* *
* The Black Legion by FBI
accounts was a white cult organization that operated in the
mid-west during the 1930s supposedly to protect America from
such things as Communism. Members wore black robes with skull
and cross bones. Malcolm X who lived in Detroit as a child
claimed that such a group was responsible for the death of this
father. There is a currently a file maintained by the FBI on
this group containing some 964 pages.
* * *
* *
The
Black Legion of hoodlums, thugs, murderers, and some politicians
seeking advancement, dress themselves in black robes, decorated
with the pirate's symbol of the skull and crossbones, and feel
that they are all powerful, recognizing no law save their own.
Their ridiculous costumes, titles and rituals would be of no
importance, except that this organization, formed to commit
murder and lesser crimes, seeks to extend its rule by terror and
mystery, and imposed its bloody will on well-selected tools who
actually commit murder under orders. New
York Daily Mirror, June 5, 1936
* * *
* *
Irene
du Pont organized the Black Legion in the United States. This
was a fascist organization that terrorized and murdered union
leaders and disrupted union organizing campaigns. The members
wore hoods and black robes with skull and crossbones. Another of
his organizations was the American Liberty League, which taught
hatred of blacks and Jews, love of Hitler and loathing of the
Roosevelts. The DuPont and Morgan families even approached Major
General Smedley Butler through an intermediary to determine if a
military coup could be organized against President Roosevelt
because Roosevelt's programs for the poor and working class were
so hated by DuPont and other important American capitalists.
Major General Butler was deeply offended and reported the plot
to Roosevelt. "Fascism
and the Republican Party"
by Gary Sudborough •
Sunday March 02, 2003 IconoclastGS@aol.com
* * *
* *
In
Black Legion (the film directed 1936 by Archie Mayo),
Humphrey Bogart gives an outstanding performance as factory
laborer Frank Taylor, who loses a promotion to a foreign-born
coworker. Filled with hatred, Taylor joins the Black Legion, a
secret white supremacist organization. The group burns down the
barn of Taylor's coworker, scaring him out of town. Thus, Taylor
receives the promotion. But when Taylor is forced to spend his
time recruiting new members for the Legion, he is demoted from
plant foreman back to factory laborer. The Legion attacks
Taylor’s new boss, making friends suspect Taylor's
involvement, while Taylor himself begins drinking heavily in a
fit of self-loathing. When Taylor finally loses his job and the
Legion gears up for an attack on a former friend, it appears
that Taylor has hit rock bottom--with only himself to blame.
This fast-paced, black and white tale of moral decay and
redemption is based on the true story of the Black Legion's
condemnable actions in Michigan in the 1930s. Warner
Home Video, Running Time: 83 minutes, Not Rated, B&W, item
#VVWA65273
* * * *
*
* * * * *
 |
Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
|
* * * * *
|
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
 |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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