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FOCUS: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar | Brian Flores Sues the NFL. What Took So Long?
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's Substack
Abdul-Jabbar writes: "Brian Flores is suing the National Football League and the only question I have is 'What took so long?'"

From College Football to the NFL, Blacks Aren't Treated as Management Material

Brian Flores is suing the National Football League and the only question I have is “What took so long?” I’m not referring specifically to Flores’ lawsuit, but to making public the racism inherent in the NFL like a vestigial limb.

Ah, you say, but don’t Black players dominate with 57.5 percent being Black and only 24.9 percent being White? That’s like saying a fast food chain isn’t racist because 57.5 percent of their fry cooks are Black. The issue isn’t how many Black fry cooks or baristas or halfbacks you have, it’s how many Blacks have the opportunity to rise into upper management.

In the case of the NFL, not many. Which is odd when you consider that the majority of players are Black and therefore offer a bigger pool of trained professionals from which to choose. As with most businesses, it makes sense to promote from within because employees have the experience and knowledge to manage.

The alabaster ceiling stifles Black ambition and sends a clear message that “your kind” aren’t good enough. Let’s look at the numbers. Despite nearly 60 percent of the NFL players being Black, at the beginning of the 2021 season only three of the 32 head coaches were Black: Pittsburgh Steelers’ Mike Tomlin, Houston Texans’ David Culley and Miami Dolphins’ Brian Flores. At the end of the season, Culley and Flores have been fired leaving only Tomlin as the single Black head coach.

College football programs are equally disappointing. When the 2020 season began there were 14 Black head coaches out of 130 FBS (Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of college football) programs), though 48.5 percent of players were Black. Michigan State coach Mel Tucker, who is Black, hoped things would change in 2021. “Once I saw jobs start to open up, I wanted to see if there was going to be anything different, whether there would be more minorities, coaches of color, hired as head coaches,” he said. “I didn’t see a noticeable difference. I didn’t see anything that showed me that there was any type of change in behavior in the hiring process.”

Well, there was some change. Black coaches is college football declined. When three of the 11 Black coaches at Power 5 programs lost their jobs, the Power 5 hired no new Black coaches for the first time since 2015. Only two of the 17 new FBS head coaches are Black. The message is clear: if you’re Black, stay in your lane. The slow lane.

While I’m sure there’s a Greek chorus of dissenting voices, those voices are probably mostly White and haven’t faced a lifetime of closed doors from behind which the beige bosses shout, “We don’t discriminate. Try again later.” Much later. With the same results.

We like to think of sports as the embodiment of America’s best intentions: a level playing field in which merit is the only standard of judgement. As goes sports, so goes America. Unfortunately, the NFL is an $8.78 billion industry and the people who control the money prefer the people who run their business to look more like them. In many cases, it’s probably not even conscious racism, just an unconscious comfort level based on what’s familiar. Mashed potatoes over chitlins. As goes sports, so goes America.

Which is why we have the Rooney Rule. The 2003 policy requires NFL teams to interview People of Color for head coaching positions (modified in 2009 to include other senior management and player personnel positions). Many White people think this kind of affirmative action program guarantees Blacks more jobs. But as every Black person knows, interviews are often PR gestures that adhere to the letter of the law, not the spirit. In his lawsuit, Flores details when he was scheduled to interview with the Giants, but received a text message from New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick congratulating him on getting the Giants job. It seems Belichick got his Brians mixed up. Brian Daboll got the job—three days before Flores was set to interview. Former NFL head coach Marvin Lewis said he had a similar experience when he interviewed for the head coach position for the Carolina Panthers.

Even though the Rooney Rule can be used as a ruse of inclusivity, it still forces the bosses to at least get used to interacting with the fry cooks and baristas, maybe becoming more comfortable with them, and maybe even seeing potential they’d routinely ignored before. But that in itself isn’t enough. Qualified Black coaches need their shot now, not in some golden age future where they can be judged on the content of their football coaching skills and not the color of their skin.

We know it’s possible. In contrast to football, the number of Black coaches increased in NCAA basketball in 2021 with 51 percent of men’s coaches and 47 percent of women’s coaches being Black. Last year in the NBA, the number of Black coaches nearly doubled with the percentage of Black coaches increasing from 23% to 43%.

Since the NFL sees no moral or patriotic reason to change, they need external pressure to change—pressure from fans, from players, from sponsors, from all Americans who don’t think business as usual is good for America.

As goes sports, so goes America. It’s up to us to make both go in the right direction.

“TODAY” REALLY MATTERS FOR DONATIONS — We have scratched and clawed all month to make our budget but with 5 days to go the donations have stalled and all that hard work is in jeopardy. A reasonable effort will make this work. We need to start now. Today is a critical day for donations. Very important now.
Marc Ash • Founder, Reader Supported News

PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611

Thursday, January 27, 2022

RSN: FOCUS: Fintan O'Toole | Beware Prophecies of Civil War

27 January 22

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FOCUS: Fintan O'Toole | Beware Prophecies of Civil War
Fintan O'Toole, The Atlantic
O'Toole writes: "In January 1972, when I was a 13-year-old boy in Dublin, my father came home from work and told us to prepare for civil war. He was not a bloodthirsty zealot, nor was he given to hysterical outbursts."

The idea that such a catastrophe is unavoidable in America is inflammatory and corrosive.

In January 1972, when I was a 13-year-old boy in Dublin, my father came home from work and told us to prepare for civil war. He was not a bloodthirsty zealot, nor was he given to hysterical outbursts. He was calm and rueful, but also grimly certain: Civil war was coming to Ireland, whether we wanted it or not. He and my brother, who was 16, and I, when I got older, would all be up in Northern Ireland with guns, fighting for the Catholics against the Protestants.

What made him so sure of our fate was that the British army’s parachute regiment had opened fire on the streets of Derry, after an illegal but essentially peaceful civil-rights march. Troops killed 13 unarmed people, mortally wounded another, and shot more than a dozen others. Intercommunal violence had been gradually escalating, but this seemed to be a tipping point. There were just two sides now, and we all would have to pick one. It was them or us.

The conditions for civil war did indeed seem to exist at that moment. Northern Irish society had become viciously polarized between one tribe that felt itself to have suffered oppression and another one fearful that the loss of its power and privilege would lead to annihilation by its ancient enemies. Both sides had long-established traditions of paramilitary violence. The state—in this case both the local Protestant-dominated administration in Belfast and the British government in London—was not only unable to stop the meltdown into anarchy; it was, as the massacre in Derry proved, joining in.

Yet my father’s fears were not fulfilled. There was a horrible, 30-year conflict that brought death to thousands and varying degrees of misery to millions. There was terrible cruelty and abysmal atrocity. There were decades of despair in which it seemed impossible that a polity that had imploded could ever be rebuilt. But the conflict never did rise to the level of civil war.

However, the belief that there was going to be a civil war in Ireland made everything worse. Once that idea takes hold, it has a force of its own. The demagogues warn that the other side is mobilizing. They are coming for us. Not only do we have to defend ourselves, but we have to deny them the advantage of making the first move. The logic of the preemptive strike sets in: Do it to them before they do it to you. The other side, of course, is thinking the same thing. That year, 1972, was one of the most murderous in Northern Ireland precisely because this doomsday mentality was shared by ordinary, rational people like my father. Premonitions of civil war served not as portents to be heeded, but as a warrant for carnage.

Could the same thing happen in the United States? Much of American culture is already primed for the final battle. There is a very deep strain of apocalyptic fantasy in fundamentalist Christianity. Armageddon may be horrible, but it is not to be feared, because it will be the harbinger of eternal bliss for the elect and eternal damnation for their foes. On what used to be referred to as the far right, but perhaps should now simply be called the armed wing of the Republican Party, the imminence of civil war is a given.

Indeed, the conflict can be imagined not as America’s future, but as its present. In an interview with The Atlantic published in November 2020, two months before the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, the founder of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, declared: “Let’s not fuck around.” He added, “We’ve descended into civil war.” The following month, the FBI, warning of possible attacks on state capitols, said that members of the so-called boogaloo movement “believe an impending insurgency against the government is forthcoming and some believe they should accelerate the timeline with armed, antigovernment actions leading to a civil war.”

After January 6, mainstream Republicans picked up the theme. Much of the American right is spoiling for a fight, in the most literal sense. Which is one good reason to be very cautious about echoing, as the Canadian journalist and novelist Stephen Marche does in The Next Civil War: Dispatches From the American Future, the claim that America “is already in a state of civil strife, on the threshold of civil war.” These prophecies have a way of being self-fulfilling.

Admittedly, if there were to be another American civil war, and if future historians were to look back on its origins, they would find them quite easily in recent events. It is news to no one that the United States is deeply polarized, that its divisions are not just political but social and cultural, that even its response to a global pandemic became a tribal combat zone, that its system of federal governance gives a minority the power to frustrate and repress the majority, that much of its media discourse is toxic, that one half of a two-party system has entered a postdemocratic phase, and that, uniquely among developed states, it tolerates the existence of several hundred private armies equipped with battle-grade weaponry.

It is also true that the American system of government is extraordinarily difficult to change by peaceful means. Most successful democracies have mechanisms that allow them to respond to new conditions and challenges by amending their constitutions and reforming their institutions. But the U.S. Constitution has inertia built into it. What realistic prospect is there of changing the composition of the Senate, even as it becomes more and more unrepresentative of the population? It is not hard to imagine those future historians defining American democracy as a political life form that could not adapt to its environment and therefore did not survive.

It is one thing, however, to acknowledge the real possibility that the U.S. could break apart and could do so violently. It is quite another to frame that possibility as an inevitability. The descent into civil war is always hellish. America has still not recovered from the fratricidal slaughter of the 1860s. Even so, the American Civil War was relatively contained compared with what happened to Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution, to Bosnia after the breakup of Yugoslavia, or to Congo from 1998 to 2003. The idea that such a catastrophe is imminent and unavoidable must be handled with extreme care. It is both flammable and corrosive.

Marche clearly does not intend to be either of these things, and in speculating about various possible catalysts for chaos in the U.S., he writes more in sorrow than in anger, more as a lament than a provocation. Marche’s thought experiment begins, however, with two conceptual problems that he never manages to resolve.

The first of these difficulties is that, as the German poet and essayist Hans Magnus Enzensberger put it in his 1994 book Civil Wars, “there is no useful Theory of Civil War.” It isn’t a staple in military school—Carl von Clausewitz’s bible, On War, has nothing to say about it. There are plenty of descriptions of this or that episode of internal conflict. Thucydides gave us the first one, History of the Peloponnesian War, 2,500 years ago. But as Enzensberger writes, “It’s not just that the mad reality eludes formal legal definition. Even the strategies of the military high commands fail in the face of the new world order which trades under the name of civil war. The unprecedented comes into sudden and explosive contact with the atavistic.”

This mad reality is impossible to map onto a country as vast, diverse, and demographically fluid as the United States already is, still less onto how it might be at some unspecified time in the future. Marche has a broad notion that his putative civil war will take the form of one or more armed insurrections against the federal government, which will be put down with extreme violence by the official military. This repression will in turn fuel a cycle of insurgency and counterinsurgency. Under the strain, the U.S. will fracture into several independent nations. All of this is quite imaginable as far as it goes. But such a scenario does not actually go very far in defining this sort of turmoil as a civil war. Indeed, Marche himself envisages that, while “one way or another, the United States is coming to an end,” this dissolution could in theory be a “civilized separation.”

But this possibility does not sit well with the doomsaying that is his book’s primary purpose. Nor is it internally coherent. Marche seems to think that a secession by Texas might be consensual because Texas is a “single-party state.” This would be news to the 46.5 percent of its voters who supported Joe Biden in the 2020 election. How would they feel about losing their American citizenship and being told that they now owe their allegiance to the Republic of Texas? If we really do want to imagine a future of violent conflict, would it not be just as much within seceding states as among supposedly discrete geographic and ideological blocs?

The secession of California as well as Texas is just one of five “dispatches” that Marche writes from his imagined future. He begins with an eminently plausible and well-told tale of a local sheriff who takes a stand against the government’s closure for repair of a bridge used by most of his constituents. The right-wing media make him a hero figure, and he exploits the publicity brilliantly. The bridge becomes a magnet for militias, white supremacists, and anti-government cultists. The standoff is brought to an end by a military assault, resulting in mass casualties and creating, on the right, both a casus belli and martyrs for the cause. Marche’s other dispatches describe the assassination of a U.S. president by a radicalized young loner; a combination of environmental disasters, with drought causing food shortages and a massive hurricane destroying much of New York; and the outbreak of insurrectionary violence and the equally violent responses to it.

All of these scenarios are well researched and eloquently presented. But how they relate to one another, or whether the conflicts they involve can really be regarded as a civil war, is never clear. Civil wars need mass participation, and how that could be mobilized across a subcontinent is not at all obvious. Marche seems to endorse the claim of the military historian Peter Mansoor that the pandemonium “would very much be a free-for-all, neighbor on neighbor, based on beliefs and skin colors and religion.” His scenarios, either separately or cumulatively, do not show how or why the U.S. arrives at this Hobbesian state.

Marche’s other conceptual problem is that, in order to dramatize all of this as a sudden and terrible collapse, he creates a ridiculously high baseline of American democratic normalcy. “A decade ago,” he writes, “American stability and global supremacy were a given … The United States was synonymous with the glory of democracy.” In this steady state, “a president was once the unquestioned representative of the American people’s will.” The U.S. Congress was “the greatest deliberative body in the world.”

These claims are risible. After the lies that underpinned the invasion of Iraq and the abject failures of Congress to impose any real accountability for the conduct of the War on Terror, the beacon of American democracy was pretty dim. Has the sacred legitimacy of any U.S. president been unquestioned, ever? Did we imagine the visceral hatred of Bill Clinton among Republicans or Donald Trump’s insistence that Barack Obama was not even a proper American, let alone the embodiment of the people’s will?

This failure of historical perspective means that Marche can ignore the evidence that political violence, much of it driven by racism, is not a new threat. Even if we leave aside the actual Civil War, it has long been endemic in the U.S. Were the wars of extermination against American Indians not civil wars too? What about the brutal obliteration of the Black community in Greenwood, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921—should that not be seen as an episode in a long, undeclared war on Black Americans by white supremacists? The devastating riots in cities across America that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, and in Los Angeles after the beating of Rodney King in 1992, sure looked like the kind of intercommunal violence that Marche conjures as a specter from the future. Arguably, the real problem for the U.S. is not that it can be torn apart by political violence, but that it has learned to live with it.

This is happening again—even the attempted coup of January 6 is already, for much of the political culture, normalized. Marche is so intent on the coming catastrophe that he seems unable to focus on what is in front of his nose. He writes, for example, that the assault on the Capitol cannot be regarded as an insurrection, because “the rioters were only loosely organized and possessed little political support and no military support.” The third of these claims is broadly true (though military veterans featured heavily among the attackers). The first is at best dubious. The second is bizarre: The attack was incited by the man who was still the sitting president of the United States and had, both at the time and subsequently, widespread support within the Republican Party.

In this context, feverish talk of civil war has the paradoxical effect of making the current reality seem, by way of contrast, not so bad. The comforting fiction that the U.S. used to be a glorious and settled democracy prevents any reckoning with the fact that its current crisis is not a terrible departure from the past but rather a product of the unresolved contradictions of its history. The dark fantasy of Armageddon distracts from the more prosaic and obvious necessity to uphold the law and establish political and legal accountability for those who encourage others to defy it. Scary stories about the future are redundant when the task of dealing with the present is so urgent.

SHOCKED BY THE LACK OF SUPPORT — I just want you to know that, as a monthly contributor who thinks the work you are doing is hugely important, I am shocked by the lack of support of other readers. Rest assured that rsn is deeply appreciated and I count on it/you to keep informed. If we want a “free” and independent press in today’s world of corporate news, you are essential and I, for one, am deeply grateful to you and want to express my thanks. I’m sorry that your fundraising efforts are not bringing faster and more abundant results. In deep appreciation.
Marilyn, RSN Reader-Supporter

PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611

Wednesday, January 26, 2022

RSN: FOCUS: Paul Krugman | Attack of the Right-Wing Thought Police

26 January 22

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FOCUS: Paul Krugman | Attack of the Right-Wing Thought Police
Paul Krugman, The New York Times
Krugman writes: "Freedom is under attack, on more fronts than many people realize."

Americans like to think of their nation as a beacon of freedom. And despite all the ways in which we have failed to live up to our self-image, above all the vast injustices that sprang from the original sin of slavery, freedom — not just free elections, but also freedom of speech and thought — has long been a key element of the American idea.

Now, however, freedom is under attack, on more fronts than many people realize. Everyone knows about the Big Lie, the refusal by a large majority of Republicans to accept the legitimacy of a lost election. But there are many other areas in which freedom is not just under assault but in retreat.

Let’s talk, in particular, about the attack on education, especially but not only in Florida, which has become one of America’s leading laboratories of democratic erosion.

Republicans have made considerable political hay by denouncing the teaching of critical race theory; this strategy has succeeded even though most voters have no idea what that theory is and it isn’t actually being taught in public schools. But the facts in this case don’t matter, because denunciations of CRT are basically a cover for a much bigger agenda: an attempt to stop schools from teaching anything that makes right-wingers uncomfortable.

I use that last word advisedly: There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?”

Anyone tempted to place an innocuous interpretation on this provision — maybe it’s just about not assigning collective guilt? — should read the text of the bill. Among other things, it cites as its two prime examples of things that must not happen in schools “denial or minimization of the Holocaust, and the teaching of critical race theory” — because suggesting that “racism is embedded in American society” (the bill’s definition of the theory) is just the same as denying that Hitler killed 6 million Jews.

What’s really striking, however, is the idea that schools should be prohibited from teaching anything that causes “discomfort” among students and their parents. If you imagine that the effects of applying this principle would be limited to teaching about race relations, you’re being utterly naive.

For one thing, racism is far from being the only disturbing topic in American history. I’m sure that some students will find that the story of how we came to invade Iraq — or for that matter how we got involved in Vietnam — makes them uncomfortable. Ban those topics from the curriculum!

Then there’s the teaching of science. Most high schools do teach the theory of evolution, but leading Republican politicians are either evasive or actively deny the scientific consensus, presumably reflecting the GOP base’s discomfort with the concept. Once the Florida standard takes hold, how long will teaching of evolution survive?

Geology, by the way, has the same problem. I have been on nature tours where the guides refuse to talk about the origins of rock formations, saying that they have had problems with some religious guests.

Oh, and given the growing importance of anti-vaccination posturing as a badge of conservative allegiance, how long before basic epidemiology — maybe even the germ theory of disease — gets the critical race theory treatment?

And then there’s economics, which these days is widely taught at the high school level. (Full disclosure: Many high schools use an adapted version of the principles text I co-author.) Given the long history of politically driven attempts to prevent the teaching of Keynesian economics, what do you think the Florida standard would do to teaching in my home field?

The point is that the smear campaign against critical race theory is almost certainly the start of an attempt to subject education in general to rule by the right-wing thought police, which will have dire effects far beyond the specific topic of racism.

And who will enforce the rules? State-sponsored vigilantes! Last month Ron DeSantis, Florida’s governor, proposed a “Stop Woke Act” that would empower parents to sue school districts they claim teach critical race theory — and collect lawyer fees, a setup modeled on the bounties under Texas’ new anti-abortion law. Even the prospect of such lawsuits would have a chilling effect on teaching.

Did I mention that DeSantis also wants to create a special police force to investigate election fraud? Like the attacks on critical race theory, this is obviously an attempt to use a made-up issue — voter fraud is largely nonexistent — as an excuse for intimidation.

OK, I’m sure that some people will say that I’m making too much of these issues. But ask yourself: Has there been any point over, say, the past five years when warnings about right-wing extremism have proved overblown and those dismissing those warnings as “alarmist” have been right?

I CANNOT BELIEVE YOU GET SO LITTLE FUNDING! — I don't understand how most readers expect you to do everything for nothing. If we don't stand behind you all we get is propaganda. Real journalism is so rare today. We all should be protecting it. I am in my 70s and no longer working, but what you do is crucial if we ever plan on becoming a democracy finally. That's why I give every month. All take and no give back is a recipe for disaster, and we don't want to dis the stars!
Marc Ash • Founder, Reader Supported News

PO Box 2043 / Citrus Heights, CA 95611

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Racist politicians and racist redistricting

2022 has given state legislators the opportunity to redraw Congressional maps, oftentimes to tip the scales, protect political power, and institutionally disenfranchise Black, brown, and low-income voters.

Gerrymandering is the new Jim Crow, and its effects are being seen across the country as legislators divide diverse communities into separate congressional districts in order to dilute the collective strength of Black and brown voters.

In Nashville, Republicans have redrawn Justice Democrat Odessa Kelly’s Congressional District. The GOP broke up Nashville into different House districts that favor Republicans in order to destroy a progressive stronghold in the South. Racist politicians have been carving out electoral districts and suppressing the vote at the expense of Black and brown voters for decades, enabled by weak national voting rights laws and the filibuster.

Will you help us fight back? At this moment, we need our movement to stand up against unfair election maps, keep Odessa in the fight, and ensure Black and brown voices are heard in Nashville. That is why we’re asking you to split a contribution between Justice Democrats and Odessa Kelly’s campaign — so we’re ready for whatever comes next.

Nashville is just one example of the impact of gerrymandering, and the need for national comprehensive voting rights legislation. That is why Justice Democrats are working hard, not just to elect Odessa Kelly, but to fight voter suppression and abolish the racist filibuster.

The politicians drawing up these maps know that the collective power of our movement is unstoppable. But at this moment, we need to use that power to fight these racist maps and elect working people to Congress. Will you join us by splitting a contribution between Odessa’s campaign and Justice Democrats?

In solidarity,

Justice Democrats

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Sunday, December 19, 2021

RSN: FOCUS: DeNeen L. Brown | How Ida B. Wells Became the Last Hope for 12 Wrongly Convicted Black Men

19 December 21

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FOCUS: DeNeen L. Brown | How Ida B. Wells Became the Last Hope for 12 Wrongly Convicted Black Men
DeNeen L. Brown, Guardian UK
Brown writes: "Throughout the Red Summer of 1919 and beyond, no journalist did more to chronicle the lynchings and other forms of terror inflicted on Black people than Ida B. Wells-Barnett."

After the 1919 Elaine race massacre, the men on death row looked to the investigative journalist to use the power of the pen to save them

The 12 Black men had been tortured, smothered with rags soaked in chemicals, strapped to electric chairs, beaten with whips by white mobs trying to wring “confessions” out of them. The men had been arrested after the Elaine Massacre, during the Red Summer of 1919, when white mobs “with blood in their eyes” descended on the cotton fields of Elaine, Arkansas, killing more than 800 Black people.

The men, who had come to be called “The Elaine 12”, had been unfairly rounded up, then falsely convicted after a sham six-minute trial in Helena, Arkansas. Now, they sat on death row for crimes they did not commit.

They had one last hope.

Perhaps, Ida B Wells-Barnett, a Black investigative journalist known for her utter fearlessness in her “crusade for justice” for her people, could save them. Perhaps this woman, who had once written “if it were possible”, she, “would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them,” had that kind of power to fight a “tide of hatred”.

Did Wells, an unflinching woman who had traveled the country to investigate the ruthless barbarity of white mobs in other lynchings and massacres, have that much power to save these Black men on death row in Arkansas?

One of the old Black men believed she did.

“Dear Mrs. Wells-Barnett,” he wrote. “This is one of the 12 mens which is sentenced to death speaking to you on this day and thanking you for your grate speech you made throughout the country in the Chicago Defender paper. So I am thanking you to the very highest hope you will do all you can for your collord race. Because we are innercent men, we Negroes. So I thank God that thro you, our Negroes are looking into this truble, and thank the city of Chicago for what it did to start things and hopen to hear from you all soon.”

The letter was dated 30 December 1919 with a date line of Little Rock, Arkansas. It was sent to Wells three months after the Elaine Massacre.

Wells heard the desperation in the letter and, without hesitation, took a train from Chicago, heading into the deep south, which had once threatened her life and warned her never to return.

“It was my first return to the South since I had been banished thirty years before,” she later wrote.

The letter from the Black men on death row, Wells wrote, was “a cry from Macedonia”.

Wells was born enslaved in 16 July 1862 in Holly Springs, Mississippi, during the civil war, five months before President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. After her parents died of yellow fever, she took care of her siblings and eventually became a teacher in Memphis.

In 1884, Wells filed a lawsuit against the Chesapeake, Ohio, and Southeastern Railroad, citing racial discrimination after a white conductor tried to force her from first class into a smoking car. In the groundbreaking case, Wells won the lawsuit, but lost on appeal. Wells wrote: “I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them.”

In 1889, Wells became a part owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight newspaper, where she continued to write columns against racism. Wells began investigating lynchings of Black people, compiling a groundbreaking “Red Record” of the lynchings. In a column published on 21 May 1892, Wells denounced “the old thread bare lie” that lynching was used to “protect white womanhood”.

Wells, who was traveling on the east coast at the time, was unmoved by threat to her life.

“I had been warned repeatedly by my own people that something would happen if I did not cease harping on the lynching of three months before,” Wells wrote in her memoir, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells. “I had expected that happening to come when I was at home. I had bought a pistol the first thing after [my friend] Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers.”

Wells wrote: “I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit.”

After the publication of the column, a white mob descended on her office in Memphis, destroying her presses and warning they would kill Wells if she published her newspaper again. Wells moved to Chicago, where she continued her crusade for justice for Black people and for women.

In 1913, Wells founded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago. She traveled to Washington DC to join the women’s march for suffrage, whose white leaders had demanded that Black women march at the back of the parade.

Wells stood on the sidelines, but when the Illinois delegation passed, she stepped into the parade and took her place at the front.

As Wells, who was a co-founder of the NAACP, fought for suffrage, she continued investigating racial terror lynchings and massacres, including the East St Louis Massacre of 1917, the Chicago Massacre of 1919 and the Elaine Massacre of 1919.

The Elaine Massacre erupted on 30 September 1919, after Black sharecroppers organized a union to fight unscrupulous white land owners in Arkansas who cheated Black sharecroppers out of money for their crops of cotton.

On that night of 30 September, dozens of Black men met in a church in Hoop Spur, to deliberate on membership in the Progressive Farmers and Household Union. They planned to hire an attorney to help them in negotiations with white land owners.

Cotton crop prices were soaring, and the men hoped they could finally gain an economic foothold and rise out of the peonage system of sharecropping that kept them in perpetual debt to white land owners. Knowing there could be trouble from white people in Arkansas, who did not want them to organize, they placed Black veterans outside the church to stand guard.

About 11pm that night, white men drove up the dark country road. “Without warning,” Wells wrote, “a volley of shots are fired into this free assembly. The lights go out and those who are not killed or wounded get away as quickly as possible.”

The Black veterans fired back. A white man, WA Adkins, was killed, “whether by the men he is with or the guards out in front will probably never be known”, Wells wrote.

Some historians say dozens of Black men, women and children were killed in the church.

“No one knows how many of these peaceable unoffending Negroes were killed by this volley,” Wells wrote, “as the persons who did this dastardly deed burned the church down the next day so no bullet holes in walls, broken windows or dead bodies of Negroes would show the conspiracy of whites to kill black people.”

Wells argued, “had this been a conspiracy of Negroes to kill whites, they would not have started in by killing their own members, break up their own meeting, nor burn their own church. They would have been in or near some white assembly hall or home working mischief. There would be more evidence of the conspiracy to kill whites than the single body of W.A. Adkins found dead beside the automobile which brought him to the Negro church to disturb a Negro meeting and commit murder.”

Word spread like wildfire through Arkansas and surrounding states by telegrams and newspapers, falsely reporting that there was a “Black insurrection.” Thousands of white men from the surrounding states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Tennessee and Texas marched on Phillips county. A local sheriff led a posse of thousands of white men, who looted, burned houses and shot Black people indiscriminately.

“The press dispatches of October 1, 1919, heralded the news that another race riot had taken place the night before in Elaine, Arkansas, and that it was started by Negroes who had killed some white officers in an altercation,” Wells later wrote in her book “The Arkansas Race Riot,” which was published in 1920. “Later on, the country was told that the white people of Phillips County had risen against the Negroes who started this riot and had killed many of them, and that this orgy of bloodshed was not stopped until United States soldiers from Camp Pike had been sent to the scene of the trouble.”

White officials in Phillips county sent word to Governor Charles H Brough in Little Rock, requesting that he send troops. Brough dispatched more than 500 soldiers from Camp Pike, located near Little Rock.

Brough traveled from Little Rock to Elaine to join the hunt of Black people fleeing the white mobs. During the next week, soldiers from Camp Pike, led by then Colonel Isaac Jencks, hunted Black people, walking acres across farmland to find Black people hiding along the banks of the Mississippi River, and in swamps, thickets and canebrakes.

“In 1925, Sharpe Dunaway,” according to the Arkansas Historical Society, “an employee of the Arkansas Gazette, alleged that soldiers in Elaine had ‘committed one murder after another with all the calm deliberation in the world, either too heartless to realize the enormity of their crimes, or too drunk on moonshine to give a continental darn.’”

The soldiers, who according to accounts included a machine gun battalion, rounded up Black people who survived the massacre at gunpoint and held them in camps, until white people came to “vouch” for them.

A white journalist for the Memphis Press reported that white mobs shot at dead Black bodies lying in the street. The mobs cut off fingers, ears, genitals and toes for keepsakes. The reporter gave an eye-witness account of US soldiers dragging a Black man into a street. In a horrific act, the mob poured some kind of fuel over the Black man’s body and lit it.

“The mob moved in its bloodlust,” the reporter wrote. “A mob attacked Lula Black, pulling her from her home, pistol whipping her, and kicking her. The mob killed another Black woman, Frances Hall, pulling her dress over her body.”

The governor’s photographer snapped photos of Hall’s body. The governor kept the photo in a scrapbook.

By 7 October 1919, the massacre ended.

Even as Black bodies lay in the killing fields that had grown cotton, more than 285 Black people were captured and locked in stockades in Helena, 20 miles from Elaine.

Hundreds of Black people were arrested; 122 black men and women were indicted on charges that ranged from “night riding” to murder.

On 5 November 1919, 12 Black men were convicted of murder and sentenced to die by electrocution.

The men, who became known as the “Elaine 12”, were identified as: Frank Moore, Frank Hicks, Ed Hicks, Joe Knox, Paul Hall, Ed Coleman, Alfred Banks, Ed Ware, William Wordlaw, Albert Giles, Joe Fox, and John Martin.

In Chicago, when Wells heard the news of the “Elaine 12”, she began immediately raising attention about their case and raising money to save them.

“They had been in prison in Helena, Ark, since the first week in October,” Wells wrote. “They had been beaten many times and left for dead while there, given electric shocks, suffocated with drugs, and suffered every cruelty and torment at the hands of their jailers to make them confess to a conspiracy to kill white people. Besides this a mob from the outside tried to lynch them.”

Wells explained that “during all that two months of terrible treatment and farcical trial, no word of help had come from their own people until a copy of the Chicago Defender, December 13th, fell into their hands”.

“A letter of mine had already appeared in the Chicago Defender calling attention to the fact that the riot had been precipitated by the refusal of colored men to sell their cotton below the market price because they had an organization which advised them so to do,” Wells wrote in her autobiography Crusade for Justice.

“I appealed to the colored people of the country to use their influence and money for those twelve men, who had been found guilty of murder in the first degree and then sentenced to be electrocuted.”

On 22 January 1920, Wells arrived in Little Rock, Arkansas, and headed immediately for the secret address the man had included in his letter. “Those men were under sentence of death and there was no time to be lost,” Wells wrote.

In Little Rock, she found a group of Black women, the wives and mothers of the 12 Black men who were waiting on death row. She disguised herself as an old woman and slipped into the jail.

“The iron bars were wide enough apart to enable us to shake hands,” Wells wrote. “The one guard on duty sat about fifty feet away reading the Sunday paper. When he looked up, he saw only a group of insignificant looking colored women who had been there many times before, so he went on reading his newspaper.”

Inside the jail, Wells took precise notes, recording the testimony of the men.

Wells asked them “to write down everything they could recollect about the rioting, and what befell each one of them”.

She asked them to “tell me the number of acres of land they had tilled during the year, how much cotton and corn they had raised, and how many heads of cattle and hogs they owned, and be sure to say what had become of it all”.

William Wordlow told her that it was about five carloads of white men who drove to the church that night on 30 September 1919.

“I was out in front of the church in the road when these men came up in these cars and started shooting in the church on the other people both women, men and children. When the white men started that work, I broke and ran away. I saw them when they made the first shot. I went in the woods and stayed all night. I stayed until the soldiers came, then I came to them. I had eight women and children with me to hide, keep them from getting killed. The white people sent word all through the country they were coming to kill all the Negroes they could find. The soldiers took me to Elaine and I was put in the school-house and they kept me there seven days. Then they brought me on to Helena jail and we were whipped like dogs to make stories on each other.”

The man pleaded:

“I did not kill no one. I did not have a gun. Then after my trial was over in six minutes, some of the white men came from Elaine to the jail and told me if I would put something on more Negroes they would turn me free, if I would call just two or three men’s names that they did call to me. I would not do so, because it would be a story and I will not lie on no one. I was whipped twice in jail. Near to death. While they were whipping me they put some kind of dope in my nose; also I was put in an electric chair and shocked to make me tell a story on other men.”

Frank Moore told Wells that more than 120 Black men, women and children were in the church that night. When the white men began shooting, he said he ran home. “The next morning the whites sent us word that they was coming down there and ‘kill every nigger they found.’’’

Moore told Wells:

“The white people want to say that union was the cause of the trouble. It’s not so; the white people were threatening to run us from our crops before this trouble started. The Phillips County people know they started this trouble and they only got the army there to cover what they had done.”

As Wells prepared to leave the jail, the men sang a song they had composed. The men sang in the most mournful tones she had ever heard.

“I used to have some loving friends to walk and talk with me. But now I am in trouble, they have turned their backs on me; They just laugh me to scorn and will not come nigh, and I just stand and wring my hands and cry.

Chorus: “And I just stand and wring my hands and cry, And I just stand and wring my hands and cry, Oh Lord! Sometimes I feel like I ain’t got no friends at all. And I just stand and wring my hands and cry.”

Before she left, Wells asked the men to “have faith to believe that the great state of Arkansas would undo the wrong that had been done to them. I said they should pray daily that God would give the authorities the wisdom to realize the wrong that had been done, and the courage to right that wrong. I earnestly believe such prayers, will strengthen the hands of the white people of the state who want to do the right thing.”

Wells returned to Chicago and wrote a pamphlet on the Elaine Massacre, publishing “the facts I had gathered and helping them to circulate them”, Wells wrote in Crusade for Justice.

“I raised the money to print a thousand copies, and circulated almost the entire edition in Arkansas.”

The NAACP mounted a case to fight for them. “In Little Rock and at the headquarters of the NAACP in New York, efforts began to fight the death sentences handed down in Helena, led in part by Scipio Africanus Jones,” according to the Encyclopedia Arkansas, “the leading black attorney of his era in Arkansas, and Edgar L McHaney. Jones began to raise money in the black community.”

The lawyers won new trials for six of the men. However, the convictions of six of the men who became known as the Moore defendants were upheld.

The first six defendants were eventually freed by the Arkansas supreme court. The case of the Moore defendants went to the US supreme court, which granted a new hearing, in the case of Moore v Dempsey, ruling the men had not been given due process.

The attorney Scipio Jones began negotiations to have the men released. On 14 January 1925, then-Governor Thomas McRae ordered that the Moore defendants be released.

The next winter, Wells was at home on a Sunday evening when she received a knock at her door.

“A strange young man opened it. He said, ‘Good evening, Mrs. Barnett. Do you know who I am?’

“I do not,” I said.

He said, ‘I am one of them twelve men that you came down to Arkansas about last year.’

The man, Wells wrote, was well dressed and had been living in Chicago for three months.

“He said he had been looking for me all that time. He wanted to tell me how much he felt indebted for my efforts.”

She introduced the man to her family.

He told them, “‘Mrs. Barnett told us to quit talking about dying, that if we really had faith in the God we worshiped we ought to pray to him to open our prison doors, like he did for Paul of Silas. After that,’ he said, ‘we never talked about dying any more, but did as she told us, and now every last one of us is out and enjoying his freedom.’”