Chicago Race Riot
Let’s take Chicago for an example. After an incident involving the stoning of a young black man who’s on a raft in Lake Michigan by a white man. You have conflict between blacks and whites break out. That conflict was driven largely by white ethnic gangs who saw an opportunity to drive African Americans out of all-white, mostly Irish-American neighborhoods. Blacks have been moving into these neighborhoods because the place they were expected to live, required to live by practice and in some cases real estate practices and the law, was bursting at the seams, the so-called Black Belts. So African Americans were moving into white neighborhoods and gangs attacked just black-occupied homes during Chicago’s so-called riot to drive them out. We’ve got photographs of children dancing and cheering in these looted homes, smiling as they’re lit on fire. The homes right next to those looted places are just fine. That’s not a riot, that’s ethnic cleansing. That’s a calculate move to use mass violence to intimidate, hurt, punish, and set an example.
What is sharecropping? "The Elaine Massacre Documentary"
See “The Elaine Massacre” on Amazon Prime Video
Someone else owned the land, you go out and plant and raise the crops on that land.
Sharecropping was set up so that the freedmen can have an ownership in the crop. They wouldn’t just be paid laborers. The idea is that the crop would be shared, so the slaves would get the land back, but the whites would be the landowners, but sharecropping has a bad historical meaning. It wasn’t meant that way it was “to share the crop,” which meant that the people would share the profit. The blacks wouldn’t be just wage owners.
It really wasn’t a partnership, it was a form of exploitation. A lot of sharecroppers were signing contracts that couldn’t read, and if they were literate, then they couldn’t understand. And the contracts were written in a way that gave all the advantage to the landowner.
The past sins of America
If we really want to understand this history and where it should be in our place, it’s not an aberration that happened on the Mississippi River in the deep south. This was very much a microcosm of a national tragedy, a national shame, a national attitude that was happening, a national battle that was happening.
Watch “The Elaine Massacre” on Amazon Prime Video