The day the Klan picked the wrong people to mess with
by midtowng | 1/17/2010 01:11:00 AM
"You saw those cars coming, and you knew who those men were. They wanted you to see them. They wanted you to be afraid of them."
- Lillie McKoy, former mayor of Maxton talking about the KKK

By the mid-1950's the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and the KKK decided they had to fight back. Their campaign of terrorism swept through many of the southern states, but largely fell flat in North Carolina.
James W. "Catfish" Cole, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina, decided he was going to change that. Cole was an ordained minister of the Wayside Baptist Church in Summerfield, North Carolina, who regularly preached the Word of God on the radio. His rallies often drew as many as 15,000 people. As Cole told the newspapers: "There's about 30,000 half-breeds up in Robeson County and we are going to have some cross burnings and scare them up."

Cole made a critical mistake that couldn't be avoided by a racist mind - he was completely ignorant of the people he was about to mess with.



Dr. Perry was a black doctor in Monroe, NC, and helped finance a local chapter of the NAACP. One night at an meeting the word was received that the Klan threatened to blow up Dr. Perry's house. The meeting broke up and everyone went home to get their guns.
Sipping coffee in Perry's garage with shotguns across their laps, the men agreed that defending their families was too important to do in haphazard fashion. "We started to really getting organized and setting up, digging foxholes and started getting up ammunition and training guys," Williams recalled. "In fact, we had started building our own rifle range, and we got our own M-1's and got our own Mausers and German semi-automatic rifles, and steel helmets. We had everything."
Many of these men were veterans of the WWII who didn't scare easily. Men guarded the house in rotating shifts and the women of the NAACP set up a telephone warning system.
On October 5, 1957, Catfish Cole organized a huge Klan rally near Monroe. Afterward the decision was made to move on Dr. Perry's home.
a large, heavily armed Klan motorcade roared out to Dr. Perry's place, firing their guns at the house and howling at the top of their lungs. The hooded terrorists met a hail of disciplined gunfire from Robert Williams and his men, who fired their weapons from behind sandbag fortifications and earthen entrenchments. Shooting low, they quickly turned the Klan raid into a complete rout. "[Police Chief] Mauney wouldn't stop them," B. J. Winfield said later, "and he knew they were coming, because he was in the Klan. When we started firing, they run. We run them out and they started just crying and going on."
Amazingly no one was killed, but a number of cars were disabled. The following day the Monroe city council held an emergency meeting and passed an ordinance against Klan motorcades.

This setback was a huge embarrassment to Cole and his racist movement. He needed a weaker opponent to abuse and he needed it quick. Cole's target was a small indian tribe that was marginalized even in the indian community - the Lumbee.

The Lumbee had been fighting for official recognition since shortly after the Civil War. Through recorded history they were normally classified as "mulatto" and "free persons of color". They had always considered themselves indian, but were classified and treated as descendants of blacks. Their eyes and skin were lighter than most indians.
The State of North Carolina recognized them in 1885, but the federal government refused to recognize them as a distinct indian tribe until 1956. The Lumbee Act, which recognized their existence, specifically prohibited the tribe from receiving federal services normally provided to tribes by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The Lumbees were living alone in the margins.

On January 13, 1958, the Klan burnt a cross on the lawn of a Lumbee woman because she was living with a white man. The next day it was the lawn of a Lumbee family that had moved into a white community. As the days passed more crosses were burnt while Cole traveled around the area holding rallies and preaching against the evils of "mongrelization" and the loose morals of Lumbee women.
Pleased with the growing hatred he was feeding, he called for a massive Klan rally of 5,000 members on January 18, 1958, at Hayes Pond. The purpose was to remind indians of "their place in the racial order".
"He said that, did he?" asked Simeon Oxendine, who had flown more than thirty missions against the Germans in World War II and now headed the Lumbee chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. "Well, we'll just wait and see."
"They didn't differentiate between the Indian and black population. They figured to have their usual show and go home."
- Stan Knick, director of the UNC-Pembroke Native American Resource Center

In the days leading up to the Hayes Pond rally, Cole had come through town with a loudspeaker on his flat-bed truck, preaching his vile hate for everyone to hear.
Cole wasn't actually from the county and neither were many of his followers. So it was probably a surprise to Cole when Robeson County sheriff Malcolm McLeod visited Cole in his South Carolina home and "told him that his life would be in danger if he came to Maxton and made the same speech he'd been making." Cole's reply: "It sounds like you don't know how to handle your people. We're going to come show you."

The Battle of Hayes Pond

The Fayetteville Observer had gotten word that the Lumbee were planning on attending this rally even if they weren't invited.
Reese reported that Lumbee leaders, including Neill Lowery and Sanford Locklear, had decided to run the Klan out of the county. Willie Lowery's barbershop in Pembroke become the Lumbee planning room for the upcoming battle. From there the call went out for volunteers and according to Reese, more than 1,000 Lumbees answered the call.
Another leader was Simeon Oxendine, who had been a waistgunner on a B-17 during WWII. He wasn't someone you wanted to match up against.

Cole's big rally was a flop before it even started. The local Klan members sensing the mood of the community stayed away. Instead, only 50 of his most hard-core supporters showed up to hear Cole preach against the evils of mixed marriage on the public address system he had set up on his truck. As the sun was setting they rigged up a floodlight and prepared a tall, wooden cross to burn later.
The sound of a reel-to-reel tape of "Kneel at the cross" poured into the meadow. They wore white hooded robes and carried rifles. The Lumbee, they assumed, were cowering in their homes that night.
"They were talking about blacks, using the 'n' word a lot, calling us 'half-n's'," Littleturtle said. "I think their intention was to intimidate us."
Instead of cowering, the Lumbees had assembled about a mile away. Small groups of armed Lumbee indians, about 500 in total, fanned out across the highway and began to encircle the Klansmen.
As the song finished and the rally was to begin, Sanford Locklear walked up to Cole and began arguing with him. Words became shoves and tempers rose. Neill Lowery had seen enough. He leveled his shotgun at his hip and blasted out the floodlight. The field went dark.

The Lumbees began firing into the air and yelling their warhoops as they charged the field. The nerve of the Klansmen broke and they fell into complete panic.
The Klansmen dropped their guns and scrambled for their cars. Some had brought their wives and children with them, who wailed in fear as dark-faced Lumbee milled around their cars and pointed flashlights at them.

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James Cole, the Grand Dragon himself, was in such a panic that he ran into a nearby swamp, abandoning his wife and "white womanhood" in the process. Cole's wife, Carolyn, also in a panic, drove her car into a ditch. After a few minutes several Lumbee helped push her car back onto the road.

"The only thing they left behind was their stuff and their families."
- Littleturtle

The state patrol, led by Sheriff McLeod, had set up camp about a mile away. McLeod intentionally waited until the shooting started because he didn't want to be accused of defending the Klan by showing up early. He organized his men to search the bushes for Klansmen who were hiding, and then escorted them out of the county.
Afterward the police tossed a couple tear-gas grenades into the field to disperse the crowd. The battle was over.

Four people suffered minor injuries from falling shotgun pellets. One Klansman was arrested for public drunkenness.
One Klansman cursed a Lumbee who was blocking the road. The Lumbee punched him through the open car window.

To the victors go the spoils

The victorious Lumbee had collected the robes and banners that the Klansmen had left behind. They then held their own "Klan parade" through the town of Maxton. Some rode in cars, other marched. The parade ended with a bonfire of Klan material in Pembroke. Catfish Cole was hung in effigy.
The large, captured Klan banner was taken back to the VFW convention in Charlotte, where Lumbee posed in front of it for pictures.

Newspapers praised the Lumbee and mocked the Klan. James Catfish Cole was prosecuted, convicted, and served a two-year sentence for inciting a riot.
The Klan ceased to exist in Robeson County until 1984.

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RedSK--S & HATE CRIMES (Edited)
by Winter Rabbit | 9/30/2009 07:32:00 PM

Source

The Indian removals which destroyed one quarter of the Cherokee tribe, were actually conceptualized by Jefferson and then extended and carried out by Jackson. There were great debates about whether the “redskins” were human and whether they had souls.







I heard a descendant of Moxtaveto (Black Kettle), speak about the racism of Sports Mascots. She said the focus was on the name "Redskins." She went on to explain how, after American Indians were mutilated and exterminated, the name used to refer to the mutilated American Indian was "Redskin." As if anyone thinks the killers said anything that would indicate the reality of what they had done at the time. "Redskin" was a term used to dehumanize and enable the genocide.


Source

REDSKIN A 500 YEAR HATE CRIME,
is being used in educational presentations throughout the United States to effectively reveal the history of racial and religious hatred behind the term Redskin Indians and clearly shows the harm brought by ridiculing minorities. It is appropriate for adults and children in middle school or older.


Disgustingly so, “Redskin Indians” refers to literally skinning American Indians. “But his (Jackson’s) Indian Fighters had a very peculiar preoccupation, that was skinning the Indians on the battlefield. They used to make pants” it says in the video. Reverend Goat Carson, who is “Internationally recognized for his presentations,” discusses it in “REDSKIN A 500 YEAR HATE CRIME.”


Source

Telling it like it is Reverend Goat cuts through the barriers created by America's history books. "REDSKINS" makes human beings out of the Indian children and elders who were mutilated and skinned for their religious and racial heritage.


Furthermore, if anyone doubts that manifestations of that hate are less than current, I relate the following.





PORTLAND -- The FBI is investigating recent posts on craigslist that offered to sell "Maine Indian scalps" to "white people only," according to court documents and the leader of the Penobscot Indian Nation, who reported the situation to state and federal officials.

The person who posted the items claimed to have six scalps and related artifacts that were obtained by bounty hunters in the 1700s and came into his possession through a private family collection.

- snip –

"Even if it is hair, with a little bit of flesh on it, that is human remains. That could be one of our ancestors," Mitchell said. "This doesn't just affect people in the past. It affects us today, people who are living."



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So one last time, "Redskin Indians" refers to literally skinning American Indians. "But his (Jackson's) Indian Fighters had a very peculiar preoccupation, that was skinning the Indians on the battlefield. "They used to make pants" it says in the video.

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It goes on to say “they’d be able to take an Indian and skin him from the hip down and make themselves a pair of pants.” Next, it talks about how they made reins for their bridle to ride their horses and that “redskins” became a joke. Hence, "the depth and pervasiveness of the racism against Indigenous Peoples so deeply engrained in the history and psyche of the United States and the dominant culture."

One last time, "Redskin" was a term used to dehumanize and enable genocide.

What the Consolidated Indigenous Shadow Report says about Indian Mascots on page 72.


Although the United States would probably respond that racist mascots and logos are an exercise of free speech that it has reserved under the Convention, they reveal the depth and pervasiveness of the racism against Indigenous Peoples so deeply engrained in the history and psyche of the United States and the dominant culture.


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A Pictoral History of Racism in the United States
by AndrewMc | 9/23/2009 05:00:00 AM
This is a picture history, and I don't want to foreshadow the story. Follow me below.





The images of a slave ship shocks us today, and part of their power comes from the dehumanization of the slaves. Shackled and forced into the cargo hold, these Africans are pictured as sub-human.

slave ship


Here the imagery is a bit more subtle, as the artist portrays slaves killing helpless women and children as well as an unarmed man. It reinforces the racial imagery of the brutish black man.






This widely circulated image of a slave being executed for taking part in a rebellion in Suriname demonstrates the brutal lengths to which people went in order to enforce the slave system. It also reinforces the idea of the kinds of punishments fit for non-whites.




After the American Civil War, racial imagery came to be used as a tool of political and social oppression. Not that this wasn't the situation previously, but after the Civil War Africans had the legal right to vote. For racist whites this required new methods of intimidation, and imagery was as important as ever. Here we see an African American and an Irishman depicted as monkey-like, showing that in this early period the use of an ape to depict people of supposed "lower" racial orders wasn't confined to African Americans.





The Spanish American War and the onset of imperialism provided American cartoonists with another opportunity to depict the "other" in stereotypical ways. Note the use of ape-like imagery to show foreigners as sub-human. This, of course, coincided with the height of the "Social Darwinism" movement.





Of course, racial intimidation wasn't limited to cartoon-world. In real life, whites lynched blacks by the thousands from the 1860s through the 1960s. Lynching provided the violent backdrop, and the ever-present threat, that helped reinforce the consequences of transgressions by blacks who strayed out of "their place."





For some, lynching was a family affair. Note the young girl in the right-hand foreground.





Racism also wasn't limited to cartoons and violence. Institutional racism in the form of workplace segregation was the legalized norm in many states up through the 1960s and 1970s.





As it was for public facilities, of course.




The presence of groups like the KKK--even when they weren't engaged in violence--served as a form of intimidation.








And then we have this, regarding President Barack Obama, which is easy to parse in the context of several hundred years of racial imagery and intimidation.













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Did Racism Help Cause the Mortgage Crisis? The Bubble Bursts
by Ralph Brauer | 12/17/2008 10:20:00 PM


Carter Glass



Part III of IV

In 1997 the FDIC published an imaginary interview with Carter Glass that predicted what would occur with the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act two years later.
Banks lent their names, prestige and tradition of sound banking operations to these affiliates, and on that basis did people invest and transact business with them. When calamity struck, not all bankers felt a responsibility to the citizens they had enticed.

This imaginary interview would prove especially prescient about people of color.



With Glass-Steagall out of the way, mainstream banks began getting into the loansharking business in a big way. In a paper for the St. Louis Federal Reserve System, Souphala Chomsisengphet and Anthony Pennington-Cross point out:
The market share of the top 25 firms making subprime loans grew from 39.3 percent in 1995 to over 90 percent in 2003. Many firms that started the subprime industry either have failed or were purchased by larger institutions.

A 1999 article “Banks Take Over Subprime” in National Mortgage News captures how the repeal of Glass-Steagall changed the market:
Among the top 25 sub prime lenders in the third quarter of 1999, ten are owned by either a bank or thrift. A year ago, just three of the top 25 were owned by depository institutions.

The myth persists that the victims of this boom in loansharking ended up in that position because they could not have qualified for other loans. Yet data from a 2002 Fannie Mae report dispels this notion. It found:
Credit quality alone therefore does not fully explain the extreme reliance of black households on the subprime market. Further research by Freddie Mac reports that as much as 35 percent of borrowers in the subprime market could qualify for prime market loans. Fannie Mae estimates that number closer to 50 percent.

There are others who have confirmed that the myth is false, most notably the Wall Street Journal, whose analysis of credit scores is one of the most widely-used sources. Authors Rick Brooks and Ruth Simon reported that the study of more than $2.5 trillion in subprime loans made since 2000 showed:
In 2005, the peak year of the subprime boom, the study says that borrowers with such credit scores got more than half -- 55% -- of all subprime mortgages that were ultimately packaged into securities for sale to investors, as most subprime loans are. The study by First American LoanPerformance, a San Francisco research firm, says the proportion rose even higher by the end of 2006, to 61%. The figure was just 41% in 2000, according to the study.

The repeal of Glass-Steagall did not change one fact--the prime victims of predatory lending remained people of color. A 1999 Woodstock Institute Report on lending in Chicago noted:
The restructuring of financial services industries and the failure of federal and state regulators to respond to these changes have increased the ability of certain lenders and brokers to exploit homeowners, particularly in minority and modest-income communities.

In October 2002, ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) released “The Great Divide,” a report on 2001 national loan data for 68 metropolitan areas. The report found continuing and even growing racial and economic disparities in home mortgage lending. Nationally, African‑American mortgage applicants faced rejection 2.31 times more often than white applicants, and Hispanics were denied 1.53 times more often than whites.

For those who hold an economic or class-based analysis of the subprime market targeting people of color, the ACORN study is an eye-opener, for it found income made little difference. ACORN notes in Chicago African‑Americans earning more than $84,600 had 2.06 times more likelihood of being turned down than whites earning less than $28,450. The report said:
The rise in subprime and predatory lending has been most dramatic in minority communities. Subprime lenders account for half, 51 percent, of all refinance loans made in predominantly black neighborhoods, compared to just 9 percent of the refinance loans made in predominantly white neighborhoods. Subprime lending, with its higher prices and attendant abuses, is becoming the dominant form of lending in minority communities.

The Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina adds their study to the evidence:
In North Carolina, the incidence of high cost loans originated by African-American borrowers are more than four times (4.15) greater than for whites in North Carolina.

Foreclosed: State of the Dream 2008 by United for a Fair Economy has a graph that shows the pattern



The study goes on to point out:
We estimate the total loss of wealth for people of color to be between $164 billion and $213 billion for subprime loans taken during the past eight years. We believe this represents the greatest loss of wealth for people of color in modern US history.

The banking industry has tried to explain these figures in a variety of ways, the main one being the old dodge of shifting the argument from race to class, but the North Carolina study and others refute this theory.
We also staunchly argue that continuing discrimination and corporate practices are a factor in the loan pricing disparities by race. The history of racism in finance continues to play a role in access and cost of credit.

In 2007 testimony before the House Financial Services Committee Jim Campen, Executive Director Americans for Fairness in Lending, reported on results of an ongoing study his group is conducting in the Boston area:
The black/white denial rate ratio, which averaged about 2.0 during the 1990s, was 2.34 in 2005, while the Latino/white denial rate ratio, typically about 1.5 during the 1990s, was 2.07 in 2005.

In the highest income category, consisting of borrowers with incomes above $150,000, black applicants experienced a denial rate of 25.9%, almost triple the 8.9% denial rate experienced by their white counterparts; the 20.7% denial rate for Latinos with incomes above $150,000 was 2.3 times greater than the white rate.

I have focused my analysis on mortgage lending in Massachusetts, with particular emphasis on the city of Boston and the Greater Boston area, but I believe that a detailed examination of mortgage lending patterns in other cities and states would reveal qualitatively similar findings.

Again, a chart tells the complete story. Note what is essentially a flat line as income increases. The message to people of color is clear: not matter how much you make you will face discrimination in getting a mortgage.



In short, not only did the repeal of Glass-Steagall open the floodgates for banks to enter into loansharking, after the repeal the discrimination against people of color became worse!

Another graph from the Center for Responsible Lending shows the impact of discrimination:



Michael Hudson found that Citi was right in the middle of this:
In 1999, the company agreed to pay as much as $2 million to settle a lawsuit accusing Commercial and American Health & Life of overcharging tens of thousands of Alabamans on insurance. Beasley, Allen, claim[ed] nearly 1,500 clients in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee who had Commercial Credit or CitiFinancial loans.

In 2002 Citi bought Associates First Capital, a sleazy Texas firm that had paid over $33 million in settlements to Georgia and North Carolina lawsuits. Martin Eakes of North Carolina’s Self-Help Credit Union even directly challenged Citi head Sandy Weill at a stockholders’ meeting in April 2001:
No company that values its good name would have bought Associates.

In the fallout over the merger and Citi's own subprime branch CitiFinancial (which had been created from the original Weill loansharking operation), Citi agreed to a $240 million settlement with the Federal trade Commission. Hudson noted that despite all the big numbers, each victim ended up with an average of $120 and the cost to Citi was two week's profits.

Jodie Bernstein, director of FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said Citigroup's newly acquired affiliate-Associates First Capital-engaged in a wide variety of deceptive practices:
They hid essential information from consumers, misrepresented loan terms, flipped loans and packed in optional fees to raise the costs of the loans.

And where was Robert Rubin during all this?

The True Impact

This essay has featured an unusual number of quotes, charts and statistics, which at times march down the page one after the other. There are editorial and rhetorical reasons for this: editorially I have always believed in quoting directly from the source when writing on the web so readers can see what someone said and rhetorically I wanted readers to feel the weight of this evidence piling up.

For that is exactly the situation people of color find themselves facing. The real implications of the mortgage crisis press down on families and communities, suffocating dimensions of life that white suburbanites take for granted--good schools, easy access to shopping, and, most of all, choices.

We need to remember that behind the numbers lie people. Their personal experiences testify to the real consequences of the problem. One story comes from Michelle Allison of the NAACP’s Merced Branch in California, who was locked into a prepayment loan and now owes $100,000 above what she initially requested:
It’s like being over a barrel. I just wanted to be treated fairly and receive the best service. I was not given options or enough information for me to make an alternate decision. I want to get back to where I was financially before I received my loan.

The AARP has another story:
Betty Cooper was an older, wheelchair-bound African-American widow, living on a monthly pension. She experienced a bait and switch of her interest rate that resulted in unaffordable monthly payments. In addition, she was charged a hidden broker fee that cost her a steep 8 percent of the mortgage, and an unexplained balloon mortgage payment.

Multiply stories like these by the numbers in the statistics above and you have some idea of the trail of misery that has been left by loan sharking in communities across the country.

The Web of Deceit

The real shock is that many of these studies data back to as long as a decade ago, with each subsequent study piling on more evidence to support the previous ones. After much time spent reading all this evidence you begin to wonder if anyone else has read it. Yet some of the studies such as the North Carolina one were inserted into the Congressional Record where they lie today, largely unknown to the general public.

This is evidence of discrimination on a scale resembling the mountain of evidence marshaled for Brown v Board or the abuses of Reconstruction or the evils of slavery. In 1944 Gunnar Myrdal referred to the problem of race as an "American dilemma." Sixty years later the dilemma has become quite simply one of economic survival and with it the survival of our democratic society.

Sandy Weill built a financial empire on loansharking. Even long after Citi had mergered and acquisitioned its way to the very top of the American financial industry, Citi continued to engage in loansharking. And they are far from alone. Bank of America recently agreed to a settlement that will probably be the largest in history over the loansharking activities of its subprime affiliate, Countrywide.

Weill could not have done this alone. Instead he had help at the highest levels, including the three Congressmen whose names are on the bill that repealed Glass-Steagall to then Secretary of the Treasury Robert Rubin to the many economists and policy wonks who were gung-ho for securitization in all its manifestations. Rubin joined Citi shortly after leaving Treasury to become one of its most trusted advisors. Did he know about the loansharking or was he looking the other way?

Given the huge increase in subprime mortgages and the role they played in Citi's portfolio along with the mountain of evidence showing their disproportionate impact on people of color it is hard to believe anyone in the financial industry from regulators to bankers was not aware of this. Yet they chose not merely to look the other way, but to allow it to continue until the elephant in the room became too big to ignore.

This is what researchers mean when they speak of "structural racism," for it is not merely a matter of personal prejudice. Many of the people involved--including Sandy Rubin--would vehemently deny that they are racists. The ugly reality of structural racism is that like termites infecting a house it gnaws away at institutions until they weaken and threaten to topple.

Right now the entire American economy may topple because it is infected with the termites of structural racism. In a recent paper Rick Cohen writes:
The subprime crisis carries the seeds of structural racism not from discriminatory intent, but from ostensibly racially benign or supposedly ameliorative policies and programs. This is a difficult message for the nation to hear. The pushback has been strong.

Jim Campen agrees:
The enormous racial disparities in mortgage lending and the dramatic shrinkage of the portion of total mortgage lending that is subject to evaluation by bank regulators under the provisions of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) indicate the need for major changes in public policy toward the mortgage lending industry.

The final installment of this series examines some of these policy changes.

Continue to Part IV

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