Piggybacking off the Urban Intellectuals report, The First Terrorist Act Using Airplanes in America…, written by FURIOUS, I became curious.

In this enlightened age of knowingness about how presidential administrations are supposed to work as opposed to how they do work, how did the Warren G. Harding and Calvin Coolidge administrations handle the terrorist attacks of Black Wall Street in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in some of the more well-known cases like the massacre at Rosewood, Florida?

There’s a lot of thought, talk and speculation going around about ISIS (Islamic State and Iraq and Syria) these days, just like there are still aftershock waves rumbling through the nation over the Taliban and al Qaeda, but during the terrorism of America’s Black homeland residents, two staunchly conservative Republican presidents were in office, one of whom it is known was at the heart and root of The Great Depression.

Harding, an adulterer also believed to be an “undercova brotha,” is also rumored to have been a fan of the 1915 film The Birth of a Nation, a/k/a “Romancing the Ku Klux Klan.”

As a matter of information, Harding’s own administration was plagued with accusations of government bribery and insider corruption. (see “The Teapot Dome Scandal” … what is up with Republicans and tea?)

Harding himself was never implicated or charged in the wrongdoings, but he died of a heart attack while in office. Some have said it was because of all of the stress of the scandals that were taking root with his history as a President. Coolidge, another stated “undercova brotha” with Black ancestry and Vice President at the time, was sworn into office by a Notary Public.

But here we are: The sanitized version of Harding and Coolidge.

It was on their watch as President and Vice and subsequent President that these stateside burnings and lynchings occurred and history tells us about what they really did to help put a stop to it: Nothing.

Here were two allegedly “high bright” light-skinned Black men, corrupted and/or kept at bay by the GOP constituents of their time.

It’s a known fact that most presidents shied away from any discussion about race in America unless they had to or were forced to address it, and our “first out-from-under-the-cova” Black President, Barack Obama, has not been much different than his white presidential predecessors when it comes to these matters.

Note: Many Americans like to compare President Obama to the New Deal‘s Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who saved America’s economy by making the totality of America as a whole responsible for each and every citizen–no matter what their economic situation; but Obama seems to “move and stick” more like a Herbert Hoover-type* than Roosevelt.

What we don’t want to talk about is the sanitized version of the homeland terrorist attacks of the residents and business owners of Black Wall Street, we want to talk about the after-impact and the way these two U.S. Presidents addressed it.

They really did not.

Organized violence against Black Americans all over the country rose to prominence on Harding’s watch, and talk though he might about “political equality,” he made it perfectly clear that he did not mean “social” equality and did little to nothing to prevent or alleviate attacks against Black people in the future.

“I do not know the most practical method of dealing with the Ku Klux Klan,” said Harding, “but I think every organization of that sort is a menace to American freedom and American institutions.”

Coolidge’s stand against the KKK and the onslaught against American Blacks was met with an even more minimal ‘conclusion’ about what was to be done about them.

While the Klan used force to defend their racist points of view and narrow introspection about what it meant to be 100-percent American, it was said of Coolidge “The mildness of his opposition to the Klan typified his lack of leadership on racial issues.”

The decline of the Klan happened, not because a U.S. President took a solid stance against them, but because their own internal leadership failed them. It was later, on John F. Kennedy’s watch that a hard line surfaced, and even after Kennedy was assassinated, Lyndon B. Johnson’s stance on Civil Rights and Equal Protection under the Law for Black Americans was little more than a follow-up act to Kennedy’s. Note: Kennedy was a northern-born Democrat, and Johnson a southern-born and bred Democrat. There was a difference then, there is still a difference between those two factions of the Democratic Party now.

Black people faced resistance on all fronts when it came to integrating into American society, and we are mostly well aware that little of that resistance has changed over the decades since then. We’ve got a long way to go, but we’re still a long way from what anyone can visibly and spiritually recognize as “progress.” Especially in the south.

The Harlem Renaissance and its social protests defined the Black person of the north; but complacency, compliance, and a rather lackadaisical attitude about the future defined Black people in the south and southwest.

Jim Crow America, under the watch and keep of these two Republican presidents of the 1920s, became the more inventive, creative, educated and covert James Crowe, III, Esquire — who infiltrated nearly every police and sheriff’s department in the nation, and nearly every judgeship and courtroom bench across America. Crowe also made simultaneously sure that nearly all advancements Black people made to progress, no matter what they did or how hard they worked, were blocked and hindered at every turn in the juncture.

In 2014, ladies and gentlemen, that impediment to progress has not ended. We pay more taxes, but we get less government representation than we ever did. Black People in America are the REAL ‘Boston Tea Party’ on all accounts – overtaxed even before we had money to spend, and far underrepresented. Black America has lived under this kind of tyranny ever since slavery ended.

The Klan no longer had to do any thing illegal to keep Black people in their assigned “place.”

They made racism perfectly acceptable by law and what’s even worse is that at the heart of almost ALL of those terrorist attacks was a Black man who had been accused of some “insult” to the dignity of a white woman, most of which were a pack of proliferated racist lies.

REFERENCES

Henretta, James A.; Edwards, Rebecca; Self Robert O. – America’s History/Combined Volume, Bedford/St. Martin’s Press, Boston, MA (2000)

Sibley, Katherine A.S., Editor – A Companion to Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover – The American Presidents series, Wiley Blackwell/John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (2014)

The Nat Caricature – The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia; Dr. David Pilgrim, Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, Ferris State University

AQPR: Always Question Perceived Reality