On this first anniversary of the insurrection, I thought about the people who made storming the Capitol a family affair.
Children learn what they live, and adhere to what they’re taught by those they trust. There's so much that can be passed on to one's children. Ignorance, irresponsibility, hatred, and bigotry shouldn't be on the list, but in America they seem to top some lists.
The insurrection happened because America still coddles, and has yet to truthfully educate and correct her own. It also happened because some people sincerely think they're more American than others.
There’s a deep sense of entitlement, and a gross lack of accountability. It’s hard not to conclude, as lightweight sentences and probation are ordered, that some people ARE above the law--or at least they think they're supposed to be.
Why do judges seem reluctant to hold people accountable?
The low hanging fruit are slowly realizing that they were played. They're finding that along with rights, come responsibilities. Some people are headed to jail, not for long, but they're going nonetheless, and the excuses their family members are making for them are making it clear that accountability has been missing in many families.
I thought about my own elders. Never did any of them ever encourage me to brazenly break the law. They didn't teach me to hate, demean, or deliberately harm anyone. They taught about empathy, caring, sharing, the value of hard work, honesty, and fairness. They also taught that, although these principles may not always be reciprocated, I wasn't responsible for what others refused to do. They taught that I had to answer to God.
I still wonder what the scene and response at the Capitol would have looked like if the rioters had looked anything like me. History doesn’t demand that I wonder very long.
History does document an impressive throng of men who assembled at The National Mall on October 16, 1995. Not one of them thought to storm the Capitol building, break windows, ransack offices, attack policemen, or smear feces on those hallowed walls. Maybe it was because they were taught better.
Americans have to face, and tell the whole, unvarnished truth about our history, otherwise the deniers, opportunists, gaslighters, liars, and the lies they tell, will ensure that last year’s global embarrassment will happen again.
Any politician, of either party, who thought him or herself safe that day, is a fool. The new monsters, that politics, mis-education, and poor parenting helped create, showed up last year and left even those who encouraged it all, shaken and worried. They should have been.
Why did something so horrible happen in 2021? Hateful people who'd been taught to hate, bore children. Their children learned what they lived, grew up, and continued the tradition. Their hatred made them easy to manipulate.
A history of lies, censorship, denial, and never being held accountable, is what fueled the whole “tourism” narrative.
That anyone is still asking, begging, and fighting for voting rights, and federal remedies to combat the very deliberate effort to exclude swaths of the population from the election process, is ridiculous. How much longer do our elders have to wait, beg, fight, and march? Haven't they been through, seen, and shared enough horror?
That anyone thought they could overturn a fair election, is ridiculous too, but it almost happened, and the criminality in high places that encouraged the insurrection continues-- unpunished.
The only consolation I have, is something else my elders taught: "No one ever gets away with anything, Baby. If it don't come out in the wash, it's comin' out in the rinse".
America has been in the underhanded business of disenfranchisement and stoking fear for far too long. It’s documented, and has, for generations, affected my family's right to exercise its right to vote, and enjoy full citizenship.
This is my paternal great-great grandmother, Emma Dean Martin Hamilton. The year she was born, the 1855 Louisiana gubernatorial election was the second election to take place under the Louisiana Constitution of 1852. As a result of this election, Robert C. Wickliffe became governor of Louisiana. He reduced funds for public education, advocated the spread of slavery to the islands of the Caribbean, and the removal of free people of color from the state— lest they be a negative influence on slaves.
“Louisiana, looking to find a more straightforward method to exempt Whites, created the Grandfather Clause in 1898 which allowed those who were able to vote before 1867, and those whose fathers or grandfathers could vote before 1867, to skip the tests and taxes. As no Blacks could vote in Louisiana before 1867 (the year in which the Reconstruction Act ordered universal male suffrage), the grandfather clause excluded Blacks in an explicit manner, thus, in theory, avoiding the ire of the Supreme Court and Northern Congressmen. Additionally, the enactment of the Grandfather Clause avoided national scrutiny because the national media was preoccupied with the coinciding outbreak of the Spanish-American War." ~BlackPast.org
This is my maternal grandmother, Ethel Johnson Washington. She was born on Cinclare Sugar Mill Plantation in Brusly, Louisiana, in 1898–only 35 years after Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation. On June 11, 1970, the state of Louisiana finally ratified the 19th Amendment. My grandmother could not cast her first vote for president until 1972. She was 74 years old.
This is my paternal grandmother, Spencena “Rose” Hurstian Williams. She was born in Red Cross, Louisiana in Pointe Coupee Parish, Louisiana in 1910. I’d love to know more about her father, Charles.
"Between 1887 and 1892, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Virginia refused equal access to African Americans on public accommodations and transportation. These laws forced Blacks to sit in the back of the bus, on separate cars in trains, and in the balcony at theaters, for example. From this period on, segregation became a rigid legal system separating the races from cradle to grave—including segregated hospital facilities, cemeteries, and everything in between—no longer tolerating any flexibility in the racial interactions that had previously existed."
This is my paternal great-grandmother, Nellie Gordon Martin. She was born on Australia Plantation in Louisiana in 1887.
The first implicit literacy test was South Carolina's notorious "eight-box" ballot, adopted in 1882. Voters had to put ballots for separate offices in separate boxes. A ballot for the governor's race placed in the box for the Senate seat would be thrown out. The order of the boxes was continuously shuffled, so that literate people could not assist illiterate voters by arranging their ballots in the proper order. The adoption of the secret ballot constituted another implicit literacy test, since it prohibited anyone from assisting an illiterate voter in casting his vote. In 1890, Southern states began to adopt explicit literacy tests to disenfranchise voters. This had a large differential racial impact, since 40-60% of blacks were illiterate, compared to 8-18% of whites. Poor, illiterate whites opposed the tests, realizing that they, too, would be disenfranchised."
This is my paternal great-grandmother, Aydell (census enumerators wrote Idal and Idella) Seals Williams, born in Louisiana in 1882.
Voting rights legislation is critical. The attempted coup and violent insurrection we remember today is more proof of that. It is past time for the Voting Rights Act trumpeted by the late Congressman John Lewis, to see the light of day. Tweets won’t do. Speeches won’t do. Given our nation’s abysmal history of systemic racism, injustice, disenfranchisement, and the current, feverish, broad daylight attempts to make voting more difficult for citizens, there’s no time to delay. It’s a shame that a law is required to ensure the right of every eligible citizen to cast ballots, but it’s where America has been, and unfortunately, here we are. There has to be an urgency and willingness in elected officials to do the right thing and genuinely serve. Sadly, many who played integral roles in the atrocity that unfolded, as people watched TV screens in disbelief, are still occupying seats of power and have faced zero consequences.
This is my maternal great-grandmother, Amanda Mims Godfrey Washington. She was born in Mississippi in 1855. She lived in St. Landry, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
(Did you note those surnames? Yes. Those Washingtons were in Virginia before they settled in Louisiana...and my great-great grandfather's name was...you guessed it...George.)
When I look at the photos of my grandmothers—all natural-born, law-abiding citizens—I marvel at the strength, faith, and wisdom they must have had.
I also wonder what the angry, unhinged insurrectionists meant, and still mean by “taking our country back”. I wonder exactly where it is that racists direct people of color to “go back” to.
For me, that would be the state of Louisiana. Right here... in THIS country.
One day, people are going to realize how much their insistence on perpetuating racism has cost them financially, emotionally, physically, and spiritually.
I wonder how America can extend her hands into undemocratic affairs all over the world; identify terrorists all over the world, but fail so miserably to address her own.
There’s a theory, I hear…
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