STORY: Newswise — Civil rights leaders this week have called for a march on the U.S. Justice Department and for an economic boycott to influence the government to deal with the issue of hate crimes. This comes after several recent incidents around the nation in which nooses have been discovered hanging in workplaces, school campuses and other locations. The incidents have resulted in protests and police investigations. University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) associate professor of history Horace Huntley, Ph.D., says the incidents are evidence of the lingering residue of slavery and segregation.
"Incidents such as these are frontal attacks on equity and justice in this society," he said. "They serve to revive the 'good old days' when black people were subjected to and subordinated by unabated white supremacy."
WHO: Horace Huntley, Ph.D., teaches African-American history in the UAB Department of History. He is co-author of the books "Black Workers Struggle for Equality in Birmingham" and "Nerve Juice and the Ivory Tower: The True Story of the 1969 Morrill Hall Takeover at the University of Minnesota."
WHAT: "America was established on the primacy of white supremacy," Huntley said. "The incidents of recent days are simply symptomatic of this fact, and evidence of a much larger problem that America has failed to address. On many historic occasions the nation has had the opportunity to address, and possibly remedy, the race question. In each case, it failed."
The American Revolution offered the possibility when the issues of freedom from tyranny were in the air, Huntley said. The Reconstruction period was another failed attempt, when the nation abandoned black people after the Compromise of 1876 and removed federal troops from the South, leaving black people unprotected.
"This led to unabated lynching, but also to the denial of black participation in the body politic," he said. "Where black people had voted, held political offices and were on the verge of becoming bonafide American citizens, the federal government turned a blind eye while the South went on a rampage."
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