I often give talks about the question of invention and I use the Roland-808 as an example, so I figure I should leave the reference here as well.
Its inventors would prefer you remember and cite them as a collaborative, not competitive, team and stop asking for a single name.
Confederate memorials in prominent areas are a form of domestic terror tactics, like racist graffiti denigrating the American landscape.
They are akin to someone putting up a statue of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, or naming the streets after them, right in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
Who would do such a thing?
McVeigh and Nichols would. Does that mean they should be allowed to do it, or that people should avoid removing some monument to terrorism put up by the terrorists or their descendants? No. We would take them down.
What would their statues be for?
We have to ask the simple question whether the statues represent the worst of people. In other words are they known for horrible things primarily and is that the purpose of the statue?
Have you ever heard of McVeigh except as a result of his terrorism?
McVeigh’s bombing would not have been classified as terrorism under the old rules since he was American and attacking Americans.
More to the point did General Bragg ever do anything worth celebrating in his career or was he only the guy hated by everyone, known to even shoot his own soldiers in the back during his failed attempts to expand his love of slavery?
And why should everyone care about these issues? Banksy explains:
At first I thought I should just shut up and listen to black people about this issue. But why would I do that? It’s not their problem. It’s mine. People of colour are being failed by the system. The white system. Like a broken pipe flooding the apartment of the people living downstairs. This faulty system is making their life a misery, but it’s not their job to fix it. They can’t – no-one will let them in the apartment upstairs. This is a white problem. And if white people don’t fix it, someone will have to come upstairs and kick the door in.
Confederate celebration and monuments are a rare case of the losers trying to re-write history. They were put up to terrorize Americans in their daily routines.
Leaving them up gives the false impression that white supremacists did not lose their war of aggression against America and allows white power groups to falsely claim their cause of terrorism is validated.
Here’s what you need to know about tearing down prominent Confederate names, statues, memorials and the like:
100 yards from where we stand, less than 90 days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady.
Is there really any debate necessary who put these statues up and why, given this is how they were presented in the dedication speech? Do not forget that this kind of violence is an encoded signal for state sanctioned rape of black women by white men, the “economy” of forced birth that America used to domestically generate its four million slaves in the 1800s. Support for that complete madness is the revision to history that these statues are meant to convey — as if white men physically attacking black women is something America is meant to commemorate.
The push to raise Confederate monuments was an orchestrated effort to erase history and then rewrite it with a loser’s narrative. It perpetuates Civil War and terrorizes Americans in plain sight.
General Lee pleaded with his followers to never raise a memorial to him or his cause of slavery, yet white supremacist groups have ignored his exact orders and disrespectfully done the opposite.
On the 4th of September 1869 Lee declared there should be no monuments to him because Americans should commit to oblivion the feelings of his slaveholder rebellion.
Taking down public Confederate celebrations and signals is a restoration project.
Again Banksy explains:
Here’s an idea that caters for both those who miss the Colston statue and those who don’t. We drag him out the water, put him back on the plinth, tie cable round his neck and commission some life size bronze statues of protestors in the act of pulling him down. Everyone happy. A famous day commemorated.
America should commemorate the act of ending slavery, but also celebrate the act of ending any celebration of slavery. Either rename things with American heroes or modify the name to include context of their defeat by heroes.
Stop the erasure of American history from Confederate graffiti trying to cover up real narratives with racist and false ones. No more context-free commemorations allowed of the failed slaveholder rebellion.
And anyone who openly disagrees with taking down Confederate signals should be drafted into a minimum of two weeks service cleaning and restoring Grant’s tomb.
Remember at the start when I asked “Who would do such a thing?”
I’m talking now specifically about the shocking 75% of white women in America who say they want to keep the ugly Confederate statues.
These white women prove the point made by James Baldwin:
New laws, gestures of sympathy, and acts of racial charity would never suffice to change the course of the country. Something more radical had to be done; a different history had to be told.
Baldwin was saying the real history of America has to be told, which means restoring it from those who have been trying to disgrace and erase it with their Confederate statues.
Ask yourself would you remove Nazi graffiti from a Synagogue, would you remove Nazi graffiti from a US Army base… these answers should be yes, just like they should be yes for tearing down Confederate statues polluting the landscape.
Update: July 8, 2020
FiveThirtyEight project has picked up the story and has this excellent conclusion:
…deeper understanding of their historical context paints a very different picture — these statues were meant to promote white supremacy and intimidate Black people… the narrative has changed to telling history. Who have we left out of history? What history aren’t we telling through the veneration of Confederate leaders?
There’s a line “do not obey” within the famous Curtis Mayfield song “Move On Up” (from his 1970 debut album Curtis).
Take nothing less than the supreme best
Do not obey for most people say
’cause you can pass the test
So what we have to do is
move on up and keep on wishing
Remember your dream is your only scheme
so keep on pushing
What might “do not obey” refer to?
To start, let’s look all the way back at Woodrow Wilson’s racist “America First” campaign of 1916, which manifested in years of organized white mobs committing widespread violence and terrorizing black neighborhoods.
Historians, for example, might point to the NYC 1917 Silent Parade meant to protest the fact that in America “black skin was death warrant”, or the Chicago 1919 massacre that was part of a “Red Summer” of white supremacist terrorist acts.
This frightful condition continued such that by 1921 all of Tulsa’s black neighborhoods and “Wall Street” were burned to the ground by planes dropping napalm.
Here’s an eyewitness account published by Smithsonian:
I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top…
The side-walks were literally covered with burning turpentine balls. I knew all too well where they came from, and I knew all too well why every burning building first caught from the top… ‘Where oh where is our splendid fire department with its half dozen stations?’ I asked myself. ‘Is the city in conspiracy with the mob?’
Even a “white Tulsan perspective” published in 1921 admitted “lack of law enforcement was in no small part a contributing factor” to death and destruction from domestic terrorist groups attacking Americans.
White violence mobs facilitated by law enforcement literally pushed Americans into forced labor and mass graves, followed with construction of a KKK convention hall on top of cities ruined by white violence (an early form of racist “urban renewal” politics made famous by Nixon, although he more subtlety used dynamite and bulldozers instead of napalm and planes)…
A news story written in 1921 clearly called out “old white group control” as a form of American tyranny:
One of the charges made against the colored men in Tulsa is that they were “radical.” Questioning the whites more closely regarding the nature of this radicalism, I found it means that Negroes were uncompromisingly denouncing “Jim-Crow” cars, lynching, peonage; in short, were asking that the Federal constitutional guaranties of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” be given regardless of color. The Negroes of Tulsa and other Oklahoma cities are pioneers; men and women who have dared, men and women who have had the initiative and the courage to pull up stakes in other less-favored States and face hardship in a newer one for the sake of eventual progress. That type is ever less ready to submit to insult. Those of the whites who seek to maintain the old white group control naturally do not relish seeing Negroes emancipating themselves from the old system.
All of this, the fact that America continued to systemically deny freedom and liberty based solely on race throughout the 1900s, still is rarely if ever taught in American schools.
Blocked from upward mobility by state-sanctioned violent white supremacist mobs — meaning police offered the opposite of help to Americans under attack — you perhaps can see exactly why black community protection groups emerged.
In other words, ethnic-based “gangs” were started as a way to enable the kind of peace needed to prosper, by defending American communities against organized white supremacist domestic terrorism.
Although some black gangs likely formed to counter the aggressive white youth, the unorganized black youth were no match for the well-organized, all-white gangs that were centered in their athletic clubs.
Wherever white oppression tactics were found, and police failed in their duties, a gang was likely formed to defend against injustices and thus enable a degree of protection to help enable gains in health, wealth and prosperity.
Catholic (Polish, Irish, German, Italian), Chinese, Jewish and black gangs all were established to protect against American domestic terrorism. These ethnic gangs also fundamentally depended on fund-raising and community support events. It is a fine line obviously between donations and extractions/taxation, given a lack of transparency or legal representation possible in gang systems.
A story from Milwaukee, for example, involves a fund-raising event on a huge boat in Lake Michigan. A violent storm caused a collision that sank the boat and decimated that community by drowning the “Irish Union Guard” abolitionist militia leadership. So many leaders of that one community died in just one fund-raising tragedy, it has been said the entire balance of Milwaukee’s political power abruptly shifted on that day towards German militia running the city.
Another story, this time from Minneapolis, is how Jewish gangsters violently attacked any German “Silver Shirt” militia (Nazi) rally, calling it a “patriotic duty as Americans” to shut-down pro-Hitler influence operations.
Berman learned that Silver Shirts were mounting a rally at a nearby Elks’ Lodge. When the Nazi leader called for all the “Jew bastards” in the city to be expelled, or worse, Berman and his associates burst in to the room and started cracking heads. After ten minutes, they had emptied the hall. His suit covered in blood, Berman took the microphone and announced, “This is a warning. Anybody who says anything against Jews gets the same treatment. Only next time it will be worse.” After Berman broke up two more rallies, there were no more public Silver Shirt meetings in Minneapolis.
Totally defeated on the streets the Silver Shirt members then became the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) to gain an unfair advantage over their targets (the city in conspiracy with the mob), but that’s a blog post for another day.
Gangs typically dissipated as they become assimilated by mainstream opportunities (upward mobility) in America (even a catholic has been elected President). However America has such high levels of continued oppression of blacks (1950s White House urban renewal was encoded race warfare) it is no wonder black gangs have lingered.
See the film “Rubble Kings” for an excellent look at the socio-economics of how and why New York gangs were formed in the 1960s and what helped them dissipate in the Bronx. Hint: upward mobility through opportunities in music and art — foundations of today’s rap and hip-hop markets.
With that in mind, let’s look at what Mayfield may have been writing about in his lyrics. The year was 1970 when he released his debut album Curtis, and also when one of the Chicago gangs (Blackstone Rangers) tried to pressure Mayfield to fund them.
He did not obey. Instead he offered them a concert and used his platform to drive a “move on up” message.
He was pushing hope for equality and justice of assimilation that other the races in America were allowed to achieve, leaving behind the need for paying for gang protection from the systemic violence of white power groups.
The Atlantic has described the situation as…
…no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.
To make an even finer point on the social power of this song, by 1975 a popular TV show about black “nouveau-riche” prosperity in America, called The Jeffersons, created a theme song called “Movin’ On Up“.
Fish don’t fry in the kitchen
Beans don’t burn on the grill
Took a whole lotta tryin’
Just to get up that hillNow we’re up in the big leagues
Gettin’ our turn at bat
As long as we live
It’s you and me, baby
There ain’t nothin’ wrong with that
For further reading, consider how “up that hill” in The Jeffersons 1975 theme song is likely a reference to American intolerance — “shining city on a hill“.
The death of Ann Mitchell, aged 97, was just announced in Edinburgh.
One of only 5 women accepted to read mathematics at Oxford in 1940, she finished her degree a year early and went on to play a key role in Hut 6 “Machine Room” at Bletchley Park.
Hut 6 dealt with the high priority German army and air force codes, most important of which was the “Red” code of the Luftwaffe. They wrote out some of the jumbled nonsense which had been received and underneath wrote a “crib” of the probable German text. Ann’s key role was the next step in breaking the code, composing a menu that showed links between the letters in the text received and the crib, with the more compact the menu, the better. As every code for every unit of the German forces was changed at midnight, each day the work began all over again to identify clues to the new day’s codes. It was an intense intellectual process, working against the clock, and the urgency provided a constant challenge. Ann and her colleagues in Hut 6, most of whom had degrees in economics, law or maths, worked around the clock in shifts, with one free day each week. As the war came to a close, the number of messages declined until there were no more. “I did go up to London for VE Day on 8 May 1945 but I remember very little about the celebrations,” she said. The codebreakers returned to normal life and, having signed the Official Secrets Act and sworn not to divulge any information about her work, Ann never told anyone, not even her husband, about her wartime role.
She led a life of great service delivered quietly — her groundbreaking WWII work in mathematics was not officially recognized until 2009.
Women, whose stories have been told far less widely than the men they worked with, reportedly made up three-quarters of the workforce at Bletchley Park.
Whatever the reason for the remarkable women codebreakers to be rarely mentioned while their male colleagues were profiled, historians lately have been trying to update and correct the message.
Food for thought when you consider the origins of cyber security had such a high percentage of women, and yet in the latest surveys “women accounted for 10% of the cybersecurity workforce in the Asia-Pacific region, 9% in Africa, 8% in Latin America, 7% in Europe and 5% in the Middle East.”
Like many veterans after the war Ann contributed to other areas. She researched social impacts of divorce and made significant contributions to Scots family law, “which ensured that the needs of children were properly taken into account in a divorce settlement”.
The BBC also has details of her life.