Black history that doesn't make it into the history books v2.0
As most readers here know, US history has been sanitized for "our" protection. This being black history month, please put down historical events, good and/or bad, that aren't generally known.
Here's my entry--Torn from the Land
Please post your own examples as you come across them.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Thank you so much for posting this!
Lots of similarities to the AA experience.
Thanks, Spaz. 
I'd love to see other global contributions to this thread. Black history is world history, after all.
Thanks, lmd!
DU and the wonderful people who leave because of the hostility and mean spiritedness of certain members.
I know of one in particular who left in 2009 and started her very own successful website.. she isn't Black but she was treated badly for posting pics of our Democratic President on DU!
Oh this is from her website now! 
http://theobamadiary.com/2015/07/04/fourth-of-july-at-the-white-house/
Probably because it's been so insane around here lately.
This is absolutely amazing. You have been finding the most amazing gems. And I love the international flavor of your contributions. Thanks so much for that.
books. Dr. Williams is well known but it's always good to have a reminder.
Thanks for your contribution.
Paul Robeson and the Civil Rights Congress submitting We Charge Genocide petition to the United Nations Secretariat, New York, December 17, 1951, Daily Worker/Daily World Photographs Collection, Tamiment Library, New York University.
- See more at: https://www.americanquarterly.org/interact/beyond_subprime.html#sthash.DGCSt5sw.dpuf
It's not that this guy died--it's how he lived. A remarkable man, a remarkable life:
Dr. Beny J. Primm, left, with Mayor John V. Lindsay of New York, center, and Dr. Bertram S. Brown, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, in an undated photo. As mayor, Mr. Lindsay secured money used by Dr. Primm to open a methadone clinic in Brooklyn in 1969.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/25/nyregion/dr-beny-primm-pioneer-in-aids-prevention-dies-at-87.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-2&action=click&contentCollection=Health&_r=0
His daughter Annelle Primm confirmed the death.
Dr. Primm was treating trauma cases at Harlem Hospital in the early 1960s when he became aware of the havoc that drug addiction was causing. “As an anesthesiologist, I saw young people in the E.R., their bodies riddled with bullet and knife wounds,” he wrote in his 2014 memoir, “The Healer: A Doctor’s Crusade Against Addiction and AIDS,” written with John S. Friedman. “I knew that behind this devastation was the scourge of drugs, and I made a promise to myself that I would work to stop these black kids from going down.”
In 1969, he founded the Addiction Research and Treatment Corporation, which opened a methadone clinic in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and, within a few years, a half-dozen treatment centers in Brooklyn and Manhattan. He became recognized as an authority on heroin addiction and its treatment.
Dr. Primm saw his first AIDS case in 1983 when examining an addict at one of his treatment centers. As tests became available for H.I.V., the virus that can lead to AIDS, he discovered that more than 40 percent of his patients were infected with the virus. The finding turned him into an outspoken advocate for clean-needle programs and robust information campaigns aimed at high-risk populations.
....
A remarkable guy with a compelling backstory--just the way he got a medical degree was pretty amazing!
Thanks for your contribution to this awesome thread, MAD. 
There wasn't much but a write-up at the site. BUT I'm so glad this thread is Black History That Doesn't Make It Into History Books because there's so much that could be included here about Africa Before Slavery!!!
One story that touched my heart is knowing what Timbucto means, Bouctou's well, named for Bouctou, a Taureg woman, who, legend has it, discovered this well around which the whole city sprang along the trans-Saharan trade route.
So many stories before and during the enslavement of our people that I'm going to enjoy posting here.
Thanks, Number23 for maintaining this thread
We have stuff posted from black Canada, the Caribbean and I'd love to see alot more articles/pieces from Africa. I have no doubt that Africa is an area that ALL of us could learn a hell of a lot more about.
So if you ever come across some pieces about the Motherland (particularly your family's home country 
) they would be welcome additions to this thread.
Thanks for posting.
Last edited Tue Jan 26, 2016, 08:46 PM - Edit history (1)
By Bilge Ebiri for Vulture:
This year’s Sundance Film Festival was filled with movies about the love of movies: The drama smash Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and the documentary The Wolfpack both featured characters whose lives centered around a fascination with classic films, and who strove to re-create those films in their own way. But no film demonstrated the power of cinema more resonantly than Sembene!, directed by Samba Gadjigo and Jason Silverman, which screened as part of the world-documentary competition.
The Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene (1923–2007), often called the father of African cinema, had a seismic career. He effectively created an African film industry out of nothing: In 1963, with a used 16mm camera and leftover film stock sent by friends from Europe, he made a short called Borom Sarret (The Wagon Driver), considered the first African movie made by a black African. Until the independence of French West Africa in 1960, French colonial authorities had made it illegal for Africans to make films of their own, so countries like Senegal had no film equipment, no professional actors, and no funding; Sembene used friends and family to put the film together. “Any time I hear an American independent talking about his war story in getting a film made, I have to smile to myself and think of Ousmane Sembene,” says co-director Silverman.
In 1966, Sembene made La Noire de … (Black Girl), the first feature film ever released by a sub-Saharan African director; it was awarded France’s prestigious Prix Jean Vigo and put him on the map, making him a mainstay on the festival circuit. From there, his profile rose. With the politically charged epics Xala (1975), Ceddo (1977), and Camp de Thiaroye (1987), he created some of the most beautiful films of all time, courting both controversy and acclaim and ensuring that African cinema had a place on the world stage. Ceddo was so inflammatory it was banned in some African countries for its depiction of strife between Muslims and Christians. Thiaroye, about a colonial-era massacre of African troops by the French, was banned in France but won six awards at the 1987 Venice Film Festival. Sembene’s devastating final film, Moolade, about female genital mutilation, won the Un Certain Regard award at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival.
Sembene! documents the filmmaker’s eventful life — he grew up in a family of fishermen on the shores of the Casamance River in rural Senegal, living a life of what he termed “daily vagrancy.” Kicked out of school for insubordination, uninterested in fishing and wanting to see the world, he stowed away to France. He was working as a dockworker in Marseilles in the 1950s when he wrote his first novels, out of a desire to see the Africa that he knew depicted in literature. When he turned to cinema in the 1960s, it became a vital link for him between the oral cultures of his youth and the timely political issues of his day. His films often start off in simple, fablelike ways, but they proceed to ask complex questions about identity and tribal, spiritual, and political allegiance. These are serious films about serious subjects, but thanks to Sembene's poetic style of storytelling, they hover between realism, ritual, and myth. They are, all of them, utterly intoxicating.
much more here: http://www.vulture.com/2015/02/how-ousmane-sembene-invented-african-cinema.html
Sembene! trailer:
Thanks so much, lmd. 
of African descent really added to it.
Sounds as though the Nazis picked up some tactics from America here. Makes me ever so proud.
Response to BlueMTexpat (Reply #51)
Take a look at this monster
His name is King Leopold II of Belgium.
He “owned” the Congo during his reign as the constitutional monarch of Belgium. After several failed colonial attempts in Asia and Africa, he settled on the Congo. He “bought” it and enslaved its people, turning the entire country into his own personal slave plantation. He disguised his business transactions as “philanthropic” and “scientific” efforts under the banner of the International African Society. He used their enslaved labor to extract Congolese resources and services. His reign was enforced through work camps, body mutilations, torture, executions, and his own private army.
Most of us aren’t taught about him in school. We don’t hear about him in the media. He’s not part of the widely-repeated narrative of oppression (which includes things like the Holocaust during World War II). He’s part of a long history of colonialism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide in Africa that would clash with the social construction of a white supremacist narrative in our schools. It doesn’t fit neatly into school curriculums in a capitalist society. Making overtly racist remarks is (sometimes) frowned upon in ‘polite’ society; but it’s quite fine not to talk about genocide in Africa perpetrated by European capitalist monarchs.1
Mark Twain wrote a satire about Leopold called “King Leopold’s Soliloquy; A Defense of His Congo Rule”, where he mocked the King’s defense of his reign of terror, largely through Leopold’s own words. It’s an easy read at 49 pages and Mark Twain is a popular author in American public schools. But like most political authors, we will often read some of their least political writings or read them without learning why the author wrote them in the first place. Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, serves to reinforce American anti-socialist propaganda about how egalitarian societies are doomed to turn into their dystopian opposites. But Orwell was an anti-capitalist revolutionary of a different kind—a supporter of working class democracy from below—and that is never pointed out. We can read about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, but “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” isn’t on the reading list. This isn’t by accident. Reading lists are created by boards of education in order to prepare students to follow orders and endure boredom. From the point of view of the Department of Education, Africans have no history.
Leopold was just one of thousands of things that helped construct white supremacy as both an ideological narrative and material reality. I don’t pretend that he was the source of all evil in the Congo. He had generals, and foot soldiers, and managers who did his bidding and enforced his laws. He was at the head of a system. But that doesn’t negate the need to talk about the individuals who are symbolic of the system. But we don’t even get that. And since it isn’t talked about, what capitalism did to Africa, all the privileges that rich white people gained from the Congolese genocide, remain hidden. The victims of imperialism are made, like they usually are, invisible.
Photos of Leopold's genocide are too hideous to include here and not for the faint of heart.
http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/2010/12/22/when-you-kill-ten-million-africans-you-arent-called-hitler/
That means a lot to me!
I was in Belgium for a month back in the late '80s. The Belgians were the warmest, most down to Earth people I met in Europe, not that I've visted every country to be really fair. Years later, future husband turns out to be 1/2 Belgian. It was husband who clued me to the never-mentioned reign of Leopold.
So as soon as I thought, why attack Belgium, I remembered Leo and felt let's mourn the milions upon millions of Congolese victims and plunder of the country's riches, well into the 1940s, that eventually made Belgium the 2nd richest European country. I mourn all of the dead innocents.
There's this interview from Last Year, after the Paris attack, of Vincent Kompany, star footballer born of a Belgian mom and Congolese dad, and outspoken critic of the government.
"When I was a kid in my neighborhood there was nobody that supported Belgium," Kompany told CNN. It was impossible and unthinkable because there was nothing they could relate to." http://us.flash24.news/sport/paris-attacks-belgium-must-heal-divisions-says-vincent-kompany/
Kompany said Belgian politicians had failed to recognize the potential problems because of their lack of interaction with the local communities.
“There’s a sense of me that really believes that it was predictable, really predictable,” Belgium’s national captain, who grew up in a troubled Brussels neighborhood, told CNN’s Amanda Davies.
“I think it was inevitable, because I only used to see politicians in our neighborhoods once every six years when they needed to come for votes,” he said.
“But I have really struggled to see a real concern, a genuine desire to be a part of making those neighborhoods.”
However, if Belgium is fighting for the hearts and minds of the disenfranchised, Kompany fears the battle is being lost.
“The reason why it hurt me so much is because they’re not people of a religious faction, they’re people that have been able to fall off the grid and people have been able to indoctrinate them,” the 29-year-old said. http://wgno.com/2015/11/26/paris-attacks-politicians-failed-the-people-of-brussels-says-vincent-kompany/
I can only imagine King Leo is part of the ever-present history that fuels radicalization of disenfranchized Arabs and Africans who've been in Belgium for generations.
I've read several accounts that though Hutu and Tutsi existed together since time immemorial, the almost non-existent division between the two was intensified by pure fantasy, when the Belgian colonizers just up and decided that the Tutsi were closer to white- measuring heads, noses, height and whatnot- and therefore the natural leaders. Once upon a time, from what I've read, since the people were intermixed, Hutu and Tuti became signifiers of proximity to the king's court.
II. RACIAL CLASSIFICATION AND COLONIALISM
In order to strengthen their control, the Belgian colonists divided Rwanda’s unified population into three distinct groups: Hutu, Tutsi, and Twa. In order to do this, the colonists created a strict system of racial classification. Both the Belgians and the Germans, influenced by racist ideas, thought that the Tutsi were a superior group because they were more “white” looking. The colonists believed that the Tutsi were natural rulers, so they put only Tutsis into positions of authority and discriminated against Hutus and Twa. The size of the nose and the color of the eyes were factors that determined whether a person was classified as Hutu, Tutsi or Twa. Even though prior to colonization, the people of the region that became Rwanda lived together, the Belgian colonization put one group above the other https://www.wcl.american.edu/humright/center/rwanda/documents/Jigsaw1_History.pdf
Beyond Victimhood: 5 Slaves Who Fought Back and Changed History
Not all of these had the African American experience of slavery, but ALL changed history.
http://www.juancole.com/2016/03/beyond-victimhood-5-slaves-who-fought-back-and-changed-history.html
The United Nations calls this 400-year-period “one of the darkest chapters in human history.” And according to the U.N., March 25 is aimed at raising awareness of the dangers of racism and prejudice today.
To mark the day, teleSUR aims to commemorate all victims of the trade but will pay special attention to those who dedicated their lives to ending slavery through resistance and rebellion.
Congrats for keeping it up! It's an educational resource for all of us! 
I think our history is just too freaking fabulous and there's just much too much to make palatable for the dominant culture. Too much communication, trade, discoveries that would leave supremacy in a shambles.
That's why I LOVE this thread. We all have bits and pieces of information we're constantly finding and it's so nice to come here to post.
Thank you 
and that so many are contributing.
Yes, thanks be to Brewman_Jaxx for the ongoing thread of excellent finds! 
"Whitewash," the documentary, is a film exploring the complexity of race in America through the struggle and triumph of the history of black surfers. Narrated by Grammy Award® winner Ben Harper with Tariq “Blackthought” Trotter of the Roots, the story is told through the eyes of black surfers and historians from Hawaii, Jamaica, Florida, and California.
This controversial and probing film looks deep into America’s painful and pervasive legacy of slavery and exclusion. From surfing’s “discovery” by Captain James Cook in Hawaii in 1778 through the explosion of surf culture during the days of segregated Jim Crow America in the1960’s, Whitewash explores the myths that black surfers have overcome in their search for waves. http://newyorksurffilmfestival.com/2009featurefilms/whitewash
As a side note: My dad was a great swimmer and surfed a lot well into his teens while still a lad in Africa. He had no idea it was only for white people when he came here in his 30's back in the mid '60s. As he used to say, coastal people just naturally surf. I was really grateful when this film came out few years ago and it included surfing in Ghana that slave traders stopped.
If interested, but unfortunately, the entire documentary is no longer available online for free. But can be viewed on YouTube for $1.99 at Virgil Films.
In 1919, after the end of World War I, Black sharecroppers in Arkansas began to unionize. This attempt to form unions, triggered white vigilantism and mass killings, that left 237 Blacks dead.
Towards the end of 1918, attorney Ulysses S. Bratton of Little Rock, Arkansas listened to Black sharecroppers tell stories of theft, exploitation, and never ending debt. One man by the name of Carter, explained how he cultivated 90 acres of cotton and then had his landlord confiscate the crop and all of his possessions. Another Black farmer, from Ratio, Arkansas said a plantation manager would not give sharecroppers an itemized record of their crop. No one realized that within a year of meeting with Mr. Bratton, one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. would take place. In a report released by the Equal Justice Initiative, white people in the Delta region of the South, started a massacre that left 237 Black people dead. Even though the one-time death toll was unusually high, it was not uncommon for whites to use racial violence to intimidate Blacks.
Mr. Bratton represented the deprived sharecroppers who became members of a new union, the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America. The new union was founded by a Black Delta native named Robert Hill. With no prior organizing experience, all Robert Hill had going for him was ambition. Mr. Hill said “the union wants to know why it is that the laborers cannot control their just earnings which they work for,” as he asked Black sharecroppers to each persuade 25 new members to join a lodge.
http://blackmainstreet.net/never-forget-americas-forgotten-mass-lynching-237-black-sharecroppers-murdered-arkansas/
...This enlarged his personal powers and involved him directly in the administration of all new government programs. As president of the National Tourist Institute, Castro launched a campaign to revive Cuba’s tourist industry.
During the spring of 1959, Castro contacted former boxing champion Joe Louis through Rowe-Louis-Fischer-Lockhart, Inc., an advertising firm based in New York City. Joe Louis and Billy Rowe, a former columnist with the Pittsburgh Courier, had been long-time friends and partners in this advertising business since 1935. The former heavy weight champion helped Rowe recruit clients, made commercial appearances, and participated in social and promotional events arranged by wealthy businessmen who wanted to bask in the fame and national prominence of the Brown Bomber.
Castro, who witnessed the glory years of Louis’s boxing career as a Cuban youth in the 1930s, also admired Louis’s athletic achievements and his struggle against overwhelming disadvantages as the son of an Alabama sharecropper and great grandson of a slave. The accomplishments of the former boxing champion captured the imagination of African America, elevated the Brown Bomber to the status of the first black hero in white America, and made Joe Louis an international celebrity among colonial subjects who had battled the ravages of American and European imperialism. The Cuban leader also understood that Joe Louis could provide the first serious link with middle-class African Americans. They had tourist dollars to spend but were prohibited by “Jim Crow” restrictions that were standard problems for African American travelers throughout resort venues in the Caribbean. Louis eventually assembled an impressive delegation of seventy-one prominent leaders, personalities, and newspaper editors who were all well-known throughout black America. Noted members of this delegation included: John H. Sengstacke, Sr., publisher and general editor of the Chicago Daily Defender, the largest black owned daily in the world, and co-founder and past president of the National Negro Publishers Association; Attorney Loren Miller, the editor-publisher and legal counsel for the California Eagle; and Carl Murphy, editor and publisher of the Baltimore Afro-American. Other participants represented the Pittsburgh Courier, the New Orleans Louisiana Weekly, the Los Angeles Sentinel, the Ohio Sentinel, the Philadelphia Tribune, Johnson Publications (Ebony Magazine and Jet Magazine), the Cleveland Call Post, True Magazine, and the New York Amsterdam News.
The Joe Louis Commission was given official governmental recognition in Cuba but in the United States the white press viewed this effort as solely another commercial venture by the former boxing champion desperately seeking to satisfy pressing financial obligations. As American-Cuban diplomatic relations rapidly deteriorated in 1960, Louis’s activities in the island were chastised as supportive of a communist inspired regime. The mindset of Cold War policy makers and their anticommunism supporters viewed indigenous challenges to American international supremacy as Communist orchestrated. Ironically, while Louis was attacked, white owned corporations continued to do business with the new revolutionary government.
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December 31, 1959 Havana, Cuba
The Brown Bomber -- fighter and would be DIPLOMAT. That is too cool. 
has to offer.
I am so glad that you enjoyed the thread. You are most welcome, especially if you have some nuggets you'd like to add yourself!
What an amazing find! I'm still not sure why it was called the "Ethiopian" regiment though??
To be honest, I had never heard of the Ethiopian regiment until it was mentioned on Roots v 2.0. From there, it was to the Google.
And, while wondering around the google, I found a bunch of other Black people, places and things that I will be posting ... probably a item a day.
I had forgotten how important this particular thread is.
Muchas gracias
Funny how the witchhunt only ended after "prominent" read: white and rich folks starting getting named.
2nd youngest person in the U.S. to be executed.
