THE UNHEEDED, TRAGIC, AND INESCAPABLE TRUTH ABOUT THE USA
We are witnessing a political march and mass suicide of our society into the graveyard of history.
©Wendell Griffen, 2025
I was a state court trial judge in Arkansas from January 2011 until I retired at the end of December 2022. During the last years of my tenure, I began court sessions by reading about racial injustice from a calendar published by the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama. If I were still on the bench, this is what I would be reading this month.
April 1, 1807 – Ohio enacts a law banning Black witnesses from testifying in court against white people.
April 2, 1802 – State of Georgia cedes land to create Alabama and Mississippi, adding two states where slavery is legal in order to ensure that “slave states” outnumber free states in the U.S. Senate.
April 3, 1911 – President William Howard Taft expels an all-Black calvary unit from San Antonio for protesting racial segregation.
April 4, 1968 – Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
April 5, 1880 – Johnson Whittaker, one of West Point’s first Black cadets, is brutally beaten by his white classmates; he is later accused of faking the attack and expelled.
April 6, 1892 – A mob of 80 white men seize Issac Brandon from a Virginia jail and lynches him on the courthouse lawn while his young son pleads for his life.
April 7, 1927 – The Ku Klux Klan kicks off a 10-day series of revival events at a white Presbyterian church in Evergreen, Alabama, and recruits 600 new members.
April 8, 1911 – Banner Mine near Birmingham, Alabama, explodes, killing 128 people, nearly all of whom were Black men leased to the Pratt Consolidated Coal Company as convict laborers.
April 9, 1939 – Banned from every indoor venue in Washington, D.C. due to her race, Black opera singer Marian Anderson performs for 75,000 people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
April 10, 1956 – Four white men attack Black singer Nat King Cole while he is performing for an all-white audience in Birmingham, Alabama.
April 11, 1913 – President Woodrow Wilson’s cabinet implements a government-wide segregation policy in workplaces, restrooms, and lunchrooms.
April 12, 1963 – Commissioner of Public Safety Eugene “Bull” Connor orders violent arrests of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and dozens of civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama.
April 13, 1873 – An armed white mob kills 150 Black people following a contested election in Colfax, Louisiana.
April 14, 1906 – On the town square in Springfield, Missouri, a white lynch mob hangs and shoots to death Fred Coker and Horace Duncan, two Black men, before thousands of spectators.
April 15, 1903 – Several thousand white people in Joplin, Missouri, lynch a Black man named Thomas Gilyard and attack Black neighborhoods, burning homes, shooting Black people, and forcing every Black resident to flee the city.
April 16, 1945 – At a tryout for Black ballplayers from the Negro Leagues, Boston Red Cox fans taunt and abuse Black players, including Jackie Robinson, and Red Sox managers send them home without a contract.
April 17, 1915 – A white Georgia mob lynches Caesar Sheffield, a Black man, after he is accused of stealing meat.
April 18, 1846 – New Jersey enacts a law to bind enslaved Black people to indefinite servitude as “apprentices for life” who cannot leave the state or their jobs without written permission from their “masters or mistresses.”
April 19, 1989 – Five Black and Latino teenagers are arrested for raping a jogger in New York City’s Central Park and are incarcerated for years before being exonerated.
April 20, 1965 – Georgia business owner Lester Maddox threatens three Black seminary students at gunpoint for trying to eat in his segregated restaurant; he is acquitted of all charges and later elected governor.
April 21, 2007 – White parents in Turner County, Georgia protest a high school’s decision to hold its first racially integrated prom; previously, parents had organized private, racially segregated proms for students.
April 22, 1987 – The Supreme Court upholds the death penalty in McCleskey v. Kemp despite proof that it is racially biased, reasoning that racial discrimination in the criminal justice system is “inevitable.”
April 23, 1963 – During a one-man civil rights march to Jackson, Mississippi, a white activist named William L. Moore is found dead from a gunshot to the head on U.S. Highway 11 near Attalia, Alabama.
April 24, 1877 – Federal troops withdraw from Louisiana, marking the end of Reconstruction.
April 25, 1959 – A white mob beats, shoots, and throws the chained body of Mack Charles Parker, a Black man, into the Pearl River after he is accused of raping a white woman in Poplarville, Mississippi.
April 26, 1862 – California lawmakers ratify new law “To Protect Free White Labor Against Competition with Chinese Coolie Labor, and to Discourage the Immigration of Chinese into the State of California.
April 27, 1899 – Black community leader Michael Daniel is lynched in Georgia for “talking too much” about the recent lynching of another Black man, Sam Hose.
April 28, 1936 – A mob of white men in Colbert, Georgia, seizes Lint Shaw, a Black farmer, from police custody and shoots him to death hours before his trial on allegations of attempting to assault two white women.
April 29, 1992 – An all-white jury acquits the officers who violently beat Rodney King, a young Black man in Los Angeles, sparking an uprising in which more than 50 people die and over 2,000 are injured.
April 30, 1866 – White police in Memphis attack Black soldiers, triggering a wave of violence by white police and mobs who kill nearly 50 Black people, rape at least five Black women, and burn 100 Black homes and businesses.[1]
I would be reading these entries this month, as I did at the beginning of most court sessions during the first Trump presidency and the first half of the Biden presidency. Now, as I did then, I would confront lawyers, clients, and the visiting public with the unheeded, tragic, and inescapable truth about how racialized injustice, violence, and bigotry has been committed, excused, licensed, sacralized, commercialized, capitalized, commodified, merchandized, glorified, and embraced throughout U.S. history.
That is why I was saddened, but not surprised, when the right-wing Heritage Foundation issued its Project 2025 manifesto.
That is why I was saddened, but not surprised, when the Hateful Faithful clan of Southern (Slaveholder) Baptists, gangster capitalists, neofascists, imperialists, pro-zionist colonizers, kleptocrats, misogynists, war mongers, folks who despise LGBTQ people, and anti-Black and Brown immigrant haters bet the future of the United Staes on a vicious sociopath, Donald Trump, in 2024.
I was saddened, but not surprised, when other pro-zionist colonizers, gangster capitalists, and political speculators who have used Indigenous people, Blacks, Latinos, women, LGBTQ people, workers who are and are not immigrants, teachers, people with physical and/or mental differences, and senior citizens for photo ops and talking points while disregarding the truths we spoke and lived bet the future of the United States on Joe Biden, and then on Kamala Harris, knowing that Biden and Harris enabled, financed, counseled, and outfitted the racist, land stealing, genocidal Israeli apartheid regime of Benjamin Netanyahu.
Because I grew up with, experienced, and vividly recall the inequities of Jim Crow education, I was saddened, but not surprised, when voters elected politicians who openly called for banning books, prosecuting librarians, firing teachers, and taking tax dollars from public education.
I opposed Clarence Thomas’ confirmation when George H. Bush nominated him to succeed Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court. I opposed John Roberts when George W. Bush nominated him to succeed William Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. So, I was saddened, but not surprised, when Roberts led the Supreme Court to gut the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Thomas voted with him.
Roberts led the Supreme Court to invalidate admission policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina that included consideration of racial diversity. Thomas voted with him.
Roberts, Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett voted to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2023.
Roberts led the Court to declare Donald Trump and any other president absolutely immune from prosecution for criminal conduct last July. Thomas voted with him.
Now, rather than upholding due process of law as a fundamental right guaranteed to all people, the Roberts Court – with Thomas as its senior member – has reduced due process of law to whatever falsehood or fiction government agents and officers spin to kidnap, detain, and violently remove international students who protest genocide by Israel against Palestinians in Gaza from the United States.
And now, instead of using their law licenses, wealth, and prestige to protect and preserve due process, democracy, public health and safety, and fight bigotry, corruption, and governmental hatefulness, some of the nation’s biggest law firms and richest lawyers are cutting deals with a neofascist regime headed by a vicious sociopath (Donald Trump), the world’s richest gangster capitalist (Elon Musk), and people Kurt Vonnegut accurately termed “not-so-closeted white supremacists” in his final book, A Man Without A Country.
The unheeded, tragic, and inescapable truth is that politicians and voters have supported racist, sexist, anti-worker, anti-immigrant, authoritarian, deadly military adventures since the founding of the United States.
The unheeded, tragic, and inescapable truth is that politicians and voters who know better continue to support racist, sexist, anti-worker, anti-immigrant, authoritarian gangster capitalism and imperialism.
The unheeded, tragic, and inescapable truth is that millions of people in this society believe the lie that doing this is right, and that doing it more forcefully and violently to other people will make their lives better.
And the unheeded, tragic, and inescapable truth is that every society of people across history who thought that way – and the graveyard of history is full of examples – was damnably wrong.
Historians will write, philosophers will ponder, and prophets will preach about how our generation whistled, disregarded truth, dismantled democracy, rejected liberty, and profaned justice as we marched into that graveyard. And our descendants will curse, lament, and struggle with the consequences of our political suicide, for countless generations.
[1] Equal Justice Initiative, A History of Racial Injustice 2025 Calendar, © 2024 Equal Justice Initiative.
God still speaks I see. The Gospel According to Wendell could easily be Gospel # 5 in my canon.