Ever since the United States’ “war on terror” began, American media has been rife with stereotypes of Muslims as violent, foreign threats. Advocates trying to push back against this characterization sometimes emphasize that “Islam means peace,” since the two words are derived from the same Arabic root.

Indeed, the traditional Muslim greeting “al-salamu alaykum” means “peace be upon you.” Some Americans were already familiar with the phrase, thanks to an unexpected source: hip-hop culture, which often incorporated the Arabic phrase.

This is but one example of Islam’s deep intertwining with the threads of hip-hop culture. In her groundbreaking book “Muslim Cool,” scholar, artist and activist Suad Abdul Khabeer shows how Islam, specifically Black Islam, was a crucial part of hip-hop’s roots – asserting the faith’s place in American life. From prayerlike lyrics to tongue-in-cheek references, Islam and other religions are woven into hip-hop’s beats.

That’s the focus of a class we teach at Boston University. One of us is a professor of religion, history and pop culture, while the other is a graduate student in Islamic Studies.

More than ‘hello’

In Muslim cultures, “al-salamu alaykum” is more than a way of saying hello. It points to the spiritual peace of submitting to God – and not only in this life. Saying “peace be upon you” is a prayer that God will grant heaven to the person with whom you are speaking. Many Muslims believe that “salam” is also the greeting heard upon entering heaven.

The Quran instructs Muslims that “when you are greeted with a greeting, respond with a better greeting or return it.” This means that the proper response to “al-salamu alaykum” is, at a minimum, to respond in kind: “wa alaykum al-salam.”

This exchange has been adapted by several rap artists – including Rick Ross, who does not identify as Muslim, and turns the phrase’s meaning on its head. Ross uses the greeting in the hook of his song “By Any Means,” referencing a famous speech by civil rights leader Malcolm X, who was a minister of the Nation of Islam for many years until shortly before his assassination. In 1964, Malcolm X declared African Americans’ right “to be respected as a human being … by any means necessary.”

Half a century later, Ross rapped,

By any means, if you like it or not
Malcolm X, by any means
Mini-14 stuffed in my denim jeans
Al-salaam alaykum, wa alaykum al-salaam
Whatever your religion kiss the ring on the Don

Ross’s use of the phrase, right after he mentions Malcolm X, appears to insinuate that if one wishes him peace, he will wish them the same. However, if one wishes him violence, he will not hesitate to respond in kind.

‘Peace to all my shorties’

Other hip-hop artists have used “al-salamu alaykum” in many different ways, including lyrics that show broader familiarity with the laws of Islam. For example, it is sometimes contrasted with pork, which is prohibited in Islam, and by extension, the police – the “pigs,” in derogatory slang – though it is more common for non-Muslim singers to use it in this way.

“Tell the pigs I say Asalamu alaikum,” Lil Wayne says in “Tapout,” a song that has little else to do with Islam. Joyner Lucas likewise raps, “I say As-salāmu ʿalaykum when I tear apart some bacon,” in the song “Stranger Things.” Combinations of the sacred and the profane are present throughout hip-hop, not limited to references to Islam.

Finally, many rappers, particularly those who are Muslim, use the greeting in a more straightforward manner. In their 1995 song “Glamour and Glitz,” A Tribe Called Quest raps:

Peace to all my shorties who be dying too young
Peace to both coasts and the land in between
Peace to your man if you're doing your thing
Peace to my peoples who is incarcerated
Asalaam alaikum means peace, don't debate it

Here they affirm and assert that the core of the greeting is one of peace and harmony – not only between people, but between all of God’s creations.

Shared identity

But even if Muslims come in peace, society may not see them that way – and that experience of discrimination often comes through in some lyrics. Rapper French Montana, who immigrated to the Bronx – the birthplace of hip-hop – from Morocco, raps in his 2019 song “Salam Alaykum:”

As-salamu alaykum, 
That pressure don’t break, 
It don’t matter what you do, 
they still gon’ hate you

It’s a harsh recognition that whatever one’s actions, whether violent or peaceful, they may still result in racism – a realization he shares with some fellow Muslim rappers in Europe. A comedic take on this is done by Zuna and Nimo in their 2016 song “Hol’ mir dein Cousin,” where at the start of the song, Nimo states he has a shipment of “haze–” marijuana, but at the end of the video, it turns out the shipment is of “Hase–” bunnies. Yet, throughout the song the rappers speak about violence and drug trade, painting a conflicting picture of innocence versus guilt.

Fatima El-Tayeb, a scholar of race and gender, calls hip-hop a “diasporic lingua franca” in her 2011 book “European Others,” highlighting how an art form created by African Americans, and speaking to their experiences, has become one of the main ways minorities around the world speak about their struggles and successes. Some young Muslims in Europe, for example, use hip-hop as a key way to assert their sense of belonging in societies.

In hip-hop, “al-salamu alaykum” is not treated as though it were part of a foreign culture. These rappers’ beats create a space where it’s OK to be Muslim – a space in which Islam is not merely tolerated, but recognized as a valuable part of pop culture.

Margarita Guillory, Associate Professor of Religion, Boston University and Jeta Luboteni, Ph.D. Student in Religion, Boston University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – I was 9 years old when Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full” dropped. I have vivid memories of the bass-laden track booming out of car stereos and hearing it on Black radio, like Kiss FM’s top eight at 8 p.m. countdown.

On the track “Move the Crowd,” Rakim – also known as “the God MC” – rhymes “All praise is due to Allah and that’s a blessing.” Growing up as a Black Muslim in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, I was already familiar with the phrase. Like all Muslims, I learned to say it during my daily prayers and as an expression of gratitude.

But when Rakim laced those words into the lyrics of what ultimately became a popular song, he affirmed what I was seeing around me in my Brooklyn community – that Islam and Muslims were prominent features of Black life.

A key concept

Rakim dropped another familiar phrase in the song: knowledge of self.

With knowledge of self, there’s nothing I can’t solve
At 360 degrees I revolve
This an actual fact, it’s not an act, it’s been proven
Indeed and I proceed to make the crowd keep moving.

When Rakim extols the benefits of “knowledge of self” to himself as an emcee and a human being, he is drawing on a philosophy that has been critical to Black Islam, a term I use to describe the different forms of Islamic belief and practice found in Black America.

Knowledge of self comes from this tradition, beginning roughly a century ago, which has become known for advancing Black consciousness, resistance and redemption. Knowledge of self is an ethical pursuit to understand one’s place in and relationship to the world in order to positively change it.

In my 2016 book, “Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States,” I demonstrate how knowledge of self is fundamental to hip-hop. It is often described as hip-hop’s “fifth element,” the others being DJing; emceeing or “rhyming”; graffiti or “writing”; and dance, from “b-boying” to “pop locking.”

While the phrase and the consciousness that it represents have been mentioned in too many songs to count – from Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” to Lauryn Hill’s “Doo Wop” and Talib Kweli’s “K.O.S. (Determination)” – history shows the term has been a part of Islamic literature for nearly a millennium. For example, the first chapter of the celebrated 12th-century Islamic scholar Abu Hamid Al-Ghazali’s famous text “The Alchemy of Happiness” is titled “The Knowledge of Self.”

The concept of ‘knowledge of self’ was instrumental in Lauryn Hill’s breakout 1998 single ‘Doo Wop:’

In my book, I make the case that Islam, specifically Black Islam, gave hip-hop knowledge of self.

Su’ad Abdulkhabeer, Muslim Cool
Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States.. Click here.

The lessons

Rakim’s reference to knowledge of self’s being an “actual fact” is a nod to the “actual facts” of the “Lost-Found Muslim Lessons,” the catechism taught by Master W.D. Fard Muhammad, who founded the Nation of Islam on July 4, 1930. Master Fard taught these lessons to the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, who would become the religious movement’s leader.

These lessons are fundamental to the way that the Nation of Islam understands the world and the role of Black people in it. The lessons are also studied by the Nation of Gods and Earths, a related spiritual path, of which Rakim is a member. Knowledge of self comes to hip-hop through these lessons.

Rakim was not alone. During the golden age of hip-hop, a period from about the mid-1980s through mid-1990s, rappers – influenced by Black Islam – steadily proclaimed their knowledge of self in their music. Big Daddy Kane declared there’s “no pork on my fork,” an acknowledgment of the Islamic injunction against the consumption of swine. The Poor Righteous Teachers gave the Arabic greeting as salaamu alaikum with the dome of Harlem’s Masjid Malcolm Shabazz in the background in the music video for “Rock Dis Funky Joint.” And from Brooklyn to the California Bay, acclaimed emcees like Guru and local acts were rhyming about “praying to the east,” a reference to the Muslim practice.

The message

Long before rappers spoke of knowledge of self in the 1980s, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad expounded on the term in his book “Message to the Blackman in America,” released in 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. In it, he emphasized Black self-reliance – with knowledge of self being a key component.

“The so-called Negroes must be taught and given Islam,” Muhammad wrote. “Why Islam? Islam, because it teaches first the knowledge of self. It gives us the knowledge of our own. Then and only then are we able to understand that which surrounds us … this kind of thinking produces an industrious people who are self-independent.”

In some ways, it comes as little surprise that a term promulgated by a fierce advocate of self-reliance in the mid-1960s would be so widely embraced by hip-hop shortly after it was born as a counterculture in the early 1970s.

Hip-hop’s consciousness

When Black Islam helped hip-hop culture cultivate knowledge of self, it created an aspiration, arguably unique for contemporary popular music as a whole, to not just rhyme about it or write graffiti about it, and so on, but to apply it in real life. As a result, knowledge of self became hip-hop’s consciousness, emphasizing an awareness of injustice and the imperative to address it through both personal and social transformation. Critically, this consciousness, while informed by Black Islam, is embraced by hip-hop community members of all stripes.

Via Pixabay/ Wikimedia.. The 1989 song ‘Self-Destruction’ opens with a sample of a speech by Malcolm X.

The consciousness led to different forms of hip-hop-based activism. Songs against gun violence like The Stop the Violence Movement’s “Self-Destruction” and “We Are All in the Same Gang” by the West Coast All Stars.

“Self-Destruction” opens, not inconsequentially, with a sample of a speech by Malcolm X, the onetime spokesman for the Nation of Islam and icon of Black Islam. The consciousness also contributed to the formation in 2004 of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, which set the stage for other, albeit less radical and comprehensive, engagements with politics by the hip-hop generation, like the Vote or Die campaign and the push for Obama in 2008.

Nearly 10 years later, this consciousness was on display at the 2017 Grammy performance by A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes and Consequence that was an open call to “resist” in the Trump era. This consciousness also continues to inspire the many organizations like Kuumba Lynx and the Inner-City Muslim Action Network in Chicago that use hip-hop as a form of arts-based activism for youth.

And, of course, it remains in the music.

The knowledge continues

On the track “Family Feud,” Jay-Z – like Rakim – praises God, but this time in Arabic: “Alhamdulillah,” Mumu Fresh questions others’ knowledge of self with the line “Good morning, sunshine, welcome to reality/I tried to wake you, but you were sleepin’ so peacefully in your fallacy.” Busta Rhymes dropped “Extinction Level Event 2: The Wrath of God,” full of warnings and prophecies. And in a freestyle viewed around the world, Black Thought rhymes about the wisdom he got at the masjid. This consciousness is so entwined with music that Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” became a Black Lives Matter movement anthem.

Like hip-hop, this consciousness operates globally. Take, for example, the Iraqi-Canadian Narcy, Cape Town’s YoungstaCPT, Cuban hip-hop artist Robe L. Ninho and the U.K.’s Enny, whose works track their own journey for knowledge of self.

Things have changed since Rakim dropped “Move the Crowd” in 1987. Gentrification is pushing my community out of Brooklyn, and Islam and Muslims are more known and subject to the state and interpersonal violence of anti-Muslim racism. Yet hip-hop still affirms what I see around me – knowledge of self is as vital as ever.

Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, Associate Professor of American Culture, University of Michigan

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

( Inequality.org ) – In our United States today, all of us do not have an “equal opportunity” to become rich — or even comfortable. Rich people like things that way. Grand fortunes only grow grander when the richest among us have plenty of exploitable people around to exploit.

To keep things that way, rich people have gone out of their way over the past half-century to make sure all of us do not have “equal opportunity” to a quality education. This week, with the Supreme Court’s stunning ruling that strikes down affirmative action in higher ed admissions, the most fervent advocates of plutocratic privilege have now completed their squashing of the world’s most ambitious attempt to create a system of public education that can truly guarantee all kids a quality education.

That ambitious effort began all the way back in 1787 when our new nation’s earliest lawmakers, in the Northwest Ordinance, required towns in future states to reserve prime real estate for public schools. Their goal: to ensure that “the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”

“Without education, the founders feared democracy would devolve into mob rule and open doors to unscrupulous politicians and hucksters,” the University of South Carolina Law School’s Derek Black has pointed out. “Our democratic experiment might very well just fail.”

Realizing the founders’ goal of “forever” encouraging public education would end up taking almost forever. Not until the years after World War II would the United States have anything remotely close to a public school system that extended equal opportunity to young people of all colors and classes, to children with and without disabilities. In the 1960s, federal tax dollars finally began helping every community offer all children a quality educational experience.

Those dollars came via progressive tax rates that actually had most of America’s richest contributing something close to their fair tax share.

In those same mid-20th-century decades, we overhauled American higher education. We created networks of public community colleges, all with free or low-cost tuition. We created student grant and loan programs that enabled millions of young people to earn four-year and postgraduate degrees without building up debts that would take them lifetimes to pay off.

Americans who wanted to opt out of this ambitious new world of public education remained free to do so. The rich could still send their kids to private academies. Any families that so chose could send their kids to religious schools — but not on the public dime. Public tax dollars went to fund public education. Those dollars, we believed, were building democracy, teaching people of all backgrounds how to work with and learn from each other.

These noble goals would, of course, regularly go unmet. But the goals themselves — the rhetoric of “equal educational opportunity” — did really matter. Parents and communities, armed with this rhetoric, ventured forth and did noble battle against the still formidable barriers to equal opportunity. They even won many of those battles. We were moving, as a nation, in the right direction.

And then rich people said stop. These rich felt like saps. High taxes on their “hard-earned” incomes were bankrolling the education of other people’s children. Their alma maters, our wealthiest fretted, might even start cutting back on the “legacy admissions” that guaranteed their offspring easy entry into the nation’s most prestigious colleges and universities.

The “indignities” these wealthy endured went well beyond the “disrespect” they felt. They saw the source of their fortunes, their “right” to run Corporate America as they saw fit, under direct threat as the United States entered into the 1970s. The federal government — under a Republican president no less — seemed to be hobbling business at every turn.

At the end of 1970, Richard Nixon had signed into law legislation that created a new federal agency to protect workers from injury and illness. Just a few weeks earlier, the first administrator of another new federal office, the Environmental Protection Agency, had announced his attention to give business polluters no quarter. As an independent agency, William Ruckelshaus pronounced, the EPA had “only the critical obligation to protect and enhance the environment.”

Things were clearly getting out of hand. Business seemed to be taking a shellacking from every direction. New federal agencies. A restless labor movement. Campuses full of profs and students who felt free to ridicule business values. Corporate America clearly had to respond. But how? The U.S. Chamber of Commerce would put that question to Lewis Powell, a leading corporate attorney.

Powell’s answer would come in a confidential 1971 memo, just two months before his nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. The time had come, Powell declared, “for the wisdom, ingenuity, and resources of American business to be marshalled against those who would destroy it.”

Business confronts, Powell would contend, critics “seeking insidiously” to “sabotage” free enterprise. “Extremists on the left,” he insisted, have become “far more numerous, better financed, and increasingly are more welcomed and encouraged by other elements of society, than ever before.”

Corporate America, Powell would exhort, must show more “stomach for hard-nose” combat. Yet individual corporate leaders, Powell understood, can only do so much. Real strength, he would go on to explain, lies “in careful long-range planning” and “consistency of action over an indefinite period of years.” Real strength demands a “scale of financing available only through joint effort” and “the political power available only through united action and national organizations.”

Powell’s 1971 musings, notes historian Kim Phillips-Fein, “crystallized a set of concerns shared by business conservatives in the early 1970s” — and gave “inspiration” to corporate leaders who would later become familiar names and powerful forces, men like arch Colorado right-winger Joseph Coors.

Together, these newly energized corporate leaders would unleash upon America what political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson have called “a domestic version of Shock and Awe.” The number of corporate public affairs offices in Washington, D.C. would quintuple between 1968 and 1978, from 100 to over 500. In 1971, only 175 U.S. corporations had registered lobbyists in Washington. The 1982 total: almost 2,500.

Corporate leaders also bankrolled a series of new militantly “free market” think tanks and action centers: the Heritage Foundation and American Legislative Exchange Council in 1973, the Cato Institute in 1977, the Manhattan Institute in 1978, among many others.  The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, for its part, would double its membership between 1974 and 1980 and triple its budget.

Photo by Gayatri Malhotra on Unsplash

Complementing this new ideological infrastructure: a torrent of campaign contributions to rich people-friendly pols. In the mid-1970s, U.S. senators were depending on labor for almost half their campaign funding. By the mid-1980s, senators were getting less than a fifth of their funding from union PACs.

By the early 2000s, adds Jacob Hacker, the Republican Party had solidified its intimacy with “very, very, very rich billionaire donors” and corporate groups. The GOP now marched in total sync with the policy priorities of America’s most fortunate: more regressive tax cuts, more deregulation, and more extreme conservatives on the nation’s judicial benches.

The personal payoff from this synchronization would be huge for America’s deepest pockets. Between 1995 and 2007, sinking effective income tax rates saved America’s 400 richest households an average $46 million per year. The “flip side” of this “aggressive pursuit of lower taxes by the rich”? Hacker and fellow analyst Nathan Loewentheil have the consequential answer: chronic government budget deficits and insufficient funds for public goods like public education.

The predictable result? Everything from overcrowded elementary school classrooms to tuition rates that make higher education unaffordable for vast numbers of American households.

George Washington would not approve. In 1796, in his annual presidential address to Congress, Washington opined that our nation’s lawmakers had no duty “more pressing” than “the common education of a portion of our youth from every quarter.”

We are failing that youth. We are coddling our rich instead.

Via Inequality.org

Content licensed under a Creative Commons 3.0 License

Nothing will change for my institution, the University of Michigan. In 2006 the good people of the state passed Proposal 2, forbidding the use of race as a factor in admissions.

This measure caused the percentage of African-American students to drop. In 2005 non-Hispanic Blacks made up 7.2% of the Ann Arbor undergraduate student body.

Today African-American students make up less than 4% of the undergraduate student body on the Ann Arbor campus. That is a 45% drop. Virtually the same thing happened in the University of California system when they had to stop doing affirmative action.

The University of Michigan drop came despite the university’s attempt to substitute “hardship” as an admissions criterion for “race.” Students wrote in their personal statements about difficulties and obstacles that they faced in life through their high school years. But of course, as hard as life might be for African-Americans in the United States, there are others who face obstacles and hardships — poor whites, LGBTQ+ people, and women, and many of these other disadvantaged people are white. So they seem to have taken up nearly half the slots formerly allotted to Black people.

In other words, “hardship,” which Chief Justice John Roberts admitted in his decision might be considered in admissions, just doesn’t do the same work as race-conscious admissions do.

13.64% of Michiganders are African-American, so they are vastly underrepresented on the Ann Arbor campus.

Leave slavery aside, when they were unpaid labor for as much as 400 years. From the 1930s to 1968 the practice of redlining in Michigan prevented African-Americans from accumulating wealth through home ownership. That gave white families a galactic advantage. Even since redlining was officially outlawed in the 1960s, it cast a long shadow on homeownership rates and pricing of houses by neighborhood. Informal segregation, sometimes abetted by realtors, continues to keep Detroit and Flint among the most segregated cities in the United states.

H/t Urban.org

That bastion of left-wing radicalism, the RAND think tank (which started out as an adjunct to the US Air Force) reports: “The median Black household in America has around $24,000 in savings, investments, home equity, and other elements of wealth. The median White household: around $189,000,” This happened because of redlining and other elements of systemic racism, not because of any fault of African-Americans themselves.

John Roberts believes that such injustices have already been made up. They haven’t. They haven’t begun to be. Having robbed Black people blind since 1619, the least we can do is try to give them educational opportunities consonant with their proportion of the population.

Personally, I think the University of Michigan should set up a magnet K-12 school in Detroit and promise admission to those who graduate from it with good grades. If it was our school, we should be able to do as we please with its graduates. If it was in Detroit, it would ipso facto have mostly African-American attendees, but that wouldn’t be our problem.

There is a well-known fallacy among economists, called the “lump of labor.” Many people assume that if you increase job-holders among one group, it will reduce the jobs for another, that there is a fixed amount of labor to be done. This idea could not be more false. Look at Turkey in 2016-2017, when the economy grew 4% a year at a time of slowdowns for other countries. Economists concluded that the growth came about because two million Syrian workers had fled to Turkey from their civil war. That meant that farmers who wanted to expand suddenly had access to farm labor, and urban businesses that wanted to expand had access to educated Syrians, adding to the available work force. Turkey could do more work because it had more workers. Syrians didn’t take jobs from Turks, they expanded the pie.

Opponents of affirmative action in higher education believe in a similar fallacy, the “lump of education.” So they think if you admit more minorities to colleges and universities, it will keep out some whites who might otherwise have gotten in. But the colleges and universities might expand their student body. This has happened at my university, In 1984 when I arrived at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus there were a little over 34,000 students, including about 6,000 graduate students. Today we have almost 50,000 students, including 17,000 grads. Michigan’s population was 9 million in 1984. It is 10 million today. The state grew 10%. The student body grew by 32%. Things change. In many cities and states “meds and eds,” medicine and education have replaced traditional industry as contributors to gross domestic project, and we can expect further expansion of education.

There is room in this growing economy for everybody. Let’s find a way to benefit from the talents of all Americans of all races and backgrounds, and not systematically sentence some to menial labor based on the color of their skin.

(The Conversation) – The news was startling.

On June 19, 1865, two months after the U.S. Civil War ended, Union Gen. Gordon Granger walked onto the balcony at Ashton Villa in Galveston, Texas, and announced to the people of the state that “all slaves are free.”

As local plantation owners lamented the loss of their most valuable property, Black Texans celebrated Granger’s Juneteenth announcement with singing, dancing and feasting. The 182,566 enslaved African Americans in Texas had finally won their freedom.

One of them was Joshua Houston.

He had long served as the enslaved servant of Gen. Sam Houston, the most well-known military and political leader in Texas.

Joshua Houston lived about 120 miles north of Galveston when he learned of Granger’s proclamation.

It was read aloud at the local Methodist Church in Huntsville, Texas, by Union Gen. Edgar M. Gregory, the assistant commissioner for the Freedmen’s Bureau in Texas.

If Juneteenth meant anything, it meant at least that Joshua Houston and his family were free.

But there was more too.

The promise of freedom meant that more work needed to be done. Families needed to be reunited. Land needed to be secured. Children needed to be educated.

Indeed, the radical promise of Juneteenth is embodied in the community activism of Joshua Houston and the educational career of his son Samuel Walker Houston.

The violent white reaction to Black political power

Within a year of Granger’s proclamation, Houston had established a blacksmith shop near the Huntsville town square and moved his family into a two-story house on the adjoining lot.

He helped found the Union Church, the first Black-owned institution in the city, as well as a freedmen’s school to begin educating African American children.

In 1878 and 1882, a Republican coalition of Black and white voters opposed to conservative Democratic rule elected Houston as the county’s first Black county commissioner, a powerful position in local governance.

Despite this dramatic turn of events, Houston’s political story was hardly unique.

In the two decades following emancipation, 52 Black men served in the state Legislature or the state’s constitutional conventions.

But that number had fallen to two by 1882.

Opposition to Black freedom had been a powerful force in the state’s political culture since emancipation.

Armstead Barrett, a former slave in Huntsville, recalled in 1937 that an enraged white man had reacted to Granger’s Juneteenth order by riding past a celebrating Black woman and murdering her with his sword.

In 1871, the violence continued when the white citizens of Huntsville stormed the county courthouse and aided the escape of three men who had lynched freedman Sam Jenkins.

Later, in the 1880s, attacks on Black elected officials, their white political allies and Black voters escalated dramatically.

In the early 1900s, changes in state election laws, including the introduction of the poll tax, effectively disenfranchised most Black voters and many poor whites as well. Voter participation dropped from roughly 85% at the high tide of Texas populism in 1896 to roughly 35% when the poll tax became effective in 1904.

As a result, Robert Lloyd Smith was the last Black legislator for nearly 70 years when he finished his term in 1897.

That wall of white supremacy at the state Capitol would not crack again until 1966, when federal voting rights legislation and Supreme Court rulings nullified schemes to deny African Americans the ballot.

These changes enabled the election of Black officials such as Barbara Jordan, the first African American woman to serve in the Texas Senate.

Like father, like son

On an unknown date, a few years after Juneteenth, Joshua Houston’s son Samuel Walker Houston was born free in the bright light of Reconstruction.

Although he spent his adulthood in some of the darkest years of Jim Crow, he continued his father’s work as an educator and community leader. Following a short stint at Atlanta University in Georgia and Howard University in Washington, D.C., Samuel Walker Houston returned to Huntsville and founded a school in the nearby Galilee community.

Houston’s school was named for him and served as one of the first county training schools for African Americans in Texas. It enrolled students at every level, from first grade through high school, and provided a curriculum based on Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee model of vocational training.

Young women at Houston’s school received training in homemaking, sewing and cooking, while young men learned carpentry, woodworking and mathematics.

By 1922, enrollment at the school had grown to 400 students, and it was recognized by contemporaries as the leading school of East Texas. In the 1930s, Houston’s school was absorbed into Huntsville’s school district, and he became the director of Black education in the county.

Houston encouraged a practical education for Black Texans, but he also believed that young Texans of all races needed to learn an account of history that differed from the white supremacist narrative that dominated Southern history.

Toward this end, he joined with Joseph Clark and Ramsey Woods, two white professors who pioneered race relations courses at Sam Houston State Teachers College. Together, the group led the Texas Commission on Interracial Cooperation’s effort to evaluate Texas public school textbooks during the 1930s.

In an analysis of racial attitudes in state-endorsed textbooks, they found that 74% of books presented a racist view of the past and of Black Americans. Most excluded the scientific, literary and civic contributions of Black people, while mentioning their economic contributions only in the period of slavery before the Civil War.

Instead, the group argued, books designed for both Black and white Texans needed to take the “opportunity … to do simple justice” by including Black history and the “struggle for the exercise” of equal civil, political and legal rights.

White Texans refused to adopt a textbook in the 1930s that taught the fundamental equality of the races, or portrayed Reconstruction, as it is now widely understood, as a missed opportunity to establish a more just and egalitarian Texas.

But Houston and his white counterparts were motivated by the conviction that progress, both for African Americans and for Texas, required a more honest and progressive account of the state and its history.

An ongoing battle for equality

Today’s legislative efforts in Texas and elsewhere to restrict the teaching of systemic racism in public schools ignore the lessons and realities represented by Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston’s lives.

The argument used for supporting such restrictions is that “divisive concepts” like the history of racism may make some students feel uncomfortable or guilty.

That sort of thinking echoes the same justification provided by Texas lawmakers in 1873, when many argued that the state’s schools must be segregated to ensure “the peace, harmony and success of the schools and the good of the whole.”

But the opposite is true.

In reality, the prohibition on teaching the darker chapters of our past creates a segregated history.

Instead, as Samuel Walker Houston recognized, young Texans must have a more honest account of the past and of one another to progress into a unified and egalitarian society.

Texas history is both the story of people who dedicated their lives to the work of advancing freedom and the story of powerful people and forces that stood against it.

One cannot be understood without the other.

Americans cannot appreciate the accomplishments of Joshua and Samuel Walker Houston without examining the vicious realities of Jim Crow society.

The lesson of their lives, and of the Juneteenth holiday, is that freedom is a precious thing that requires constant work to make real.

Jeffrey L. Littlejohn, Professor of History, Sam Houston State University and Zachary Montz, Lecturer, History Department, Sam Houston State University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured Image: Joshua Houston leads a Juneteenth Parade in Huntsville, Texas, in a photo circa 1900.
Sam Houston Memorial Museum and Republic of Texas Presidential Library

Shame on those political elites demanding we abandon even striving for a fair country.

Jim Hightower

OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker.

Via Otherwords.org

In my view some of the actions Trump took while president were much, much worse than storing some old files in his bathroom. The government over-classifies things and the 1917 Espionage Act, which underpins some of the charges against him, is unconstitutional and should be struck down. Maybe if the Republicans are angered enough by its use against their party’s leader they can be proper libertarians and get rid of the damn thing.

So here are three things Trump did, which immediately come to mind, that should have been crimes that landed him in jail.

1. Trump initiated a formal policy of family separation of undocumented immigrants to the United States. He didn’t change the law, just the way Homeland Security and other agencies viewed the law. It is not intrinsically illegal for people to enter the US without a visa, if, for instance, they are seeking asylum. You can’t really tell the status of their case until they go before a judge. So up until 2017 they weren’t considered criminals. But Trump encouraged law enforcement to disregard asylum claims and to view them as having broken the law for just having stepped foot in the US. If they were criminals they had to be jailed. And children cannot be held in a jail for adults. So the practical outcome of treating the parents as criminals was that their children would be taken from them by child services and placed in juvenile detention or even in foster homes.

The policy had no other rationale but cruelty. Then White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, part of Trump’s psychopathocracy, openly boasted about sending a message in this way to immigrant families not to come with their children. There is no, repeat, no evidence that the family separations slowed immigration. The practice did, however, resemble the actions of slavers in the America of the 19th century who separated enslaved families and sold family members down the river. Some of the children taken away were US-born. The government lost track of others. Some children were abused.

Anybody who did a thing like that should go to jail for life. But it wasn’t even illegal, and although 66% of Americans disapproved, 27% thought it was the right thing to do.

2. Muslim Ban. Trump tried three times to come up with regulatory language that would allow him to ban some Muslims from coming to the United States. Discriminating against people on the basis of religion is un-American. Because he finally tied the ban to countries that would not or could not conform to US reporting requirements on would-be immigrants, he finally made it stick. Most of the big Muslim countries, like Egypt, Turkey, Bangladesh and Indonesia were not even affected. He managed to make life more difficult for Yemeni-Americans who could not see their grandparents anymore, or for desperate Syrians trying to flee their civil war. As with family separation, the cruelty was the point.

3. Trump’s deployment of force against peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters at LaFayette Square in June 2020 was illegal and unconstitutional. His attempt to order in military forces contravened posse comitatus.

Scott Michelman of the ACLU observed, “The President’s shameless, unconstitutional, unprovoked, and frankly criminal attack on protesters because he disagreed with their views shakes the foundation of our nation’s constitutional order. And when the nation’s top law enforcement officer becomes complicit in the tactics of an autocrat, it chills protected speech for all of us.”

Also illegal was his use of federal agents to kidnap protesters in Portland, Oregon, off the streets without due process.

Of course these three lawless actions that harmed large numbers of innocent people are only a drop in the bucket among the innumerable unethical, illegal, unconstitutional or just plain ugly things Trump did to our country. If he goes to jail for stupidly fooling around with some old Pentagon war plans, that will be ironic, since it is probably the least damaging of his crimes.

May 2023 marks 98 years since the birth of civil rights leader Malcolm X, formerly Malcolm Little.

Malcolm X was a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, or NOI, and helped to lead the organization until he left in 1964 – the year before his assassination.

The NOI, whose role in civil rights movements is a focus of my research, included leaders such as Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, who along with Malcolm X are known for their fiery rhetoric and teachings on race.

The NOI, which teaches a Black supremacist message and advocates for racial separatism, has also been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

While the organization once boasted half a million members, the group is now relatively small. Currently it has an estimated membership of roughly 35,000 – but prominent NOI members, such as boxer and onetime Malcolm X friend Muhammad Ali, attracted wide public interest in the movement. Today, its influence continues to extend well beyond its membership.

Although Malcolm X – and other prominent members like Ali – left the NOI, thousands of students each year learn about the group from Malcolm X’s “Autobiography,” originally published in 1965.

Malcolm X’s influence on popular culture also remains significant. He inspired a Hollywood biopic and is referenced in the work of artists such as Beyoncé, Tupac Shakur and Snoop Dogg, who was briefly associated with NOI.

Netflix: “Blood Brothers | Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali Official Trailer | Netflix

Thanks largely to Malcolm X, the NOI is now a household name, but its teachings remain controversial, particularly among Muslims.

A radical alternative to Christianity?

W.D. Fard, a peddler by day and preacher by night, established the NOI in 1931 in Detroit, Michigan.

He taught that God was a Black man who taught the first human beings Islam. Accordingly, Fard framed Islam as “the natural faith” for people whose ancestors came from Africa, before colonization and slavery had forced Christianity onto them. He argued that Black people should abandon Christianity in favor of Islam as their ancestral religion.

Fard also taught that Christianity was “the white man’s” religion and a corrupted form of Islam used to promote white supremacy. The message appealed to Black migrants from the South, who were sometimes looked down upon by Northern Black Protestants. Fard disappeared from the historical record in the mid-1930s.

Malcolm X and the NOI

Malcolm X joined the NOI while incarcerated in 1952. He became an international spokesman for the group, using his fierce wit and sense of humor to debate Black and white leaders on matters of race, religion and politics.

Malcolm X was suspended from the NOI in 1963 for his comments about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. The following year, he renounced the NOI, converted to Sunni Islam, completed the hajj and formed a Black civil rights organization called the Organization of Afro-American Unit, or OAAU. This group sought to unite all Black people across the globe and conditionally accepted help from white people committed to Black freedom. The NOI, on the other hand, focused on the U.S. and refused all help from white Americans.

Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, during an OAAU event in New York. The identity of his killers remains a mystery.

A new era

When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, his son, Warith Deen Mohammed, transformed the NOI into the “World Community of al-Islam in the West.” He downplayed previous teachings about Black supremacy and aligned the movement closer to Sunni Islam. In 1977, however, a protégé of Elijah Muhammad’s and Malcolm X’s named Louis Farrakhan “restored” Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam. Farrakhan assumed leadership of the group and emphasized Elijah’s teachings on race.

W.D. Fard, the NOI’s founder, and his successor Elijah Muhammad did not seem to know much about Sunni or Shiite Islam’s teachings. Fard did not cite the Quran to his followers, and Elijah Muhammad did not read the book until after assuming the NOI’s leadership.

As the group grew after World War II, Muhammad and other leaders became more familiar with mainstream Islamic tenets. They changed the name of their meeting places from “temples” to “mosques” and incorporated the Quran and Arabic phrases into their teachings and community organizing.

While the movement has changed its practices to align more closely with global expressions of Islam, many Muslims do not consider the NOI part of the Ummah, the global community of Muslims.

Not universally considered Muslim

The NOI’s unique theology is one of the reasons the group is not accepted into the Ummah.

Other forms of Islam maintain that God is eternal, nonhuman and singularly divine. The NOI, however, teaches that W.D. Fard was “God in person” who called Elijah Muhammad as his prophet.

Despite this significant deviation from mainstream forms of Islam, the NOI follows four of the five pillars of Islam: five daily prayers (salat), giving alms to the poor (zakat), pilgrimage to Mecca (hajj) and a month of fasting during Ramadan.

NOI Muslims did not practice Ramadan until 1988, when Farrakhan instructed members to fast “with the entire Islamic world.”

Changing attitudes?

That change led to opportunities for intra-Muslim cooperation but also underscored the limited acceptance of the NOI that continues among many other Muslim groups.

For example, in 2000, NOI members prayed with Houston Muslims during Ramadan, allowing the NOI to connect with other American Muslims.

However, these cross-Muslim events have not continued in Houston. Nor are they common elsewhere. The lack of sustained pan-Muslim events might suggest that, even when religious practice aligns, there remain obstacles to the building of relationships between mainstream and NOI Muslims.

While both the NOI and Malcolm X remain controversial, for many admirers X’s work has taken on new significance for today’s racial justice movements.

Joseph R. Stuart, Postdoctoral Fellow, Brigham Young University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.