(I first heard the news from Dru Blood 2005-10-24.)

Rosa Louise McCauley Parks died this evening at her home in Detroit, with her friends at her side, at the age of 92. She was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama; she spent most of her life in Montgomery, Alabama, and then Detroit, Michigan. She was, of course, best known for her critical role in the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the development of the Freedom Movement in the American South.

There are three things you need to know, and remember, about her life.

First, you should know how she came up, and how she and a handful of other black women set the South afire with the Freedom Movement:

Whatever the truth, [by fall 1955] Jo Ann Robinson, Mary Fair Burks, and the other [Women’s Political Council] members were tired of searching for the perfect symbol for their cause. No longer would they consult with male leaders about whether to stay off the busses. Their plans for a boycott were ready, and, at the very first opportunity, they would be put into effect, no matter what the men said. The black women of Montgomery, Robinson said later, were ready to explode.

The woman who would provide the fuse was a light-skinned, forty-two-year old seamstress who wore rimless glasses and pulled her graying hair back into a neatly braided coil. Quiet, unassuming, polite–the perfect lady, so everyone said who knew her. Soon, she would stun them all, revealing some of the tortured complexity that lay beneath the prim facade. There was so much that was hidden about Rosa Parks. Even her appearance was deceptive. The coil at the nape of her neck, for example, concealed the fact that her hair was long, straight, and silky–a legacy, she said, from her Indian ancestors. When she pulled out the pins at home, her hair spilled down her back in luxuriant waves. I never cut my hair because my husband liked it this way, she told a friend years later.

Just as few people ever saw Rosa McCauley Parks with her hair down, few knew about her Indian and white heritage, her deep racial pride, her smoldering anger, her lifelong rebellion against being pushed around by whites. Three of her four great-grandfathers were white. Her maternal grandfather, in whose home she was raised, was the son of a white plantation owner and light enough to pass for white himself. Sylvester Edwards loved to use his appearance to embarass and upset whites, shaking hands and speaking familiarly with those who didn’t know him, then laughing when they found out the truth. He delighted in calling whites by their first names and made jokes about them behind their backs. When the Ku Klux Klan rampaged through their small community outside Montgomery, Rosa McCauley’s grandfather kept a double-barreled shotgun by his side at all times. I don’t know how long I would last if they came breaking in here, he told her, but I’m getting the first one who comes through the door.

His standing up to whites made a deep impression on his small, slight granddaughter, who received a further dose of racial pride when, at the age of eleven, she enrolled in Miss White’s school in Montgomery. Officially known as the Montgomery Industrial School for Girls, Miss White’s was founded by white teachers from New England to teach domestic skills, as well as academic subjects, to black girls. The teachers at Miss White’s were shunned by the rest of the city’s white population, and th school was twice set afire. The white community’s fear that the school’s curriculum included racial equality as well as cooking and sewing was not misplaced. It was no accident that several of the women most active in the Montgomery Bus Boycott had attended Miss White’s. What I learned best at the school, Parks wrote, was that I was a person with dignity and self-respect, and I should not set my sights lower than anybody els just because I was black.

More than once as a child, she put those lessons into practice. When she was ten, a white boy threatened to hit her. She responded by threatening to smash his head in with a brick. Another time, a white boy on roller skates, careening behind her on the sidewalk, tried to push her aside. She turned and pushed back. His mother, standing nearby, told the little girl that she could put me so far in jail that I never would get out again for pushing her child.

…

By the 1940s, the fire in [her husband, and NAACP organizer] Raymond Parks had damped down. He had tried for years to register to vote but had not succeeded. Finally, he just gave up trying. Now, Rosa took up the banner. Raymond Parks had long discouraged her from joining the NAACP–too dangerous for a woman, he said. But in 1943, Rosa found that the local chapter had at least one female member–her old friend from Miss White’s school, Johnnie Carr. Rosa decided to go to the December meeting to see Carr and take a look at the organization for herself. The meeting, which Carr didn’t attend, turned out to be the annual election of officers. The men said they needed a woman to take the minutes, and Parks, the only woman present, agreed. I was too timid to say no, she explained. She paid her membership dues, was elected secretary on the spot, and from that moment on, threw herself into civil rights work with a singular passion.

Despite her modern image as a simple seamstress who just happened to get on a bus one day and ignite a movement, Rosa Parks, together with E. D. Nixon, was the mainstay of the Montgomery NAACP through the 1940s and 1950s. On her lunch hours, in the evenings after work, and on weekends, Parks would be in Nixon’s office, answering phones, handling correspondence, sending out press releases to newspapers, keeping track of the complaints that flooded in concerning racial violence and discrimination. As much as he depended on her, Nixon had litle use for women as activists. One time he told Parks that women don’t need to be nowhere but in the kitchen. She shot back: Well, what about me? Realizing he had painted himself into a corner, Nixon came back with a lame reply: … I need a secretary and you are a good one. She was much more than that. In the early 1940s, she helped organize the local NAACP Youth Council and became its adviser, encouraging its teenage members to try to integrate the local white library. Childless herself, she loved working with youngsters, who, in turn, responded to her warmth and enthusiasm.

–Lynne Olson (2001): Freedom’s Daughters: The Unsung Heroines of the Civil Rights Movement from 1830 to 1970, pp. 95-97.

And you should also know why she did what she did that day in December 1955:

On December 1, 1955, less than two months after Mary Louise Smith’s arrest [for refusing to give up her seat on a segregated bus], Rosa Parks waited for a bus to take her home from work. She was just steps away from the Winter Building, where the order had been given in 1861 to fire on Fort Sumter and ignite the Civil War. Shortly after five o’clock, a bus pulled up to the stop. Absorbed in thought about an NAACP workshop she was planning for that weekend, Mrs. Parks didn’t notice the driver until after she had paid her money and boarded. As she sank into a seat in the black section’s front row, she realized with a jolt that he was the same man who’d thrown her off some twelve years before. The bus lumbered down Montgomery Street and stopped in front of the Empire Theater, where several whites got on and sat down in the first ten rows. One man was left standing. The driver turned to Parks and the other blacks sitting in the next row. Let me have those front seats, he said. When nobody moved, he barked, Y’all better make it light on yourselves and let me have those seats. The man in the window seat next to Parks stood up and moved back, as did the two women across the aisle. Parks simply moved over to the window seat.

She sat there, remembering how her grandfather kept his shotgun by the fireplace or in his wagon, remembering how he refused to be terrorized by the Klan, even when everyone else was. She remembered, too, how wonderful it had been at [Highlander Folk School] to feel like an equal with whites. At that moment, she decided it was time that other white people started treating me that way. Years later, she would declare: People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or any more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in…. There had to be a stopping place, and this seemed to have been the place for me to stop being pushed around …. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what rights I had as a human being and a citizen, even in Montgomery, Alabama.

The driver asked Parks if she was going to stand up. She looked at him. No, she replied. Well, he said, I’m going to have you arrested. She answered quietly: You may do that. It was a moment of profound personal significance. For most black Southerners, the idea of agreeing to go to jail, of voluntarily submitting themselves to a dreaded legal system that had oppressed and killed so many blacks before them, was unthinkable. But doing the unthinkable, rising above the fear and shame of the jail experience, would turn out to be an exhilarating act of personal liberation–for Rosa Parks and the blacks, young and old, who followed her. Here was an individual, virtually alone, challenging the very citadel of racial bigotry, Pauli Murray said ten years later. Any one of us who has ever been arrested on a Southern bus for refusing to move back knows how terrifying the situation can be, particularly if it happened before the days of organized protest and we had neither anticipated nor prepared beforehand for the challenge. The fear of a lifetime… is intensified by the sudden commotion and the charged atmosphere in the cramped space of the bus interior.

As the driver, James Blake, got off the bus to call the police, Parks sat in her seat, trying hard not to think about what might come next, trying not to worry about being manhandled as Claudette Colvin and countless others had been. A few minutes later, two officers boarded the bus. One of them asked Parks why she didn’t stand up. She replied with a question of her own: Why do you all push us around? I don’t know, he said, but the law is the law, and you’re under arrest. The policeman picked up her purse and shopping bag, escorted her off the bus, and put her in a squad car for the ride to the city jail. At the jailhouse, Parks asked if she could have a drink from the water fountain and was told it was for whites only. She was then fingerprinted, booked, and put in a cell with two other black women, one of whom gave her a drink of water from a dark metal mug.

Meanwhile, word of Parks’s arrest had begun to spread throughout black Montgomery. A neighbor of E. D. Nixon’s saw her being escorted by the policemen off the bus and immediately notified Nixon, who, in turn, called [white civil rights activists] Clifford and Virginia Durr. Nixon and the Durrs rushed down to the jail to bail out Parks. As Parks emerged from her cell, matrons on either side of her, the first person she saw was Virginia Durr. Tears in her eyes, Durr threw her arms around Parks. They hugged and kissed, Parks later recalled, as if they were sisters.

–Olson (2001), pp. 107-109.

And finally, you should know how much she did, and how much we all owe her.

Now that the boycott was over, there was some carping, particularly by whites who opposed it, that the protest, in fact, had accomplished nothing, that the Supreme Court, not the boycott, had ended Jim Crow on the city’s buses. What could they possibly gain from the boycott that they can’t gain from the federal courts? Joe Azbell, city editor of the Advertiser, had grumbled early in the protest. What could they gain? A sense of dignity, self-respect, and power; a feeling of community; a determination to claim basic rights; a loss of fear–victories that were nothing short of revolutionary for blacks in the Deep South in the 1950s. The Ku Klux Klan of Montgomery discovered for itself what blacks had achieved when, on the night after the Supreme Court ruling, some forty cars loaded with white-hooded thugs cruised slowly through black neighborhoods. There was no panic, no dread; instead, blacks jeered and laughed and shook their fists as the Klan drove by. Disconcerted by their failure to terrorize, the Klansmen drove away.

…

Virginia Durr remained close to Rosa Parks, whose own life had also become much more difficult. During the boycott, Parks had devoted herself to the cause, traveling, making speeches, raising money. She served on the [Montgomery Improvement Association]’s executive board, worked as a car pool dispatcher, handed out clothes and food to people who had been fired because of their civil rights involvement. After the boycott was over, she tried to get another job in Montgomery, but no one would hire her. She had little income except the money she made from sewing at home and from funds that Virginia Durr had raised for her in appeals to the Highlander Folk School and to some of the Durr’s more affluent Northern friends. To be a heroine is fine, but it does not pay off, Durr tartly observed.

…

However she may have felt about not being given credit, there is no question that Parks moved to Detroit primarily because she needed a job. Even there, she had difficulty finding work. She finally took a position as a hostess at a guest house at Hampton Institute, a black college in Virginia, but when Hampton reneged on an implied promise to provide an apartment for her, her husband, and her mother, she returned to Detroit, where she first worked for a seamstress friend and then in a clothing factory. Not until 1965, when Representative John Conyers, Jr., hired her as a receptionist in his Detroit office, was she finally able to achieve more than a hand-to-mouth existence.

Her friends, meanwhile, were appalled that she had been allowed to slip into the shadows of civil rights history. Her image, as crafted by King and the other male boycott leaders, was that of a tired seamstress who had been tracked down by the Zeitgeist–the spirit of the times. When Septima Clark saw a documentary about the boycott, she noted that Parks was hardly mentioned. We talked about it, she and I, Clark said. She gave Dr. King the right to practice his nonviolence … It was Rosa Parks who started the whole thing. E. D. Nixon made the same point to a woman sitting next to him on a plane one day. When the woman found out Nixon was from Montgomery, she said she did not know what would have happened to black people if King had not been there to lead the boycott. Nixon replied: If Mrs. Parks had got up and given that white man her seat you’d never aheard of Dr. King.

–Olson (2001), pp. 129-131.

When South African freedom icon Nelson Mandela came to Detroit in 1990, the person he was most honored to meet was Parks. When he got off the plane, a line of dignitaries waited to greet him. Mandela simply stood in awe when he saw Parks. He chanted, Rosa, Rosa, Rosa Parks!. recalled Keith, who had escorted her to the airport to meet Mandela.

He recognized her before he recognized anyone, Keith said.

Mandela later told Keith that Parks was his inspiration while he was jailed and her example inspired South African freedom fighters.

Mandela called Parks the David who challenged Goliath in a 1993 speech at the NAACP convention in Indianapolis.

The best-selling poet and writer Maya Angelou said of her, Mrs. Parks is for me probably what the Statute of Liberty was for immigrants. She stood for the future, and the better future.

Angelou recalled the pleasure of having Parks as a guest at her home in Winston-Salem, N.C., several years ago.

She was as tender as a rose and she was as strong as steel.

— Cassandra Spratling, Detroit Free Press 2005-10-24: Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead

Here is how she wanted you to remember her.

Parks’ health had been declining since the late 1990s. She had stopped giving interviews by then and rarely appeared in public. When she did, she only smiled or spoke short, barely audible responses.

In one of her last lengthy interviews with the Detroit Free Press in 1995, she spoke of what she would like people to say about her after she passed away.

I’d like people to say I’m a person who always wanted to be free and wanted it not only for myself; freedom is for all human beings, she said during an interview from the pastor’s study of St. Matthew African Methodist Episcopal Church, a small congregation she joined upon moving to Detroit in 1957.

— Cassandra Spratling, Detroit Free Press 2005-10-24: Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead

May she rest in peace.

Further reading:

• WikiPedia: Rosa Parks
• WikiPedia: Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Cassandra Spratling, Detroit Free Press 2005-10-24: Rosa Parks, civil rights heroine, is dead
• Detroit Free Press 2005-10-25: Detroit-area residents remember Rosa Parks’ legacy
• Detroit News 2005-10-25: Friends, leaders recall a fighter
• Jannell McGrew, Montgomery Advertiser 2005-10-24: Parks’ quiet courage helped change the world

Take down that flag and for the love of God turn off that Lee Greenwood. Independence Day is not about the United States. (There was no such country in 1776, before or after the Declaration; the Declaration only claimed to absolve the former colonies from any allegiance to the Crown.) Least of all is this a day for the government or for its loyalists. 4 July is for rebels and radicals.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. –That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it …. [W]hen a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

— Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776

Jefferson, of course, claimed that the natural consequence of altering or abolishing government was to “institute new Government.” So much the worse for Jefferson (and especially for those whom he later came to govern), but that affects what’s entailed by the principles enunciated in the Declaration about as much as the fact that Jefferson pretended like he didn’t have a moral duty to immediately release his slaves from bondage affects the fact that the Declaration’s defense of complete equality and inalienable natural rights nevertheless condemned slavery beyond hope of appeal. Whatever Jefferson’s failings, his argument, if sound, is an argument against any form of coercive government whatsoever. If indeed we do have the “right to alter or abolish” government–any government–in virtue of our right to withdraw our consent to their authority, and we retain that right as free human beings no matter what institutions we may have been born into or roped into, then no government can ever rightly demand our allegiance against our will; we are, all of us, free to withdraw that allegiance and (thereby) remove ourselves from any obligation to any government at any time. The only question that remains is whether that right to alter or abolish government is a right that belongs to each of us, individually, or a right that has to be exercised collectively (by some group of us acting together). But if our right to refuse government authority derives from (1) our birthright to equal station as sovereign individuals, and (2) the natural and unalienable rights that follow from that, then it’s hard to see how these individually held rights could entail anything less than an individual right, as the political equal of any puffed-up prince or president on Earth, for you, personally, right now, to sever all political connections if you want, and to tell your would-be rulers just where they can go promulgate their law.

Over at Catallarchy they’ve been singing the praises of flag-burning. I might be more enthusiastic about it if I thought the flag were really the problem; but, aside from being even uglier than most of the world’s military colors, there’s not too much harm that you can say the flag itself has really done. But flags aren’t all that you can burn. Here’s how William Lloyd Garrison, for example, marked the occasion 151 years ago today, when Boston was outraged by the use of armed federal troops to force Anthony Burns back into Southern slavery:

The rally began with a prayer and a hymn. Then Garrison launched into one of the most controversial performances of his career. To-day, we are called to celebrate the seventy-eighth anniversary of American Independence. In what spirit? he asked, with what purpose? to what end? The Declaration of Independence had declared “that all men are created equal … It is not a declaration of equality of property, bodily strength or beauty, intellectually or moral development, industrial or inventive powers, but equality of RIGHTS–not of one race, but of all races.

—Massachussets Historical Society, July 2005

We have proved recreant to our own faith, false to our own standard, treacherous to the trust committed to our hands; so that, instead of helping to extend the blessings of freedom, we have mightily served the cause of tyranny throughout the world. Garrison then spoke about the prospects for the success of the revolutionary spirit within the nation, prospects he regarded as dismal because of the insatiable greed, boundless rapacity, and profligate disregard of justice prevalent at the time. He concluded his speech by asserting, Such is our condition, such are our prospects, as a people, on the 4th of July, 1854! Setting aside his manuscript, he told the assembly that he should now proceed to perform an action which would be the testimony of his own soul to all present, of the estimation in which he held the pro-slavery laws and deeds of the nation …

— from Thoreau: Lecture 43, 4 July, 1854

Producing a copy of the Fugitive Slave Law, he set fire to it, and it burst to ashes. Using an old and well-known phrase, he said, And let all the people say, Amen; and a unanimous cheer and shout of Amen burst from the vast audience. In like manner, Mr. Garrison burned the decision of Edward G. Loring in the case of Anthony Burns, and the late charge of Judge Benjamin R. Curtis to the United States Grand Jury in reference to the treasonable assault upon the Court House for the rescue of the fugitive–the multitude ratifying the fiery immolation with shouts of applause. Then holding up the U.S. Constitution, he branded it as the source and parent of all the other atrocities,–“a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell,”–and consumed it to ashes on the spot, exclaiming, So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen! A tremendous shout of Amen! went up to heaven in ratification of the deed, mingled with a few hisses and wrathful exclamations from some who were evidently in a rowdyish state of mind, but who were at once cowed by the popular feeling.

–from The Liberator, 7 July 1854 (boldface added)

Happy Independence Day.

(Links thanks to Marian Douglas [2005-06-07], Lew Rockwell [2005-06-06], and Edmund Burke [1757].)

Cops in America are heavily armed and trained to be bullies, and they routinely hurt people who are not posing any serious threat to anyone, in order to make sure that they stay in control of the situation. You already knew that they electrified children and suspected salad-bar thieves; you can also add to the list women who have committed the horrible crimes of driving on a suspended license and going 12 miles an hour over the speed limit, provided that they are (1) Black and (2) talk back to the cops, especially on points of legality. Note that being completely unarmed and doing nothing more dangerous than not getting out of the vehicle promptly on command will not stop them from using a 50,000 volt electric blast to immobilize you with pain two or three times in quick succession. Neither, incidentally, will being eight months pregnant.

This is getting repetitive, so let’s just review:

We already knew that Florida cops were willing to electrify a 6 year old boy and a 12 year old girl with a 50,000 volt blast from a taser. The 6 year old was distraught and threatening to hurt himself (after all, why hurt yourself when you can have a cop immobilize you with pain?); the 12 year old’s crime was playing hooky and maybe being a little tipsy, and the incredibly dangerous imminent threat she posed was that she ran away from the cop and so might have been able to skip school. Back when it happened, I mentioned that the main reaction from the police brass was to review the decision to equip cops with tasers–as if the equipment were the primary problem here. I also mentioned that we might be better served by scrutinizing the paramilitary police culture that we have, in which peace officers are trained to take control of every situation at all times, by any means necessary, and where any notion of proportionality between the possible harm and the violence used to maintain control is routinely chucked out the window in the name of law and order and winning the war on crime.

…

The cops, of course, continue to treat these cases as a P.R. management problem, not a public safety problem created by out-of-control cops. That’s because the cops aren’t out of control; they are doing what cops normally do in our society; we only know about it here because the victims were vulnerable enough that their caretakers were able to get the attention of the newsmedia and the civil courts. We are not talking about a few bad apples here; we are talking about a systematic feature of policing in our society.

— Geekery Today 2005-04-26: Peace Officers

Meanwhile. in Seattle:

Law enforcement officers have said they see Tasers as a tool that can benefit the public by reducing injuries to police and the citizens they arrest.

Seattle police officials declined to comment on this case, citing concerns that Brooks might file a civil lawsuit.

But King County sheriff’s Sgt. Donald Davis, who works on the county’s Taser policy, said the use of force is a balancing act for law enforcement.

It just doesn’t look good to the public, he said.

— Marian Douglas 2005-06-07: Police Taser pregnant woman 3 Times, Just happens to be Black

I’ve been at this for a while with more or less the same analysis applid in each of several different cases (1, 2, 3), so by now I probably ought to at least add a bit by way of a reply to Martin Striz’s complaints. In that direction, let me just say that my main concern here is the paramilitary stance that police forces take toward you and I, and the routine use of extreme violence that that fosters; and that my main difference from Martin has a lot to do with a difference over whether the institutional framework that cops work in is essentially or just accidentally connected with the abuses of power that rampaging cops display every day.

But there’s no need for me to dwell on this point about the hangman State when Edmund Burke already explained it better than I could, back in 1757:

These Evils are not accidental. Whoever will take the pains to consider the Nature of Society, will find they result directly from its Constitution. For as Subordination, or in other Words, the Reciprocation of Tyranny, and Slavery, is requisite to support these Societies, the Interest, the Ambition, the Malice, or the Revenge, nay even the Whim and Caprice of one ruling Man among them, is enough to arm all the rest, without any private Views of their own, to the worst and blackest Purposes; and what is at once lamentable and ridiculous, these Wretches engage under those Banners with a Fury greater than if they were animated by Revenge for their own proper Wrongs. …

To prove, that these Sort of policed Societies are a Violation offered to Nature, and a Constraint upon the human Mind, it needs only to look upon the sanguinary Measures, and Instruments of Violence which are every where used to support them. Let us take a Review of the Dungeons, Whips, Chains, Racks, Gibbets, with which every Society is abundantly stored, by which hundreds of Victims are annually offered up to support a dozen or two in Pride and Madness, and Millions in an abject Servitude, and Dependence. There was a Time, when I looked with a reverential Awe on these Mysteries of Policy; but Age, Experience, and Philosophy have rent the Veil; and I view this Sanctum Sanctorum, at least, without any enthusiastick Admiration. I acknowledge indeed, the Necessity of such a Proceeding in such Institutions; but I must have a very mean Opinion of Institutions where such Proceedings are necessary. …

I now plead for Natural Society against Politicians, and for Natural Reason against all three. When the World is in a fitter Temper than it is at present to hear Truth, or when I shall be more indifferent about its Temper; my Thoughts may become more publick. In the mean time, let them repose in my own Bosom, and in the Bosoms of such Men as are fit to be initiated in the sober Mysteries of Truth and Reason. My Antagonists have already done as much as I could desire. Parties in Religion and Politics make sufficient Discoveries concerning each other, to give a sober Man a proper Caution against them all. The Monarchic, Aristocratical, and Popular Partizans have been jointly laying their Axes to the Root of all Government, and have in their Turns proved each other absurd and inconvenient. In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse!

— Edmund Burke (1757): A Vindication of Natural Society

Tom DiLorenzo has made a pretty steady gig for himself in lodging criticisms — mostly just ones — against the federal government’s conduct in the Civil War and against Abraham Lincoln in particular. But the tenor of his comments and his comments about similar crimes by leading lights of the Confederacy has led to some accusations that he seems to be motivated by a dishonestly-supported fetish for Dixie at least as much by concerns about the historical Lincoln. Lately he decided to prove these charges wrong, once and for all, with the following modest proposal:

re: Greatest Americans

Perhaps we should start a list of politically incorrect greatest Americans. I’ll begin by nominating Robert E. Lee, who brilliantly led the Army of Northern Virginia in its war of secession against the empire.

Virginia originally voted to stay in the union, after the lower south seceded, and re-voted (by popular vote as well as by its legislature) only after Lincoln began his invasion of the southern states. Lee turned down command of the Union Army, which was offered to him, to defend his home country against foreign invaders. He also personally liberated the slaves his wife had inherited, something Ulysses S. Grant did not get around to until he was forced to do so by the 13th Amendment in 1866.

(This should cause the politically-correct liberventinists to start cackling like a flock of hens).

Now, my opinions about Robert E. Lee may be different from Tom DiLorenzo’s. (If I were going to make a list of politically incorrect greatest Virginians, I would suggest Gabriel Prosser or Nat Turner long before the pro-slavery, anti-secession, statist warrior Lee.) But whatever our differences may be, what I want to remark on here is that DiLorenzo’s description of Lee contains a documented factual error. I know about it, and he knows about it; I know that he knows about it because I wrote him about it a week ago:

To: Thomas DiLorenzo
Subject: Like a flock of hens, indeed.
Date: Mon, 20 Jun 2005

In “re: Greatest Americans”, you recently claimed:

Perhaps we should start a list of politically incorrect greatest Americans. I’ll begin by nominating Robert E. Lee, who brilliantly led the Army of Northern Virginia in its war of secession against the empire. … He also personally liberated the slaves his wife had inherited, …

But this is not true. Lee’s wife did not inherit any slaves and Lee did not “liberate” them. Lee did gain temporary control over 63 slaves after the death of his father-in-law, George Washington Parke Custis, but Custis freed the slaves in his will and Lee was legally obligated to process the manumission papers within five years of his death. (You can find a copy of the will at [1].) In fact, after hiring the slaves out to other plantations for the five years he finally released the slaves in the winter of 1862 and formally filed the manumission papers on December 29, 1862 [2], five years, two months, and nineteen days after his father-in-law’s death.

To suggest that Lee deserves any credit for the emancipation when the terms of the will legally mandated it, and when he held the slaves in bondage for his own profit as long as he was legally able to do so, is either misinformation or disinformation; in either case it should not have been printed and ought to be publicly corrected.

Sincerely,
Charles Johnson

DiLorenzo didn’t mention this point in his later posts to the LRC Blog, exactly, but he did go on to prove his objectivity by explaining that Lee could not be blamed by anti-state, anti-war, pro-market libertarians for his role in the imperial war against Mexico because doing the right thing would have been personally costly and possibly dangerous, and to suggest Jefferson Davis as the candidate for the state of Mississippi.

Still, it is important that these facts see the light of day. I wrote yesterday in praise of direct action over lobbying, and since DiLorenzo’s public correction doesn’t seem to be forthcoming, I suppose that I will have to take matters into my own hands.

Lee did not free a single one of the slaves that he gained control of after his father-in-law’s death. Custis emancipated them in his will; Lee just enacted the terms of Custis’s will, as he was legally obligated to do as its sole executor. Lee also happened to keep control over those 63 slaves for as long as he could legally get away with it and sent them, for his own profit, to be forced to work on neighboring plantations and in eastern Virginia. To credit Lee with liberating enslaved people, when it was his father-in-law who freed them, and Lee who kept them in bondage as long as he felt that he could, is disingenuous, and the statement ought to be retracted.

Further reading:

• GT 2005/01/03: Robert E. Lee owned slaves
• No Treason 2004/10/19: DiLorenzo Responds
• No Treason 2004/10/18: Speaking of Slavery
• No Treason 2003/05/18: Making a Fetish of the Confederacy at LewRockwell.com

(Thanks to Marian Douglas for shining light on this.)

We already knew that Florida cops were willing to electrify a 6 year old boy and a 12 year old girl with a 50,000 volt blast from a taser. The 6 year old was distraught and threatening to hurt himself (after all, why hurt yourself when you can have a cop immobilize you with pain?); the 12 year old’s crime was playing hooky and maybe being a little tipsy, and the incredibly dangerous imminent threat she posed was that she ran away from the cop and so might have been able to skip school. Back when it happened, I mentioned that the main reaction from the police brass was to review the decision to equip cops with tasers–as if the equipment were the primary problem here. I also mentioned that we might be better served by scrutinizing the paramilitary police culture that we have, in which peace officers are trained to take control of every situation at all times, by any means necessary, and where any notion of proportionality between the possible harm and the violence used to maintain control is routinely chucked out the window in the name of law and order and winning the war on crime.

I hate being proven right.

It doesn’t take fancy electric tasers for Florida cops to be overbearing, brutal assholes. They can do it the old-fashioned way: for example, by sending three adult officers to pin a five year old girl’s arms behind her back and handcuff her.

A lawyer has threatened to sue police officers who handcuffed an allegedly uncontrollable five-year-old after she acted up at a Florida kindergarten.

The officers were called by the school after a teacher and assistant principal failed to calm down the little girl.

The incident was caught on a video camera which was rolling in the classroom as part of a self-improvement exercise at the St Petersburg school.

A lawyer for the girl’s mother said the episode was ncomprehensible.

The video, made public by the lawyer this week, shows the unfolding of the violent tantrum, which started when the little girl refused to take part in a maths lesson.

She then ripped some papers off a bulletin board and lashed out at staff trying to calm her down.

After calling her mother and learning she would not be able to pick up the child for at least one more hour, the teachers resorted to calling the police.

Three officers rushed to the scene and handcuffed the girl, by that time apparently calm, after pinning her arms behind her back.

The footage showed her in distress after being handcuffed.

— BBC 2005-04-23: U.S. police handcuff five-year-old

One of the minor consolations of subjecting schoolchildren to a school police state is that the surveillance has left a video record of the handcuffing.

So a kindergardner is uncontrollable and this justifies calling the cops, and then (even though she wasn’t doing anything anymore, just in case she got any ideas) hand-cuffing her as she screams.

By the way, this is not the first time that this has happened

Trayvon McRae is 6 years old.

After throwing a tantrum in music class, and kicking and hitting a St. Petersburg police officer who was taking him home, this kindergartener was handcuffed and arrested on a charge of battery on a law enforcement officer. Both of his wrists fit neatly into a single cuff.

Mikey Rao was 8 when he got arrested.

He didn’t want to go to the principal’s office, so he ran out of his class and kicked and scratched a teacher’s aide. He spent several hours in the Citrus County Jail.

Demetri Starks turned 9 last week.

One day this summer, when he was still 8, he swiped a neighbor’s jar of change. Police stopped the 60-pound St. Petersburg boy wearing a T-shirt covered with monsters from the cartoon Digimon. They handcuffed him and sent him to a detention center where he stayed locked up for nine days.

— St. Petersburg Times 2000-12-17: Under 12, Under Arrest

Hell, it’s not even the only time that it’s happened recently.

Two boys, aged 9 and 10, were charged with second-degree felonies and taken away in handcuffs by the police because they drew stick figures depicting violence against a third student.

There was no act of violence, no weaponry. According to news reports, the arrested children had no prior history of threatening the student depicted in the drawing. The parents were not advised or consulted. The school’s immediate response was to call the police and level charges “of making a written threat to kill or harm another person.”

The incident was not an aberration but one of three similar occurrences in the Florida school system during the same week. In another case, a 6-year-old was led away in handcuffs by police. And those three incidents are only the ones that managed to attract media attention.

— Wendy McElroy 2005-02-10: On Handcuffed and Felonious Children

(Just in case you Blue Staters were thinking about getting smug about those barbarians down yonder in Florida, you might also be interested to know about the California cops who beat the shit out of a non-verbal autistic teenager who didn’t follow their orders–using bludgeons, a taser, and pepper spray.)

The cops, of course, continue to treat these cases as a P.R. management problem, not a public safety problem created by out-of-control cops. That’s because the cops aren’t out of control; they are doing what cops normally do in our society; we only know about it here because the victims were vulnerable enough that their caretakers were able to get the attention of the newsmedia and the civil courts. We are not talking about a few bad apples here; we are talking about a systematic feature of policing in our society. We’re not talking about something that a bit of administrative hand-wringing and P.R. management and tinkering with equipment will solve. Police brutality, especially police brutality against unruly Black people, ain’t exactly new. This is what happens when the means of defense are almost entirely in the hands of a professionalized paramilitary force. You get an institutional culture of command-and-control. You get unaccountable peace officers who go on a rampage when their orders are questioned, and who apparently don’t have any principled inhibitions about using force on people that is wildly out of proportion to any possible threat. (Restraint can especially go out the window if they are Black. Or if they are otherwise thought to be unlikely to get sympathetic attention from the courts.)

So just remember, Johnny: the cops are here to keep you safe. By hurting you for no reason when you pose absolutely no threat to anyone.

Further reading

• Marian Douglas 2004-04-22: 3 Florida Police Handcuff A 5 Year Old [Black] Child- The Continued Criminalisation of Being Black
• Marian Douglas 2004-04-22: CNN.com Video: Police Handcuff Five Year Old Girl – after White School Teachers Call Police
• Marian Douglas 2004-04-23: BBC: US Police Handcuff Five-Year-Old; Black Child Mobbed and Handcuffed by White Adults
• Marian Douglas 2004-04-24: “On handcuffed and felonious children” – Wendy McElroy, published in February
• Marian Douglas 2004-04-24: What kind of society handcuffs a five year old, arrests a seven year old, and more??
• GT 2004/11/14: Civil defense
• GT 2002/02/13: More police brutality in Montgomery
• GT 2002/01/30: Corporate elites meet & greet; New York Times makes shit up
• GT 2001/04/22: History of Race Riots Reveals — and Obscures