Did Westward Expansion Cause the Civil War?

Mass migrations have probably been among the great selective events of human history. The Ostsiedlung, for example, selected for German citizens who were well-disciplined, hard working, good planners, and probably quick to defend their land holdings from others. Overall, Germans descended from the folks who participated in the Ostsiedlung appear to be more likely to join or vote for far-right political parties, be Neo-Nazis, or otherwise engage in “far right subcultures.”

(Here is a map for you:

NPD = German far-right political party)

In Jayman’s discussion of the Pioneer Hypothesis, he notes:

“The Whites in the U.S. have a much higher TFR than most any European country. As well, Europeans overall are much further to the Left than Americans. I became interested in this when I noted that most of the ethnic groups of Americans—particularly the ones away from urban areas—seem far more to the Right than their brethren in the Old Countries. …

“Particularly interesting is the conservative nature of huge swaths of the Midwest and the Upper Plains/Mountain West. These places, while receiving some settlers ultimately originating from the Anglo-Scottish border regions and other Scotch-Irish (the same people who settled Appalachia), are also suffused with large numbers of other Europeans, such Germans and Scandinavians, people who today aren’t exactly known to be raving right-wingers. …

“Liberals are concentrated in old-colonial states, in places without much space to expand into. The reddest states on the other hand are areas with wide open stretches of land. … We can see what by looking the fertility rates of liberal (and sparsely populated) northern New England. The U.S. states of Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire have plenty of land and low land values, but aren’t very fecund. … The population in upper New England is largely composed of the original colonial stock; they lost their fast-breeding inklings long ago…”

Jay hypothesizes that the cities produce liberals, ie,

“Liberal-minded people (and by extension, slow-breeders in general, when Eastern Europe and East Asia are also considered) descend from people who have stayed put for generations—or at the very least, never moved into previously empty lands. Under such conditions—which, prior to industrialization was Malthusian—rapid breeders were not favored. Rather efficient competitors—those who maximize their resources before starting a family—were selected for.”

And that the countryside produces conservatives, ie,

“The early colonist came and spread across the land very quickly, easily displacing the earlier inhabitants. … The rapid increase of a population when it moves into an area that it did not previously inhabit sounds like a great opportunity for evolution by natural selection to work its magic.

“When new land is abundant, and “family formation” is relatively easy, which types of individuals are selected for? Yup, those who married young and had lots of children (the fairly harsh and physically demanding nature of the American frontier ensured that paternal investment needed to remain high, such that stable marriage was important). In short, people who are “family oriented” are selected for.”

I propose a complementary hypothesis:

Migration is more appealing to conservatives than to liberals, so major migrations result in conservatives self-sorting into frontier areas, while liberals are left behind.

Further, this sorting event may trigger a “run away” effect: as people find themselves in an environment that seems increasingly liberal (or conservative,) due to all of the conservatives (or liberals) leaving, they shift their own political opinions to better agree with the consensus or perhaps maintain their own self image as more liberal than others, leading the group to shift increasingly liberal (or conservative.)

Notice an inconsistency in Jay’s theory that he himself admits: low fertility in rural Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. If open land itself selects for higher fertility, then even a population whose ancestors were liberals ought, over time, to become more fecund. But if the conservatives have simply left these areas for Kansas, leaving the liberals behind, then we might expect to find liberals in Maine and conservatives in Kansas.

Likewise, colonization of the US may have involved the more conservative elements migrating from Europe to the US, leaving behind a more liberal Europe compared to the new colonies. Since this is a post that’s ultimately supposed to be about the Civil War, let’s use slavery as an example issue.

France abolished slavery in its overseas colonies in 1794 (it had been illegal in mainland France since the 1300s,) though this was violently opposed by the colonists and slavery was re-instituted until 1848, (Haiti obviously excepted.)

In 1783, the British began agitating against slavery; by 1799, Britain abolished the enslavement of Scottish coal miners and salters. (An act passed in 1606 had enslaved them.) The slave trade was abolished in 1807, and in 1833, slavery was formally abolished throughout their empire.

Spain, (a major colonizer earlier than Britain or France,) attempted to outlaw slavery in its colonies in 1542, but this was never enforced throughout most of their territory due to colonialist opposition. Slavery was eventually abolished throughout most of Latin America during the 1810-1820s Independence Wars, but it persisted for a few decades more in a few places, and wasn’t abolished until 1873 in Puerto Rico, 1886 in Cuba, and 1888 in Brazil. (Brazil wasn’t a Spanish colony, of course.)

On to the US!

It’s no secret that the bulk New England’s colonists happened to be more liberal than the bulk of the South’s, and by 1804, slavery was illegal throughout the North. This may overstate the North’s position, however, as the anti-slavery laws came only gradually into effect.

While slavery remained legal in the South until 1865 (and who knows how long it would have stayed legal had the North not intervened,) many Southerners had begun voluntarily freeing their slaves. By 1810, Virginia, Maryland, and Delaware had substantial freedman populations, with Delaware in the lead with 75% of their slaves free. Estimates of the total number of free blacks on the eve of the Civil War vary from 488 thousand (or 11% of the total black population of the US,) to 1.5 million (or 34%). (I suspect the discrepancy is due to different definitions of “free.”)

I have heard some speculation that, had the North not intervened, the South would have eventually given up slavery on its own, much like Brazil. Certainly this fits with the generalized pattern across the Western world, but I have no evidence at my disposal to support (or contradict) the idea.

Regardless, I do know that the attitude in the North toward abolitionism changed radically between 1800 and 1860.

In the early 1800s, Northern views on the abolitionists in their midst ranged from “Kind of weird” to “Kill them with fire,” as graphically illustrated by the time white abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison was nearly murdered by an angry mob in Boston, MA:

“In the fall of 1835, a mob of several thousand surrounded the building housing Boston’s anti-slavery offices, where Garrison had agreed to address a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society after the fiery British abolitionist George Thompson was unable to keep his engagement with them. The mayor and police persuaded the women to leave the building, but when the mob learned that Thompson was not within, it began yelling for Garrison with cries for his lynching or tar and feathering. The mayor managed to sneak Garrison and an assistant out a window, but the mob pursued, captured him, tied a rope around his waist, and dragged him through the streets of Boston. The sheriff rescued Garrison from lynching by arresting him and taking him to the Leverett Street Jail for his own protection.” (Wikipedia.)

By the late 1850s, private citizens in the North were raising money to fund John Brown’s eventual bloody raid on Harper’s Ferry; by 1861, the North collectively decided it was worth killing at least 260,000 Southerners (the vast majority of whom did not even own slaves) and sacrificing at least 365,000 of their own people to end slavery in the South. Estimates of total Civil War deaths range from 625,000–850,000, in exchange for the freedom of 3 to 4 million people.

And by 1870, African Americans were given the right to vote.

Other than the printing press, what caused this radical shift in attitudes?

The other big thing going on in America at the time was Westward Expansion.

Between 1607 and 1776, Americans didn’t even settle the entirety of of the 13 Colonies:

Zone of American settlement circa 1776

The western portions of New York, Pennsylvania, Georgia, etc., were still under Indian control. But with the end of British control, settlement expanded rapidly. A mere 55 years later, the territory had more than doubled:

Zone of American settlement circa 1820

By 1822, Americans were swarming into Mexico, soon to be known as Texas.

Interestingly, here’s how the Wikipedia describes the circumstances:

“Hoping that more settlers would reduce the near-constant Comanche raids, Mexican Texas liberalized its immigration policies to permit immigrants from outside Mexico and Spain.^[74] Under the Mexican immigration system, large swathes of land were allotted to empresarios, who recruited settlers from the United States, Europe, and the Mexican interior. The first grant, to Moses Austin, was passed to his son Stephen F. Austin after his death.

“Austin’s settlers, the Old Three Hundred, made places along the Brazos River in 1822.^[75] Twenty-three other empresarios brought settlers to the state, the majority of whom were from the United States.^[75][76] The population of Texas grew rapidly. In 1825, Texas had about 3,500 people, with most of Mexican descent.^[77] By 1834, the population had grown to about 37,800 people, with only 7,800 of Mexican descent.^{[78]” (Emphasis added)}

In 1830, Mexico attempted to halt American immigration to Texas; in 1835, the Texicans revolted. California also began receiving American settlers in the 1820s, and quickly followed a similar path.

Zone of American settlement circa 1835

By 1848, Mexico had lost half its territory to the US, officially opening up almost the entire continental US to American settlement. By 1861, California Oregon, Texas, and Kansas had become official states, not just territories:

 

American states in 1861

Let’s take a closer look at this map.

Red = States that seceded before April 15, 1861

Light Red = States that seceded after April 15, 1861

Yellow = States that stayed in the Union, even though they permitted slavery

Blue = Union states where slavery was illegal.

I don’t know what’s up with Kentucky, but Missouri had significant populations of both Southerners and Northerners. Maryland and Delaware, as we’ve discussed, were already well on their way toward ending slavery when the war broke out, and were basically occupied by Union troops, anyway, due to their proximity to DC.

The difficulty of this sort of map is that it only shows the territorial borders of the states, rather than the population densities; parts of West Texas today probably have a lower population density than many parts of the non-state territories on this map. Regardless, the nation had expanded quite a bit in the <100 years since independence, and seems to have been expanding faster in the North than in the South.

At the same time as Northerners were leaving the coast in droves, more immigrants, eg Irish and Germans, were arriving from Europe. The Germans were particularly selected for liberalness, being the losers of the 1848 rebellions against the German government; Thomas Edison’s father was a refugee from a failed Canadian independence bid.

In sum, I propose that Westward Migration in the 1800s drew disproportionately from the East Coast’s more conservative folks–the guys most likely to drag an abolitionist through the streets and tar and feather him–thus leaving behind a population of more liberal folks. This caused a radical shift in the ideas being discussed in the North as there were simply fewer pro-slavery arguments to be heard, and public consensus therefore shifted suddenly leftward.

“But wait,” I hear you saying, “Didn’t the South expand Westward, too? Why didn’t that cause the South to go liberal?”

A few factors:

1. The South started out more conservative than the North, so even if it did become more liberal over time, it still would not have become as liberal as the North.
2. The South probably received fewer liberal Germans and Canadians, though don’t cite me on that because I know a lot of Germans settled in Texas.
3. The South is really inhospitable, especially to whites:

Take a good look. Houston is on the same latitude as Cairo. North Carolina is at the same latitude as Tunisia. Florida is down by Western Sahara. Even Washington, DC, is only at the latitude of Spain, southern Italy, Greece, and Turkey.

Most Southerners hail from places too far north to even show up on this map. To get to London,’s latitude, you’d have to go to the northern tip of Newfoundland, Canada. For Scotland, you’d have to go to Labrador.

Whites did not thrive in the South. It was really hot, swampy, and full of diseases they had no immunity to, like Malaria and Yellow Fever, which arrived with the African slaves and quickly spread. The population was suffering widespread malnutrition due to inadequate, improperly prepared food and parasites like Necator Americanus, “American Killer”, aka hookworms, which also came over with the slaves. When people finally figured out what was causing all the anemia and began eradicating hookworms, they discovered that about 40% of Southern children were infected.

Since these diseases were endemic to Africa, their effect on the black population was less devastating; it’s no wonder that the Scottish and Scotch-Irish settlers in the South migrated up into the cooler regions of the Appalachians and stayed there, leaving the low-lying areas open for black settlement.

As a result, the Southern economy and population grew very slowly, especially compared to the North. It has only been since the invention of air conditioning that much of the South has become remotely inhabitable by whites; Houston, Texas, would be nothing but a speck of dust on the map if it weren’t for AC.

The North, by contrast, had an abundance of land at its disposal that wasn’t riddled with malaria-infested swamps, and so could expand quickly.

So not only was the South not expanding as quickly as the North, Southern whites really did see themselves as at a biological disadvantage to blacks, who did not suffer as much from the Southern diseases and heat.

4. As a result, obviously, the Southern economy was actually more tied up in slavery than the Northern economy, where it had never been as big a factor and the long winters gave the environmental upper hand more to whites, and it is obviously going to take longer for attitudes to shift in a place where eliminating slavery going to be a big deal than in a place were there weren’t a whole lot of slaves to start with.

So environmental factors basically colluded to dampen an effects of Western migration in the South while the North expanded freely, leading to an acceleration in political changes in the Northern cities, resulting in a sudden willingness to go to war over the issue.

Some Notable Nigerians

It’s easy to roll your eyes at people demanding that we teach the history of Africa and other non-Western locales. But I support such a move, so long as the history is honest.

Of course it wouldn’t be honest; we are a society of liars.

Here is Madam Efunroye Tinubu (c. 1810 – 1887) :

From the Wikipedia

Madam Tinubu was a wealthy and powerful chieftess of the Egba clan (Youruba people, Nigeria.) She made her money through the slave trade, and resisted the British Colonial Government because it was interfering with he ability to make money by selling humans into bondage.

Tinubu Square in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria, is named in her honor.

Cosmic Yoruba has some interesting things to say about the next chieftess of the Egba, Efunsetan Aniwura:

“…she was a WSW [note: woman who has sex with women] who never married, never had any children and was referred to as lakiriboto [a woman with no vaginal opening] …

“Efunsetan Aniwura rose to become a very powerful and wealthy trader in the 19th century, she is one of the few Yoruba women that has withstood the test of history. Oral tradition states that she had three large farms, and that no less than 100 slaves worked in each at a time. Apparently she owned over 2,000 slaves in her lifetime.

“Like other Yoruba women traders, Efunsetan travelled across the land trading with all sorts of people. Her speciality was in arms and ammunition, she would lend these to warriors when they were going on military expeditions and it seems she also went to war a few times herself.”

Cosmic Yoruba notes that “oral tradition” is often dodgy, and we can’t believe everything we hear. She rejects various stories about Efunestan going crazy and terrorizing her slaves, on the grounds that they don’t make much sense, and further speculates:

“I wonder if this is a classic example of history erasing a woman’s achievements. I will never get tired of pointing out how our current ideas on how our female ancestors lived are very different from the reality. We believe that they all married, lived “under” their husbands, never divorced, spent their lives in the kitchen while the men went out to work, never enjoyed sex, were all straight and so on. Powerful women like Efunsetan, who may have never married or had children and may have even been queer will have their stories snipped and trimmed, molded to become a warning for other women…so as to discourage them from craving power perhaps.”

Cosmic Yoruba has done a lot more research about traditional Nigerian life than I have, so I am inclined to trust her. Besides, her accounts line up with most other accounts I have read.

Cosmic Yoruba ends with songs praising Efunestan:

“The woman, who instils fear in others,
the fearsome one, who slaughters slaves to celebrate Id-el-Kabir.
Efunsetan is one force, Ibadan is another.
The valiant that challenges the Almighty God,
if the most high does not answer her on time,
Efunsetan leaves the earth to go and meet him in Heaven…”

 

Have you heard the story that Africa was a developed, thriving place full of wealthy economies and fabulous cities, until evil Europeans showed up, enslaved a bunch of people and colonized the rest?

Cities did exist in Sub-Saharan Africa, but they were few and far between. They were in the sorts of places you would expect them to, like the intersections of major trade routes or major ports. There were a few major trade items, like gold, ivory, and human beings. There were empires with wealthy individuals.

But the overall level of economic development throughout the sub-continent was very low. Those who claim that Europeans are responsible for the current levels of African development need to explain why African development was so low before the Europeans got there.

Edited to add: hey, look, we have a new graph! It is far superior to the old one, though it covers a different time range, so well still have to use both:

I really hope I can find a better graph

with special thanks to commentator “With the thoughts you’d be thinkin” and Wikimedia Commons

Back in the year one, most of the world was engaged in hunter-gathering, small-scale agriculture, or herding. The GDP of most of the world reflects this. Africa at least has gold to export, unlike the steppe. Africa is still less developed than Western Europe (and this is including northern Africa, which is quite different from Sub-Saharan Africa.)

By 1300-1400, various estimates put British per cap GDP around $1,000, with the average for Western Europe as a whole a little lower, but still more than the current per capita GDP of many modern Sub-Saharan countries. And it’s more than SSA had in 1400, well before European colonialism began. If anything, Africa’s GDP only took off after colonialsim; there is no sign that colonialism caused economic collapse.

According to Peter Frost, “In sub-Saharan Africa, high polygyny rates are associated with ‘female farming’ societies, and such societies began to spread outward from a point of origin near the Niger’s headwaters some 6,000 to 7,000 years ago (Murdock, 1959, pp. 44, 64-68).”

In The African Outlier, Frost quotes Draper, 1989 (PDF):  “Much of rural African subsistence is based on the work of women in their gardens; men make only modest contributions. Typically, rights in land are held by men by virtue of their membership in kinship or village units. A man who wishes to add another wife is under few constraints (provided his kinship group has the land and bridewealth), since women, in effect, pay their own way. They produce food, and they rear children. In rural areas, when a man marries an additional wife, he is awarded additional fields for this woman and her children (Bryson 1981). The importance of male labor to support such households is reduced. In former times, before colonially imposed peace, the male role in defense was important. But since central governments have been present, men who remain in rural villages spend their time in leisure, in management of household labor, or in local political affairs…”

And in The Beginnings of Black Slavery and The Beginnings of Black Slavery II, Frost argues that, “… It looks like black slaves began to enter the Middle East in growing numbers some time before 0 AD, the result being a slow but steady increase in the region’s black population throughout the early Christian era and into the Islamic era.”

He goes on to argue that polygamy basically drove the slave trade. Do the math; if one man has 5 wives, then four men have no wives. What do you do with your extra men? Attack the next village over, capture their women and sell all of their extra men into slavery.

There are other possible explanations, but I happen to find Frost’s convincing.

The idea that things were going swimmingly until Europeans showed up and started enslaving everyone is pure a-historical baloney. In fact, did you catch this little bit above: “Madam Tinubu … resisted the British Colonial Government because it was interfering with he ability to make money by selling humans into bondage.”

According to the Wikipedia page on Colonial Nigeria, “British influence began with prohibition of slave trade to British subjects in 1807. The resulting collapse of African slave trade led to the decline and eventual collapse of the Edo Empire. ”

So Nigerian heroes were actively resisting British influence in Nigeria because the British were trying to stop them from enslaving people, and the slave trade is supposed to be the fault of the colonizers?

 

Let’s teach history.

Black reactions to white people tanning

As I promised yesterday, I found the reactions on this post: Darkness Matters, to the phenomenon of white people using Melanotan II to, well, tan rather interesting. Her are a few quotes:

“Dr. Bey explained why whites have so much aggression, anger and hatred towards us and how they are planning to wipe us clean off the map. What I’m about to say is going to shock you. In the words of Booker T. Coleman, “Don’t believe anything I say. Do your own research. I could be lying to you.” Whites are kidnapping us, melting down our organs, cutting open our skulls and eating our pineal gland in order to become “powerful” and injecting our melanin into themselves.”

You know, I had not even considered cannibalism as a possible method for getting a tan. Also, I think she missed the part where it’s a fake hormone made in a lab that isn’t even identical to the real one in your body (and technically, it’s not fake melanin, but fake a-MSH.)

Some of the comments on the post are equally interesting:

“Not to forget mentioning the Rhesus Negative Blood type. Having learnt a lot about it (my mother is this blood type and I’m sure a lot of you know that it is the oldest blood type on this planet), it is no surprise to me that this, besides the melanin, could be why Caucasian ‘celebs’ are snatching up Black babies QUICK. It’s the cure. Even if the Caucasians are calling it the ‘Anunnaki blood type’.
They are trying to graft themselves back in because – and this could not be stressed enough, they’re fully aware that their time is up. …”

Actually, blacks tend to be Rh positive, like virtually everyone else on the planet. Rh negative blood is only found in >10% of people in Europeans. So, no, Europeans aren’t stealing black babies to get Rh negative blood. That’d be like stealing blacks to get blond hair.

Anunnaki? Or you can delve into the truly crazy shit.

Okay, I just want to pause here and issue a PSA on behalf of all whites, everywhere: No, we aren’t eating your brains. We don’t want to eat your brains. Or your skin. That’s disgusting. Also, this Anunnaki bullshit is pure crazypants. 99.99% of whites do not believe this. For goodness sakes.

Back to the comments.

“the blood bank won’t stop calling me and always trying to tell me that there is a blood shortage. They ask if, you could like to have your blood go to sicklwe [sic] cell children. I have found that they put a little mark on it so it is used for particular people.
They also run genetic test on your blood when you donate it and they have you sign away rights kind of alla Henretta Lacks. I’ve had one of them say that my blood helped people get well faster and that I should donate as much as possible. This has freaked me out and I haven’t been back since. I’m thinking of changing my phone number as I know they can track you through your cell phone using GPS. I don’t plan on being snatched.” (my bold)

“… I always told my family that whenever you see missing black kids that are posted on the news or on the board at Walmart, they are in underground slave camps and will be used for experiments. They are preying on the weak.”

“Do you think that maybe the babies are their own insurance policies to keep them alive if, the need a pigment fix. Do you think they would have their children drained of their blackness for such a thing?”

“And those abandoned warehouses, university hospitals that are Khazar funded, like NYU, LONG island Jewish, Columbia, Etc…are where they conduct experiments.”

Who are the Khazars, you’re wondering? “The Khazar theory” is a now-disproven theory of Ashkenazi Jewish origins favored principally by anti-Semites, Neo-Nazis, and people who don’t know any better. (We know it’s been disproven because we have genetic testing, and it turns out that the Askenazim are half Italian, half Middle Eastern, with no Khazar blood.) The one bit of truth to the idea is the fact that there was once a Jewish Khazar state, but it later converted to Islam, and thus it became rather lacking in Jews.

“Whites have always lusted after melanin, which explains their obsession with black sexuality. Whitewomen allowing random blackmen to impregnate them with a half-black baby with the consent of their white boyfriends and husbands. White female celebrities adopting black babies from Haiti and various countries across Africa, and so forth. What are white folks trying to accomplish? They want to mold black and half-black babies into white people under the guise of multiculturalism.”

“I think Dr. Llaila Afrika posited that the study of melanin is the ONLY thing they are doing in science nowadays & I believe he is right.”

“I notice they push the interracial agenda.Just look at paula paton and robin thicke.She is biracial but says she’s black and their child looks white he has blonde hair and blue eyes.This is what they are trying to do breed out the black race and replace it with a more fertile and tanner lookin white race.”

“Victoria Rowell is another mixed blackwoman that birthed a white daughter with blonde hair and blue eyes, and she had the nerve to say her daughter is black by extension because she’s a black female…Insanity! Halle Berry is another stupid mixed blackwoman playing games with our bloodlines. Stacey Dash is half-black and half-mexican…all of her children have white fathers. Yet, she wants to portray herself as a black female. All of these women want blackmen to support their careers, and ignore the “Elephant In The Room.” They have white babies. Our race gains nothing by the likes of Tamera Mowry birthing white babies with whitemen…Nothing!”

” I’ve always known that something was amiss but couldn’t out my finger on it. You know when I “woke up”? When 9/11 hit. A friend of mine gave me The Protocols in school and while I did read it, It didn’t really register. When 9/11 happened, something clicked for me. Then I began to feel different. TV became a nuisance and my mind wasn’t clouded with football and music videos and clothes and shopping. I wanted more but couldn’t place what that was. When someone introduced me to some radio stations that talked about blacks and our sad state of affairs, I wept. At last!!! I’m not crazy after all.”

Honestly, I think combining Melanin Theory and Nazi propaganda is kind of weird.

(According to melanin theorist Wade Nobles, “That in the evolution of the species, in what some people call the Ontogenetic evolution of humankind, that in the evolution of the species the human family separated in a sense that one branch of the family stopped its evolutionary path and simply depended upon the central nervous system as the total machinery for understanding reality. Whereas, the root of the family continued its path and not only evolved a central nervous system but developed what I called at that time an essential melanic system. And that I even went so far as to try to develop a little formula and suggested that CNS + EMS = HB. CNS (Central Nervous System) + EMS (Essential Melanic System) = HB (Human Being). That the central nervous system combined with the essential melanic system is what makes you human. That, in fact, to be human is to be Black. To be human is to be Black.” From the Wikipedia.)

The whole post and comments are kind of like the Precious Bodily Fluids scene in Dr. Strangelove:

There was also a reference in the thread to the Night Doctors, so I looked them up on Wikipedia:

“Night Doctors, also known as night riders, night witches, Ku Klux doctors, and student doctors are bogeymen of African American folklore who emerged from the realities of grave robbing, medical experimentation, and intimidation rumors spread by Southern whites to prevent workers from leaving for the North. …In order to further emphasize the rumors, white owners would dress in white sheets to represent kidnappers. They wandered the African American communities to make them believe that they would be abducted, taken to medical facilities and killed.”

“In New Orleans there was an interesting variation on the night doctors called the “needle men”. Thought to be medical students from Charity Hospital (now the Medical Center of Louisiana at New Orleans), the needle men would poke an unsuspecting individual in the arm, resulting in death.”

“I sure don’t go out much at this time of year. You takes a chance just walkin’ on the streets. Them Needle Mens is everywhere. They always comes ’round in the fall, and they’s ’round to about March. You see, them Needle Mens is medical students from the Charity Hospital tryin’ to git your body to work on. That’s ’cause stiffs is very scarce at this time of the year”.

“Johns Hopkins Hospital was believed to be a source of “needle men” and the “black bottle men.” They were thought to kidnap African Americans right off the street. A woman from the book The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks states that “You’d be surprised how many people disappeared in East Baltimore when I was a girl. I’m telling you, I lived here in the fifties when they got Henrietta, and we weren’t allowed to go anywhere near Hopkins. When it got dark and we were young, we had to be on the steps, or Hopkins might get us.””

On a related note, Michiko Kakutani gives us a quick view into mainstream writer Ta-Nehisi Coates’s new book:

““Between the World and Me”… offers an abbreviated portrait of the author’s life at home, focusing mainly on the fear he felt growing up. Fear of the police, who he tells his son “have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body,” … The “need to be always on guard” was exhausting, “the slow siphoning of essence,” Mr. Coates writes. He “feared not just the violence of this world but the rules designed to protect you from it, the rules that would have you contort your body to address the block, and contort again to be taken seriously by colleagues, and contort again so as not to give police a reason.” … They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could — with no justification — shatter my body.” (bold mine.)

The Past Makes ISIS Look Good

“The April 20, 1859 edition of the Macon Messenger [1] carried a short obituary notice for King Gezo stating, “…His majesty, the King of Dahomey, the great negro seller of Africa, has departed this life. He was in the habit of ransacking all the neighboring African kingdoms, for the purpose of making captives, whom he sold to the slavers. At his funeral obsequies, his loving subjects manifested their sorrow by sacrificing eight hundred negroes to his memory. He is succeeded by his son, King Gezo II.”1. Marriages and Obituaries From the Macon Messenger; Willard R. Rocker 1988King Gezo’s soldiers also did a lot of beheading. Oh, yes, many of them were women, members of the “Dahomey Amazons,” so I guess they’re the sorts of folks that academics like to hold up as shining examples of how gender egalitarianism dominated the world before evil Europeans stepped in and changed everything.

Of course, many of those women soldiers were foreign captives or child soldiers forced into the army by their families, so I find it difficult to get too excited about female empowerment that’s basically jut slavery.