Know your history: Understanding racism in the US Black History. There will never be an acceptable explanation for what happened between Michael Brown and Darren Wilson in Ferguson but we will never fully grasp why the stage was set for such an encounter unless we know American history. We cannot fully comprehend why Dylan Roof murdered nine parishioners at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston unless we study the Civil War and the Confederacy. We cannot truly fathom how a minor traffic stop in Cincinnati could result in a white campus police officer blowing out the brains of an unarmed black man unless we delve into the role race has played in law enforcement from the enactment of the federal Fugitive Slave Act in 1. Examining American history provides us with the tools to analyse how the death of Michael Brown and the demonstrations on Florrisant Avenue became a tipping point and sparked a movement. Connecting the dots between the past and the present helps us to see the origins of our current national debate - about race, police misconduct, white supremacy, white privilege, inequality, incarceration and the unfinished equal rights agenda.

The pendulum The history of people of African descent in America - which is to say the history of America - is a pendulum of progress and setbacks, of resilience and retaliation, of protest and backlash. There have been allies and there have been opponents. There have been demagogues, who would divide Americans on the basis of colour and class, and visionaries who would seek to lead us to common ground. The quest for "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" has been an American aspiration since the Declaration of Independence, but black Americans, Native Americans and women were not at the table in 1. Forty of the 5. 6 signers owned other people. Lest there be any doubt about where the young nation's sentiments lay, the Supreme Court's 1.

Know your history: Understanding racism in the US "And then you might understand how the death of Michael Brown became a tipping point in the US.". Sex tapes, FBI smears and the double life of an all too human saint: The other side to the Martin Luther King story. 50th anniversary of iconic I Have A Dream speech. Our take on 'The Thrill of It All,' the second album from the Grammy-winning U.K. crooner.

Dred Scott decision made clear that people of African descent - whether enslaved or free - would not be considered American citizens and had no legal standing in the courts. It mattered not that some of their grandfathers had served in George Washington's Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. Last month in Washington, DC, at the third annual March on Washington Film Festival, Clarence B Jones, a confidant and personal legal counsel to Martin Luther King, Jr., said "a definitive discussion and description of the institution of slavery, the concomitant supporting ideology of white supremacy and the impact it has had on subsequent generations" are missing from the history curriculum of most American high schools and colleges. Without that knowledge, he said, it is impossible to understand America today."Our history has never taught the centrality of race as the key barometer to how well we are doing with the American Experiment," added Pulitzer Prize winning historian Taylor Branch that same evening. Watch Fashion Download Full. If you don’t have race at the forefront of an investigation of how America is fulfilling its goals, then something is wrong. And unfortunately right now we are paying the price for 5. Indeed every time we see another video - of Sandra Bland, of Freddie Gray, of Tamir Rice - we witness the horrifying evidence of our national failure to confront this legacy.

What used to be called "the Negro problem", really is a matter of the intransigence of white supremacists who are mired in the past. Slavery was not the benign, paternalistic system described in the history textbooks of my youth.

Instead, it was a brutal, often sadistic, form of domination over the bodies and minds of people who were kidnapped, whipped, beaten and raped. Generations of human beings toiled against their will without pay or legal rights. For 2. 46 years - from 1. Africans were forced into indentured servitude in Jamestown, Virginia, until the end of the Civil War in 1. African descent in America were enslaved. Those who had purchased or otherwise been granted their freedom lived a precarious, circumscribed existence.

Slavery and the slave trade were essential to the American economy and to the development of American capitalism, especially after Native Americans were driven off their ancestral land in the Deep South in the 1. The wealth of the nation was inextricably dependent upon uncompensated labour, which enriched not only the planters, but universities, banks, textile mills, ship owners and insurance companies, who held policies on their bodies. To settle a debt, an owner merely needed to sell one of his slaves.

By 1. 85. 0, enslaved Americans, who were listed in their owners' inventory ledgers alongside cattle and farm equipment, were worth $1. When the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter in April 1. Now numbering four million souls, they were, as Ta- Nehisi Coates has written, America's "greatest financial asset". Immediately after the Civil War, during the hopeful, but brief period of Reconstruction, black people were finally recognised as citizens with rights. But just as quickly as the 1. Reconstruction ended with retaliatory Redemption. When federal troops abandoned their posts in the South after the Compromise of 1.

Confederates regrouped as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia. They regained control of their workforce, not by owning them, but by circumscribing their lives through terror, violence and voter suppression. READ MORE: Reflections of a former white supremacist. In Louisiana, the number of registered black voters plummeted from 1. Fraudulent voting schemes pushed black elected officials from state legislatures and from Congress. During the late 1.

• One person was killed and a boy, 12, shot in the groin after an apparent drug-related shooting inside a Starbucks.
• Opportunity. Dedicated to creating paths to brighter futures, The Johnson Scholarship Foundation has invested in possibilities for over twenty-five years.

Congress . When North Carolina's George Henry White left in 1. Oscar De. Priest was elected in Chicago.

For virtually the first half of the 2. Amendment had no value for blacks in the former Confederate states, where they were denied the right to vote through the cynical artifice of poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses. Jim Crow laws and Black Codes obliterated Reconstruction wins and codified racially based discrimination. The sharecropping system, which left black farmers in debt at the end of every harvest, was equivalent to slavery. Black children were allowed to attend school only during times of the year when there were no farm chores to do.

Historian Rayford Logan called the period "nadir of American race relations". Those who got too uppity were lynched, firebombed in their homes and chased from land they owned.

In 1. 91. 5, DW Griffith's technically groundbreaking movie, Birth of a Nation, glorified the Klan and fed the trope of black inferiority and criminality. Around the same time, a migration wave began that would eventually see more than six million black Americans flee the brutality and deprivation of the South for the relative freedom of the North and the West. Four years later, when black soldiers returned from World War I military duty in France, they were attacked during the "Red Summer" as resentful whites instigated riots in at least 3. Chicago and Washington, DC to Memphis and Charleston. Their goal was to put men who had received France's Croix de Guerre back in their place as the Klan had done after Reconstruction.

The NAACP investigated and black newspapers editorialised. During the succeeding decades - through the Depression, the New Deal and World War II - the pendulum continued to swing between progress and setbacks. The attitudes that informed Jim Crow laws and discriminatory public policy existed in the North as well as the South. The results are evident today in major American cities, where banks refused loans to black home buyers in the 1. In 1. 95. 7, when my parents were ready to finance a new home in an all- black development of newly constructed residences in a suburb of Indianapolis, they were unable to secure a loan from any of the city's large banks. Both were college graduates and business executives.

Sex tapes, FBI smears and the double life of an all too human saint: The other side to the Martin Luther King story. I Have A Dream speech celebrated this week. Claims human rights activist lived a double life and was a serial womaniser. Married campaigner Coretta Scott in 1. FBI investigation is said to have uncovered details that the preacher slept with members of his congregation.

Published. 2. 2: 5. GMT, 3. 0 August 2. GMT, 3. 1 August 2.

He was, without any doubt, one of America’s greatest heroes. A brave, eloquent and inspiring man whose stirring speeches still resonate powerfully today. No wonder, on the 5. March on Washington at which he made his I Have A Dream speech, the U. S. President and former presidents — Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter — gathered this week to pay tribute to Martin Luther King. But Washington didn’t always feel that way about the Baptist preacher and civil rights leader from Atlanta, Georgia.

Scroll down for video. Marital bliss? Martin Luther King married Coretta Scott in 1. Driven by FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover’s mistaken conviction that King was a dangerous Communist, federal agents bugged his hotel rooms. What they found, and tried to use against him in a poisonous blackmail campaign, was not evidence of Communism but of serial adultery.

Leading one of the most astonishing double lives in history, King was not just the Bible- thumping champion of the rights of man, but also an inveterate womaniser who cheated on his wife throughout their marriage. King’s secret sex life became such a talking point at the White House that recently released interviews with Jackie Kennedy revealed even she knew about it. Jackie confided how her brother- in- law Bobby Kennedy had told her the FBI had recorded King trying to arrange a sex party on the night before the March on Washington in August 1. I can’t see a picture of Martin Luther King without thinking, you know, that man’s terrible,’ sniffed the former First Lady. Bobby had told her that King ‘was calling up all these girls and arranging for a party of men and women, I mean, sort of an orgy’. That King was a sex addict — though probably no worse than Mrs Kennedy’s husband, JFK — has long been a source of embarrassment in an America that effectively declared him a saint. Though it is beyond question that King was charismatic, tireless and courageous, it is also indisputably true that this brilliant man had a seamier side, as one of Dr King’s closest associates confirmed. Civil rights campaigner the Rev Ralph Abernathy was the man who cradled King the day he was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1.

But in 1. 98. 9, Abernathy — who succeeded King as the movement’s leader — incurred the eternal wrath of his allies and accusations of a  Judas- like betrayal after he confirmed that  long- standing rumours about his old friend’s rampant sexual appetites were true. In his autobiography, Abernathy said King — whose 1. Coretta Scott produced four children — had a ‘weakness for women’. King, a pastor from the age of 2. Biblical prohibition against sex outside marriage,’ said his friend. It was just that he had a particularly difficult time with that temptation.’And that was putting it mildly.

Abernathy related an extraordinary story that indicated King spent the last night of his life enjoying the attentions of not one but two lovers, followed by an encounter with a third woman whom he knocked sprawling across his motel room bed. The fateful evening had started with King delivering his historic I’ve Been To The Mountaintop speech at the Masonic Temple in Memphis, in which he appeared to foresee his own death.

Afterwards, Abernathy, King and a civil rights movement comrade, the Rev Bernard Lee, went to the home of one of King’s female friends for a late- night dinner. Abernathy said he and Lee took a post- prandial nap in the sitting room. He awoke at 1am to see King emerging with the woman from her bedroom. Best kept secret: America's hero and civil rights leader (pictured left) is said to have had a sex life similar to the notorious womaniser JFK (second right)On the road: King travelled across the country to preach. According to old friend Rev Ralph Abernathy, he picked up women along the way. They then returned to their lodgings at a local motel, where a black female politician was waiting to see him. She got her wish and Abernathy left the couple to go to get some sleep in the room he shared with King.

At around 7am or 8am, King burst into their bedroom, looking alarmed, said Abernathy. King needed his friend’s help to calm down a third woman who was, he said, ‘mad at me. She came in this morning and found my bed empty’. As a reviewer of Abernathy’s book put it at the time, the author’s implication was obvious: ‘King, a married man, had been unfaithful even in his unfaithfulness.’The drama didn’t end there.

When the third woman turned up in the room, her argument with King became so intense that he ‘lost his temper and knocked her across the bed’. In the hailstorm of outrage from the civil rights movement that followed his claims, several of those involved in this eventful night later came out to challenge Abernathy’s version. Adjua Abi Naantaanbuu, a Memphis hair salon owner, said she hosted the dinner party and there had been no sex in her house that night. She hadn’t been a friend of King either, merely a civil rights activist who had been asked to feed the visitors. Georgia Davis Powers, the Kentucky state senator who paid that late visit to King at the motel, said the pair simply stayed up talking until 4am. Bernard Lee claimed Abernathy’s tale was invented and he had ‘betrayed a great trust . . . to make a buck’. But Abernathy stuck to his story until his death. In all honesty, in all fairness, it happened,’ he said.

Were Abernathy’s critics closing ranks to protect the legacy of a giant? Their problem was that Abernathy was not the only one to level such accusations. Turning a blind eye: When Coretta Scott King received an FBI tape containing details of her husband's exploits, she ignored it. Though the subject never makes it into the admiring discussions of King on U. S. breakfast TV, CNN or the pages of the New York Times, the preacher’s serial sexual adultery has  been covered in a string of acclaimed biographies. According to Pulitzer prize- winning biographer David Garrow, it was an open secret among civil rights, activists who even warned King to rein in his ‘compulsive sexual athleticism’.

But he was unrepentant, bluntly telling a friend: ‘I’m away from home 2. F*****g’s a form of anxiety reduction.’Though he didn’t name names, Garrow said three particular women became more than one- nights stands. King grew very close to one of them — believed to be a female colleague from Atlanta. At one point, he saw her almost every day, though — Garrow added — ‘it did not eliminate the incidental couplings that were a commonplace of King’s travels’. It was clearly not just the civil rights leader doing the chasing. A King aide recalled watching woman after woman making passes at King at a suburban New York fund- raising party.‘I could not believe what I was seeing in white Westchester women,’ he said.

They would walk up to him and would sort of lick their lips and hint, and [hand him] notes . . .  After I saw that thing that evening, I didn’t blame him.’Evidently, King could afford to be choosy in his adultery. According to an old family friend: ‘The girls he “dated” were just like models . . .  tall . . . all usually were very fair, never dark.’ King, he added, was ‘really a Casanova’, but one who had a ‘quiet dignity’ and was respectful towards his many conquests. It was an extraordinary secret existence for a man who used the message of the Gospels in all his speeches and who would tell interviewers that ‘sex is basically sacred . . . and must never be abused’.