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QotD: The Silent Parade
To the beat of muffled drums 8,000 negro men, women and children marched down Fifth Avenue yesterday in a parade of “silent protest against acts of discrimination and oppression” inflicted upon them in this country, and in other parts of the world. Without a shout or a cheer they made their cause known through many banners which they carried, calling attention to “Jim Crowism,” segregation, disenfranchisement, and the riots of Waco, Memphis, and East St. Louis.—The New York Times, (A Former Newspaper) 29 July 1917
We own 20,ooo farms with 20,000,000 acres of land worth $500,000,000—Sign carried in the Negro Silent Protest Parade, commonly known as the “Silent Parade.”
There was a time when protests by and on behalf of African Americans could be peaceful. On this day in 1917, they took it further with a silent protest parade down Fifth Avenue in New York City. There were no white Marxists there to turn it into a violent riot. There were not even cheers or shouts. Just a silent march with black boy scouts along the parade route handing out flyers to explain their complaints. The protests were against lynchings, especially what had been recent incidents in Waco and Memphis, and terrible riots in St. Louis where scores of African Americans were killed. The St. Louis riots were spurred when African Americans were brought in as strikebreakers against a unionization attempt.
As a risible footnote, some of the signs that the people carried in the parade appealed directly to the President of the United States, who happened to be Thomas Woodrow Wilson. Had he been there, I doubt he would have been moved to do anything other than to call in troops to break up the protest.
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I seriously considered having this as the entire entry:
There is lazy and then there is…wow.
Hey, I didn’t do it! 🤣🤣🤣🦥
Interesting that the Times once knew that the word “riot” existed.
Excellent post, Arahant. Wish today’s protestors and our black citizens could see it!
We used to be a calmer nation. I stumbled upon this two-minute clip on YouTube the other day. This is the same guy who admirably ordered the 101st Airborne Division to Little Rock to make sure a group of teenagers got to go to their local high school. Yet here he is saying that General Lee is one of the four men he most admires.
This was a common attitude in the 1950s. I grew up with Lee in my father’s house. My father is not a racist. He is from the South, and he was in the Army. I think it’s a complicated legacy, which I don’t think will be fairly presented again for many decades, however one defines “fair.”
In my home growing up, he was known as Cousin Robert E. Lee. The FFV were all inter-related in one way or another.
I have never heard General Lee disparaged. My family always admired and respected him.
It’s weird to me that it’s such a knee jerk reaction now to say all those guys were “horrible” people. I guess that’s the way it has to be, but it shows a great lack of curiosity about why so many Americans–not just Southerners–liked Lee in the first place. The Lost Cause is outdated historiography, to be sure, but there was more to the story than this. While I am sympathetic to the views of black Americans, to reduce Lee’s legacy completely to “racism”, “Lost Cause”, “traitor”, and “slavery” is a game that means it will take many more years before anyone attempts to actually understand the admiration your family and mine had for him. I am not surprised at all that this lack of nuance has then broadened out and snared other historic figures like George Washington.
I could not agree more. :-)
The Insurrection’s iconoclast motive is divorced from moral concerns, it is to sow disorder and to prepare the ground for a new counterfactual mythos in which Marx and Lenin are liberators and the Bill of Rights is the very definition of oppression. Up is down, black is white.
They have defined everything as violence, so clearly the correct response is…