Latest news with #EqualJusticeInitiative
Yahoo
25-05-2025
- Yahoo
A Black 18-year-old college student was lynched on a playground 95 years ago. His nephew just accepted his posthumous degree
As Imam Plemon El-Amin stood on stage at Morehouse College in front of hundreds of people, donning graduation regalia his uncle Dennis Hubert never got to wear, all he could think was that Hubert would never be forgotten – even 95 years after he was killed. Hubert, an 18-year-old African American divinity student at Morehouse College, was lynched in June 1930 by a mob of seven White men on the playground of a segregated Atlanta school. Last Sunday, the historically Black all-male college where Hubert was a rising sophomore awarded him a posthumous Bachelor of Arts degree in religion. At the commencement ceremony, Morehouse President David Thomas called Hubert a 'son of Morehouse, a martyr of justice, and what history now sees as the Trayvon Martin of the 1930s in Atlanta.' El-Amin, who never met Hubert, says the moment reminded him of an Islamic saying: There are three things a person leaves behind after their death – their charity, knowledge and family members who pray for them. 'Many prayers were said in his name,' El-Amin said about the ceremony, where the 75-year-old accepted the posthumous degree on his uncle's behalf. 'Many people remembered him and were informed about his life and his legacy, and so the knowledge was there, as well as the charity of him sacrificing his life so that we would be more conscious of the value of young life and the value of human life, but also the value of justice.' El-Amin's family has had 'a long tradition' of a 'connection with Morehouse,' he said, with multiple generations graduating from the institution. Ten men in his family graduated from Morehouse and seven women graduated from its sister school, Spelman College. 'I was proud of Morehouse to give Dennis the honor, and I'm quite appreciative,' El-Amin said. 'The whole Hubert family is really appreciative of that.' Hubert's family had well-established roots in the community: his father was a prominent preacher and his mother was the principal of the elementary school where Hubert was killed, according to El-Amin. 'For one of their promising children, who (was) a rising sophomore at the Morehouse College to be murdered just in cold blood … at that time, 1930, is saying that there (were) no human rights given to the people of Georgia,' El-Amin said. Hubert was one of at least 38 lynching victims killed in Fulton County between 1877 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative. In Georgia, nearly 600 African Americans were lynched in that period – the second highest number of lynchings in any state. 'When we begin to address this history, when we begin to try to create remedies for the harm and suffering that terror violence and lynching violence created, I think we lay a path down that will help us move forward, which is why I was so pleased that Morehouse decided to award a degree posthumously to Dennis Hubert,' said Bryan Stevenson, the executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative. Like many lynching victims, Hubert was a young man with a bright future ahead of him. When he was killed, the student had been the driver for John Hope, the first Black president of Morehouse. 'This is a recognition of Dennis as not only a human being, but also as someone that had made his mark and was beginning to make his mark at Morehouse, and was not able to make his full mark here in the city or in life, but that people have a high regard for him,' El-Amin said. Less than 15 minutes after Hubert arrived at the Crogman School for Negroes that fateful evening on June 15, 1930, several White men attacked Hubert, falsely accusing him of insulting a White woman. 'What do you want of me? I have done nothing,' Hubert told the mob before one of the men shot him point-blank in the back of the head in front of two dozen witnesses. Hubert's killing sent shockwaves across the community, and the men were soon indicted in connection with his killing – accountability that was rare during that period, according to the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition. The defense argued the killing was 'justifiable homicide' because of the alleged insult. 'The African American community was pushing for justice, and they did get some things that were first in terms of justice between Black and White folk,' El-Amin said. Two days after the men were denied bail, the home of Dennis Hubert's father, Rev. G. J. Hubert, was burned to the ground, according to the coalition. When a Black Baptist church held a fundraiser to rebuild the home and support prosecution of the men, a White mob bombed it with tear gas. Days later, Dennis Hubert's cousin, Rev. Charles R. Hubert, escaped an attempt on his life, and the Spelman College chapel was attacked, according to the coalition. The men were acquitted of murder charges, and only two were convicted of lesser offenses, according to the coalition. One man received a sentence of 12 to 15 years for voluntary manslaughter, while another who confessed to firing the fatal shot received a sentence of just two years. El-Amin's mother, who was 12 when her brother was killed, scarcely spoke about Hubert because of the pain his loss had wrought. 'He was probably her protector and her person that she looked up to,' El-Amin said. But when she grew older and El-Amin became her caretaker, his mother would often call him 'Dennis,' which was 'quite moving' for El-Amin. Though Hubert died 20 years before his nephew was born, the tragedy scarred the family for generations. Growing up as the only son in his family, El-Amin said his mother worried about him because she couldn't bear to lose another family member. Other family members moved out of Atlanta to escape the trauma. They were among more than six million Black people who fled the South to escape racial terrorism between 1916 and 1970, according to the coalition. While Hubert's death traumatized El-Amin's family, he says he's comforted by his faith. 'Life doesn't stop with death and … God rewards those who are oppressed and those who are unjustly murdered,' he said. Part of the tragedy of Hubert's lynching was a lack of awareness surrounding his story among Morehouse graduates until only recently, several alumni said. Michael Tyler, a 1977 Morehouse graduate, said he doesn't 'believe that any of my classmates, or anybody during our generation, was aware of what had transpired with Dennis Hubert.' A few years ago, Tyler learned of Hubert's story when he visited an exhibit memorializing him at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. Sean Jones, a 1998 graduate who serves as president of the Atlanta branch of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, discovered that piece of his school's history in 2021, then called for a discussion of it at the next alumni meeting. As a board member of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition, Jones constantly advocated for the college to formally recognize Hubert and educate both students and alumni about his story. 'It's personal, it's painful, and … oftentimes it's a scary thing, because some persons have nightmares about it once they hear this kind of history,' Jones said. 'But it is something that must be discussed, must be highlighted.' The lack of awareness about the tragedy – even among Morehouse graduates – made the college's tribute that much more meaningful, Tyler and Jones said. 'It was extraordinarily significant and compelling, and something that I am exceedingly proud of my alma mater for doing – telling a story that had not been told in the public domain as it needed to be,' Tyler said. With the long-overdue recognition, '(Hubert's) memory will continue to inspire a new generation of Morehouse Men to serve with courage, speak truth to power, and uphold the ideals of equity and moral leadership in their respective callings,' a Morehouse College spokesperson said in a statement. Morehouse had approached El-Amin about the decision to award Hubert a degree a year and a half ago and initially planned to recognize Hubert last year, he said. Morehouse's faculty and students had nominated Hubert for the honorary degree, according to the college president. 'We remember the son who should have become a man here. We remember the voice that would have preached liberation. We remember the dreamer who was never given the chance to dream aloud,' Thomas said at the ceremony. El-Amin believes the school's decision to honor Dennis was influenced by the work of the Fulton County Remembrance Coalition and the Equal Justice Initiative to memorialize Hubert along with other lynching victims. The organizations in 2021 collected soil from the site of Hubert's killing – now the Crogman School Lofts apartment complex – and placed a marker there in his honor in 2022. A group of Morehouse students who attended the 2022 commemoration joined hands, encircled the memorial marker and sang the 'Dear Old Morehouse' hymn in Hubert's honor, Tyler recalled. 'Ninety-five years later, people are conscious of his life, which means he's still alive, though not here with us physically or in body, but his life, his will, and he is providing inspiration for those of us left behind,' El-Amin said. Such memorials may help educate future generations and prevent the return of past injustices, community members said. They're especially important today 'when there's such a hostility in some spaces to learning the history of struggle and violence against Black people,' Stevenson, of the Equal Justice Initiative, said. 'We can see that those very, very terrible times are not that far away and can easily come back,' El-Amin said.
Yahoo
05-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Irondale mayor hosting 5th annual prayer breakfast
IRONDALE, Ala. (WIAT) — Irondale Mayor James D. Stewart Jr. will host the 5th Annual Irondale Mayor's Prayer Breakfast on May 7. The event will take place at Church of the Highlands on 4700 Highlands Way in Irondale. Doors open at 6:30 a.m. with the program scheduled to begin at 7:45 a.m. The breakfast brings together local pastors, community members, elected officials and more. Mayor Stewart will hold a keynote conversation with Anthony Ray Hinton, a community educator with the Equal Justice Initiative. 'We are honored to welcome Mr. Anthony Ray Hinton to Irondale for our 5th Annual Mayor's Prayer Breakfast,' said Mayor Stewart in a release for the event. 'His story is a testament to the power of hope and perseverance in the face of unimaginable adversity, and we believe his presence will uplift and inspire all who attend. National Day of Prayer is an opportunity for all of us to renew our commitment to praying for our community, serving neighbors in need, and making a difference in the lives of others.' Those interested in attending can learn here. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
USA Today
05-05-2025
- Politics
- USA Today
Who gets to write America's history? Activists prepare to battle Trump administration.
Who gets to write America's history? Activists prepare to battle Trump administration. Historians and activists say its important to protect sites like the Harriet Tubman visitor center, which tell stories of many pasts. Show Caption Hide Caption Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center upholds her legacy The Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad Visitor Center is one of two national historical parks keeping the abolitionist's legacy alive. CHURCH CREEK, MD ‒ Deanna Mitchell pointed to the bronze bust of Harriet Tubman at the center's entrance and urged visitors to touch the nape of its neck to feel the scars. The bust, she explained, faced North where Tubman had led dozens of enslaved people to freedom. 'It was a dark time,'' said Mitchell, superintendent of the Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historical Park, which includes a visitor's center. Tubman has been the subject of renewed public interest in recent weeks, since the Trump administration briefly removed information about the abolitionist from the National Park Service's website. The Tubman picture and quote were restored after a public uproar, but the move raised alarms amidst other instances of Black and Native American figures being temporarily removed from federal websites. In President Donald Trump's first three months, he has repeatedly taken aim at what he's criticized as unfair "woke" policies to promote DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. As part of that critique, he has targeted the "revisionist" telling of American history, which emphasizes events he describes as negative. "Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation's history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth," Trump wrote in a March 27 executive order. In recent years, the National Park Service has touted its efforts to preserve the histories of underrepresented groups, spending millions last year alone to restore and build sites that share the stories of abolitionists like Tubman, along with Japanese interned in World War II and nearly forgotten Mexican farmworkers. But a number of historians, civil right activists and educators worry those kinds of efforts may be scaled back or even eliminated as the Trump administration reshapes how the government presents America's past. 'Very few serious historians, scholars or cultural experts think the problem in America is that we have talked too much about our history of racial injustice, the history of slavery and lynching and segregation," said Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a human rights organization. 'The problem has been the opposite." And Meeta Anand, senior director of Census and Data Equity at The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, sees the federal changes as an attempt to control the story of America. "It represents a very deliberate effort to erase certain communities and the contributions communities have made," she said. 'History has tentacles' On a recent Wednesday, Mitchell led visitors through exhibits telling the story of Tubman's life. She explained how the abolitionist braved death to help family and other enslaved Black people escape along the Underground Railroad. 'She lived a long life based on what she had to endure,' Mitchell told them. The center is one of two National Park Service sites telling Tubman's story. The other is in Auburn, New York, where Tubman later lived until her death at 91. The center, co-managed by the Maryland Park Service, had 30,000 visitors last year. Many had been there before. 'Visitors actually are putting themselves in the space where she was and then they're learning through guided tours," Mitchell said. 'They're learning through tactile objects that they can touch and get information from." Mitchell said she hasn't heard about any proposed cuts to the center and the staff is working hard as it always has to help people better understand history. Just last April, the National Park Service touted $23.4 million in grants for 39 projects that aimed to preserve sites and stories about African American efforts to fight for equal rights. Over the years, the National Park Service evolved from a focus mostly on nature and parks to include sites with rich histories, Mitchell said. 'We realized as a service that history has tentacles,'' she said. 'And there are cultural aspects of our history that need to be preserved and protected.' 'You want people to know the history' The Reidy family studied a map outside the Underground Railroad Visitor Center looking for other Tubman sites to explore. Tim and Kim Reidy brought their children, Elizabeth, and Sam, to the center to learn more about Tubman. They were on a spring break trip from Westchester, New York. 'It seemed like an important and historically relevant aspect of the history of the place to bring them to,'' said Kim Reidy. 'I'm glad that places like this exist.' Elizabeth, 15, had learned about Tubman in school, but she said 'it's so important to have museums and these spaces dedicated to this.' Tim Reidy said the family may also visit the Tubman center in Auburn. 'It's one thing to read about it, but to be in the actual physical space is a whole different experience," he said. 'You can see why people want to come here. You don't want to lose that." Rhonda Miller of Bowie, Maryland, and her daughter, Madison, followed along as Mitchell, the superintendent, led them on a tour of the Tubman center. Miller and other members of Parents Helping Parents Together, a support group for parents of children with special needs, had traveled two hours to the center. Miller grew up learning the basics about Tubman and she and Madison had watched the 2019 movie, 'Harriet.' 'This was building on that, actually going to see places where she may have walked," Miller said. 'I love the way they put this museum together and presented the information. It was really amazing.' Miller said with efforts to erase Black history it was particularly important that Madison also learn about it outside the classroom. 'I would hate to see places like this disappear," Miller said after the visit. 'We need them." 'Treat our history with the respect' A few miles from the center in downtown Cambridge, William Jarmon gathered visitors at the Harriet Tubman Museum and Educational Center to share her history. Tubman spent the first 27 years of her life enslaved in the region. The small museum featured portraits of Tubman and exhibits. A mural of Tubman with an outstretched hand was painted on the side of the building. There are also other nods to Tubman's legacy in the county, including a statue outside the courthouse. Jarmon, president of the Harriet Tubman Organization, a nonprofit that runs the museum, said it relies in part on tours it offers and local support to continue its mission. 'We are making it our business to reach every generation, especially through the schools so that they will understand that it's just not her story, but it's all of our stories," Jarmon said. More: New Alabama sculpture park, Black history museums are changing the way history is told Stevenson said institutions that receive federal funding are feeling pressure to roll back diversity programs. The Equal Justice Initiative has three sites in Montgomery, Alabama, focused on the Black experience, including a new sculpture park. The programs are privately funded. 'I hope this is a short-term problem because I really believe that the majority of people in Congress don't want to defund our major museums and institutions, even if they don't agree with every sentence in those museums," Stevens said. Some groups, including faith leaders, have stepped up to teach more Black history . Others have increased their support of Black-run museums and programs, said Cliff Albright, co-founder of Black Voters Matter. Still, he said, taxpayer-funded institutions should include that history. 'Our expectation is that they treat our history with the respect that it deserves, even as some of us are looking at ways that we can ensure that that history gets maintained," Albright said. Those efforts shouldn't let up, Stevenson said. 'What we should not do is retreat from truth telling, retreat from honest and accurate history, from providing the full story,'' he said. 'That's a recipe for disaster, for fostering ignorance.'
Yahoo
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Jim Crow Economy Is the True Horror in Sinners
This article contains light spoilers for Sinners. Sinners is a symphony of vampire bites, gunshot wounds, people being staked in the heart and left to burn alive. Ryan Coogler's film about twin gangsters trying to strike it rich in the Jim Crow South rapidly swerves toward supernatural horror when an ancient vampire seeks a way into the juke joint the twins have set up with their ill-gotten gains. But the true horror in the film is the economics of Jim Crow, which drives every event in the plot, including the vampire bloodbath that ultimately cuts the musical revelry—and the twins' dreams—short. Coogler's films tend to incorporate deep historical research that gets revealed subtly through brief, easy-to-miss moments and story details. Sinners is almost two movies in one: a vampire slaughterhouse film that's also a period piece about the near-impossibility of upward mobility in the segregation economy. The sawmill the twins convert into their juke joint becomes a bloody trap from which there is no escape, much like the system they are born into and seek to transcend. [Read: The triumph of a film that flips on us halfway through] The movie's protagonists, the Smokestack Twins, known as Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are flamboyant entrepreneurs and World War I veterans returning from Chicago to Clarksdale, Mississippi, a city long associated with the blues, in the 1930s. One of the twins remarks that Chicago is merely 'Mississippi with tall buildings,' and the viewer is left to speculate why, but history offers at least one possible explanation. In 1919, just after the end of World War I, Black veterans in Chicago would have witnessed one of the worst race riots of that 'Red Summer' of lynchings, sparked by the death of a Black teenager named Eugene Williams, who drowned after a white man threw rocks at him while he was swimming in Lake Michigan. Williams had apparently drifted across an invisible whites-only line that the man who killed him was enforcing. The police refused to arrest the perpetrator, and dozens of Black and white people were killed in the ensuing violence, which saw white mobs rampaging through Black neighborhoods. Black World War I veterans, some of whom defended their communities during the riot, were themselves frequently targeted for racial violence rather than admired for their service, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes; segregationist legislators feared they would return and expect to be treated as equals. The Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman warned that, for the Black soldier, military service was 'but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.' The historian Chad Williams writes in Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era that 'conflict in the South and the major urban race riots of the postwar era reflected the conscious determination of many black veterans, emboldened and politicized by their army experience, to resist continued subjugation.' That context helps explain the twins' cavalier attitude toward the white man they purchase the juke joint from in the film. When Smoke and Stack tell him they'll kill any KKK member who trespasses on their property, the seller, secretly a Klan leader, falsely insists the KKK no longer exists. In actuality, the second incarnation of the Klan remained influential, but Klan denial was a common propaganda strategy. We later learn that the capital the twins use to buy the property was stolen from the Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago, for whom the twins worked before returning to Mississippi. It would have been very difficult for them to acquire that seed capital otherwise; as the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has noted in her study of the racial wealth gap, white banks at the time generally would not extend credit to Black borrowers. The strict separations of the Jim Crow economy are illustrated in perhaps the most striking shot in the movie, when a young Chinese American woman, Lisa Chow, crosses the street to speak with her mother in their whites-only shop. Until that point, we have been shown only the Black side of town, where the Chows also maintain a store. The sweeping shot reveals that the town's white residents are mere feet away, but they might as well be on a different planet. Part of a group of immigrants to Mississippi known as the Delta Chinese, the Chows are neither Black nor white and are allowed to sell to both customer bases at the same time. The twins soon discover, however, that the same segregated economy that deprives them of seed money means that their clientele cannot afford to pay for their products in cash. 'The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or petty criminal judgments; his rent rises with the price of cotton, his chances to buy land are either non-existent or confined to infertile regions,' W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1907. 'If by accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a landholder, his property, civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob.' This century-old observation is almost a summary of the film's setting, just without the vampires. [Read: Ryan Coogler didn't want to hide anymore] The film conveys two forms of peonage prominent in the 1930s South—labor arrangements not far removed from slavery. One is convict leasing, which we see as Stack, his cousin Sammie, and a veteran bluesman called Delta Slim pass by a chain gang on their drive to the juke joint. Because the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery 'except as punishment for a crime,' many southern states passed laws that, in practice, allowed authorities to arrest Black people for minor crimes such as 'loitering' or 'vagrancy' and then coerce them to work for free under heinous conditions. The other is sharecropping, the details of which are the catalyst for the eventual vampire massacre. Early on in the film, we see Sammie, an aspiring musician and preacher's son, picking cotton in the morning so that he can fill his quota and spend the rest of the day playing his guitar. Under the sharecropping system, Black people and poor whites were kept in an interminable cycle of debt by landlords, no matter how hard they worked, and so were bound to continue—Du Bois described it as a form of serfdom. Landlords would pay sharecroppers in 'scrip,' paper or wooden tokens that could be used to purchase only highly marked-up goods from the landlords' own stores. As the writer Michael Harriott notes, the Chows' shop would have been one of the few places in town where Black residents could expect fair prices. The twins successfully pack the juke joint with customers who are intoxicated by Sammie's supernatural skills with a guitar—Delta Slim describes Black music as a kind of magic, and in another striking scene, Sammie's playing summons the spirits of the revelers' ancestors and descendants. But the twins soon discover that much of their clientele can purchase drinks only with scrip—which means breaking even on their investment will be impossible. Their business faces other barriers: A plot point that sees the twins stealing electricity for the juke joint recalls the fact that most of the South, kept poor and underdeveloped by the demands of the segregated economy, didn't have electricity until the New Deal, under FDR. Elsewhere in the film, the Irish vampire Remmick, pursued by Choctaw vampire hunters, tricks his way into the protection of a pair of Klan members living near Clarksdale and turns them into creatures of the night. Shortly after Stack realizes that the juke joint isn't making enough money, Remmick shows up with his progeny. Attracted by Sammie's virtuoso playing, they ask to be invited in but are rejected because they are white; another aspect of the era was that white businesses could sell to Black customers, but Black businesses were limited to Black clientele. As vampires, they are forced to wait outside. When Mary, Stack's old flame and, in the parlance of the time, an octoroon who is passing for white, learns from Stack that the juke joint is unprofitable, she offers to go see if Remmick and the others have U.S. currency. Mary becomes the vampires' first juke-joint victim and is then invited inside, where she promptly seduces and kills Stack, who later rises again as a vampire. But the entire reason any of this happens is that running a profitable business as a Black person in the Jim Crow economy is nearly impossible. If the Smokestack twins could borrow capital from white banks, they wouldn't have needed to rob the mob and leave Chicago. If the sharecroppers were paid with actual money, the juke joint would have been profitable. And if the juke joint were profitable, then Mary would never have walked outside and been turned by the vampires. The economic constraints imposed by segregation are what, in the end, expose the twins and their customers to the supernatural horror Remmick represents. Interestingly, Coogler treats Remmick sympathetically, offering hints about Remmick's own experience of oppression and his doomed quest to seek out his loved ones, who are long dead. Remmick is a monster, but his homeland was colonized by some of the same rapacious forces that brought the twins' ancestors to America. The tragedy of persecuted people brought into bloody conflict with one another by forces beyond their control is a consistent theme in Coogler's films, including his two Black Panther movies. [Read: The tragedy of Erik Killmonger] The only unadulterated monsters in the film are the Ku Klux Klan, who show up at the juke joint the next morning to kill the twins and take back the property the Klan leader sold to them, thus pocketing the money. This outcome is foreshadowed earlier in the film, during a story Delta Slim tells as they are passing the chain gang. Slim recalls a friend who was lynched for carrying too much cash, which a group of white men assumed he had stolen. Slim's tale illustrates a deadly catch-22 of Jim Crow economics: Whatever Black people acquired, white people could take by force. The final conflict between Smoke and the Klan ends in a satisfying Western-style shoot-out, but it also shows that the twins were always doomed. The powers that be in Clarksdale were never going to allow them to prosper. That's a different kind of horror story, one that is all the more terrifying because it lacks any supernatural element. Unlike vampires, the Jim Crow economy was real, and it shapes America to this day. When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic. Article originally published at The Atlantic
Atlantic
02-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Atlantic
The Real Horror of Sinners Isn't Supernatural
This article contains light spoilers for Sinners. Sinners is a symphony of vampire bites, gunshot wounds, people being staked in the heart and left to burn alive. Ryan Coogler's film about twin gangsters trying to strike it rich in the Jim Crow South rapidly swerves toward supernatural horror when an ancient vampire seeks a way into the juke joint the twins have set up with their ill-gotten gains. But the true horror in the film is the economics of Jim Crow, which drives every event in the plot, including the vampire bloodbath that ultimately cuts the musical revelry—and the twins' dreams—short. Coogler's films tend to incorporate deep historical research that gets revealed subtly through brief, easy-to-miss moments and story details. Sinners is almost two movies in one: a vampire slaughterhouse film that's also a period piece about the near-impossibility of upward mobility in the segregation economy. The sawmill the twins convert into their juke joint becomes a bloody trap from which there is no escape, much like the system they are born into and seek to transcend. The movie's protagonists, the Smokestack Twins, known as Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B. Jordan), are flamboyant entrepreneurs and World War I veterans returning from Chicago to Clarksdale, Mississippi, a city long associated with the blues, in the 1930s. One of the twins remarks that Chicago is merely 'Mississippi with tall buildings,' and the viewer is left to speculate why, but history offers at least one possible explanation. In 1919, just after the end of World War I, Black veterans in Chicago would have witnessed one of the worst race riots of that 'Red Summer' of lynchings, sparked by the death of a Black teenager named Eugene Williams, who drowned after a white man threw rocks at him while he was swimming in Lake Michigan. Williams had apparently drifted across an invisible whites-only line that the man who killed him was enforcing. The police refused to arrest the perpetrator, and dozens of Black and white people were killed in the ensuing violence, which saw white mobs rampaging through Black neighborhoods. Black World War I veterans, some of whom defended their communities during the riot, were themselves frequently targeted for racial violence rather than admired for their service, as the Equal Justice Initiative notes; segregationist legislators feared they would return and expect to be treated as equals. The Mississippi Senator James K. Vardaman warned that, for the Black soldier, military service was 'but a short step to the conclusion that his political rights must be respected.' The historian Chad Williams writes in Torchbearers of Democracy: African American Soldiers in the World War I Era that 'conflict in the South and the major urban race riots of the postwar era reflected the conscious determination of many black veterans, emboldened and politicized by their army experience, to resist continued subjugation.' That context helps explain the twins' cavalier attitude toward the white man they purchase the juke joint from in the film. When Smoke and Stack tell him they'll kill any KKK member who trespasses on their property, the seller, secretly a Klan leader, falsely insists the KKK no longer exists. In actuality, the second incarnation of the Klan remained influential, but Klan denial was a common propaganda strategy. We later learn that the capital the twins use to buy the property was stolen from the Irish and Italian mobs in Chicago, for whom the twins worked before returning to Mississippi. It would have been very difficult for them to acquire that seed capital otherwise; as the legal scholar Mehrsa Baradaran has noted in her study of the racial wealth gap, white banks at the time generally would not extend credit to Black borrowers. The strict separations of the Jim Crow economy are illustrated in perhaps the most striking shot in the movie, when a young Chinese American woman, Lisa Chow, crosses the street to speak with her mother in their whites-only shop. Until that point, we have been shown only the Black side of town, where the Chows also maintain a store. The sweeping shot reveals that the town's white residents are mere feet away, but they might as well be on a different planet. Part of a group of immigrants to Mississippi known as the Delta Chinese, the Chows are neither Black nor white and are allowed to sell to both customer bases at the same time. The twins soon discover, however, that the same segregated economy that deprives them of seed money means that their clientele cannot afford to pay for their products in cash. 'The black peon is held down by perpetual debt or petty criminal judgments; his rent rises with the price of cotton, his chances to buy land are either non-existent or confined to infertile regions,' W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1907. 'If by accident or miracle he escapes and becomes a landholder, his property, civil and political status are still at the mercy of the worst of the white voters, and his very life at the whim of the mob.' This century-old observation is almost a summary of the film's setting, just without the vampires. The film conveys two forms of peonage prominent in the 1930s South—labor arrangements not far removed from slavery. One is convict leasing, which we see as Stack, his cousin Sammie, and a veteran bluesman called Delta Slim pass by a chain gang on their drive to the juke joint. Because the Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery 'except as punishment for a crime,' many southern states passed laws that, in practice, allowed authorities to arrest Black people for minor crimes such as 'loitering' or 'vagrancy' and then coerce them to work for free under heinous conditions. The other is sharecropping, the details of which are the catalyst for the eventual vampire massacre. Early on in the film, we see Sammie, an aspiring musician and preacher's son, picking cotton in the morning so that he can fill his quota and spend the rest of the day playing his guitar. Under the sharecropping system, Black people and poor whites were kept in an interminable cycle of debt by landlords, no matter how hard they worked, and so were bound to continue—Du Bois described it as a form of serfdom. Landlords would pay sharecroppers in 'scrip,' paper or wooden tokens that could be used to purchase only highly marked-up goods from the landlords' own stores. As the writer Michael Harriott notes, the Chows' shop would have been one of the few places in town where Black residents could expect fair prices. The twins successfully pack the juke joint with customers who are intoxicated by Sammie's supernatural skills with a guitar—Delta Slim describes Black music as a kind of magic, and in another striking scene, Sammie's playing summons the spirits of the revelers' ancestors and descendants. But the twins soon discover that much of their clientele can purchase drinks only with scrip—which means breaking even on their investment will be impossible. Their business faces other barriers: A plot point that sees the twins stealing electricity for the juke joint recalls the fact that most of the South, kept poor and underdeveloped by the demands of the segregated economy, didn't have electricity until the New Deal, under FDR. Elsewhere in the film, the Irish vampire Remmick, pursued by Choctaw vampire hunters, tricks his way into the protection of a pair of Klan members living near Clarksdale and turns them into creatures of the night. Shortly after Stack realizes that the juke joint isn't making enough money, Remmick shows up with his progeny. Attracted by Sammie's virtuoso playing, they ask to be invited in but are rejected because they are white; another aspect of the era was that white businesses could sell to Black customers, but Black businesses were limited to Black clientele. As vampires, they are forced to wait outside. When Mary, Stack's old flame and, in the parlance of the time, an octoroon who is passing for white, learns from Stack that the juke joint is unprofitable, she offers to go see if Remmick and the others have U.S. currency. Mary becomes the vampires' first juke-joint victim and is then invited inside, where she promptly seduces and kills Stack, who later rises again as a vampire. But the entire reason any of this happens is that running a profitable business as a Black person in the Jim Crow economy is nearly impossible. If the Smokestack twins could borrow capital from white banks, they wouldn't have needed to rob the mob and leave Chicago. If the sharecroppers were paid with actual money, the juke joint would have been profitable. And if the juke joint were profitable, then Mary would never have walked outside and been turned by the vampires. The economic constraints imposed by segregation are what, in the end, expose the twins and their customers to the supernatural horror Remmick represents. Interestingly, Coogler treats Remmick sympathetically, offering hints about Remmick's own experience of oppression and his doomed quest to seek out his loved ones, who are long dead. Remmick is a monster, but his homeland was colonized by some of the same rapacious forces that brought the twins' ancestors to America. The tragedy of persecuted people brought into bloody conflict with one another by forces beyond their control is a consistent theme in Coogler's films, including his two Black Panther movies. The only unadulterated monsters in the film are the Ku Klux Klan, who show up at the juke joint the next morning to kill the twins and take back the property the Klan leader sold to them, thus pocketing the money. This outcome is foreshadowed earlier in the film, during a story Delta Slim tells as they are passing the chain gang. Slim recalls a friend who was lynched for carrying too much cash, which a group of white men assumed he had stolen. Slim's tale illustrates a deadly catch-22 of Jim Crow economics: Whatever Black people acquired, white people could take by force. The final conflict between Smoke and the Klan ends in a satisfying Western-style shoot-out, but it also shows that the twins were always doomed. The powers that be in Clarksdale were never going to allow them to prosper. That's a different kind of horror story, one that is all the more terrifying because it lacks any supernatural element. Unlike vampires, the Jim Crow economy was real, and it shapes America to this day.
