On July 29, Immigration and Customs Enforcement fitted Bel with a GPS ankle monitor and placed him in the agency’s “alternatives to detention” program. The next day, he posted on Instagram that he came to the country to study and not to commit a crime, and that he now walked through American streets with a monitor on his leg and a shame he never expected to feel. At 8:03 on the morning he died, he called his father, Pierre Ronal Bel, on video and said he was not doing well mentally because of the bullying. His family says he died by suicide. The Ohio State Highway Patrol is still investigating, and the Clark County coroner’s office said a cause of death will take weeks.

Federal officials centered this summer’s monitoring campaign on Springfield. Two years ago, Donald Trump and JD Vance told a national audience that Haitians in Springfield were stealing and eating residents’ pets, and Springfield officials said at the time that the claim was false. American officials have accused Haitians of endangering the public before, and each time they wrote the accusation into policy.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

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Springfield in 2024

On September 9, 2024, a staffer for JD Vance called Springfield City Manager Bryan Heck and asked whether the rumors about Haitian immigrants taking and eating pets were true. Heck told him no. Springfield Mayor Rob Rue said hours before the presidential debate that no credible reports existed of pets harmed by anyone in the immigrant community. On September 10, 2024, Trump repeated the claim during the debate anyway. Moderator David Muir corrected him on air, and Trump said it again.

Over the following days, Springfield received more than 35 threats of violence. Officials evacuated schools and supermarkets, and several colleges moved classes online. Governor Mike DeWine said publicly that he trusted the mayor and the city manager, who found no evidence for the story.

Suspicion Aimed at Haitians

In 1983, the Centers for Disease Control listed Haitians as one of four groups at high risk of AIDS, a grouping that doctors and reporters called the “4-H” theory, after homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin users, and Haitians. The listing treated national origin as a medical risk factor.

Haitian nurses and doctors in the United States lost work. Haitian children in American schools heard from classmates that they carried a fatal disease. Haitians organized and marched through 1983 and 1984, and in April 1985, the CDC removed them from the list.

In February 1990, the Food and Drug Administration told blood banks to refuse donations from people of Haitian origin. On April 20, 1990, tens of thousands of Haitians marched from Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge into Lower Manhattan, and the Washington Post counted more than 50,000 of them. The FDA dropped the policy in December 1990.

What Springfield Faces Now

In late July, after a Supreme Court ruling, the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, and more than 300,000 people lost permission to live and work in the country. Springfield has about 60,000 residents, more than 10,000 of them Haitian. ICE summoned hundreds of them to a field office in Blue Ash, near Cincinnati, and fitted most of them with ankle monitors, according to lawyers and volunteers. Wearers have reported swelling and blisters.

Bel asked ICE to take his monitor off. He posted redacted letters to the immigration judge from teachers and from his manager at the Texas Roadhouse. ICE left the monitor on him. After his death, the agency rejected any attempt to blame it and said that nobody has to remain in the country illegally wearing a GPS monitor, since people can leave through a government app in exchange for a flight and a payment. ICE also confirmed that Bel entered the United States legally in 2024 through a scheduled appointment at a port of entry.

DeWine called the death a horrible tragedy and repeated that he considers mass deportation misguided. On Sunday, hundreds of people gathered in Springfield for a rally that organizers named Unshackle Springfield.

Springfield officials told the country in 2024 that the accusation against their Haitian neighbors was false, and the federal government acted on the accusation anyway. The government locked a monitor to Pierre Damas Bel’s leg for the last 33 days of his life.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Jessica Orozco. “ICE: Haitian Wright State Student Who Died by Suicide on I-70 Entered U.S. Legally in 2024.” Springfield News-Sun, September 2, 2026.

Miriam Jordan. “Haitian Student, Despondent Over Ankle Monitor, Dies in Apparent Suicide.” New York Times, September 1, 2026.

Camilo Montoya-Galvez. “Family Blames Suicide of 20-Year-Old Haitian Immigrant on ICE Crackdown.” CBS News, September 2, 2026.

“Vance’s Team Was Told Haitian Immigrant Rumors Were False Before Debate, Springfield Mayor Confirms.” CNN, September 20, 2024.

“’I’m Afraid’: Aftermath of Trump’s Misinformation on Springfield’s Haitians.” Al Jazeera, September 15, 2024.

“Trump Repeats Baseless Claims That Haitian Immigrants Are Eating Pets in Springfield, Ohio.” PolitiFact, September 11, 2024.

National Library of Medicine. Surviving and Thriving: AIDS, Politics, and Culture. Exhibition materials, Bethesda, MD.

“50,000 Protest Ban on Blood Donations by Haitians, Africans.” Washington Post, April 21, 1990.

Loomer holds no position in the Trump administration, though she keeps close access to President Donald Trump and has nearly two million followers on X. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called her a “stone-cold racist,” and Maryland Governor Wes Moore wrote that she insults Black women because she believes racism sells. Former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress in January after breaking with Trump, said Trump and the Republican Party keep Loomer in their inner circle. The White House did not answer a request for comment from Reuters. On Monday, Loomer repeated the language and said she meant every word. White entertainers and government officials spent three centuries building the caricature that Loomer used, and they built it to discredit Black women who complained about their treatment or held authority over other people.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

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White Americans Built the First Caricatures

European travelers to West Africa in the seventeenth century described the women they met as lustful by nature, and English colonists carried the description into the American colonies. David Pilgrim, a sociologist at Ferris State University who founded the Jim Crow Museum, documented how slaveholders used that image, which took the name Jezebel, to explain away the rape of enslaved women. Enslaved women counted as property and could not bring a rape charge. Slavers stripped them for inspection at auction and read the pregnancies they forced on them as proof of appetite. Historian Deborah Gray White, in Ar’n’t I a Woman?, found that no white man in the South received a conviction for raping a Black woman between the end of the Civil War and the mid-1960s, though the crime was common.

White writers paired Jezebel with Mammy, the heavy, asexual house servant who cared for her enslaver’s children and accepted her position. Marilyn Yarbrough, a law professor at the University of North Carolina, wrote with Crystal Bennett that Mammy allowed slaveholders to deny their sexual interest in the women they held. White Americans kept using the image for a century after slavery ended. Companies sold pancake flour under the Aunt Jemima label into the 2020s, and Hattie McDaniel won an Academy Award in 1940 for playing a Mammy in Gone with the Wind. Yarbrough and Bennett described what the two images did to Black women who reported sexual abuse. Nobody believed that a man would want Mammy, and nobody believed Jezebel.

Broadcasters Turned a Character Into a Type

Minstrel shows added a third figure. Blair Kelley, a historian at North Carolina State University, told the BBC that white performers played Black women in blackface and fat suits, screaming at the men around them. Audiences learned to locate the trouble in Black life in the woman’s mouth.

In 1928, Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, two white actors, put Amos ‘n’ Andy on national radio and made the wife of the character George “Kingfish” Stevens named Sapphire. She berated her husband as a failure in episode after episode. At the show’s peak in 1930 and 1931, between thirty and forty million people listened six nights a week, roughly a third of the country. CBS aired a television version with an all-Black cast from 1951 to 1953 and stations ran the reruns until 1966, when the NAACP and the civil rights movement finally forced the show off the air.

Pilgrim pointed out that Sapphire Stevens aimed her contempt at her husband and nobody else. Later writers widened the target. Aunt Esther on Sanford and Son traded insults with her brother-in-law through the 1970s, and Florence on The Jeffersons mocked her employer for a decade. Pilgrim described the label that came out of these shows as a mechanism for punishing Black women who refused to stay quiet and out of sight.

Officials Wrote the Caricature Into Policy

In 1965, Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan published a government report titled The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, and he blamed Black poverty on family structure and on Black mothers in particular. Yarbrough and Bennett identified the report as the source of the matriarch, a Black mother who spends too little time at home and strips the men around her of authority.

Historian Allie R. Lopez has argued that officials put the idea to work before Moynihan wrote it down. In 1962, the White Citizens’ Council, a segregationist organization formed to fight school desegregation, ran what its members called Reverse Freedom Rides. Council members bought one-way bus tickets for poor Black women who received welfare and promised them jobs and apartments in Northern cities. To raise money from white donors, Council members advertised these women in local newspapers as lazy and undeserving. Mamie Lee Underwood of Centreville, Alabama, boarded a bus with ten children and a grandchild and reached Cleveland on July 1, 1962. She couldn’t find an apartment or work, and Cuyahoga County residency rules disqualified her from assistance. When she asked to come home, Council chairman J. W. Oakley said her case no longer concerned him.

In the 1970s, Ronald Reagan used the same figure in presidential campaigns and called her the welfare queen. In 1996, Bill Clinton signed a Republican bill ending federal welfare as a guaranteed benefit, after vetoing two earlier versions of it.

Black Women in Public Life

In 2008, Michelle Obama told a rally in Milwaukee, “for the first time in my adult life I am proud of my country.” Mychal Massie, who chaired a Black conservative organization, answered that she was an angry black harridan who insulted the nation that made her rich. Ten years later, chair umpire Carlos Ramos penalized Serena Williams a full game during the U.S. Open final after she called him a thief. Trina Jones, a law professor who studies racial stereotyping, told the BBC that Americans treat a Black woman who pushes back as domineering.

Loomer has repeated these attacks for years. In 2024, she said the White House would smell like curry if Kamala Harris won the presidency. Last year, she called Representative Jasmine Crockett’s reported treatment of her staff “typical DEI Shaniqua” behavior. People direct these insults at Black women across American public life, and they direct them at the women who hold office. Nixon faces Republican Senator Ashley Moody on November 3 and would become Florida’s first Black senator if she wins.

Nixon told Newsweek this week that people have called her a dog and an ape, and that the attacks have become normal for a Black woman in politics. She is right about the pattern. Slaveholders needed Jezebel to excuse rape, and federal officials needed the matriarch to justify cutting aid. Loomer needs the caricature to tell voters that a Black woman who wins an election is unfit to hold the seat.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Wiggins, Christopher. “Laura Loomer Went on a Racist Tirade Against Black Democrats So Vile It Set Off Marjorie Taylor Greene.” The Advocate, August 30, 2026.

Singh, Kanishka. “Trump Ally Laura Loomer Faces Fresh Criticism Over Racist Comments.” Reuters, August 31, 2026.

Pilgrim, David. “The Jezebel Stereotype.” Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, July 2002, edited 2024.

White, Deborah Gray. Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. Rev. ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1999.

Yarbrough, Marilyn, with Crystal Bennett. “Cassandra and the ‘Sistahs’: The Peculiar Treatment of African American Women in the Myth of Women as Liars.” Journal of Gender, Race and Justice 3 (Spring 2000): 626–57.

Prasad, Ritu. “Serena Williams and the Trope of the ‘Angry Black Woman.’” BBC News, September 11, 2018.

Pilgrim, David. “The Sapphire Caricature.” Jim Crow Museum, Ferris State University, August 2008, edited 2023.

Lopez, Allie R. “When Southern Segregationists Gave Black Residents One-Way Bus Tickets North.” TIME, March 21, 2024.

Gibbs, Alice. “Angie Nixon Calls Out Trump’s ‘Harmful Rhetoric’ After Laura Loomer Attack.” Newsweek, September 1, 2026.

Sponsors call these measures patriotic education. Congress changed this ritual twice, and both times it was in response to events abroad. In 1942, they replaced the salute that American schoolchildren used because it matched the one Germans and Italians gave Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. In 1954, they inserted “under God” to mark a difference between the United States and the officially atheist Soviet Union. Teachers and police officers have punished students who declined to take part.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

A Marketing Campaign in Schools

The Youth’s Companion, a Boston family weekly, sold American flags to public schools. Its marketing chief, James B. Upham, offered a nine-by-fifteen-foot flag to any school that raised ten dollars in ten-cent student donations, and each donor family received a subscription. In 1891, the magazine mailed flags to 25,000 schools and brought in $250,000.

Upham then planned a national school ceremony for October 1892, the four hundredth anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s landing, and lobbied Congress and President Benjamin Harrison to endorse it. He recruited Francis Bellamy, a Baptist preacher and Christian socialist whose congregation wanted him gone, to run it. On September 8, 1892, the magazine printed the ceremony, including the words students would say in unison, “I pledge allegiance to my Flag and the Republic for which it stands.”

Union veterans had started the schoolhouse flag movement a few years earlier to absorb new arrivals from southern and eastern Europe. Upham and Bellamy belonged to a group of Protestant Americans of northern European ancestry who believed Catholic immigrants needed to assimilate.

Students Saluted the Flag

The Youth’s Companion printed instructions for a salute. At a signal from the principal, students faced the flag with the right hand raised palm downward to the forehead, then extended the arm toward the flag until they finished speaking. Americans used the gesture, called the Bellamy salute, for fifty years.

By the mid-1930s, Americans noticed the resemblance between the Bellamy salute and the straight-armed salutes of the fascist governments in Germany and Italy, as the political scientist Richard J. Ellis documents in his book To the Flag. Americans worried that editors abroad would crop the flag out of photographs of American classrooms and present the images as proof of support for Hitler. On June 22, 1942, six months after the United States entered the war, Congress adopted the first federal Flag Code, and on December 22, 1942, Congress amended it to direct Americans to render the pledge with the right hand over the heart.

School officials meanwhile expelled children who refused the salute. Jehovah’s Witnesses treat saluting a flag as an act of worship, and their children did not stand for the pledge. In Minersville School District v. Gobitis in 1940, the Supreme Court ruled that a Pennsylvania district could expel two of those children, and mobs attacked Witnesses across the country in the months that followed. In West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette in 1943, the Court reversed itself. Justice Robert Jackson wrote that no official may prescribe what is orthodox in politics or religion, or force citizens to confess a belief.

Congress Answered the Soviet Union

Bellamy left God out of his pledge, and his son later explained that his father believed in the separation of church and state. That absence lasted sixty-two years.

During the second Red Scare, American politicians wanted to assert the moral superiority of American capitalism over Soviet communism, and many conservatives described communism as godless. In 1952, the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization, began petitioning the federal government to insert “under God” into the pledge. Representative Louis C. Rabaut, a Michigan Democrat, took up the petition and introduced legislation, telling colleagues that the phrase would deepen student patriotism and serve as a bulwark against communism.

In February 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower attended a sermon by Reverend George Docherty at New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington, D.C. Docherty argued that leaving the phrase out omitted the defining element of American life, and he dismissed atheists on the grounds that anyone who denied Christian ethics fell short of the American ideal. Eisenhower signed the bill on Flag Day, June 14, 1954, and described the new phrase as a strengthening of the “spiritual weapons” the country would rely on in peace and war. Two years later, he signed legislation making “In God We Trust” the national motto.

The sponsors of the 1954 bill anticipated a constitutional challenge and wrote that the phrase recognized the guidance of God in national affairs rather than establishing a religion. Courts have accepted that reasoning ever since.

Schools Punished Students Anyway

Barnette settled the law in 1943, and the Eleventh Circuit still upheld a Florida statute requiring written parental permission in Frazier v. Winn in 2008.

On January 27, 2010, a thirteen-year-old girl at Roberto Clemente Middle School in Germantown, Maryland, stayed seated during the pledge, and her teacher sent her into the hallway. She stayed seated again the next day, and the teacher called two school resource officers, who pulled her out of the classroom. An assistant principal told the girl’s mother that the student should apologize, and the acting principal later apologized to the family instead.

On October 2, 2017, India Landry, a senior at Windfern High School outside Houston, stayed seated in her principal’s office when the pledge came over the intercom, and Principal Martha Strother expelled her. Landry had sat out more than two hundred times. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton intervened in the family’s lawsuit in September 2018 to defend the state statute, and the parties dismissed the case that December after Landry settled with Strother.

On February 4, 2019, a substitute teacher at Lawton Chiles Middle Academy in Lakeland, Florida, told an eleven-year-old Black sixth grader to stand. He answered that the flag was racist and the national anthem offended Black people, and she asked why he did not live somewhere else. A school resource officer arrested him for disrupting a school function and resisting an officer, then took him to a juvenile detention center. Polk County schools did not require participation, and Lakeland police said the charges followed his conduct rather than his refusal.

Lawmakers Return to the Pledge

Sponsors of the current bills point to opt-out provisions as proof that no student faces compulsion, and the record of the past eighty years shows what happens to students who use those provisions. Alabama voters will decide in November whether to write a daily recitation into the state constitution, and legislators elsewhere keep filing the same requirement.

Congress changed the salute during a war against Germany and Italy, then added a religious clause during a standoff with the Soviet Union. Members of Congress wrote the words that American children recite each morning to serve the foreign policy of those two conflicts.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

1. “Here Is a Breakdown of Laws in 47 States That Require Reciting the Pledge of Allegiance,” The Hill, April 2, 2022.

2. “Alabama Voters to Decide Two Constitutional Amendments Related to the Pledge of Allegiance and School Prayer,” Ballotpedia News, April 10, 2026.

3. Anna Barrett, “Alabamians to Vote on Four Statewide Constitutional Amendments in November,” Alabama Reflector, August 5, 2026.

4. South Carolina General Assembly, Senate Bill 135, 126th Sess. (2025–2026).

5. “State House Dispatch: May 5, 2025,” American Civil Liberties Union of South Carolina.

6. “Pledge of Allegiance in Schools: Do Students Have to Stand?” Freedom Forum.

7. Promoting American Patriotism In Our Schools Act, H.R. 1351, 119th Cong. (2025).

8. Todd DePastino, “The Strange History of the Pledge of Allegiance,” Veterans Breakfast Club.

9. Jeffrey Owen Jones, “The Man Who Wrote the Pledge of Allegiance,” Smithsonian, November 2003.

10. Robert Longley, “Why Americans Once Gave the ‘Bellamy Salute,’” ThoughtCo, October 3, 2020.

11. Richard J. Ellis, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005).

12. Bob Greene, “The Peculiar History of the Pledge of Allegiance,” CNN, December 23, 2013.

13. Minersville School District v. Gobitis, 310 U.S. 586 (1940).

14. West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943).

15. Becky Little, “Why Eisenhower Added ‘Under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance During the Cold War,” History.com, last updated July 16, 2026.

16. Michael Lipka, “5 Facts About the Pledge of Allegiance,” Pew Research Center, September 4, 2013.

17. Frazier v. Winn, 535 F.3d 1279 (11th Cir. 2008).

18. “Girl Disciplined After Refusing to Stand for Pledge,” NBC4 Washington, February 23, 2010.

19. “Texas Attorney General Joins Pledge of Allegiance Lawsuit in India Landry Case,” Washington Post, September 26, 2018.

20. “Cy-Fair ISD: District Dismissed from Pledge of Allegiance Case,” Houston Chronicle, December 29, 2018.

21. “Florida Student Arrested for Disturbance After He Refused to Participate in the Pledge of Allegiance,” CNN, February 18, 2019.

On August 29, Google began showing “Lake America” to people using its maps in the United States, citing its practice of following federal sources. Ontario Premier Doug Ford answered by unveiling a billboard on the Canadian shore reading “Lake Ontario. Now and Always.” Ontario comes from ontarí:io, a Wyandot word for a large lake. Federal officials have spent sixty years taking racist names off of American maps, and Trump has now ordered the same officials to take off a second Native one.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

Surveyors Renamed Haudenosaunee Country

In 1779, George Washington ordered Major General John Sullivan and Brigadier General James Clinton into Haudenosaunee territory in what is now central and western New York. Writing to Sullivan on May 31, Washington set the objective as “total destruction and devastation of their settlements,” and he gave the two generals roughly a quarter of the Continental Army. Their soldiers burned about forty towns along with the orchards and cornfields around them, and drove survivors west toward the British post at Fort Niagara, where many died during the following winter. Haudenosaunee people still call the office of the president Hanadagá:yas, which translates as “He Who Destroys Villages.”

New York’s legislators then turned the emptied land into soldiers’ pay. In 1782, they set boundaries for the first townships of the Military Tract, roughly 1.8 million acres in the Finger Lakes region held as bounty land for the state’s Revolutionary War veterans. Crews under Surveyor General Simeon De Witt mapped the tract in 1789 and cut it into twenty-eight townships of one hundred lots each. On July 3, 1790, veterans drew for lots by ballot. Robert Harpur, an Irish immigrant and former classics teacher clerking in De Witt’s office, named the townships for figures from Greek and Roman antiquity, including Ovid, Romulus, Cicero, Marcellus, Hannibal, Pompey, and Ulysses. Most of those names still sit on New York road signs.

Four years later, at Canandaigua on November 11, 1794, Washington’s agent Timothy Pickering signed a treaty with the Six Nations promising them the “free use and enjoyment” of their remaining lands. Article III of that treaty fixes the boundary of Seneca land beginning on Lake Ontario. Federal negotiators used the Native name for the lake in the document guaranteeing Seneca territory.

Officials Took Charge of the Map

After the Civil War, federal agencies mapping the West spelled the same places in different ways. On September 4, 1890, President Benjamin Harrison signed Executive Order 28, creating the United States Board on Geographic Names and directing every department to accept its rulings. In 1906, Theodore Roosevelt widened that authority to cover all geographic names in federal use. Harry Truman signed Public Law 80-242 in 1947, which gave the Interior secretary authority equal to the board’s over naming decisions.

In 1962, Secretary Stewart Udall identified a slur for Black people as derogatory, and in 1963 the board replaced it with “Negro” across federal maps and publications. In 1974, board members ruled that the pejorative for Japanese people be changed in every occurrence.

Putting a Native name back took much longer. Koyukon Athabascan people call the highest mountain in North America Denali, meaning the high one. In 1896, a gold prospector named it for William McKinley, then campaigning for president, and Congress wrote Mount McKinley into federal law in 1917. On March 11, 1975, Alaska Governor Jay Hammond asked the Interior secretary to restore the older name, and board members deferred for forty years while Ohio’s congressional delegation fought it. On August 30, 2015, Interior Secretary Sally Jewell used her authority under the 1947 law to make Denali official.

On November 19, 2021, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland signed two orders extending the corrections. The first declared “sq___” derogatory, a slur aimed at Native women, and created a task force to replace it on federal land. The task force reviewed more than 660 features and consulted tribal governments and the public, and in September 2022 the board voted new names for nearly 650 of them. Haaland’s second order created an Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names to identify further derogatory names.

On January 20, 2025, his first day back in office, Trump signed Executive Order 14172, which put McKinley back on the mountain and renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. Google relabeled the gulf for American users in February, and Mexico’s government sued the company in May 2025, arguing that Trump’s order reaches only the United States continental shelf. On February 27, 2025, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum terminated the advisory committee Haaland created. Lake America is the third name Trump has changed by order, and the second Native name he has taken off the federal map.

Researchers Counted Names in National Parks

In 2022, the ecologist Bonnie McGill and colleagues published a study in the journal People and Nature of more than 2,200 place names in sixteen national parks. They found 52 features named for settlers who committed acts of violence, most of it against Native people, and ten names that used racial slurs. They counted 205 settler names that replaced documented Native names, against 107 features that kept a traditional Native name.

One of the 52 was Mount Doane in Yellowstone, named for Lieutenant Gustavus Doane, who in January 1870 helped lead an attack on a Piikani Blackfeet camp on the Marias River in Montana. Soldiers killed at least 173 people, most of them women, elders, and children sick with smallpox, and Doane proudly wrote about the attack for the rest of his life. Stanley Grier, chief of the Piikani Nation, campaigned for years to take the name off the peak. On June 9, 2022, the board voted fifteen to nothing to rename it First Peoples Mountain.

Governments and Nations Refuse the Order

On August 28, J. Conrad Seneca, president of the Seneca Nation of Indians, asked Trump to rescind the order, calling it unpresidential and pointing to the Canandaigua treaty. He wrote that the Seneca name for the water is sga:nyodai:yoh, meaning beautiful lake, and that Seneca and Haudenosaunee people traveled it for diplomacy long before English speakers arrived. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, who leads the only state bordering the lake, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney both said they would keep using Lake Ontario.

Their refusals do not undo the change. Google draws its labels from the Geographic Names Information System, so a decision made inside the Interior Department now reaches hundreds of millions of phones. American officials have removed Native names from the official landscape since surveyors first divided the Finger Lakes into lots, and the officials who corrected part of that record are now reversing it.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Trump, Donald J. “Honoring the American History of the Great Lakes and Renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America.” Executive order, August 27, 2026.

Associated Press. “Lake Ontario Now Called Lake America on Google Maps for US Users After Trump Ordered Name Change.” August 30, 2026.

Al-Kassab, Fatima. “Canada Claps Back at Trump’s Efforts to Rename Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America.’” NPR, August 30, 2026.

Rück, Daniel. “Trump’s ‘Renaming’ of Lake Ontario Is Emblematic of Centuries of Colonial Erasure.” The Conversation, August 28, 2026.

Fischer, Joseph R. A Well-Executed Failure: The Sullivan Campaign Against the Iroquois, July–September 1779. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997.

Indigenous Values Initiative. “Sullivan-Clinton Campaign.” Syracuse, NY, 2017.

Onondaga Historical Association. “Revolutionary War Veterans Draw for Lots in the Military Tract.” Syracuse, NY, 2016.

New York State Archives. Records of the Surveyor General Relating to the Military Tract, 1782–1795. Albany, NY.

Kappler, Charles J., ed. Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties, vol. 2, “Treaty with the Six Nations, 1794.” Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1904.

Oberg, Michael Leroy. Peacemakers: The Iroquois, the United States, and the Treaty of Canandaigua, 1794. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Harrison, Benjamin. Executive Order 28, September 4, 1890.

U.S. Board on Geographic Names. Principles, Policies, and Procedures: Domestic Geographic Names. Reston, VA: U.S. Geological Survey, 2016.

Crowley, Sydney. “Charting the Course: What Is the U.S. Board on Geographic Names?” In Custodia Legis, Law Library of Congress, September 4, 2024.

U.S. Geological Survey. “Does the Board on Geographic Names (BGN) Decide What Is Derogatory or Offensive?” Frequently Asked Questions, 2023.

Jewell, Sally. Secretary’s Order 3337, “Change of the Name of Mount McKinley to Denali.” U.S. Department of the Interior, August 28, 2015.

Alaska Historical Society. “Statement on the Denali Name Change.” Anchorage, AK, 2025.

Haaland, Deb. Secretary’s Order 3404, “Declaring ‘Sq___’ a Derogatory Term.” U.S. Department of the Interior, November 19, 2021.

U.S. Department of the Interior. “Interior Department Completes Removal of ‘Sq___’ from Federal Use.” Press release, September 8, 2022.

Trump, Donald J. “Restoring Names That Honor American Greatness.” Executive Order 14172, January 20, 2025.

Associated Press. “Mexico Sues Google for Renaming Gulf of Mexico as ‘Gulf of America.’” May 9, 2025.

National Park Service. “Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names.” Washington, DC, 2025.

McGill, Bonnie M., et al. “Words Are Monuments: Patterns in US National Park Place Names Perpetuate Settler Colonial Mythologies Including White Supremacy.” People and Nature 4, no. 5 (2022): 1104–1120.

Tasoff, Harrison. “The Living Legacy of Names.” The Current, University of California, Santa Barbara, April 6, 2022.

National Park Service. “Yellowstone’s Mount Doane Name Changes to First Peoples Mountain.” News release, June 9, 2022.

Seneca, J. Conrad. Statement of the President of the Seneca Nation of Indians, August 28, 2026.

I grew up in Germantown in the same county, and I went to high school in Poolesville, where about 150 white adults blocked the doors against fourteen Black students in 1956. I wanted to know what happened to her, so I spent a day looking at county school records. She remembered it correctly. Montgomery County officials closed the school she walked to in June 1960 and reassigned every child in it, and they left a thinner paper trail behind that decision than behind anything they did for white students.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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What I Found

Montgomery County officials built Sandy Spring Elementary in 1952. They put up four modern brick schools for Black students between 1950 and 1952 to consolidate children out of one-room and two-room wooden buildings. Historians call these buildings “equalization schools,” because several states funded new construction for Black children to answer legal challenges to segregation by making the separate schools look equal. Montgomery County finished this one two years before the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education. Officials closed it to Black students in June 1960, eight years after opening it. The building stands today at 18529 Brooke Road as the Ross Boddy Community Center, named for its principal.

In 1960, Sherwood Elementary sat on the grounds of Sherwood High School. The county replaced it with the Sherwood Elementary that exists now in 1978, so the school she rode the bus to no longer stands.

Those dates put her transfer in September 1960. Her family also had no say in it. From 1955 through 1959, the county let Black students move to white schools only if the superintendent recommended them, weighing their grades and what administrators judged to be their ability to handle an integrated classroom. By 1960, officials skipped that process for her. They closed her school and reassigned everyone in it.

Sandy Spring Before Desegregation

Sandy Spring held the first school for Black children in Montgomery County, meeting by 1864 in Sharp Street Methodist Church. Quaker farmers around Sandy Spring emancipated the people they enslaved in the late 1700s, and a free Black community grew there decades before the Civil War. In October 1866, Freedmen’s Bureau officer R.G. Rutherford surveyed the county and reported that white residents refused to help Black people build schools and obstructed the ones they managed to open. He named Sandy Spring as the exception. That history connects directly to what my reader described ninety-four years later, when she walked to school without a crowd outside it.

Desegregation still cost the children who went through it. Ross Boddy, who ran her school, watched what happened after the county sent Black students into white buildings. He said teachers placed many of the children in special education classes without proper testing, because to those teachers the children seemed slow.

What This Work Takes

Ralph Buglass and Sharyn Duffin, the two historians who compiled the fullest record of the county’s segregated Black schools, call their research a detective process. Montgomery County administrators kept cursory and incomplete records on Black schools for a century, so the paper trail behind one Black woman’s first-grade year is thinner than the trail behind any of her white classmates. Finding it took hours I could only spend because readers pay for this newsletter.

I want to do more of these. The next one could be your family. But I have no advertisers and no corporate owners funding me, and fewer than 5 percent of the people reading this pay for the work. Paid subscriptions buy the research time that turns a memory into a documented history.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Reader correspondence to the author, August 2026.

Washington Area Spark. “White Supremacists Boycott Poolesville School: 1956.”

Buglass, Ralph D., and Sharyn R. Duffin. The Segregated Black Schools of Montgomery County. Rockville, MD: Montgomery History, revised April 2026.

Montgomery County Public Schools. “Sherwood Elementary School: About Us.”

Montgomery History. “Brown vs. Board — The Process.”

The product, however, was real. A costume does not appear on a company like Target’s website quickly. Buyers select seasonal items a year or more before Halloween, vendors produce samples, marketing staff hire child models and stage photo shoots, and merchandisers approve the listing before it goes live. Dozens of Target employees looked at that mask over many months, and not one of them stopped it. In January 2025, Target ended the diversity commitments it announced after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, including the goal of raising Black representation across its workforce. The costume moved through the company because Target cut the programs meant to put Black employees in the rooms where Target makes these decisions.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

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What Target Sold

Target declined to say who designed the product or how it moved through approval, and the company said only that it was looking closely at how the costume reached shelves. From the 1840s through the end of the nineteenth century, white performers built the minstrel show, the dominant form of American popular entertainment, by blackening their faces with burnt cork and painting enormous mouths over their own. They played Black characters as stupid and greedy for audiences who paid to laugh. Illustrators and advertisers kept using the painted mouth well into the twentieth century, long after the stage form declined.

Anyone raised on that visual history recognizes it immediately, which is why Black shoppers identified the costume within hours of finding it online. That recognition is ordinary knowledge among people who grew up seeing the caricature used against them, and Target employed too few of those people to catch it.

Dong-hwan Lee, a professor at Gyeongin National University of Education in South Korea who studies American culture and has written about minstrelsy, told the New York Times that selling such a product reduces Black people to clownish figures. Rev. Jamal Bryant, a Georgia pastor who organized a 40-day “Target Fast” boycott of the retailer in 2025, said the costume showed that Target still lacks Black decision-makers and needs internal change.

Ending Diversity Programs

Four days after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd in May 2020, Target chairman and chief executive Brian Cornell issued a statement saying his leadership team wept over how little was changing. Target and the Target Foundation then gave $10 million to civil rights organizations including the National Urban League. In April 2021, the company committed to spend more than $2 billion with Black-owned businesses by the end of 2025 and to carry products from more than 500 Black-owned suppliers. Target also pledged to raise the share of Black employees in its workforce by 20 percent, and senior executives ran a Racial Equity Action and Change committee to steer the work.

In January 2025, Target told employees by memo that it was ending those three-year diversity goals. The company stopped submitting data to the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index and shut down the program dedicated to stocking more products from Black- and minority-owned businesses, replacing the whole effort with a strategy it named “Belonging.” The announcement followed Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his administration’s stated plan to investigate corporate diversity initiatives.

Each of those cuts removed a specific check. The workforce goal put Black employees into buying and marketing jobs, and the supplier program brought Black-owned vendors into the conversations about what Target stocks. Target eliminated both, along with the equity committee that gave senior leaders a standing reason to review products for the problem the clown mask presented, and approved a minstrel caricature for national distribution the following year.

Paying for Police in Minneapolis

Target executives made decisions about Black customers long before 2020, and their record shows what those decisions looked like without Black people in the room. Peter Waldman and Lauren Etter reported in Bloomberg Businessweek in August 2021 that Target spent roughly 25 years as one of the most influential corporate donors to American law enforcement, under a trademarked program called Target & Blue. Starting in the early 2000s, Target ran an initiative called Safe City that paid for neighborhood surveillance systems and police equipment in more than 25 cities.

In Minneapolis, Target donated $300,000 to the police department in 2004 to install 30 cameras across the downtown business district and to build a radio system linking officers to businesses and private security. Target executives also worked with the Minneapolis City Attorney’s Office to create geographic restriction orders, court writs that bar individuals from entering specified downtown areas.

In 2009, Minneapolis police made nearly 9,000 arrests inside the surveillance zone, a 60 percent increase over 2004. More than 80 percent were misdemeanors, and Black residents made up 7 out of 10 of the people police arrested in a city where Black residents are about a fifth of the population. Between 2009 and 2021, city records show judges placed at least 214 people under geographic restriction orders, 74 percent of them Black and 10 percent American Indian. Target stopped funding Safe City in 2015, and five days after Floyd’s murder the company deleted the Target & Blue name from its website.

Who Stays in the Room

Sheletta Brundidge, a Minneapolis-area business leader, told Reuters that after the rollback Target no longer had people in the room who would have objected to the costume. The racial justice organization Color of Change said someone along Target’s supply chain either missed the racism or felt unable to name it. Target has not disputed either account, nor have they named an employee who raised a concern.

Target’s shares closed at $169.89 on August 24 and fell 3.78 percent the next day. The stock has still risen roughly 63 percent this year under Michael Fiddelke, who replaced Cornell as chief executive and has cut prices and remodeled stores. Target recovered the market value the boycott cost it while keeping the rollback that caused the boycott. Removing the costume took the company one day. Building a workforce that would have caught the costume took commitments Target made in 2021 and built through 2025 until they canceled them, and the company has restored none of them.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Reuters. “Target Apologizes for Children’s Clown Halloween Costume after Backlash.” NBC News, August 25, 2026.

Yoon, John. “Target Apologizes and Drops Halloween Costume Criticized as Racist.” New York Times, August 25, 2026.

Snopes. “Beware of Alleged Target Ad Featuring Costume That Drew Backlash for Blackface, Minstrel Imagery.” Snopes, August 27, 2026.

Associated Press. “Target Apologizes after Backlash over ‘Offensive’ Halloween Costume.” August 26, 2026.

Target Corporation. “Target Commits to Spending More Than $2 Billion with Black-Owned Businesses by 2025.” Press release, April 7, 2021.

“Target Rolls Back DEI Initiatives, the Latest Big Company to Retreat.” CNBC, January 24, 2025.

Waldman, Peter, and Lauren Etter. “How Target Got Cozy with the Cops, Turning Black Neighbors into Suspects.” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 25, 2021.

The two men designated August as a month to push lenders and local governments toward Black entrepreneurs. Twenty-two years later, Black-owned firms make up just 3 percent of American businesses and take in roughly 1 percent of gross revenue. That gap is not an accident of the market. Americans built Black businesses over and over, and other Americans dismantled them.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

A Long Record of Destroying Black Wealth

In March 1865, Congress chartered the Freedman’s Savings and Trust Company to hold the money of newly freed people. More than 30 branches opened across a dozen states and Washington, D.C., and nearly 70,000 people deposited their earnings, including Civil War veterans collecting pensions and women working as seamstresses and laundresses. In 1870, Congress loosened the rules and let the white trustees move deposits into stocks, real estate, and unsecured loans they made to themselves. The bank went under on June 29, 1874. It left 61,144 depositors short nearly $3 million, about $88 million today. Frederick Douglass, whom the trustees installed as president that March to calm the panic, put $10,000 of his money in and lost it. Depositors petitioned Congress for the next fifty years. White Southern legislators blocked every reimbursement bill, and in 1927 the Treasury announced that nothing remained.

Black Tulsans built the Greenwood district into a commercial center of barber shops, grocers, theaters, and offices for doctors and lawyers, partly because segregation laws barred them from shopping in white Tulsa. On May 31, 1921, a white mob, much of it deputized by local police, moved through roughly 35 blocks and burned the district down. Historians estimate as many as 300 people died and 10,000 lost their homes. Residents filed claims against the city worth more than $1.8 million. The city commission and the insurance companies denied nearly all of them. One white business owner’s claim was approved, for guns taken from his shop. Prosecutors did not charge anyone.

Mortgage brokers repeated the theft with paperwork. During the housing boom, more than half of Black homebuyers financed purchases with subprime loans, against 22 percent of white buyers. The Department of Housing and Urban Development found that borrowers in upper-income Black neighborhoods refinanced into subprime loans at twice the rate of homeowners in low-income white neighborhoods. When the market collapsed, about 30 percent of Black and Hispanic borrowers lost their homes to foreclosure, compared with 11 percent of white borrowers. Black homeownership sits at rates last seen in the 1990s, and the gap with white homeownership is wider now than it was in the 1960s, when housing discrimination was legal.

Federal Policy Now

The current administration continues the work. In March 2025, President Trump signed an executive order to shutter the Minority Business Development Agency, the federal office that helped minority-owned firms reach capital and federal contracts. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s department told Congress it had “fully eliminated” the agency, and a federal judge in Rhode Island ordered the dismantling reversed, first in May 2025 and permanently that November. Black contractors hold about 1.2 percent of a $774 billion federal contracting market. Black unemployment reached 6.3 percent in July 2026, against 3.6 percent for white workers.

History Can’t Hide is a Black business. I have run my own business since college and have been lucky enough never to work for anyone else. This newsletter does not receive money from advertisers and is not backed by a corporation. It’s backed by paid subscribers, who make this work possible. If you have spent this month looking for Black-owned businesses to support, this is one, and Monday is not a deadline for it.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Templeton, John William, and Frederick E. Jordan Sr. Quoted in “Celebrating Black Business.” Black Enterprise, August 2013.

United States Census Bureau. Annual Business Survey, 2022.

Hill Edwards, Justene. Savings and Trust: The Rise and Betrayal of the Freedman’s Bank. New York: W. W. Norton, 2024.

Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. “The Freedman’s Savings Bank: Good Intentions Were Not Enough.” Washington, DC: OCC.

National Museum of African American History and Culture. “Freedman’s Savings Bank.” Smithsonian Institution.

Sullivan, Missy. “’Black Wall Street’ Before, During and After the Tulsa Race Massacre: PHOTOS.” History, May 24, 2021.

Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921. Final Report. Oklahoma City, 2001.

Thielman, Sam. “Black Americans Unfairly Targeted by Banks Before Housing Crisis, Says ACLU.” The Guardian, June 23, 2015.

Blanton, Kimberly. “Subprime Crisis Lingers for Minorities.” Squared Away Blog, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College, October 2, 2018.

Roberts, William, and Mariam Rashid. “Trump’s Agenda Is a Direct Threat to the Black Middle Class.” Center for American Progress, August 18, 2025.

Haidara, Alexanderia. “’The Black Economy Is Under Attack’: Pressley, Civil Rights Leaders Sound Alarm on Jobs and Voting Rights.” The Black Wall Street Times, May 22, 2026.

United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Employment Situation — July 2026. Washington, DC, August 7, 2026.

When the Post fired her, she was the last full-time Black opinion columnist on its staff. Attiah won her job back because her union contract gave her a way to fight the firing. Most people who write for a living in this country have no such contract, and the papers that once employed them now answer to the men who bought them.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

Grounds for Firing a Columnist

The Post told Attiah her posts constituted gross misconduct. It argued that she disparaged white men in violation of the paper’s social media policy, that her posts harmed the organization’s integrity, and that her continued association with the Post endangered other employees. Espinosa rejected each claim. Attiah had written about white men who espouse hatred and violence, and Espinosa found that reading those words as an attack on white men generally was unsupported by the plain language of the posts. On the safety argument, Espinosa wrote that the Post‘s reasoning failed to recognize that the people making threats bear responsibility for their behavior, not the person they threatened. She pointed to the Post‘s stated policy of protecting its journalists from online harassment campaigns.

Espinosa also noted how differently the Post treated another columnist. Marc Thiessen, a contract columnist, reshared posts encouraging critics of Kirk to be doxxed and fired, and he endorsed a post that cursed the media and Democrats. Editorial page editor Adam O’Neal spoke with Thiessen about being careful online. The Post took no further action against him. O’Neal fired Attiah within four hours, without a phone call.

Black Editors and Their Newspapers

In 1827, a group of Black New Yorkers pooled their money to found Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper in the United States. Editors John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish wrote in the first issue that Black Americans would now plead their cause themselves rather than depend on white abolitionists to speak for them in the white press. Roughly two dozen Black-owned papers followed in Northern cities before the Civil War.

Ida B. Wells edited and co-owned the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. In March 1892, a white mob seized her friend Thomas Moss and his business partners Calvin McDowell and William Stewart from a Memphis jail and murdered them, after the three men defended their grocery store from an armed white crowd. Wells began investigating lynchings and found that white mobs killed Black men over debts, over consensual relationships with white women, and over successful businesses that competed with white ones. On May 21, 1892, she published an editorial rejecting the claim that lynching punished the rape of white women. Memphis white newspapers called her a scoundrel and told readers that patience had run out. On May 27, while Wells traveled in the Northeast, a white mob destroyed the Free Speech office and broke its printing press. Creditors seized and sold what remained. Co-owner James Fleming fled the city. An armed group forced Reverend Taylor Nightingale, who had founded the paper, to sign a retraction. Wells never returned to Memphis. She wrote her account of the lynchings for the New York Age that June and kept publishing for the rest of her life.

Where Newsroom Protections Came From

On August 7, 1933, columnist Heywood Broun used his nationally syndicated column in the New York World-Telegram to call for a union of reporters. Publishers were cutting wages and firing staff, and Broun pointed out that unionized printers earned roughly thirty percent more than the editorial writers who considered a union beneath them. Journalists met at the National Press Club in Washington that December and founded the American Newspaper Guild, with Broun as its first president. The Guild had 7,000 members by June 1934. Its first contract, with the Philadelphia Record, set maximum hours, overtime, minimum pay scales, and paid vacations. Washington Post publisher Eugene Meyer recognized the Guild as a bargaining unit for 36 of his employees in 1936. During the 1960s, the Guild used contracts and grievances to fight racial discrimination in newsroom hiring and promotion.

That history decided Attiah’s case. As a private employee, she had no First Amendment claim against her employer. Matthew Finkin, a law professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told Mother Jones that speech protections for private employees barely exist, and that without a union a worker has nothing. Finkin put private-sector union membership at six percent. Attiah belonged to the Washington-Baltimore News Guild, whose contract with the Post requires good and sufficient cause for termination and allows members to take disputes to binding arbitration. That clause is the reason she won.

Who the Opinion Pages Serve Now

On February 26, 2025, Jeff Bezos announced that the Post opinion section would publish in support of personal liberties and free markets, and that opposing viewpoints would appear elsewhere. Opinions editor David Shipley resigned the same day. More than 75,000 digital subscribers canceled within two days, on top of the 300,000 who canceled after Bezos blocked the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in October 2024. Nathan Robinson reviewed a year of the editorial board’s output for The Nation in April 2026 and found editorials opposing minimum wage increases, rent control, caps on credit card interest rates, and taxes on the wealthy, along with repeated attacks on Bernie Sanders for proposing a moratorium on AI data center construction. Bezos backs several AI companies whose growth depends on those data centers.

Attiah kept writing on Substack through the year she spent fighting her termination, and she has said her subscribers there carried her through the financial hit. Independent publishing covered her costs while the institution she gave eleven years to cut her off.

That is the arrangement here as well. History Can’t Hide takes no advertising money and answers to no parent company. No donor holds a check over my head, and no editor tells me which arguments I can and cannot make. I decide what to research and what to publish, which is the entire reason I can write about billionaires buying opinion pages without wondering who signs my paycheck. The tradeoff is that this work exists only for as long as readers pay for it. Paid subscriptions cover the research time, the archives, and the hours it takes to check a claim before it reaches you. I plan to keep publishing through this election and the ones that follow, and paid subscribers are what make that possible. If this piece told you something you did not know, please become one.

Karen Attiah got her job back because a contract her predecessors won in the 1930s still had teeth, and because she was willing to spend a year enforcing it. The papers that fire writers for writing now belong to men with business before the government, and the protections that remain inside those papers cover a shrinking number of people. Readers who want journalism that is not accountable to those owners have to pay for it directly.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Attiah, Karen. “The Washington Post Fired Me. I Fought—and Won My Job Back.” The Golden Hour by Karen Attiah, August 24, 2026.

Mullin, Benjamin. “Washington Post Ordered to Rehire Fired Columnist.” New York Times, August 24, 2026.

“Washington Post Ordered to Reinstate Karen Attiah, Opinion Writer Who Was Fired After Posts About Charlie Kirk Killing.” CBS News, August 25, 2026.

Cutler, Sonel. “Karen Attiah Fought the Washington Post and Won.” Mother Jones, August 26, 2026.

“Too Long Have Others Spoken for Us.” The Black Press: Soldiers Without Swords Study Guide. California Newsreel.

“On May 27, 1892: White Mob Destroys Memphis Office of Ida B. Wells’s Newspaper.” Equal Justice Initiative, A History of Racial Injustice calendar.

“Ida B. Wells: Journalist, Activist, Civil Rights Icon, and Free Speech Hero.” Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

“Mob Violence and Anti-Lynching Campaign.” A Voice for Justice: The Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells. University of Chicago Library.

“History.” The NewsGuild–CWA.

“About the Guild.” The Washington Post Guild.

Salamon, Errol. “Labor Unions in Media.” Encyclopaedia Britannica.

“Bezos Announces Restrictions on ‘Washington Post’ Opinion Coverage.” Le Monde with AFP, February 27, 2025.

Folkenflik, David. “Bezos’ Changes at ‘Washington Post’ Lead to Mass Subscription Cancellations — Again.” NPR, February 28, 2025.

Robinson, Nathan. “The Bezos Post Editorial Page Has Become a Mouthpiece for Pro-Billionaire Propaganda.” The Nation, April 21, 2026.

The two days of hearings before Chitty produced what the trial did not. Mike Howard, who led Anthony’s defense at trial, testified that he and Collin County prosecutor Bill Wirskye made a verbal agreement to keep character evidence about both teenagers away from the jury and to focus the case on what happened under the tent. Neither side documented this agreement on paper. Howard’s team collected records describing 53 incidents of violence and racism involving Austin Metcalf and his twin brother Hunter, among them a juvenile offense report about graffiti reading “KKK” and “Kill all Black people,” for which the brothers served 12 months of probation. Wirskye held material of his own, including text messages in which Anthony wrote about wanting to stab someone, and a report from Anthony’s girlfriend to an assistant principal on the morning of the meet that he had been driving past her house.

Texas already has a law meant to stop prosecutors from hiding evidence, and Howard obtained the Metcalf records through discovery under that law. Two lawyers then privately settled a question that a judge should have decided in open court, and they left almost no record of how they settled it.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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A Conviction in Williamson County

In August 1986, someone beat Christine Morton to death in her bed in Williamson County. Williamson County prosecutor Ken Anderson charged her husband, Michael Morton, and presented no physical evidence tying him to the killing. Anderson argued that Morton killed his wife because she refused to have sex with him on his birthday. On February 17, 1987, the jury convicted Morton of murder, and the court sentenced him to life.

Anderson never turned over what police gathered. The Mortons’ three-year-old son told his grandmother that his father was not home and that a “monster” killed his mother. Neighbors told police that a man repeatedly parked a green van behind the house and walked into nearby woods. A San Antonio officer reported that a woman tried to use Christine Morton’s missing credit card. When Morton’s lawyers grew suspicious and the trial judge ordered Anderson to hand over the chief investigator’s reports, Anderson gave him a file with those items missing.

In 2011, DNA testing on a bloody bandana found near the house identified Mark Norwood, a convicted felon living in Texas at the time of the murder. Morton left prison on October 4, 2011, after nearly 25 years, and a court exonerated him that December. The Texas Supreme Court ordered a Court of Inquiry into Anderson, by then a sitting district judge. In November 2013, Anderson pleaded to criminal contempt, served 10 days in jail, resigned from the bench, and surrendered his law license.

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brady v. Maryland that prosecutors must disclose evidence material to guilt or punishment, and Texas counties applied that ruling unevenly for decades. Governor Rick Perry signed Senate Bill 1611, the Michael Morton Act, on May 16, 2013, and it took effect the following January. Under the law, prosecutors must produce offense reports and witness statements on request, whether or not they consider the material important. Texas legislators wrote the statute to govern what prosecutors hand over. They wrote nothing about what lawyers agree to leave out once both sides have the material.

Proceedings Without a Record

Howard testified that the attorneys met with state District Judge John Roach Jr. off the record at least twelve times, without Anthony present. The case had no pretrial hearings or motions. Lawyers filed papers directly with Roach rather than through the district clerk’s office. Roach imposed a gag order and barred electronics from the courtroom. He kept the overflow room closed for most of the trial. Anthony’s appellate lawyer, Russell Wilson, called the arrangement a “shadow docket.” Wirskye told Chitty that Roach made every decision with the attorneys’ permission and that off-record conversations happen routinely in major Texas trials. Lawyers on both sides received threats, he said, and Roach acted as he did to protect Anthony.

On the final day of trial, Wirskye said the agreement did not cover Anthony’s testimony. Howard described a shouting match in chambers and roughly 10 to 30 minutes to help his client decide. Anthony did not testify, and his current lawyers argue that his silence damaged his self-defense claim. Wirskye maintains that he honored the deal and tried to find a way for Anthony to take the stand.

Detroit, 1925

In 1925, Ossian Sweet, a Black physician, moved his family into a house in a white Detroit neighborhood. White crowds had already driven two other Black families out of nearby homes that summer. On the evening of September 9, a crowd surrounded the Sweet house and threw stones. Shots came from an upstairs window and killed Leon Breiner, a white man standing across the street. Prosecutors charged all eleven people inside the house with murder. The NAACP hired the defense attorneys Clarence Darrow and Arthur Garfield Hays.

Hays asked Sweet on the stand to describe his state of mind. Prosecutor Robert Toms objected, asking whether everything Sweet saw as a child could justify a crime decades later. Darrow answered that the defendants acted on what they knew about white mobs and Black families. Judge Frank Murphy ruled that the jury could hear it. Sweet then testified that he recognized the crowd outside as the kind of mob that pursued Black people throughout American history. The first jury deadlocked and Murphy declared a mistrial. Toms retried Henry Sweet alone in April 1926, and in May the jury acquitted him.

Murphy made that ruling in public, over the prosecutor’s objection, with a court reporter taking it down. Texas rules restrict what a jury may hear about a victim’s violent history, and Anthony knew nothing about the Metcalf graffiti when he stabbed Austin Metcalf. No judge in Collin County ruled on any of it.

Where the Case Goes Now

Wilson said the defense will continue in the Fifth Court of Appeals in Dallas. Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis said his office expected Chitty’s ruling and remains confident in the process. Austin Metcalf’s father, Jeff Metcalf, told NewsNation that the testimony about his son disappointed him and that the facts of the killing had not changed.

Anthony’s jury decided a self-defense claim without evidence that two lawyers agreed to withhold from it. The record does not show how they reached that agreement or what a judge would have done with the evidence.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Sederstrom, Jill. “Judge Denies Karmelo Anthony’s Bid for New Trial.” Oxygen, August 24, 2026.

Ramos, Harriet, and Lillie Davidson. “Past Allegations of Racism, Violence Raised in Hearing for New Karmelo Anthony Trial.” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, August 21, 2026.

Walton, Xavier, and Denisse Gomez. “New Testimony Reveals Why Karmelo Anthony Chose Not to Take the Stand.” NewsNation, August 22, 2026.

Conlin, Lauren. “Secret ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ Exposes Evidence Karmelo Anthony Jury Never Heard.” Los Angeles Magazine, August 23, 2026.

Innocence Project. “Michael Morton.” Accessed August 24, 2026.

Death Penalty Information Center. “Texas Enacts ‘Michael Morton Act’ Intended to Reduce Wrongful Convictions.” May 20, 2013.

Texas Legislature. “Bill Analysis, S.B. 1611.” 83rd Legislature, Regular Session, 2013.

Deliso, Meredith, and Lisa Sivertsen. “Trial Judge Removed from Karmelo Anthony Case as Teen Seeks New Trial over Track Meet Stabbing.” ABC News, August 19, 2026.

Linder, Douglas O. “The Sweet Trials: An Account.” Famous Trials. Accessed August 24, 2026.

University of Minnesota Law Library. “The Sweet Trials, Clarence Darrow and Race.” Clarence Darrow Digital Collection. Accessed August 24, 2026.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

Royalties From a Cover

In 1973, Parton recorded “I Will Always Love You” as a farewell to Porter Wagoner, the country singer whose television program gave her a national audience and whose business partnership she was leaving. Nineteen years later, Whitney Houston recorded the song for The Bodyguard, the 1992 film she starred in with Kevin Costner. Houston’s version spent fourteen weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Forbes estimated the recording earned Parton about $10 million in royalties during the 1990s.

In July 2021, Andy Cohen asked Parton on Watch What Happens Live what she bought with that money. She said she purchased a strip mall in what was then the Black section of Nashville, a short distance off 16th Avenue, and that Black families made up most of the surrounding neighborhood. She said the location suited her given where the money came from, and that she wanted to be there among Houston’s people, who she counted as her people as well. “This is the house that Whitney built,” she said.

Parton did not mention the purchase publicly for close to thirty years. She only brought it up because a talk show host asked her a direct question about money.

Changing a Name

Parton’s company World Choice Investments ran a dinner attraction in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri, called Dixie Stampede. The show staged a Civil War contest and seated the audience on North and South sides of the arena. In 2017, after the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, critics wrote about what the attraction was selling. In January 2018, Parton and World Choice announced the show would run as Dolly Parton’s Stampede. The company said attitudes change and that a simpler name would remove any confusion about the show.

Parton explained the decision to Billboard in August 2020. She called her earlier position innocent ignorance, said she never wanted to offend anyone, and said that once you understand something causes harm you should fix it. “Don’t be a dumbass,” she added.

The renaming came two years before the Chicks and Lady A dropped their references to the Confederate South.

What She Said Out Loud

Billboard published that interview during the protests that followed the murder of George Floyd. Parton told the magazine she understood why people needed to be seen and heard, said plainly that Black lives matter, and asked whether white people believed theirs were the only lives that counted. Country radio largely avoided the subject that summer. Parton had spent fifty years declining to take political positions and took one anyway.

She had commercial reasons to stay quiet. Dollywood draws millions of visitors a year to East Tennessee, and a substantial share of her audience did not want to hear any of this from her. She said it regardless, and she changed her business when people explained the harm it caused. Most white performers with her money and her audience did neither. Whether anyone else in country music will speak the way Parton did is an open question, and I plan to keep writing about it.

History Can’t Hide has spent the past year covering how American popular music took from Black musicians and then wrote them out of the credits. Dolly did the opposite. May she rest in peace.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Hernandez De La Cruz, Melissa. “Dolly Parton’s Family Announces Country Music Legend’s Death at 80.” Associated Press, August 25, 2026.

Hernandez, Joe. “Dolly Invested Royalties From Whitney’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ In A Black Community.” NPR, August 2, 2021.

“Dolly Parton Shares Why She Dropped ‘Dixie’ From Her Stampede.” Taste of Country, August 13, 2020.

“Artists Applaud Dolly Parton For ‘Dixie’ Comment.” Billboard, August 14, 2020.

“Dolly Parton on BLM: ‘Of Course Black Lives Matter!’” Rolling Stone, August 14, 2020.

August ends next Monday, and National Black Business Month ends with it. Historian John William Templeton and engineer Frederick E. Jordan Sr. created the observance in 2004. Jordan spent years trying to get financing for the San Francisco engineering firm he started in 1969, and he built the month around the barrier he ran into. Templeton argued at the time that the country should have supported roughly 2.5 million Black-owned businesses and instead had about half that number. Majority Black-owned firms made up about 3 percent of classifiable American businesses in 2022 and roughly 1 percent of gross revenue. I am writing about that gap in detail next week.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

History Can’t Hide is one of those businesses. I own it, I run it, and paid subscribers fund all of it. I receive no money from advertisers, and there is no parent company to cover a shortfall if it comes.

My costs went up this year. I pay contractors for research, fact-checking, and editing, because the reporting in these pieces takes more hours than I have. The YouTube video essays that run alongside the articles got longer, which means more archival footage, more licensing, and more time in production. Every one of those line items comes out of subscription revenue.

Two election cycles are coming up. Voters go to the polls in November, and the presidential race starts the day after. Over the next two years, arguments about American history will run through nearly every campaign in the country, and most of the outlets covering those arguments answer to an advertiser or an owner. I want to cover them without cutting research or taking money from anyone who expects something back.

If you read this newsletter every week and can afford it, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. That is what keeps the research funded and the videos in production. If a monthly payment does not work right now, an annual subscription costs less over the year, and a gift subscription for someone who reads over your shoulder helps just as much.

If you already pay, thank you. You are the reason this publication exists in the form it does, and I do not take that lightly.

Ms. Rachel used a platform far larger than mine to tell people where to put their money. Black Business Month ends in a week, but I will keep publishing after it, on the strength of readers who decide this work is worth paying for.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

Ronald Reagan did not create all of these conditions. Wages for production workers flattened around 1973, seven years before he won the presidency. Jimmy Carter appointed Paul Volcker to run the Federal Reserve, and Volcker pushed short-term interest rates toward 20 percent to break inflation. Carter also signed the deregulation of airlines and trucking. Dozens of House Democrats voted for Reagan’s 1981 tax bill. What Reagan did was take away the tools American workers used to claim a share of what they produced. He destroyed the strike as a functional threat, and he signed laws that moved the federal tax burden off corporations and onto wages.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

Reagan Answered a Strike

In October 1980, Reagan wrote to Robert Poli, president of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization, and pledged that his administration would work closely with the union. PATCO endorsed him over Carter the following month, one of the few unions to back a Republican that year. Reagan ran the Screen Actors Guild in the 1950s and led the guild into a strike against the Hollywood studios in 1960.

In February 1981, PATCO opened contract negotiations with the Federal Aviation Administration. Controllers wanted a 32-hour work week and a $10,000 raise for every member, a package the union valued at $770 million. The FAA countered with $40 million.

On August 3, 1981, most PATCO members walked out. The strike violated a 1955 statute barring federal employees from striking, a law no president had enforced. In 1970, postal workers struck illegally and kept their jobs. Reagan gave the controllers 48 hours to return and announced that there would be no negotiations and no amnesty. On August 5, Reagan fired more than 11,000 controllers and permanently barred them from federal employment. Supervisors and military controllers staffed the towers alongside the roughly 2,000 controllers who crossed the picket line. In October 1981, the Federal Labor Relations Authority decertified PATCO, the first federal union to lose its certification. Bill Clinton lifted the rehiring ban in August 1993, and by 2006 the FAA rehired about 850 of the fired controllers.

Employers Followed the Example

Donald Devine, who ran the Office of Personnel Management under Reagan, later reported that private executives told him the government’s handling of the strike gave them room to take a harder line with their unions. By 1982, a group at the Wharton School circulated a manual urging business leaders to study what Reagan did to PATCO.

A 1938 Supreme Court ruling gave employers the legal right to permanently replace striking workers, but the labor historian Joseph McCartin found that firing strikers struck almost everyone as unacceptable before 1981. After 1981, corporations including Phelps Dodge and International Paper provoked strikes and then hired permanent replacements to force concessions from their workers. The Government Accountability Office found that 25 percent of employers hired or threatened to hire replacement workers during strikes in 1989, up from 15 percent four years earlier.

The number of major strikes collapsed. Before 1981, the United States averaged roughly 300 large work stoppages a year. By the 2010s, the average was 16. Workers understood that walking out now gave an employer a reason to replace them. McCartin argued that the ability to strike kept wages rising in line with productivity, and he estimated in 2021 that average hourly pay would sit about $10 higher if that relationship held after 1981.

The strike was not the sole cause of union decline. Union density fell from 35 percent of the workforce in 1945 to 23 percent by 1980, before PATCO walked out. Writing in 1991, the journalist John Crudele pointed to changes in the automobile industry that eliminated 800,000 union jobs. Reagan removed the remaining leverage of the workers who still held union cards.

Congress Moved the Tax Burden

On August 13, 1981, Reagan signed the Economic Recovery Tax Act at his California ranch, Rancho del Cielo. The law cut the top marginal income tax rate from 70 percent to 50 percent. Later Treasury estimates put the revenue loss at about 9 percent of federal receipts over the first two years. Most senior Reagan officials never expected the cut to pay for itself, and they counted on spending reductions that Congress never delivered.

Congress then raised taxes with Reagan’s signature in 1982, 1983, 1984, and 1987. The 1983 increase mattered most for ordinary workers. Reagan appointed a commission chaired by economist Alan Greenspan to repair Social Security’s finances, and Congress accelerated scheduled payroll tax increases and delayed a cost-of-living adjustment by six months. Legislators also raised the retirement age and began taxing benefits for higher-income recipients. The combined employer and employee payroll tax rate rose from 10.8 percent in 1983 to 12.4 percent by 1990.

Payroll taxes apply only to wages, and only up to an annual cap. A machinist earning $30,000 paid the full rate on every dollar. A person living on dividends and capital gains paid none of it. While Congress raised the payroll tax, corporate income tax collections fell to their lowest level since World War II, reaching 0.9 percent of gross national product in 1982. Corporate receipts averaged 15 percent of federal revenue during the 1970s and under 10 percent through the 1980s. In 1986, Congress lowered the top individual rate again, to 28 percent.

Lenders Gambled With Insured Deposits

Savings and loan associations funded long-term fixed-rate mortgages with short-term deposits, and rising interest rates left them paying depositors more than they collected on their loans. In 1981 and 1982 combined, the industry lost almost $9 billion.

In October 1982, Reagan signed the Garn-St. Germain Depository Institutions Act. The law removed interest rate caps and let thrifts put 40 percent of their assets into commercial loans. Congress left federal deposit insurance priced the same for reckless institutions as for careful ones. The Federal Home Loan Bank Board eliminated ceilings on loan-to-value ratios in 1983, and Reagan cut the budget of the board’s examination staff. Thrift operators chased high returns with money the federal government guaranteed.

More than 1,000 savings and loans failed by 1989. According to FDIC financial statements, the direct cost to taxpayers reached $124 billion by the end of 2004. Savings and loans wrote 45 percent of American residential mortgages in 1980 and 27 percent in 1990. New home construction fell to levels last seen during World War II, and the collapse helped push the country into the 1990 recession.

Reagan took office during a period of significant economic strain and responded by weakening the position of workers inside the economy. American workers lost the strike as a working threat, and with it the mechanism that kept pay rising with output. Wage earners covered a larger share of federal taxes while corporations covered less, and taxpayers absorbed the losses of the institutions that financed their houses. The middle class of 1980 rested on arrangements that Reagan took apart. American workers held their position in 1980 because they could still stop production and because Congress still taxed capital more heavily than wages, and Reagan ended both conditions.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

1. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. “Union Members — 2025.” News release, February 18, 2026.

2. University of Texas at Arlington Libraries. “The 1981 PATCO Strike.” The Compass Rose, September 2, 2021.

3. Simon, Julia, and Kenny Malone. “Looking Back On When President Reagan Fired The Air Traffic Controllers.” NPR Morning Edition, August 5, 2021.

4. McCartin, Joseph A. “The Downward Path We’ve Trod: Reflections on an Ominous Anniversary.” Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor, Georgetown University, August 4, 2021.

5. Burns, Michael K. “10 Years After PATCO Strike, A Legacy of Labor Bitterness.” Baltimore Sun, August 4, 1991.

6. Crudele, John. “Decline Of Unionism Didn’t Start With PATCO Strike.” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 3, 1991.

7. Robert, Brett. “’Reaganomics’: The Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981.” Reagan Library Education Blog, August 15, 2016.

8. Wessel, David. “What We Learned from Reagan’s Tax Cuts.” Brookings Institution, December 8, 2017.

9. Peter G. Peterson Foundation. “Social Security Reform: Lessons From the Greenspan Commission.” 2026.

10. Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. “The Decline of Corporate Income Tax Revenues.” October 24, 2003.

11. Ely, Bert. “Savings and Loan Crisis.” The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics. Library of Economics and Liberty.

12. Kenton, Will. “Understanding the Savings and Loan Crisis: Key Events and Its Impact.” Investopedia, April 24, 2026.

Atlanta Black Star counted the Raleigh death as its seventh confirmed case in the United States in 2026 involving a Black person who died hanging under circumstances the public disputed. Earlier cases included Jerard “Jay” Jackson, 28, who died near Rothbury, Michigan, on June 30, and Tasia Fortune, 29, who died behind a vacant home in Jackson, Mississippi, earlier in August. Officials in each case pointed toward suicide.

Officials may turn out to be right about any one of these deaths. In several of them, they reached that conclusion before completing the work that would let anyone tell a suicide from a killing, which is the same failure that kept American lynchings out of the official record for eighty years.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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Families Questioned the Rulings

On May 8, 2026, Kenneth Tolbert walked his service dog past the grounds of the United House of Prayer for All People on West Sugar Creek Road in north Charlotte and saw what he took for a figure standing still under a tree. Tolbert found 16-year-old Juliana Umba Nzita held upright by a ratchet strap around her neck, the kind of strap drivers use to secure cargo, wrapped twice around a leaning trunk that stood at least twice her height. Her feet rested on the ground beside a toddler-size blue chair. Her family reported her missing ten days earlier.

By that Monday, the county medical examiner ruled the death a suicide. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police closed the case four days after that. According to a Charlotte Observer investigation, no one performed an autopsy, no one located Nzita’s cell phone, and no investigator interviewed Tolbert, the man who found her. Tolbert, who stands five feet nine inches, told the paper he could not reach the limb himself and could not work out how a girl shorter than him had. Nzita’s uncle, Mathy Nzita, asked why authorities did not investigate further after finding a teenage girl hanging in a public churchyard. Relatives also said Nzita struggled with her mental health and endured severe bullying before she died.

Those two facts sit together uncomfortably, and both belong in the record. A medical examiner who declines to perform an autopsy cannot rule out a homicide, whatever the truth of this particular death turns out to be. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Community Relations Committee, a 45-member advisory body, was still asking police for answers in late July.

The dispute over Demartravion “Trey” Reed followed the same shape. In September 2025, officials found the 21-year-old Delta State University student hanging from a tree near recreation courts on the Cleveland, Mississippi campus. The Bolivar County coroner and the Mississippi medical examiner both concluded suicide and found no injuries consistent with an assault. Attorney Ben Crump and Colin Kaepernick’s Know Your Rights Camp arranged a second autopsy for the family. Activists working with the family told the Chicago Crusader that the second examination found blunt force trauma to the back of Reed’s head. No one has released that report publicly, and Snopes could not verify the claim. Delta State police turned their files over to the FBI and the United States Attorney’s Office for review.

Coroners Left Killings Unsolved

Between 1877 and 1950, white Americans lynched at least 4,400 Black people, according to the Equal Justice Initiative, which documented roughly 2,000 more killings during Reconstruction. Local officials rarely identified anyone. White residents closed ranks around the men who committed the killings, and coroner’s juries returned findings that named no one.

Matthew Williams shows how the process worked. On December 4, 1931, in Salisbury, Maryland, someone shot Williams, a 23-year-old Black man, and his white employer, Daniel Elliott, at Elliott’s lumberyard. State’s Attorney Murray Phillips and the local press said Williams shot Elliott and then shot himself. Black and white residents gave a competing account, later documented by legal scholar Sherrilyn Ifill in On the Courthouse Lawn, holding that Elliott’s son James shot both men over money he owed Williams and invented the story. That evening, a crowd of white men gathered around the courthouse square, marched to Peninsula General Hospital where Williams lay with a bullet wound to the head, and took him from a side door after a nurse let them in. They threw him from a first-floor window, dragged him several blocks, stabbed him with an ice pick, and hanged him from a tree on the Wicomico County courthouse lawn. They then dragged his body to the Wicomico River bridge, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire. Townspeople cut the rope into pieces and kept them.

Thousands of white residents knew what happened. No one went to prison. Photojournalist Paul S. Henderson, who covered the lynching for the Baltimore Afro-American, collected a piece of the rope, which now sits in the National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Congress Refused to Act

Beginning in 1921, the NAACP sponsored federal anti-lynching legislation, starting with the Dyer bill. Southern senators killed it. In 1935, Walter White and Mary McLeod Bethune pressed President Franklin Roosevelt to back the Costigan-Wagner bill, which would have put law enforcement officers on federal trial for failing to protect people in their custody. Southern opposition defeated that bill as well. Congress considered roughly 200 anti-lynching measures over the following decades and passed none of them. In 2005, the Senate formally apologized for that record. President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Antilynching Act on March 29, 2022, which made lynching a federal hate crime.

For a century, that meant one thing in practice. County sheriffs, elected coroners, and local prosecutors decided whether a Black person’s death warranted investigation, and they answered to the same white voters who attended the killings.

Communities Weigh the Official Account

That structure survives. County coroners and state medical examiners still classify deaths, and in much of the rural South voters elect coroners who hold no medical training. On February 18, 2026, the civil rights organization JULIAN released A Crimson Record, modeled on Ida B. Wells’s 1895 study A Red Record, documenting more than 70 suspected modern-day lynchings across seven Southern states since 2000, with 20 in Mississippi. In one case JULIAN reexamined, officials found Willie Andrew Jones Jr., a 21-year-old Black man, hanging from a tree in Scott County, Mississippi, in 2018. An independent medical examiner later determined that someone lynched him.

Black families who reject a suicide finding are not making a claim about statistics or about any conspiracy. They are pointing at investigations that ended before they started. Officials who close a hanging death in three days without an autopsy have not proven that no one killed the person. They have only declined to find out.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

“NC Man’s Hanging Death in Downtown Raleigh Being Investigated as a Suicide, Police Say.” WTVD-TV, August 18, 2026.

“Black Man Found Hanging from Tree near Raleigh Caribbean Festival.” The North Carolina Beat, August 2026.

Ginther, Mary. “’Deeply Disturbing’: Police Investigating Black Man’s Hanging as a Suicide, Leaving Leaders Demanding to Know What Really Happened.” Atlanta Black Star, August 17, 2026.

“Family and Community Question Suicide Ruling in Death of Black Teen Found Hanged in Charlotte.” TheGrio, July 27, 2026.

“Death of 16-Year-Old Black Teen Found Hanged near a Tree Ruled Suicide.” BlackNews.com, July 2026.

“Committee Questions Police Investigation into Death of Teen Found Hanging at Charlotte Church.” WBTV, July 31, 2026.

Beveridge, Lici. “Tree Hanging Death at Delta State University Raises Dread of Mississippi’s Past Lynchings.” The Marshall Project, November 4, 2025.

“Questions Linger about Second Autopsy in Mississippi Lynching Death.” Chicago Crusader, October 2025.

“Inspecting Claims Trey Reed’s 2nd Autopsy Shows Blunt Force Trauma.” Snopes, October 8, 2025.

“Family Awaits Results of Independent Autopsy on Delta State Student Trey Reed.” Mississippi Today, October 24, 2025.

Equal Justice Initiative. Reconstruction in America: Racial Violence after the Civil War, 1865–1876. Montgomery, AL: Equal Justice Initiative, 2020.

“Lynching in America.” American Experience, PBS.

Salahu-Din, Tulani. “The Evidence of Things Unsaid: The Lynching of Matthew Williams, 1931.” National Museum of African American History and Culture, July 6, 2017.

Ifill, Sherrilyn A. On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century. Boston: Beacon Press, 2007.

JULIAN. A Crimson Record: Seven State Modern-Day Lynching Report 2000–2025. 2026.

“’A Crimson Record’ Exposes over 70 Modern-Day Lynchings across the South.” EURweb, February 19, 2026.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

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Where the Story Started

In her 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou wrote about her childhood in Stamps, Arkansas, where people said the town’s white residents were so prejudiced that a Black person “couldn’t buy vanilla ice cream. Except on July Fourth.” Poet Audre Lorde described a family trip to Washington, D.C., in her autobiography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Her family sat down at a Breyer’s soda fountain counter and a waitress told them she could sell them ice cream to take out, but they could not eat it there.

On July 4, 2014, culinary historian Michael Twitty published an essay in The Guardian under the headline that black people were denied vanilla ice cream in the Jim Crow South except on Independence Day. Twitty wrote that custom rather than law produced the restriction. He described his father visiting Lancaster County, South Carolina, in the 1940s and asking a general store owner to buy candy and ice cream. The owner grabbed the boy by the collar for addressing him as “Sir” instead of “Yassuh.”

Checking the Record

In June 2024, reporter Nur Ibrahim published an investigation for Snopes and could not identify a single firsthand account tying Jim Crow discrimination to vanilla ice cream specifically.

Jennifer Wallach, professor of history at the University of North Texas, told Ibrahim she had never encountered evidence that denying vanilla was a widespread practice, and she explained why on economic grounds. White business owners wanted Black customers’ money. In the drugstores where sit-ins later took place, Black people could shop and spend. They could not sit at the lunch counter on equal terms. Restaurants ran separate seating sections or takeout windows, which humiliated Black customers without turning away their business. Wallach also pointed out that white supremacy kept many Black Southerners poor enough that ice cream stayed out of reach as a luxury, and she argued that the vanilla story pulls attention away from harsher facts about segregation.

Twitty told Ibrahim he regretted that readers took his essay literally. His father’s account, he said, never included the Fourth of July detail. He also rejected the butter pecan conclusion drawn from his work, because Black families made vanilla ice cream at home. Both of his grandmothers owned ice cream makers, and vanilla was the household favorite.

Darryl Goodner, co-owner of the Louisville Cream ice cream company in Kentucky and creator of the Butter Pecan Podcast, researched the question and found no definitive answer either. He told the Louisville Courier Journal that butter pecan makes sense in the South simply because Georgia grows so many pecans.

Segregation at the Counter

Soda fountains and lunch counters were real sites of exclusion, and Black customers fought over them for decades. On July 7, 1948, Edna Griffin, John Bibbs, and Leonard Hudson ordered ice cream sodas at the Katz Drug Store in downtown Des Moines, Iowa, and a clerk refused them on the grounds that the store did not serve Black people. Griffin organized a boycott, picketed the store every Saturday for two months, and filed charges under an 1884 Iowa law banning discrimination in public accommodations. A jury convicted the owner, Maurice Katz, and fined him. On February 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College sat down at the Woolworth’s counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and stayed until closing. In 1963, a photographer captured James Baldwin standing outside a Durham, North Carolina, ice cream parlor with a “Colored entrance only” sign on the door.

Black customers in these disputes demanded the right to sit and receive service like anyone else. No account of them mentions which flavor anyone ordered.

A Gardener Named Antoine

Pecan trees grow wild across North America, and Indigenous peoples ate the nuts long before Europeans arrived. Growers through the middle of the nineteenth century generally accepted that nut trees could not be improved by grafting the way fruit trees could, and every attempt with pecans failed.

In the winter of 1846, a Louisiana physician named A.E. Colomb, who had tried and failed to graft pecans at Anita Plantation, crossed the Mississippi River to ask for help. Jacques Telesphore Roman, who owned Oak Alley Plantation in St. James Parish, directed him to an enslaved gardener named Antoine. An estate inventory listed Antoine as a Creole gardener, age 38, and valued him at $1,000. Antoine grafted sixteen seedlings successfully that winter and eventually grafted 126 trees, producing a thin-shelled nut that a person could crack by hand.

In 1876, Hubert Bonzano, who owned Oak Alley by then, exhibited the nuts at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. William H. Brewer, chair of agriculture at Yale’s Sheffield Scientific School, awarded Bonzano a certificate for the size and quality of the pecans. Growers named the variety Centennial, and the American pecan industry grew from that stock. Antoine received no payment, no credit, and no recorded acknowledgment during his life. Historians know his mother Zaire was born into slavery in Louisiana and his father Zephyr was kidnapped from the Congo, and little else.

The vanilla in the ice cream has a parallel history. In 1841, on the French island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean, a 12-year-old enslaved boy named Edmond Albius worked out how to pollinate the vanilla orchid by hand. Growers still use his method. Albius died in poverty.

Why the Flavor Stayed

Georgia and Texas lead American pecan production, and Southern farms have supplied the nut for generations. A YouGov poll found Southerners the most likely of any American region to say they like butter pecan, at 42 percent. Black Southerners who moved north during the Great Migration carried Southern cooking with them, and butter pecan turned up at cookouts, church socials, and Sunday dinners in Chicago and Detroit as readily as in Atlanta. Parents passed the preference to children, who passed it on again.

The taste is now general. In its national survey conducted in April 2026, the International Dairy Foods Association found butter pecan ranked second among American adults, ahead of vanilla.

Black Americans eat butter pecan ice cream because pecans grew where their families lived and because an enslaved man in Louisiana solved a horticultural problem that let growers farm the nut commercially. Nobody paid him and nobody credited him, which is the erasure worth talking about.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Ibrahim, Nur. “Black People Couldn’t Buy Vanilla Ice Cream Under Jim Crow?” Snopes, June 13, 2024.

Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. New York: Random House, 1969.

Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1982.

Twitty, Michael W. “Black People Were Denied Vanilla Ice Cream in the Jim Crow South – Except on Independence Day.” The Guardian, July 4, 2014.

Alexander, Leslie. “The Little Known History of Black Women Using Soda Fountains as Contested Spaces.” African American Intellectual History Society, May 11, 2017.

Benedict, L. F., et al. “Pecan Station: One of a Kind in the USA.” AgMag, LSU Agricultural Center, June 20, 2012.

“How Do You Say Pecan?” National Park Service, last updated September 4, 2024.

Grauke, L. J. “The Beginning of Modern Pecan Culture: Centennial.” Pecan South Magazine, June 17, 2024.

“Oak Alley Plantation, 3645 State Highway 18, Vacherie, St. James Parish, LA.” Historic American Buildings Survey, Library of Congress.

Kaplan, Rachelle. “The Slave Gardener Who Turned the Pecan Into a Cash Crop.” Zócalo Public Square, October 21, 2024.

Barbeito, Camila. “If You Love Butter Pecan Ice Cream, Its Dark History May Come As A Surprise.” mitú, July 17, 2023.

“America’s Favorite Ice-Cream Flavors: Vanilla, Chocolate, and Mint Chocolate Chip.” YouGov.

“Chocolate Returns to No. 1 and Butter Pecan Surpasses Vanilla Ahead of National Ice Cream Day.” International Dairy Foods Association, July 16, 2026.

On November 8, 2021, Ocasio-Cortez posted something else. Democratic strategists were blaming Terry McAuliffe’s loss in the Virginia governor’s race on wokeness, and she answered that pundits used the word as a derogatory euphemism for civil rights and justice. Democrats who distanced themselves from racial justice, she wrote, made the protection of voting rights less likely and guaranteed their own defeats. Five years later, she carried out the maneuver she warned against, and she did it with a joke instead of an argument.

The phrase does two things at once. It converts an important period of political education into a product cycle with a version number, and it adopts the framing of the people who spent six years attacking that education. Whether the retreat wins votes in November is a separate question from whether it is honest.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

What “Stay Woke” Meant

In 1938, blues musician Lead Belly recorded a spoken introduction to his song about the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers whom an Alabama court convicted of rape in 1931 on false accusations. He told Black listeners traveling through Alabama to keep their eyes open and stay woke. In 1962, novelist William Melvin Kelley wrote in the New York Times about white speakers borrowing Black vocabulary without carrying its meaning, and he used the word as Black speakers used it. Musician Erykah Badu repeated the phrase in her 2008 song “Master Teacher,” and organizers picked it up again after 2014.

The word described a condition rather than a period. A person paid attention to what the country did to Black Americans, or a person did not. Nobody who used the phrase in 1938 or 1962 or 2008 attached a release date to it.

Conservative commentators and campaign strategists spent the years after 2019 converting the word into an accusation, and by 2023 Republican governors were using it in legislation. Ocasio-Cortez identified that conversion in 2021 and told Democrats not to accept it. Democrats now use the word the way the people who took it use it, which is what the numbering does. A version number implies obsolescence, and obsolescence settles the argument without anyone having to make one.

The Great Awokening and the Backlash

In April 2019, Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias published an article called “The Great Awokening,” drawing on survey research by Georgia State political scientist Zach Goldberg. The data showed white liberals moving sharply left on questions of race after 2014, to positions further left than those of the average Black voter on some measures. Yglesias described a real shift, and the shift had a source.

After a Ferguson police officer killed Michael Brown in August 2014, Black organizers spent six years teaching a mass audience about American racial history. Protest was one part of that work. The rest of it moved through reading lists, syllabi, and public argument. Nikole Hannah-Jones and her colleagues published the 1619 Project in the New York Times Magazine in August 2019. In June 2020, books by Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo occupied most of the top slots on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. Millions of people learned the words redlining, convict leasing, and qualified immunity within the same year.

Organizers in other communities did parallel work and often did it together. Native organizers at Standing Rock in 2016 drew support from Black Lives Matter chapters, and the acronym BIPOC spread through movement organizations because activists wanted a term that held Black and Indigenous experience together without collapsing either. Asian American organizers built “Stop AAPI Hate” in March 2021 after a wave of attacks during the pandemic. Disabled organizers and trans organizers pushed their histories into the same conversation.

The scale of participation was immense. Estimates of turnout for the protests after Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd on May 25, 2020, range from 15 million to 26 million people, according to polling that Harvard political scientist Erica Chenoweth and the Crowd Counting Consortium compiled that summer. Some participants paid for it. Federal prosecutors charged more than 300 demonstrators, and Judge Michael Mihm sentenced 19-year-old Shamar Betts to four years in prison and $1,686,170.30 in restitution for a Facebook post that drew a crowd to a mall in Champaign, Illinois.

The backlash arrived on the same scale. Corporations abandoned the diversity programs they announced in 2020, and by 2025 only about a quarter of S&P 500 companies weighed gender or race when adding board members, down from nearly half the year before. In May 2025, the Justice Department moved to dismiss the consent decrees that federal investigators negotiated with Minneapolis and Louisville after the killings of Floyd and Breonna Taylor, and judges dismissed both.

Reconstruction and the Dunning School

In 1867, Congress passed the Reconstruction Acts over President Andrew Johnson’s veto and placed the former Confederate states under military governance. Over the next decade, more than 600 Black men served in Southern state legislatures and 16 served in Congress.

The Northern Republicans who wrote those laws walked away from them within ten years. Democrats took the House in 1874. After the disputed presidential election of 1876, Republican leaders negotiated a settlement that made Rutherford B. Hayes president, and in April 1877, Hayes withdrew federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana. Northern newspapers that endorsed Black suffrage in 1868 now described Southern Reconstruction governments as corrupt.

Historian William Dunning taught at Columbia University from 1886 until his death in 1922, and his doctoral students wrote state-by-state histories arguing that those governments failed through incompetence and that the white Southerners who overthrew them restored order. American textbooks carried that account for fifty years. W.E.B. Du Bois, a sociologist and a founder of the NAACP, published Black Reconstruction in America in 1935 and documented what Reconstruction legislatures actually built, including the first public school systems in the South. His final chapter, “The Propaganda of History,” named Dunning’s students and their methods.

The correction cost Du Bois his standing with the organization he helped create. In 1951, the Justice Department indicted him, then 82, for failing to register as a foreign agent while chairing a group that circulated a petition against nuclear weapons. The NAACP board under executive secretary Walter White declined to defend him and instructed local branches to stay out of the case. A judge acquitted him that November. The State Department revoked his passport and held it for eight years.

Folding Instead of Explaining

Ocasio-Cortez has a defensible political argument available to her. Voters rejected the demand to defund police departments, polling never showed majority support for it, and candidates who carry that language into a general election historically have lost. She could say that plainly, explain which parts of 2020 she still believes, and defend them.

She said something else. The rhetoric belonged to a moment, she explained, because COVID opened the Overton window and people entertained any policy that might improve things. Organizers move the range of acceptable debate through years of argument. Ocasio-Cortez described that range as something a pandemic opened and closed on its own, which removes the organizers from their work and removes her from her positions at the same time. The six years of teaching become a mood that passed.

Democrats have done this before. During the 1980 and 1984 campaigns, Ronald Reagan and his allies used “liberal” as an accusation, and Democratic candidates stopped using the term to describe themselves. A group of elected Democrats founded the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985 to move the party away from the positions they blamed for those defeats, and Bill Clinton chaired it in 1990 and 1991. In 1994, Clinton signed the crime bill that funded 100,000 new police officers. Democrats replaced the word liberal with the word progressive, and candidates now distance themselves from the word progressive.

The range of acceptable debate is moving right in front of us, and the people best positioned to hold it in place are apologizing instead. Ossé, Hong, and Ocasio-Cortez built their public standing during the period they now describe as an embarrassment. Each of them had a national audience at the moment a reporter raised the question, which is the only moment when explaining anything to a national audience is possible.

Calling 2020 crazy answers a question nobody asked about timing and leaves the actual question unanswered. Whether police departments should be funded at current levels or whether the prison population should shrink are arguments a person can win or lose on the evidence. Ocasio-Cortez declined to have any of them on television this month, and the people who spent the last six years educating the country lost the argument by forfeit.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Kircher, Madison Malone. “A.O.C. Said ‘Woke 1.0 Was Crazy.’ But What Is It?” New York Times, August 12, 2026.

Ocasio-Cortez, Alexandria. Posts on Twitter, November 8, 2021.

Bacon, Perry. “Actually, AOC, Woke 1.0 Did a Lot of Good Things for This Country.” New Republic, August 10, 2026.

Blake, Aaron. “Democrats like AOC Are Trying to Shrug Off Their ‘Woke’ Era. That’s Bad for Our Politics.” CNN, August 10, 2026.

Nguyen, Alex. “What Does ‘Woke 1’ Even Mean?” Mother Jones, August 11, 2026.

Potas, Dace. “Nice Try, AOC. But ‘Woke 1 Was Crazy’ Isn’t an Apology.” USA Today, August 12, 2026.

Ledbetter, Huddie. “Scottsboro Boys.” Recorded 1938. Library of Congress, Alan Lomax Collection.

Kelley, William Melvin. “If You’re Woke You Dig It.” New York Times Magazine, May 20, 1962.

Yglesias, Matthew. “The Great Awokening.” Vox, April 1, 2019.

Goldberg, Zach. “America’s White Saviors.” Tablet, June 5, 2019.

Hannah-Jones, Nikole, et al. “The 1619 Project.” New York Times Magazine, August 18, 2019.

Chenoweth, Erica, and Jeremy Pressman. “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History.” Crowd Counting Consortium, Harvard Kennedy School, 2020.

U.S. Attorney’s Office, Central District of Illinois. “Champaign Man Sentenced for Inciting Riot.” Press release, August 20, 2021.

United States v. Betts, No. 21-2572 (7th Cir. 2024).

U.S. Department of Justice. “The U.S. Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division Dismisses Biden-Era Police Investigations and Proposed Police Consent Decrees in Louisville and Minneapolis.” Press release, May 21, 2025.

Foner, Eric. Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877. New York: Harper and Row, 1988.

Du Bois, W. E. B. Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935.

Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.

Baer, Kenneth S. Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000.

Reporters at the Nashville Banner and Newsweek pointed out the errors within a day. Japanese immigrants in California made the first fortune cookies in America, and restaurants in China do not serve them. The waving cat is a Japanese figure called a maneki-neko, and the soy sauce on the table was Kikkoman, a Japanese brand. The most recent Department of Agriculture census, published in 2024, recorded no Chinese-owned farms in Tennessee and put Chinese ownership at well under 1 percent of American farmland. Blackburn defended the ad. She told Newsweek that allowing the Chinese Communist Party to buy land was the first step toward spreading communist values in America, then pointed to the Democratic Socialists of America in New York as evidence. On August 6, 2026, she won the Republican primary with 43.6 percent of the vote.

The move Blackburn made in that statement, from a foreign government to Americans she disagrees with, is the part of this material that has always done the work. In the 1950s and 1960s, American candidates and state agencies spent heavily on advertising that attached the communist label to domestic opponents, and they aimed a great deal of it at Black Americans who organized against segregation. The ads succeeded.

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Selling the Menace

In 1950, fewer than 50,000 Americans out of a population of 150 million belonged to the Communist Party. Federal loyalty boards nonetheless investigated millions of government employees and asked them which magazines they read and whether they attended church. Roughly 2,700 federal workers lost their jobs under the loyalty program between 1947 and 1956, and thousands more resigned before it ended in the early 1960s.

Private companies sold the fear directly to advertisers. In June 1950, three former FBI agents who owned a firm called American Business Consultants published Red Channels, a book naming 151 people who worked in radio and television and accusing them of pushing Communist ideas on the public. The same firm then charged fees to clear the names it had printed. Networks and sponsors carried out the firings. CBS cancelled Hazel Scott’s variety show, the first American television program with a Black performer in the starring role, days after Scott read a statement against blacklisting to a congressional panel. Many people listed in Red Channels had backed the desegregation of broadcasting or criticized police violence. FBI agents privately recorded that the actress Jean Muir, dropped from the sitcom The Aldrich Family after a letter-writing campaign, actively fought racial discrimination.

Maryland, 1950

Millard Tydings, a Democrat who represented Maryland in the Senate from 1927, chaired the subcommittee that examined Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claim, made in February 1950, that he held a list of Communists working in the State Department. In July 1950, the subcommittee reported that the charges were a hoax, and Tydings publicly called them a fraud.

McCarthy’s staff answered during Tydings’s re-election campaign that fall. They helped produce a four-page tabloid supporting the Republican challenger, Baltimore lawyer John Marshall Butler, and a group calling itself Young Democrats for Butler distributed it. Inside ran a photograph of Tydings listening closely to Earl Browder, the head of the Communist Party USA. The printers made the picture by combining a 1938 photograph of Tydings listening to a radio with a 1940 photograph of Browder delivering a speech. Tydings did not meet Browder until Browder testified before the subcommittee in July 1950. The caption called the picture a composite, and most readers did not know the word. Roughly half a million copies circulated.

Butler won by more than 43,000 votes, and Tydings left the Senate after 24 years. A Senate subcommittee investigated the campaign and issued a report in 1951, after Butler took his seat.

Segregationists Adopt the Method

Myles Horton founded the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, in 1932 as an adult education center for Appalachian workers. By the early 1950s, the staff turned the school toward race relations, and Highlander became one of the few places in the South where Black and white organizers met in the same room. Rosa Parks attended a workshop there in the summer of 1955.

On September 2, 1957, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Highlander’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebration. The Georgia Commission on Education, a state body created to defend segregation, sent a photographer who posed as a participant. That October, the commission printed a four-page newspaper-sized pamphlet titled Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tenn., built around the photographs he took.

In the spring of 1965, hundreds of billboards went up across the South carrying one of those photographs, with King seated in a classroom under the caption “Martin Luther King at Communist Training School.” The John Birch Society sold the same image through its American Opinion bookstores as postcards, twenty for a dollar. Numbered captions identified King, the Communist Party official Abner Berry, Aubrey Williams of the Southern Conference Educational Fund, and Horton. The photographer faked nothing. The caption did the work, and the people who paid for the billboards did not need a court to agree with them.

What the Charge Accomplished

The historian Nico Slate has shown that Highlander did draw on the American left, and that organizers there used methods developed in labor movements of the 1930s. The school taught people to run citizenship classes and to challenge segregation laws, which is not what a communist training school means. Tennessee revoked Highlander’s charter in 1962 and the state sold the property at auction, though Horton reopened the institution in Knoxville.

Blackburn’s ad works on the same logic. The threat she names is a foreign government, and the policy she describes concerns who may buy land inside Tennessee. Her explanation to Newsweek ran from Chinese land purchases to American socialists in a single sentence. Her campaign released a second ad the following week that targeted immigrants. The props on the table were Japanese, which tells you the ad was not built to inform anyone about China. Between 1950 and 1965, this kind of advertising cost a senator his seat and put a civil rights leader’s face on hundreds of billboards as a foreign agent. Voters rewarded the people who paid for it, which is why candidates keep making it.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

1. Sarah Grace Taylor, “Marsha Blackburn Again Targets China in Fortune Cookie-Smashing Campaign Ad,” Nashville Banner, July 10, 2026.

2. Jasmine Laws, “Marsha Blackburn Destroys Fortune Cookies in Anti-China Campaign Ad,” Newsweek, July 9, 2026.

3. “Sen. Marsha Blackburn Wins the Republican Primary for Governor of Tennessee,” NBC News, August 6, 2026.

4. Wendy Wall, “Anti-Communism in the 1950s,” Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

5. Carol Stabile, “How the Red Scare Shaped American Television,” American Masters, PBS, February 28, 2025.

6. “McCarthyism and the Red Scare,” Miller Center, University of Virginia.

7. “The Press: Unpretty Picture,” Time, 1951.

8. “John M. Butler, Senator From Md. in 1950s, Dies,” Washington Post, March 17, 1978.

9. “Highlander Folk School,” Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University.

10. Georgia Commission on Education, Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tenn. (Atlanta, GA, 1957).

11. Library of Congress, “Billboard with Photograph of Dr. Martin Luther King and Others Seated in a Classroom at the Highlander Folk School, Monteagle, Tenn.,” 1965, Prints and Photographs Division.

12. Nico Slate, “The Radical Civil Rights Movement: The Highlander Folk School and the Legacies of the Left in Cold War America,” Past & Present 260, no. 1 (August 2023): 200–235.

13. John M. Glen, Highlander: No Ordinary School (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996).

14. “Blackburn Targets Immigrants in Second Campaign Ad, While PAC Spends More Than $2 Million for Her Campaign,” Nashville Banner, July 16, 2026.

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On July 26, 2026, a man I went to high school with sent me a message. He started by saying he doubted I would remember him. He wrote that watching me teach history pushed him to go back to school and finish his history degree, with law school after that. He said my research helped him process his relationship to the past and to his past actions. He described himself as a former conservative and a former Mormon. He closed by saying he doubted I would ever read the message or care.

I read it several times. We went to Poolesville High School in Montgomery County, Maryland, the specific history of that town part of why the message meant so much to me.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

Poolesville in 1956

Poolesville is in the northwestern corner of my county, in farm country. In 1922, Klansmen organized in Montgomery County, and by the fall of 1925 they ran as many as twelve chapters stretching from Takoma Park and Bethesda out to Poolesville and Damascus.

In 1955, Superintendent Forbes Norris began desegregating Montgomery County schools in phases, starting near the populated center of the county and moving outward. In the fall of 1956, officials extended the plan to Poolesville and assigned fourteen Black students in the seventh through ninth grades to the K-12 school there. About 150 white adults blocked the entrances on the first day. Thirty police officers walked the children past the crowd and into the building. Parents and students held signs reading “Keep Poolesville White” and “Stop Integration.”

That night, a segregationist group called the Maryland Petition Committee filled Poolesville Town Hall, and parents of 153 children marched on the county courthouse to spread the boycott across the county. Norris warned that keeping a child out of school carried a $50 fine and a 30-day jail term, and parents ended the boycott within the week. Montgomery County desegregated the rest of its schools without organized opposition. Poolesville was the exception.

Two Sides of One County

I grew up in Germantown, about twenty miles east. In 2023, the personal finance site WalletHub ranked Germantown the most ethnically diverse city in the country, using measures that included linguistic and birthplace diversity. My elementary school was a Title 1 school, meaning the federal government sent it extra money because of how many low-income students it enrolled. My middle school, Neelsville, was majority Black and Hispanic, and students called it the “Prison on the Hill” because the building was falling apart.

At the end of eighth grade, I applied to the Science, Technology, and Mathematics magnet program at Poolesville High School and got in. Poolesville was on the wealthier and whiter side of the county. Montgomery County directed money into its facilities and curriculum because officials designated it an excellent school, and for years it ranked first in Maryland. By the time I graduated, I was the only Black student out of 240 in the magnet program.

What Keeps This Going

The man who messaged me came out of that school. He grew up conservative and Mormon, and he spent years holding positions he now regrets. Nobody argued him out of them. He read and watched history that nobody taught him, and he changed his mind. Then he enrolled in classes to study it himself.

That is what this newsletter is for. I have no advertisers and no corporate owner, so paid subscribers cover the research and the production. Every subscription pays for the next story that schools left out. If my work has changed how you understand this country, a paid subscription keeps it going.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Personal communication to the author, July 26, 2026.

Montgomery County Lynching Memorial Project. “A Look at the History of Racial Violence in Montgomery County.”

Poolesville Seniors. “67th Anniversary for Poolesville Schools Integration.” September 2023.

“Desegregation in Poolesville.” The Crisis at Mansfield.

Washington Area Spark. “White Supremacists Boycott Poolesville School: 1956.”

WTOP News. “Germantown, MD, Tops List of Most Diverse Places in the US.” February 2023.

USLegal. “Title 1 School Law and Legal Definition.”

Fox 5 Washington, DC. “Neelsville Middle Students Speak Out About School Nicknamed ‘Prison on the Hill.’”

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At Stone Mountain Park in Georgia, fifteen miles east of Atlanta, state officials spent $11 million on a museum exhibit that explains how the Ku Klux Klan came back to life on that mountain in 1915. In July 2025, the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans sued to stop the exhibit, arguing that it violated a state law requiring the park to operate as a Confederate memorial. Georgia’s attorney general moved to dismiss the suit.

The history under dispute begins with a single night in November 1915, when sixteen men climbed the mountain and set a cross on fire. They did it because of a movie. Director D.W. Griffith released The Birth of a Nation that year, and the men on the mountain copied what they saw on the screen, down to the robes and the flaming cross. The Klan that Americans recognize today came out of fiction, and the men who joined it learned the part from a film.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!

Subscribe now

How the Story Got Made

Novelist Thomas Dixon Jr. published The Clansman in 1905, a book that presented Reconstruction as a period when freed Black Southerners and Northern politicians terrorized white families until hooded riders restored order. Dixon toured the country with a stage version. In 1915, he sold the film rights to Griffith, a Kentucky director whose father fought for the Confederacy.

Griffith spent an unprecedented amount of money on the production and used techniques that audiences had not seen before, including close-ups, cross-cutting between separate scenes, and a full orchestral score. The film ran more than three hours. It premiered in Los Angeles on February 8, 1915, and became the most profitable American film made to that point, taking in $3.75 million in New York City alone by the end of the year.

Dixon had studied at Johns Hopkins University alongside Woodrow Wilson in the 1880s, and he used that connection to arrange a screening at the White House. On February 18, 1915, Wilson, his daughters, and members of his cabinet watched the film in the East Room, the first motion picture ever shown there. Dixon wanted a presidential endorsement to fend off the censorship boards that could ban a film in any city. Wilson supposedly called it “like writing history with lightning.” Historian Mark Benbow traced that line and found no printed version of it until 1937, twenty-two years after the screening and thirteen years after Wilson’s death. Dixon never mentioned it in his memoirs. Other people present recalled that Wilson left without saying anything.

Costumes and Rituals

Confederate veterans founded the first Klan in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1865. Federal prosecutors broke it under the Enforcement Acts, and by the mid-1870s it no longer functioned as an organization. Its members had worn whatever they could assemble, in many colors, and they never burned crosses.

Dixon invented the burning cross. In Book IV of The Clansman, one character presents “the old Scottish rite of the burning cross” and describes couriers carrying a fiery cross from village to village to summon the clans. Dixon took the image from Sir Walter Scott’s 1810 poem The Lady of the Lake, which described the Highland practice of lighting a cross to call Scottish clansmen to battle. No evidence connects that Scottish custom to the Reconstruction Klan.

Griffith filmed the scene. In the movie, a rider lifts a burning cross over his head, and the theater orchestra played Wagner as white audiences cheered. Griffith also dressed his riders in matching white robes and pointed hoods, giving the Klan a uniform it had never possessed.

Stone Mountain, 1915

William Joseph Simmons, a former Methodist preacher who made his living selling memberships in fraternal orders, followed the film’s success from Atlanta. He obtained a copy of the original Klan’s founding document and wrote his own prospectus around it. On Thanksgiving eve, November 25, 1915, he led fifteen men up Stone Mountain, swore them in, and burned a cross, borrowing the ceremony directly from Griffith’s picture.

Simmons later explained that he chose Thanksgiving because something was about to happen in Atlanta the following week that would give his new order a boost. The Birth of a Nation opened in the city in early December. Simmons bought newspaper advertisements announcing his organization and placed them beside the theater’s advertisements for the film. On opening night, Simmons and his men rode down Peachtree Street in white sheets on hooded horses, firing rifle salutes outside the theater.

Recruitment moved slowly at first, and Simmons only signed up about five thousand men over five years. In June 1920, he hired Edward Young Clarke and Elizabeth Tyler of the Southern Publicity Association, who ran a professional marketing operation and took most of the dues. Membership then climbed into the millions. Historian Linda Gordon estimates four to six million members at the peak; other historians put the figure between 2.5 and 4 million. The organization grew fastest outside the South. In Indiana, roughly 250,000 men joined, close to a third of the state’s white Protestant male population, and Grand Dragon D.C. Stephenson drew more than 100,000 people to a rally in Kokomo in July 1923. Stephenson’s 1925 conviction for the abduction and death of Madge Oberholtzer collapsed the organization within two years.

Opposition and What It Won

Black Americans fought the film from the moment it opened. Boston Guardian editor William Monroe Trotter, who graduated from Harvard in 1895 and became the first African American elected to Phi Beta Kappa, organized against it through the spring of 1915. He pressed Mayor James Curley to ban it, petitioned the state legislature, and filed suit. On April 17, 1915, he tried to buy tickets at the Tremont Theatre, and police arrested him along with ten others.

The NAACP, then five years old, worked mainly through censorship boards, and some of its leaders worried that public protest would advertise the film. Trotter and the NAACP’s Boston branch together staged roughly eighteen mass rallies by June, drawing between five hundred and 2,500 people each. Massachusetts passed a new censorship law, and the board it created then ruled the film unobjectionable. Theaters in Boston screened it 360 times over six and a half months. The campaign brought the young NAACP national attention and put Black protest on the front pages of seven daily newspapers in a single city.

The Mountain Today

Georgia law still protects the carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee, and Thomas Jackson on the face of Stone Mountain, and it cannot legally be altered or obscured. The state’s plan to explain in a museum what happened on that mountain in 1915 drew a lawsuit within months. Griffith and Dixon built the Klan that millions of Americans joined, and the people who defend the site where those men gathered are still working to keep that account out of public view.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Gringlas, Sam. “Confederacy Group Sues Georgia State Park over Exhibit on Slavery, White Supremacy.” NPR, July 14, 2025.

Dixon, Thomas, Jr. The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan. New York: Doubleday, Page, 1905.

Stokes, Melvyn. D. W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation: A History of “The Most Controversial Motion Picture of All Time.” New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

Benbow, Mark E. “Birth of a Quotation: Woodrow Wilson and ‘Like Writing History with Lightning.’” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 9, no. 4 (2010): 509–33.

Chalmers, David M. Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan. 3rd ed. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987.

Scott, Walter. The Lady of the Lake. Edinburgh: John Ballantyne, 1810.

Rice, Tom. White Robes, Silver Screens: Movies and the Making of the Ku Klux Klan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015.

Gordon, Linda. The Second Coming of the KKK: The Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s and the American Political Tradition. New York: Liveright, 2017.

Pegram, Thomas R. One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2011.

Greenidge, Kerri K. Black Radical: The Life and Times of William Monroe Trotter. New York: Liveright, 2020.

Lehr, Dick. The Birth of a Movement: How Birth of a Nation Ignited the Battle for Civil Rights. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.

Official Code of Georgia Annotated § 50-3-1.

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In 2009, workers building an underground parking garage in Lagos, a port town on Portugal’s southern coast, cut into a fifteenth-century rubbish dump outside the old city walls and found human bone. Archaeologists from the University of Coimbra recovered 158 skeletons of men, women, and children. Intentionally filed teeth and African ornaments among the remains pointed to African origin, and genetic testing confirmed West and Central African ancestry. Nobody gave these people a burial, and someone threw them into the dump alongside butchered animal bones and broken pottery. Six of them showed physical evidence of binding.

Today, a multi-level parking complex covers the site, and a minigolf course sits on top of it. In July 2025, Portuguese director Dulce Fernandes released a documentary about the excavation, Contos do Esquecimento, in cinemas across Portugal. Lagos is where Portuguese merchants held Europe’s first recorded public sale of enslaved Africans, in August 1444, 175 years before the White Lion sold African captives to English colonists in Virginia. The plantation system that American slaveholders later ran took its shape on Portuguese islands in the Atlantic. American slavery grew out of an older business, and knowing that origin does not make American slavery smaller.

Trade Across the Sahara

Long before Portuguese sailors reached West Africa, merchants moved enslaved people north across the desert. Following the Arab conquests of North Africa in the seventh century, Berber traders ran caravans between the West African savanna and the Mediterranean coast, carrying gold and captives north and salt and cloth south. Merchants sold enslaved people at Sijilmasa in present-day Morocco, and buyers carried them onward to Egypt and to Mediterranean ports.

Historians estimate that around nine million Africans crossed the Sahara or the Indian Ocean into slavery between roughly 800 and 1800, though the surviving records are thin and the estimates vary. Buyers in North Africa and the Middle East wanted women more than men, largely for domestic and sexual labor inside wealthy households. Slavers castrated many enslaved men and boys, and many died from the procedure. By common estimate, roughly half of the captives died on the desert crossing.

Islamic law prohibited the enslavement of Muslims, so merchants raided and purchased from non-Muslim populations further south. In 1377, the North African historian Ibn Khaldun wrote in the Muqaddimah that Black Africans submitted readily to slavery because they possessed little that he counted as human. Genoese and Venetian merchants bought into these markets throughout the late Middle Ages, and by the 1460s Africans made up roughly a tenth of Lisbon’s population.

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August 1444

In the 1430s, Portuguese mariners sailed past Cape Bojador on the Moroccan coast for the first time, using the newly designed caravel. Prince Henry, the king’s brother, organized and licensed the voyages that followed. In 1444, Lançarote de Freitas, a customs official at Lagos, took out one of those licenses and assembled the first slaving expedition that merchants rather than the crown financed. Six caravels raided Idzagen fishing settlements off present-day Mauritania and seized about 235 people, killing those who resisted.

On August 8, 1444, the caravels landed at Lagos. Residents gathered to watch. Henry supervised from horseback while his officials marched the captives to open ground outside a town gate and divided them into five lots. Henry took forty-six people as his royal fifth. Buyers kept the rest or bid for them at auction.

Gomes Eanes de Zurara, a royal chronicler whom King Afonso V commissioned to praise Henry, described the morning in his Crónica dos Feitos da Guiné around 1453. He wrote that the men handling the division separated children from parents and wives from husbands. Zurara also sorted the captives by skin color and described the darkest among them as living without reason or custom, which he offered as grounds for enslaving and converting them. Historians read Zurara cautiously, since Henry’s household employed him. Popes supplied the legal cover. In 1452, Nicholas V issued Dum Diversas, which authorized Afonso V to reduce non-Christians to permanent servitude, and in 1455 he issued Romanus Pontifex, which granted Portugal exclusive rights along the African coast.

Sugar and the Atlantic Islands

Portuguese merchants put enslaved labor to work on islands. Settlers planted sugar on Madeira in the 1450s and began settling São Tomé, in the Gulf of Guinea, in the 1490s. On São Tomé, Portuguese planters assembled the parts of a system that later spread across the Americas. No population lived on the island before they arrived, so every worker reached it by ship. Planters grew a single export crop and bought enslaved Africans from the mainland to run mills that demanded continuous labor through the harvest. The planters and their mill designs moved from São Tomé to Brazil. Spanish colonists carried the same arrangement further west. In 1526, they brought enslaved Africans to San Miguel de Gualdape near present-day Savannah, Georgia, the first enslaved Africans in what became the United States.

Arguments About Comparison

Some writers point to trans-Saharan slavery and to slavery inside African societies to claim that American slavery resembled everything around it and warrants no particular attention. In 2023, the Journal of Free Black Thought published an essay by the historian Justin Suran arguing that chattel slavery in the United States stood out for its similarities to other systems rather than for its differences.

In 2003, the Ohio State historian Robert Davis published Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, which estimated that corsairs operating from North African ports such as Algiers and Tunis enslaved between one million and 1.25 million European Christians between 1530 and 1780. Davis reached that figure by extrapolation. He took counts from single locations and calculated how many new captives traders needed each year to replace those who died or left by ransom. Ehud Toledano reviewed the book in the Journal of African History and noted that Davis wrote about Ottoman slavery without consulting Ottoman sources. White nationalist websites have circulated Davis’s number for two decades.

West African households absorbed enslaved people into kinship groups, and many gained freedom within a lifetime. Their children often held free status at birth. Slaveholders in the Americas built something else. They made the status permanent and heritable by law, and they attached it to African descent. The Portuguese and Spanish merchants who supplied Iberian buyers in the fifteenth century supplied American buyers in the sixteenth, working the same ports under the same papal authorizations.

Memory in Portugal

Portuguese officials have not settled how to mark any of this. In 2016, the Lagos city council opened a slavery museum in the old customs building, a few hundred meters from the burial site and near a statue of Henry raised under the Salazar dictatorship. The 158 skeletons remain at a research facility in Coimbra. In December 2024, Elena Morán, the archaeologist who directs the museum, announced plans for a memorial at the excavation site. The parking complex and the minigolf course still cover the ground, and researchers do not know how many bodies lie underneath, since the excavation reached only part of the site.

American slaveholders did not invent the system they ran. Portuguese merchants assembled it across the fifteenth century on the Iberian coast and the Atlantic islands, and Spanish and English colonists carried it across the ocean. American slaveholders inherited a working business and expanded it for another two centuries.

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Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Ferreira, Maria Teresa, Catarina Coelho, and Sofia N. Wasterlain. “Discarded in the Trash: Burials of African Enslaved Individuals in Valle da Gafaria, Lagos, Portugal (15th–17th Centuries).” International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 29, no. 4 (2019): 670–80.

Marcocci, Giuseppe, dir. The Early Atlantic Slave Trade in Portugal: A Digital Archive of Contested Legacies. University of Oxford and EuroClio, 2025.

Fernandes, Dulce, dir. Contos do Esquecimento. Lisbon: Ukbar Filmes, 2025.

Sherry, Bennett. “Trans-Saharan Trade Routes.” OER Project, World History Project.

Koigi, Bob. “Forgotten Slavery: The Arab-Muslim Slave Trade.” FairPlanet, Beyond Slavery dossier.

Ibn Khaldun. The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967.

Lowcountry Digital History Initiative. “Slavery Before the Trans-Atlantic Trade.” African Passages, Lowcountry Adaptations. College of Charleston.

Lowcountry Digital History Initiative. “Launching the Portuguese Slave Trade in Africa.” African Laborers for a New Empire: Iberia, Slavery, and the Atlantic World. College of Charleston.

Meredith, Martin. The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor. New York: PublicAffairs, 2014.

Zurara, Gomes Eannes de. The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea. Translated by Charles Raymond Beazley and Edgar Prestage. 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society, 1896–99.

Suran, Justin. “Was American Slavery Unique?” Journal of Free Black Thought, May 17, 2023.

Davis, Robert C. Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Toledano, Ehud R. Review of Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters, by Robert C. Davis. Journal of African History 47, no. 1 (2006).

Mohamed, Rawan. “From Chains to Change: The Differences Between African Slavery and the Trans-Atlantic Trade.” The Gale Review, April 8, 2025.

“Lagos to Honour African Slaves with Memorial.” Portugal Resident, December 11, 2024.

Nine days earlier, he resigned from his professorship at the University of Cambridge and his fellowship at Jesus College, after the university opened an investigation into his academic qualifications and honorary appointments.

In 2023, Cambridge hired Arday at 37 and promoted him as the youngest Black professor in the institution’s history. His family said he faced a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years. The Metropolitan Police are treating his death as unexpected and not suspicious, and a coroner will determine the cause. What happened to Arday over the past month went far beyond anything the allegations against him could account for.

Allegations and Findings

Nathan Cofnas, a Cambridge researcher who has argued that in a meritocracy Black people would be famous only for sports and entertainment, first published the plagiarism claims publicly.

Academics unconnected to Cofnas then raised concerns, including Colin Mills, head of Oxford’s department of sociology.

The Times found that Arday described the same research participant differently across papers, with those inconsistencies appearing at least 25 times across three papers, and that one participant quote closely matched earlier work by epidemiologist Anjum Memon. Arday admitted errors and denied fabricating anything. He told The Times, “I am accountable for the mistakes I’ve made,” and, “what I am not is a liar.”

In March, a misconduct panel at Liverpool John Moores University, where Arday completed his PhD in 2015, concluded that the citation problems resulted from honest and reasonable error, and the university upheld his doctorate. The panel also accepted that Arday lacked a full supervisory team, and Arday said he received one formal supervision session during the entire doctorate.

I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!

With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.

If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.

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Scale of the Response

Arday became the subject of hundreds of articles in British and international press, and the scrutiny intensified before Simon and Schuster published his memoir on Tuesday. On Newsnight, Labour MP Bell Ribeiro-Addy read out the names of William O’Reilly, Ross Holmes, David Lachman, and Nicola Morrison, academics who plagiarized work or manipulated data, and said the difference between them and Arday was that they were white.

Journalist Ash Sarkar said Arday was not the first Cambridge academic accused of plagiarism, and he was the first whose case ran on front pages for days. Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge autism researcher and Arday’s friend, said Arday was not coping and that people ridiculed and discredited every detail of his life.

Cambridge’s Role

Cambridge promoted Arday heavily after hiring him, and the university defended him publicly when the first accusations appeared. According to Retraction Watch, an academic integrity site, complaints about duplication in Arday’s work circulated inside Cambridge for years, and the university disregarded repeated warnings.

On Tuesday, Cambridge wrote to faculty calling the case an aberration and promising an independent investigation of his hiring. A group of academics signed an open letter criticizing the university for building a media narrative around Arday’s youth and his race. James Cleverly, a Conservative MP, said institutions put Arday in a position he was not qualified for so they could show off a Black wunderkind.

Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, said Arday faced a public shaming that others in his position would not have faced. Daniel Kebede, general secretary of the National Education Union, said the case tells Black people that taking a prominent public role makes them a target. Arday made errors in his work and acknowledged them. The campaign that followed had a scale and a duration his errors do not explain, and a man died at the end of it.

I write this newsletter because the people who did this to Jason Arday work on this side of the Atlantic too, and I have been on the receiving end of it.

On July 4, the White House Domestic Policy Council published a 162-page report on the Smithsonian titled Saving America’s Story. My name is on page 56. The report lists me as one of three featured speakers the National Museum of American History invited to its 2024 National Youth Summit, and offers that as proof the museum recruited Democratic Party operatives to turn American teenagers into political activists. The one sentence about me concerns ICE. The footnote supporting it points to a podcast episode released in February 2026, seventeen months after the summit ended.

I am 26 years old and I teach history on the internet. That was enough to put my name in a federal report. TikTok and Instagram have removed my videos, and I have watched my reach collapse after I covered certain subjects. What happened to Arday is the same process at a scale I have not faced, and it ended with a man dead at 41.

This newsletter is the one place where nobody else holds the switch. Fewer than 5% of my subscribers pay for it. If you have been reading for free, I am asking you to change that today. It costs about what you spend on one coffee a month, and it is what keeps me writing while people with far more power would prefer that I stopped.

🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨

Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!

If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.

So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.

But less than 5% of you are paid supporters.

That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.

This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.

• 📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.

• 🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.

• 🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.

I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.

History Can't Hide from Kahlil Greene is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

If you’re having trouble upgrading your subscription with the above link, visit historycanthide.substack.com/subscribe

Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian), PayPal (@kahlilgreene2), or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00).

References

Reck, Charlotte. “Cambridge professor found dead after scrutiny over academic record faced ‘sustained abuse,’ family say.” CNN, August 15, 2026.

Hvistendahl, Mara. “Jason Arday, Cambridge Scholar Who Resigned Under Scrutiny, Is Found Dead.” The New York Times, August 14, 2026.

Hamilton, Fiona, and Emma Yeomans. “Jason Arday: I am not a liar, says star academic accused of plagiarism.” The Times, July 31, 2026.

Ahmed, Aneesa. “Tributes paid to Jason Arday after former Cambridge professor’s death.” The Guardian, August 15, 2026.

In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be reached at 116 123. In the US, call or text 988.