Bullets and Ballot Boxes

April 24, 2018 8:51 PM

On the evening of September 8, 1948, young Dorothy Nixon and her grandmother heard a car approach their home and heard two white men calling for her father. The white men had grown up near the Nixons and were well known to the family: Johnnie Johnson arrived with a shotgun, and his brother, Jim A. Johnson, carried a pistol. Jim called up to the Nixon’s house, demanding Isaiah Nixon come outside. When Nixon stepped onto the porch, Johnson asked Nixon how he voted that day...

Buried Truths is a podcast that grows out of an Emory University history class, deeply exploring a Civil Rights era murder that was never prosecuted, giving a window into the history of the voting rights movement, Georgia politics and much more.

More on the Georgia Civil Right's Cold Cases Project.

posted by latkes (6 comments total)

One week before the election, Klansman Samuel W. Roper asked gubernatorial candidate Herman Talmadge for his thoughts on the best method of keeping black Americans from voting. In response, Talmadge wrote one word on a scrap of paper: pistols.

Scary stuff.
posted by pracowity at 12:59 AM on April 25, 2018 [4 favorites]

thanks for sharing, latkes. there's a lot of history hidden here, even in ostensibly liberal Atlanta. I've talked to immigrants, other PoC, and lefty funders here about some of the empirically suspect revisionism of slavery, Jim Crow, and the Civil Rights Era here and you'd be surprised (or not, depending on your cynicism and/or practiced engagement with your community) about how many people have adopted the white supremacist framings of state's rights, heritage not hate, and so on

I'm glad that folks are beginning to grapple with some of these issues but getting your elected officials to act on anything like displacement or Confederate monuments and so on is like trying to get a horse to come back downstairs. there is a lot of political education that needs to happen, both with community leaders and with the community itself, and I'm glad that resources like this exist

ps the link above is to Uncivil, a really excellent podcast covering the histories following the Civil War through individual stories, and how many of these threads tie to the modern day. the specific podcast linked talks about the history of state's rights and it's really worth a listen. I mean, they are all worth a listen but if you only have time for one, there ya go
posted by runt at 6:50 AM on April 25, 2018 [7 favorites]

One thing I think bears a terrible mention: looking at the other cold cases, a lot of black men who were willing to stand up despite the threat were WWII veterans - men who were entitled to our country’s deepest gratitude, who received only its scorn.

Langston Hughes saw this conflict, writing Will V-Day Be Me-Day Too,

I am a Negro American
Out to defend my land
Army, Navy, Air Corps—
I am there.
I take munitions through,
I fight—or stevedore, too.
I face death the same as you do
Everywhere.

I've seen my buddy lying
Where he fell.
I've watched him dying
I promised him that I would try
To make our land a land
Where his son could be a man—
And there'd be no Jim Crow birds
Left in our sky.

So this is what I want to know:
When we see Victory's glow,
Will you still let old Jim Crow
Hold me back?
When all those foreign folks who've waited—
Italians, Chinese, Danes—are liberated.
Will I still be ill-fated
Because I'm black?

Here in my own, my native land,
Will the Jim Crow laws still stand?
Will Dixie lynch me still
When I return?
Or will you comrades in arms
From the factories and the farms,
Have learned what this war
Was fought for us to learn?

posted by corb at 6:58 AM on April 25, 2018 [14 favorites]

Looking forward to listening to this series, thanks for posting.
posted by stillmoving at 8:48 AM on April 25, 2018

Is there no way to get to episodes 1 & 2 without going through Apple, Google, etc.? I only see 3-5 listed.
posted by introp at 1:23 PM on April 25, 2018

I know the website is weird. I wonder if you go on their Twitter or Facebook page if you can find links to the first couple episodes? I listened through a third party podcast app.
posted by latkes at 3:54 PM on April 25, 2018