Black History Month Part 6: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Architecture of Exclusion – Footnotes
Federal Housing Administration, Underwriting Manual (Washington: FHA, 1938), Part II, Section 9, paragraph 937. https://www.huduser.gov/portal/sites/default/files/pdf/Federal-Housing-Administration-Underwriting-Manual.pdf HMDA Annual Data. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/data-research/hmda/ CRA Examination Reports. Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council. https://www.ffiec.gov/cra/ Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022. https://www.federalreserve.gov/publications/files/scf23.pdf Debbie Gruenstein Bocian et al., Foreclosures by Race and […]
Black History Month Part 5: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: Reconstruction and the First Betrayal – Footnotes
Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), 425–444. Foner’s documentation of Klan violence and the federal response — and withdrawal — is the definitive scholarly treatment. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/reconstruction-eric-foner Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: […]
Black History Month Part 5: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: Reconstruction and the First Betrayal
How Every Promise Made to Black America Was Earned, Not Given — and Then Systematically Taken Back By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Pattern There is a pattern in American history that is so consistent, so documented, and so precisely repeated across 160 years that it can no longer be described as a series of […]
Black History Month Part 4: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Bible and the Whip – Footnotes
Genesis 9:20–27 (KJV). The standard scholarly treatment of the Curse of Ham and its racial application is Stephen R. Haynes, Noah’s Curse: The Biblical Justification of American Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). https://global.oup.com/academic/product/noahs-curse-9780195142792 Ephesians 6:5 (KJV). See also Colossians 3:22 and 1 Peter 2:18. The use of these passages in proslavery theology is […]
Black History Month Part 4: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Bible and the Whip
How Sacred Text Became a Weapon — and What the People It Was Used Against Did with the Same Book By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Two Weapons The apparatus of American racial slavery required two instruments of control. The first was physical. The whip, the chain, the brand, the auction block, the patrol, the […]
Black History Month Part 3: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Mirror America Still Cannot Look Into
Frederick Douglass, the Fourth of July, and the Contradiction That Has Never Been Resolved By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Man and the Moment On July 5, 1852, a man stood before an audience of approximately 600 people in Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, and delivered an address that remains, 174 years later, the […]
Black History Month Part 3: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Mirror America Still Cannot Look Into – Footnotes
Philip S. Foner, ed., The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 2 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 181. The speech was delivered on July 5 rather than July 4 at the request of the organizing committee, who held their celebration one day after the national holiday. The date itself carried meaning that Douglass exploited […]
Black History Month Part 2: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Laboratory Footnotes
Lerone Bennett Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of Black America (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1962; revised edition, New York: Penguin Books, 1993). The title references the arrival of “20 and odd” African captives at Point Comfort, Virginia, in August 1619, documented in a letter from Governor John Rolfe. https://archive.org/details/beforemayflowe00benn Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali […]
Black History Month Part 2: We Were Never Less: The Defiant Ascent of Black America: The Laboratory
How the Attempt to Define Us as Less Than Human Proved the Opposite By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA The Apparatus and Its Confession There is a principle in law that applies with particular force to the history we are about to examine. It holds that a witness who testifies against his own interest is among […]
Shared National Values
Non-White, Non-Heterosexual American History Under Erasure By Eric Lawrence Frazier, MBA On Sunday night, CBS News correspondent Norah O’Donnell sat down with Maryland Governor Wes Moore—the nation’s only Black governor—for a nationally televised town hall and asked him a question that, by now, most thinking Americans have already answered for themselves: Do you consider President […]
