White Genocide Week - Day Four!

Wonderful Whites Day!

Happy WHITE GENOCIDE WEEK, y'all!

I wanted today to be a celebration of wonderful white people, living and dead, that I don't think get enough recognition for being as outstanding as they are or were. These people are the best not just of whites but of all people. They are boldest, bravest, and brashest. The crème de la crème, if you will. 

Newton Knight 

"If they had a right to conscript me when I didn't want to fight the Union, I had a right to quit when I got ready."

Newton Knight was brought to my attention by the movie "Free State of Jones". Watching this harrowing story of love and survival in the face of hate and death, which I HIGHLY recommend, I couldn't help but ask why I hadn't heard of him before. The answer, unsurprisingly, is that they attempted to intentionally erase him from history. Good for him and us that they failed.

Here's a synopsis from Biography.com-

Newton Knight was born in 1837 in Jones County, Mississippi. Knight opposed the state seceding from the United States, saying that white farmers like himself did not support slavery. After deserting from the Confederate army, he led a rebellion against the Confederacy in Jones County, according to lore and declaring it “The Free State of Jones.” After the war, he lived with a woman who had been enslaved. They had five children. Knight's descendants formed a biracial community in the segregated South.

The beard alone is bad ass. Add the fact that he deserted the Confederate army to fight against them, and had him some hybrid, white genocide babies along the way, and he sits firmly on the top of my list.

James Zwerg

"When you think about what we were doing — wanting to have lunch with our friends, riding a bus, going to a movie, taking a taxi cab, going to see a doctor, or an emergency room — these are things people do every day," Zwerg says now. "How does that provoke violence?"

Jim is the best kind of hero - one that vehemently denies being one. He was just a kid from Wisconsin that, having never seen segregation before, wanted to stand up for his friends. In doing so he was almost beaten to death by racist southern white people alongside John Lewis. In response to this savage beating he had this to say:

"We're dedicated to this," Zwerg said. "We'll take hitting. We'll take beating. We're willing to accept death. But we're going to keep coming until we can ride from anywhere in the South to anyplace else in the South, without anybody making any comments. Just as American citizens."

Here is a great article from Tony Gonzalez on this awesome individual.

Juliette Hampton Morgan

"Are people really naïve enough to believe that Negroes are happy, grateful to be pushed around and told they are inferior and ordered to 'move on back'? They may take it for a long time, but not forever."

Juliette was just a librarian.She was wealthy, privileged, beautiful, and, most dangerous of all for an activist, white.  She wasn't the subject of racism, violence, and oppression by default. She could have lived her entire life happily ignoring the injustice around her but she refused. Unable to drive, she was forced to ride public transportation. It was there that she saw the terrible treatment that black Americans were receiving for nothing more than their skin color. 

From Katlyn Joy at Listverse.com: 

...she began writing letters to the local newspaper, advocating fair treatment of black people. As a result, she became a target of all manner of attacks, including taunting at work, mocking by bus drivers and white passengers, and public humiliation. The situation escalated when a cross was burned into her lawn.

 When she continued to write, she received numerous death threats and attempts to have her fired. She ultimately could not withstand the assaults: She resigned her post on July 15, 1957, and was found dead the next morning from an intentional overdose of pills. Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote of her in his book, Strive Towards Freedom: The Montgomery Story, saying that she was the first to draw parallels between the movement and Gandhi in her letters to the editor. 

Rev. James Reeb

"So in his death, James Reeb says something to each of us, black and white alike—says that we must substitute courage for caution, says to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy that produced the murder. His death says to us that we must work passionately, unrelentingly, to make the American dream a reality, so he did not die in vain."

- Martin Luther King, Jr

Since James Reeb has a dedicated Unitarian Universalist congregation dedicated to him, I figured I'd just link them here. They have some great links there you can check out on him. This is from their section "Who was James Reeb?";

The Rev. James Reeb was a white Unitarian Universalist minister who worked with poor people in Boston. He answered the call of Dr. Martin Luther King for clergy to come to Selma, Alabama, to protest violence by state troopers against civil rights marchers.  

On March 9, 1965, Reeb and two other UU ministers, Rev. Orloff Miller and Rev. Clark Olsen, were walking back after dinner to a meeting led by Dr. King when they were attacked by a group of white men. One hit Rev. Reeb in the head with a club. The blow was fatal; Rev. Reeb died March 11, 1965. 

Though Jimmy Lee Jackson, an African-American hospital worker, had been killed in the civil rights struggle in Selma two weeks earlier, Rev. Reeb's murder drew national attention, and is credited with helping to hasten passage of the federal Voting Rights Act. 

The founders of our congregation decided to name it after Rev. Reeb as a sign of our commitment to social justice and the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

Although his murder drew national attention, none of his murderers ever saw the inside of a cell. In April 1965, all four men - Elmer Cook, William Stanley Hoggle, Namon O’Neal Hoggle, and R.B. Kelley - were indicted in Dallas County, Alabama for Reeb’s murder; three were acquitted by an all-white jury, surprise, surprise, that December. The fourth man fled to Mississippi and was not returned by the state authorities for trial.

Viola Gregg Liuzzo

“[We're] going to change the world. One day they'll write about us. You'll see.”

Viola Liuzzo is another kindhearted person that, hearing the call of her fellow Americans in need, traveled to Selma to assist in voter registration efforts and civil rights protests in general. It's said that her pilgrimage from Detroit, Michigan, where she had five children and a second husband, was fueled in no small part by the events of March 7, 1965 - "Bloody Sunday". This was the first march from Selma. Predictably, it ended in teargas and bloody batons.

Viola was already an activist, being a member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and she cared deeply about the cause. She worked to ferry black voters back and forth from Selma and Montgomery until a group of KKK terrorists, one of them an FBI informant, rolled up next to her car at a stop light and shot her in the face. Her car rolled off the road, through a ditch, and came to rest against a beat up out fence. Her passenger, a black teenager by the name of Leroy Moton, played dead as the terrorists circled back to make sure they were both dead. Covered in blood, and terrified, his ruse worked.

LBJ announced her killers had been caught the very next day and Michigan governor George Romney, Mitt's dear old dad, said this; 

“Viola Liuzzo gave her life for what she believed in, and what she believed in is the cause of humanity everywhere.”

And for all of the words of these politicians, for all the outrage, for all the media attention, her killers were never convicted of her murder. The closest they got was federal firearms charges.

The only silver lining I can see in the whole story is that the defense attorney Matt Murphy, who referred to Viola as a "white nigger" in his closing arguments, fell asleep at the wheel of his car, and died when it smashed into a gasoline truck.

Good riddance.

Jonathan Myrick Daniels

"One of the most heroic Christian deeds of which I have heard in my entire ministry was performed by Jonathan Daniels."

- Martin Luther King, Jr

Jonathan Myrick Daniels was a Harvard educated Episcopalian priest that had the extreme misfortune of being a white man with empathy in a land full of violent white supremacist terrorists. One of the many clergymen recruited by Martin Luther King Jr, he traveled to Selma with other students, a year shy of graduating the seminary, to join the cause. 

Initially intending to stay for only the weekend, he missed his bus home, and returned to the Episcopal Theological School in Cambridge, Massachusetts just in time to request to spend the semester working and studying in Selma. While there he worked to integrate the local Episcopal church by bringing groups of young African Americans there with him. His attempts were mostly unsuccessful. He headed back up to the seminary, passed his exams, and returned to Selma to continue his civil rights work - registering voters, organizing federal, state, and local agencies to provide aid to the needy, tutoring children, and helping those in need to apply for aid.

From the wiki - 

On August 14, 1965, Daniels was one of a group of 29 protesters, including members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), who went to Fort Deposit, Alabama to picket its whites-only stores. All of the protesters were arrested and taken to jail in the nearby town of Hayneville. The police released five juvenile protesters the next day. The rest of the group was held for six days; they refused to accept bail unless everyone was bailed.Finally, on August 20, the prisoners were released without transport back to Fort Deposit. After release, the group waited near the courthouse jail while one of their members called for transport. Daniels with three others—a white Catholic priest and two black female activists—walked to buy a cold soft drink at nearby Varner's Cash Store, one of the few local places to serve non-whites. But barring the front was Tom L. Coleman, an unpaid special deputy who was holding a shotgun and had a pistol in a holster. Coleman threatened the group and leveled his gun at seventeen-year-old Ruby Sales. Daniels pushed Sales down and caught the full blast of the shotgun. He was instantly killed. Father Richard F. Morrisroe grabbed activist Joyce Bailey and ran with her. Coleman shot Morrisroe, severely wounding him in the lower back, and then stopped firing.[5]

Murdered, at 26 years old, for trying to give rights to black people.

His murderer, Tom L. Coleman, was never prosecuted. He lived a long, free life and died in 1997. He was 86. 

Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman

Schwerner "was described by family and friends as friendly, good-natured, gentle, mischievous, and 'full of life and ideas'. He believed all people were essentially good. He named his cocker spaniel 'Ghandhi'. He loved sports, animals, poker, W.C. Fields, and rock music."

By all accounts, Mickey Schwerner was a sheepdog from the beginning. As a boy he protected his friends, notable among them Robert Reich, from bullies. He wanted to be a veterinarian, later switched his major to rural sociology, got involved in the civil rights movement, and became the leader of his local Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) group on the lower east side of Manhattan.

Andrew Goodman was born and raised on the upper west side. His path was both very different and very similar to Schwerner's. He attended Queens College in New York city, where he was a friend and classmate to Paul Simon, and he'd intended to study drama - even gaining some off broadway experience along the way. He, too, changed his mind. He switched to anthropology. It seems that this passion is what propelled him into social activism. 

He joined Schwerner, head of the CORE field office, in Meridian, Mississippi for the "Freedom Summer" project, and worked with him to register black voters. Meridian was a hostile place for these two New York Jews. They set out on June 21, 1964, with Meridian native James Chaney, an African American activist, to investigate the burning of a black church that had been being used for education and voter registration. The trio never made it back. The account of their murder by KKK terrorists is chilling and heartbreaking.

On their return to Meridian, the three men were stopped and arrested by Deputy Sheriff Cecil Price (a Klan member) for allegedly driving 35 miles over the 30-mile-per-hour speed limit. The trio were taken to the jail in Neshoba County where Chaney was booked for speeding, while Schwerner and Goodman were booked "for investigation". After Chaney was fined $20, the three men were released and told to leave the county. Price followed them in his patrol car. At 10:25, Price sped to catch up with the station wagon before it crossed the border into the relative safety of Lauderdale County. Price ordered the three out of their car and into his. He then drove them to a deserted area on Rock Cut Road while being followed by two cars filled with other Klansmen. He then turned them over to the Klansmen who beat Chaney and then shot and killed Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney.

Predictably, the trial that followed was a farce. However, in 2005, thanks in no small part to the brilliant work of investigative reporter Jerry Mitchell, a white supremacist by the wholly unsurprising name of Edgar Ray Killen, who's nickname was "Preacher", was investigated, tried, and convicted of the three murders - Although they still shied away from "murder" outright and settled for manslaughter. He's currently rotting in prison. He's eligible for parole in 2025. He's 92. 


The deaths of the three men left an indelible mark on those that had known them in life, and even those that hadn't, and they continue to be beacons of light and stark reminders of the brutality of white supremacist terrorism to this day. Goodman's parents, in particular, used the event to launch a noble foundation that to this day works towards the very goals for which he, James, and Mickey gave their lives.

In 1966, Andrew’s parents, Robert and Carolyn Goodman started The Andrew Goodman Foundation to carry on the spirit and purpose of their son’s life. After the death of Robert Goodman in 1969, Carolyn continued the work of the Foundation, focusing on projects like a reverse march to Mississippi and a 25th Anniversary Memorial. The memorial, which took place at St. John The Divine Church in NYC, was attended by 10,000 people and was presided by Governor Mario Cuomo, Maya Angelou, Peter Seeger, Aaron Henry, Harry Belafonte, Robert Kennedy Jr., and others closely associated with the Civil Rights movement. After Carolyn’s death in August 2007, David Goodman, Andrew’s younger brother, and Sylvia Golbin Goodman, David’s wife, took up the work of the Foundation.

For nearly 50 years, the organization was a private foundation acting in the public interest. With their eyes set on the future, the Board of Trustees of The Andrew Goodman Foundation elected to turn the organization into a public charity in 2012. In 2014, on the fiftieth anniversary of the murders, the Foundation officially launched Vote Everywhere, a program designed to support college students who are continuing the work of Freedom Summer.

This concludes "Wonderful Whites Day!". Thanks for reading and remember:

I don't hate white people - Just white supremacy.

See you tomorrow for "Odin's Day - The Link Between Odinism and White Supremacy".

- Soos