Sarah Birnbach

For the past two weeks, I have written about lynchings in both Southern states and non-Southern states. Despite the slowdown in lynchings across the country, racial terrorism created a legacy of new forms of violence, a compromised criminal justice system, and long-term psychological impacts. After the rate of lynchings slowed, violence against Black Americans took new…

WARNING: The information and photos in this newsletter can be upsetting. Lynchings were not unique to Southern states, but as the chart below indicates, the number of lynchings in non-Southern states is significantly less than those in the South. The Great Migration brought tens of thousands of African Americans to northern industrial cities. The growing Black population…

The lynching problem / Dalrymple, 1899. Courtesy: Library of Congress “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” ~ Maya Angelou, On the Pulse of Morning WARNING: The information in this newsletter may be upsetting and potentially traumatizing. DISCLAIMER: In researching material for this newsletter,…

EDITORIAL NOTE: In last week’s newsletter, the sub-heading 1868 – OPELOUSAS, GEORGIA should have been OPELOUSAS, LOUISIANA. As I mentioned in last week’s newsletter, an opinion piece in The Washington Post by Walter Greason entitled, “We must honor those lost to violent racism,” inspired me to learn more about the history of racial violence in our…

THE ISSUES On any given day, nearly half a million people languish in jail cells across America, waiting for their criminal cases to move forward, severed from their lives and communities even though they have not been convicted of a crime. People in pretrial detention now make up more than 2/3 of America’s jail population.…

THE FACTS: The United States is the world’s leader in its rate of incarceration with 2.2 million people currently in federal, state or local prisons and jails – a 500% increase over the last forty years. The United States is home to 5% of the world’s population yet it now houses 25% of the world’s prison…

I recently read an article encouraging readers to buy and read more books by writers of color. And to be honest, even though I’ve ready many authors of color, when I went to my bookshelf, I clearly had many many more books by white authors. Since my right arm will be immobilized in a sling…

Back in July, I wrote a newsletter listing organizations that work to combat racism, with hotlinks to the websites of each organization (a partial list at best). If you missed that newsletter, you can find it here. Now I’ve thought of additional ways we can use our dollars to combat racism. The five ideas below are thought…

“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.” ~ Frederick Douglass For the past two weeks, I’ve written about the disparities in our educational systems between Black and White children in an effort to share some of our history and make a case for integrating schools. But what about the curricula…