Can We Handle the Truth?

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Those that scaped the fire, were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte and very few escaped. It was conceived they thus destroyed about 400.

'It was supposed that no less than 600 Pequot souls were brought down to hell that day,' wrote the Puritan theologian Cotton Mather, an expert on the destination of souls.

The massacres of American Indians by the armies of the United States-in Colorado in 1864, in Montana in 1870, in South Dakota in 1890, to cite just a few-were massacres in the most literal sense: that is, wholesale slaughter of hundreds of unarmed men, women, and children. The number of those events cannot be counted, and should by that fact be a subject for intense scrutiny.

The results of such an investigation would be as sobering to young Americans as the story of the Boston Massacre is inspiring. And sobriety about our national sins might be instructive at a time when we need to consider what role we will play in the world during the coming century.

Atrocities against African Americans took place either by official acts or by white mobs with the collaboration of government officials. In 1917, an article called 'The Massacre of East St. Louis' appeared in the NAACP publication the Crisis, written by W.E.B. Du Bois and Martha Gruening. When African Americans were hired to replace whites, hysteria took hold and a white mob attacked the black section of East St. Louis, leaving 6,000 blacks homeless and perhaps 200 dead. Mangled bodies were found floating in the Mississippi River. Josephine Baker, the St. Louis-born entertainer who decided she could not live in this country, said at the time: 'The very idea of America makes me shake and tremble and gives me nightmares.'

The killing of workers by police and militia is given little notice in our history books. I thought I knew about many of these events, but I keep learning about more, such as the Bay View Massacre in Milwaukee, which took place May 5, 1886 (the day after the Haymarket bombing in Chicago). On that day, striking steelworkers marched toward a mill in Milwaukee and were intercepted by a squad of militia who fired point-blank into the strikers, killing seven.

In 1897, there was a coal strike in Pennsylvania. Immigrant Austrians, Hungarians, Italians, and Germans were brought in to break the strike. The strikebreakers themselves soon organized and went on strike. Marching toward the Lattimer mine, they refused to disperse. The sheriff and his deputies opened fire and killed 19 people, most of them shot in the back.

In 1919, a mob attack in Elaine, Arkansas, left perhaps 100 or more African Americans dead. In 1921, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, planes dropped nitroglycerin on a 35-block black business district, destroying hundreds of businesses, more than a thousand homes, 20 churches, a hospital, libraries, and schools. The number of black people killed was estimated by some in the hundreds, by others in the thousands, with bodies put into mass graves, stuffed into mine shafts, or thrown into the river.

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