Ramblings

Allan C. Brownfeld

Allan C. Brownfeld is the author of five books, the latest of which is The Revolution Lobby (Council for Inter-American Security). He has been a staff aide to a U.S. Vice President, members of Congress, and the U.S. Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. He is associate editor of The Lincoln Review and a contributing editor to Human Events, The St. Croix Review, and The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Finally, the Tulsa Massacre Is Becoming a Part of Our History

Finally, 100 years after it occurred, the Tulsa Massacre of 1921 is receiving the recognition it deserves. It represents a dark day in our history.

For the first time, an American president visited Tulsa to commemorate this event. He met with three survivors, now centenarians, and the descendants of other victims. He declared that:

“For much too long, the history of what took place here, was told in silence, cloaked in darkness. But just because history is silent doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. . . . I come here to help fill the silence, because in silence wounds deepen. And, painful as it is, only in remembrance do wounds heal.”

We cannot learn from history if we pretend that it never happened. Until recently, this massacre, which killed up to 300 African Americans, burned nearly 40 square blocks to the ground, and left at least 9,000 black residents homeless, was largely unknown. Most history books never mentioned it.

I have a personal memory of visiting Tulsa and exploring the Greenwood area which had been burned down. It was a prosperous black neighborhood, referred to as the “Black Wall Street” by Booker T. Washington. Some years ago, my daughter spent a year working in Tulsa for Americorps. After her graduation from college, our family drove in two cars to Tulsa. Prior to the trip, my wife did some research and learned of the 1921 events. None of us had ever heard of this before. It never appeared in history textbooks. Once in Tulsa, we visited the area. There was almost nothing there, and not a single historical marker. Tulsa wanted very much to forget this event.

Historian Scott Ellsworth, in his book Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Riot of 1921, writes that:

“Overnight, over one thousand homes occupied by blacks had been destroyed in Tulsa. The Greenwood business district had been put to the torch. In terms of density of destruction and ratio of casualties to population, it has probably not been equaled by any riot in the U.S. in this (20th) century.”

Located along and near Greenwood Avenue, the area included schools, a hospital, two newspapers, thirteen churches, three fraternal lodges, eleven rooming houses, four hotels, two theaters, numerous retail stores from restaurants to billiard parlors, and a public library. The Greenwood Cultural Center describes the area as “a hotbed for jazz and blues and the site where Count Basie first encountered big-band jazz” as well as “the richest African-American neighborhood in North America.”

One black victim of the violence was 40-year-old physician Dr. Andrew C. Jackson. The Mayo brothers, of Mayo Clinic renown, regarded him as “the most able Negro surgeon in America.” He came out of his burning house with his hands up. He was shot three times and bled to death.

The massacre came about when a 19-year-old shoe shiner, Dick Rowland, left his shoe shine stand to use the only restroom available to blacks in segregated downtown Tulsa. He went to the Drexel Building, where a 17-year-old white girl, Sarah Page, operated the elevator. Between the first and third floor, Sarah let out a scream. Rowland said he tripped and fell against her. She was not harmed in any way, and pressed no charges. She never claimed that anything improper had occurred. Rowland was arrested. The Tulsa Tribune headlined an editorial, “To Lynch Negro Tonight.” A white crowd gathered, and things soon got out of hand.

Oklahoma was a segregated state. In 1910, legislators passed a law intending to prevent blacks in Oklahoma from voting, but it was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. This was also the era of so-called “progressive” Democrat Woodrow Wilson in the White House. Wilson was a committed segregationist. Under his administration, black postal workers across the country lost their jobs. Federal offices in Washington and across the country were segregated by Wilson. He hosted the screening of the pro-Ku Klux Klan movie The Death of a Nation by D. W. Griffith at the White House. Wilson later commented about how much he liked the movie.

Events in Tulsa, unfortunately, were hardly unique. On Nov. 10, 1898, white supremacists murdered African Americans in Wilmington, North Carolina, and deposed the elected Reconstruction-era government in a coup d’état.

The town’s newspaper, The Daily Record, was burned down and as many as 60 people were murdered in a few hours. The local government that was elected two days earlier was overthrown and replaced by white supremacists. It was the only coup d’état to take place on American soil.

Before the violence, this port city on the Cape Fear River was remarkably integrated. Three of the ten aldermen were African Americans, and black people worked as policemen, firemen, and magistrates. Democrats, then the party of the Confederacy, vowed to end this “Negro domination.” In 1900, the North Carolina legislature effectively stripped African Americans of the vote.

The massacre in Tulsa was preceded by events in Wilmington and followed by other such assaults on black people in many cities, such as Atlanta and East St. Louis, Illinois. Recognition of these events is long overdue. At the Vernon AME Church on Greenwood Avenue in Tulsa, where black people sought refuge during the massacre, the Rev. Robert Turner unveiled a prayer wall for racial healing. The Rev. William Barber, standing outside the church, which was set ablaze during the massacre, said he was humbled “to stand on this holy ground. You can kill the people, but you cannot kill the voice of the blood.”

The Rev. Turner declared:

“Outside of the majestic Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, it will be one of the few public outdoor prayer walls in the world, and we believe it will be the only one solely used for racial healing.”

No one in Tulsa was ever punished for this attack, and the victims were never compensated for the lives and property lost, either by government or insurance companies. There is now discussion of reparations for the three survivors and the descendants of those who were lost.

It is good for all of us that the history of what happened in Tulsa in 1921 should be widely known by Americans. History is complicated. As human beings are flawed, so all societies exhibit such flaws. Societies often like to hide or cover up such parts of their histories. Only now is Germany confronting its genocide in Namibia. Canadian flags are flying at half-mast in memory of the murder of indigenous children. The role played by European countries in their colonial ventures in Asia and Africa is coming under increased scrutiny in Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, and other countries.

As President Biden said in Tulsa:

“We do ourselves no favors by pretending none of this ever happened. I come here to help fill the silence, because in silence wounds deepen. And painful as it is, only in remembrance wounds heal.”

Celebrating America on July 4: A Time to Confront the Complexity of Our History

As Americans prepare to commemorate July 4, our society is facing a growing examination of our history, with the focus largely on our shortcomings. Throughout the country, statues are being removed of figures once considered worthy of being honored, but now found wanting. Schools and universities are changing their names to reflect contemporary sensibilities. In various communities the names of once revered figures such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt are coming under attack. America, we have been told, is guilty of “structural racism.” A new kind of identity politics is replacing the goal of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, which was to create a colorblind society in which men and women would be judged on the “content of their character” rather than the color of their skin.

There is much in American history to regret, as there is in the history of every country on earth. We are, after all, imperfect human beings. We were guilty of slavery, although it was not America’s “original sin,” as some now claim. Slavery existed in Ancient Greece and Rome and was embraced in both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. In 1787, when the Constitutional Convention met, slavery was legal everyplace in the world. Many of our Founding Fathers wanted to eliminate slavery at that time. Among them were Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay. They compromised on this question to get all 13 colonies to declare independence from England. Were they wrong to do so? In retrospect, a strong case can be made that they were.

After the Civil War ended slavery, black Americans faced an era of segregation, lynchings, and bigotry enshrined in law. In the South, they were denied the right to vote. I remember the years of segregation. I lived in the South and saw on a daily basis the disabilities under which blacks lived. I remember Martin Luther King’s march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. I was saddened to hear of the murder of the Rev. James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, who had joined with other clergymen in going to Selma to participate in the march. A year or so earlier, Jim Reeb came to speak at the William and Mary Law School, where I was a student. After his talk, I hosted a reception for him at my house.

The horrors of slavery and segregation are a part of our history. But so is our ability to reform and to change. In 1954, school segregation was declared unconstitutional. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act was adopted. My generation, which grew up in the years of segregation, lived to see a black president elected and re-elected. We lived to see black Americans hold the most important positions in our society — from Secretary of State, to Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to Supreme Court Justice. We still have serious problems to resolve, as the George Floyd case shows us. But if our society were indeed imbued with “structural racism,” it is unlikely that all of this would have happened in one lifetime.

The story of America is indeed complex. When the Framers of the Constitution completed their work in 1787, the French Revolution had not yet occurred. Italy and Germany were not nations, but only a collection of warring states. No other people in 2021 are living under the same governmental structure which existed in their countries in 1787 — only Americans.

The U.S. Constitution changed Americans from being subjects of government to being its rulers. In his book, We Hold These Truths, Mortimer Adler writes:

“The government of the United States resides in us — we, the people. What resides in Washington is the administration of our government. I am sorry to say that most Americans think of themselves as the subjects of government and regard the administrators in public office as their rulers, instead of thinking of themselves as the ruling class and public officials as their servants — the instrumentalities for carrying out their will.”

When the Constitution was written, the Framers could look everyplace in the world for an example of a free society with limited government — and find none to follow. No existing government in 1787 was designed to provide its people with freedom, nor had any in past history.

The Framers set out to create something that had never been created before — an inherently perilous undertaking. They fully realized the uniqueness of their enterprise. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina asked:

“Is there, at this moment, a nation on earth that enjoys this right, where the true principles of representation are understood and practiced, and where all authority flows from and returns at stated periods to the people? I answer, there is not.”

The achievements of the Constitutional Convention were considered miraculous in their own day. James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson, who was serving as the U.S. representative in France, on Dec. 9, 1787, saying it was “impossible to consider the degree of concord which ultimately prevailed as less than a miracle.”

Madison declared that:

“Happily for America, happily we trust for the whole human race, they (the Framers) pursued a new and more Noble course. They accomplished a Revolution which has no parallel in the annals of human society. They reared the fabrics of governments which have no model on the face of the globe. They formed the design of a great Confederacy, which it is incumbent on their successors to improve and perpetuate.”

One of the unprecedented breakthroughs that the Framers included in the Constitution was that there would be no religious test for public office or for citizenship. Elsewhere in the Western world, Catholics were without rights in Protestant countries, Protestants were without rights in Catholic countries, while Jews had few rights in either case. Charles Pinckney lamented:

“How many thousands of the subjects of Great Britain at this moment labor under civil disabilities, merely on account of their religious persuasions! To the liberal and enlightened mind, the rest of Europe affords a melancholy picture of the depravity of human nature, and of the total subversion of those rights, without which we should suppose no people could be happy or content.”

Pinckney pointed out that:

“From the European world are no precedents to be drawn for a people who think they are capable of governing themselves. Instead of receiving instructions from them, we may with pride affirm that, new as this country is, in point of settlement, inexperienced as she must be upon questions of government, she still has read more useful lessons to the old world, she has made them more acquainted with their own rights, than they had been otherwise for centuries. . . . ”

Professor Samuel Huntington notes that:

“This is a new event in the history of mankind. Heretofore most governments have been formed by tyrants, and imposed on mankind by force. Never before did a people, in a time of peace and tranquility, meet together by their representatives and, with calm deliberation, frame for themselves a system of government.”

The Framers of the Constitution were under no illusion that they had written a document that would stand the test of time without additions and changes. It is for this reason that Article V sets forth the process by which amendments can be adopted. James Madison stated that the founders hoped their successors would “improve and perpetuate” the Constitution. He said that

“. . . useful alterations will be suggested by experience that could not but be foreseen. . . . It, moreover, equally enables the general and the State governments to originate the amendment of errors, as they may be pointed out by the experience on one side or the other.”

That the Constitution has survived these 234 years and has enabled Americans to live in freedom and to attract to our shores men and women of every race, religion, and nation who sought liberty is testimony to the extraordinary achievement of the Founders. Kurt Weill, the lyricist who was forced to flee Nazi Germany, captured America’s genuine uniqueness when he wrote a song entitled, “Every Name Is an American Name.” The Founders were committed to building a new civilization that would become a model for the rest of mankind. “Happily for Americans,” declared James Madison, “happily we trust for the whole human race, they (the Founders) pursued a new and more Noble course.”

In recent days we have heard a great deal about America’s flaws and shortcomings which, sadly, are a part of the human condition, not only here but wherever imperfect human beings are to be found. We have seen our early leaders demeaned because their values were not those of the 21st century. This, the Quaker theologian Elton Trueblood pointed out, represents the sin of “contemporaneity,” holding people of the past guilty of not embracing the standards of the present time. Instead, we should recognize that their belief in limited government, checks and balances, religious freedom, and individual rights, set them apart from their contemporaries elsewhere in the world. We can take pride in their achievement and respect their understanding that it would be necessary to change and advance as time went by. America is not finished. It is still changing and moving forward. The Fourth of July celebrates this unique contribution to advancing human liberty.

Recent Assaults on Our History Miss the Uniqueness of the American Story

American history, in recent days, has come under relentless attack. Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) said of the Fourth of July celebration that, “The freedom they’re referring to is for white people. This land is stolen land and black people still aren’t free.” Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) attacked the Declaration of Independence, suggesting that

“. . . all men are created equal is only applicable to white men. . . . Isn’t it something that they wrote this in 1776 when African-Americans were enslaved. They weren’t thinking about us then. But we’re thinking about us now.”

U.S. Air Force Academy Professor Lynne Chandler Garcia says that George Washington was a “racist” and that the U.S. Constitution “was ingrained with racism from the beginning.”

We could fill pages with similar thoughts. Those who provide this assessment do not compare colonial America with other places in the real world at that time, or with other real places in earlier history. Instead, they compare America in 1776 and 1787 with their idea of “perfection,” as “enlightened” men and women would have it in 2021. By that standard, America is found wanting — but so would every other country in the world be in precisely the same position.

When the Framers of the Constitution gathered in Philadelphia, slavery was legal everyplace in the world and had been all through history. Indeed, most people in the ancient world regarded slavery as a natural condition of life. It has existed almost universally through history among peoples of every level of material culture — among nomadic pastoralists of Asia, hunting societies of North American Indians, and sea people such as the Norsemen. The legal codes of Sumer provide documentary evidence that slavery existed there as early as the 4th millennium B.C. The poems of Homer supply evidence that slavery was an integral part of Ancient Greek society as early as 1200 B.C.

Our Judeo-Christian tradition was also one which accepted the legitimacy of slavery. In Leviticus, God instructs the Children of Israel to enslave the heathen and their progeny forever. St. Paul urges slaves to obey their masters with full hearts and without equivocation. He wrote:

“Slaves, give entire obedience to your earthly masters, not only with an outward show of service . . . but with singlemindedness out of reverence for the Lord.”

When the Constitution was written, the Framers could not find a single example in history of a society which had made slavery illegal. The first society to do so would be Denmark, which in 1792 banned the importation of slaves to its colonies in the West Indies, although the law was not to take effect until 1803. What the critics of the Constitution overlook is the fact that what is historically unique is that so many of the leading men of the American colonies of that day wanted to eliminate slavery, and pressed vigorously to do so. Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton were ardent abolitionists. John Jay, who would become the first Chief Justice, was president of the New York Anti-Slavery Society. Rufus King and Gouverneur Morris were in the forefront of opposition to slavery and the slave trade. One of the great debates at the Constitutional Convention related to the African slave trade. George Mason of Virginia made an eloquent plea for making it illegal. He said, “Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven upon a country.”

In the end, the slave trade was made illegal, but this was delayed by 20 years, a compromise made by ten states to ensure that the original union would include the three states of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina. In retrospect, this compromise may have been a mistake. It would have been good if slavery had been eliminated at the beginning. If it had, the U.S. would have been the first nation in history to do so. Critics of our history would do well to consider the new ground broken by the Founding Fathers. They created something new and unique in history. Americans in 2021 live under the same form of government our Founders established in 1787. That is not true of any other country in the world.

One of the unprecedented breakthroughs that the Framers included in the Constitution was that there would be religious freedom, separation of church and state, and no religious test for public office or for citizenship. Elsewhere in the Western world, Catholics were without rights in Protestant countries, Protestants were without rights in Catholic countries, while Jews had rights in neither.

America was — and is — something unique in the world, made up of men and women of every race, religion, and nation. This was true from the very beginning. Visiting New Amsterdam in 1643, the French Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues was surprised to discover that in this town of 8,000 people, 18 languages were spoken. In his “Letters from an American Farmer,” J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur wrote in 1782: “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.”

In Redburn, written in 1849, Herman Melville declared:

“There is something in the contemplation of the mode in which America has been settled that, in a Noble breast, should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes. Settled by the peoples of all nations, all nations may claim her for their own. You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world. . . . We are not a narrow tribe of men . . . no: our blood is the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand Noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation, so much as a world.”

At a celebration in New York City of the 150th anniversary of Norwegian immigration, news commentator Eric Sevareid, whose grandfather emigrated from Norway, addressed the group — in the form of a letter to his grandfather. He said:

“You knew that freedom and equality are not found but created. . . . This grandson believes this is what you did. I have seen much of the world. Were I now asked to name some region on Earth where men and women lived in a surer climate of freedom and equality than the northwest region where you settled — were I asked I could not answer. I know of none.”

America, being a nation composed of imperfect human beings, has made many mistakes in its history. But the Founding Fathers knew that this would be true. They provided a means to amend the Constitution, and this we have done. Freedom has been expanded, slavery was ended by a civil war, segregation was ended, legislation has been passed to provide equal rights to all citizens. America is not finished. Positive change will continue. But our vocal critics continue to compare America to perfection and find it wanting — not to other real places that have an address.

As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:

“France was a land, England was a people, but America, having still about it the quality of the idea, was harder to utter — it was the graves at Shiloh, and the tired, drawn, nervous faces of its great men, and the country boys dying in the Argonne for a phrase that was empty before their bodies withered. It was a willingness of the heart.”

One Dead White Male Still Popular in the Academy: Karl Marx

Back in the early 1990s, Jesse Jackson led a group of students at Stanford University in chants of “Hey, Hey, Ho Ho, Western culture Has Got To Go.” A Stanford professor declared that the study of Western civilization was “imbued with whiteness” and had to be largely abandoned. More recently, this campaign has gained strength. All over America, once revered figures such as William Shakespeare, John Milton, and Aristotle are being castigated as “dead white males.” Martin Luther King’s goal of living in a society in which men and women would be judged on “the content of their character” and not “the color of their skin” has been set aside by those who now embrace a much different, race-based, vision for our future.

Not too long ago, students at the University of Pennsylvania removed a large Shakespeare portrait from the staircase that students and faculty members of the English Department walk by every day. In its place, the students put up a photograph of Audre Lorde, the black feminist poet. At universities around the country, the study of ancient history and classical literature is under increasing attack because of its alleged “whiteness.”

It is interesting to note that one “dead, white European male” who remains in vogue is Karl Marx, whose influence also continues among radical movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. What has been widely overlooked by those who are keeping the Marxist flame alive is the blatant racism of Karl Marx. Largely unknown to his non-white and non-Western admirers is the contempt in which Marx held all non-European peoples and cultures.

Much has been written about the fact that Marx, although of rabbinical descent on both sides of his family, was an extreme anti-Semite. In fact, his book, World Without Jews, is considered by many to be a forerunner to Hitler’s Mein Kampf.

Little, however, has been written about Marx’s racial views, the contempt in which he held not only non-whites, but whole groupings of Europeans, especially the Slavic peoples.

In a book entitled Karl Marx: Racist, Nathaniel Weyl shows how Marx privately developed an entire racial hierarchy and racial views of history by the 1860s. In the middle of that decade, Marx was casting about for some scientific or pseudo-scientific justification for his racial notions, which he found in the work of Pierre Trémaux. He and his friend and benefactor Friedrich Engels went so far as to advocate wars of extermination against Slavic peoples and the destruction of Russia. How ironic that the Soviet Union later proclaimed itself a “Marxist” state.

“Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels,” Weyl writes:

“. . . were neither internationalists nor believers in equal rights for all races and peoples. They opposed the struggles for national independence of those races and peoples that they despised. They believed that the ‘barbaric’ and ‘ahistoric’ peoples who comprised the immense majority of mankind had played no significant role in history and were not destined to do so in the foreseeable future. They regarded them as obstacles to the forward sweep of history. They considered them as objects rather than subjects. They were people who ought to be conquered and exploited by the more advanced nations. Some of these inferior stock were people who ought to be eradicated and swept from the surface of the earth.”

Marx took from Hegel, another German philosopher, the idea that certain races, peoples, and nations were “ahistoric.” Either they had never played any role in history and never would, as in the case of black Africans, or they were insignificant peoples whose history was irrelevant, or they were frozen at civilization levels at which the more advanced portions of mankind had already left them behind.

“There were ideas,” Weyl notes,

“. . . which Marx would adopt and transform. . . publicly and for political reasons, both Marx and Engels posed as friends of the Negro. In private, they were anti-black racists of the most odious sort. They had contempt for the entire Negro race, a contempt they expressed by comparing Negroes to animals, by identifying black people with ‘idiots’ and by continuously using the opprobrious term ‘n____r’ in their private correspondence.”

Marx, for example, wrote to Engels on July 30, 1862, about one of the leaders of socialism in Germany and his rival Ferdinand Lasalle, whom he referred to as “that Jewish n____r, Lasalle.” He wrote:

“It is now absolutely clear to me that, as both the shape of his head and his hair texture shows — he descends from the Negroes who joined Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or grandmother on the paternal side hybridized with a n____r). . . . The pushiness of the fellow is also n____r-like.”

Marx championed slavery in the United States. When Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, probably the leading socialist thinker in France at the time, published a book called The Philosophy of Poverty, Marx replied with a vitriolic rebuttal entitled The Poverty of Philosophy (1874). Proudhon had advocated the emancipation of slaves in the U.S. Marx replied:

“Without slavery, North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world and you will have anarchy — the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Abolish slavery and you will have wiped America off the map of nations.”

In the U.S., socialists early in the 20th century adopted Marx’s racist views. On September 14, 1901, the Social Democratic Herald characterized black Americans as inferior, depraved elements who went around “raping women and children.” In an article in the paper dated May 31, 1902, Victor Berger, one of the national leaders of the Socialist Party, wrote that “there can be no doubt that the Negroes and mulattos constitute a lower race.”

It is ironic indeed that the most acceptable white male in the curriculum on American college and university campuses is Karl Marx, a bigot and supporter of slavery. On what basis, one wonders, is he more acceptable than John Calhoun or Woodrow Wilson, not to mention Robert E. Lee or Jefferson Davis? Marx not only referred to black Africans as “ahistoric” people but praised the thinking of French technologist Pierre Trémaux, who argued that the human race was the product of evolution, but that blacks resulted from so-called regeneration.  Marx hailed Trémaux’s work as making “a very significant advance over Darwin” and termed a Creole man who married his niece a “guerrilla offspring.”

Marx also approved of European imperialism in Asia because he considered the Asian culture so inferior that it was incapable of entering historic development without a European push. Of China and India, he said they were “semi-barbarian and semi-civilized” and had “no history at all, at least no human history.”

Marx’s colleague, Friedrich Engels, was equally racist in his views. When he learned that Marx’s son-in-law, Paul Lafargue, who was partially of black background, was running as a socialist in a district that contained the Paris zoo, Engels observed, “Being in his quality as a n____r, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district.”

Before his death, the respected black economist Walter Williams wrote a column entitled, “Did You Know That Karl Marx Was a Racist and an Anti-Semite?” He noted that:

“Most people who call themselves Marxists know very little of Karl Marx’s life. . . . Marx is a hero to many civil rights organizations . . . what most people do not know is that Marx was a racist and anti-Semite. When the U.S. annexed California after the Mexican-American War, Marx wrote: ‘Without violence, nothing is ever accomplished in history. Is it a misfortune that magnificent California was seized from the lazy Mexicans who did not know what to do with it?’”

Given the racial attitudes of Karl Marx, it is difficult to understand why he remains immune from criticism on the part of those non-whites and non-Europeans he held in such contempt. If there ever was a public figure who believed that black lives don’t matter, Karl Marx is it.     *