The Matagorda Gazette. (Matagorda, Tex.), Vol. 2, No. 18, Ed. 1 Wednesday, January 25, 1860:
By Juan Montoya
Special to El Rrun-Rrun
For all of those who yearn back for the years when the South was the South and get all nostalgic for the era when one could actually live out this great southern "heritage," take a gander at this clipping sent to us by one of our seven readers who came across it while researching for other subjects.
The clipping notes the arrest and sentencing of a free negro who had come into the state at Galveston against the laws of Texas.
If you were a free black person, you were not allowed in the state under penalty of law. This was even before the Civil War.
His crime?
Being free.
Aggravating circumstances?
Being free, and black.
Punishment: working for a pittance for a white man. In other words, to make you a slave again. Show you your place.
Deterrence: An example for black slaves who might have harbored the seditious dream of freedom.
Later that year, on December 20, 1860, South Carolina – under the justification that the Union was abridging the sovereign rights of states to have the freedom to do with your "property" (black human beings) as they pleased – declared their secession from the United States of America. Within the next six months, ten other southern states would secede from the Union:
Mississippi - January 9, 1861
Florida - January 10, 1861
Alabama - January 11, 1861
Georgia - January 19, 1861
Louisiana - January 26, 1861
Texas - February 1, 1861
**April 12, 1861, the Civil War begins with the attack of Fort Sumter.**
Virginia - April 17, 1861
Arkansas - May 6, 1861
North Carolina - May 20, 1861
Tennessee - June 8, 1861
In the slaughter that followed, 750,000 soldiers died, more than half of those from the North. The Union was preserved at a huge human cost. And the South has never acknowledged it was whipped in defense of this "noble cause."
But, oh, for the good old days, uh? Do you still wonder why people want to do away with any vestige of this insidious Texas and southern "heritage"? )
Pro-Southern "rebs" are still allowed to attend Memorial Day Silent March at Brownsville's Veterans Park
7 comments:
Why is it so difficult for people to just obey the law?
Texas, 1860. A Black man steps into Galveston with the wrong kind of freedom clinging to his skin. The law swarms him like cockroaches in a diner kitchen. Six months chained, auctioned to strangers, his sweat turned into someone else’s profit. When it ends, they spit him back onto the street like a bone stripped clean, warning that if he breathes Texas air again he will be swallowed whole. His crime was existence. His body turned into a billboard of terror, screaming to every enslaved eye that freedom itself was a punishable disease.
The same disease rages now, only the costumes changed. Ice Barbie herself, Kristi Noem, struts through El Salvador’s mega-prison with cameras snapping, a plastic smile stretched across her face. Behind her, thousands of shaved heads bow in chains under fluorescent light, a human menagerie paraded for the world. The spectacle is not hidden. It is sold like a ticketed tour, cruelty packaged in sequins.
Fear is the gasoline. It floods their veins, turns their pupils wide. They need someone under their boot. It could be anyone. The free man in Galveston. The migrant mother clutching her child under buzzing fluorescent lights. The student pulled off campus for holding a protest sign, their visa shredded for daring to speak about Palestine. The target rotates, but the ritual never changes.
This is not about rising up. It is about shoving others down. It is not about cheaper goods or better jobs. It is about making sure minorities stay in the dirt, faces pressed into concrete floors under fluorescent glare, lungs choking on dust and disinfectant. The boot never lifts, it only grinds harder. Even the ballot box is twisted into a weapon, with districts carved like butchered carcasses, maps bent and stretched so voices vanish before they reach the count. They call it representation, but it is a slow strangulation, a vote drowned before it draws breath.
Resentment is their drug. They snort it off the headlines, inject it through the nightly news, chew on it like raw meat. Every neighbor who looks different, every student who speaks out, every rumor that their throne is cracking, it all turns sour in their guts. And sour demands victims. They throw human beings into cages and call it order. They deport students for chanting in the street and call it security. They redraw maps until entire communities disappear and call it democracy. They laugh at suffering and call it strength. But the fix never lasts. The hunger always comes back, gnawing at them like rats in the walls.
The language does the rest. “Illegal.” “Enemy.” “Animal.” Each word slithers into the bloodstream like worms in a carcass. The body jerks, the mob convulses, the crowd mistakes their spasm for truth. They clap while the poison eats them alive from the inside.
And when fantasy is not enough, the cartoon takes over. Trump waves his hands and paints a border moat stocked with alligators, snakes writhing in the mud, soldiers armed with rifles that shoot through the night like video-game fireballs. He dreams of migrants scorched with hot oil, cartoon anvils falling from the sky, a Saturday morning massacre repackaged as policy. The crowd laughs, then cheers, then demands it be built.
Galveston was not an accident of cruel men. It was a template. What began with a free man shackled for daring to breathe has mutated into today’s detention centers, cartoon fantasies turned into barbed wire, mega-prisons staged like theater, votes sliced out of existence by surgical maps, and mobs hungry for pain. The cruelty is the point. The spectacle is the fix. And the audience rots in real time, clapping with skeleton hands, smiling as their own faces melt in the glow of the fire.
The problem now is that liberals don't believe in equality. Equality to them is role reversal. Liberals put blacks in positions of power so that they can discriminate against whites. Just look at Letitia James, Alvin Bragg, Fani Willis, and other blacks coming after Trump. A few years ago, Ghana, invited American blacks to return to their homeland. Blacks who aren't happy in America should look into that offer.
In 1960s Australia still registered aboriginal folks under a classification for fish and flauna.
Evil racist.
Ah yes, the fantasy where every Black DA is part of a secret cabal plotting to ‘discriminate’ against poor, helpless billionaires like the bloated casino swindler. The idea that equality means treating the indicted the same as everyone else melts their teeth like sugar cubes in acid. And the final flourish? Telling millions of Americans to ship themselves to Ghana, as if deportation is patriotism. It’s not politics, it’s projection a carnival of fear, painted in blackface and draped in the flag.”
You sound so smart, I do not know why people do not listen to your ideas. Republicans are smart: Go to where the jobs are. Give your all to your country. Minorities should not be seen. Minorities should be poor and uneducated.
Sundown towns still exist. Pay a visit to Vidor, Texas. Just don't overstay your visit. Vidor comes to mind. I'm sure there are more besides just in Texas.
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