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Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
She was EIGHT MONTHS PREGNANT, getting her two children ready for school, when six officers arrived at the door with a warrant.
Porcha Woodruff thought it was a joke. They were arresting her for carjacking.
She and her fiancé asked them to check whether the suspect on the report was pregnant. They refused.
Detroit, the morning of 16 February 2023. She is 32.
Here is how they got to her. A woman had returned the victim's phone to a petrol station. Police ran facial recognition on the petrol station video. The software produced Porcha Woodruff.
Then — and this is the part that turns a software error into a human one — they put her in a photo line-up using an **eight-year-old picture** from a 2015 arrest. They had her current driver's licence. They used the old photo. The victim picked it.
A visibly, enormously pregnant woman was processed for robbery and carjacking.
She was held and released that evening on a hundred-thousand-dollar personal bond. By the time she got out she was having contractions from the stress, and a medical centre recorded a low heart rate from dehydration.
On 6 March the Wayne County Prosecutor dropped the case. Insufficient evidence.
Her lawsuit calls the match what it was: an "unreliable facial recognition match." The police chief said the allegations were "very concerning."
Think about the order of events once more, because it matters.
The machine was wrong. Then a detective chose an eight-year-old photograph over the licence on file. Then six officers went to a house.
Then nobody in that chain looked at a woman eight months pregnant and compared her to a report that did not mention a pregnant suspect.
Her story is a reminder of why these injustices must be documented, remembered, and challenged. Get our book which documents over 150 of the crimes against Black people savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
More than FOUR HUNDRED families were thrown off the land in one Tennessee winter.
Not for a debt. Not for a crime. They had registered to vote.
So they spent the winter in army surplus tents, in a field, with children.
Fayette County, Tennessee, 1960. Sharecropping families — they did not own the land they worked, and
that was the whole lever.
They registered. The landowners evicted them, many without notice.
Then came the part that was meant to finish it. **The merchants closed ranks.** Names were circulated.
Families who had registered could not buy groceries. Could not buy seed. Could not get petrol. Credit
was cancelled. Insurance policies were cancelled.
And white doctors refused to treat their own patients.
Read that again. Not a mob. Not a night ride. A list, passed between shopkeepers, that meant a
pregnant woman could not see the doctor she had always seen.
John and Viola McFerren had started the civic league that ran the registration drive. A landowner
named Shepard Towles let the evicted families put tents on his ground, which took more courage than
most people will ever have to find.
They called it Tent City. Surplus army canvas, through a Tennessee winter, with no running water,
cooking outside, children going to school out of a tent.
In Haywood County next door, about thirty more families did the same.
They did not fold. The Justice Department came in. By December 1960 it had sued forty-five
landowners, twenty-four merchants and one bank. On 26 July 1962 the landowners were permanently
ordered to stop interfering with Black registration and voting.
So this one ends with a win — a federal injunction, won by sharecroppers living in tents.
But hold the price in your head. Four hundred families. Two winters. And the weapon was not a gun.
It was a grocery list.
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
In 1911 Maryland opened a place called the Hospital for the Negro Insane.
The first patients BUILT IT. They cleared the ground and put up the buildings they were then locked
inside.
One man was committed because he startled a white man's horse. Another because he spoke with an English accent.
Crownsville, Maryland. It was not a hospital the way you are picturing a hospital. It was a farm with
locks on it, and the people inside were the labour.
The standard for being sent there was not a diagnosis. It was somebody's opinion — usually a white
police officer's or a white neighbour's. The journalist Antonia Hylton, who spent ten years on the
records, puts it plainly: the criteria were "incredibly wide and flexible."
So: a man cut in front of a white driver in traffic and spooked his horse. That is the whole reason
he was committed.
And a man was picked up walking around Baltimore speaking with an English accent, because the
authorities assumed a Black man with that voice must be putting it on.
He was not putting it on. He was from London. He had been a jockey.
Sit with that for a second. He told them where he was from. His accent was the evidence against him.
They kept coming — new patients every week, for decades, while the farm got bigger and the wards got
fuller. Some of the men who built the place in 1911 never left it. They died on the grounds.
Crownsville did not close in the 1950s, or the 1970s.
It closed in 2004.
There are people alive right now who worked there, and families still trying to find out where their
relatives are buried on that land.
No trial. No sentence. No release date. Somebody decided you were mad, and that was the rest of your
life.
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
If you're playing this, you are racist. If you a nigga playing this, you hate yourself. Somebody not Black made this to make fun of you. Fuck everybody involved and playing
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
The rulebook of American professional golf contained the phrase "Caucasian race only" until 1961.
Charlie Sifford spent years trying to get it removed.
When he finally played, people kicked his ball into the rough and put human waste in the cup before he reached the green.
He had learned the game as a caddie in Charlotte, and he was good enough to win the Negro National Open six times while being barred from the tour that mattered.
The PGA's constitution restricted membership to golfers of the Caucasian race. Sifford, with the help of the California attorney general, forced its removal in 1961.
He was forty when he finally got a card.
He played with galleries shouting at him, with threats phoned to his hotel, with his ball moved, and with tournaments in the South simply declining to invite him — which was legal, because invitations were discretionary.
He won twice on tour. He was never once invited to the Masters, which used its own invitation rules to keep him out through his entire prime.
He carried a cigar everywhere and refused to stop smoking it on the course, which annoyed people, which was rather the point.
Tiger Woods called him the grandpa he never had and said he would not have had a career without him.
In 2014 he was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died the following year at ninety-two.
He got a sentence deleted from a rulebook. That was the whole fight, and it took him most of his best years.
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
In 1838 a university sold two hundred and seventy-two human beings to pay off its debts.
Men, women and children were loaded onto ships in Maryland and sent to Louisiana sugar plantations to keep a college solvent.
Georgetown. The Jesuits who ran Georgetown owned plantations in Maryland. The college was in financial trouble.
So the provincial superior authorised the sale of the enslaved community — the entire community, families together and families broken, for about a hundred and fifteen thousand dollars.
Some of them had been promised they would never be sold south. Priests went down to the quarters to organise the loading.
The money saved the school. For most of two centuries this was simply not discussed.
A university needed money. So it sold 272 human beings. Some of the darkest chapters of Black history were not hidden by accident. They were buried because powerful institutions had something to lose.
If these are the stories you were never taught, it’s time to uncover them savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
Keeping everyone (including Africans) completely ignorant about Africa and the central role it plays in the economic and natural world is a core feature of Europeanised education, not a bug.
You're not supposed to know that the DRC is the most resource-rich country in the world, with an estimated $24 trillion sitting under its soil. You're not supposed to know that the rise of "western civilisation" from the 15th century on was entirely made possible by European contact with Africa, and that the resources and labour extracted from coastal West Africa from 1492 onwards are the entire reason why both American continents exist in their current form.
You're not supposed to know that both WW1 and WW2 were essentially wars fought over the right to African colonial domination and expansion, and that even the uranium that was used in "Little Boy" and "Fat Man" dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Shinkolobwe uranium mine in eastern DRC. You're not supposed to know that the reason the country of France exists in its current form is because tens of thousands of conscripted West African soldiers fought and won against the Nazis in Europe, and the French thereafter shipped them back to West Africa and massacred them at Camp Thiaroye in Senegal to avoid paying them their due wages.
You're not supposed to know that there was nothing cold about the so-called Cold War, because the vast majority of the hot theaters it was physically fought in were on the continent of Africa. (Zimbabwe, DRC, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, Angola, Eritrea, Zambia etc). You're not supposed to know that the ongoing Ukraine war and the war in the Sahel are in fact the same conflict being fought by the same 2 sides, and that the reason France is desperately pushing funding and arms to Ukraine even as it falls into internal crisis is that Ukraine is acting as its proxy army in West Africa, as it tries to regain its lost colonial territories there, especially Niger where the cheap yellowcake uranium for its famously cheap nuclear energy used to come from before the 2023 revolution.
You're definitely not supposed to know that the entire global economy and system of trade as you know it is built on ruthless extraction from Africa and ensuring that Africa does not control anything it exports. You're not supposed to know that "Italian leather" doesn't come from Italy - it comes from Kano, Nigeria. You're not supposed to know that "Swiss chocolate" does not exist because cocoa does not grow anywhere in Switzerland or Europe - it comes from Ghana, Cote d'Ivoire and Nigeria. You're not supposed to know that Israel and the UAE control the global diamond and gold markets even though Israel has no diamond mine and the UAE has zero gold mines, because both resources are literally being stolen from the DRC and Sudan on an industrial basis.
You're basically not supposed to understand that the entire geopolitical world as you know it, rests entirely on extraction from Africa, poverty of Africans, and your own ignorance about where everything you use comes from.
Completely deliberate 500+ year-old feature, not accidental bug.
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
Black jockeys won fifteen of the first twenty-eight Kentucky Derbies.
By 1921 there were none. Not fewer — NONE. They were removed from the sport entirely and it took sixty-nine years before another Black jockey rode in the Derby.
Isaac Murphy was the best of them. He was born enslaved in Kentucky. He won the Derby three times — the first jockey ever to do it and rode with a win rate he reported at around forty-four per cent, a figure no modern jockey approaches.
As prize money and prestige grew, white jockeys organised to force Black riders out — boxing them in on the rail, refusing to ride against them, pressuring owners.
Racing associations stopped licensing them.
Within twenty years, an entire profession that Black men had dominated since before the Civil War was simply emptied.
This is the pattern that repeats everywhere in this archive and almost nobody names it: Black excellence does not get pushed out of the poor jobs. It gets pushed out of the jobs that become lucrative.
We must never forget our history
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
Chuck D: “This concert is not by Ed Sheeran’s promoters. Free Palestine, free Haiti, and please free a closed mind”
Flavor Flav: “And fuck Donald Trump!”
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
The man who invented the operation that saves babies born with blue-baby syndrome had no medical degree, no college degree, and was listed on the payroll as a JANITOR.
He guided the first operation from a stool behind the surgeon's shoulder, telling him where to cut.
Vivien Thomas. He had been saving to study medicine when the 1929 crash wiped out his savings and the bank holding them.
He took a job as a lab assistant at Vanderbilt for a janitor's wage, because that was the classification available.
Within a couple of years he was running experimental surgery — developing techniques, performing operations on his own, training surgeons.
He moved to Johns Hopkins with Alfred Blalock in 1941, where he was still paid as a janitor and had to enter through a back door.
He was the only Black man in that building not carrying a mop.
He worked out the surgical fix for tetralogy of Fallot — the condition killing infants who turned blue and died — and built the instruments for it.
The first operation on a child was in 1944. Blalock, who had never done the procedure, asked Thomas to stand behind him and talk him through it.
The surgeons on the paper became world famous. Thomas was not credited.
Hopkins hung his portrait in 1971 and gave him an honorary doctorate in 1976. Generations of surgeons he personally trained insisted on it.
He was paid as a cleaner while inventing heart surgery.
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
“Black man kill a black man, it’s cool they lovin dat
Black man kill a white man & they sentencing him to death
White man kill a black man then scream about self-defense
Break it down to manslaughter wit all of the evidence" —
Soulja Slim
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
Slavery ended in December 1865. But Did you know that before then, Mississippi had already passed a law, weeks earlier, making it a crime for a Black person to be unemployed?
They were called the Black Codes, and Mississippi's came first. The others copied it within months.
If you could not show a written labour contract for the coming year by the second Monday in January, you could be arrested for vagrancy. If you could not pay the fine, you were hired out — and your former owner got first refusal.
Black children whose parents were judged unable to support them could be "apprenticed" until adulthood, with preference given to the former owner.
It was illegal to rent land in towns. Illegal to quit before your contract ended — and anyone who employed you after you quit could be sued.
Free, on paper, in November. Legally required to be working for somebody by January, or be sold to whoever paid your fine.
Read the calendar again: the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified on 6 December 1865. Mississippi's code was already on the books.
They did not wait to see what freedom would look like. They had the replacement drafted before the thing itself was abolished
That contradiction is part of the history that inspired our book documenting the most underrated and ignored racial history of Black people.
Get yours savvypurchase.samcart.com/pr…
Atticks’ Spirit retweeted
A Black cadet at West Point was found unconscious in his room, tied to his own bed, with his ears slashed.
The academy's conclusion was that he had done it to himself.
Johnson Whittaker. 1880.
He was one of the first Black cadets ever admitted. He had been ostracised for three years — no roommate would share with him, no cadet would speak to him.
On the morning of April 6, 1880, he was found beaten, bound, and bleeding on the floor of his quarters.
West Point convened an inquiry and decided he had staged the whole thing to win sympathy. Then it court-martialled HIM.
He was convicted. The conviction was eventually thrown out by the President on legal grounds — and the army discharged him anyway on a technicality about an exam.
He became a teacher and a lawyer and never talked about it much.
In 1995 — one hundred and fifteen years later — the United States finally issued him a commission as a second lieutenant.
