If you are a history teacher in a state that has a right wing legislature and governor (and it has been a concerted project of the right to capture as many Independent State Legislatures as possible, along with the federal courts) your career may be in danger if you ask your students to google Red Summer. You see, having students click on a website that documents dozens of little known racist massacres of a hundred years ago will undoubtedly make innocent, white, Christian kids feel bad. History can be a very mean adolescent girl.

This largely forgotten season of racist violence and horror, painted red with the blood of its innocent victims (among them many Black WWI vets), does not even include bloody mayhem like the now infamous massacre and destruction of the prosperous Black neighborhood of Greenwood  in Tulsa (1921) or plenty of others we hear about, to our surprise, from time to time.   The Atlanta race riot of 1906, for example.     At exactly the moment the last Russian Czar was winking at massacres of Jews, called pogroms, white leaders here were acquitting everyone involved in our own anti-Black pogroms, while punishing any surviving Blacks who may have been seen fighting back.

After the Civil War the only southerners who faced any consequence for taking up arms to fight in the “Northern War of Aggression” (apart from the Confederate warden of the infamous Andersonville Prison camp, an early concentration camp where thousands died, who was executed for his war crimes) were the Black veterans of the Union army, routinely tortured and murdered for standing up for their constitutional rights.   See, e.g. Colfax Massacre, Easter Sunday 1872.

Teach this sort of bloody history at your own risk, Florida history teachers.   According to our own shamelessly pandering white nationalists in various state and federal offices, it is strictly up to the states to decide how American history will be taught to future generations, fucking anti-racist, anti-fascist freedom haters! That’s the lesson of the Civil War, Independent State Legislatures get to decide the intimate fates of their citizens, as well as the last word letting them vote and, more importantly, on counting their ballots! Independent State Legislature Doctrine, bitches.