Hate kills! the consequences of bigotry

The soviet gulags

In the Soviet Union Gulags, between 1917and 1977, 62 million people are thought to have been murdered. The Gulags were prison camps for political dissidents in the Soviet Union. Under Stalin’s rule, the Gulags were filled to capacity and new ones had to be built continuously to accommodate the vast numbers of people who were purged from the body politic. The vast majority of those sent to the Gulags were political prisoners. The barracks were large but poorly made—even though winters in Siberia are brutally cold, many buildings had no sides. Prisoners were used as slave labor which included digging post holes in almost-frozen ground in early winter, and building new rail lines for more prisoners. Prisoners often built their own barracks, often being forced to use extremely shoddy material. If the bad food or starvation diet, lack of medical care, dangerous work, and brutal beatings didn’t kill the prisoners, sometimes the weather did: many prisoners froze to death. The only headstones for the graveyards where most prisoners ended up were rough wooden posts made by the friends of those who had died. (External Link) (External Link)

The burning of “little africa”

In 1923, a large white mob invaded and burned to the ground the large African American suburb in Tulsa, Oklahoma. No white perpetrator was arrested, although millions of dollars in property was destroyed and an unknown number of lives were lost. The local newspapers blamed the blacks for provoking the violence. In fact, many blacks were arrested or held during the conflagration. The smoke rising into the air from the fires covered a huge geographical area: in one photograph from the time, the caption reads “Little Africa burns.” African Americans were rounded up and arrested or held while their neighborhoods burned. Even the elderly were not spared, one photo in a Tulsa newspaper of the time shows an elderly man standing in the midst of a pile of burnt rubble in what used to be his house. Where homes once stood, there is only devastation. African Americans who gathered to try to stop the fires were arrested and marched down the streets. Many of the photographs bear an eerie resemblance to scenes of bombed towns and villages in World Wars I and II. Even God wasn’t immune from the violence and destruction; there is a photograph that shows a large African American church burning. The mob carried, and used, weapons in order to make sure that no one would interfere and forcibly removed African Americans from their homes. (External Link) (External Link) (External Link)

The destruction of rosewood, florida

In January 1923, a white mob in east-central Florida, enraged by unfounded rumors of the attack on a white woman by a black man, assaulted the small, all-African American community of Rosewood, killed 8, and, as in Tulsa, burned the entire town to the ground. The night before the raid on Rosewood a Ku Klux Klan rally was held just outside of the nearby white town. The neighborhoods of Rosewood lay in smoldering ruins and the white mob spared nothing, not even the shacks of poor sharecroppers. (External Link) (External Link) (External Link) (External Link)