"White men raping black women was not considered a crime at the time." – Roseanne Pereira:

In 1906 a race riot broke out in Atlanta, Georgia (see "Century-Old Race Riot Still Resonates in Atlanta" by Kathy Lohr), taking the lives of more people than historical records can account for. Few of us today have any knowledge of what was taking place a short 100 years ago, not only in Atlanta, but around much of the U. S. It's a sign of how ahistorical the American mindset is.

In the Middle East, people are still seething over Alexander the Great's invasion, while here in the U. S. people have little notion of what their grandparents' world was like. For American's what happened in 1906 might have well taken place on Mars.

Nevertheless, the scars remain. And Atlanta wasn't the only scene of mob violence and murder. Lynchings took place throughout the U. S., even in such northern states as Illinois, and they continued to be a part of our lives at least as late as the 1960s while Lyndon Johnson was president.

When the FBI went to Philidelphia, Mississippi to investigate the murder of three civil rights workers, they discovered the bodies of nine black men who had been lynched, when a creek outside of the town was dredged in an attempt to recover the bodies of the civil rights workers.

Within months of the investigation, the U. S. would be heavily involved in the Vietnam War, where black soldiers made up no less than 40 percent of the American forces on the ground, four times the number that would accurately represent their demographics back in the U. S.

Ignoring history has allowed us all to be exploited. And it continues to do so.