BLACK ROCK DESERT, Nev. — Tens of thousands of partygoers were still stranded Monday morning in the northern Nevada desert after a late-summer storm turned a week-long counterculture fest into a mud pit.
Burning Man organizers said the main road leading out of the festival was still too muddy for a mass exodus of RVs and vehicles to safely exit but hoped traffic could begin flowing around noon Monday.
Organizers closed the festival to vehicles after more than a half an inch (1.3 centimeters) of rain on Friday drenched the Black Rock Desert about 110 miles (177 kilometers) north of Reno.
The annual gathering attracts nearly 80,000 artists, musicians and activists for a mix of wilderness camping and avant-garde performances. Disruptions are part of the event’s recent history: Organizers had to temporarily close entrances to the festival in 2018 due to dust storms, and the event was twice canceled altogether during the pandemic.
“We are a little bit dirty and muddy but spirits are high. The party still going,” said Scott London, a Southern California photographer, adding that the travel limitations offered “a view of Burning Man that a lot of us don’t get to see.”
The road closures came just before “the Man” — a large wooden effigy — was supposed to have been burned Saturday night. Organizers said that the fires had been postponed to Monday night as authorities worked to reopen exit routes by the end of the Labor Day weekend.
At least one fatality has been reported at the festival, but Burning Man organizers said the death of a man in his 40s wasn’t weather-related. The sheriff of nearby Pershing County said he was investigating but has not identified the man.
President Joe Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday that he is aware of the situation at Burning Man, including the death, and the White House is in touch with local officials. Biden said he did not know the cause of death.
With their party closed to motorized traffic, attendees trudged through mud — many barefoot or with plastic bags on their feet. Revelers were urged to conserve supplies of food and water, and most remained hunkered down at the site.
A few, however, managed to walk several miles to the nearest town or catch a ride there.
Celebrity DJ Diplo posted a video to Instagram on Saturday evening showing him and comedian Chris Rock riding in the back of a fan’s pickup truck. He said they had walked six miles through the mud before hitching a ride.
“I legit walked the side of the road for hours with my thumb out,” wrote Diplo, whose real name is Thomas Wesley Pentz.
The event is remote on the best of days and emphasizes self-sufficiency — meaning most people bring in their own food, water and other supplies.
Those who remained Sunday described a resilient community making the most of the mucky conditions: Many posted selfies of themselves covered in mud, dancing or splashing in the makeshift lakes.
Rebecca Barger, a photographer from Philadelphia, arrived at her first Burning Man on Aug. 26 and was determined to stick it out through the end.
“I’m not leaving until both ‘The Man’ and ‘The Temple’ burn,” Barger said, referring to the wooden effigy and wooden structure that are traditionally torched during the event’s last two nights.
She said one of the biggest concerns has been the lack of toilet options because the trucks that normally arrive to clean out the portable toilets multiple times a day haven’t been able to reach the site since Friday’s rainstorm. Some revelers said trucks had resumed cleaning on Sunday.
To prevent her shoes from getting stuck in the muddy clay, Barger says she put a plastic bag over each of her shoes and then covered each bag with a sock. Others were just barefoot.
“Everyone has just adapted, sharing RVs for sleeping, offering food and coffee,” Barger said. “I danced in foot-deep clay for hours to incredible DJs.”
On their website, organizers encouraged participants to remain calm and suggested that the festival is built to endure conditions like the flooding. They said cellphone trailers were being dropped in several locations Saturday night and that they would be briefly opening up internet overnight. Shuttle buses were also being organized to take attendees to Reno from the nearest town of Gerlach, a walk of about five miles (eight kilometers) from the site.
The event began Aug. 27 and had been scheduled to end Monday with attendees packing up and cleaning up after themselves.
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Associated Press reporters Michael Casey in Boston, R.J. Rico in Atlanta, Lea Skene in Baltimore, Juan Lozano in Houston, Julie Walker in New York and Rio Yamat in Las Vegas contributed.
A Florida redistricting plan pushed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis violates the state constitution and is prohibited from being used for any future U.S. congressional elections since it diminishes the ability of Black voters in north Florida to pick a representative of their choice, a state judge ruled Saturday.
Circuit Judge J. Lee Marsh sent the plan back to the Florida Legislature with instructions that lawmakers should draw a new congressional map that complies with the Florida Constitution.
The voting rights groups that challenged the plan in court “have shown that the enacted plan results in the diminishment of Black voters’ ability to elect their candidate of choice in violation of the Florida Constitution,” Marsh wrote.
The decision was the latest to strike down new congressional maps in Southern states over concerns that they diluted Black voting power.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Republican-drawn map in Alabama, with two conservative justices joining liberals in rejecting the effort to weaken a landmark voting rights law. Not long after that, the Supreme Court lifted its hold on a Louisiana political remap case, increasing the likelihood that the Republican-dominated state will have to redraw boundary lines to create a second mostly Black congressional district.
In each of the cases, Republicans have either appealed or vowed to appeal the decisions since they could benefit Democratic congressional candidates facing 2024 races under redrawn maps. The Florida case likely will end up before the Florida Supreme Court.
Every 10 years — following a once-a-decade census — lawmakers in all 50 states, including Florida, redraw political boundaries.
DeSantis, a candidate for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, was criticized for essentially drawing Democratic U.S. Rep. Al Lawson, who is Black, out of office by carving up his district and dividing a large number of Black voters into conservative districts represented by white Republicans.
In an unprecedented move, DeSantis interjected himself into the redistricting process last year by vetoing the Republican-dominated Legislature’s map that preserved Lawson’s district. He called a special session, submitted his own map and demanded lawmakers accept it.
In their lawsuit, the voting rights groups claimed the redrawn congressional map violated state and federal voting rights protections for Black voters.
Florida’s population of 22.2 million is 17% Black. Under the new maps, an area stretching about 360 miles (579 kilometers) from the Alabama border to the Atlantic Ocean and south from the Georgia border to Orlando in central Florida is only represented by white members of Congress.
The Florida judge rejected defense arguments from Republican lawmakers that the state’s provision against weakening or eliminating minority-dominant districts violated the U.S. Constitution.
Marsh wrote: “The court finds that defendants have not satisfied their burden in this case.”
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Follow Mike Schneider on Twitter at @MikeSchneiderAP
WASHINGTON — A masked white man carrying at least one weapon bearing a swastika fatally shot three Black people inside a Florida store Saturday in an attack with a clear motive of racial hatred, officials said.
The shooting in a Dollar General store in a predominately African-American neighborhood left two men and one woman dead and was “racially motivated,” Jacksonville Sheriff T.K. Waters said.
In addition to carrying a firearm with a painted symbol of the genocidal Nazi regime of Germany of the 1930s and 1940s, the shooter issued racist statements before the shooting. He killed himself at the scene.
“He hated Black people,” the sheriff said.
The shooting came on the same day thousands visited Washington, D.C., to attend the Rev. Al Sharpton’s 60th anniversary commemoration of the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous “I Have A Dream” speech.
Rudolph McKissick, a national board member of Sharpton’s National Action Network, was not in Washington, D.C., on Saturday. Yet his thoughts on the shooting touched on issues raised by the civil rights leader.
“The irony is on the day we celebrate the 60th commemoration of the March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King stood up and talked about a dream for racial equality and for love, we still yet live in a country where that dream is not a reality,” McKissick said. “That dream has now been replaced by bigotry.”
The gunman, who was in his 20s, wore a bullet-resistant vest and used a Glock handgun and an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. He acted alone and there was no evidence he was part of a group, Waters said.
The shooter sent written statements to federal law enforcement and at least one media outlet shortly before the attack with evidence suggesting the attack was intended to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of two people during a video game tournament in Jacksonville by a shooter who also killed himself.
Officials did not immediately release the names of the victims or the gunman on Saturday. Local media identified a man believed to be the shooter but his identity was not independently confirmed by The Associated Press by early Sunday.
The shooting happened just before 2 p.m. within a mile of Edward Waters University, a small, historically Black university.
The university said in a statement that a security officer had seen the man near the school’s library and asked for identification. When he refused, he was asked to leave and returned to his car. He was spotted putting on the bullet-resistant vest and a mask before leaving the grounds, although it was not known whether he had planned an attack at the university, Waters said.
“I can’t tell you what his mindset was while he was there, but he did go there,” the sheriff said.
Shortly before the attack, the gunman sent his father a text message telling him to check his computer, where he found his writings. The family notified 911, but the shooting had already begun, Waters said.
“This is a dark day in Jacksonville’s history. There is no place for hate in this community,” said Waters, who noted the FBI was assisting with the ongoing inquiry and had opened a hate crime investigation. “I am sickened by this cowardly shooter’s personal ideology.”
Mayor Donna Deegan said she was heartbroken. “This is a community that has suffered again and again. So many times this is where we end up,” Deegan said. “This is something that should not and must not continue to happen in our community.”
McKissick said the shooting took place in the historic New Town neighborhood, which now needs love and affirmation.
“It’s a Black neighborhood, and what we don’t want is for it to be painted in some kind of light that it is filled with plight, violence and decadence,” McKissick said.
“As it began to unfold, and I began to see the truth of it, my heart ached on several levels,” he said, noting the shooting appears to be an extension of a racial divide in the state highlighted by political turmoil, which he said has been fuelled in part by Gov. Ron DeSantis.
“This divide exists because of the ongoing disenfranchisement of Black people and a governor, who is really propelling himself forward through bigoted, racially motivated, misogynistic, xenophobic actions to throw red meat to a Republican base,” McKissick said in reference to DeSantis.
“Nobody is having honest, candid conversations about the presence of racism,” said McKissick, a Baptist bishop and senior pastor of the Bethel Church in Jacksonville.
DeSantis, who spoke with the sheriff by phone from Iowa while campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, denounced the shooter’s racist motivation, calling him a “scumbag.”
“This guy killed himself rather than face the music and accept responsibility for his actions. He took the coward’s way out,” DeSantis said.
McKinnis said the location of the shooting was chosen because of its proximity to Edward Waters University, where students remained locked down in their dorms for several hours. No students or faculty were believed to have been involved, the university said.
The attack at a store in a predominantly Black neighborhood recalls past shootings targeting Black Americans, including at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket in 2022 and a historic African Methodist Episcopal church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.
The Buffalo shooting, which killed 10 people, stands apart as one of the deadliest targeted attacks on Black people by a lone white gunman in U.S. history. The shooter was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The Jacksonville shooting came a day before the 63rd anniversary of the city’s notorious “Ax Handle Saturday,” when 200 Ku Klux Klan members attacked Black protesters conducting a peaceful sit-in against Jim Crow laws banning them from white-owned stores and restaurants.
The police stood by until a Black street gang arrived to fight the Klansmen, who were armed with bats and ax handles. Only Black people were arrested.
Jacksonville native Marsha Dean Phelts was in Washington with others at the King commemoration and said learning of the shooting was “a death blow.”
Phelps, who is Black, said her acute awareness of Florida’s history of racial tensions was amplified by the deadly shooting. The 79-year-old is a resident of Amelia Island, an African-American beach community in Nassau County established in 1935 as a result of segregation.
“We could not go to public parks and public beaches, unless you owned your own,” she recalled of the state’s past institutional discrimination. “You did not have access to things that your taxes pay for.”
LaTonya Thomas, 52, another Jacksonville resident riding a charter bus home after the Washington commemoration, said she wouldn’t allow the shooting to draw down her spirits after the “wonderful experience,” but she was saddened by the violence.
“We took this long journey from Jacksonville, Florida, to be a part of history,” she said. “When I was told that there was a white shooter in a predominantly Black area, I felt like that was a targeted situation.”
Thomas said she was able to reach a close family friend employed at the store to confirm the person was not working during the shooting.
“It made the march even more important because, of course, gun violence and things of that nature seem so casual now,” she said. “Now you have employees, customers that will never go home.”
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AP writers Russ Bynam and John Raoux in Jacksonville, Terry Spencer in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Trisha Ahmed in St. Paul, Minnesota, and Mike Balsamo in Washington contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Thousands converged on the National Mall on Saturday for the 60th anniversary of Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington, saying a country that remains riven by racial inequality has yet to fulfill the legendary civil rights leader’s dream.
“We have made progress, over the last 60 years, since Dr. King led the March on Washington,” said Alphonso David, president and CEO of the Global Black Economic Forum. “Have we reached the mountaintop? Not by a longshot.”
The event is convened by the Kings’ Drum Major Institute and the Rev. Al Sharpton ‘s National Action Network. A host of Black civil rights leaders and a multiracial, interfaith coalition of allies will rally attendees on the same spot where as many as 250,000 gathered in 1963 for what is still considered one of the greatest and most consequential racial justice and equality demonstrations in U.S. history.
Inevitably, Saturday’s even was shot through with contrasts to the initial, historic demonstration. Speakers and banners talked about the importance of LGBTQ and Asian-American rights. Many who addressed the crowd were women after only one was given the microphone in 1963.
Pamela Mays McDonald of Philadelphia attended the initial march as a child. “I was 8 years old at the original March and only one woman was allowed to speak — she was from Arkansas where I’m from — now look at how many women are on the podium today,” she said.
For some, the contrasts were bittersweet. “I often look back and look over to the reflection pool and the Washington monument and I see a quarter of a million people 60 years ago and just a trickling now,” said Marsha Dean Phelts of Amelia Island, Florida. “It was more fired up then. But the things we were asking for and needing, we still need them today.”
As speakers delivered messages they were overshadowed by the sounds of passenger planes taking off from Ronald Reagan National Airport. Rugby games were underway along the Mall in close proximity to the Lincoln while joggers and bikers went about their routines.
On Friday, Martin Luther King III, who is the late civil rights icon’s eldest son, and his sister, Bernice King, each visited their father’s monument in Washington.
“I see a man still standing in authority and saying, ‘We’ve still got to get this this right,’” Bernice said as she looked up at the granite statue.
Featured speakers include Ambassador Andrew Young, the close King adviser who helped organize the original march and who went on to serve as a congressman, U.N. ambassador and mayor of Atlanta. Leaders from the NAACP and the National Urban League are also expected to give remarks.
Several leaders from groups organizing the march met Friday with Attorney General Merrick Garland and Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the civil rights division, to discuss a range of issues, including voting rights, policing and redlining.
The gathering Saturday was a precursor to the actual anniversary of the Aug. 28, 1963 March on Washington. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris will observe the march anniversary on Monday by meeting with organizers of the 1963 gathering. All of King’s children have been invited to meet with Biden, White House officials said.
For the Rev. Al Sharpton, founder of the National Action Network, continuing to observe March on Washington anniversaries fulfills a promise he made to the late King family matriarch Coretta Scott King. Twenty three years ago, she introduced Sharpton and Martin Luther King III at a 37th anniversary march and urged them to carry on the legacy.
“I never thought that 23 years later, Martin and I, with Arndrea, would be doing a march and we’d have less (civil rights protections) than we had in 2000,” Sharpton said, referring to Martin Luther King III’s wife, Arndrea Waters King.
Martin Luther King Jr.’s Washington remarks have resounded through decades of push and pull toward progress in civil and human rights. But dark moments followed his speech, too.
Two weeks later in 1963, four Black girls were killed in the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama, followed by the kidnapping and murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi the following year. The tragedies spurred passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
And the voting rights marches from Montgomery to Selma, Alabama, in which marchers were brutally beaten while crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in what became known as “Bloody Sunday,” forced Congress to adopt the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Unfortunately, we’re living in a time when there’s a younger generation who believes that my daddy’s generation, and those of us who came after, didn’t get enough done,” Bernice King said. “And I want them to understand, you are benefiting and this is the way you’re benefiting.”
She added: “We can’t give up, because there’s a moment in time when change comes. We have to celebrate the small victories. If you’re not grateful, you will undermine your progress, too.”
Saturday’s gathering gave Denorver Garrett, 31, hope.
He walked around the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, carrying a cross with names of victims of police brutality and gun violence. “I’ve lost a lot of friends to gun violence and God put it on my heart to carry this cross and turn my pain into something,” Garrett said. “This fight though, has gotten very hard over time and hearing people who are united for the betterment of our people and communities—it’s recharged me to continue and I’m glad I came.”
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Ayanna Alexander, Gary Fields and Jacquelyn Martin in Washington and Nicholas Riccardi in Denver contributed to this report.
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WASHINGTON — The last part of the speech took less time to deliver than it takes to boil an egg, but “I Have A Dream” is one of American history’s most famous orations and most inspiring.
On Aug. 28, 1963, from the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. began by speaking of poverty, segregation and discrimination and how the United States had reneged on its promise of equality for Black Americans. If anyone remembers that dystopian beginning, they don’t talk about it.
What is etched into people’s memory is the pastoral flourish that marked the last five minutes and presented a soaring vision of what the nation might be and the freedom that equality for all could bring.
As participants prepare to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, that five-minute piece of King’s 16-minute address is the star of that day and today it is the measuring stick of the country’s progress.
How did that memorable moment come to be? Were there other speakers?
King was one of several prominent figures speaking to the many tens of thousands gathered on the National Mall that summer day. Others included A. Phillip Randolph, the march director and founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters; Roy Wilkins, the NAACP’s executive secretary; Walter Reuther, president of the United Auto Workers; and John Lewis, a 23-year-old who led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later was a longtime congressman.
There were memorable moments before King spoke.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, who today is the District of Columbia’s veteran nonvoting delegate to Congress, was a SNCC member who helped organize the march. She remembers that march leaders got Lewis to tone down his planned speech because of concern it was too inflammatory. “He had phrases in there about, for example, Sherman marching through Georgia,” Norton said, a reference to Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman burning most of Atlanta during the Civil War. “So we had to work with the leaders of the march to change a little bit of that rhetoric.”
King had no peer at the microphone, she said, acknowledging she does not remember now what others may have said. “I’m afraid that Martin Luther King’s speech drowned out everything. It was so eloquent that it kind of surpassed every other speech.”
Did King deliver the speech off the cuff?
The first two-thirds were from written text. The actual speech he used is on loan now at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, in the “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom” gallery of the museum, and shows where he broke script.
King lieutenant Andrew Young said in an interview that he worked with King preparing the text and “none of the things that we remember were in his speech. They didn’t give him but nine minutes and he was trying to write a nine-minute speech.”
A King biographer, Jonathan Eig, said King hit the end of his written remarks and kept going because “he was Martin Luther King” and “it was time to do what he loved to do best, and that’s to give a sermon.”
Had King talked about a dream before?
Although he set the text aside, his deviation was not extemporaneous in the truest since of the word.
Eight months before the March on Washington, King gave an address in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, with similar themes, including a dream.
In June 1963, King spoke in Detroit and opened with the same recognition of Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation before noting that 100 years later, Black people in the U.S. were not free. He talked of the circumstances and sense of urgency but then moved into what he said was a “dream deeply rooted in the American dream.”
The speech mirrored points he would speak of two months later.
Although King used the theme on several occasions “he always made it sound fresh. That’s kind of how he operated,” said Keith Miller, an Arizona State professor who has studied and written extensively about King’s speeches and addresses.
Legend has it that renowned gospel singer Mahalia Jackson prompted King to make the addition?
Whether Jackson was the catalyst or cheered him on after he started, King did not initially intend to speak about a dream and Jackson did say, “Tell them about the dream Martin.” Whatever the close sequence, the two are intertwined now in that moment.
Young said the speech “wasn’t going too well, but everybody was polite listening. But then Mahalia Jackson said, ‘Tell them about the dream Martin’ and he must have heard it or it was in his spirit any way and he took off.”
Arndrea Waters King, King’s daughter-in-law, said Jackson’s suggestion was the moment “that he just really broke out and really started to deliver, if nothing else, what most people remember when they remember the dream.”
Eig, author of “King: A Life,” said he has listened to the master tape made by Motown and she clearly pushes King about the dream, “but it’s only after he has already begun the dream portion of the speech.” Norton, who was nearby and heard Jackson, agrees that was the sequence.
How important was the march to the steps toward equality in the 1960s?
The diversity and size of the crowd and energy were major drivers for the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, as well as the fair housing law, Norton said. “It would have been very hard for Congress to ignore 250,000 people coming from all over the country, from every member’s district.”
Aaron Bryant, curator of photography, visual culture and contemporary history at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, said the impact was immediate in some ways.
“After the March on Washington, you had some of the organizers, some of the leaders of the march actually meeting with (President) John Kennedy and (Vice President) Lyndon Johnson, to talk more strategically about legislation. So it wasn’t just a dream. It was about a plan and then putting that plan into action,” Bryant said.
Historians and other luminaries of that time said tragedies and atrocities fortified those plans. Those include the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, that killed four girls two weeks after the march; the murders of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964; and the televised beatings of civil rights activists on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, in March 1965.
Why the focus on the final five minutes?
Eig believes that focus on hope and not the harsher reality of the day and the lack of progress is due in part to the predominantly white media that chose the inspirational part of the speech over King calling for accountability.
That focus has done a “disservice to King” and his overall message, Eig said, because “we forget about the challenging part of that speech where he says that there are insufficient funds in the vaults of opportunity in this nation.”
Has the dream been achieved?
Bryant said the answer to that probably varies within generations, but a democracy “is always going to be a work in progress. I think particularly as ideas of citizenship and democracy and definitions among different groups change over the course of time.”
Bryant said history shows the progress that followed the march. “The question is how do we compare where we were then to where we are now?”
In the eyes of King’s older son, Martin Luther King III, “Many of us, and I certainly am one, thought that we would be further.” He referred to the rewriting of history today and the rise in public hate and hostility, often driven by political leaders.
“There used to be civility. You could disagree without being disagreeable,” he said.
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Vivek Ramaswamy leaned forward in his leather seat aboard the Cessna 750. He was fiddling with his pen, talking about Donald Trump. It was the final Friday in July. In several hours he’d join his fellow Republican presidential contenders at the Iowa GOP Lincoln Dinner. Ramaswamy—not even 40, zero political experience—was the second-to-last speaker on the bill. Trump, of course, was the headliner.
Ramaswamy is the author of Woke, Inc., a book-length takedown of corporations that champion moral causes along with profits. The treatise was a New York Times best-seller and is now part of the American culture-war canon. His first company, Roivant Sciences, netted him hundreds of millions of dollars by bringing a Wall Street ethos to biotech: Drug patents were prospective assets. Another Ramaswamy venture, Strive Asset Management, markets itself as a place where return-on-investment outweighs all else, including concerns about social issues or the environment.
That afternoon’s flight was a short hop, Columbus to Des Moines. As the private jet barreled west, Ramaswamy sipped a Perrier and scribbled his thoughts in a large notebook. It was on a flight like this, he told me, where he sketched out his 10 “truths”:
God is real. There are two genders. Human flourishing requires fossil fuels. Reverse racism is racism. An open border is no border. Parents determine the education of their children. The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind. Capitalism lifts people up from poverty. There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four. The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.
“I just wrote down things that are true,” he said flatly. “It took me about 15 minutes.”
Ramaswamy doesn’t consider himself a culture warrior; he insists that he is merely speaking the truth. He presents his ideas as self-evident, eternal truths. I asked him if he believes that truths can change over time. For instance, what did he make of the fact that most white Americans used to view it as a “truth” that Black people were genetically inferior—that they weren’t fully human?
“I don’t think that’s true,” he said.
“It is true,” I said. “That’s partly what justified slavery.”
“But it was a justification; it wasn’t a belief,” he said. “Look at emperors—Septimius Severus in Rome. He was Black. He had dark skin. They viewed dark skin as the way we view dark eyes.”
This is how a debate with Ramaswamy unfolds. He’ll engage with your question, but, when needed, he’ll expand its parameters. If that fails, he’ll pivot to thoughts on the existence of a higher power. “I don’t think that human beings ever accepted that Black people were not created equal in the eyes of God,” he said. (His favorite president, Thomas Jefferson, believed exactly that.)
Here’s where else he’s gone in his quest for the truth. He has tantalized audiences with the idea that Americans don’t know “the truth about January 6” and has argued that those who stormed the Capitol have been lied to and “suppressed.” He argues that people who identify as transgender suffer from a mental-health disorder: “I think there is something else going wrong in that person’’s life, badly wrong,” he has said. He calls race-based affirmative action “a cancer” and vows to end it “in every sphere of American life.” He endorses using the military to secure America’s borders, brokering a deal that would cede a huge chunk of Ukraine to Russia, and defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression “only as far as 2028.” His grandest vision might best be described as the inverse of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal: a demolition of the federal government—FBI, CDC, DOE, ATF, IRS—gone.
Ramaswamy radiates confidence: steady eye contact, knowing nod, satisfied smile. He campaigns for up to 18 hours a day. He mostly keeps to a uniform of black pants, black T-shirt, and a black blazer. He operates in a world of declarative statements and punctuates his sentences with “right?” and “actually,” like a tech bro. He’s currently in third place in most national polls. At last month’s Turning Point USA conference, in Florida, Ramaswamy had a breakout moment when 51 percent of straw-poll respondents said he was their second choice for president. “Pretty remarkable how far he’s come in a very short amount of time,” Charlie Kirk, the organization’s founder, tweeted.
Last week, leaked documents designed to inform Ron DeSantis’s strategy at Wednesday’s first presidential debate portrayed Ramaswamy as the candidate to beat. The Florida governor’s super PAC advised him to “take a sledgehammer” to the 38-year-old outsider. Many potential voters will likely be intrigued when they hear Ramaswamy speak his truths onstage this Wednesday. He is living a life they can only dream about: Start a company or two, make half a billion dollars, say whatever you want. And then, naturally, run for president.
The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy on his phone after a taping of the PBS political talk show Firing Line With Margaret Hoover.
A colossal American flag hangs on the outside of Ramaswamy’s spare-no-expense campaign headquarters in Columbus. The property is a former barn; the word TRUTH is plastered everywhere. One communal work area, for phone banking, is roughly the size of a basketball court. He has his choice of two production studios from which to record his never-ending stream of cable-news hits, podcast appearances, and social-media videos.
During my visit, John Schnatter—a.k.a. Papa John—flew in from Kentucky via private helicopter to speak his truth on Ramaswamy’s own nascent podcast, The Vivek Show.
Papa John told the candidate how he became very rich—how his single pizza shop grew into a chain of over 5,000 stores—then turned to a long, complicated story about his downfall. He claims that he was set up by a PR firm that goaded him into saying a racial slur during a private coaching session and that this firm is connected to Hillary Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein. (Reached for comment, a spokesperson for the PR firm referred me to a recent partial summary judgment against Schnatter in the firm’s favor.) He used the words “demonic” and “satanic” to describe the American left. At one point, the conversation veered toward Russia and Hunter Biden’s laptop. “I don’t know why the Creator put me through this,” Papa John said.
All the while, Ramaswamy nodded, smiled, or, when applicable, shook his head in disbelief. This was his media-forward candidacy, distilled: a morning behind the mic inside a posh podcast setup chatting with a fellow entrepreneur about the perils of woke capitalism. When the episode aired, he’d have a cautionary tale for listeners, a potentially viral clip that would get him in front of new voters.
The night before, I watched Ramaswamy speak to a couple hundred young conservatives at the Forge Leadership Summit. He looked around the room and preached that “hardship is not a choice, but victimhood is a choice.” It’s one of his favorite lines, and a nod to his second book, Nation of Victims. The crowd that night was almost exclusively white, and Ramaswamy’s inflection was temporarily suffused with twang.
“We’re starved for purpose and meaning and identity at a time in our national history when the things that used to fill our void—faith, patriotism, hard work, family—these things have disappeared,” he said. He rattled off a list of “poisons” that have filled the void, pausing for dramatic beats between each one: “Wokeism. Transgenderism. Climatism. COVIDism. Globalism. Depression. Anxiety. Fentanyl. Suicide.” The crowd murmured.
He kept rolling. He said that Russia’s war against Ukraine is “really just a battle between two thugs on the other side of Eastern Europe.” He warned that incremental change within American institutions is impossible.
Right now, he said, we have reached a “1776 moment” in this country.
“Do we stand on the side of reform?” he asked. “Or do we stand on the side of revolution?”
When he finished, half the people in the room jumped to their feet.
Vivek Ramaswamy with his son, Karthik, before speaking at a house party and fundraiser in Hubbard, Iowa.
Ramaswamy hurried out and ducked into an SUV: He feared he’d be late for his prime-time interview on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show. During the ride, he revisited one of the more challenging audience questions. A woman had asked if, as president, he would commit to making abortion illegal at the federal level. He told her that he is “unapologetically pro-life,” but a strict constitutionalist—an originalist. He said he viewed recent state-level abortion restrictions as victories for federalism. The woman seemed unsatisfied.
Ramaswamy knew that abortion questions would keep coming up. “I do feel like I’m being bullied a little bit on this issue,” he told his aides. They ran through his options. A video? A public address? Suddenly the subject seemed fraught. “Eh, probably an abortion speech isn’t a good idea, to be honest with you,” he said.
After the Cuomo interview, we drove to Ramaswamy’s house. It’s bright and white with giant ceilings—suburban palatial. One of the family’s two nannies appeared and started putting together a spread: chili, kale, watermelon salad, tofu tacos.
Throughout his professional life, Ramaswamy has aimed to be perceived as an American traditionalist who is simultaneously ahead of the curve. He is the son of Indian immigrants and a practicing Hindu. As a high-school student at St. Xavier, a Jesuit prep school in Cincinnati, he quickly got up to speed on all things Bible. On the campaign trail, he frequently invokes spirituality, and his message has the feel of old-school Christianity.
Growing up, he loved hip-hop, especially Eminem, and his own performances under his alter-ego “Da Vek” as a Harvard student landed him in The Crimson. He still occasionally leans into it. The day we met, he had just freestyled on Fox News. Earlier this month, he grabbed the mic and did an Eminem impression at the Iowa State Fair.
Though now running as a Republican, he long identified as a libertarian. He cast his first vote, when he was a 19-year-old, in the 2004 election, supporting the Libertarian candidate Michael Badnarik. (He sat out every subsequent presidential election until 2020, when he voted for Trump.)
Ramaswamy told me a story about how in eighth grade, he was pushed down a flight of stairs at his public school. Though he underwent hip surgery afterward, he was careful not to portray himself as a victim. Instead, he described the event as the catalyst for his arrival at St. Xavier.
I asked him about coming of age in the post-9/11 world, when many ignorant Americans assumed that anyone with brown skin might be a terrorist. He told me about the experience of being singled out and questioned while flying to Israel—that unique sensation of being the last passenger permitted to board. “I didn’t chafe at that, though, because, honestly, in some ways it was data-driven,” he said. I asked if he considered the action itself to be racist. “No, I think racism has to involve some level of animus, actually,” he said. “I have experienced racism, to be clear. But that’s not—I don’t think that entails animus. So it doesn’t qualify as racism to me.”
He told me he doesn’t believe his race will negatively affect his electability in 2024. He said that among most GOP voters, the No. 1 political problem is “not, like, Arabs right now.” He spoke of what he saw as other underlying American anxieties, such as “the feeling of being victimized right here at home,” he said. “Forces that are different than Mohamed Atta,” he added, alluding to one of the 9/11 hijackers.
The entrepreneur and political newcomer Vivek Ramaswamy speaks at the Republican Party of Iowa’s 2023 Lincoln Dinner fundraiser, which featured 13 Republican presidential hopefuls including former President Donald Trump.
Ramaswamy’s wife, Apoorva, was leaning on the kitchen island, listening to our conversation. After her husband slipped away to hop on a Zoom call with “a bunch of people from Silicon Valley,” she joined me at the table. She was fighting a cold but nonetheless happy to make time for a stranger in her home at nearly 10 p.m. on a weeknight. Besides, she said, she wanted to wait up for Vivek when he was done for the day.
The couple met at a house party in 2011, when they were both graduate students at Yale. They struck up conversation, realizing they were neighbors. Apoorva was following in her father’s footsteps, studying medicine, while Vivek was pursuing a law degree after a few years working in finance in New York. “He just seemed awesome, like someone who was interesting and someone who was full of life,” she said. “I was pretty sure pretty early on that I was going to probably end up marrying him.”
Apoorva, like her future husband, grew up a practicing Hindu. The couple is now raising their two toddlers, Karthik and Arjun, in the faith. Apoorva’s parents also came to the United States from India. “I think, as a child of immigrants, we defaulted toward being Democrats insofar as we thought about it at all, which was honestly not very much,” she said. In recent years, she told me, her mom and dad had become Trump supporters. “They chose this country—they love this country more than any country in the world, and they believe in it,” she said. “And it was cool” for them “to see someone who was unapologetic about it.”
I asked Apoorva if she could recall the first time Vivek told her he wanted to become president.
“I think that, like, on a serious level, it was …” she paused for a long moment. “This December.” Vivek, she said, saw the presidency as one of “the different options open to him.” Other young, rich men unsure of what to do next with their life have bought a yacht or a big-city newspaper, or run for governor of Texas. Ramaswamy chose the presidency.
Apoorva is a head-and-neck-cancer surgeon at the Ohio State University. I asked her if, as a physician, she supported vaccines. She told me that she and her entire family had received COVID shots, but like her husband, she endorses the idea of personal choice over government mandates. This libertarian approach permeates many aspects of their life. Instead of sending their kids to public school, they have “some educators who come to the house.” (She pointed to the special relationship between Alexander the Great and his private tutor, Aristotle, as a model.) Like Vivek, she’s ambitious and career-driven. She told me she doesn’t necessarily plan to give up her job at OSU even if her family moves into the White House. “I think Jill Biden did show that it is possible to be a spouse who is working,” she said.
“This is a totally new world for me, and the concept of being a political spouse is not, like, the fifth thing I would call myself,” she said. “It’s, you know, this is the thing we’re doing, for sure. And I’m proud to support my husband in it. But I think this is about him and his vision. This is not about me.”
The next day, in Des Moines, Ramaswamy periodically stepped away from our interview aboard his campaign bus to play with his older son, Karthik, who had come along for the trip. I asked Ramaswamy if his friends and family were surprised when he told them he was running for president.
“Not shocked, but a combination of excited and personally concerned for me, actually—just knowing how dirty this is,” he said. “I’m pretty uncompromising. And I think most people have an impression that politics is a dirty sport where you have to, you know, be compromised.”
I brought up something Papa John had told him: This wasn’t a knife fight, but a gunfight.
“I mean, I would phrase it differently, but I would say you need a spine of steel to play this sport, for sure,” Ramaswamy said. “Some people who have been coddled in their siloed kingdoms, mini kingdoms they’ve created for themselves, have not been ready for when they’ve shown up for the real thing. I think it was an advantage not to be surrounded by people who heaped false praise on me in one of the 50 states of the union—I think that’s a trap that certain governors almost every cycle have fallen into.”
He smiled, making it clear that he was going out of his way not to invoke his closest rival, Ron DeSantis, by name.
While DeSantis spent the first stretch of his campaign blackballing the mainstream media, Ramaswamy has taken a different approach. His presidential candidacy was preceded by a profile in The New Yorker, and though he himself is perpetually on cable news, he said he hardly ever tunes in. With one exception: “I think Tucker Carlson was great, actually. I really enjoyed watching him.”
“I think Tucker had something to say,” he said. “We’re not slaves to a partisan orthodoxy. I don’t have a particular affinity for the Republican Party apparatus, and I think neither does Tucker.”
He told me he admired how Carlson wasn’t a “delivery mechanism” for something that showed up on the teleprompter. I asked if he had read any of the evidence that came out in the discovery process of the Dominion Voting Systems lawsuit against Fox News, the case that ultimately led to Carlson leaving the network. “I really didn’t,” Ramaswamy said. “It didn’t strike me as super interesting because it seemed like a lot of inside baseball.” I told him that Carlson had been saying certain things on air and, in some cases, texting the direct opposite to his producer. For instance: He said he hates Trump. “Did he say that?” Ramaswamy asked.
For a moment, he seemed genuinely surprised.
The Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaks during a live event with Elon Musk and David Sacks on X Spaces (formerly known as Twitter).
“Most people have barely heard of me,” Ramaswamy admitted to Elon Musk. He was pacing barefoot around his 30th-floor downtown–Des Moines hotel room, doing a live Twitter (X) Spaces broadcast. It was late Friday afternoon, just a few hours before the Lincoln Dinner. Half-eaten takeout was idling in clamshell containers. Ramaswamy had been going nonstop but didn’t seem remotely tired.
Musk and his Silicon Valley friend David Sacks had been trying to make the social network’s shaky audio platform a virtual destination on the 2024 campaign trail, with intermittent success. I could hear Musk’s voice through Ramaswamy’s earbuds. Over and over again, he’d interrupt the candidate. If Ramaswamy was frustrated, he didn’t let it show. After having watched several of his media hits in a row, I noticed how Ramaswamy had developed an array of tricks to wrangle attention, such as when he brought up “our mutual friend Peter,” as in Thiel. He told Musk how much he “loved” the Twitter Files. By the end of the broadcast, he seemed to have made a new fan. Last week, Musk called him “a very promising candidate.”
He continues to find support among a group of very online iconoclasts. “That Vivek guy is very interesting,” Joe Rogan said recently. “He’s very rational and very smart.” Jordan Peterson has praised him as “hard to corner in the best way.” Andrew Yang, who ran as a freethinking businessman in the 2020 Democratic primary, told me he believes that people are just waiting for others to rally behind Ramaswamy. “Vivek’s going to have his moment. There’s going to be a wind at his back. And then when that wind hits, I think people will be stunned at how quickly his support grows.”
At the Iowa Events Center, more than 1,000 people listened politely as 13 Republican candidates (pretty much the entire field except Chris Christie) each made a 10-minute case for themselves. DeSantis announced that “The time for excuses is over!” before clomping away in his heeled boots. Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina preached the value of hard work, telling the room that President Joe Biden and the left were selling “a narcotic of despair.” Former Vice President Mike Pence trudged through his speech and received hardly any applause when endorsing the idea of a federal abortion ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
Just after 8 p.m., Ramaswamy was waiting offstage, looking over his notes. He bounded up the steps to the sounds of Brooks & Dunn’s “Only in America.”
“It’s good to be here, back in Iowa. I feel like I live here now!” Ramaswamy told the crowd.
He was speaking slower than usual, and he had ditched the twang from the previous night. He seemed utterly at ease. He talked about securing our southern border “and our northern border too.” He received lively applause after saying he would shut down scores of three-letter government agencies. He cycled through his list of poisons and his 10 truths. The clapping waxed and waned. His line about “two genders” was a hit, as was his finale about the Constitution. All in all, he received one of the strongest responses of the night: When the speech concluded, he was treated to a partial standing ovation. He paused for a few extra moments to take it all in, waving at the crowd with both hands.
Downstairs, Ramaswamy glowed in his after-party suite. “Eye of the Tiger” and “Born in the U.S.A.,” and a series of country songs blared from speakers. He told the few dozen people before him that he was prepared not only to win the nomination but to deliver a Ronald Reagan–style landslide victory. Some seemed convinced.
The Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy leaves American Dream Machines after he and his son, Karthik, visited the vintage-car shop between campaign events. Ramaswamy’s son joined the candidate on the two-day campaign trip to Iowa.
The next morning, as his campaign bus lumbered to rural Hubbard, I asked Ramaswamy if he had heard what his fellow Republican Will Hurd had said at the event. Hurd, a former Texas congressman, was booed off the stage after telling the Lincoln Dinner crowd “the truth”: that Trump was running only to stay out of prison. “I know the truth,” Hurd said. (Loud boos.) “The truth is hard.” (Louder boos.)
Ramaswamy waved away Hurd’s assertion. He told me that if Trump weren’t running, “they” wouldn’t be prosecuting him. With each passing month, with each new indictment, Ramaswamy has doubled down on his public promise to pardon Trump if elected. He told me that he believes doing so would be “the right thing for the country.” He said the indictments, so far, were “obviously politically motivated.”
During one of his “truth” monologues at the Lincoln Dinner, Ramaswamy told the crowd, “We can handle the truth about what really happened on January 6.” As the bus rolled north, I asked him: What is the truth about January 6?
“I don’t know, but we can handle it,” he said. “Whatever it is, we can handle it. Government agents. How many government agents were in the field? Right?”
Then, suddenly, he was talking about 9/11.
“I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers. Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we’re doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to. Well, if we’re doing a January 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of,” he said. “‘Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who are unarmed.’ What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right?”
I pressed him on the comparison, and suddenly, the bold teller of truths was just asking questions. “Oh yeah, I don’t think they belong in the same conversation,” he said. “I think it’s a ridiculous comparison. But I brought it up only because it was invoked as a basis for the January 6 commission.”
But is he actually confused about who was behind the 9/11 attacks? It was hard to get a straight answer from him. “I mean, I would take the truth about 9/11,” he said. “I am not questioning what we—this is not something I’m staking anything out on. But I want the truth about 9/11.” Some truths, it seems, can be proudly affirmed; others are more elusive. (Asked to clarify Ramaswamy’s views on 9/11, his spokesperson pointed me to a 1,042-word tweet from the candidate, in which he suggested that the U.S. government covered up involvement by Saudi intelligence officials in planning the attacks.)
Ramaswamy told me he’s not interested in being Trump’s vice president, or serving in Trump’s Cabinet. “Reporting in to somebody is not something I’m wired to do well,” he said. “I’m not in this to be a politician. I think there’s a chance to lead a national revival, cultural revival, that touches the next generation of Americans. I don’t think I’m going to be in a position to do that if I’m in an administrative role.”
Unlike Trump, Ramaswamy has signed the “loyalty pledge” to support the eventual GOP nominee—a prerequisite for participation in the debate. He also told me that he would commit to accepting the results of the election. So far, the closest he’s come to ever actually criticizing Trump is saying that 30 percent of the country became “psychiatrically ill” when he was in office. Throughout our discussions, it was clear that Ramaswamy seemed to view Trumpism as something he could tap into. He told me that his path to winning involved recognizing and celebrating Trump’s accomplishments, and promising to build on them.
“I believe with a high degree of conviction that I will win this election,” he said.
If, for whatever reason, that didn’t come to pass, he told me he would “probably just go back to what I was doing”—business, writing books, hanging out with his family. “And I might take a look at the future.”
During our final conversation, I asked Ramaswamy if he felt understood or misunderstood as a candidate. He didn’t hesitate to answer.
“Mostly misunderstood.”
What do you think people misunderstand about you?
“My motivations,” he said.
“I’m not aggrieved by that. I’m patient. But I hope that by the end of this, actually—it’s a deep question—but I think I would rather be properly understood and lose because people decided that the real me is not who they want, than to lose because people never got to know who I really am. That would bother me. And it would be hard to reconcile myself with that. But if people across this country really know just who I am and what I stand for, and then that’s not what they want in a leader, I am 100 percent at peace with that. I have no problem. So that’s kind of my goal in this process.”
The bus pulled onto a sprawling private property in the middle of nowhere. Ramaswamy and his aides hopped off. The millionaire outsider candidate, beholden to no one, was preparing to speak his truth before a wealthy Iowa donor and his friends.
CINCINNATI — Aissata Sall was scrolling through WhatsApp in May when she first learned about the new route to the United States. For Ibrahima Sow, the discovery came on TikTok a few weeks later.
By the time their paths crossed at the tidy one-story brick house in Cincinnati, they had encountered hundreds of other Mauritanians, nearly all of them following a new path surging in popularity among younger migrants from the West African nation, thanks largely to social media.
“Four months ago, it just went crazy,” said Oumar Ball, who arrived in Cincinnati from Mauritania in 1997 and recently opened his home to Sow, Sall and more than a dozen other new migrants. “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”
The spike in migration was made possible by the discovery this year of a new route through Nicaragua, where relaxed entry requirements allow Mauritanians and a handful of other foreign nationals to purchase a low-cost visa without proof of onward travel.
As word of the entry point spreads, travel agencies and paid influencers have taken to TikTok to promote the trip, selling packages of flights that leave from Mauritania, then connect through Turkey, Colombia and El Salvador, and wind up in Managua, Nicaragua. From there, the migrants, along with asylum seekers from other nations, are whisked north by bus with the help of smugglers.
“The American dream is still available,” promises a video on TikTok, one of dozens of similar posts from French-speaking “guides” that help Mauritanians make the trip. “Don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today.”
“We wish you success. Nicaragua loves you very much,” a man working for a travel agency says in Spanish in another video.
The influx of Mauritanians has surprised officials in the U.S. It came without a triggering event — such as a natural disaster, coup or sudden economic collapse — suggesting the growing power of social media to reshape migration patterns: From March to June, more than 8,500 Mauritanians arrived in the country by crossing the border illegally from Mexico, up from just 1,000 in the four months prior, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
The new arrivals likely now outnumber the estimated 8,000 foreign-born Mauritanians previously living in the U.S., about half of whom are in Ohio. Many arrived in the 1990s as refugees after the Arab-led military government began expelling Black citizens.
Some who left say they’re again fleeing state violence directed against Black Mauritanians. Racial tensions have increased since the May death of a young Black man, Oumar Diop, in police custody, with the government moving aggressively to crush protests and disconnect the country’s mobile internet.
The nation was one of the last to criminalize slavery, and the practice is widely believed to persist in parts of the country. Several Mauritanians who spoke to The Associated Press said police targeted them because of anti-slavery activism.
“Life is very difficult, especially for the Black Mauritanian population,” said Sow, 38, who described himself as an activist in the country. “The authorities became threatening and repressive.”
It became difficult to fight, he said, and his life was threatened. So he fled via the new route to Cincinnati, where he’d heard a thriving Mauritanian community was helping new arrivals get on their feet.
Previously, applying for asylum in the U.S. meant flying to Brazil, then risking a dangerous trek through the dense jungle of the Darien Gap. The new route through Nicaragua bypasses that link.
The trip can cost $8,000 to $10,000, a hefty sum that some families manage by selling land or livestock. With economic growth over the past decade, Mauritania has moved into the lower ranks of middle-income countries, according to the U.N. refugee agency, but the poverty rate remains high, with 28.2% living below the poverty line.
The Nicaragua route also allows migrants to avoid the boat voyages to Europe that have killed tens of thousands in the past decade. Mauritanian and Spanish authorities have cracked down on boats crossing the Atlantic for Spain’s Canary Islands, and people are increasingly being intercepted after trekking to North Africa to try to cross the Mediterranean. Flying to Nicaragua is legal, and the rest of the trip is on land — attractive options for Mauritanians and others who want to leave Africa.
The new passage presents a rare opportunity to a generation yearning for a better life, said Bakary Tandia, a Mauritanian activist living in New York: “No matter what is your burning desire to come, if there is no route, you will not even think about it. The reality is: People are seeing a window of opportunity, that’s why they are rushing.”
Still, some who’ve followed the Nicaragua route say they were misled about potential dangers and the future awaiting them in the U.S. This month, a bus carrying migrants tumbled down a steep hillside in Mexico, killing 18 people, including one Mauritanian. Two other Mauritians were hospitalized.
Sall, a 23-year-old nurse, said she was robbed of her remaining money on a bus in Mexico by men dressed as police officers. After crossing the border, she was hospitalized with dehydration.
“On WhatsApp they say, ‘Oh, it’s not very difficult.’ But it’s not true,” she said. “We confront so much pain along the way.”
Ibrahim Dia, a 38-year-old who owns a cleaning company in the Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou, said his brother left the country in June, following the Nicaragua trip he’d seen countless others take in recent months. But he was detained at the border and remains jailed at a Texas detention site, Dia said.
Many Mauritanians enter the U.S. in Yuma, Arizona. Some are dropped off on a Mexican highway by smugglers for a roughly two-hour walk through a knee-deep river and flat desert shrub and rocks. They surrender to Border Patrol agents in Yuma waiting under stadium lights where a wall built during Donald Trump’s presidency abruptly ends.
After a period of detention and screening that could last hours or days, they may enter the country to await a court date, a process that can take years. Others are kept in detention for weeks, or placed on a small number of flights deporting them back to Mauritania.
Human rights groups have called on the Biden administration to grant Temporary Protected Status to Mauritania, pointing to reports of abuse against Black residents who are deported after fleeing.
Those who can enter are often put in touch with a close-knit group of American and Mauritanian-born advocates who connect them to housing and help pay for flights across the U.S. Some head to Philadelphia, Denver, Dallas or New York, where an overwhelmed shelter system has left migrants — many from Mauritania and elsewhere in Africa — sleeping on the sidewalk
Ohio remains the most common destination. Several thousands have found their way to Cincinnati, settling in with the small but vibrant existing community. A group of volunteers, led by longtime resident Ball, help with paperwork and adjustments to the country. Some days, Ball makes multiple trips to the airport to pick up people coming from the border, bringing them to his home or a block of apartments rented out by the community.
On a recent Friday evening, more than a dozen Mauritanians carpooled to a nearby mosque to pray. After the service, they piled into the living room of another friend’s house for dinner: steaming bowls of lamb and couscous served on the floor, with cans of Coca-Cola. A women’s World Cup game played as the group discussed their pasts and futures.
Sall, the one-time nurse, said she wants to go back to school. She’s taken on an unofficial role as cook in the house she shares with others new to Ohio. She hopes to stay in Cincinnati with the community that’s embraced her and many others.
“The Mauritanian people gave me a big welcome,” she said. “And they gave me hope.”
____
Offernhartz reported from New York; Brito from Barcelona, Spain. AP journalist Elliot Spagat contributed from San Diego.
CINCINNATI — Aissata Sall was scrolling through WhatsApp in May when she first learned about the new route to the United States. For Ibrahima Sow, the discovery came on TikTok a few weeks later.
By the time their paths crossed at the tidy one-story brick house in Cincinnati, they had encountered hundreds of other Mauritanians, nearly all of them following a new path surging in popularity among younger migrants from the West African nation, thanks largely to social media.
“Four months ago, it just went crazy,” said Oumar Ball, who arrived in Cincinnati from Mauritania in 1997 and recently opened his home to Sow, Sall and more than a dozen other new migrants. “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”
The spike in migration was made possible by the discovery this year of a new route through Nicaragua, where relaxed entry requirements allow Mauritanians and a handful of other foreign nationals to purchase a low-cost visa without proof of onward travel.
As word of the entry point spreads, travel agencies and paid influencers have taken to TikTok to promote the trip, selling packages of flights that leave from Mauritania, then connect through Turkey, Colombia and El Salvador, and wind up in Managua, Nicaragua. From there, the migrants, along with asylum seekers from other nations, are whisked north by bus with the help of smugglers.
“The American dream is still available,” promises a video on TikTok, one of dozens of similar posts from French-speaking “guides” that help Mauritanians make the trip. “Don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today.”
“We wish you success. Nicaragua loves you very much,” a man working for a travel agency says in Spanish in another video.
The influx of Mauritanians has surprised officials in the U.S. It came without a triggering event — such as a natural disaster, coup or sudden economic collapse — suggesting the growing power of social media to reshape migration patterns: From March to June, more than 8,500 Mauritanians arrived in the country by crossing the border illegally from Mexico, up from just 1,000 in the four months prior, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
The new arrivals likely now outnumber the estimated 8,000 foreign-born Mauritanians previously living in the U.S., about half of whom are in Ohio. Many arrived in the 1990s as refugees after the Arab-led military government began expelling Black citizens.
Some who left say they’re again fleeing state violence directed against Black Mauritanians. Racial tensions have increased since the May death of a young Black man, Oumar Diop, in police custody, with the government moving aggressively to crush protests and disconnect the country’s mobile internet.
The nation was one of the last to criminalize slavery, and the practice is widely believed to persist in parts of the country. Several Mauritanians who spoke to The Associated Press said police targeted them because of anti-slavery activism.
“Life is very difficult, especially for the Black Mauritanian population,” said Sow, 38, who described himself as an activist in the country. “The authorities became threatening and repressive.”
It became difficult to fight, he said, and his life was threatened. So he fled via the new route to Cincinnati, where he’d heard a thriving Mauritanian community was helping new arrivals get on their feet.
Previously, applying for asylum in the U.S. meant flying to Brazil, then risking a dangerous trek through the dense jungle of the Darien Gap. The new route through Nicaragua bypasses that link.
The trip can cost $8,000 to $10,000, a hefty sum that some families manage by selling land or livestock. With economic growth over the past decade, Mauritania has moved into the lower ranks of middle-income countries, according to the U.N. refugee agency, but the poverty rate remains high, with 28.2% living below the poverty line.
The Nicaragua route also allows migrants to avoid the boat voyages to Europe that have killed tens of thousands in the past decade. Mauritanian and Spanish authorities have cracked down on boats crossing the Atlantic for Spain’s Canary Islands, and people are increasingly being intercepted after trekking to North Africa to try to cross the Mediterranean. Flying to Nicaragua is legal, and the rest of the trip is on land — attractive options for Mauritanians and others who want to leave Africa.
The new passage presents a rare opportunity to a generation yearning for a better life, said Bakary Tandia, a Mauritanian activist living in New York: “No matter what is your burning desire to come, if there is no route, you will not even think about it. The reality is: People are seeing a window of opportunity, that’s why they are rushing.”
Still, some who’ve followed the Nicaragua route say they were misled about potential dangers and the future awaiting them in the U.S. This month, a bus carrying migrants tumbled down a steep hillside in Mexico, killing 18 people, including one Mauritanian. Two other Mauritians were hospitalized.
Sall, a 23-year-old nurse, said she was robbed of her remaining money on a bus in Mexico by men dressed as police officers. After crossing the border, she was hospitalized with dehydration.
“On WhatsApp they say, ‘Oh, it’s not very difficult.’ But it’s not true,” she said. “We confront so much pain along the way.”
Ibrahim Dia, a 38-year-old who owns a cleaning company in the Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou, said his brother left the country in June, following the Nicaragua trip he’d seen countless others take in recent months. But he was detained at the border and remains jailed at a Texas detention site, Dia said.
Many Mauritanians enter the U.S. in Yuma, Arizona. Some are dropped off on a Mexican highway by smugglers for a roughly two-hour walk through a knee-deep river and flat desert shrub and rocks. They surrender to Border Patrol agents in Yuma waiting under stadium lights where a wall built during Donald Trump’s presidency abruptly ends.
After a period of detention and screening that could last hours or days, they may enter the country to await a court date, a process that can take years. Others are kept in detention for weeks, or placed on a small number of flights deporting them back to Mauritania.
Human rights groups have called on the Biden administration to grant Temporary Protected Status to Mauritania, pointing to reports of abuse against Black residents who are deported after fleeing.
Those who can enter are often put in touch with a close-knit group of American and Mauritanian-born advocates who connect them to housing and help pay for flights across the U.S. Some head to Philadelphia, Denver, Dallas or New York, where an overwhelmed shelter system has left migrants — many from Mauritania and elsewhere in Africa — sleeping on the sidewalk
Ohio remains the most common destination. Several thousands have found their way to Cincinnati, settling in with the small but vibrant existing community. A group of volunteers, led by longtime resident Ball, help with paperwork and adjustments to the country. Some days, Ball makes multiple trips to the airport to pick up people coming from the border, bringing them to his home or a block of apartments rented out by the community.
On a recent Friday evening, more than a dozen Mauritanians carpooled to a nearby mosque to pray. After the service, they piled into the living room of another friend’s house for dinner: steaming bowls of lamb and couscous served on the floor, with cans of Coca-Cola. A women’s World Cup game played as the group discussed their pasts and futures.
Sall, the one-time nurse, said she wants to go back to school. She’s taken on an unofficial role as cook in the house she shares with others new to Ohio. She hopes to stay in Cincinnati with the community that’s embraced her and many others.
“The Mauritanian people gave me a big welcome,” she said. “And they gave me hope.”
____
Offernhartz reported from New York; Brito from Barcelona, Spain. AP journalist Elliot Spagat contributed from San Diego.
CINCINNATI — Aissata Sall was scrolling through WhatsApp in May when she first learned about the new route to the United States. For Ibrahima Sow, the discovery came on TikTok a few weeks later.
By the time their paths crossed at the tidy one-story brick house in Cincinnati, they had encountered hundreds of other Mauritanians, nearly all of them following a new path surging in popularity among younger migrants from the West African nation, thanks largely to social media.
“Four months ago, it just went crazy,” said Oumar Ball, who arrived in Cincinnati from Mauritania in 1997 and recently opened his home to Sow, Sall and more than a dozen other new migrants. “My phone hasn’t stopped ringing.”
The spike in migration was made possible by the discovery this year of a new route through Nicaragua, where relaxed entry requirements allow Mauritanians and a handful of other foreign nationals to purchase a low-cost visa without proof of onward travel.
As word of the entry point spreads, travel agencies and paid influencers have taken to TikTok to promote the trip, selling packages of flights that leave from Mauritania, then connect through Turkey, Colombia and El Salvador, and wind up in Managua, Nicaragua. From there, the migrants, along with asylum seekers from other nations, are whisked north by bus with the help of smugglers.
“The American dream is still available,” promises a video on TikTok, one of dozens of similar posts from French-speaking “guides” that help Mauritanians make the trip. “Don’t put off tomorrow what you can do today.”
“We wish you success. Nicaragua loves you very much,” a man working for a travel agency says in Spanish in another video.
The influx of Mauritanians has surprised officials in the U.S. It came without a triggering event — such as a natural disaster, coup or sudden economic collapse — suggesting the growing power of social media to reshape migration patterns: From March to June, more than 8,500 Mauritanians arrived in the country by crossing the border illegally from Mexico, up from just 1,000 in the four months prior, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection data.
The new arrivals likely now outnumber the estimated 8,000 foreign-born Mauritanians previously living in the U.S., about half of whom are in Ohio. Many arrived in the 1990s as refugees after the Arab-led military government began expelling Black citizens.
Some who left say they’re again fleeing state violence directed against Black Mauritanians. Racial tensions have increased since the May death of a young Black man, Oumar Diop, in police custody, with the government moving aggressively to crush protests and disconnect the country’s mobile internet.
The nation was one of the last to criminalize slavery, and the practice is widely believed to persist in parts of the country. Several Mauritanians who spoke to The Associated Press said police targeted them because of anti-slavery activism.
“Life is very difficult, especially for the Black Mauritanian population,” said Sow, 38, who described himself as an activist in the country. “The authorities became threatening and repressive.”
It became difficult to fight, he said, and his life was threatened. So he fled via the new route to Cincinnati, where he’d heard a thriving Mauritanian community was helping new arrivals get on their feet.
Previously, applying for asylum in the U.S. meant flying to Brazil, then risking a dangerous trek through the dense jungle of the Darien Gap. The new route through Nicaragua bypasses that link.
The trip can cost $8,000 to $10,000, a hefty sum that some families manage by selling land or livestock. With economic growth over the past decade, Mauritania has moved into the lower ranks of middle-income countries, according to the U.N. refugee agency, but the poverty rate remains high, with 28.2% living below the poverty line.
The Nicaragua route also allows migrants to avoid the boat voyages to Europe that have killed tens of thousands in the past decade. Mauritanian and Spanish authorities have cracked down on boats crossing the Atlantic for Spain’s Canary Islands, and people are increasingly being intercepted after trekking to North Africa to try to cross the Mediterranean. Flying to Nicaragua is legal, and the rest of the trip is on land — attractive options for Mauritanians and others who want to leave Africa.
The new passage presents a rare opportunity to a generation yearning for a better life, said Bakary Tandia, a Mauritanian activist living in New York: “No matter what is your burning desire to come, if there is no route, you will not even think about it. The reality is: People are seeing a window of opportunity, that’s why they are rushing.”
Still, some who’ve followed the Nicaragua route say they were misled about potential dangers and the future awaiting them in the U.S. This month, a bus carrying migrants tumbled down a steep hillside in Mexico, killing 18 people, including one Mauritanian. Two other Mauritians were hospitalized.
Sall, a 23-year-old nurse, said she was robbed of her remaining money on a bus in Mexico by men dressed as police officers. After crossing the border, she was hospitalized with dehydration.
“On WhatsApp they say, ‘Oh, it’s not very difficult.’ But it’s not true,” she said. “We confront so much pain along the way.”
Ibrahim Dia, a 38-year-old who owns a cleaning company in the Mauritanian city of Nouadhibou, said his brother left the country in June, following the Nicaragua trip he’d seen countless others take in recent months. But he was detained at the border and remains jailed at a Texas detention site, Dia said.
Many Mauritanians enter the U.S. in Yuma, Arizona. Some are dropped off on a Mexican highway by smugglers for a roughly two-hour walk through a knee-deep river and flat desert shrub and rocks. They surrender to Border Patrol agents in Yuma waiting under stadium lights where a wall built during Donald Trump’s presidency abruptly ends.
After a period of detention and screening that could last hours or days, they may enter the country to await a court date, a process that can take years. Others are kept in detention for weeks, or placed on a small number of flights deporting them back to Mauritania.
Human rights groups have called on the Biden administration to grant Temporary Protected Status to Mauritania, pointing to reports of abuse against Black residents who are deported after fleeing.
Those who can enter are often put in touch with a close-knit group of American and Mauritanian-born advocates who connect them to housing and help pay for flights across the U.S. Some head to Philadelphia, Denver, Dallas or New York, where an overwhelmed shelter system has left migrants — many from Mauritania and elsewhere in Africa — sleeping on the sidewalk
Ohio remains the most common destination. Several thousands have found their way to Cincinnati, settling in with the small but vibrant existing community. A group of volunteers, led by longtime resident Ball, help with paperwork and adjustments to the country. Some days, Ball makes multiple trips to the airport to pick up people coming from the border, bringing them to his home or a block of apartments rented out by the community.
On a recent Friday evening, more than a dozen Mauritanians carpooled to a nearby mosque to pray. After the service, they piled into the living room of another friend’s house for dinner: steaming bowls of lamb and couscous served on the floor, with cans of Coca-Cola. A women’s World Cup game played as the group discussed their pasts and futures.
Sall, the one-time nurse, said she wants to go back to school. She’s taken on an unofficial role as cook in the house she shares with others new to Ohio. She hopes to stay in Cincinnati with the community that’s embraced her and many others.
“The Mauritanian people gave me a big welcome,” she said. “And they gave me hope.”
____
Offernhartz reported from New York; Brito from Barcelona, Spain. AP journalist Elliot Spagat contributed from San Diego.
BRANDON, Miss. — Six white former Mississippi law officers are expected to plead guilty to state charges on Monday for torturing two Black men in a racist assault after recently admitting their guilt in a connected federal civil rights case.
Prosecutors say some of the officers nicknamed themselves the “Goon Squad” because of their willingness to use excessive force and cover it up, including the attack that ended with a victim shot in the mouth.
In January, the officers entered a house without a warrant and handcuffed and assaulted the two men with stun guns, a sex toy and other objects. The officers mocked them with racial slurs throughout the 90-minute torture session. They then devised a cover-up that included planting drugs and a gun on one of the men, which could have sent him to prison for years.
The officers are expected to plead guilty to state charges including home invasion, obstruction of justice and conspiracy to hinder prosecution, as well as aggravated assault for the officer who pulled the trigger.
Each of the men reached individual plea agreements that include prison sentences ranging from five to 30 years, court records show. Time served for the state charges will run concurrently with the sentences they are scheduled to receive in federal court in November following their pleas on Aug. 3.
The men include five former Rankin County sheriff’s deputies including Brett McAlpin, Hunter Elward, Christian Dedmon, Jeffrey Middleton and Daniel Opdyke, and a police officer from the city of Richland, Joshua Hartfield.
Elward admitted he shoved a gun into Jenkins’s mouth and pulled the trigger in a “mock execution” that went awry.
After the brazen acts of police violence in Rankin County came to light, some residents pointed to a police culture they said gave officers carte blanche to abuse their power.
The civil rights charges followed an investigation by The Associated Press linking some of the officers to at least four violent encounters with Black men since 2019, which left two dead and another with lasting injuries. The Justice Department launched a civil rights probe into the case in February.
Rankin County’s majority-white suburbs have been one of several destinations for white flight out of the capital, Jackson, which is home to one of the highest percentages of Black residents of any major U.S. city.
The officers warned Jenkins and Parker to “go back to Jackson or ‘their side’ of the Pearl River,” the documents say.
The two victims, Michael Corey Jenkins and Eddie Terrell Parker, were targeted because a white neighbor complained that two Black men were staying at the home with a white woman, court documents show.
Parker was a childhood friend of the homeowner, Kristi Walley. She’s been paralyzed since she was 15, and Parker was helping care for her.
“He’s a blessing. Every time I’ve needed him he’s been here,” Walley said in a February interview. “There were times I’ve been living here by myself and I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
Parker and Jenkins have left Mississippi and aren’t sure they will ever return to the state for an extended period. They took solace that at least one part of the justice system appears to have worked.
“With a little fight, with a lot of fight, you can come out with the truth,” Parker said a day after the guilty pleas were announced. “And the truth always prevails over any lie or story you make up.”
Jenkins still has difficulty speaking because of his injuries. The gunshot lacerated his tongue and broke his jaw before exiting his neck.
“As far as justice, I knew we were going to get it,” Jenkins said. “But I thought it was maybe going to take longer.”
Kristen Clarke, who heads the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, said they fomented distrust within the community they were supposed to serve. Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch said the abuse of power would not be tolerated.
___
Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow him at @mikergoldberg.
MONTGOMERY, Ala. — As bystanders trained their smartphone cameras on the riverfront dock while several white boaters pummeled a Black riverboat co-captain, they couldn’t have known the footage would elicit a national conversation about racial solidarity.
Yet, a week after multiple videos showing the now-infamous brawl and valiant defense of the outnumbered co-captain were shared widely on social media, it’s clear the event truly tapped into the psyche of Black America and created a broader cultural moment.
Andrea Boyles, a sociology professor at Tulane University, said a long history of anti-Black racism and attacks and current events likely magnified the attack’s impact and response.
“Especially at a time like now where we see an increase in anti-Black racism through legislation and otherwise, whether we’re thinking about history, the banning of Black history and curriculum and all sorts of things across the state of Florida” and elsewhere, Boyles said. “So this is why it is on the forefront of people’s minds. And folks are very much tuned in, Black people in particular.”
Many see the Aug. 5 ordeal on the riverfront dock in Montgomery, Alabama’s capital city steeped in civil rights history, as a long-awaited answer to countless calls for help that went unanswered for past Black victims of violence and mob attacks.
“We witnessed a white mob doing this to him,” said Michelle Browder, an artist and social justice entrepreneur in Montgomery, describing the attack by boaters on the Black riverboat co-captain.
“I call it a mob because that is what it was, it was a mob mentality,” she added. “It then became a moment because you saw Black people coming together.”
After being inundated with images and stories of lethal violence against Black people, including motorists in traffic stops, church parishioners and grocery shoppers, the video from Montgomery struck a chord because it didn’t end in the worst of outcomes for Black Americans.
“For Montgomery to have this moment, we needed to see a win. We needed to see our community coming together and we needed to see justice,” Browder said.
Videos of the brawl showed the participants largely divided along racial lines. Several white men punched or shoved the Black riverboat co-captain after he took a separate vessel to shore and tried to move their pontoon boat. The white boaters’ private vessel was docked in a spot designated for the city-owned Harriott II riverboat, on which more than 200 passengers were waiting to disembark.
The videos then showed mostly Black people rushing to the co-captain’s defense, including a Black teenage riverboat crew member who swam to the dock. The videos also showed the ensuing brawl that included a Black man hitting a white person with a folding chair.
As of Friday, Alabama police had charged four white people with misdemeanor assault. The folding chair-wielding man turned himself in Friday and was charged with disorderly conduct.
Jim Kittrell, the captain of Harriott II, told The Daily Beast that he thought race might have been a factor in the initial attack on his co-captain, but the resulting melee was not a “Black and white thing.”
“This was our crew upset about these idiots,” Kittrell also told WACV radio station.
He later explained that several members of his crew, seen confronting the pontoon boat party after the riverboat docked, “felt they had to retaliate, which was unfortunate.”
“I wish we could have stopped it from happening but, when you see something like that, it was difficult. It was difficult for me to sit there in the wheelhouse watching him being attacked,” Kittrell told the station.
Kittrell told The Associated Press by phone that the city had asked him not to talk about the brawl.
Major Saba Coleman of the Montgomery Police Department said on Tuesday that hate crime charges were ruled out after the department consulted with the local FBI. But several observers noted the presence of a hate motivation, or lack thereof, on the part of the pontoon boat party was not why the event resonated so strongly.
“All these individuals having smartphones and cameras have democratized media and information. In the past, it was a very narrow scope on what news was being reported and from what perspectives,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said.
The technology, Johnson added, “opened up an opportunity for America as a whole to understand the impact of racism, the impact of violence and the opportunity to create a narrative that’s more consistent with keeping African Americans and other communities safe.”
The riverfront brawl spawned a multitude of memes, jokes, parodies, reenactments and even T-shirts. “Lift every chair and swing,” read one shirt in a play on “ Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing,” the late-19th century hymn sometimes referred to as the Black national anthem.
Another meme likened the co-captain’s toss of his hat into the air to sending the “bat signal,” a reference to the D.C. Comics character Batman. One image of the scene captured from bystander video was altered to imitate Marvel Comics’ Avengers characters assembling through magic portals on the dock to defend the Black co-captain.
Many observers on social media were quick to point out the significance of the city and location where the brawl took place. Montgomery was the first capital of the Confederacy and the riverfront is an area where enslaved people were once unloaded to be sold at auction. The area is a few blocks from the spot where Rosa Parks was arrested for disobeying bus segregation laws.
“Much of (the riverfront brawl reaction) is emblematic of the history of Montgomery,” said Timothy Welbeck, the director of the Center for Anti-Racism at Temple University in Philadelphia.
“This is the home of the bus boycott; this is the home of intense, racialized segregation and various forms of resistance today,” he said. “Even if there wasn’t an explicit mention of race, many people saw a white man assaulting a Black man as a proxy for some of the racist behavior that they’ve seen before. It brought about a sense of solidarity and unified fate, too, in this particular moment.”
Then there’s the lingering trauma of seeing past Black victims of violence and mob attacks suffer without help or intervention. Here was the rare event in which bystanders not only chronicled the moment but were able to intervene and help someone they saw being victimized.
In other notable instances, such as George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, bystanders were restrained because the perpetrators were law enforcement officers. In a video of Floyd’s encounter with police filmed by Black bystander Darnella Frazier, people can be heard pleading for the Black man’s life as he gasped for air with a white officer’s knee held to his neck.
Physically intervening in Minneapolis would have invited arrests and placed the would-be rescuers at risk for harm themselves.
Historically, lynching victims were often taken from their families as the Black community had to stand by mutely. Emmett Till’s family members in Mississippi were haunted by their inability to stop the white men who kidnapped and killed him.
Bowder, the Montgomery artist, said the conversation needs to continue.
“I’m hoping for a hopeful message out of this,” she said.
Katrina Hazzard, a Rutgers University professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Criminal Justice, said she has seen that hopeful message in the comments of support that have crossed racial and ethnic lines in identifying the aggressors and the right for people to defend themselves and the crewman.
“That’s just been refreshing for me to see and for me to hear across the board,” she said.
___
Aisha I. Jefferson reported from Chicago and Aaron Morrison, who reported from New York, is a member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. AP reporter Gary Fields contributed from Washington, D.C.
PHILLIPS COMMUNITY, S.C. — The Rev. Elijah Smalls Jr. once grew okra, butter beans and other vegetables in the neighborhood where his family has lived near the South Carolina coast since not long after the Civil War. That was before new half-a-million-dollar homes in a nearby subdivision overwhelmed the drainage system.
Runoff meant for sewers now pools in the 80-year-old veteran’s backyard, making gardening impossible.
Smalls and his relatives are among the many original families still living in historic settlement communities around Charleston. People who had been enslaved at Phillips Plantation bought patches of it to make their futures. Their descendants question whether the next generation can afford to stay.
“This is the only place I wanted to live and raise my family,” said Fred Smalls, standing outside the home where his two sons grew up.
All along the South Carolina coast, land owned by the descendants of enslaved people is being targeted by developers looking to make money on vacation getaways and new homes. From Myrtle Beach south to Hilton Head, Black landowners who inherited property have been embroiled in disputes with investors looking to capitalize on rising real estate values.
State reforms approved in 2017 provided what supporters described as “shark repellant” — a law that made it harder for developers to strike deals below market prices with distant heirs who had long since moved away.
But skyrocketing property taxes are creating a growing burden as assessments rise. Younger family members may not qualify for homestead exemptions and other tax breaks. Elders worry that their family legacies — established by formerly enslaved ancestors who acquired land despite entrenched racism across the defeated South — are slipping away.
Most of the hundreds who still live on the remaining 450 acres or so of Phillips Community trace their lineage to the founders. Residents enjoy the pace of the South Carolina Lowcountry in the settlement communities, where neighbors have long taken care of each other.
“If we don’t take steps to protect them, we’re going to lose them parcel by parcel,” said Coastal Conservation League Executive Director Faith Rivers James.
——
Orange mesh fencing lines the dirt expanse of a new development site that encircles the ranch-style house where Josephine Wright has taken her stand. The 93-year-old woman is the matriarch of a family that has owned land on Hilton Head Island since Reconstruction.
“I’m being surrounded, really,” Wright said recently in the Brooklyn accent she picked up before returning to her late husband’s home 30 years ago in Jonesville Historic Gullah Neighborhood.
They wanted tranquility as his Parkinson’s disease progressed. But gone is the lush greenery that once grew on 29 acres previously owned by other relatives bordering Wright’s home. A Georgia-based developer, Bailey Point Investment, LLC, broke ground last summer on a 147-unit vacation rental complex there.
Managers of her family’s trust failed to pay escalating tax bills. The land sold at a 2014 tax auction for just $35,000 — a fraction of its current worth.
Then the investment company sued Wright, who owns her one acre separately. The company alleged that a corner of her screened-in porch, a shed and a satellite dish encroach on the construction project. A lawyer for the company did not return a call from The Associated Press.
She suspects they want to run her off, but she’s not intimidated. NBA superstar Kyrie Irving and filmmaker Tyler Perry have lent their support. Town officials don’t intend to issue building permits until the case is closed. She says other residents have thanked her for holding out.
She expected to spend these days in peace. Her small home remains the gathering spot for an extended family that includes 40 grandchildren, generations who she hopes will also enjoy the land.
“I just want to be able to live here in this sanctuary with a free mind,” Wright said.
—-
The first self-governed town of formerly enslaved people in the United States was located on Hilton Head Island. Wright’s neighborhood gets its name from a Black Civil War veteran named Caesar Jones who had escaped enslavement and purchased more than 100 acres himself, finding refuge in marshland that had been dismissed by colonists as unsuitable for farming.
It’s hardly undesirable today. The advent of air conditioning helped make coastal land more appealing. New highways improved access to the coast, where population increases have made South Carolina the 10th fastest-growing state during the past decade.
Those searching for land found easy targets in the Gullah Geechee community, owned by descendants of West Africans who were forced into slavery on rice, indigo and cotton plantations along the Atlantic coast. They developed their unique culture on isolated islands, but their separation from the U.S. legal system left them vulnerable to exploitation.
Developers took advantage in many cases of what’s known as heirs’ property — land transferred from generation to generation without a will and shared equally by part-owners whose numbers balloon with each branch in the family tree. South Carolina developers could buy a single heir’s interest and wind up taking everything from outmatched families suddenly navigating an unwieldy system.
Heirs’ property is under threat throughout the Black Belt. Roughly 5 million acres over 11 states worth almost $42 billion collectively remains trapped in cloudy titles, according to the most conservative estimates from a 2023 study led by rural sociologist Ryan Thomson at Auburn University. It’s a strain acutely felt by Black landowners given the Deep South’s legacy of enslavement.
Some remaining owners are more determined than ever to stay.
Julia Campbell, 60, has spent two decades establishing a family tree to identify every heir with even the slimmest stake in the 25-acre John’s Island land her family has held since the 19th century. The former member of a Charleston group established to protect Black cemeteries emphasized that the ground itself bears witness to history.
It’s important for her to document — especially at a time when she said “some people want to close the book on us.”
“These people who could barely read or write were able to hold onto the property,” she said. “We should be able to hold onto it.”
—-
South Carolina’s 2017 reforms stymied some predatory behavior, according to Josh Walden of the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation. The Charleston-based non-profit has helped clear titles for over 3,000 tracts worth some $17.5 million since 2009, but his most modest estimates suggest about 40,000 tracts remain held in heirs’ property across six coastal counties alone.
Risk persists for those facing heightened assessments that come with exurban gentrification.
“Obviously, people are still looking for land,” Walden said. “They’re still approaching heirs’ property owners asking if they’ll sell their interests.”
The clamor for these lands is so feverish that even people with clear titles remain vulnerable. James calls it “the next frontier in preserving African American property.”
South Carolina tax law evaluates residential land at its highest usage — a boon to sellers but a burden for those who want to stay.
“They’re not planning to take the money and run,” Phillips Community Association President Richard Habersham said of his neighbors. “They’re planning to pass it down.”
James has proposed that state lawmakers ease growing pains by passing a new “cultural property preservation” tax exemption to provide incentives to support historic communities, just like existing credits help preserve historic buildings.
A statewide measure could resemble local efforts. One ordinance blocked a golf course on Gullah Geechee land on St. Helena Island. Last month, the Beaufort County Council rejected a developer’s request to remove a 502-acre plot from a zoning district that bans gated communities and resorts in locations considered culturally significant. Other officials are soliciting feedback from Gullah Geechee and African American communities to identify historical sites in the Charleston area for preservation.
“Property is not just a commodity,” James said. “Property has a sentimental value that the law should recognize.”
—-
That value became more elusive for Queen Mary Davis when a housing development next door restricted her access to a family cemetery by requiring her to gain admission from security guards.
A formerly enslaved ancestor named Dennis Allen purchased the first patches of what is now the family’s 31-acre property back in 1897. It’s nestled in a Hilton Head neighborhood that is home to some of the largest Gullah extended families.
But Davis, 70, could soon lose nearly a third of it. The land is stuck in a cumbersome legal dispute with other heirs dating back to 2009. A judge has ordered that 11 acres be placed on the market for $7 million. A previous deal fell apart after a North Carolina firm rescinded its $7.5 million offer.
The situation is an egregious example of sagas that attorney Willie Heyward has seen all too often during a 37-year career largely focused on heirs’ property. He’s represented members on both sides of Davis’ contentious case at various points, and says many families get mired in costly, yearslong court battles that ultimately diminish the returns for everyone.
This generation of heirs’ property owners will be the last with numbers Heyward considers manageable — about 250 relatives is the most he’s seen.
As family trees number thousands of people, any outcome other than land loss can become impractical — a “crushing” prospect for his elderly clients clinging to the last vestiges of their ancestry.
Relatives interested in selling have a legal right to pursue that option, and defending land becomes especially difficult when families aren’t united. Heyward and James both want legislators to expand opportunities for mediation so resource-limited families don’t rack up legal fees trying to protect their interests.
What was once a vehicle for maintaining ownership has become an engine of its demise.
“I see a very dark future on the horizon if something is not done,” Heyward said.
—-
Longtime residents report that Phillips Community sounds different nowadays. Traffic thrums along a busy road. The scuttle of fiddler crabs no longer accompanies walks to a nearby creek. Woods once filled with the calls of raccoon hunts have been replaced by a quiet subdivision.
And still more development looms. A private Charleston-based company has plans for several dozen houses in the center of the neighborhood, spreading closer to the 35 acres bought by the Smalls’ great grandfather and largely kept within the bloodline since 1875. The Rev. Elijah Smalls Jr. said he’s heard rumblings about new commercial enterprises entering the frenzy.
“If that comes in, that would definitely be the death of the community,” he said.
Some of Smalls’ neighbors may have left, but the pastor says he’s not going anywhere. He built the brick house that sits right off Elijah Smalls Road. He can’t start over at his age, and nearby homes cost too much anyway.
Fred Smalls isn’t moving either. Wearing a black baseball cap with “ARMY” emblazoned in gold, he notes that many original members fought for their own freedom in the 128th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Infantry. Paintings of 19th century African American soldiers hang on his walls.
His Army service took him to Germany, Turkey, Alaska and Oklahoma. But he always knew he’d return.
—-
This story corrects the name of John’s Island, not St. John’s Island
—-
Pollard is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
PHILLIPS COMMUNITY, S.C. — The Rev. Elijah Smalls Jr. once grew okra, butter beans and other vegetables in the neighborhood where his family has lived near the South Carolina coast since not long after the Civil War. That was before new half-a-million-dollar homes in a nearby subdivision overwhelmed the drainage system.
Runoff meant for sewers now pools in the 80-year-old veteran’s backyard, making gardening impossible.
Smalls and his relatives are among the many original families still living in historic settlement communities around Charleston. People who had been enslaved at Phillips Plantation bought patches of it to make their futures. Their descendants question whether the next generation can afford to stay.
“This is the only place I wanted to live and raise my family,” said Fred Smalls, standing outside the home where his two sons grew up.
All along the South Carolina coast, land owned by the descendants of enslaved people is being targeted by developers looking to make money on vacation getaways and new homes. From Myrtle Beach south to Hilton Head, Black landowners who inherited property have been embroiled in disputes with investors looking to capitalize on rising real estate values.
State reforms approved in 2017 provided what supporters described as “shark repellant” — a law that made it harder for developers to strike deals below market prices with distant heirs who had long since moved away.
But skyrocketing property taxes are creating a growing burden as assessments rise. Younger family members may not qualify for homestead exemptions and other tax breaks. Elders worry that their family legacies — established by formerly enslaved ancestors who acquired land despite entrenched racism across the defeated South — are slipping away.
Most of the hundreds who still live on the remaining 450 acres or so of Phillips Community trace their lineage to the founders. Residents enjoy the pace of the South Carolina Lowcountry in the settlement communities, where neighbors have long taken care of each other.
“If we don’t take steps to protect them, we’re going to lose them parcel by parcel,” said Coastal Conservation League Executive Director Faith Rivers James.
——
Orange mesh fencing lines the dirt expanse of a new development site that encircles the ranch-style house where Josephine Wright has taken her stand. The 93-year-old woman is the matriarch of a family that has owned land on Hilton Head Island since Reconstruction.
“I’m being surrounded, really,” Wright said recently in the Brooklyn accent she picked up before returning to her late husband’s home 30 years ago in Jonesville Historic Gullah Neighborhood.
They wanted tranquility as his Parkinson’s disease progressed. But gone is the lush greenery that once grew on 29 acres previously owned by other relatives bordering Wright’s home. A Georgia-based developer, Bailey Point Investment, LLC, broke ground last summer on a 147-unit vacation rental complex there.
Managers of her family’s trust failed to pay escalating tax bills. The land sold at a 2014 tax auction for just $35,000 — a fraction of its current worth.
Then the investment company sued Wright, who owns her one acre separately. The company alleged that a corner of her screened-in porch, a shed and a satellite dish encroach on the construction project. A lawyer for the company did not return a call from The Associated Press.
She suspects they want to run her off, but she’s not intimidated. NBA superstar Kyrie Irving and filmmaker Tyler Perry have lent their support. Town officials don’t intend to issue building permits until the case is closed. She says other residents have thanked her for holding out.
She expected to spend these days in peace. Her small home remains the gathering spot for an extended family that includes 40 grandchildren, generations who she hopes will also enjoy the land.
“I just want to be able to live here in this sanctuary with a free mind,” Wright said.
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The first self-governed town of formerly enslaved people in the United States was located on Hilton Head Island. Wright’s neighborhood gets its name from a Black Civil War veteran named Caesar Jones who had escaped enslavement and purchased more than 100 acres himself, finding refuge in marshland that had been dismissed by colonists as unsuitable for farming.
It’s hardly undesirable today. The advent of air conditioning helped make coastal land more appealing. New highways improved access to the coast, where population increases have made South Carolina the 10th fastest-growing state during the past decade.
Those searching for land found easy targets in the Gullah Geechee community, owned by descendants of West Africans who were forced into slavery on rice, indigo and cotton plantations along the Atlantic coast. They developed their unique culture on isolated islands, but their separation from the U.S. legal system left them vulnerable to exploitation.
Developers took advantage in many cases of what’s known as heirs’ property — land transferred from generation to generation without a will and shared equally by part-owners whose numbers balloon with each branch in the family tree. South Carolina developers could buy a single heir’s interest and wind up taking everything from outmatched families suddenly navigating an unwieldy system.
Heirs’ property is under threat throughout the Black Belt. Roughly 5 million acres over 11 states worth almost $42 billion collectively remains trapped in cloudy titles, according to the most conservative estimates from a 2023 study led by rural sociologist Ryan Thomson at Auburn University. It’s a strain acutely felt by Black landowners given the Deep South’s legacy of enslavement.
Some remaining owners are more determined than ever to stay.
Julia Campbell, 60, has spent two decades establishing a family tree to identify every heir with even the slimmest stake in the 25-acre John’s Island land her family has held since the 19th century. The former member of a Charleston group established to protect Black cemeteries emphasized that the ground itself bears witness to history.
It’s important for her to document — especially at a time when she said “some people want to close the book on us.”
“These people who could barely read or write were able to hold onto the property,” she said. “We should be able to hold onto it.”
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South Carolina’s 2017 reforms stymied some predatory behavior, according to Josh Walden of the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation. The Charleston-based non-profit has helped clear titles for over 3,000 tracts worth some $17.5 million since 2009, but his most modest estimates suggest about 40,000 tracts remain held in heirs’ property across six coastal counties alone.
Risk persists for those facing heightened assessments that come with exurban gentrification.
“Obviously, people are still looking for land,” Walden said. “They’re still approaching heirs’ property owners asking if they’ll sell their interests.”
The clamor for these lands is so feverish that even people with clear titles remain vulnerable. James calls it “the next frontier in preserving African American property.”
South Carolina tax law evaluates residential land at its highest usage — a boon to sellers but a burden for those who want to stay.
“They’re not planning to take the money and run,” Phillips Community Association President Richard Habersham said of his neighbors. “They’re planning to pass it down.”
James has proposed that state lawmakers ease growing pains by passing a new “cultural property preservation” tax exemption to provide incentives to support historic communities, just like existing credits help preserve historic buildings.
A statewide measure could resemble local efforts. One ordinance blocked a golf course on Gullah Geechee land on St. Helena Island. Last month, the Beaufort County Council rejected a developer’s request to remove a 502-acre plot from a zoning district that bans gated communities and resorts in locations considered culturally significant. Other officials are soliciting feedback from Gullah Geechee and African American communities to identify historical sites in the Charleston area for preservation.
“Property is not just a commodity,” James said. “Property has a sentimental value that the law should recognize.”
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That value became more elusive for Queen Mary Davis when a housing development next door restricted her access to a family cemetery by requiring her to gain admission from security guards.
A formerly enslaved ancestor named Dennis Allen purchased the first patches of what is now the family’s 31-acre property back in 1897. It’s nestled in a Hilton Head neighborhood that is home to some of the largest Gullah extended families.
But Davis, 70, could soon lose nearly a third of it. The land is stuck in a cumbersome legal dispute with other heirs dating back to 2009. A judge has ordered that 11 acres be placed on the market for $7 million. A previous deal fell apart after a North Carolina firm rescinded its $7.5 million offer.
The situation is an egregious example of sagas that attorney Willie Heyward has seen all too often during a 37-year career largely focused on heirs’ property. He’s represented members on both sides of Davis’ contentious case at various points, and says many families get mired in costly, yearslong court battles that ultimately diminish the returns for everyone.
This generation of heirs’ property owners will be the last with numbers Heyward considers manageable — about 250 relatives is the most he’s seen.
As family trees number thousands of people, any outcome other than land loss can become impractical — a “crushing” prospect for his elderly clients clinging to the last vestiges of their ancestry.
Relatives interested in selling have a legal right to pursue that option, and defending land becomes especially difficult when families aren’t united. Heyward and James both want legislators to expand opportunities for mediation so resource-limited families don’t rack up legal fees trying to protect their interests.
What was once a vehicle for maintaining ownership has become an engine of its demise.
“I see a very dark future on the horizon if something is not done,” Heyward said.
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Longtime residents report that Phillips Community sounds different nowadays. Traffic thrums along a busy road. The scuttle of fiddler crabs no longer accompanies walks to a nearby creek. Woods once filled with the calls of raccoon hunts have been replaced by a quiet subdivision.
And still more development looms. A private Charleston-based company has plans for several dozen houses in the center of the neighborhood, spreading closer to the 35 acres bought by the Smalls’ great grandfather and largely kept within the bloodline since 1875. The Rev. Elijah Smalls Jr. said he’s heard rumblings about new commercial enterprises entering the frenzy.
“If that comes in, that would definitely be the death of the community,” he said.
Some of Smalls’ neighbors may have left, but the pastor says he’s not going anywhere. He built the brick house that sits right off Elijah Smalls Road. He can’t start over at his age, and nearby homes cost too much anyway.
Fred Smalls isn’t moving either. Wearing a black baseball cap with “ARMY” emblazoned in gold, he notes that many original members fought for their own freedom in the 128th Regiment of the U.S. Colored Infantry. Paintings of 19th century African American soldiers hang on his walls.
His Army service took him to Germany, Turkey, Alaska and Oklahoma. But he always knew he’d return.
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This story corrects the name of John’s Island, not St. John’s Island
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Pollard is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
photos time-released to move at 12:01 a.m. Saturday RPRB101-102.
Nine months after leaders of Georgia’s oldest city stripped the name of a pro-slavery U.S. vice president from one of its public squares, nominees being considered for the green space’s new name include a Black woman who taught formerly enslaved people to read and write.
Susie King Taylor, who started a school for Black children and adults on the Georgia coast in 1862 with support from occupying Union soldiers, is among the finalists recommended for an honor Savannah hasn’t bestowed in 140 years: choosing a name to adorn one of the historic squares that are among the city’s signature features.
A pair of citizen advisory panels has submitted six names for Savannah’s city council to consider for a scheduled Aug. 24 vote on a new name for the square. In a big break with the city’s past, none of the finalists are white men.
Instead, the nominees are four Black people — a pastor, a formerly enslaved woman, a civil rights hero and an Army pilot — as well as Native Americans who inhabited the area when Savannah was founded and a group of women who in the 1950s put Savannah on the path to preserving its past.
“Regardless of what name is picked, it will be a name that represents more diversity in Savannah and sort of expands the story that Savannah tells about itself,” said Kristopher Monroe, chairman of the local Historic Site and Monument Commission that made its recommendations earlier this month.
With towering live oaks and blooming azaleas framing benches at its center, the square near the southern edge of Savannah’s downtown historic district has been without a name since Nov. 10, when the city council voted unanimously to get rid of the name Calhoun Square.
For more than 170 years, the park-like space was named for John C. Calhoun, a South Carolina politician who served in Congress and as U.S. vice president in two administrations before his death in 1850.
Calhoun was among Washington’s most vocal supporters of slavery in the decades preceding the Civil War, which made him a target of racial justice advocates seeking to rid public spaces of statues and other markers honoring the Confederacy and white supremacists.
“This square has a lot of memories for what used to be,” said Patt Gunn, who gives guided tours focused on Savannah’s Black history. As a child, she often did homework on a bench in the square while her mother worked nearby. “It is honorable to say we can remove Calhoun.”
Gunn leads a group of activists that wants the square to honor Taylor, who also assisted the Union Army as a nurse during the Civil War and went on to establish multiple schools for freed Black children.
The recommended finalists also include the Rev. George Leile, who in 1777 founded one of America’s oldest Black churches in Savannah. W.W. Law led the civil rights campaign that peacefully desegregated the city’s schools, stores and restaurants in 1963. Army Maj. Clayton Carpenter, a special operations pilot, saved his crew but perished in a 2014 helicopter crash during training in Savannah.
The other finalist nominees are the name “Creek Square” for the Native Americans who lived in the area when British colonists settled Savannah in 1733, and “Seven Sisters Square” for the women activists who kickstarted Savannah’s historic preservation movement in the 1950s to protect older homes and buildings from demolition.
“I don’t know what the city council will do, but this family is honored that Clay was considered,” said Colette Carpenter, who didn’t know her pilot son was being nominated until his Army buddies submitted an application.
Grouping homes and buildings around public squares was a unique part of Savannah’s original town plan when British settlers founded Georgia as their 13th North American colony. Most of the 23 squares are named for an individual person, and each of those is a white man.
Not everyone agrees Calhoun deserved to lose the distinction. Savannah resident David Tootle filed a lawsuit last month asking a Chatham County judge to block the city council’s upcoming vote. He argues that removing signs bearing Calhoun’s name from the square violates a 2019 Georgia law passed to protect public monuments such as Confederate memorials from removal.
“He was a major figure in American history, whether we like him or not,” Tootle said of Calhoun. “I don’t agree with some of the things he did, but it doesn’t take away his contribution to the country.”
Savannah Mayor Van Johnson said the city has not violated the state law. The city owns the square, he said, and therefore has the right to choose its name.
Savannah officials aren’t bound to choose a name from the six recommended finalists, but Johnson, who like 54% of Savannah’s population is Black, said he is impressed with the list and its diversity.
“I think any of the names can easily be the name of the square,” the mayor said. “All of them have merits.”
MIAMI GARDENS, Fla. — Leaders of a forum on Florida’s new standards for teaching Black history encouraged parents to let their discontent be heard by showing up at local school board meetings, sending feedback to the state’s Department of Education and voting.
Hundreds of lawmakers, teachers and parents crowded into Antioch Baptist Church in Miami Gardens on Thursday night to discuss the new policy, which has drawn harsh criticism for requiring teachers to instruct middle-school students that enslaved people “developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
But Florida Education Commissioner Manny Diaz, the person responsible for overseeing the new standards, wasn’t in attendance.
Diaz, a former area high school teacher in Miami-Dade County, had previously agreed to attend, according to organizers. His participation was advertised on fliers publicizing the event, which was sponsored by Democratic state Sen. Shevrin Jones. A chair even was set up for him with a placard bearing his name.
Diaz, who who was appointed commissioner last year by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, said on social media that “there was nothing sudden” about his inability to attend the town hall meeting. He said he told Jones last week he would be visiting schools to welcome back teachers and students. Thursday was the first day of school across many parts of Florida.
But Fedrick Ingram, the secretary-treasurer of the American Federation of Teachers, called Diaz out.
“First, let me address the elephant in the room,” Ingram told the cheering crowd. “Manny Diaz is a coward. Ron DeSantis knew that this was going on. Manny Diaz knew that this was going on, and they both know how important this is for the Black community. They know they should’ve been here tonight to face you.”
Anthony Durden, a local activist and minister from Miami Gardens, called the new standards disrespectful and insensitive. He said the only way to move forward was with “honest dialogue” but that students were being deprived of that.
“To say that Blacks benefited from slavery is insane,” Durden said.
Miami-Dade school board member Steve Gallon III also urged parents to teach their children at home about the horrors of slavery.
“My prayer is this becomes a catalyst for a movement,” he said.
The meeting took place in a historic Black church in Miami Gardens, where two-thirds of the population is African American, according to the U.S. Census. The crowd’s attitude toward the new standard was mostly negative.
Jones, the state senator, said he would set up a group to study the standards, and asked audience members to sign up.
DeSantis, who is seeking the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, has repeatedly defended the new language while insisting that his critics, who include Vice President Kamala Harris and two leading Black Republicans in Congress, are intentionally misinterpreting one line of the sweeping curriculum.
Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, traveled to Florida last month to condemn the curriculum. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is the chamber’s sole Black Republican and is also seeking the White House, also issued a direct rebuke of DeSantis.
Critics said the new school standards are the latest in a series of attacks on Black history by the governor’s administration. At the beginning of the year, DeSantis’ administration blocked a new Advanced Placement course on African American studies from being taught in high schools, saying it was contrary to state law.
DeSantis also has pushed through the “ Stop WOKE Act,” a law that limits discussions on race in schools and by corporations, and banned state universities from using state or federal money for diversity programs.
Karen Thompson, a school counselor who attended the town hall meeting, called the new standards “really absurd and heart-wrenching.” Thompson said she hoped they will be rescinded this year since she believed they were motivated by politics and racism. And she described Diaz’s reason for being absent as “a poor excuse.”
“My question to Governor DeSantis is, ‘Why suddenly all of these attacks on Black history?’ I think it’s absurd because slavery was in no way a good thing,” Thompson said. “Education should be about the truth.”
BALTIMORE — More than 70 years after doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells without her knowledge, a lawyer for her descendants said they have reached a settlement with a biotechnology company that they accused of reaping billions of dollars from a racist medical system.
Tissue taken from the Black woman’s tumor before she died of cervical cancer became the first human cells to continuously grow and reproduce in lab dishes. HeLa cells went on to become a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines.
Despite that incalculable impact, the Lacks family had never been compensated.
Lacks’ cells were harvested in 1951, when it was not illegal to do so without a patient’s permission. But lawyers for her family argued that Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, continued to commercialize the results long after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known. The company unjustly enriched itself off Lacks’ cells, the family argued in their lawsuit, filed in 2021.
The settlement came after closed-door negotiations that lasted all day Monday inside the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Some of Lacks’ grandchildren were among the family members who attended the talks.
Attorney Ben Crump, who represents the family, announced the settlement late Monday and said the terms are confidential.
In a joint statement, Thermo Fisher representatives and attorneys for the Lacks family said they were pleased to resolve the matter and declined to comment further on the agreement.
A poor tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, Lacks got married and moved with her husband to Turner Station, a historically Black community outside Baltimore. They were raising five children when doctors discovered a tumor in Lacks’ cervix and saved a sample of her cancer cells collected during a biopsy.
Lacks died at age 31 in the “colored ward” of Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was buried in an unmarked grave.
While most cell samples died shortly after being removed from the body, her cells survived and thrived in laboratories. They became known as the first immortalized human cell line because scientists could cultivate them indefinitely, meaning researchers anywhere could reproduce studies using identical cells.
The remarkable science involved — and the impact on the Lacks family, some of whom had chronic illnesses and no health insurance — were documented in a bestselling book by Rebecca Skloot, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks,” which was published in 2010. Oprah Winfrey portrayed her daughter in an HBO movie about the story.
Johns Hopkins said it never sold or profited from the cell lines, but many companies have patented ways of using them.
In their complaint, Lacks’ descendants argued that her treatment illustrates a much larger issue that persists today: racism inside the U.S. medical system.
“The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history,” the complaint reads.
In a brief filed in support of the Lacks family, attorneys advocating for civil rights, women’s rights and health care equity said the case is one of many in which U.S. doctors and scientists have exploited minority patients. Another example they cited involved James Marion Sims, a 19th century Alabama surgeon heralded as the father of modern gynecology who performed experimental surgeries on a dozen enslaved women without the use of anesthesia, claiming Black people could endure more pain than white people.
“Indeed, a great portion of early American medical research is founded upon nonconsensual experimentation upon systemically oppressed people,” the attorneys wrote.
In another supporting brief, Southern University law professor Deleso Alford highlighted the discrepancy in status and financial stability between Lacks’ descendants, including grandson Ron Lacks who wrote a book in 2020, and the medical professionals profiting off her cells.
“In the same year Mr. Lacks was self-publishing a book in the hopes of finding some help for his family, the CEO of Thermo Fisher received a compensation package of over $26 million,” the brief says.
Thermo Fisher argued the case should be dismissed because it was filed after the statute of limitations expire. But lawyers for the Lacks family said that shouldn’t apply because the company is continuously benefiting.
In a statement posted online, Johns Hopkins Medicine officials said they reviewed all interactions with Lacks and her family after the publication of Skloot’s book. While acknowledging an ethical responsibility, the statement said the medical system “has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line.”
Though her relatives hadn’t received financial compensation, they reached an agreement with the National Institutes of Health in 2013 that gave them some control over how the DNA code from HeLa cells is used.
Crump, a civil rights attorney, has become well known for representing victims of police violence and calling for racial justice, especially in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The Lacks family joined him Tuesday near Baltimore’s waterfront to announce the settlement and pay tribute to Lacks on what would have been her 103rd birthday. The group brought balloons and a cake to celebrate.
Lacks’ only surviving child, Lawrence Lacks Sr., lives to see justice done, grandson Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. said. Now 86, Lawrence Lacks was 16 when his mother died.
“There couldn’t have been a more fitting day for her to have justice, for her family to have relief,” Carter said. “It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.”
BALTIMORE — More than 70 years after doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital took Henrietta Lacks’ cervical cells without her knowledge, a lawyer for her descendants said they have reached a settlement with a biotechnology company that they accused of reaping billions of dollars from a racist medical system.
Tissue taken from the Black woman’s tumor before she died of cervical cancer became the first human cells to continuously grow and reproduce in lab dishes. HeLa cells went on to become a cornerstone of modern medicine, enabling countless scientific and medical innovations, including the development of the polio vaccine, genetic mapping and even COVID-19 vaccines.
Despite that incalculable impact, the Lacks family had never been compensated.
Lacks’ cells were harvested in 1951, when it was not illegal to so without a patient’s permission. But lawyers for her family argued that Thermo Fisher Scientific Inc., of Waltham, Massachusetts, continued to commercialize the results well after the origins of the HeLa cell line became well known. The company unjustly enriched itself off Lacks’ cells, the family argued in their lawsuit, filed in 2021.
The settlement came after closed-door negotiations that lasted all day Monday inside the federal courthouse in Baltimore. Some of Lacks’ grandchildren were among the family members who attended the talks.
Attorney Ben Crump, who represents the family, announced the settlement late Monday. He said the terms are confidential.
“The parties are pleased that they were able to find a way to resolve this matter outside of Court and will have no further comment about the settlement,” Thermo Fisher representatives and attorneys for the Lacks family said in a joint statement.
HeLa cells were discovered to have unique properties. While most cell samples died shortly after being removed from the body, her cells survived and thrived in laboratories. They became known as the first immortalized human cell line because scientists could cultivate her cells indefinitely. That meant scientists anywhere could reproduce studies using identical cells.
The remarkable science involved — and the impact on the Lacks family, some of whom had chronic illnesses and no health insurance — were documented in a bestselling book by Rebecca Skloot, “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” Oprah Winfrey portrayed her daughter in an HBO movie about the story.
A poor tobacco farmer from southern Virginia, Lacks got married and moved with her husband to Turner Station, a historically Black community outside Baltimore. They were raising five children when doctors discovered a tumor in Lacks’ cervix and saved a sample of her cancer cells collected during a biopsy.
Lacks died at age 31 in the “colored ward” of Johns Hopkins Hospital. She was buried in an unmarked grave.
Johns Hopkins said it never sold or profited from the cell lines, but many companies have patented ways of using them.
In their complaint, Lacks’ grandchildren and other descendants argued that her treatment illustrates a much larger issue that persists today: racism inside the U.S. medical system.
“The exploitation of Henrietta Lacks represents the unfortunately common struggle experienced by Black people throughout history,” the complaint reads. “Too often, the history of medical experimentation in the United States has been the history of medical racism.”
Thermo Fisher argued the case should be dismissed because it was filed after the statute of limitations expired, but attorneys for the family said that shouldn’t apply because the company continues to benefit from the cells.
In a statement posted to their website, Johns Hopkins Medicine officials said they reviewed all interactions with Lacks and her family after the 2010 publication of Skloot’s book. While acknowledging an ethical responsibility, it said the medical system “has never sold or profited from the discovery or distribution of HeLa cells and does not own the rights to the HeLa cell line.”
Though her relatives hadn’t received financial compensation, they did reach an agreement with the National Institutes of Health in 2013 that gave them some control over how the DNA code from HeLa cells is used. The deal came after the family raised privacy concerns about making Lacks’ genetic makeup public.
Crump, a civil rights attorney, has become well known for representing victims of police violence and calling for racial justice, especially in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder. The Lacks family joined him Tuesday morning near Baltimore’s waterfront to announce the settlement and pay tribute to Lacks on what would have been her 103rd birthday. The group brought balloons and a cake to celebrate.
“We did it — and what a birthday present today,” Crump said during the news conference.
Lacks’ only surviving child, Lawrence Lacks Sr., lives to see justice done, grandson Alfred Lacks Carter Jr. said. Now 86, Lawrence Lacks was 16 when his mother died.
“There couldn’t have been a more fitting day for her to have justice, for her family to have relief,” Carter said. “It was a long fight — over 70 years — and Henrietta Lacks gets her day.”
Last week, U.S. Sens. Chris Van Hollen and Ben Cardin, both Maryland Democrats, introduced a bill to posthumously award Lacks the Congressional Gold Medal.
“Henrietta Lacks changed the course of modern medicine,” Van Hollen said in a statement announcing the bill. “It is long past time that we recognize her life-saving contributions to the world.”
U_S_ Sen_ Tim Scott is criticizing fellow Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov_ Ron DeSantis for supporting standards requiring teachers to instruct middle school students that slaves developed skills that “could be applied for their perso…
ByMEG KINNARD and HANNAH FINGERHUT Associated Press
Republican presidential candidate Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis greets local residents during a meet and greet at the Hotel Charitone, Thursday, July 27, 2023, in Chariton, Iowa. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)
The Associated Press
ANKENY, Iowa — U.S. Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina has criticized fellow Republican presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for supporting new standards that require teachers to instruct middle school students that slaves developed skills that “could be applied for their personal benefit.”
“What slavery was really about was separating families, about mutilating humans and even raping their wives. It was just devastating,” Scott, the sole Black Republican in the Senate, told reporters on Thursday after a town hall in Ankeny. “So I would hope that every person in our country — and certainly running for president — would appreciate that.”
“People have bad days,” Scott added. “Sometimes they regret what they say. And we should ask them again to clarify their positions.”
DeSantis has been facing criticism from Florida teachers, civil rights leaders and President Joe Biden’s White House on the school standards. Vice President Kamala Harris, the nation’s first Black vice president, traveled to Florida last week to condemn the curriculum.
Scott’s comments came as he and DeSantis stumped in Iowa ahead of the state Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner, a gathering at which 13 candidates in the GOP presidential primary field will be addressing an expected 1,200 activists on Friday. Scott, part of the GOP’s most diverse presidential field ever, was asked for his take on the standards hours after DeSantis defended them during a gaggle with reporters as he campaigned.
“At the end of the day, you got to choose: Are you going to side with Kamala Harris and liberal media outlets or are you going to side with the state of Florida?” DeSantis told reporters, citing Democrats’ criticism of the language. “I think it’s very clear that these guys did a good job on those standards. It wasn’t anything that was politically motivated.”
Responding on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, to reporters’ posts of Scott’s video, a super PAC supporting DeSantis on Thursday night called the posts “incredibly sloppy or intentionally disingenuous,” reposting video of DeSantis’ defense of the curriculum earlier in the day.
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Kinnard reported from Columbia, S.C., and can be reached at http://twitter.com/MegKinnardAP.
When President Joe Biden signs a proclamation on Tuesday establishing a national monument honoring Emmett Till and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, it will mark the fulfillment of a promise Till’s relatives made after his death 68 years ago.
The Black teenager from Chicago, whose abduction, torture and killing in Mississippi in 1955 helped propel the civil rights movement, will be seen as more than just a cause of that movement, said Till’s cousin the Rev. Wheeler Parker Jr.
“We are resolute that it now becomes an American story and not just a civil rights story,” Parker told The Associated Press, ahead of a planned proclamation signing ceremony at the White House.
With the stroke of Biden’s pen, the Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley National Monument, located across three sites in two states, will be federally protected places. But Till’s family members, along with a national organization seeking to preserve Black cultural heritage sites, say their work protecting the Till legacy continues.
They hope to raise money to restore the sites and develop educational programming to support their inclusion in the National Park System.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday that the Till national monument will be the Biden-Harris administration’s fourth designation that reflects their “work to advance civil rights.” The move comes as conservative leaders, mostly at the state and local levels, push legislation that limits the teaching of slavery and Black history in public schools.
The Democratic president’s administration “will continue to speak out against hateful attempts to rewrite our history and strongly oppose any actions that threaten to divide us and take our country backwards,” Jean-Pierre said.
Brent Leggs, executive director of the African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund, a program of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, said the federal designation is a milestone in a yearslong effort to preserve and protect places tied to events that have shaped the nation and that symbolize national wounds.
“We believe that not until Black history matters will Black lives and Black bodies matter,” he said. “Through reckoning with America’s racist past, we have the opportunity to heal.”
The African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund has provided $750,000 in grant funding since 2017 to help rescue sites important to the Till legacy. With its partners, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Lilly Endowment Inc., Leggs said an additional $5 million in funding has been secured for specialized preservation of the sites.
Biden’s proclamation protects places that are central to the story of Emmett Till’s life and death at age 14, the acquittal of his white killers by an all-white jury and his late mother’s activism.
In the summer of 1955, Mamie Till-Mobley put her son Emmett on a train to her native Mississippi, where he was to spend time with his uncle and his cousins. In the overnight hours of Aug. 28, 1955, Emmett was taken from his uncle’s home at gunpoint by two vengeful white men.
Emmett’s alleged crime? Flirting with the wife of one of his kidnappers.
Three days later, a fisherman on the Tallahatchie River discovered the teenager’s bloated corpse — one of his eyes was detached, an ear was missing, his head was shot and bashed in.
Till-Mobley demanded that Emmett’s mutilated remains be taken back to Chicago for a public, open casket funeral that was attended by tens of thousands of people. Graphic images taken of Emmett’s remains, sanctioned by his mother, were published by Jet magazine and propelled the civil rights movement.
At the trial of his killers in Mississippi, Till-Mobley bravely took the witness stand to counter the perverse image of her son that defense attorneys had painted for jurors and trial watchers.
Altogether, the Till national monument will include 5.7 acres (2.3 hectares) of land and two historic buildings. The Mississippi sites are Graball Landing, the spot where Emmett’s body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River just outside of Glendora, Mississippi, and the Tallahatchie County Second District Courthouse in Sumner, Mississippi, where Emmett’s killers were tried.
There is already the Emmett Till Interpretive Center in Sumner, which received philanthropic funding to expand programming and pay staff who interface with visitors.
At Graball Landing, a memorial sign installed in 2008 had been repeatedly stolen and was riddled with bullets. An inch-thick bulletproof sign was erected at the site in October 2019.
The Illinois site is Roberts Temple Church of God in Christ in Chicago, where Emmett’s funeral was held in September 1955.
In a statement emailed to the AP, Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin saluted Mamie Till-Mobley’s courage to have the nation and the world bear witness to the scourge of racial hatred. The monument, he said, helps “ensure that Emmett Till’s story is not forgotten.”
The Till national monument will join dozens of federally recognized landmarks, buildings and other places in the Deep South, in the north and out west that represent historical events and tragedies from the civil right movement. For example, in Atlanta, sites representing the life and legacy of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., including his birth home and Ebenezer Baptist Church, are all part of the National Park Service.
The designation often requires public and private entities to work together on developing interpretation centers at each of the sites, so that anyone who visits can understand the site’s significance. The hiring of park rangers is supported through partnerships with the National Park Foundation, the park service’s official nonprofit, and the National Parks Conservation Association.
Increasingly, the park service includes sites “that are part of the arc of justice in this country, both telling where we’ve come from, how far we’ve come, and frankly, how far we have to still go,” said Will Shafroth, the president and CEO of the National Park Foundation.
That’s where Leggs’ African American Cultural Heritage Action Fund and the Till family’s work remains — to raise enough money so that the sites are properly maintained and have the staffing needed to educate the public.
For Parker, who was 16 years old when he witnessed Emmett’s abduction, the Till monument proclamation begins to lift the weight of trauma that he has carried for most of his life. Tuesday is the anniversary of Emmett’s birth in 1941. He would have been 82.
“I’ve been suffering for all these years of how they’ve portrayed him — I still deal with that,” Parker, 84, said of his cousin Emmett.
“The truth should carry itself, but it doesn’t have wings. You have to put some wings on it.”
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Associated Press writers Joshua Boak and Darlene Superville contributed to this report.
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Aaron Morrison is a New York-based member of AP’s Race and Ethnicity team. Follow him on social media.
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Louisville’s new police chief will be the first Black woman to lead the embattled department full-time, bringing fresh hope to a force under a federal consent decree after years of scrutiny following the police shooting of Breonna Taylor in 2020.
Louisville interim police chief Jacquelyn Gwinn-Villaroel is formally taking the job of new chief. Louisville Mayor Craig Greenberg announced Thursday that she was chosen after a nationwide search. The city has gone through several chiefs and interim leaders since the death of Taylor, a Black woman shot dead in a police raid gone awry.
Gwinn-Villaroel came to Louisville from the Atlanta Police Department in 2021 alongside former Chief Erika Shields, who hired her as a deputy chief. Greenberg, who was elected mayor last year, had said in December that Gwinn-Villaroel would become interim chief after Shields stepped down in January.
“This is a challenging job,” Greenberg said at a news conference Thursday. “And over the last few months, it’s become very clear that the best person to do this work is already on the job.”
Gwinn-Villaroel thanked Greenberg for taking a “leap of faith” with her hiring.
“I stand here today on the shoulders of so many who paved the way for me and opened the doors,” she said.
Greenberg said Gwinn-Villaroel showed leadership during a mass shooting at a downtown bank in April, when one of her officers was shot and wounded.
She faces challenges in recruiting new officers to a force that has about 250 job openings, and restoring community trust after the U.S. Justice Department announced in March that it had found Louisville police engaged in a pattern of violating constitutional rights and discrimination.
That announcement, made by Attorney General Merrick Garland, followed an investigation prompted by Taylor’s shooting. A Justice Department report found the Louisville/Jefferson County Metro Government and Louisville Metro Police Department “engage in a pattern or practice of conduct that deprives people of their rights under the Constitution and federal law.”
The report said the Louisville police department “discriminates against Black people in its enforcement activities,” uses excessive force and conducts searches based on invalid warrants. It also said the department violates the rights of people engaged in protected speech, like the street protests in the city in the summer of 2020 after Taylor’s death.
Gwinn-Villaroel had served as the the third interim chief since Taylor’s death. Former longtime chief Steve Conrad was fired in 2020. Former interim chief Yvette Gentry became the first Black woman to serve in that role when she was hired in 2020, following another interim chief that had succeeded Conrad.
