ABSTRACT
The historian Khalil Gibran Muhammad's 2010 book, The Condemnation of Blackness, has dramatically improved our understanding of the evolution of a national discourse indelibly connecting criminality and Blackness in the Progressive Era following the 1890 census, which included prison data and measured that Blacks were 12% of the US population, though 30% of its prisoners. The assertion of Black citizenship coinciding with the Great Migration out of the South and toward community building in locales on the region's border or beyond seemingly holding greater potential for autonomy, prosperity, and safety was met with police intimidation and violence throughout the era and in disparate places. Lumpkins, however, has blamed the CTLU leadership more than its rank and file and, in perhaps the most original analytical approach to the origins of the massacre, has disagreed with scholars who “attribute the clashes” of this era “mainly to interracial competition for jobs and housing”.
