1870: UNITED STATES. That American icon, Mark Twain, gets into the spirit of the genocide being conducted against native Americans and descends into racist hatred in The Noble Red Man when he writes, “He is ignoble, base and treacherous, and hateful in every way. Not even imminent death can startle him into a spasm of virtue. The ruling trait of all savages is a greedy and consuming selfishness, and in our Noble Red Man it is found in its amplest development. His heart is a cesspool of falsehood, of treachery, and of low and devilish instincts.”1871: UNITED STATES. In October, a mob of more than five hundred whites besieges Los Angeles' Chinatown and attacks Chinese-American residents of the city. Every Chinese-occupied building on the street is ransacked and Chinese residents are attacked and robbed. More than twenty people are killed, ten percent of the city's Chinese population.
1871: KOREA. U.S. forces invade Korea to “punish natives for depredations and attacking a U.S. survey boat” illegally taking soundings in Korean waters. Two hundred and forty three Koreans are killed by the U.S.
1873: COLOMBIA. The U.S. invades Colombia to “protect American interests”.
1873: UNITED STATES. Following a disputed election and the murder of black man by whites, black residents of the Colfax, Louisiana area seek safety in the Colfax courthouse. Sheriff Columbus C. Nash, whose installation as sheriff instead of the black candidate formed part of the electoral dispute, leads three hundred armed whites, largely members of the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups, to the courthouse. When those taking shelter in the building refuse to leave, Nash's gang opens fire. An estimated sixty blacks run from the building and are pursued through forested land and killed. All but fifty of those remaining in the courthouse are killed. Many of the victims' bodies are later found to have been mutilated.Approximately fifty blacks survive the slaughter and are taken prisoner. Told they are being taken to a local jail, all but one are murdered that night. The only survivor of the Colfax Massacre, Benjamin Brimm, is shot in the head but lives and manages to crawl away unseen.
When federal troops arrive, they estimate the number of victims at one hundred and five. That estimate is disputed and the real figure may be as high as two hundred and eighty since many bodies were hidden in the woods or thrown in the nearby Red River.
Eventually, ninety seven individuals are indicted although only nine are arrested and put on trial. Only one man is charged with murder, the rest with violations of the Enforcement Act of 1870 which had been intended to protect blacks' voting and civil rights. All nine defendents are ultimately acquitted. No one is ever convicted of any of the murders.
The cases of three of the defendants end up in the U.S. Supreme Court which declares open season on blacks by ruling that the protections given to former slaves by the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution do not apply to the actions of individuals but only to the actions of state governments and their agencies.
1873-present: UNITED STATES. Congress passes the so-called Comstock Act which makes it illegal, in the land of the free, to send any "obscene, lewd, and/or lascivious" materials through the mail, including contraceptive devices and information. Twenty-four states pass similar prohibitions on materials distributed within the states. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, founded in 1873 by Anthony Comstock, took it upon themselves to decide what was "lewd" and proudly displayed book burning on their official seal. Comstock personally brought about the destruction of fifteen tons of books, many tons of printing plates and nearly four million pictures.1873-1877: UNITED STATES. The so-called Panic of ’73 plunges the U.S. into depression. Triggered by a railroad-connected bank failure, the underlying cause was the previous decade of fraud carried out by railroad interests as the continuing genocide against native Americans opened up ever more land for railroad construction.
Of the country's 364 railroads, 89 went bankrupt. A total of 18,000 businesses failed in the first two years of the depression. Wages were cut, workers went on strike. Federal troops were used against workers and more than one hundred people were killed.
1873-1896: MEXICO. The U.S. repeatedly invades Mexico “in pursuit of bandits”.
1874: UNITED STATES. When unemployed workers demonstrate in New York's Tompkins Square Park, mounted police charge into the crowd, beating men, women and children. Hundreds are injured. New York Police Commissioner Abram Duryee, is quoted as saying, "It was the most glorious sight I ever saw."1874: HAWAII. The United States invades the independent nation of Hawaii to “protect American interests”.
1874: UNITED STATES. The U.S. government ratchets up its policy of ethnic cleansing when Secretary of the Interior, Columbus Delano testifies to Congress: "The buffalo are disappearing rapidly, but not faster than I desire. I regard the destruction of such game as Indians subsist upon as facilitating the policy of the Government, of destroying their hunting habits, coercing them onto reservations, and compelling them to adopt the habits of 'civilization'(sic)."In the previous two years, almost eight million buffalo had been slaughtered in the campaign to exterminate by starvation the Cheyenne, Sioux, Dakota and Comanche nations. The extermination of the buffalo was carried out in order to steal the lands which had been guaranteed in perpetuity to the Plains Indians by legally binding treaties. In total, as many as sixty million buffalo are slaughtered, reducing the total buffalo population to just over one thousand by 1889 and, as intended, completely destroying the ability of the Plains Indians to maintain their way of life.
1874: UNITED STATES. Cincinnati physician Robert Bartholow conducts brain surgery experiments on Mary Rafferty, a thirty year-old domestic servant dying of an infected ulcer.
1875: UNITED STATES. Twenty black Americans are killed in a massacre in Clinton, Mississippi.
1876: UNITED STATES. The ethnic cleansing and theft of the lands of native Americans is proceeding apace as America celebrates its first centenary. The country's leading literary intellectual, William Dean Howells, takes time out in an essay expressing his "thrill of patriotic pride" in America to advocate "the extermination of the red savages of the plains." Writes Howells in the influential Atlantic Monthly, "The red man, as he appears in effigy and in photograph....is a hideous demon, whose malign traits can hardly inspire any emotion softer than abhorrence."
1876: UNITED STATES. The U.S. government attempts to force the Lakota nation to agree to an alteration of the terms of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, in order to enable whites to take gold from the Black Mountains. When the Lakota insist that the treaty be honored, the U.S. government attempts to drive the Lakota off their land and onto a reservation. In June, Crazy Horse and five hundred native warriors surprise U.S. troops on the Rosebud River, forcing them to retreat. Shortly afterward, Major General George Custer discovers Sitting Bull's encampment on the Little Bighorn River. He attacks but is overwhelmed by Lakota warriors. Custer and all of his troops are killed in the battle which becomes known as Custer's Last Stand. When news of Custer's defeat emerges, the U.S. government floods the region with troops, carrying out the desired ethnic cleansing and stealing the land which had been guaranteed to the Lakota. Sitting Bull escapes capture, leading a group of warriors to safety in Canada.1876: UNITED STATES. Race riots and terrorism against blacks occur throughout South Carolina during the summer of 1876.
1877: UNITED STATES. Ten coal mining activists are hanged in Pennsylvania.
1878: UNITED STATES. Large numbers of Chinese-owned businesses are burned in racially motivated rioting by whites in San Francisco.
1879: UNITED STATES. As we all know, in 1879, the great American inventor, Thomas Alva Edison, invents the light bulb, ushering in a new era in human existence.Well, not quite. It’s just another lie told to American schoolchildren which, like the rest, they end up still believing as adults. Electrical lighting was invented in 1809 by the English chemist Humphry Davy. Improvements were made in 1820 by Warren de la Rue, in 1835 by James Lindsay, in 1850 by Edward Shepard, in 1854 by Henricg Globel, in 1875 by Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans, and in 1878 by Sir Joseph Swan, who developed the first light bulb which would burn for hours.
In 1879, Edison “invents” a light bulb which burns about twice as long as Swan’s before failure. The “invention” is based on a patent Edison bought of the 1875 Woodward and Evans development and on work stolen from other inventors including Swan. Edison was successfully sued by Sir Joseph Swan for patent infringement and, in 1883, Edison’s U.S. patent of the light bulb was disallowed by the U.S. Patent Office because it was based on the prior work of other inventors.
Although we have been indoctrinated to regard Edison as perhaps the greatest inventor of all time, in fact he was first and foremost a businessman and not an overly scrupulous one.
1880s-1910: MEXICO. Under the U.S.-supported Diaz dictatorship, U.S. oil companies, particularly the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil (Exxon-Mobil, Esso) and the Texas Oil Company (Texaco), extract vast amounts of oil from Mexico without paying any royalties or taxes of any kind to the Mexican people.U.S. interests, most notably the Rockefellers and McCormick (International Harvester), “employ” millions of indentured Indians who are, in reality, slaves, on vast plantations in the Yucatan and elsewhere. Countless hundreds of thousands of people die of starvation, overwork, beatings and various other forms of abuse. Children are born into slavery on the plantations and die there, still in slavery.
The Diaz dictatorship carries out genocides of numerous Mexican Indian races so that their land can be stolen and sold for a pittance to American interests, including yellow media tycoon, warmonger and Nazi propagandist-to-be William Randolph Hearst who acquires some seven million acres of Mexico in this manner. Other members of the American ruling class benefiting from the genocides are Harrison Gray Otis, E. H. Harriman, the Rockefellers and the Guggenheims.
American corporations operating in Mexico, with the connivance of the tame Diaz dictatorship, employ Mexicans under appalling conditions for starvation wages. Mexican labor organizers and strikers attempting to achieve minimal pay and working standards are murdered by Pinkertons and other hired goon squads.
1881-1907: UNITED STATES. Apartheid on public transportation is mandated by the state of Tennessee in 1881. Florida (1887), Mississippi (1888), Texas (1889), Louisiana (1890), Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Georgia (1891), South Carolina (1898), North Carolina (1899), Virginia (1900), Maryland (1904), and Oklahoma (1907) follow suit.
1882: UNITED STATES. The U.S. Congress passes the Chinese Exclusion Act, banning most Chinese from immigrating to the U.S. and barring Chinese from becoming naturalized citizens.1882: EGYPT. U.S. forces invade Egypt to “protect American interests”.
1883: UNITED STATES. In the always paramount interests of freedom and equality, the United States Supreme Court overturns the Civil Rights Act of 1875 which had ended state-sanctioned apartheid in accomodation, restaurants, transportation and other public places. It will be almost a hundred years before Congress passes another law banning apartheid in the United States.
The world has never witnessed
such barbarous laws
entailed upon a free people
as have grown out of the decision
of the United States Supreme Court.
Henry McNeil Turner
1883: UNITED STATES. A white mob opens fire on a group of unarmed black men, women, and children in Danville, Virginia. White Democrats then stage a coup and seize control of the democratically-elected black city government.