Victimization, Victimhood, and the Right to Keep Naming What Happened

Victimized vs. Victimization

Victimization describes an experience, act, process, or condition in which someone is harmed, exploited, abused, targeted, deprived of rights, or subjected to wrongdoing.

Victimization tells us what happened.

Civil Rights Protesters, Washington DC

Victimized describes what was done to a person or group. Someone can be victimized by another person, an institution, a government, a discriminatory system, or a criminal act.

Victimized tells us what someone was subjected to.

Neither word tells us everything about who the person is.

Survivor describes a person in relationship to what they have endured and continued beyond. Survival does not necessarily mean someone escaped unharmed, prevailed in court, received justice, healed completely, or emerged stronger. Sometimes survival simply means: I am still here, and what happened to me does not get to become my entire identity. AND I absolutely reserve the right to speak about wrongdoing. 

There is a strange thing that happens when people survive injustice, violence, abuse, and harm. Terror. Eventually, somebody becomes more uncomfortable with how long the harmed are talking about it than with how long the harm lasted.

In error, Black people are sometimes described as embracing “victimhood” when we speak plainly about slavery, racial terror, Black Codes, convict leasing, Jim Crow, stolen land, redlining, medical experimentation, segregation, discriminatory lending, government surveillance, mass incarceration, destroyed communities and other documented forms of racial injustice.

But naming victimization is not the same thing as surrendering to it.

Victimization describes what was done.

A person is victimized when someone harms, exploits, violates, deceives, terrorizes, discriminates against, steals from, abuses or otherwise wrongs them. A community can be victimized too. So can generations of people when laws, institutions and systems repeatedly produce or enforce the harm.

Victimhood describes the condition of having been a victim of wrongdoing.

Neither word requires shame. Neither word means helpless. Neither word cancels courage, resistance, intelligence, joy, achievement, dignity or survival. And neither word creates an expiration date on justice.

A person who was robbed remains entitled to say that she was robbed even if she rebuilt everything that was taken from her. A family whose land was unlawfully taken does not lose its claim to the truth because several generations have passed. A Survivor does not become less resilient because she wants accountability. A community does not have to stop documenting an injustice simply because other people have grown tired of hearing about it.

There is a dangerous little trick hidden inside some conversations about “victim mentality.”

The original question is:

What happened, who did it, and what should be done about it?

Then suddenly the conversation becomes:

Why are you still talking about what happened?

The second question is often a way of escaping the first.

Black Americans have every right to investigate what happened to our ancestors, preserve their names, identify the institutions involved, trace stolen property, calculate economic losses, correct false histories, pursue legal remedies where they exist, demand accurate education, seek restitution and keep unfinished questions before the public.

Survival does not cancel the debt.

In fact, survival is often the reason the record exists at all.

People survived to testify. They saved letters. They kept deeds. They remembered names. They established newspapers. They photographed destruction. They challenged laws. They filed lawsuits. They told their children what happened when official histories preferred silence.

That is not an unhealthy attachment to victimhood. That is recordkeeping.

There is also no contradiction between the words victim and Survivor.

A victim names the relationship between a person and a wrongful act. A Survivor tells us that the person continued beyond that act. Depending upon the circumstances, someone may use either word, both words or neither. The language belongs first to the people whose lives were touched by the harm.

What we should resist is not the word victim.

We should resist the idea that being victimized tells us everything there is to know about a person or a people.

Black history contains profound victimization because profound wrongs occurred. It also contains resistance, family, faith, invention, litigation, scholarship, organizing, migration, business, music, political thought, military service, institution-building, rebellion, love, humor and ordinary people making lives under extraordinary pressure.

We do not honor that history by removing the victimization.

We honor it by telling the whole story.

So when this collection examines Black Codes, lynching, redlining, destroyed Black communities, medical experimentation, COINTELPRO, housing discrimination or any other injustice, we will not begin from embarrassment about acknowledging victims.

We will ask what happened.

Rosa Parks Civil Rights and Sexual Assault Advocate

We will ask who experienced it.

We will ask who benefited.

We will ask who resisted.

We will ask what was lost.

We will ask what was rebuilt.

We will ask what was repaired.

And where something remains unresolved, we will not pretend that the passing of time resolved it.

Victims have every right to keep righting wrongs.

Sometimes that work belongs to the people who experienced the original harm. Sometimes their children inherit unanswered questions. Sometimes grandchildren find a deed, court record, newspaper clipping or family story and realize that something described as unfortunate was actually deliberate.

They are allowed to pick up the unfinished work.

There is no statute of limitations on telling the truth about history.

Survival should never be used as evidence that the original harm no longer deserves an accounting.

We survived.

Now we get to tell what happened.

**Please keep in mind that this is NOT a complete detailed list.

1. Slavery, Emancipation & Reconstruction

National Council of Negro Women Mary McLeod Bethune: 1930 ca

1. Transatlantic slave trade
2. The Middle Passage
3. American chattel slavery
4. Sexual violence and reproductive exploitation of enslaved Black women
5. Slave patrols
6. Resistance, escape, rebellion and maroon communities
7. Free Black communities before emancipation
8. Dred Scott v. Sandford
9. The Civil War and Black military service
10. Emancipation
11. Reconstruction
12. Black political participation during Reconstruction
13. Freedmen’s schools and Black education
14. Black Codes
15. Convict leasing
16. The rise of the Ku Klux Klan
17. Reconstruction-era racial terrorism
18. Disfranchisement and grandfather clauses

2. Land, Wealth & Economic Exclusion

19. The Homestead Act and racial disparities in access to land
20. Black landownership after emancipation
21. Black farmer land loss
22. Heirs’ property and Black land loss
23. Discrimination against Black farmers in federal agricultural programs
24. Racial discrimination in banking and lending
25. Redlining
26. FHA mortgage discrimination
27. Racially restrictive housing covenants
28. Shelley v. Kraemer
29. Real-estate steering
30. Blockbusting
31. Housing discrimination
32. The Fair Housing Act of 1968
33. Discriminatory implementation of GI Bill benefits
34. Urban renewal and displacement of Black neighborhoods
35. Eminent domain and Black community displacement
36. Interstate highway construction through Black neighborhoods
37. The Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956 and urban displacement
38. White flight and suburbanization
39. Gentrification and displacement
40. Property appraisal discrimination and the racial wealth gap

3. Racial Terror & Destruction of Black Communities

41. Lynching in the United States
42. Spectacle lynching
43. Sexual violence and mutilation associated with racial terror
44. Destruction and expulsion of Black communities
45. Tulsa Race Massacre
46. Rosewood Massacre
47. Wilmington massacre and coup of 1898
48. Elaine Massacre
49. Atlanta Race Massacre of 1906
50. East St. Louis massacre of 1917
51. Red Summer of 1919
52. Destruction and seizure of Black-owned property during racial violence
53. Sundown towns
54. Church bombings and attacks on Black churches
55. The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing
56. Emmett Till
57. Racial terror directed at Black civil-rights workers

4. Segregation, Voting & Civil Rights

58. Jim Crow segregation
59. Poll taxes
60. Literacy tests
61. Grandfather clauses
62. White primaries
63. Smith v. Allwright
64. School segregation
65. Kenneth and Mamie Clark’s research on segregation
66. Brown v. Board of Education
67. Resistance to school integration
68. Boston school desegregation and the anti-busing violence of the 1970s
69. Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States
70. Civil Rights Act of 1964
71. Voting Rights Act of 1965
72. Fair Housing Act of 1968
73. Racial gerrymandering and redistricting
74. The Southern Strategy
    

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5. Medicine, Science & Bodily Autonomy

75. Medical experimentation on enslaved Black people
76. Gynecological experimentation on enslaved Black women
    

    Henrietta Lacks

77. J. Marion Sims and experimentation on enslaved women
78. Tuskegee syphilis study
79. Henrietta Lacks and the HeLa cell line
80. Holmesburg Prison experiments
81. Medical experimentation on incarcerated people
82. Eugenics in the United States
83. Compulsory sterilization
84. Sterilization abuse involving Black women
85. Reproductive coercion and population-control policies
86. History of Planned Parenthood and debates surrounding race, eugenics and reproductive policy
87. Racial disparities in medical treatment
88. Race correction/race norming in medicine and testing
89. Environmental racism and public health
90. Flint water crisis

6. Policing, Prisons & Criminal Justice

91. Development of slave patrols
92. History of American policing and race
93. Racialized policing after Reconstruction
94. Convict leasing
95. Chain gangs
96. Prison labor
97. Racial disparities in arrests and sentencing
98. The War on Drugs
99. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986
100. Crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparities
101. Mandatory minimum sentencing
102. School-to-prison pipeline/ Abuse-to-prison pipeline
103. Mass incarceration
104. Violent encounters between police and Black civilians
105. Police accountability and qualified immunity
106. Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

7. Government Surveillance & Political Repression

107. FBI surveillance of Black political organizations
108. COINTELPRO
109. Surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr.
110. Government targeting of Black nationalist organizations
111. Black Panther Party surveillance and disruption
112. Fred Hampton and the 1969 Chicago police raid
113. Surveillance of civil-rights organizations
114. Political infiltration and informants
115. Government responses to Black liberation movements

8. Drugs, Policy & the Crack Era

116. Origins and spread of crack cocaine
117. Crack-era media coverage
118. Racialized portrayals of crack addiction
119. “Crack baby” moral panic and subsequent scientific reassessment
120. Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986
121. Federal sentencing disparities
122. War on Drugs enforcement disparities
123. Iran-Contra affair
124. Contra-linked drug-trafficking allegations
125. Gary Webb’s Dark Alliance reporting
126. CIA Inspector General investigations concerning Contra-related trafficking allegations
     

     Afeni Shakur-Davis

127. Long-term effects of crack-era criminal policy on Black communities

9. Education, Media & Cultural Representation

128. Segregated education
129. Unequal school funding
130. School tracking and racial disparities
131. Disciplinary disparities in schools
132. School-to-prison pipeline
133. Hollywood stereotypes of Black Americans
134. Minstrelsy and racial caricature
135. Media portrayals of Black criminality
136. Racialized reporting of crime
137. Eurocentric beauty standards
138. Colorism
139. Erasure and distortion of African history
140. Representation of ancient African civilizations, including Kemet/Egypt
141. Appropriation, commercialization and misattribution of Black cultural innovations
142. Black inventors and disputes concerning recognition and attribution

Some of the Black Communities that Were Attacked, Destroyed, or Expelled

Dozens of Black American communities were massacred, attacked, burned, dispossessed, or violently expelled, while hundreds and eventually thousands of other communities practiced deliberate racial exclusion.

1. Colfax, Louisiana — 1873 — Colfax Massacre; more than 100 Black people were killed according to the historical compilation, and nearby Pollock’s small Black population subsequently left.
2. Celina, Tennessee — 1878 — Black residents left after months of racial violence.
3. Comanche County, Texas — 1886 — Black residents expelled.
4. Paragould, Arkansas — 1888–1908 — repeated racial violence contributed to most of roughly 150 Black residents leaving.
5. Lexington, Oklahoma — 1892 — Black residents expelled.
6. Blackwell, Oklahoma — 1893 — Black residents expelled; the community became a sundown town.
7. Monett, Missouri — 1894 — Black residents expelled following a lynching.
8. Linton, Indiana — 1896 — hundreds of Black workers were expelled; exclusion eventually extended throughout Greene County.
9. Elwood, Indiana — 1897 — documented racial expulsion.
10. Wilmington, North Carolina — 1898 — massacre and white-supremacist coup against an elected biracial government; thousands of Black residents subsequently left the city.
11. Pana, Illinois — 1899 — racial/labor violence killed Black miners and was followed by expulsion of the Black population.
12. Carterville, Illinois — 1899 — five Black miners were killed; surviving Black miners left afterward.
13. Mena, Arkansas — 1901 — most Black residents left following the lynching of Peter Berryman.
14. Pierce City, Missouri — 1901 — roughly 300 Black residents were expelled following lynchings.
15. Decatur, Indiana — 1902 — a white mob forced Black residents from the city.
16. Joplin, Missouri — 1903 — Black residents driven out following a lynching.
17. Sour Lake, Texas — 1903 — a large white mob opened fire and drove Black residents from the community.
18. Bonanza, Arkansas — 1904 — gunfire was used to terrorize Black residents; nearly all were expelled.
19. Sheridan, Arkansas — 1904 — nearly all Black residents were expelled during this period; another forced displacement occurred decades later.
20. Harrison, Arkansas — 1905 and 1909 — racial violence and intimidation drove Black residents from the community.
21. Cotter, Arkansas — 1906 — documented Black expulsion.
22. Birmingham/Marshall County, Kentucky — 1908 — Black residents were driven from Birmingham and much of the surrounding county.
23. Anna, Illinois — 1909 — Black families expelled following a nearby lynching.
24. Jonesboro, Illinois — 1909 — Black families likewise expelled.
25. Hickory Ridge, Arkansas — 1910 — dynamite was thrown at Black homes during the expulsion of residents.
26. Forsyth County, Georgia — 1912 — approximately 1,000 Black residents, representing nearly the entire Black population, were driven from the county through racial terror.
27. East St. Louis, Illinois — 1917 — major massacre; estimates of Black deaths vary widely, and thousands were left homeless.
28. Erwin, Tennessee — 1918 — after the murder and burning of a Black man, the remaining Black population was forced to witness the burning and ordered out of town.
29. Corbin, Kentucky — 1919 — approximately 200 Black workers were forced from town.
30. Washington, D.C. — 1919 — white mob attacks against Black residents during the Red Summer. The Library of Congress documents the 1919 period as involving racial attacks across numerous American cities.
31. Chicago, Illinois — 1919 — major Red Summer racial violence against Black communities.
32. Omaha, Nebraska — 1919 — major Red Summer racial violence, including the lynching of Will Brown.
33. Knoxville, Tennessee — 1919 — major racial violence during the Red Summer period.
34. Elaine, Arkansas — 1919 — one of the deadliest episodes of racial violence of the era; Black sharecroppers and residents were attacked after organizing around crop payments. The Library of Congress includes Elaine among its documented racial massacres.
35. Ocoee, Florida — 1920 — Black residents were attacked after attempts to exercise voting rights; homes were burned and the Black community was effectively destroyed and expelled.
36. Greenwood, Tulsa, Oklahoma — 1921 — the Greenwood district, commonly remembered as Black Wall Street, was attacked and destroyed; thousands were left homeless and death estimates remain disputed.
37. Jay, Florida — 1922 — approximately 175 Black residents fled following racial violence and threats.
38. Rosewood, Florida — 1923 — Black community attacked and burned; residents killed and Survivors forced into permanent exile.
39. Blanford, Indiana — 1923 — Ku Klux Klan-led expulsion of Black residents.
40. Manhattan Beach, California — 1920s — different mechanism: the city used eminent domain against property that included the Black-owned Bruce’s Beach resort. This belongs in the archive as dispossession, not massacre.
41. Vienna, Illinois — 1954 — Black homes were burned and the Black population driven from the area.
42. Sheridan, Arkansas — 1954 — Black families were pressured from the community after Brown v. Board, including threats involving Black employees’ homes.

The victimization is historical fact.

It is also the history of people who escaped, resisted, litigated, organized, revolted, migrated, educated children, created institutions, accumulated land, built businesses, founded churches and schools, fought in wars, wrote newspapers, changed laws, created political movements, preserved families and cultures, and survived attempts to prevent many of those things.

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