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Twenty-eight years before the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a black man was lynched in Leavenworth, Kan.
Fred Alexander, accused of attacking a woman, was dragged out of a jail cell, tortured and murdered in a ravine near Spruce Street on Jan. 15, 1901, while an estimated 8,000 citizens of the city watched, according to an archived article from The New York Times.
“There is no marker where Fred Alexander was killed in the ravine behind the city,” said Dr. Shawn Alexander, assistant professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas.
Alexander, no relation to the Leavenworth man, spoke at a luncheon celebrating King’s birthday Jan. 12 at the Frontier Conference Center. He told attendees that racism is not a problem of only the southern United States, nor it is a problem of the past. While Kansas is known as the Free State, where one of the court cases in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka led to desegregation of schools, Kansas has also been part of those problems of racism and denial of human rights.
“But we forget, Brown v. Board happened here — why? — because segregation was here. It’s not a southern phenomenon. We have a case in Topeka, Kan., because people are denied access to school, but we forget that in the narrative,” Alexander said.
One of his students, a Kansas native, once argued with Alexander that racism doesn’t exist anymore. Then the student took two of his fellow students, both African Americans, to his hometown in Kansas. They went to a bar owned by a man the student had known for years. The bar owner, after looking at his two African American friends, asked them to leave. That was in 2009.
Alexander also said that while celebrating King’s victory for civil rights, people sometimes forget the historical facts. King fought for human rights, not just civil rights for African Americans, Alexander said.
“But his dream in the beginning is a nightmare, and he tells you that,” he said. “And that’s what we’re struggling with today, is to get back to the beginning of that speech and push for things he’s calling for.”
Many of King’s actions revolved around protests for unions and worker’s rights and housing rights. The title of his 1963 march was actually “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” Alexander said. King believed that fighting class-ism was as important as fighting racism.
“King’s shattered dream remains our own,” Alexander said. “Joblessness is still widespread, underneath official unemployment statistics wages remain too low to lift millions of people out of poverty. Conservative politicians and global corporations relentlessly chip away at human rights and workplace safety.”
Although civil rights were granted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Alexander said it was simply upholding U.S. Constitutional amendments that were passed in the 1860s and 1870s.
“Martin Luther King stands up in the 1950s with a group of people calling for the exact same things that people stood up for in 1884 and 1890,” Alexander said. “…please abide by your rules. The Constitution, the 14th and 15th amendment, says you cannot do this to me. But yet you find a way around it.”
Twenty-eight years before the birth of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a black man was lynched in Leavenworth, Kan.
Fred Alexander, accused of attacking a woman, was dragged out of a jail cell, tortured and murdered in a ravine near Spruce Street on Jan. 15, 1901, while an estimated 8,000 citizens of the city watched, according to an archived article from The New York Times.
“There is no marker where Fred Alexander was killed in the ravine behind the city,” said Dr. Shawn Alexander, assistant professor of African and African-American Studies at the University of Kansas.
Alexander, no relation to the Leavenworth man, spoke at a luncheon celebrating King’s birthday Jan. 12 at the Frontier Conference Center. He told attendees that racism is not a problem of only the southern United States, nor it is a problem of the past. While Kansas is known as the Free State, where one of the court cases in Brown v. the Board of Education of Topeka led to desegregation of schools, Kansas has also been part of those problems of racism and denial of human rights.
“But we forget, Brown v. Board happened here — why? — because segregation was here. It’s not a southern phenomenon. We have a case in Topeka, Kan., because people are denied access to school, but we forget that in the narrative,” Alexander said.
One of his students, a Kansas native, once argued with Alexander that racism doesn’t exist anymore. Then the student took two of his fellow students, both African Americans, to his hometown in Kansas. They went to a bar owned by a man the student had known for years. The bar owner, after looking at his two African American friends, asked them to leave. That was in 2009.
Alexander also said that while celebrating King’s victory for civil rights, people sometimes forget the historical facts. King fought for human rights, not just civil rights for African Americans, Alexander said.
“But his dream in the beginning is a nightmare, and he tells you that,” he said. “And that’s what we’re struggling with today, is to get back to the beginning of that speech and push for things he’s calling for.”
Many of King’s actions revolved around protests for unions and worker’s rights and housing rights. The title of his 1963 march was actually “The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,” Alexander said. King believed that fighting class-ism was as important as fighting racism.
“King’s shattered dream remains our own,” Alexander said. “Joblessness is still widespread, underneath official unemployment statistics wages remain too low to lift millions of people out of poverty. Conservative politicians and global corporations relentlessly chip away at human rights and workplace safety.”
Although civil rights were granted in the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Alexander said it was simply upholding U.S. Constitutional amendments that were passed in the 1860s and 1870s.
“Martin Luther King stands up in the 1950s with a group of people calling for the exact same things that people stood up for in 1884 and 1890,” Alexander said. “…please abide by your rules. The Constitution, the 14th and 15th amendment, says you cannot do this to me. But yet you find a way around it.”
