In December of 1890 the United States of America and the Lakota were at war. By 1890, the wars between the American Indians and the United States were almost over with the Indians being overwhelmed by United States technology and firepower. Anyway, in December of 1890 the 7th US Calvary was doing cleanup operations against the Lakota. They had surrounded the remnants of the warriors and their families at Wounded Knee in South Dakota and were engaged in disarming them. Depending on whose account we read, the disarmament went south somehow and fighting resumed. The 7th had overwhelming firepower and when the smoke cleared between 250-300 Indian men, women, and children, and 30 something soldiers, lay dead.

The US Army calls this, “The Battle of Wounded Knee,” and social historians call it, “The Wounded Knee Massacre.” Whatever you want to call it, we can all call it an unnecessary tragedy. The Indian Wars were over. The United States had won. I know that sounds weird, but the Indian tribes were Americans (as in they were here first) but they were not citizens of the United States of America. They were aliens in the the eyes and the laws of the USA. Even after the end of the Indian Wars, the United States Congress didn’t confer birthright US citizenship on Native Americans until 1924 – largely because of the bravery and dedication of Indians in The Great War.

Even today, 140 years after Wounded Knee and almost 100 years after birthright citizenship, the United States and the Sovereign Tribes haven’t got all the details of our relationship worked out.

What, you might ask, does this have to do with the Black Holocaust? I said I was going to write about that not the Indian Wars. Much, I believe.

History is messy – as is the entire story of how one tribe or ethnicity relates to another, and how that story is told.

Yesterday (June 1, 2021), Mr. Biden, in behalf of the United States government, gave an impassioned speech to commemorate the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot or Massacre. (If it was a race riot, it was a riot by the European-descended against the African-descended and not the other way around.) It was a tragic massacre of some 300 people and the destruction of their homes and businesses much as had been the outcome at Wounded Knee.

If we allow the recent race (a word I hate to use because it doesn’t capture the reality that ethnic identity is far more significant in the history of conflict between peoples that their “race.”) riots (I’m not all that old, so the first one I remember well is the Los Angeles Riot of 1965) be seen as the model of ethnic violence in the US, we will miss the larger historical record. While the riots since the 1960s have been mostly Black-on-White, or Black-on-Black, that is not the way it has always been. If we look back on ethnic violence in the US since the end of the Civil War and the conferral of birthright citizenship on the former slaves in 1868, the major riots were White-on-Black culminating in Rosewood in 1923. I don’t know how you feel about this, but it boggles my mind that we are less that 100 years from the day when it seemed quite ok for my migrant ancestors to take up arms against the children of their former slaves.

This impulse to suppress those peoples who “are not us” is a universal human desire- I see that the separation of humanity into distinct ethnicities at Babel as recorded in Genesis 11 lies at the base of all ethnic conflict. It may be universal, but it is a universality that is an expression of our fallen from grace and into sin condition. “What is” is not what is good regardless its universality.

Anyway, accurate data are not available but anywhere between 3000 and 6000 Black men, women, and children were unlawfully killed by White groups and mobs between 1868 and 1923. After Rosewood it became ones and twos rather than mass uprisings, so while all murders are heinous, they aren’t in the ethnic uprisings count – a few men killing just a few isn’t the act of the many (except when the many refuse to convict in the face of overwhelming evidence). For 50 years after their inclusion in the American Experiment, the governing authorities in this country turned a blind eye to the persecution and suppression of these newest citizens.

And now I get to the point of this essay: the persecution and oppression of Black Americans in the past is not the Black Holocaust. The Black Holocaust is the bastard child of the past. The American reality for her Black children is that today some 7000 Black men, women, and children were murdered by other Black men last year and the numbers are rising! Generations of oppression have produced this Black Holocaust. Yes, every murderer is responsible for his own crimes and he should pay with his life for them, but if we do not recognize that these murders are the fruit of the past we can never understand what is happening and search in the right place for a solution.

I don’t have THE secular answer. White guilt won’t work; it soothes the White liberal and angers the rest. Throwing money into the inner cities won’t work – the cities aren’t equipped to use that money wisely and well. We’ve got to be able to contextualize the persecutions of the past within the broader context of all of ethnic conflicts throughout all of recorded (and much unrecorded) history. If the Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians, although of the same “race” can’t coexist, what right have we to assume we can sing Kum-Bah-Yah and everything will be fixed? We must get beyond the denial of those who think everything would be just fine if our Black citizens would just quit rioting, killing each other, and get a job, and the denial of those who think we can end the Black Holocaust if we would only throw billions into their ethnic enclaves and usher in the new age of equity and equality. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put forth every effort to do the impossible. Even a bandaid is a benefit when no other cure is at hand.

Yes, of course, I have the Christian (God’s) solution to the problem. The GOSPEL is the only answer to ethnic conflict. In Christ God is creating a new humanity. In Christ he is healing the division of Babel. In Christ men and women of every tribe of Adam’s descendants are being made members of that new tribe that shall live and reign with him forever. In Christ the purchase of his blood are again one human race. This is the real E Pluribus Unum.