Dark History

History is knowledge It can make you uncomfortable sometimes But that makes you human so learn beyond your limits

[yourreddancer]

More history you were never taught in school.

Battle of Bamber BridgeJun 24, 1943 – Jun 25, 1943

On this day in 1943 black American soldiers faced off with white American Military police during World War II on British soil. Yes you read correctly black American soldiers had to fight their own white American soldiers, while in England, where they were fighting for the world.

Why? Because the English town of Bamber Bridge in Lancashire was not segregated so they treated the black soldiers like all other races, aka blacks were free to eat, drink anywhere, BUT back in America segregation of blacks and whites still existed. So essentially the American army went to someone else’s country and demanded they adopted America’s racist practices

So when the American Military police found out that their own black American soldiers were drinking at the same pubs as white people they went in to arrest them. The people in the town got mad about the treatment of the black soldiers and decided to then turn their pubs into “BLACKS ONLY DRINKING PUBS” the very opposite of what was taking place in America with their WHITES ONLY businesses

.Of course this pissed off the American military so guns went blazing, and when word spread back at camp that black soldiers had been shot, scores of men formed a crowd, some carrying rifles and by midnight more American military police arrived with a machine gun-equipped vehicle, so the black soldiers had no choice but to get rifles from British stores while others barricaded themselves back on base, so now it was American white soldiers versus American black soldiers. This lead to the death of one soldier, injury of 7, and 32 convictions.

Back in America the battle was hushed up because they didn’t want the country to find out that they were fighting their own soldiers which would anger the black population and weaken the morale in the country.Y

u may read about the ill treatment of black American soldiers by their own army in the book FORGOTTEN.

[aesthetic-ds]

[darkhistory222]

Dark history time

🎪🤡🤹Clown makeup and its rich history, theater and passion often hiding culture and racism in its later roots .🎪🤡🤹

🤡The performance of clowning goes as far as ancient Egypt 2400 to 2500 bc. Priests and performers known as “Pygmy”, often bald headed wearing leopard skins and masks, respected for their role in society.

🎪Seeing them in Ancient Greece & Rome known as Buffoons performed in farces, using makeup to exaggerate expressions, often mocking characters for tricks.

🃏Medieval Court Jesters from the 5th–15th Century, Traveling actors combined the roles of acrobats and fools, evolving into entertainers in royal courts. Also historically known for the perfect role where one can mock the king in power and gather information without hardly any punishment.

🎭Commedia dell'arte in the 16th Century, Italian theater introduced stock characters like Harlequin and Pierrot, which are ancestors of modern clowns. Often depicted with blue Mohawk, white painted face and the groundwork for modern clown aesthetic.

🤹🏿🤹🏻Around the 17th century is where the art of clowning began to include minstrel scenes, black face with exaggerated colorful Afros, facial features and new sterotypes And 1874 birthed the “tramp” clown, frequently depicting poor African Americans unhoused by the Civil War. To affirm a superiority they believed they were entitled to.

🤡Four types of clown stereotypes🤡

1) 🤍Whiteface clown aka the "boss" clown, they wear white makeup representing authority, intelligence, and sophistication. They often wear refined costumes, such as a neat Pierrot outfit.

Theirs is many subtypes of the white face clown including

💟The Classic (European) Whiteface,sometimes called the 'most majestic and beautiful' of the Whitefaces; an elegant clown, like the Pierrot or Harlequin of commedia dell'arte;

💟The Straight Whiteface, similar to the Classic but more colorful, more cheerful; and

💟The Grotesque Whiteface, similar to the Straight Whiteface in color and cheer, but zanier, with exaggerated features and clothes.

💟The Mime, also an elegant clown, known of course for not speaking but emoting through body language and facial expressions.

💟Famous Whiteface clowns include Frosty Little, Bozo the Clown and Ronald McDonald.💟

2) ♥️Auguste clown, The lovable, clumsy "red clown" who acts as the foil to the Whiteface. They use flesh-toned or pinkish makeup, with exaggerated features, and are the recipients of pies-in-the-face or slapstick antics.

♥️ The classic Auguste appearance is the opposite of the Whiteface, with prominent fleshtones and black-and-white features, a large ball-shaped nose, and mismatched costumes including oversized neckties, very small hats.

♥️ Famous Augustes include Cookie (from the Bozo Show) and Coco.

3)💛Character clown: a performer portrays a specific occupation, archetype, or "character," such as a doctor, chef, or firefighter. Wearing things like glasses, mustaches and beards to freckles, warts, big ears or strange haircuts.

💛The most prevalent character clown in the American circus is the hobo, tramp or bum clown.

4)🤎🖤Hobo/Tramp clown is a type of character that is forlorn, downtrodden, or happy-go-lucky. They typically feature dirt-like makeup, ragged clothing, and a depressed or optimistic demeanor. The one who is often the butt of the joke, Tramp originated with the hobos who rode the rails during the Great Depression.

Their are three types of hobo clowns broken down here

🖤🤎The Classic Tramp, forlorn and downtrodden, shuffling through life with a rain cloud over his head.

🖤🤎The Hobo or Vagabond, his manners are often elegant and refined, he's happy to be free of society.

🖤🤎The Bag Lady, a female version of the Tramp or Hobo

🖤🤎Tramps have been made famous by such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin, Emmett Kelley, and Red Skelton.

🎪Where racism comes into it.🎪

🖤🤎 In the 1800s Minstrel Shows and clown acts were closely linked, with performances intendedto ridicule Black culture through exaggerated features, tattered clothing, and dehumanizing stereotypes. Including Tramp Clowns Created by white actors James McIntyre and Tom Heath in 1874,

🖤🤎 the "tramp clown" or hobo character was a direct portrayal of African Americans depicted as homeless, lazy, or foolish following the Civil War.Performance Elements: The white makeup around the mouth for tramp clowns was specifically adopted from blackface minstrelsy to mock the appearance of African Americans.

🖤🤎The "Jim Crow" character in minstrel shows was often performed in the style of a clown, blurring the lines between the two forms of performance.Derogatory Caricatures: These clowns, often with white or red face paint, white gloves and clothes to emphasize the darkness in their painted skin perpetuated harmful stereotypes that African Americans were uneducated, impoverished, and unintelligent, helping to reinforce white supremacy during the post-Civil War era.

🖤🤎The performance had been so deeply engrained into American culture influencing famous characters like Mikey mouse, the nanny character from Tom and Jerry.

🤡🤹🏿🃏

Simply asking What is the difference between clowns, jesters and blackface?

🤡Clowns are Traditional/Circus performances for Entertainment, comedy, and slapstick humor, often aimed at children. Makeup/Style: Features stylized face paint (whiteface, Auguste, or tramp) intended to create a character rather than imitate a specific race.Behavior: Often involves slapstick, innocence, or ineptitude. Clowns react and perform, make fun of themselves, and are more physically baphoons.

🃏Jesters are is historically a court entertainer who uses wit, satire, and social commentary to mock others, often working alone. Jesters talk, mock and deliver news to the people above them. Jesters specialty is an intellectual wit, and not racially targeted.

🤹🏿 blackface/hobo and tramp clowns are intentionally designed to target specific races by amplifying unique features physically to represent them in a degrading, stereotyping way. Makeup being as dark as night, large Afro hair, big noses, lips, shoes and intentional self deprecating humor to humiliate someone culturally.

Sometimes black face and clowning intertwined through uses of props, style and acting. Whether intentional or not.

Not every clown is rooted in racism and not every performer is racist but doing the art of clowning I think it’s important to know your history and your intentions be genuine.

[darkhistory222]

Dark history story

The victim who produced over 200 slaves for his master was named Pata Seca. He was born in Sorocaba, São Paulo in the first half of the 19th century becoming property of a local farmer. His height being 7’2 he was chosen as a breeder.

Unfortunately meaning he had to forcefully have relations with other female slaves to create strong workers through “good genes”.

Pata Secas life was controlled through his masters will. He was checked for diseases often, fed well, and forced sexual interactions. We do not know how many women were forced to engage in horrific activities with and we don’t know where his remains have gone since his passing. But we do have a rough estimate of him fathering over 200 children in his lifetime.

[darkhistory222]

This engraving depicts a scene from the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), specifically titled "Revenge taken by the Black Army for the cruelties practiced on them by the French". It symbolizes the shift in power during the later stages of the revolution.

When the Black Army, led by figures like Jean-Jacques Dessalines, successfully repelled Napoleon Bonaparte's massive force of formerly enslaved people and free people of color—executing French officers by hanging. The revolution was characterized by extreme violence on both sides.

This particular scene was a direct response to the atrocities committed by French forces under General Charles Leclerc and General Rochambeau, who attempted to restore slavery and French control over the colony then known as Saint-Domingue.

The artwork was created by Marcus Rainsford and published in 1805 in his book, An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti. Rainsford, a former British captain, documented the revolution's events and provided some of the earliest visual records of the conflict..

The revolution began in August 1791 as a mass uprising of enslaved people inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution. It is widely regarded as the most successful slave rebellion in history, resulting in the permanent abolition of slavery and the establishment of Haiti as the world's first independent Black-led republic in 1804.

[darkhistory222]

Andrew Myrick was a storekeeper and trader at the Lower Sioux Agency in Minnesota before the Dakota War of 1862.

That summer the Dakota people were facing extreme hunger because the United States government delayed annuity payments and local traders refused to extend food on credit.

When asked to release provisions, Myrick reportedly said , “So far as I am concerned, if they are hungry let them eat grass.”

On August 17, 1862, fighting broke out between Dakota warriors and the settlers. Myrick was slain on the first day during the attack on the agency. When his body was found days later, accounts stated that his head was severed and his mouth and buttocks were filled with grass.

[darkhistory222]

Finnish soldiers finding the skin of a skinned Soviet soldier. Seesjärvi. 1942.

[fidelcostco]

ppl without meds: wow…. i can't imagine being dependent on medicine... pills every day? injecting myself every week? how tragic

ppl who need meds: holy fuck they invented the solution to my problem and i literally just need to take magic tiny rocks and inject some substance every week. oh my god. i get to feel better in literally any capacity. holy shit

[fidelcostco]

ppl who need meds but can't access them/meds for their thing don't exist yet: holy fuck I wish I had tiny magic rocks or injectable substance or cream or gel or potion or implant to take at whatever rate necessary to fix my problem. I'd kill to take that every day/week/etc forever if it would fix my thing

[quotefeeling]

“No matter how attractive a person’s potential may be, you have to date their reality.”

— Unknown

[lgbtlaughs]

ACT UP, 1990

[kootyl]

Grand Duchess Marie Romanov and Grand Duchess Anastasia Romanov smiling in 1911.

[darkhistory222]

Fun fact

Every United States presidents except Martin Van Buren is related through one common ancestor, king John of England.

Let that sink in a moment when we “choose” who’s president, we essentially choose one cousin or the other. A complex system of nepotism designed to divide us with an illusion of choice.

[darkhistory222]

Her name was Susannah Turner at eight years old When her father couldn't pay his debts to the landowner, he didn't lose the farm, he lost her.

Being trapped by sharecropping loans he could not repay, he signed her over to a cotton mill in exchange for canceled fertilizer and seed costs. From that moment on, Susannah Turner no longer belonged to her family. She became an indentured worker, legally bound to the mill until she turned eighteen.

Ten years of her life were sold with a signature, children bound by debt were the cheapest labor money could buy.She worked the spinning machines twelve hours a day, six days a week, in air so thick with cotton lint it coated her lungs white.

The noise shattered her hearing before she reached ten. Girls around her were pulled into machinery, injured while the machines never stopped.

She slept in a crowded dormitory, ate barely enough to survive, and watched her debt grow instead of shrink as the mill charged her for food, shelter, and care.

When a photographer captured her image in 1901, she stood barefoot in a torn dress, hair powdered gray with lint, face empty of childhood—already worn down by a life that allowed no escape.

She never reached eighteen. Susannah died at fourteen from tuberculosis caused by years of breathing cotton dust. Her death was recorded as "natural," her body withheld because the mill claimed she still owed money.

She was buried in an unmarked grave alongside other mill children, forgotten except for the photograph that survived her.

Today, that image remains as proof of what once passed for industry and progress.

[darkhistory222]

Men have always known that caring for children and running a household is hard work that’s why it’s been labeled “women’s work.”

Statistically sed women’s work equates to two full time jobs between the house and raising his kids. Yet, the moment women ask for fair pay or rights, suddenly it’s a problem. Half of those posters simply say “Women shouldn’t vote—they might make us do the things we make them do!”

It’s simply hypocrisy

Vintage anti suffrage posters

[miyaskylans]

[darkhistory222]

In December 1902, in a charity hospital in Denver, Julia Hernandez at 12 years old endured a sixteen-hour labor that pushed her small, underdeveloped body to the brink of death. Doctors fought to save her life as she gave birth to a baby boy. When the delivery ended, both mother and infant were alive, an outcome the attending physician reportedly described as a miracle given the situation.

Julia’s pregnancy began the year before, when she was eleven, after she was betrayed by an adult she trusted. When the pregnancy became known, the man disappeared, leaving Julia and her family to face the situation alone. Her mother tried keeping her out of school and away from neighbors, hoping to shield her from judgment in a society that offered little support to victims. As the pregnancy progressed, secrecy became impossible, and the family turned to the hospital as their last option.

After the birth, Julia was far too young to raise a child. Her mother assumed responsibility for the baby, who was named Carlos, while Julia attempted to return to some semblance of a childhood. She went back to school, but the experience had permanently altered her life. Her education ended early, and the physical and emotional toll followed her into adulthood. She married young, had more children, and never fully recovered from the strain placed on her body.

Julia died at just twenty-two years old during another childbirth. Carlos grew up believing she was his sister, only learning the truth years later. Her story is a reminder that behind historical records are real children whose lives were reshaped by harm they never deserved, and whose survival often came at an unbearable cost.

[darkhistory222]

In 1808, an enslaved Black woman grabbed a chair and beat her mistress unconscious. That single act of resistance bought her freedom and changed her bloodline forever.

Silvia Dubois was born into slavery on Sourland Mountain, New Jersey, around 1788 or 1789. Her father, Cuffy Baird, had fought in the Revolutionary War, wearing the uniform of a country that would never saw him as fully human.

Her mother, Dorcas Compton, was dragged back to the fields, her body still bleeding and broken. Three days after birthing Silvia into this world, When she couldn't work fast enough, still weak from childbirth, they beat her with a cattle prod.

Dorcas fought for her freedom the only way the system allowed. She mortgaged herself against loans, trying to buy her way out of chains. Eventually, she was sold away from her daughter.

By fourteen, Silvia was working at a tavern in Great Bend, Pennsylvania, owned by a man named Dominicus Dubois. The work they gave her wasn't considered women's work. She worked the fields like a man. She ferried boats across the Susquehanna River.

Her biographer would later describe her as five feet ten inches tall, two hundred pounds, well-proportioned and capable of great endurance. But those words don't capture what she really was: a woman who refused to be made small.

She cheated other ferrymen out of their money without apology. She drank and danced and fought men and women alike, and she made children afraid of her because in a world that wanted to break her, she chose to be formidable.

Dominicus Dubois, her owner, treated her with decency for the time But his wife Silvia called that woman "the very devil himself." The mistress whipped her so viciously and another occasion cracking Silvia's skull with a shovel. Her hatred leaving scars.

In 1808, while Dominicus was away serving on grand jury duty in Wilkes-Barre, the mistress had guests coming over. She ordered Silvia to scrub the bar-room floor. Silvia scrubbed it, but not to the mistress's satisfaction. So the mistress raised her hand to strike.

Silvia Dubois decided that this particular day, she would not be struck again. She grabbed a chair. And she beat that woman unconscious. The mistress fell hard against the door, Silvia thought she'd killed her. The other people in that bar-room moved to intervene, but she threatened to harm them the same way.

Silvia ran to Chenango Point in New York. She knew what happened to enslaved people who fought back. But Dominicus sent for her, and surprised her with a deal. If she took her baby back to New Jersey, he would write her a pass and grant her freedom.

She took her child and went searching for her mother in Flagtown, New Jersey. When she learned Dorcas had moved to New Brunswick, Silvia tracked her down and stayed for years. A reunion beyond slavery, pain and helplessness.

In 1812, Silvia's grandfather purchased land on Cedar Summit at Sourland Mountain. He opened a tavern called Put's Tavern, known throughout the area as a rowdy establishment where free Black people gathered. Silvia built her homestead nearby and cared for her grandfather. When he died, she inherited the tavern and ran it herself.

The historical records show that in the 1830s, Silvia and her two youngest daughters, Elizabeth Alexander and Charlotte Moore, found themselves in court multiple times. Disturbance of the peace, assault, operation of an unlicensed house. The system that once owned trying to control them thru law.

Around 1840, her tavern and home burned down. She lost her property when she couldn't pay the taxes, and a second home would also burn before 1883. Silvia spent her final years living in relative poverty on that same Sourland Mountain where she'd been born.

Six years prior to her death a man named Cornelius Larison had interviewed her and recorded her story. Without it we likely wouldn’t have known her story and it ending with her.

She passed away during the Great Blizzard of 1888, at the age of one hundred or one hundred and one. Her body is believed to rest in Stoutsburg Cemetery in Sourland Mountain, New Jersey.