You surprise me with your statement in this video: "………even though he (Grant )was more 'militant' in government defence of blacks than Johnson was ……." as Johnson did nothing to enforce the protection of newly emancipated blacks or to support the 14th amendment and often expressed disdain concerning any idea of their being equal to whites!

ANY action in regard to enforcement of protection for blacks would appear to be militant!
A history channel documentary presented several years ago stated that at the beginning
of the civil war Mr. Grant said if the civil war was to free slaves he would gladly join up
with the confederacy! A significant statement when one considers that the very same
documentary claimed Robert E. Lee freed every single slave he owned BEFORE the civil
war! In fact Mr. Grant according to this same documentary often returned slaves to their
plantations to work the fields when he was general during that war. Yet in all fairness it must be stated that Grant had a change of heart after receiving overwhelming voter support
from newly freed blacks in his first election as president and he subsequently made more
appointments of blacks in his administration than any other american president before
or after until around the time of Franklin Roosevelt who was always having to be prodded
into doing so by his wife Eleanor causing him in one private conversation to (according to
a New York daily article on private remarks of american presidents) remark he was "tiring
of having to be bothered with niggers just to get their votes!"

NO WHITE MALE elected president has been 'militant' about empowering BLACK PEOPLE and probably never will be! Neither will the 'hollywood' moguls produce films concerning
the subject you present in this series 'heads of hate'. As Charley Manson has said in his
last televised interview: "In the United States the BLACK MALE does what the WHITE MAN
lets him do!" And as long as blacks in this country continue the legacy of ignoring the
warnings of their scholars and educators such as Dr. Carter G. Woodson who predicted
in his telling book "Mis-education of the Negro" POWERLESSNESS for a people who did not
establish an enduring narrative created by them, did not mentor and train their young ones,
and establish businesses in their own communities, and that a foreign people who knew the ways of business would OWN THEIR communities and THEY would work for THEM!
A tour today of the once Jewish Lawndale community in which I grew up in the 1950's and the Austin former township where I helped my family buy a home in 1969 here in the city of Chicago will confirm Dr. Woodson's prophetic warnings!
 
Another documentary on the Roosevelt dynasty quoted Mr. Theodore Roosevelt as saying
to a group of southern businessmen after his last term in office that it would take the
average Negro in america six thousand four hundred years to catch up with the average white person in 'intelligence'! With only twenty percent of blacks registered to vote in Ferguson and the city of Chicago unable to duplicate Mr. Washington's election nearly one
hundred years after the statement made by Mr. Roosevelt, that might not have been such
a fanciful (though obviously caustically sarcastic!) projection!

It is a good thing to know the untaught history of those who have oppressed one's people and those who found it 'inconvenient' to stand firmly and unwaveringly for the justice and equal standing as humans that they were entitled to. It is even more vital to know how self-hate continues as a legacy and law unto itself to oppress one's own mind and recapitulate inferiority and powerlessness in one's own race decade after decade after decade without end!

George Santayana was right: "those who do not learn from their history are doomed to repeat it!"

Erick Dean Tippett
Retired Musician/Teacher
Chicago,Illinois