45 links that open doors to perception
Traditionally, ANIMALS 24-7 has marked Martin Luther King Day by reposting one of our very first offerings, What animal advocates owe to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.
For 2025, eleven years after that article was written, ANIMALS 24-7 is offering not just one main article and several on related topics, as we usually have, but instead posting easy access to our entire Black History & Animals Archive, with a new introduction––or reintroduction for many readers––to the content.
Profound influence
What animal advocates owe to the legacy of Martin Luther spotlighted that while Martin Luther King Jr. himself never had direct involvement in animal issues, his teachings and leadership had a profound influence on many of the leaders who built the animal rights movement that rose to national and global prominence in the two decades after his death.
These leaders are introduced, and what they learned from Martin Luther King Jr. is explained.
Martin Luther King Jr. was in his own turn profoundly influenced by several long forgotten African-American evangelists who were also animal advocates, more prominent during their lives for their animal advocacy than for their work that helped to lay the foundations of the civil rights movement that King and many others built upon.
Teachers & preachers
ANIMALS 24-7, in the days before and after Martin Luther King Day each year, has also spotlighted these African-American evangelists and their accomplishments, by posting and reposting Four black leaders who built the humane movement and Black humane history found in great-grandpa’s attic near a town called Ark.
Usually ANIMALS 24-7 has followed these brief history lessons with an updated edition of A black-and-white issue that the humane community has yet to face, further spotlighting the enduring influence of Martin Luther King Jr. on animal issues, both in the U.S. and in Africa, and pointing out how despite the instrumental contributions of African-American leadership to humane progress, U.S. humane leadership remains for the most part stubbornly, determinedly, self-defeatingly self-segregated.
(Photo courtesy of granddaughter Evangeline Olive Morris.)
Contributions erased from history
African-American leaders were deliberately and systematically purged from humane leadership roles at about the same time the U.S. entered World War II, through the influence of just two individuals, Eric Hansen and William Alan Swallow.
Hansen and Swallow were the leadership team at first the American Humane Association and then the Massachusetts SPCA and the American Humane Education Society.
Hansen and Swallow not only put African-American humane leadership out of work, but wrote them out of humane history, and Jewish humane leadership too, in Swallow’s 1963 book Quality of Mercy, which passed for the next half-century as the definitive history of the animal cause.
Unfortunately, ANIMALS 24-7 recognized Swallow’s considerable deficiencies as a historian several years before fully appreciating the insidious extent and effects of his racism.
(See How “Quality of Mercy” Swallowed the humane movement [part 1]) and How “Quality of Mercy” Swallowed the humane movement [part 2].)
Harm still unrectified
The harm done by Hansen and Swallow on multiple fronts, but especially to African-American animal advocacy, remains conspicuously unrectified.
Further, merely posting and reposting old ANIMALS 24-7 articles, on or close to Martin Luther King Day each year, barely makes a start toward undoing the damage that segregation did, and continues to do, to the animal cause.
Much more is required to restore to the collective consciousness of animal advocacy that the humane, animal welfare, animal rights, conservation, ecology, green, and plant-based movements have always grown from multi-cultural roots, even if most of the participants have never known of the branches on the other side of the family tree.
Recovering the lost history
For more than a decade now, ANIMALS 24-7 has worked to recover the lost history of African-American contributions to animal advocacy. Additional examples include Charles Henry Turner proved Darwin was right about animal sentience and Best Friends & MOVE: cults, “white privilege” & the rise of animal rights activism.
In particular, our work has included bringing to the attention of animal advocates the ongoing efforts of African-American leaders to advance plant-based vegan and vegetarian eating, beginning even before the end of slavery and organized animal advocacy.
See Sojourner Truth, her vegetarian Adventist friends, & the White lady; Dick Gregory, 50 years a vegan activist, dies at 84; Vegan advocate Dexter King, son of Martin Luther King Jr., dies at 62; and Veguary re-introduces Afro-Americans to plant-based eating.
Defense of slavery distorted law & even science
Important as ANIMALS 24-7 believes this work to be, equally important, we believe, is pointing out the extent to which defenses of slavery in the U.S. distorted the evolution of many of the views, presumptions, and erroneous concepts now enshrined in law and even science that today hinder animal advocacy.
See Why the Second Amendment does not protect hunting animals, Why mass shooters sometimes sound like conservationists; One African-American journalist’s view of John James Audubon; Audubon: brand recognition trumps what J.J. Audubon actually did; and Range war over diversity, equity, & inclusion in wildlife management.
The Ku Klux Klan is not dead yet
Echoes of the slavery era reverberate in animal issues to this day, illustrated in Galveston mock lynching may hasten police horse era to an end; When dogs mauled children outside the White House; Echoes of the Old South in pigeon-shooting lawyer’s promotion to judge; Hurricane Dorian helps to solve the mystery of the extinct Abaco wild horses; and SHARK fights pigeon shooters where black man was hunted for sport.
Comparably problematic are the lingering influences of the Ku Klux Klan, now remembered mostly as a bedsheet-wearing creepy clown act, but responsible in their heyday for more than 5,000 murders, arguably more influential in much of the U.S., both “red state” and “blue state,” than either the Republican or Democratic political parties.
See, for example, Cullman County, Alabama: combatting cockfighting in a KKK stronghold; Dogfighter runs for office in North Carolina, backed by cockfighting money; Did the Omak Suicide Race start with a horse massacre & the KKK?; Stoney Greene tries to lose dogfighting & cockfighting tail; Cockfighters “win” from delay of hurricane aid to Puerto Rico; “Dog Fighting Awareness”: what the ASPCA ignored; What was No Kill Nation founder Debi Day doing in Charlottesville?; and End of Debi Day for Nathan Winograd follows Charlottesville debacle.
Institutional racism continues
Long after the “civil rights era” broke overt Ku Klux Klan influence, institutional racism continues, seldom actually recognized as such, often including the use and misuse of animals.
See Five tried, 3 convicted for killing vegetarian shelter volunteer Elijah McClain; The USDA “milk mandate”: a black-&-white issue on school lunch trays; California bill would halt use of unleashed K-9 dogs in arrests & crowd control; Police dog attacks on black children soar in Baton Rouge; and “Animals & thugs”: horses, dogs, police & the George Floyd protests.
Yes, dangerous dogs are a racial issue
Discussion of the Ku Klux Klan, institutional racism, and the self-segregation of animal advocacy inevitably comes around to the reality that while African-Americans are only about 14% of the U.S. human population, African-Americans are twice as likely as other Americans to be killed or disfigured by dogs, especially pit bulls.
Worse, African-American children are more than three times more likely than Caucasian children to be killed or disfigured by dogs, again especially by pit bulls.
Further, this has verifiably been occurring for as long as either the racial identities of victims or breed-specific identities of the dogs attacking them have been available.
Of particular note is that African-Americans, especially African-American children, are disproportionately killed and disfigured by dogs even though only 36.9% of African-American households keep dogs, compared to 51% of Caucasian households and 75% of Latino households.
Why are honkies pushing pit bulls into African-American homes?
Of additionally disturbing note is the extent to which lily-white animal advocacy organizations have long pushed, and continue to push, pit bull adoptions into African-American homes and neighborhoods, including with slogans suggesting that informed wariness of pit bulls is “canine racism.”
See “The Conversation” & the pit bull shit; Why “Human races are not like dog breeds: Refuting a Racist Analogy”; Pit bull advocates owe Michael Vick bigtime, at victims’ expense; Pit bulls, “bullying & backlash,” & who is really threatening whom; Alabama mauling: “Emily’s Law” fails to protect public from pit bulls; Four-year-old killed by pit bulls because Miami-Dade law was not enforced; and Severely injured Duane Eddie Vanlanham won a medal & a lawsuit, but no payout.
Malcolm X had a bit to say about dangerous dogs
Also please check the most recent ANIMALS 24-7 coverage of recent fatal dog attacks listed on our front page on any given day. At this writing, six of the 18 fatal dog attacks occurring in the last 60 days were by pit bulls, killing African-Americans, two of them children.
Only two of the African-American victims were killed by pit bulls from their own households.
Civil rights leader Malcolm X, 1925-1965, briefly addressed this issue in 1963, 52 years before his daughter, not yet born at his assassination, was convicted on seven counts of abuse and neglect of a truckload of pit bulls.
Malcolm X, who often spoke about the importance of children growing up with a father’s influence, would surely have had words to prevent any of that from happening.
See Malcolm X on pit bulls, other dangerous dogs, & betrayal.
Real-life “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” not just tokenism & sloganeering
ANIMALS 24-7 has, finally, looked from time to time at the bizarre extents to which some white-run nonprofit organizations have gone to pretend to be “anti-racist” at the same time as doing little or nothing to encourage real-life “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” as opposed to practicing empty tokenism and sloganeering.
See “I can’t breathe”: stealing slogan to use for animal causes is not fighting cruelty, and ANIMALS 24-7 resigns from the Society of Environmental Journalists.
All of these links, and many more links to articles of relevance, appear in the ANIMALS 24-7 Black History & Animals Archive, accessible from our front page every day, not just on Martin Luther King Day.
Just click on the photo of Martin Luther King Jr. at right to find the table of contents, grouped under seven topical subheadings.
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