Should Be Required Reading

A friend on Facebook (yes, Facebook), posted the following article yesterday. I found it more than a bit incredible and a surprising good, even important read.

Will Racism Ever End, Will I Ever 

Stop Being a Nigger?

For me, it was incredibly quotable. I'll just stick with this one, however:

"...the greatest trick of a racist is getting folks to believe that racism doesn’t exist in the first place or that the people with no power and no privilege are the real racists, the real oppressors."

It reminded me how little, how precious little we Americans know of our own history, our own national history. It also reminded me how we need much more of it in our schools. Besides the above, I think people should have to read the following.

This book:

Slavery by Another Name

And if not reading that last book, then at least seeing the PBS special on it:

Slavery by Another Name

And finally, this article from 2 years ago:

The Case for Reparations 

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

It's fairly outrageous what we don't know or, worse, deny.

Little-Known Kansas City History

Early Kansas City home, possibly belonging to Bernoist Troost. Slave cabin in rear.

To dispel any notion that Kansas City was anything but a Confederate city, one has only to take a look at the town settlers. The first company, formed in 1839, consisted of 14 men and was spearheaded by John C. McCoy, William Gilliss, and a fur trapper from Kentucky named William Sublette. Town founder McCoy, according to the 1850 census, owned five slaves at his home on Pearl Hill. Gilliss, born in Maryland, was a slaveowner. The 1850 census shows he owned three male slaves, ages 18 -36. Although banished by Ewing in 1863, Gillis was allowed to stay, perhaps due to his age, wealth, position in the community, and by showing evidence that he had freed his last slave in 1862.

Fry P. McGee was a son of early settler James Hyatt McGee of Kentucky, reputed to have brought the first slaves to Kansas City in the late 1830’s. The 1860 slave census shows that Fry McGee, his brothers and his mother owned slaves. Jacob Ragan of Kentucky arrived in Jackson County in 1837. He was a known Confederate and was included on at least one of the Provost Marshal’s lists of “bad men.” William Miles Chick was born near Lynchburg, Virginia. He came to Kansas City in 1836. Chick, too, was a known Confederate and was one of the Provost Marshal’s “bad men.” Chick’s warehouse was located next to Jesse’s on the levee. Both were burned by Union soldiers in 1862. Col. Chick was was John C. McCoy’s father-in-law.

Five men of the 1839 company were farmers and slaveholders residing in Blue Township, Jackson County, just east of Kansas City:

Oliver Caldwell arrived in Jackson County in 1833. He farmed at Blue Valley and organized the Christian Church in Independence. The 1840 census shows that he owned 9 slaves; the 1850 census shows Oliver 58, wife Ann 54, 3 children 17-24, and 11 slaves.

George Washington Tate arrived in Westport in 1838. He became a Missouri state legislator in 1842. The 1850 census for Blue Township identifies Tate as a 53 year-old merchant, residing with his wife Lovey 46, and 3 children 14-27 and 1 male slave, age 15.

William Collins was a Kentucky native who lived in Liberty. The 1860 census for Liberty Township shows him with 4 slaves. James Smart of Virginia was a farmer who came to Jackson County 1834 with his brother Thomas and became Jackson County judge in 1846. He was a founder of the Christian Church in Independence and was Oliver Caldwell’s brother-in-law. The 1850 census for Blue Township shows Thomas 53, Nancy 48, and 3 children aged12-20. The 1860 slave census show that he owned 15 slaves.

Russell Hicks of Massachusetts came to Jackson County around 1827. He was a teacher, lawyer and judge who was called “one of the most eccentric members of the Kansas Town Company.” After the war he practised law in Sedalia and was counsel to Senator Thomas Hart Benton. The 1850 census places Hicks, 65, in Blue Township with two female slaves, ages 4 and 23.

The vast majority of the personal wealth in Jackson County prior to the war was contained among men who had been born in Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. These men and their families supported the Confederacy and its institutions. The children of the original town members were coming of age during the years leading up to the Civil War, as were the children of the thousands of southern settlers who came to Jackson County in the 1840’s.

--Text by John Dawson

We Americans Don't Seem to Learn From History

This week, I watched the first screening of PBS' Murder of a President  on American Experience, telling the story of US President James Garfield, his life, his deeply tragic assassination and death 200 days later.

It was fascinating to the point of riveting. Such great and deep history. Sad it isn't taught in our schools. Seems he was a brilliant man who fought for the people and even for the slaves of the nation, a very welcome rarety.

Too bad we don't still, to this day, have such Republicans.

Anyway, it pointed out to me, once more, how we Americans don't learn from history and I'll tell you why.

We all know our President Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed, also tragically and needlessly, in 1865, at the hands of a mad man.

At the time, Presidents didn't have security guards and protection. So the assassin came in, had access to the President and shot and killed him easily, if horribly enough.

You would think we would, as a nation, learn something from that, right? Like that we need to protect our presidents?

Nah.

We're Americans. Learn something?  Heck, no. Not from the past, not from recent history, nothing.

16 years later---sixteen whole, long years---then-President James Garfield, still unprotected, was headed to a train station, rather famously as it was in the newspaper, for pity's sake, so a crazy man came up and shot him, repeatedly. It didn't kill him instantly but soon enough, it was done.

No body guards. No protection. Nothing.

So a couple centuries later, do you think we'd learn anything from, say another countries military foray into another country?

Do you think we'd pay any attention to the world and international, military history of, say, France, that had attacked and fought the people of Vietnam?

Oh, hell, no.

Go ahead. Attack. Go in. Think you're going to win. Think you're going to win the people over. With bombs.

We all know how that went.

Couple decades later?

Not just one nation but two.

Iraq?  Afghanistan?

Oh, heck, yes, let's attack.

Forget that the British and Soviets both attacked and fought and were repelled and in effect beaten in these places and by these people.

Ignore it.  Go ahead and attack.

We're Americans.

We don't need to learn from history.

On This Day in American History -- A "Two-fer"

On this day (from today's New York Times:

It took more than 100 years after the Civil War for an African-American to join the presidential cabinet, and even longer for one to be elected governor. Both milestones happened on this day.

Robert C. Weaver was appointed secretary of housing and urban development by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966, and L. Douglas Wilder took the oath of office as governor in Richmond, Va., in 1990.

Weaver, who had three Harvard degrees, was the great-grandson of a slave and an expert strategist in the civil rights movement. “Fight hard and legally,” he said, “and don’t blow your top.”

His government service began during the New Deal, when he tried to harness benefits for blacks from the domestic spending programs. Weaver has been followed by 19 other African-Americans in the cabinet.

Mr. Wilder, a grandson of slaves, won the governorship in the onetime capital of the Confederacy with 50.19 percent of the vote. History was made only after a recount.

His margin of victory lagged far behind those of his Democratic running mates, suggesting that many Democrats did not vote for him.

Only one other African-American has been elected governor of a state: Deval Patrick, a Democrat who led Massachusetts from 2007 to 2015.

Links:  Robert C. Weaver - Wikipedia

Robert C. Weaver - Britannica.com

Robert C. Weaver: First African-American Cabinet Secretary

Douglas Wilder - Wikipedia

Douglas Wilder - Governor, Mayor - Biography.com

L Douglas Wilder - Encyclopedia.com

FDR's "Second New Deal" -- Still Waiting

On Janurary 11, 1944, with the second World War mostly over, US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt called on the nation to make sure every American had the following:

• Employment, with a living wage
• Food, clothing and leisure
• Farmers' rights to a fair income
• Freedom from unfair competition and monopolies
• Housing
• Medical care
• Social security
• Education

We're still waiting. Most especially we're still wating for that first one, a true, living wage.

Republicans seem intent on making certain Americans aren't guaranteed a true, living wage or protection from monopolies or large, powerful corporations or the ultra-wealthy, for that matter. They also seem strong-headed to end Social Security and the protections against poverty it has proved since its creation.

It doesn't bode well for the people, for the nation.

FDR himself was correct in this. His words then were as true then as they are today.

"... unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world."

It seems we've forgotten his words.

Link:  Second Bill of Rights - Wikipedia

An Insight On Race In America

A simple video but insightful.

What white people don't and can't understand:

Entertainment Overnight

Now that's music.

And that's dancing.

Heck, that's swinging.

On This Day, 1866

American history.

History they don't teach us.

Memphis riots of 1866

The Memphis riots of 1866 were the violent events that occurred from May 1 to 3 in Memphis, Tennessee. The racial violence was ignited by political, social and racial tensions following the American Civil War, in the early stages of Reconstruction.[1] After a shooting altercation between white policemen and black soldiers recently mustered out of the Union Army, mobs of white civilians and policemen rampaged through black neighborhoods and the houses of freedmen, attacking and killing men, women and children.

Federal troops were sent to quell the violence and peace was restored on the third day. A subsequent report by a joint Congressional Committee detailed the carnage, with blacks suffering most of the injuries and deaths: 46 blacks and 2 whites were killed, 75 blacks injured, over 100 black persons robbed, 5 black women raped, and 91 homes, 4 churches and 8 schools burned in the black community.

Modern estimates place property losses at over $100,000, also suffered mostly by blacks. Many blacks fled the city permanently; by 1870, their population had fallen by one quarter compared to 1865.

Public attention following the riots and reports of the atrocities, together with the New Orleans riot in July, strengthened the case made by Radical Republicans in U.S. Congress. The events influenced passage of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution to grant full citizenship to freedmen, as well as passage of the Reconstruction Act to establish military districts and oversight in certain states.

Investigation of the riot suggested specific causes related to competition for housing, work and social space between Irish immigrants and their descendants, and the freedmen. The white gentry also sought to drive freedpeople out of Memphis and back onto plantations where their labor could be exploited. Through violent terrorism, the white community at large sought to force blacks to respect white supremacy as the time of fully legal slavery was nearing its end.

Note there.

This wasn't the only time or place in American history this took place, either. It was, by no means, an isolated incident. It also took place in New Orleans.  And Tulsa. And Chicago. And I don't know where all. Again, it's history we don't like to teach, we Americans. It's history we don't really want to know. Or acknowledge. Or take responsibility for.

Why, if we took responsibility for all the things Americans have done to blacks in our nation, we couldn't blame them for being poor. And under-educated. And in poor jobs. And poor housing. And for having bad health. And for being in prison. Or for rioting.

Now could we?

President George Washington, On Torturing Prisoners

This Week in American History

From the Facebook page of Isabel Wilkerson

On this day, Nov. 12, 1940, the Supreme Court ruled on a case that would inspire one of the seminal plays of the 20th Century, “A Raisin in the Sun.” The parents of Lorraine Hansberry, Carl and Nannie, a real estate broker and a schoolteacher, had left the Jim Crow South only to discover hostility in the North. 

It was in 1937 that they tried to move into the all-white Washington Park section of Chicago. Neighbors filed a lawsuit forcing the family out on the basis of restrictive covenants. Lorraine, the youngest of the couple’s four children, was eight years old at the time and witnessed violence against her family as her parents tried to stand their ground. The Hansberrys went to court to challenge the restrictive covenants and to return to the house they bought.

The case, Hansberry v. Lee, culminated in a 1940 Supreme Court decision that helped strike a blow against segregation, though the hostility continued. Neighbors surrounded their house at one point, throwing bricks and broken concrete, narrowly missing Lorraine’s head, and neighborhood children ganged up and attacked her at school.

The experience would plant the seed for the 1959 play and later the film, “A Raisin in the Sun,” starring Sidney Poitier, Claudia McNeil and Ruby Dee. It would not be until 1968 that the landmark Fair Housing Act would officially prohibit housing discrimination in the United States.

Her father would not live to see that day nor his daughter's Broadway triumph. Carl Hansberry, a Mississippian who had journeyed to Chicago during the Great Migration, never recovered from the family's housing ordeal. He died at age 50 in 1946 of a cerebral hemorrhage in Mexico, where he was planning to move his family out of disillusionment. Their house at 6140 South Rhodes is now a Chicago landmark and the beloved play their family's legacy.

-- The Warmth of Other Suns

For more on the family's ordeal:

"To Be Young, Gifted and Black" by Lorraine Hansberry
http://www.chipublib.org/lorraine-hansberry-biography/
http://www.theroot.com/…/cu…/2009/03/not_in_my_backyard.html

Timeline of the struggle for fair housing in the US:http://www.howardfairhousing.org/case_law/34/

On This Day in American History

On August 1, 1917, labor organizer Frank Little was taken forcibly from his boarding house in Butte, Montana and lynched from a railroad trestle.

In the summer of 1917, Frank had been helping to organize copper workers in a strike against the Anaconda Copper Company. He also took a stand against WWI, arguing that all working men should refuse to join the army and fight on behalf of their capitalist oppressors. As he said in the last speech before his death, "I stand for the solidarity of labor." 

Read more: http://bit.ly/1crvo0D 

More resources for teaching about labor history: http://bit.ly/1s6F4XA 

Image: By Nicole Schulman,http://www.nicoleschulman.com/

Links:   Frank Little

Frank Little - A True American Hero

Frank Little: A Murder in Butte

The Murder of Frank Little

On this day, American History

Happy Birthday, Ida B. Wells-Barnett.

The oldest of eight children, Ida B. Wells was born in Holly Springs, Mississippi. Her parents, who were very active in the Republican Party during Reconstruction, died in a yellow fever epidemic in the late 1870s. Wells attended Rust College and then became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. Shortly after she arrived, Wells was involved in an altercation with a white conductor while riding the railroad. She had purchased a first-class ticket, and was seated in the ladies car when the conductor ordered her to sit in the Jim Crow (i.e. black) section, which did not offer first-class accommodations. She refused and when the conductor tried to remove her, she "fastened her teeth on the back of his hand." Wells was ejected from the train, and she sued. She won her case in a lower court, but the decision was reversed in an appeals court.

While living in Memphis, Wells became a co-owner and editor of a local black newspaper called THE FREE SPEECH AND HEADLIGHT. Writing her editorials under the pseudonym "Iola," she condemned violence against blacks, disfranchisement, poor schools, and the failure of black people to fight for their rights. She was fired from her teaching job and became a full-time journalist. In 1892, Tom Moss, a respected black store owner and friend of Barnett, was lynched, along with two of his friends, after defending his store against an attack by whites. Wells, outraged, attacked the evils of lynching in her newspaper; she also encouraged the black residents of Memphis to leave town. When Wells was out of town, her newspaper was destroyed by a mob and she was warned not to return to Memphis because her life was in danger. Wells took her anti-lynching campaign to England and was well received.

Wells wrote many pamphlets exposing white violence and lynching and defending black victims. In 1895 she married Ferdinand Barnett, a prominent Chicago attorney. The following year she helped organize the National Association of Colored Women. She was opposed to the policy of accommodation advocated by Booker T. Washington and had personal, if not ideological, difficulties with W.E.B. Du Bois. In 1909, she helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Wells-Barnett continued her fight for black civil and political rights and an end to lynching until shortly before she died.

She documented her anti-lynching work in Souther Horros and Other Writings available here: http://amzn.to/1mLr5DE

On this day: American history

With acknowledgment and thanks to The New York Times:

ON THIS DAY

On Feb. 25, 1870, Hiram R. Revels, Republican of Mississippi, became the first black member of the United States Senate as he was sworn in to serve out the unexpired term of Jefferson Davis.

Links:  REVELS, Hiram Rhodes - Biographical Information

Hiram R. Revels Biography

Hiram Rhodes Revels - Wikipedia

American history?

Link:  History: Get Me Rewrite!

Before Memorial Day, the first Decoration Day

Slaves Started Memorial Day

"For two weeks in April, former slaves had worked to bury the soldiers. Now they would give them a proper funeral.

The procession began at 9 a.m. as 2,800 black school children marched by their graves, softly singing “John Brown’s Body.”

Soon, their voices would give way to the sermons of preachers, then prayer and — later — picnics. It was May 1, 1865, but they called it Decoration Day.

On that day, former Charleston slaves started a tradition that would come to be known as Memorial Day."

____________________________________________

But need a "Black History Month"?  Why would we need that?

Side note: You might go to the link to this story. It's great history--national history--and it's actually a fascinating, even beautiful story. 

More on Black History Month

Facts Celebrating Black History Month:

Fanny Jackson Coppin was an African American educator and missionary.

Born into slavery in Washington, DC in 1837; an a...unt purchased her freedom at the age of 12. Another aunt took the little girl in, but Fanny had to go out and work as a domestic, getting schooling whenever she could. By age fourteen, she was supporting herself in Newport, Rhode Island as a servant for author and Mayor George Henry Calvert, studying at every opportunity; struggling for education.

“ 'It was in me,' she wrote years later, 'to get an education and to teach my people. This idea was deep in my soul.' She attended Rhode Island State Normal School and then Oberlin College, where her achievements were amazing. She was the first black person chosen to be a pupil-teacher there. In her senior year, she organized evening classes to teach freedmen.

"After her graduation in 1865, Fanny Jackson was appointed to the Institute for Colored Youth, a Quaker school in Philadelphia. Within four years, she became head principal, from which position she influenced two generations of young people.

"In a letter to Frederick Douglass in 1876, she explained her commitment: 'I feel sometimes like a person to whom in childhood was entrusted some sacred flame…This is the desire to see my race lifted out of the mire of ignorance, weakness and degradation; no longer to sit in obscure corners and devour the scraps of knowledge which his superiors flung at him. I want to see him crowned with strength and dignity; adorned with the enduring grace of intellectual attainments.''

"Her school was centered on this dream. She expanded the curriculum to include an Industrial Department, established a Women’s Industrial Exchange to display the mechanical and artistic works of young women, and founded a Home for Girls and Young Women to house workers from out of town. Moreover, she persuaded employers to hire her pupils in capacities that would utilize their education.

"In the 37 years at the Institute, she trained some of the leaders of her race and helped to shape the patterns of Black education in the late 19th century.

"In later years, she accompanied her husband to Cape Town, South Africa, where she was an effective missionary, counseling African women. She returned to Philadelphia in 1907, broken in health but not in spirit. In her last years, she completed her autobiography "Reminiscences of School Life," which remains a record of a remarkable life. Fanny Jackson Coppin died in 1913 at age 76.

Link:  http://www.coppin.edu/info/200178/

More on Black History Month

And you thought you knew.

American History and why we need a Black History Month

 

That's why.

Columbus Day, indeed

Here's your Christopher Columbus:

What we should do, instead: http://www.timeanddate.com/holidays/us/native-americans-day

The way it was, the way it unfortunately ended

According to a note with the video post: "Walter Cronkite had almost finished broadcasting the "CBS Evening News" when he received word of Martin Luther King's assassination. His report detailed the shooting and the nation's reaction to the tragedy."