“People should not spend their days mourning relatives they never knew from a war that ended 150 years ago, especially if that feeling is so paramount that it outweighs the sense of brotherhood they might feel toward fellow humans who are alive…”
Little Rock, 1957At my relatively diverse, but still primarily white, church, I am the de facto organizer for Black History Month each February. I’ve noticed that 2016 will mark the 90th anniversary of what what was Negro History Week, designed by Carter G. Woodson in 1926. “Besides building self-esteem among blacks, [it] would help eliminate prejudice among whites.”
I think the argument that the United States is “post-racial”, now that Barack Obama has been elected President twice, has been pretty well negated by the events of the past six years. There are those who will seriously argue that because Obama, and for that matter, actress Halle Berry, had white mothers, they shouldn’t be considered black. Anyone passingly aware of the historic obsessive nature of the US government to define race Continue reading “Connecting the historical dots: Ferguson to Charleston”
“Representatives… shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”
When I was vamping while waiting for the speaker for an Adult Education class during Black History Month at my church, I preemptively pointed out that the reason we STILL talk about these issues is that they are not always that well known.
Making a very tangential point, I mentioned in passing the Three-Fifth Compromise. I took this on faith that everyone knew what I was talking about. It was in the original US Constitution:
Article 1, Section 2: “Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons.”
Those “all other persons” were slaves. It was not changed until the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress on June 13, 1866, and ratified on July 9, 1868.
However, there were a couple of people who did not know this piece of Americana. So the conversation inadvertently proved the point.
“Black history IS American history” has become the mantra of both who want to continue Black History Month, and those who think it’s “been done.” The latter say, “We know about George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King already.”
To that end, I recommend checking out Filling In the Gaps in American History, which is “a collection of biographies, experiences, commentaries and behind the scenes looks at events in American History dealing with people of African descent that are generally not recorded in history texts.”
Jacqui C. Williams, FIGAH founding director, writes: “There were artists, inventors, activists, educators, women, and men of faith, cowboys, stagecoach drivers, law enforcement officers, entrepreneurs and more who contributed to the creation and development of this land over and above the labor of those enslaved. I did not read of them in my history classes…”
And I came across Civil Rights: Holding the Hands of History. It’s a Facebook Community Page about Viola Liuzzo by her daughter Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe. Viola Liuzzo was a white Detroit housewife who was shot to death by Ku Klux Klan members following the voting rights march in Alabama, the march depicted in the movie “Selma.”
From there, I found the blog of Tara Ochs, who plays Viola in the movie. Check out, especially, her posts from 2014 forward.
Born in Washington, D.C., Charles Hamilton Houston (1895–1950) prepared for college at Dunbar High School in Washington, then matriculated to Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1915.
From 1915 to 1917, Houston taught English at Howard University. From 1917 to 1919, he was a First Lieutenant in the United States Infantry, based in Fort Meade, Maryland. Houston later wrote:
“The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”
In the fall of 1919, he entered Harvard Law School, earning his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1922 and his Doctor of Laws degree in 1923. In 1922, he became the first African-American to serve as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Lloyd Lionel Gaines was born to the Gaines family in northern Mississippi in 1911. One of eleven children, seven of whom survived illness and accident, he moved with his widowed mother and siblings to St. Louis after the premature death of their father. They found a better, although not easy, life for themselves in Missouri. Gaines excelled in his studies graduating as valedictorian in 1931 from Vashon High School. At Lincoln University in Jefferson City, he graduated with honors and was President of the senior class, while participating in many extra-curricular activities and working to pay for his schooling.
Through his work at the NAACP, Houston played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court starting in 1930… Houston’s plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by demonstrating the inequality in the “separate but equal” doctrine from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision as it pertained to public education in the United States was the masterstroke that brought about the landmark 1954 Brown decision [argued before the Supreme Court by Houston disciple Thurgood Marshall].
In the documentary “The Road to Brown”, Hon. Juanita Kidd Stout described Houston’s strategy, “When he attacked the “separate but equal” theory his real thought behind it was that “All right, if you want it separate but equal, I will make it so expensive for it to be separate that you will have to abandon your separateness.” And so that was the reason he started demanding equalization of salaries for teachers, equal facilities in the schools and all of that.”
Lloyd Gaines… had been denied entrance to the law school at the University of Missouri because he was black. Instead, Missouri offered to pay his expenses for law school outside the state.
Charles Hamilton Houston, one of the few African Americans to graduate from Harvard Law School, argued that Missouri was obligated to either build a law school for blacks equal to that of whites or admit him to the University of Missouri. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in Gaines v. Canada (1938). The Gaines decision breached the walls of segregation.
Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades… he left his apartment house on March 19, 1939, never to be seen again. Had he not vanished at 28, Lloyd Gaines might be in the pantheon of civil rights history with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and other giants.
My parents are gone and have joined my ancestors, and there is no one else in an earlier generation in my lineage.
Right after I got back to Albany, after my mother’s funeral in February 2011 in Charlotte, NC, I attended the church service of my current congregation. It was Black History Month, and I had helped organize the events but did not participate much in them. I’m standing in the congregation, rather than singing in the choir when we got to do Lift Every Voice and Sing.
I’m singing it, as I’ve done dozens of times in the past. We get to the lyrics: Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last
And I start sobbing uncontrollably. Don’t know if anyone, except The Wife, noticed, but I was unable to sing anymore.
I’m reminded of this because it’s always the last song we perform at my church in Black History Month, and I am still unable to get through the song without crying at some point, and that had not been an issue before 2011. I think it’s that “adult orphan” thing, that my parents are gone and have joined my ancestors, that there is no one else in an earlier generation in my lineage – my parents were both only children – and somehow I’ve become the eldest member of my tiny little tribe on earth, the children and grandchildren of Les and Trudy Green, who were married March 12, 1950, in Binghamton, NY.
I noted that I would be putting my Black History discussion up on this blog, NOT the Times Union newspaper blog. And someone asked me why. I said, “It’s just not a safe place.”
I expected that the first time I would bother to unfriend someone on Facebook would be because of some great, substantial, important issue. And it wasn’t. It was Because Facebook.
I wrote, on Facebook:
FACEBOOK wrote to me: Why am I not seeing a movie?
If you aren’t seeing A Look Back movie when you visit facebook.com/lookback, it may be because you have not shared very many things on Facebook. Depending on how long you’ve been on Facebook and how much you’ve shared, you’ll see a movie, a collection of photos or a thank you card. (I have pics.) I am SO NOT disappointed.
And someone, who I friended, because she is a friend of a friend, wrote:
“And who gives a…”
It occurred to me, at least in Facebook World, maybe some people might have cared, since LOTS of people I knew and weren’t aware, were posting their “movies”, none of which I have actually seen yet. I wanted to explain why I had not. So the response didn’t anger me but annoyed me enough to zap her. It was just negative energy I didn’t want. I thought the CORRECT response to something on FB that was not of interest to one is to ignore it; I do it ALL THE TIME.
Whereas some I DO know passed along this nonsense about Obama having the flag lowered for Whitney Houston, but not for Shirley Temple. (In fact, Republican governor Chris Christie had the flags in New Jersey lowered for Whitney.) Because I had a relationship with him, I asked about it, and he only forwarded it because he was showing how ridiculous it was. *** I gave my Black History Month presentation at church, based on my February 13 blog post, and I noted that I would be putting it up on this blog, NOT the Times Union newspaper blog. And someone asked me why. I said, “It’s just not a safe place.”
I would undoubtedly, get more comments there than here, but a LOT more argumentative comments. I don’t mind discussion, but I loathe rants. And conversations about race almost inevitably turn into rants, usually having nothing to do with the original topic. Or, in the alternative, a twisting of one’s words. No thanks. *** Speaking of rants: OK, not really a rant, but this musician I follow on Facebook wrote:
Why do people take such pleasure in being ahead of me? That car that just HAS to nudge past me as we approach the Thruway tollbooth, that guy whose pace quickens as we both approach the door to Chipotle…are their lives so devoid of triumph that this registers as an accomplishment? Are they banking those eight saved seconds for a rainy day? Or is this some hardwired, ancient simian instinct, a fear that the monkey in front of them will get the last banana?
I so relate. I’ve noticed this when I’m trying to leave the bus and someone’s trying to push past me to get off first, not trying to catch a connecting bus.
