Category: History

February 5 W. E. B. DuBois

 

 

This Black History Month I’m Grateful for W.E.B. DuBois

 

 

“The problem of the
twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”

 

-W.E.B. DuBois

 

 

This quote is from “The Souls of Black Folk”, one of the most
important articulations of the possibilities and struggles of Black people in
America. In it, DuBois coined the term “double consciousness”, creating a
concept that retains currency in Black communities a century later.  


W.E.B. DuBois provided us so many contributions that he’s
nearly impossible to characterize. He was a prolific author, renowned educator,
social activist, political philosopher and prominent anti-colonialist. In his
remarkably long life, DuBois served as a bridge between the worlds of Frederick
Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr.  


Early in his career, DuBois helped Blacks to shift away from
Booker T. Washington’s focus on schooling to learn skilled trades toward a
focus on academic knowledge based education.  His encouragement of artistic and cultural
accomplishment combined with his concept of a “Talented Tenth”* made DuBois a primary
inspiration for the Harlem Renaissance.


While it seems odd now, Dubois died as something of a social
outcast. This was largely because his politics were considered too radical by
mainstream Black Americans. By the early 1960s, he’d become convinced that Pan-Africanism
was the best way for American Blacks to respond to racial oppression in the U. S.
 In much of his writing and thinking,
DuBois anticipated and inspired the Black Power movement.  


DuBois is best known today as one of the founders of the
NAACP and Niagara Movement. As important as those developments have been, they
are only a small part of W.E.B. DuBois’ many legacies.

 

 

Today I am grateful for W.E.B. DuBois. You should be too.

 

 

FDO

 

 

*- the idea that it is the responsibility of the best and
brightest Blacks to work toward the improvement of their race, lifting others as they go

 

 

 

 

February 4 Rosa Parks

 

 

This Black History Month I’m Grateful for Rosa Parks


 

“I had not
planned to get arrested. I had plenty to do without having to end up in jail.
But when I had to face that decision, I didn't hesitate to do so because I felt
that we had endured that too long.”

 

-Rosa Parks

 

 

 

Today is the 100th birthday of the woman many describe as “the
mother of the Civil Rights Movement”, Rosa Parks.  That kind epithet acknowledges Parks’ role in
starting the Montgomery Bus Boycott which launched the national career of
Martin Luther King Jr. and is often seen as the first example of a new type of
civil rights struggle. At the same time, though, viewing Parks as a matronly figure reinforces the false idea that Parks was an accidental heroine.


Many of us now have an image of Parks as an old woman (she
lived into her 90s) who was so exhausted and worn down that by December 1955,
she just couldn’t muster the energy to move further back on the public bus she
rode home.  In reality, the actions Parks
became famous for were in no way accidental. Parks was a longtime community
activist and, in her early 40s, vibrant, strong and defiant. Parks was
perfectly aware that she would suffer the public humiliation of an arrest and
would likely suffer long term consequences for her actions. In fact, Parks was
fired from her job.


Part of what I hope folks can take a moment to acknowledge
is that when Rosa Parks began her personal fight against the segregation of the
bus system, she was doing it on her own. There was no plan to create a boycott
of the buses. There was no Montgomery Improvement Association. There was no
guarantee that Parks would even be supported by the Black community in
Montgomery. Rosa Parks fought against an unjust system, not because she knew
she would win but because she knew the system was unjust. For that she deserves
to be richly celebrated.

 

Today I am grateful for Rosa Parks. You should be too.

 

FDO

 

 

 

February 3 David Walker

 

This Black History Month I’m Grateful for David Walker

 


". . .they want us for their slaves, and think nothing
of murdering us. . ."


-David Walker

 

 

I know less about David Walker than any other person I’ll
write about this month. That’s in part because he died in 1830 and largely
because there are very few historical records concerning him. We know that he
was a free Black man who died at only 35 and under mysterious circumstances.
Even now, Walker’s contributions to the US are subtle and have generally been
condemned when noticed. That’s because David Walker was scary!

 

Walker’s main contribution to American life was his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.
The Appeal was the clearest possible
call for a violent revolt overthrowing slavery. It is not coincidental that Nat
Turner’s revolt followed soon after the Appeal nor is it coincidental that the
rights of free Blacks were limited in response to Walker.

 

While all these
individual elements were largely negative, Walker forced everyone in the
country to recognize the possibility that there would never be a strictly political
solution to slavery. Instead, while America crafted political agreements like
the Missouri Compromise that divided the country into slave and free regions,
some in the country were willing to force America toward change.

 

In some important senses, Walker’s descendants include
Turner, John Brown, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. All these men
eventually concluded that only violence would end the scourge of slavery in
America. Unlike those others, however, Walker remains marginalized in American
history. His early, prophetic vision of America’s future process did not come
to pass exactly as he imagined. Fortunately, much of his vision of America’s possibility
did.

 

Today I am grateful for David Walker. You should be too.

 

 

FDO

 

 

February 2 Stevie Wonder

 

 

This Black History Month I’m Grateful for Stevie Wonder

 

 

 “Just because a man
lacks the use of his eyes doesn’t mean he lacks vision.”

-Stevie Wonder


 

Stevie Wonder is a living legend in an obvious way. The
owner of 22 Grammy Awards*, legendary songs and albums Wonder has had profound
success as a musical artist. It was largely Wonder’s success in transcending
the racial and musical barriers of the 1970s that paved the way for the
unprecedented crossover stardom of Black 80s singers Michael Jackson, Prince,
Whitney Houston and Lionel Richie. While these accomplishments are amazing,
Wonder’s greatest legacy may well be found in the ways he’s used his celebrity to
bring attention to social concerns. 


With the possible exception of Coretta Scott King#, no
individual deserves more credit than Wonder for the creation of the Martin
Luther King Jr. federal holiday. Wonder’s birthday song for King has even
become the model for birthday songs in Black homes today.


By the early 80s, Wonder had developed an emphasis on
pan-African identity, themes and issues. Wonder wrote about African politics,
Third World life and helped break Bob Marley into the US market. He also participated
in events designed to raise awareness and money to combat hunger, poverty,
drunken driving, AIDS, and drug use.


Stevie Wonder was also deeply committed to the end of the apartheid
system in South Africa. He was one of the most prominent Americans to argue
that our country needed to deliberately disinvest from South Africa. Wonder
helped provide public forums for Nobel Laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu who had not
been widely known in this country.

 

The combination of Stevie Wonder’s sunglasses, head shaking
and broad smile have become a cliché as is his perpetual musical optimism. What
is not cliché is the sincerity of Wonder’s dedication to the causes of peace
and justice “all throughout the world”. 

 

Today, I am grateful for Stevie Wonder. You should be too.

 

FDO

 

*- the most for any male solo artist

#- check back later this month for more 

 

 

February 1 Frederick Douglass

This Black History Month I’m Grateful for Frederick Douglass

 

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

-Frederick Douglass

 

 

The accomplishments of Frederick Douglass are so numerous they seem mythological to many of us today. For a Black person, born a slave in the first half of the 19th century, to have become so accomplished was literally unimaginable until Douglass did it.

 

A few highlights:

Douglass freed himself after illegally learning to read; worked as an abolitionist and suffragist; published The North Star and other newspapers; wrote multiple autobiographies; expanded benefits for Black soldiers in the Civil War; received nominations for Vice-President and President.

His autobiographies captivated the country and, for many Northerners, provided the first clear demonstration that Blacks could be the intellectual equal of Whites. Douglass was the first Black person to garner a truly national reputation, the nearly universal respect of Whites, and to be treated as an equal by an American President.

In fact, I consider Douglass to be the original president of Black America. He was the first person who could be said to have represented the most urgent interests of Blacks to the whole country.
It’s nearly impossible to conceive even now but Frederick Douglass was born as a slave and died as one of the most important people in the world.

 

Today, I am grateful for Frederick Douglass. You should be too.

FDO

Triple Digit Temps

 

On days this hot, I sometimes reflect on my mom's experiences working in a laundry.

 

One of the plants she worked in was a giant, industrial facility that specialized in uniforms. All summer long, my mom and the other women (at least at the time, this was still very much ‘women’s work’) baked in a giant brick edifice that contained dozens of megamachines. The washers and dryers were vastly oversized and designed to rid work clothes of their odors, stains and wrinkles. 

 

If you’ve ever spent time in a crowded Laundromat or even a self-contained home laundry room, you have some beginning sense of the temperatures laundry machines can generate on a small scale. Now magnify that output while considering the scale of dozens of these megamachines running 10 hours straight. In the summer, in an all brick building, with no external ventilation. 6 days a week.

 

These women worked for just above minimum wage and many of them suffered fainting spells (and worse) from heat exhaustion, dehydration and heat stroke. And unless one of her children fell ill, my mom made her way to this plant every day for years.

 

Eventually, she received a (long overdue) promotion and moved to a different physical facility.  She made a point of insisting that one of the other employees become her assistant, so someone else could leave that plant too.  I’m continually grateful that Mom endured so much to help my dad provide for my sisters and me.

 

And I promise not to whine about the heat today.

 

 

FDO

Average Obama

 

I liked President Obama’s Osawatomie speech and recognize the obvious resonances it has with Teddy Roosevelt’s  New Nationalism  speech. That connection has been made in multiple places and is well worth reading and reading about. I think Obama's speech was the start of something else too. Something with great potential for Obama’s re-election campaign against Mitt Romney in 2012*. I mean the re-branding of the President as “Barack Obama, regular American.”

 

I believe that in this campaign Obama will try to present himself as a typical American with a very American story. Even though he has often been defined as an outsider, I don’t think that Obama has ever believed that to be true. Obama considers himself to be quintessentially American. That belief will be easier to spread to the public at large if Obama is running against Willard Mitt Romney.

(Much in the way that Obama’s middle name became a campaign issue, I’m convinced that Romney’s first name will be tossed about and made the subject of jokes. I assume the story about Mitt being named after George Romney’s best friend Willard Marriott is true. That’s not gonna be helpful.)

 

Obama’s campaign will work hard to present Romney as the embodiment of America’s elite. Romney is, after all, the son of a governor and was born into a highly affluent family. His own professional career has placed him squarely in the 1% as defined by Occupy Wall Street. In 2000, those would have been helpful characteristics but in the midst of our Great Recession, economic privilege is no longer perceived as indicative of inherent merit. Instead, his extraordinary level of privilege is probably a major detriment to Romney’s candidacy.

 

Obama’s own American story is well known and his recent speech cleverly emphasized his rootedness via his family of regular folks from Kansas. His single mom spent time on public assistance rolls and Obama only became an elite himself through educational attainment. He legitimately is a contemporary Horatio Alger. Even as an adult, his South Side of Chicago bona fides are clearly intact. Describing his career as working for the people of his community as opposed to having the people work for him will be a winning presentation.

 

And while folks often describe Obama’s rise to national prominence as meteoric, he will be able to define himself as a political plugger compared to Romney. Obama’s political career began in the Illinois State Senate before moving on to the US Senate and then the White House. He has been an elected official since 1997. Obama can reasonably describe himself as having climbed the political ladder, albeit with tremendous speed. Romney’s sole electoral victory was his one term as Massachusetts governor. In just those four years, Romney made many choices he has since disavowed. While I personally believe Romney’s Olympic experience is very impressive, I doubt that he’ll be able to use that time as a proxy for holding office.

 

There will likely be one other interesting area in which Obama can define himself as average and Romney as exceptional: religion. Obama’s Chicago church experience was a problem for him in 2008 but in 2012 it’ll be a big advantage. Jeremiah Wright is old news and the President has so comfortably and consistently invoked God that his religiosity seems safe, normal and generically American. Romney’s Mormonism makes him suspect in the eyes of many and makes him an outsider in the eyes of many more.  I don’t want to link to some of the vicious portrayals of Mormonism in the world of mainstream punditry but it’s very easy to find scary talk about Romney’s church. The ham handed “I’m a Mormon” campaign might have helped had it begun several years ago but in the short term it will likely make Romney (and Jon Huntsman) seem even more suspicious to non-Mormon conservative Christians.

 

In terms of family, work and faith, Obama can claim common cause with ‘the American people’ in ways that Romney simply can’t. It’s a strange world wherein the half-Black guy with the Arabic name can present himself as more authentically American than the White guy who looks like middle age Superman but I think that’s what we will begin to see in the next few months. Perhaps even more strangely, I think it’s gonna work.

 

 

FDO

 

*- I've been asked if any of this applies to the President if Newt Gingrich were the GOP nominee.

2 responses- 1- If Newt's the guy, Obama won't have much to worry about anyway. 2- Yes! Obama's team will paint a picture of the President, First Lady and their two young daughters compared to Newt's 3 marriages, adulterous affairs, Clinton era sexual hypocrisy, the cancer-ridden wife divorce story and late in life conversion to Catholicism. That's a lotta grist for the campaign mill.

 

Combine that with the difference between making lots of money by writing books about your family and making lots of money by using your government contacts to (almost) lobby for corporations and it's game over. 

 

 

 

Dead Settlers Moon

 

There’s a dead settlers moon tonight

When the sky is full of piercing light

Forcing the world into noticing the depth of shadows

Sparked in white not yellow

 

These were the nights

When crossing no man’s lands

Led to rampant success for the bow strung warriors of the Sioux and Lakota

While the cavalries of gunpowder and smallpox blankets

Never seemed to arrive in time

 

 

© Gayle Force Press 2006

 

 

 

Lessons of Andrew Johnson

 

I’m reading an interesting biography of Andrew Johnson by Annette Gordon-Reed. Her primary contention is that Johnson was a wonderfully talented man who rose far beyond the expectations of his birth. Johnson utterly failed to recognize that his ability to transcend his station came from the sheer accident of his Whiteness.

 

Johnson’s intense disdain for the aristocrats of the South was almost entirely about the status of poor Southern Whites. He never connected the condition of poor Whites and poor Blacks who were slaves then newly freed people. It’s sad that the poor of America’s 21st century still struggle so much to make cross-racial coalitions.

 

It's amazing that we can still learn so much from one of the 19th century's most dramatic failures.

 

 

FDO

 

The First Fires

 

There were massive thunderstorms last night in the Indianapolis area. This morning there were multiple houses on fire and the common response seems to have been shock. It's almost as though we forgot that lightning can generate fire. I suppose that's okay. After all, in modern America, we are dramatically unaccustomed to being subject to the whims of nature.

 

The storm and aftermath made me wonder again about the initial human relationship to fire. I have lots of questions but no answers…

 

How many times have people discovered fire?

What was the first source of ‘controlled’ fire? Was it lightning; was it lava?

Was it an accident?

How long ago did it happen?

Were the people who found it hailed or cursed?

Did those individuals become powerful as a result?

Did it happen multiple times in the same place or in different places?

Have other animals ever ‘controlled’ fire?

If not, when will it happen?

 

Lots of questions but no answers.

 

 

FDO