Loading ...Archive for resistance
David Brion Davis on Slavery and Abolition: Impact on US Wealth
Posted by: | Comments
Here is a very good 2009 video lecture (at Emory U.) by a leading scholar of slavery and its economic impact, as well as the resistance to it–Dr. David Brion Davis, of Yale University.
This one is called “American and British Slave Trade Abolition in Perspective.” This would be very good for use in a course on U.S. history, and/or racism/slavery. It is in six parts, and here are the summaries:
The historical contexts of African slavery in the Americas and the relationship with free market forces and the “New World” global economy.
The connections between enslaved African labor, trans-Atlantic trade, and the increasing availability of luxury goods for mass market consumption. How did anti-slavery movements arise in this growing market context?
Three major factors led to the U.S. and British decisions to abolish the trade of enslaved Africans: revolutionary changes in moral perceptions of slavery, Anglo American antipathy towards a growing African American population, and the population growth rate of enslaved African Americans in North America.
The North American “moral luxury” of condemning the trade of enslaved Africans while supporting domestic slavery; the increasing political enthusiasm for white immigration over black enslaved labor; the impacts of the French and Haitian Revolutions on trade abolition developments.
The political and moral debates between delegates from northern states and southern slaveholding states after the Revolutionary War that led to U.S. abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade in 1808.
A comparison of the impacts of the U.S. and British decisions to abolish the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the debates over what to do with the “contraband” of enslaved Africans intercepted in the newly illegal trade.
Highly recommended.
International Athletes Protest Racism: US Media Ignore Protests
Posted by: | CommentsAt OpEdNews, Bill Hare scooped the mainstream media with a story I still have not seen anywhere else, the reality of numerous antiracism protests by World Cup athletes in South Africa recently. Not only were there pictures of former Black president Nelson Mandela everywhere at the various playing arenas, but there were regular demonstrations of a
fervent commitment to stamp out international racism. . . . Before the games begin player representatives of the competing national teams deliver statements condemning racism.
He added:
After that, in a show of unity, pictures are taken of both teams as the players that will shortly be locked in determined competition are shown posing together. The focus is on understanding and camaraderie as opposed to hate, bigotry and ignorance.
The diversity on some of these football teams was also impressive.
I wonder why in our mainstream media we have had several stories of racist actions across the country by our lunatic fringe–such as at some Tea Party events and by far-right talk show hosts–and yet no stories of these demonstrations against such racism by many of the world’s leading athletes.
It is good to see some modest, if too quickly and weakly analyzed, reporting on U.S. racism, but we should pay more attention to the actions and words of such antiracist activism, especially in the international context.
There is a certain public and media provincialism and parochialism that seems to go with our conventional America-first nationalism.
A Mexican Revolution Photo History, 100 Years Later
Posted by: | CommentsWhat do most Americans know about the Mexican Revolution? It disrupted everything in Mexico 100 years ago this November, prompting several waves of Mexican immigrants to enter the United States five generations ago.
Most of us may have heard of President Porfirio Diaz, Francisco Madero, Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, the soldaderas, Venustiano Carranza, Pascual Orozco, Victoriano Huerta, Álvaro Obregón, and others. In different contexts, we also know about William Randolph Hearst, President Woodrow Wilson, General John J. Pershing, George Patton. But do we know the latter were also participants in Mexico’s civil war upheaval?
Do we know who did what to whom when during an 18-year uprising by Mexicans that changed Mexico and the United States, a history that has continued to shape both nations? The Mexican Revolution is part of our unrecognized U.S. border history, and knowing the events of 100 years ago helps us to understand current immigration issues.
Here, for example, are the opening words of “Chapter 7: Rebel Armies Advance on Mexico City”:
Despite the unexpected developments that the revolution unleashed throughout Mexico, a feeling of expectancy, of widespread hopefulness prevailed. Even then, people had no idea what to expect, given the changes and uncertainties. What would happen when the revolutionary armies from the north and the south met in Mexico City?
People kept hearing they would be “liberated,” that the revolution would free them from Porfirio Diaz’s tyranny, but how that would happen remained unclear.
The Porfiriato had both shaped and created the Mexico that everybody knew for more than 30 years. After a generation and a half under Porfirio Diaz, and now in the grip of the revolution, most Mexicans were destitute. The country was in shambles, and Mexicans and the foreign investors wanted stability.
The advancing rebel generals–Villa, Obregon, and Zapata–were daily moving toward Mexico City with their armies. All three had supported Francisco Madero, but Madero was now gone. Obregon was beginning to fight for Carranza, and Zapata and Villa simultaneously inspired and scared the people because no one actually could say what they were going to do once they were in the Palacio Nacional, the National Palace.
The uncertain developments caused some Mexicans to be cautiously optimistic while others were depressed, and the rest didn’t know what or how to feel.
The great majority of the citizens were anxious and bewildered, for no one could control events that clearly were unpredictable. Even then, reports of battles, skirmishes, and disastrous encounters between the armies in different cities and regions of the country constantly surfaced. No one could say with certainty what would happen if and when soldiers from the different revolutionary factions met in the capital, Mexico City.
Would the losing soldiers be killed, imprisoned, or what? Would the victorious leaders meet and celebrate despite the unrest? What would they say? What would the people hear? What would they decide for Mexico? No one could say anything for sure. Clearly, it was not a good time to be in Mexico City or anywhere else in that vast country with so much unrest and unclear future. Most Mexicans didn’t know how other people they daily met on the streets felt about the revolution. It was awful because everything was in turmoil. No one knew what the following day would bring, or the next hour, or the next few minutes.
My 132-page photo history narrative contains 80 carefully selected photographs from the more than 483,000 pictures taken by Mexican, American, and foreign photographers who rushed to Mexico in 1910 to capture the revolution’s developments.
Note: Copies of Why Pancho Villa & Emiliano Zapata Wore Cananas: A 100th Year Photo History of the Mexican Revolution, 1910-1928 are available from Marco Portales at 3800 Chaucer Court, Bryan, Texas 77802.
William Grant Still’s Birthday: African American Classical Composer
Posted by: | Comments
This is the birthday of the very talented William Grant Still, the first African American composer and conductor of classical music to get much national recognition in the US. He was the grandson of enslaved African Americans and faced both poverty and much racial discrimination in his relatively long life. According to Wikipedia’s summary he composed more than 150 compositions:
(Photo: wikipedia)
He was the first African-American to conduct a major American symphony orchestra, the first to have a symphony of his own (his first symphony) performed by a leading orchestra, the first to have an opera performed by a major opera company, and the first to have an opera performed on national television. He is often referred to as “the dean” of African-American composers.
He was part of the Harlem Renaissance and celebrated and advocated for jazz and blues as central music for African Americans and US society as a whole. His first and famous first symphony, the Afro-American, was composed in 1930. It was performed the next year by the Rochester Symphony. It makes use of the long African American musical heritage, including the blues, much other rhythmic material such as that of jazz, and the tenor banjo. It also makes use of the African American poet, Paul Dunbar’s, poetry. Sample the symphony here.
Why is it not surprising that such a very talented American musician and his music are all but forgotten in this country, including in our history textbooks?
Here is a website dedicated to him. Here is another great site too, AfriClassical.com, with its blog here.
Happy May Day! Lots of Worker Rallies Today
Posted by: | Comments
Happy May Day, the workers of the world day!
And undocumented workers are the center of attention in marches by thousands of Americans today.
Alternet reports on some new actions by this peoples’ movement
Do I Look “Illegal”? – Latino Nationwide Movement Building: Arizona’s draconian immigration law is creating a wave of Latino social network activism. Following the signing of S.B. 1070, one of the most anti-immigrant laws in the country, Latinos have chosen to mobilize online in numbers rarely seen before. Within 24 hours of launching the “Do I Look ‘Illegal’?” campaign, the Latino page Cuéntame has seen an immediate response — with thousands adopting the mantra and ready to take action. …. Latinos taking part in this new wave of social network activism have not only spread the message by wearing “Do I Look ‘Illegal’?” T-shirts, signs and posts but are spreading the message of the campaign online via status updates, pictures, blogs, video and making full use of all the social media tools available. It is reminiscent of the Twitter green movement that took place last year. As such Cuéntame along with other Latino groups continue to plan actions in Arizona and Los Angeles with on-the-ground organizations to protest S.B. 1070.
The “Do I Look ‘Illegal’?” movement shows that not only have Latinos arrived in full force to the world of social media activism but that these actions are prompting massive on the ground efforts which represent the first major Latino mobilization in light of the 2010 mid-term elections.
It is striking how many people’s movements are now using the Internet and social media to create truly democratic and progressive movements that bring out ten to one hundred times the number of overwhelmingly white folks who turn out for the Republican-linked teabagger rallies.
Antiracist Action and Lives Lost: William L. Moore
Posted by: | Comments
At DailyKos today Blueness reminds us of how brave Americans can be in the struggle for racial equality. On this day, some 47 years ago the courageous William Moore, a postal worker and civil rights activist from Baltimore began his walk from Chattanooga to Jackson, Mississippi. He had a letter for one of our leading autocratic, white supremacist politicians, heading up a totalitarian Jim Crow system, Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi– a letter pressing him for racial desegregation. This was Moore’s third freedom walk:
On Moore’s final walk, as soon as he crossed the state line into Alabama, he was assailed by white motorists who denounced him as a “nigger-lover,” and pelted him with rocks. On April 23, radio station WGAD in Gadsden, Alabama received an anonymous phone tip as to Moore’s location. Reporter Charlie Hicks drove out to find Moore walking along a rural stretch of Highway 11 near Attalla. Moore told Hicks, “I intend to walk right up to the governor’s mansion in Mississippi and ring his door bell. Then I’ll hand him my letter.” …. Less than an hour after Hicks left him, a motorist found Moore’s body about a mile farther down the road, shot twice in the head at close range with a .22 caliber rifle. The gun was traced to one Floyd Simpson, a member of the Ku Klux Klan, with whom Moore had discussed integration, interracial marriage, and religion earlier in the day.
“I don’t see how anybody,” Simpson later said, “could believe in such things as intermarriage between the white and Negro races unless he was being paid for it. I told him they are having trouble in Birmingham, and I advised him to turn back as he would never get through Birmingham.”
Moore’s letter to Governor Barnet thad this message:
the white man cannot be truly free himself until all men have their rights. . .. Be gracious and give more than is immediately demanded of you.
Blueness continues with the follow-up:
Over the next month, 29 other people, black and white, tried to complete Moore’s walk. All carried signs reading “Mississippi Or Bust.” All were arrested and jailed.
And of course there was little white support, even from “liberal sources” for such protests, something we should not forget either:
The New York Times opined that Moore had died on a “pitifully naive pilgrimage”; two years previously, in the wake of brutal assaults on Freedom Riders, a Gallup poll found that 63% of white Americans who were aware of white civil-rights activists, like Moore and the Freedom Riders, disapproved of them. Just weren’t ready yet, most white folk.
Many whites still are not prepared for a truly desegregated society. Moore was 36 years old, a CORE member and veteran civil rights activist, and he was white. (see here).
Civil Rights Leader Benjamin Hooks Has Died
Posted by: | Comments
NPR has this important story today on one of the premier leaders of U.S. civil rights struggles, Benjamin L. Hooks (1925-2010):
Benjamin L. Hooks, a champion of minorities and the poor who as executive director of the NAACP increased the group’s stature. . . . “I don’t know anybody who lived a more triumphant life,” former U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young told NPR. … Hooks became [NAACP] executive director in 1977, taking over a group that was $1 million in debt and had shrunk to 200,000 members. … He pledged to increase enrollment and raise money for the organization. . . . “If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again,” he said. “If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”
Hooks view of the current scene resonates well with the need for much more civil rights organization:
“Now, the fight is not over water fountains, it’s not over riding the bus, it’s over who’s going to drive that bus,” he said. “Now, once we start digging into these economic issues, resistance may grow.”
He was a path breaker in his own life:
In 1965 he was appointed to a newly created seat on the Tennessee Criminal Court, making him the first black judge since Reconstruction in a state trial court anywhere in the South. … nominated Hooks to the Federal Communications Commission in 1972. He was its first black commissioner, serving for five years before resigning to lead the NAACP. … Hooks also created an initiative that expanded employment opportunities for blacks in Major League Baseball and launched a program where corporations participated in economic development projects in black communities.
The NAACP has continued to be a source of white supremacist attacks since the 1960s:
In 1989, a string of gasoline bomb attacks in the South killed a federal judge in Alabama and a black civil rights lawyer in Savannah, Ga. Another bomb was intercepted at an NAACP office in Jacksonville, Fla., and an Atlanta television station received a letter threatening more attacks on judges, attorneys and NAACP leaders. “We believe that this latest incident is an effort to intimidate our association, to strike fear in our hearts,” Hooks said at the time. “It will not succeed. We intend to go about our business.”
Bring Me My Machine Gun! South Africa and the Consequences of Apartheid
Posted by: | Comments
This past week Eugene Terreblanche, an Afrikaner white supremacist, was murdered by two black farm workers in South Africa. It has become painfully clear that the Rainbow Nation has very far to go to become such. And my prediction is that the growing pains will track a slow and low gradient. Writing for the BBC, Peter Burdin, sounds a distressful note:
(South Africa) is officially the most unequal society on earth…South Africa is also among the most violent societies outside war zones with 18,000 murders a year…Race permeates all aspects of life here.
For about 46 years – from 1948 to 1994 (when Nelson Mandela was elected in the first multi-racial democratic elections) – the Nationalist Party and white South Africans managed to forge an uneasy, volatile but successful system of racial separation and oppression. They managed to create what the Confederate States in the United States of America could not achieve. Apartheid was indeed a strange thing; within the country, there were white provinces where passbooks were required of all non-whites and there were ‘independent’ Bantustans which were the domain of blacks. It was a wicked system that denied rights to the majority black population. We know the familiar story by now; the story of how Madiba nurtured the emergent so-called post apartheid rainbow nation. De Klerk, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Madiba, realized that apartheid was not sustainable; besides, international sanctions against South Africa had undermined the government’s viability.
While other African countries are convulsed by ethnic divisions, South Africa is caught in the throes of racism – something we know a lot about in the United States of America. We must understand the Afrikaner mind-set; since their Dutch forebears settled in South Africa, they’ve been fighting two conflicts: one against British imperialism (The Boer Wars) and another against the indigenous inhabitants. The Boer War in 1899 was brutal and notorious for the concentration camps set up by the British that killed several thousands of Afrikaner women and children (Brian Bunting, 1969 The Rise of The South African Reich). But independence was not the only thing the Afrikaners desired; they wanted to retain their perceived superiority over the indigenous inhabitants. Brian Bunting writes (p14):
The Boer republics constituted an anachronism to the 20th century. Their code of conduct (was) incompatible with the liberal philosophy of modern capitalism. In the (republic of) Transvaal constitution it was written that there could be no equality between Black and White in Church or State.
The British imperialists were complicit in not extending any kind of rights to non-whites after the second Boer War and they accommodated the color-bar with its pass-book restrictions ensuring that racial integration would not happen. This is what the Afrikaners wanted.
So in 2010, racial accommodation is still a societal problem in South Africa. Public opinion data from the Afrobarometer surveys in 1999 depict these racial tensions in South Africa. When asked how they identified themselves, more South Africans chose race. Race polarizes in South Africa much in the same way that ethnicity polarizes in other African societies.
Some Afrikaners think that Eugene Terreblanche’s murder was provoked by the African National Congress (ANC) youth leader, Julius Malema, who sang the anti-apartheid song “Shoot the Boer.” The ANC has reportedly ordered its members not to sing the song at rallies any longer because it stokes racial tensions. There is another song “Bring me my machine Gun” often heard at youth ANC youth rallies, which refers to the struggle to topple the apartheid regime; this was the song used by Jacob Zuma during his campaign for the Presidency. Unwilling to be dominated by the British during the emergent years of their republic, the Afrikaners are now troubled by the domination of the Africans. Their fears are not unfounded; there are reports that approximately 3,000 Afrikaner farmers have been murdered since this new dispensation in South Africa. These cold cases make the Afrikaners anxious and unsure about their place in the Rainbow Nation.
When the accused black men were arraigned at the court in the town of Ventersdorp, there were reports of Eugene Terreblanche’s paramilitary group waving placards with Afrikaner nationalist symbols. The reporter notes:
Time has stood still here…there is a silent message that this is no place for blacks.
Cherokee Nation Leader Wilma Mankiller Dies
Posted by: | CommentsThe Tulsa World reports the death of Native American leader, Wilma Mankiller,
the once dirt-poor Oklahoma farm girl who grew up to become an activist for American Indian causes and women’s rights, an author and the first woman to hold the Cherokee Nation’s highest office, died Tuesday. She was 64.
President Barack Obama lauded Mankiller’s legacy. “As the Cherokee Nation’s first female chief, she transformed the nation-to-nation relationship between the Cherokee Nation and the federal government, and served as an inspiration to women in Indian Country and across America,” Obama said. “A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, she was recognized for her vision and commitment to a brighter future for all Americans. ”
In the 1960s, married by then with two children, she took an increasing interest in Indian affairs. When a group of tribal activists took over Alcatraz Island in 1969, occupying it for more than a year to protest U.S. government treatment of Indians, Mankiller visited them and raised money for the effort. … Mankiller used her fame and position to speak out on cultural issues, something she never shied from. She once said that white culture was to blame for the sexism of Cherokees, who were traditionally more matriarchal, and that Thomas Jefferson deserved as much blame for the Trail of Tears as the more often villified Andrew Jackson. When she slammed country artist Tim McGraw’s hit song “Indian Outlaw” as racially offensive, many state radio stations stopped playing it at her request.
She will be greatly missed.
February: Celebrating Black History
Posted by: | CommentsFebruary – the shortest month of the year – marks the beginning of black history month in the U.S. Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Greensboro, N.C. lunch counter sit-ins at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. If you’re not familiar with this important history, this short (6:11) video clip from the History Channel provides a basic review of the facts:
Today is also significant for the opening of a Civil Rights Museum on the site of the sit-ins in Greensboro. While the courage of people like the four young, African-American men that sat at that segregated lunch counter helped change the system of Jim Crow segregation, we should not let the civil rights struggle become ossified in memorials and museums. The truest celebration of black history month is to continue the struggle for racial equality now.
