Presented by Chris Edwards and Robin McNallie
July 4, 2021
Video:
Democracy, by Leonard Cohen
Chalice reading:
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are people who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never did and it never will. Frederick Douglass
I:
On The 1619 Project (CE) — In August, 1619, a ship with about 20 African captives from what is now Angola docked in Virginia near what is now Hampton. The pirates in charge sold them to colonists. Slavery in America began with those men and women, the first among 12.5 million to come in chains across the Atlantic. Almost two million failed to survive that dreadful Middle Passage.
Asphyxiation was a hazard. Captives were confined below deck, where oxygen could get too low for a candle to burn. Centuries later, during Ireland’s potato famine, the same conditions would prevail on a “coffin ship,” so-called because only about 70% of passengers survived, such as the ship a young barrel-maker named Patrick boarded in 1849. Patrick debarked in Boston, where he would die from cholera, but only after marrying and having 5 children. The family might have seen those ads that said “Irish need not apply,” but some of Patrick Kennedy’s progeny did well. His great-grandson was President John F. Kennedy.
Love them or not, the Kennedys lived the American dream. They arrived poor and marginalized, but each generation moved up. That was far more possible for White European immigrants than for non-Whites, especially those who arrived in chains.
Journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, starting in 2019, published a Pulitzer-winning collection of articles by African-American writers entitled “The 1619 Project,” in The NY Times, marking four centuries of slavery in America. It’s available online and expected to appear this November as a book.
She was attacked for claiming the American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery. Some other 1619Project details might also earn skepticism, but they don’t come near the mendacity of Lost Cause propaganda those of us growing up in the mid-20th Century South were fed. Hannah-Jones was just awarded tenure in her new appointment at UNC, after it had been denied when a wealthy, conservative donor said her journalism wasn’t “objective.” My own bias, I confess, agrees with what columnist Karen Attiah wrote in yesterday’s Washington Post: “Objectivity is not a neutral view from nowhere. It’s too often a view from the heights of White, male privilege.”
The old South was not a sleepy backwater, says Matthew Desmond in the 1619 Project. Before the Civil War the combined monetary value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the nation’s railroads and factories. Slavery enabled mass production. Several million slaves picked cotton – America’s first big business — and tobacco, and worked in the new sugar industry. After Columbus brought sugar-cane stalks from the Canary Islands, that industry started where Louisiana’s Domino refinery stands today. According to Solomon Northup in his Twelve Years a Slave, “enslaved children worked under the constant threat of boiling hot kettles, open furnaces and grinding rollers.”
One project writer says New Orleans became “the Walmart of people-selling.”
Desmond points out not all capitalism is the same, and claims the heritage of slavery is why “the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled.” Only 156 years, two average American lifetimes, have passed since the legal end of slavery. Its aftermath is in our nation’s DNA.
Products from slave labor supported Northern factories and textile mills in what Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner called an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.”
Slave overseers kept books of workers’ performance and assigned each one a unique quota. Falling short could get you beaten, but overshooting it could bring misery when the master raised your picking quota.
In grade-school, our Virginia History texts portrayed slavery as mostly benign. Punishments were described like a good dad spanking a misbehaving child.
You can easily find photos online, now, of the backs of people who survived slavery, covered by hideous scars. A new book by Ty Seidule, a historian who lost faith in the Confederacy’s Lost Cause, told this, about a leader still viewed as a saint by millions: When some escapees were returned to Gen. Robert E. Lee’s plantation, he ordered them severely lashed and salt water poured over their lacerated flesh. [Robert E. Lee and Me, p229], according to Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s collection of Lee’s personal correspondence.
We’ve heard of John Brown and Nat Turner, but the 1619 Project tells of many other slave uprisings. Britain and the U.S. abolished the African slave trade early in the 1800s. The project’s authors doubt that those changes marked an evolving moral consciousness. They suggest all that changed was “scrubbing the blood of enslaved workers off American dollars, British pounds and French francs,” using bank bonds. Another parallel to today’s economics was in the Panic of 1837, when Southern states went bankrupt but did not pay their debts. Cotton slavery was called “too big to fail.”
Everyone now has heard of Critical Race Theory, but not so until recently. The concept originated in law schools decades ago. It’s not part of the 1619 Project, but they’re talked about together. The core idea of CRT is a focus on racism as systemic, not so much about personal prejudice, but about practices embedded in public transactions such as those in business and politics, according to the journal Education Week. Does that sound dry? So why can you turn on cable and find pundits and politicians screaming in self-righteous rage?
Here are some examples of what could be systemic racism (you be the judge): Neighborhoods like northeast Harrisonburg, where our city 70 years ago, using federal grants, arbitrarily demolished homes against the owners’ choice. Senate elections, where your vote counts more if you live in a rural state. And Washington, D.C., where residents still can’t elect anyone to Congress. Does it harm our children to learn this? State legislators now call for schools to ban CRT, outlaw “divisive concepts,” and even place body cameras on teachers in case they go rogue!
A government project called the “1776 Commission” was begun last year to oppose both CRT and the 1619 Project by, instead, teaching only what it called “patriotic education” (i.e., happy talk). It was disbanded this year.
A few more 1619 Project nuggets:
A White slaveowner was free to rape a Black woman, and father children he would treat just like any slaves — but Black men were often lynched if they were accused of assaulting White women. Or even for whistling, allegedly, like 14-year-old Emmet Till in Mississippi, who died horribly in 1955.
Historian Ann Douglas writes, “American entertainment, whatever the state of American society, has always been integrated, if only by theft and parody.”
19th Century showman PT Barnum once needed a performer to fill in for a White singer who wore blackface. He hired a talented, real Black performer, but that would have horrified White audiences, so Barnum painted the man’s face with cork and lipstick.
When we were mostly young, some great popular music began with Black singers and musicians whose songs were then “covered” by White performers making far more money. You know Elvis’s “Hound Dog”; have you heard Big Mama Thornton’s original by that name? They tell different stories. Big Mama throws out her man, who ain’t nothin but a hound dog. Elvis scolds his dog.
There are families remembering men who died, untreated, in the infamous Tuskegee research. Social Security (excluding occupations such as farm and domestic work), Medicare, Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act — All these federal programs were resisted. They’ve helped millions, but none has eradicated disparities in health care.
“Undemocratic Democracy”: Attorney Bryan Stevenson, subject of the memoir and film “Just Mercy,” wrote the article on mass incarceration. After he’d found defendants as young as 13 sentenced to life in prison without parole, he won a 2016 Supreme Court ruling that bans mandatory life without parole for minors.
An elderly Black woman once called Stevenson a “stone catcher” – referring to the Biblical story where Jesus says, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.”
II.
On Frederick Douglass and July 4 (RMM)
In 1954, when I was a sophomore in high school, my English teacher Ms. McNamara handed out a list of books from which each student was to write a report. The only Black author on that list was Booker T. Washington, founding president of the Tuskegee Institute. I did my report on his 1901 book titled Up from Slavery, on my mother’s recommendation.
My recollection of this in the 120th anniversary year of the book’s first appearance has been influenced by the whole 1619/1776 debate and also by having recently read historian David W. Blight’s much acclaimed 2018 Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom. How much interest, I’ve asked myself, does Washington’s book, a bestseller in its first 50 years, still draw? My answer, not nearly as much as Douglass’s boldly-titled journal of 1845, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. This account brought its author instant fame, and by the time of his death 50 years later, he had made himself the most famous Black man in America, and, according to Blight, the most-photographed American. If Washington’s Up From Slavery was the story of a Black man’s ascent from slavery to freedom that found its way into American classrooms up to the 1950s, during that same period, Douglass’s account was pretty well buried, rather quickly at that. For Douglass at his death in 1895 was so revered that his passing drew thousands of both Blacks and Whites to view his casket, and throngs gathering both inside and outside the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington to witness the funeral service itself.
It was only 6 years later (1901) that Washington, with the publication of his book, was going to become the Black man in the spotlight and the classroom. In the rising tide of Jim Crow and its accompanying construction of Confederate monuments, “the good Negro,” offering dutiful accommodation to White hegemony, was going to eclipse the name and accomplishments of Douglass. This was to change, of course, after mid-Century with the rise of the Civil Rights movement and the ascension of Douglass’s spiritual heir, Martin Luther King. Blight’s biography of the prophet of freedom has restored Douglass to his rightful role. The prophet’s story really began in 1838 with his escape from slavery in Maryland to freedom, first in NY City, then New Bedford, Mass., and finally, Rochester, NY, where he would begin publishing his journal, The North Star, in 1847. He quickly drew attention with his powerful oratory, but it was the 1845 account of his bondage and escape from it that brought him national and international attention.
Slave narratives were in vogue in this antebellum era, but Douglass’s outshone all the others because it was not ghostwritten by White abolitionists, as many in the genre were. Chillingly authentic, it laid bare both the public and private brutalities of the “peculiar institution.” One recent source notes that it is the most frequently reprinted of all slave narratives. Southern slavery supporters were outraged, since Douglass’s account contradicted their propaganda that Blacks were happy in their servitude. Because of a real concern for his personal safety, Douglass, upon the book’s publication, fled to the British Isles for the next two years, where he attracted large audiences for his antislavery lectures.
In 1848, after his self-exile, Douglass attended the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, NY, the only Black person among attendees. He played a significant role in the sometimes heated debates, calling for adopting the ballot for women, which remained controversial even among the activists. Just 4 years later, Douglass, at the behest of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-slavery Society, found himself obligated to expound on the Declaration of Independence. He accepted the assignment, but only if he could speak on July 5. Among NY State Blacks, such observances had taken place on that date. Additionally, in the South, slaves were often sold on July 4, which explains perhaps why the speech Douglass delivered is often identified by the question raised in it, by Douglass: “What, to the slave, is the 4th of July?” Blight calls the oration, “The rhetorical masterpiece of American abolitionism,” and “a political sermon steeped in the Jeremiah tradition.” The speech should be seen against the background of 1852, the year that saw the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and 2 years previously, the enactment of the much-detested Fugitive Slave Law.
Blight notes the 3-part structure of the speech comparing the whole to a symphony in 3 movements. Douglass first pays tribute to the Founders, calling July 4 “an American Passover,” and the Declaration “the ring bolt to the chain of the nation’s destiny and the birth of the nation’s saving principles.” In the next section, Douglass darkens the mood, asking “What, to the slave, is the 4th of July?” He responds by literally pointing his finger at the mostly White folks in attendance. “The 4th is yours not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand-illuminated temple of liberty and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony. Do you mean, citizens, to mock me by asking me to speak today?” Then, in clear echo of Jeremiah, he exclaims, “Above your national tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are today rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them.”
In his conclusion, Douglass clearly demotes the Declaration of Independence, not because he doesn’t esteem it (he calls it “a glorious document”), but because he has come to believe that the natural rights it asserts have to be given teeth, made operative under the authority of the Constitution. By this time, Douglass had come to believe, along with only some of his fellow-abolitionists, that the Constitution should be read as an antislavery document.
Seven months after his speech, Frederick Douglass visited Harriet Beecher Stowe in Andover, Mass., who he said afterward exuded “an exalted sense of justice.” Seven years after the speech, in August, 1859, he met with John Brown in Chambersburg, Pa., where the latter tried to recruit him for his Harpers Ferry raid. Douglass, deeming the venture recklessly mad, turned him down.