WHEN WILL IT END? BLOG # 2103: SEP 22, 2017

THE MESSAGE:

BLACKS IN THE USA

The history of people of African descent in America is a pendulum of advance and setbacks, of recognition and retaliation, of protest and backlash.  Blacks throughout their history and existence in the USA have seen allies and opponents alike. They have encountered intolerant pipers, who would divide Americans on the basis of colour and class, as well as visionaries who would seek to lead the nation to common ground.

The U.S. Congress outlawed the importation of enslaved Africans in 1808.  Today, the majority of African Americans are descended from people who were already here long before many of the European Americans who arrived between 1820 and 1920.

THE BLURB:

DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

The American Dreams of "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" have been a  cherished aspiration since the Declaration of Independence; however, history reveals that black Americans, Native Americans and women were not included in the 1776 designing and signing. Forty of the 56 signers owned other people!

The Supreme Court's 1857 Dred Scott decision made it clear that people of African descent would not be considered American citizens and had no legal standing in the courts. 

It mattered not that some of their grandfathers had served in George Washington's Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. 

WHAT IS MISSING?

A look at the works of Taylor Branch, Pulitzer Prize-winning author, include A definitive discussion and description of the institution of slavery, the supporting ideology of white supremacy and the impact it has had on subsequent generations. Many of his thoughts are missing from the history curriculum of most American high schools and colleges.

Slavery and the slave trade were essential to the American economy and to the development of American capitalism. Native Americans were driven off their ancestral land in the Deep South in the 1830s to make way for vast cotton plantations. The wealth of the nation was dependent upon uncompensated labour, which enriched not only the planters, but universities, banks, textile mills, ship owners and insurance companies, who held OWNERSHIP on their bodies. 

By 1850, enslaved Americans, who were listed in their owners' inventory ledgers alongside cattle and farm equipment, were worth one-fifth of the nation's wealth. When the first shot of the Civil War was fired at Fort Sumter in April 1861, the value of that human collateral was worth more than the nation’s banks, railroads, mills and factories combined.

RAYFORD LOGAN

Immediately after the Civil War, during the so-called period of Reconstruction, black people were finally recognized as citizens with rights. The 13th, 14th and 15th amendments abolished slavery, provided equal protection under the law and granted black men the right to vote. These amendments were met with retaliatory Redemption.  Die-hard Confederates regrouped as the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia. They regained control of their workforce, not by owning them, but by controlling their lives through terror, violence and voter suppression.   

For virtually the first half of the 20th century the 15th Amendment had no value for blacks in the former Confederate states.  They were denied the right to vote by means of poll taxes, literacy tests and grandfather clauses. 

The highly touted sharecropping system left black farmers in debt at the end of every harvest. Surely this situation was equivalent to slavery. Black children were allowed to attend school only during times of the year when there were no farm chores to do. 

Historian Logan called the period the "nadir of American race relations". Those who got too uppity were lynched, firebombed in their homes and chased from the land they owned.

When black soldiers returned from World War I military duty in France, they were attacked during the "Red Summer" as resentful whites instigated riots in at least 34 cities, from Chicago and Washington DC to Memphis and Charleston. Their goal was to put men who had received France's Croix de Guerre back in their place as the Klan had done after Reconstruction. 

Two Harlem Hellfighters 

earn the Croix de Guerre (1918)

In 1954, the Supreme Court's Brown v Board of Education decision struck down so-called separate but equal education and mandated that American schools be racially integrated. 

As a post-Brown v Board child, Logan always attended integrated schools, encountering the occasional racist, but, like his parents, rolling with the punches, keeping perspective and finding progressive kindred spirits in the process. But  the diehard segregationists responded with paranoia and bitterness, decrying the evils of race-mixing and interracial breeding. 

In Indiana in 1957, when black couples were trying to finance a new home in an all-black development they were unable to secure a loan from any of the city's large banks, regardless of being college graduates and business executives. 

Many of the men were veterans of World War II and the Korean War and therefore eligible for the GI Bill's home loan guaranty. They were forced to go to Mammoth Life Insurance, a black-owned insurance company then based in Louisville, Kentucky, for their loans. 

In 1963, black students at Little Rock High School were harassed and spit upon. 

Alabama governor George Wallace tried, but failed, to block the enrollment of Vivian Malone and James Hood.

WILL THIS BATTLE EVER END?

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed poll taxes and made it possible for thousands of formerly disenfranchised black Americans to vote. Now, throughout America, there are thousands of people of colour who are city council members, mayors, members of Congress, on school boards and  formerly,  in the White House. During the last two presidential elections, black voters turned out in record numbers because they were motivated and because many of the old obstacles to voting had been removed.

In today's news we see many protests springing up in America under the banner, "BLACK LIVES MATTER". Do we really need to ask the question? Is the answer not an obvious one? I believe that the generation of youth in 2017 will demonstrate tolerance and  love for good people everywhere. Surely we don't require another ark! "Bless the beasts and the children!"

THE QUESTION:

To what extent are the violent black gangs a result of the unjust treatment blacks have received throughout their history in America?

THE QUOTE:

"I had a dream..." M.L King

THE LEMON:

Awarded to Dylann Storm Roof the American white supremacist and mass murderer convicted of perpetrating the Charleston  murder of 9 black church members.

THE CLIP: