Robert Smalls:
“My race needs no special defense, for the past history of them in this country proves them to be equal of any people anywhere. All they need is an equal chance in the battle of life.”
Thoughts on Civil War history, Blacks in the Civil War and Robert Smalls
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Deoliver47
Today marks the anniversary of the first shot fired in the Civil War at Fort Sumter in Charleston, SC, in 1861. A war fought over the enslavement of African descended people in the US. In many ways, we are still fighting that war. There is a war by Republican Teahadists to whitewash and rewrite history.
I have written here in the past about my own family history regarding the Civil War, and one of my ancestors who escaped slavery to serve in Ode to a colored soldier whose name I bear, and on my own family history website.
As a descendant of enslaved people I take the Civil War and its aftermath quite personally. For me it is not ancient history. As an anthropologist who teaches about race and racism I take care to set the story straight in the classroom and am appalled by the latest efforts of bigoted revisionists to tell a very different tale.
I was browsing the news this morning and found an Op Ed piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer by Steven Conn. I'd like to share a segment of it.
Losers have written the Civil War's history: The South won the struggle to define the conflict.
History is written by the winners, the old adage goes. But in the case of the American Civil War, that hasn't been entirely true. In the years after the war, the interpretations of Southerners and their sympathizers dominated our understanding. They couldn't turn the military defeat into a victory, so they recast the meaning of the war, turning their struggle for slavery into a principled defense of "states' rights" and a noble "lost cause." Make no mistake: The Civil War was fought over the question of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln may have taken a few years to acknowledge that the abolition of slavery lay at the heart of the conflict, but Southerners understood this from the outset.When Texans decided to secede from the Union, for example, they did so because, according to their official order of secession, "the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States." Likewise, the Confederate constitution, the document establishing the nation Southerners fought to create, makes the centrality of slavery to that nation clear, declaring, "No bill of attainder, ex post facto law, or law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves shall be passed." For Confederates, this was first and foremost a war to perpetuate slavery. The end of the war did indeed bring about the end of slavery, just as Confederates had feared. They responded in the years that followed by rewriting the history of slavery, and thus the primary reason they fought the war.
By the 50th anniversary of the war, Southern historians and writers had substituted states' rights for slavery as the reason the South went to war. Southerners fought to uphold a constitutional principle, they insisted, and to defend their Southern "honor."
Besides, they argued, slavery itself wasn't really that bad. Historians such as Ulrich B. Phillips argued that American slavery was benign and probably a worse deal for slaveholders than it was for slaves, because owners continued to care for their slaves long after they ceased to be able to work. Such writers were the Holocaust deniers of their day. Their views were thoroughly mainstream by the turn of the 20th century. American slavery, to quote one prominent historian, "had done more for the negro in 250 years than African freedom had done since the building of the pyramids." The author of that statement was Woodrow Wilson.
Seventy-five years after the war, historians were arguing that it had all been an avoidable tragedy precipitated by a few "radicals." James Truslow Adams, among the most popular historians of the 1930s, believed Northerners wanted to destroy the South. In his 1934 history of the Civil War, he blamed the war on Northern politicians such as Massachusetts Sen. Charles Sumner and Pennsylvania Rep. Thaddeus Stevens. He called them "professional negro-philes" who "seemed to care only to raise the blacks and ruin the whites of the Confederacy." No coincidence, surely, that the most popular American novel of the 1930s was Gone with the Wind. That book, and the movie version that followed, imprinted on the American imagination an image of the plantation South that was more "moonlight and magnolias" than bondage and brutality.
No moonlight and magnolias for my family.
Rape, shackles and death in bondage was their lot. But there was also resistance, and we are fighting back still. So as celebrations ensue lauding Confederate traitors, as the flags honoring slaveholding wave I decided to take today to highlight the story of one man among many who will remain nameless and perhaps forgotten.
In my research on Civil War history, and my own family I owe a debt of gratitude to black military historian and genealogist Bennie J. McRae, Jr. Bennie hosted the military forum at AfriGeneas for many years where he helped thousands of family researchers and maintained his own website Lest We Forget, where I learned so much about United States Colored Soldiers, Sailors and Contrabands In America's Civil War. His work will now be housed at Hampton Institute.
It was through Bennie's pages on Merchant Marine in the Civil War War including African-American Mariners, that I first read more details about Robert Smalls.
For those of you who are not familiar with his history and role in US politics I'd like to share part of his story.
In 1862 Robert Smalls, a 23-year-old mulatto slave, was employed by Confederates in Charleston, S.C. as pilot of Planter, area commander General Roswell Ripley’s transport steamer. In the early morning hours of May 13 the ship was loaded with armaments for the rebel forts. Contrary to regulations the white captain and crew were ashore for the night.
At about 3 a.m. Smalls commandeered the 147-foot vessel from a dock fronting General Ripley’s home and office. Smalls and his crew sailed to a nearby dock, collected family members from another ship and headed toward sea. Aboard Planter during its dash to the Union blockading squadron were Smalls’ wife, children and 12 other slaves.
Smalls donned the captain’s broad-brimmed straw hat and assumed the captain’s typical stance - arms akimbo - in the pilot house. As he passed each rebel fort he gave the correct whistle signal and was allowed to pass. Onward, the nearest Union blockading vessel, was preparing to fire on the approaching ship when Smalls raised a white flag and surrendered.
Union press hailed Smalls as a national hero, calling the ship “the first trophy from Fort Sumter.” A Congressional bill signed by President Lincoln awarded prize money to Smalls and his associates. In August 1862 two Union generals sent Smalls and missionary Mansfield French to meet with Secretary of War Stanton and President Lincoln. Their request to recruit 5000 black troops was soon granted. In October, 1862 during a speaking tour of New York to raise support for the Union cause Smalls was presented an engraved gold medal by “the colored citizens of New York” for his heroism, love of liberty and patriotism.
The Robert Smalls Foundation website has this thumbnail sketch bio which I have excerpted:
Robert Smalls mother, Lydia, descended of slaves from Guinea, was born on Ashdale Plantation on Ladies’ (now Lady’s) Island, S.C. and worked there as a field hand. While still a child she was brought to Beaufort to work as a house slave by her owner, John K. McKee... At 49 Lydia bore Robert, her only child, in a slave cabin in the back yard of the McKee house...At 12 Smalls was sent to Charleston to hire himself out for pay. Until he was 18 his owner received all but $1 of Smalls’ pay. He worked in the city as a waiter, lamplighter, stevedore, ship rigger and sailor. At 18, he negotiated his situation with his owner and thereafter retained all but $15 per month of his pay.
On December 24, 1856, Smalls, 17, married Hannah Jones, 32, a slave hotel maid. After their daughter, Elizabeth Lydia, was born Smalls entered a contract with their owner, Samuel Kingman, to buy his wife and child for $800. A son, Robert, Jr., was born in 1861. Smalls was hired in 1861 as a deckhand on Planter, the transport steamer serving Brigadier General Roswell Ripley, commander of the Second Military District of South Carolina. Smalls later became its pilot. In the early morning hours of May 13, 1862, while the white crew was ashore, Smalls, then 23, commandeered Planter, loaded with armaments for the rebel forts. With his wife, children and 12 other slaves aboard he gave the correct whistle signal as he passed each rebel fort. He then sailed toward Onward, the nearest Union blockading ship. As Onward prepared to fire on the approaching rebel ship, it raised the white flag of surrender. As Planter came alongside the Union ship, Smalls, elegantly dressed in a white shirt and dress jacket, raised his hat high in the air and shouted, “Good morning, sir! I have brought you some of the old United States’ guns, sir!”
What is even more interesting about Smalls is his life after the Civil War.
Immediately following the war, Smalls returned to his native Beaufort, SC, where he purchased his former master's house on 512 Prince St. His mother Lydia lived with him for the remainder of her life. He allowed his former master's wife—elderly and confused—to move back in the home prior to her death. In 1866 Smalls went into business in Beaufort with Richard Howell Gleaves, opening a store for freedmen. That same year in April, the "radical" Republicans that controlled Congress overrode President Andrew Johnson's vetoes and passed a Civil Rights Act, along with ratifying the 14th Amendment, extending citizenship to all Americans regardless of their color. Smalls identified with the Republican Party, saying it was "The party of Lincoln which unshackled the necks of four million human beings." In his campaign speeches he said " every colored man who has a vote to cast, would cast that vote for the regular Republican Party and thus bury the Democratic Party so deep that there will not be seen even a bubble coming from the spot where the burial took place." Later in life he recalled "I can never loose [sic] sight of the fact that had it not been for the Republican Party, I would have never been an office-holder of any kind—from 1862—to present." He was a delegate at several Republican National Conventions and participated in the South Carolina Republican State conventions.
During the Reconstruction era, Smalls was elected a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives from 1865 and 1870, and the South Carolina Senate between 1871 and 1874. He was elected to the United States House of Representatives, where he served from 1875 to 1879. From 1882 to 1883 he represented South Carolina's 5th congressional district in the House, and from 1884 to 1887 South Carolina's 7th congressional district. He was a member of the 44th, 45th, and 47th through 49th U.S. Congresses. During consideration of a bill to reduce and restructure the United States Army, Smalls introduced an amendment that “Hereafter in the enlistment of men in the Army . . . no distinction whatsoever shall be made on account of race or color.” The amendment was not considered by Congress.
Smalls was active politically into the twentieth century; he was a delegate to the 1895 constitutional convention. He spoke out against the disfranchisement of black voters. With one break in service, Smalls was appointed U.S. Collector of Customs 1889–1911 in Beaufort, where he lived as owner of the house in which he had been a slave.
Smalls died in 1915 at the age of 75. He was buried in his family's plot in downtown Beaufort.
Here's a clip from a documentary on his life:
The Smalls house where he had been born in the back in a slave cabin, and purchased in freedom, at 511 Prince St., Beaufort was designated a National Historic Landmark, May 30, 1974.
The Black American's in Congress website gives more details on his career in politics:
Smalls spoke openly in defense of his race and his party. In June 1876, he attempted unsuccessfully to add an anti-discrimination amendment to an army reorganization bill. His amendment, which would have integrated army regiments, required that race would no longer affect soldiers’ placement. The following month, Smalls addressed a bill to redeploy federal troops in the South to patrol the Texas–Mexican border. Smalls argued against transferring federal troops stationed in his home state, warning that private Red Shirt militias—South Carolina’s version of the Ku Klux Klan—would make war on the government and freedmen. Advocates of the troop transfer argued that the corrupt Republican government in South Carolina brought on the violence and that it remained a state issue. Smalls disagreed, noting that the federal presence would help “cut off that rotten part all round South Carolina so as to let the core stand. It is those rotten parts which are troubling us. We are getting along all right ourselves.”
While touring the state with Republican Governor Daniel Chamberlain during the 1876 campaign, Smalls attended a rally in Edgefield, South Carolina, where Red Shirt leader and former Confederate General Matthew Butler overran the meeting and threatened Smalls’s life. Though the Republican entourage escaped unharmed, a sympathetic observer noted the ease with which Butler and his Red Shirts moved through the town: “Even in Mexico Gen. Butler’s command could only be regarded as a revolutionary army, but in South Carolina they are called ‘reformers.’” Smalls’s opponent, George D. Tillman, who hailed from a prominent Democratic family, exacerbated tensions. The New York Times referred to Tillman as a “Democratic tiger, violent in his treatment of Republicans, incendiary in his language, and advising all sorts of illegal measures to restrain Republicans from voting.” During the campaign, Smalls described Tillman as “the personification of red-shirt Democracy” and the “arch enemy of my race.” Despite heading the militia to break up a strike in the middle of the campaign, Smalls escaped the Democratic tsunami that swept South Carolina local elections, barely defeating Tillman with 52 percent (19,954 votes). Polling places were spared much of the Red Shirt violence, primarily because Governor Chamberlain requested federal troops to stand guard.20 Tillman later contested the military presence, hoping a Democratic Congress would rule in his favor. Defending himself in the final session of the 44th Congress, Smalls called Election Day in South Carolina “a carnival of bloodshed and violence.”
Bust of Robert Smalls
In 1867 Smalls helped found the first public school in South Carolina.
In a 1903 letter to Frederick Douglass he wrote
“I am deeply interested in the common school system because it was the first public act of my life to work for the establishment of this at Beaufort.”
For those of you who are interested in reading more about Smalls, and his legacy there are now several books available, among them are two that you should purchase for children or as a gift for your local library.
Seven Miles to Freedom: The Robert Smalls Story by Jane Halfmann
which is illustrated by Duane Smith
Gullah Statesman: Robert Smalls from Slavery to Congress, 1829–1915
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.'s American Heroes: Robert Smalls, the Boat Thief
by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., (Author), Patrick Faricy (Illustrator)
Yearning to Breathe Free: Robert Smalls of South Carolina and His Families
by Andrew Billingsley. Foreword by U.S. Congressman James E. Clyburn
Andrew Billingsley is a professor of sociology and African American studies and senior scholar in residence at the Institute for Families in Society at the University of South Carolina. His previous books are Mighty like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform and Climbing Jacob's Ladder: The Enduring Legacy of African-American Families. Billingsley is the recipient of the DuBois-Johnson-Frazier Award from the American Sociological Association and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the Association of Black Sociologists.
"Billingsley enriches our understanding of the life of Robert Smalls, not only through a review of his expansive career, but by examining and connecting to it vital foundational aspects such as his family, friends and successors, a feat for which Billingsley has already gained national distinction."—Ronald Walters, University of Maryland College Park
Smalls is but one example of the story of the end of formal slavery and the Civil War. Let us not forget, and let us not allow those seeking to re-write history to do so.
In a 60 page document on the bull being circulated posted here Bennie J. McRae, Jr. Debunks Mythical Black Confederates McRae states "Mythologists do not need facts, they simply need supporters".
My ancestors were not happy darkies "lovin' the Massa" and wanting to remain as slaves. The new themes being touted are retreads of the same old racism. The Civil War wasn't about "States Rights", it was about the right to continue slavery in perpetuity and to continue to reduce humans of a darker hue to the status of cattle.
It isn't over. We haven't ended systemic pseudo-scientific racism, defacto segregation or the imprisonment and disenfranchisement of our black, brown and red citizens.
Fight On and Write On!
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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As government budget battles reach a fevered pitch, a new NAACP report argues that spending more on education and less on incarceration could turn around many minority communities. The Root: The Price of Choosing Jails Over Schools
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As federal, state and local governments across the nation slash their budgets to close looming shortfalls, there is one clear winner in the budget battles: correctional systems, which cost the nation nearly $70 billion annually. During the last two decades, funding for prisons eclipsed spending for higher education sixfold.
The NAACP is looking to reverse this trend with their new report, "Misplaced Priorities: Under Educate, Over Incarcerate," a 57-page examination of how our nation invests more in the prison system than in the education of our youth. This prioritization, kicked into hyperdrive during the last two decades, has led to a disturbing trend: Many of the neighborhoods that have the lowest rates of education have the highest rates of incarceration, with generations entering the same failing school systems before exiting to the criminal-justice system.
During Thursday's press conference, NAACP President Ben Jealous advocated for "better, cheaper, safer" alternatives to the current system. The report, released under NAACP's "Smart and Safe" campaign, hopes to illuminate how society is overinvesting in prisons as a way to solve social problems -- which unfortunately fails to break the cycles of drug addiction, domestic violence and poverty that plague so many of our communities. "Misplaced Priorities" explains:
Largely as a result of the War on Drugs -- which includes police stops, arrests, and mandatory minimum sentences -- more than half of all prison and jail inmates -- including 56 percent of state prisoners, 45 percent of federal prisoners, and 64 percent of local jail inmates -- are now those with mental health or drug problems.
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All I can say is awesome! 400 elementary schoolchildren in Oakland tested perfectly in math or reading, twenty-three of them were African-American boys. Oakland Tribune: For Oakland's African-American boys, a hopeful statistic
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Amir Ealy is bright and motivated. He tears around the yard with his friends before school, but when he walks into the classroom, he is ready to learn.
So his teachers were proud, but not surprised, to learn the 8-year-old earned a perfect score on the state math test last spring.
"It goes with him," said Michelle Ramos-Stokes, who was Amir's first- and second-grade teacher at Sobrante Park Elementary School in East Oakland. "He works really hard, and he causes everyone who's around him to work hard."
A recent school district analysis revealed that about 400 elementary schoolchildren in Oakland Unified tested perfectly in math or reading on the 2010 California Standards Test. Twenty-three of them were African-American boys.
If it weren't for a proud mother, that statistic might not have surfaced.
Chris Chatmon heads the school district's new, privately funded African-American Male Achievement initiative, and he has made extensive data requests relating to the outcomes of black male students. He is compiling rates of literacy, graduation, suspension and incarceration, among others.
But when Chatmon took a call from Ell Parker, who wondered why she couldn't find anyone to publicly acknowledge the perfect score of her son, Kevin Butler, no one knew how extraordinary the boy's achievement was. No one had asked.
Parker's request sparked a campaign to find and honor the district's highest-achievers, an effort that Chatmon hopes will evolve to include boys and girls of all races.
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Spirituality New York Times: Voodoo, an Anchor, Rises Again
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IT was past 3 a.m. in a dim basement in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Jack Laroche, a Haitian-American computer engineer, nervously awaited his bride: a voodoo spirit named Ezili Freda who believers say has the power to lavish love and wealth and render wayward spouses impotent.
A woman possessed by Freda, the spirit of love, at a voodoo marriage ceremony.
As four drummers pounded rhythmically, voodoo priestesses in bright-colored dresses danced in ecstatic circles, dousing the floor with rum and chanting, “Ayibobo!” — the voodoo “amen.” The bride’s dramatic entrance was signaled when a priestess in a shimmering pink silk dress started trembling violently, her eyes rolling toward the back of her head before she fainted. When she came to, apparently possessed by Ezili Freda, she took Mr. Laroche’s hand and nibbled on his ear coquettishly before the happy couple exchanged vows in French.
Long misunderstood and maligned in Western popular culture, voodoo has become a spiritual anchor in New York City’s vast Haitian community and in Haitian enclaves across the country as practitioners look for comfort after the devastating earthquake in the impoverished Caribbean nation last year.
In New York, where there are roughly 300,000 people who were born in Haiti or are of Haitian descent — the largest concentration in the United States — richly painted basement voodoo temples are sprinkled around Harlem and in parts of Brooklyn and Queens. Mambos, or voodoo priestesses, say they can barely keep up with “demann,” or prayer requests; spiritual love recipes to lure recalcitrant lovers are the most popular. Voodoo prayer circles in which practitioners meet to commiserate have also proliferated, with a notable intensity in the months since the earthquake.
Todd Heisler/The New York Times
A ceremony held in a Brooklyn basement celebrates Damballa, considered the creator of life by practitioners of voodoo.
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Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation with 150 million people votes New York Times Facing Violence, Nigerians Vote
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Despite bomb attacks and communal violence, voters put their inked fingers to ballots Saturday for the first round in the nation’s crucial April election.
Poll workers jammed into rickety commercial buses and cars to travel to the roughly 120,000 polling stations, most of which opened at noon for the nation’s estimated 73.5 million voters.
But in Maiduguri, where a radical Muslim sect known as Boko Haram has been blamed for violence, witnesses said gunmen killed a local politician with the All Nigeria People’s Party and set a hotel on fire. Later, a spokesman for the National Emergency Management Agency said that at least one person was killed and several were wounded by a bomb that exploded near a polling station in Maiduguri.
The election was for the National Assembly. The positions are highly lucrative, with hefty salaries and benefits and the ability to direct a swollen budget in a nation where billions in oil revenues routinely go missing.
The vote was set for a week ago, but the national election chairman stopped it because ballots and tally sheets were missing in many polling places. About 15 percent of the races will not be held Saturday because of misprinted ballots.
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Ivory Coast's UN-recognised President, Alassane Ouattara, has urged restraint after the dramatic capture of his bitter rival Laurent Gbagbo. BBC: Ouattara urges Ivory Coast calm
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Announcing an investigation into Mr Gbagbo, he promised him a fair trial and said a truth and reconciliation commission would be set up.
Mr Gbagbo surrendered after a military assault on his residence in Abidjan.
He had provoked a crisis by refusing to cede power, insisting he had won November's presidential election.
But forces loyal to Mr Ouattara advanced on his residence on Monday, while French tanks backing the UN peacekeeping mission in the country stood by.
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon welcomed the detention of Mr Gbagbo, saying it had brought to an end months of unnecessary conflict, and the UN would support the new government.
US President Barack Obama also welcomed his capture, and called on armed groups in Ivory Coast to lay down their arms to boost the chances of a democratic future.
He added that victims and survivors of violence in the country deserved accountability for the crimes committed against them.
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The high-wattage professor turns his eyes to the black experience in Latin America. Newsweek: Skip Gates's Next Big Idea
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Gates’s early academic career focused on slave memoirs but soon broadened to every aspect of the African diaspora. Genetics tells a different story than culture does, and with his PBS programs on DNA and ancestry, Gates showed viewers that blood does not always comply with people’s self-conceptions. (Gates himself is genetically 49 percent white.)
Now with Black in Latin America, his 11th title for PBS, Gates gently eviscerates the fixed idea—held especially by North Americans who think of race in terms of black and white—that long centuries of racial mixing can somehow eradicate racism. It will air in four parts, starting on April 19. In each episode, Gates travels to another part of the Latin-Caribbean world where he discovers racial conflicts and justifications that appear, to an American, entirely strange.
As it begins, Gates is still grieving for his own father, who died over Christmas. After his grandfather’s funeral in 1960, Gates interviewed both his parents about their family histories—an attempt, in retrospect, to bond with his dad. Back then, he was his mother’s favorite. “I didn’t feel particularly close to my father,” he says. “But, you know, you’re always trying to please your parents. [My career] is playing out that whole long thing since that day when I was 9 years old. It’s fascinating how life works. I’m 60. It pleased him.”
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Tuesday's Chile, Poetry Editor
Along the ancient beaches of San Francisco Bay, along tributaries flowing into its expanse, ancient peoples cremated and/ or buried the remains of their loved ones. For weeks and months afterwards, the ancient peoples would feast on shellfish and honor the dead by tossing the shells, along with personal trinkets and mementos, onto the grave sites; creating in some cases, mounds several hundreds of feet high.
These Shell Mounds have been known for over a century; yet their fact has mostly remained hidden. Developers, with the help of local academics and politicians, labelled the burial sites, "middens", or trash sites; levelled the mounds, used them for fill; and ignored, in fact, forgot the peoples who, for thousands of years, resided along the ancient shores of San Francisco Bay.
The descendents of those ancient peoples, the Ohlone, were illegally removed in 1927 from the "Register of Tribes" by L.A. Dorirngton, a corrupt Bureau of Indian Affairs official.
This is how a people who flourished for an eon are "revised" out of history.
The "official" end of the Civil War was over a century ago; yet the fight continues. Historical revisionism is rampant in the academy, from edicts by local school boards and the Governor Manse. News personalities give succor to these revisionisms; and civic exaltations are bestowed on the traitors who fought to keep slavery intact.
We cannot allow these "developers of a revised history" to bulldoze over the mountains of truth, to level history and haul it away; to use as fill to obscure the deep void of their soulless greed.
The Fifth Fact
For Ben’s project he must research five facts
about his African-American hero and write them
on posterboard. He chooses Harriet Tubman,
whose five facts are: Her father’s name was Ben.
Her mother’s name was Old Rit. She was born
in 1820 and died in 1913. She was born in Maryland
and died in New York. Ben asks for advice
about his fifth fact and I suggest: She led more than
300 people to freedom. Ben sighs the way he does
now and says, Everyone knows that, Mom.
So I try to remember the book we read yesterday,
search for the perfect fact, the one that will match
his four facts and satisfy his almost-seven mind.
Remember, I ask, she was a spy for the North
during the Civil War? It’s a hit! He writes it:
Harriet Tubman was a spy for the north during
the civil war. It was a war between the north
which is where the slaves were trying to get
and the south which is where they were.
Before the war, Abraham Lincoln signed a form
that said All the slaves everywhere are free!
which is one of the reasons they were fighting.
On summer mornings, Lincoln rode his horse
to work down the Seventh Street Turnpike
close to my new home. Down Georgia Avenue
past The Hunger Stopper and Pay Day 2 Go and liquor
stores and liquor stores. Past Cluck-U-Chicken
and Fish in the ’Hood and Top Twins Faze II
Authentic African Cuisine and the newish Metro station
and all those possibilities gleaming in developers’ eyes.
There goes Lincoln’s horse down Georgia Avenue
from the Soldier’s Home to the White House –
much cooler up here in the country, in the neighborhood,
at the hospital. And there’s Walt Whitman, the sworn poet
of every dauntless rebel the world over, hanging around
his street corner every morning to bow to the president
at Thomas Circle by the homeless guys. It’s 100 years now
since any president summered at the Soldier’s Home.
But I was born only 50 years after Harriet Tubman died,
all these centuries we drag into the next century and the next.
And sometimes I see the ghosts of Harriet Tubman
and Lincoln and Uncle Walt and the true stories
and sometimes our own despair like Washington’s
summer malaria, her 40 war hospitals, Whitman moving
from bed to bed, stroking the hair of so many dying boys.
Head north up Georgia Avenue now to our own
soldiers’ home – Walter Reed – where the boys and now
girls too mourn the ghosts of their own legs and arms
and capacity for love. Where is their sworn poet?
I write here in my new neighborhood, the city old
and new around me, Harriet Tubman born so close,
all these heroes under our feet.
-- Sarah Browning
(I've pledged the minimum $150 to help heat freezing folks in need on the Rosebud Reservation. Navajo has an important diary posted with all the particulars. Even a small amount can work towards building the minimum. Could you please help?)
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