COMMENTARY: AFRICAN AMERICAN JOURNALISM AND AFRICAN AMERICAN JOURNALISTS
by Chitown Kev
In American history, there is an unmistakable correlation between times of war, on one hand, and protests for and the eventual advancement of black civil rights, on the other. It is, after all, morally obscene for a nation to ask an individual or a group of people to “fight for the nation” while, at the same time, denying those very same people the rights and dignity that other citizens of that nation enjoy.
The dual and, at times, maddening reportage of black journalists on the nation’s wars while others, at home and abroad, were fighting for civil equality and dignity is, possibly, the great theme of African-American journalism. That social tension, palpable in much of the war reporting that I have read in the black press, produced some of the greatest reportage that I have ever read.
I am still in the process of researching for a future post here on African-American journalism during the nation’s wars. But the journalism of Thomas Morris Chester, the first African American war correspondent of a major daily newspaper deserves special mention.
As a part of the riveting New York Times series on the Civil War, Disunion, publisher jean Auets wrote of the fascinating story of Thomas Morris Chester, titled "A Black Correspondent at the Front"
Chester was born in Harrisburg, Penn., in 1834, the son of two black abolition activists. His mother, Jane, had escaped slavery in 1825; his father, George, was probably born a free man. They sold the abolitionist newspaper The Liberator at their restaurant, and may have hosted a stop on the Underground Railroad. Their community was tough, close-knit and prosperous. The citizens resisted, sometimes violently, slave-catchers who ventured there. When Frederick Douglass was pelted and beaten at a local public meeting, they enlisted friendly whites to help set up an-other meeting.
Edifying and reforming institutions, like churches, schools, fraternal lodges, benevolent societies and temperance and literary associations, permeated Chester’s early life and instilled in him a life-long belief in education. When he was 16 years old he attended Akron College, an African-American academy in Pittsburgh – a “fountain of learning,” he said. Later he attended school in New England and Liberia, and, after the Civil War, he graduated from the Inns at Court in London and was admitted to the bar.
This wealth of personal opportunities did not blind Chester to the realities of black life, North and South. In 1838, Pennsylvania changed its constitution to restrict the vote to “white freemen,” removing the franchise from “every freeman.” (Women did not enjoy voting rights, regardless of race or economic status.) The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 scarred black communities nationwide as thousands of men, women and children fled to Canada to avoid capture.
Chester’s Civil War correspondence for the Philadelphia Press was collected in a 1991 volume edited by Indiana University professor R.J.M. Blackett, titled Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from the Virginia Front
A generous preview of the book is available at Google Books.
Chester’s prose reads as very typical of the 19th century. As Chester had been a Union soldier prior to his work with the Philadelphia Press, his personal moral outrage at the treatment of black Union soldiers is to be expected; that it was published in the “MSM” of its time, even given the moral certitude of the Union cause in the North, is extraordinary. In the excerpt I have chosen here, Chester maintains that even some in the Union did not have the right to climb on a moral high horse.
“It seems that the disposition to treat colored persons as if they were human is hard for even some loyal men to acquire. The wrongs which they have suffered in this department would, if ventilated, exhibit a disgraceful depth of depravity, practiced by dishonest men, in the name of Government. These poor people are not only plundered and robbed, but are kicked and cuffed by those who have robbed them of their hard earnings and sent them to other parts of their department, confident that their ignorance would be a guard against discovery...Among the colored troops are many laborers who are employed by the Government, and because they cannot continue their work like their soldier brethren, when shells are falling and exploding among them, this gallant Kentucky major amuses himself by tying up these redeemed freemen. It is generally believed that his success in this great canal enterprise will be a brigadier general’s commission of colored troops. This, to be as mild as possible, would be exceedingly unfortunate, and unjust to those who are making so many sacrifices for the perpetuation of The Union. Gen. Butler by no means allows any man, black or white, to be treated in such an unwarrantable manner.”
Thomas Morris Chester, Black Civil War Correspondent: His Dispatches from the Virginia Front pp. 137-38
You can read at the Auets NY Times piece that Chester was so much more than a war correspondent (in fact, he was the first African American man admitted to the bar in England).
It is notable, though, that even (and especially!) in a major daily (and mainstream) newspaper of the Civil War era, a black journalist were making the moral case for the dignity and autonomy of African Americans.; words which continue to be applicable to the present day.
Amended 10/25/16 4:11 pm
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Color Of Change’ “It is clear the Department of Homeland Security and FBI are continuing their disturbing legacy of employing secretive surveillance tactics with murky legal parameters to chill The Movement for Black Lives.” Color Lines: Activists Sue FBI, DHS for Movement for Black Lives Surveillance Info.
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Back in July, racial equity advocacy group Color of Changepartnered with the Center for Constitutional Rights to file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for information related to the federal government’s surveillance of The Movement for Black Lives organizers and protesters. After reportedly not receiving the requested documents, the groups filed a lawsuit against both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) yesterday (October 20).
The suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, comes after The Intercept uncovered documents that show DHS collects information on activists via their social media accounts, particularly in Baltimore, Ferguson, New York City and Washington, D.C. Surveillance has been a hot topic of late, as the ACLU and several civil rights organizations work in tandem tointroduce local legislation that would limit how law enforcement can use technology to monitor citizens. And it’s not new: it has been well documented that the FBI used a surveillance program calledCOINTELPRO to investigate and “neutralize” members of the Black Panther Party.
“Government is supposed to protect our rights, not suppress our freedom—and yet for decades we’ve seen our government engage in a number of illegal surveillance practices that do just that,” Brandi Collins, campaign director at Color Of Change, said in a press release sent to Colorlines. “Despite their denials, it is clear the Department of Homeland Security and FBI are continuing their disturbing legacy of employing secretive surveillance tactics with murky legal parameters to chill The Movement for Black Lives, along the way targeting individuals in a number of terrifying ways.”
The lawsuit alleges that the surveillance began during the protests that followed the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, and that it targets people based on their race and political viewpoints and undermines their Constitutional rights:
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The study found that teachers are more likely to see academic challenges as disabilities when white boys exhibit them than when boys of color exhibit the same difficulties. Conversely, teachers are more likely to perceive behavioral challenges as disabilities among boys of color than when white boys have the same behavioral difficulties.
"Previous research tends to be polarized between the argument that students of color are overrepresented in special education due to racial bias in schools, and the argument that they are actually underrepresented in special education once you account for socioeconomic status and other related factors. This research finds racial bias, but it's more complicated, with both underrepresentation and overrepresentation of students of color," said Rachel Fish, assistant professor of special education at NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and the study's author.
Teachers play an important role in identifying students who may benefit from special and gifted education. Earlier research found that 75 percent of referrals originate from teachers (as opposed to parents or medical professionals), and teachers' referrals are generally confirmed through additional testing.
Because students of color are overrepresented in special education and underrepresented in gifted education, it has been assumed that teachers may be making biased decisions when referring students for testing. But existing research on teacher bias has been inconclusive.
In this study, Fish examined the role of student race and ethnicity in teachers categorizing student needs as exceptional and in need of either special or gifted education services. She conducted an experiment involving 70 third grade teachers from 14 public elementary schools in one district.
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If you want to understand the modern American city—and so much else about this country—consider exploring a new interactive mapping project from the University of Richmond’s Digital Scholarship Lab. Building off several previous projects, Mapping Inequality is a database of more than 150 federal “risk maps,” the New Deal DNA that would dictate decades of disinvestment in cities. These maps, as Oscar Perry Abello writes for Next City, illustrate "how the great government-baked wealth-creation machine of the 1930s only worked for white people."
They’re a reminder that letting huge swaths of the American city fall apart was essentially federal policy beginning in the Great Depression, when banks began to withhold lending from certain communities based on color-coded risk maps.
The Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, or HOLC, brought together mortgage lenders, developers, and real estate professionals in hundreds of American cities to design four-color maps. Neighborhoods were shaded green (“best"), blue (“still desirable”), yellow (“definitely declining”), or red (“hazardous”), in descending order of credit-worthiness. These maps, which came to shape not just the distribution of mortgages but other types of lending and investment, were the origin of the term “redlining.” This kind of discrimination was not made illegal until 1977, and continues in practice.
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Climate change is destroying thousands of miles of West Africa's coastline. It's only a matter of time before it knocks out the region's economy, too. Foreign Policy: West Africa Is Being Swallowed by the Sea.
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The tide is just starting to come in when David Buabasah begins nervously checking the waters creeping up the coastline toward his partially destroyed home.
As the high tide mounts the steep shore of this small Ghanaian fishing village perched on a shrinking peninsula between the Atlantic Ocean and the Volta River estuary, he and other inhabitants prepare for the worst.
“When the big waves come, they can easily kill you. Last week, the ocean took away part of my house while my family was sleeping inside,” says the 32-year-old fisherman, gesturing toward a crumbling brick wall and a pair of door frames, the only remains of his family’s compound.
Growing stronger by the minute, the tide begins to push wave after wave into the village, pounding the dilapidated dwellings with unrepentant force. House walls collapse under the fury of the ocean, and huge pools of saltwater fill the center of town. Those whose houses are the closest to the shoreline can only watch as the waves carry away all of their belongings.
Twenty years ago, Fuvemeh was a thriving community of 2,500 people, supported by fishing and coconut plantations that are now completely underwater. But in the past two decades, climate change and industrial activity — such as sand mining and the construction of dams and deep-sea ports, which trap sediments and prevent them from reaching the coastline — have accelerated coastal erosion here. Gradually but inexorably, the ocean has swallowed up hundreds of feet of coastline, drowning the coconut plantations and eventually sweeping away houses.
For a time, villagers retreated, rebuilding destroyed houses farther away from the advancing shoreline. But eventually they ran out of land to fall back on: The narrow peninsula is now less than 1,000 feet across, and high tides routinely wash over the entire sandy expanse. The last trees have been uprooted by the waves and lie dead along the shore, a grim omen of what awaits fishermen like Buabasah, who have seen their livelihoods destroyed in the span of a single generation.
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South Africa has formally begun the process of withdrawing from the International Criminal Court (ICC), notifying the UN of its decision. BBC: South Africa to withdraw from war crimes court
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South Africa did not want to execute ICC arrest warrants which would lead to "regime change", a minister said. Last year, a South African court criticised the government for refusing to arrest Sudan's President Omar al-Bashir.
He is wanted by the ICC on charges of genocide and war crimes.
Mr Bashir was attending an African Union summit in Johannesburg, when the government ignored an ICC request to arrest him. He denies allegations that he committed atrocities in Sudan's troubled western Darfur region.
Several media outlets say they have obtained a copy of the "Instrument of Withdrawal", signed by South Africa's foreign minister.
"The Republic of South Africa has found that its obligations with respect to the peaceful resolution of conflicts at times are incompatible with the interpretation given by the International Criminal Court," the document says.
Justice Minister Michael Masutha said at a press conference that the government would table legislation in parliament to withdraw South Africa from the ICC. The Rome Statute, under which the ICC was set up, required the arrest of heads of state for whom a warrant was issued.
The consequence of this would be "regime change" and the statute was incompatible with South African legislation which gave heads of state diplomatic immunity, he added.
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Voices and Soul
by
Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
Percy Shelley's sonnet, Ozymandias, was published in England in 1818. Earlier that year, Percy, with Mary Shelley and their children, and along with his sister-in-law Claire Clairmont, mother of Byron's child, expatriated to Bagni di Lucca, Italy. In the late summer, they moved to Este, near Venice to be closer to Byron's villa. At a time when the "Exceptionalism" of British colonial reach was unquestioned, in fact, exalted in verse, theatre and the academy, Shelly acknowledged the erosion Time has on all leaders and empires:
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley
"Ozymandias"
Jamaican-born Claude McKay certainly channeled Shelley, when in 1922, he questioned the "Exceptionalism" of an America that held the "hand that mocked them and the heart that fed." McKay saw also, though few will admit the obvious erosion of Time, that even for America, there will be a future where the "lone and level sands stretch far away."
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness, And sinks into my throat her tiger's tooth, Stealing my breath of life, I will confess I love this cultured hell that tests my youth! Her vigor flows like tides into my blood, Giving me strength erect against her hate. Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood. Yet as a rebel fronts a king in state, I stand within her walls with not a shred Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer. Darkly I gaze into the days ahead, And see her might and granite wonders there, Beneath the touch of Time's unerring hand, Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
-- Claude McKay
“America”
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