The Wall Calendar
Commentary by Chitown Kev
One of the two essays that I have the pleasure and privilege of writing for Black History Month here at Black Kos usually has to do not with a historical event or with a person but the actual process of writing history, of historia in the original sense of the word as set down and orated by the “Father of History,” Herodotus of Halicarnassus; a set of known facts weaved into a narrative that may require investigation, a finding out, a witnessing, a knowing.
Throughout my childhood, we would get monthly visits from our life insurance salesman, Mr. S. who, like my family, was born and raised in Alabama and migrated to Detroit at some point. His visits would usually last longer than it took to simply collect the money and, at some point, would include a nugget or two of facts or opinion or perhaps even myth about the history of our people, either before or after The Great Migration.
For the New Year, we were always given a wall calendar by Mr. S. as a customer appreciation. Before placing the calendar on the wall, I would look through the calendar trying to remember as many of the President’s birthdays as I could but, really, I took an inordinate sense of pride that I was born exactly 200 years after John Quincy Adams, the 6th President of the United States.
I noticed, at an early age, that the date June 3 was marked off with the name and minuscule portrait of a “Jefferson Davis”. I had memorized most of the presidents by that time through a reading of that calendar or by reading books or watching Schoolhouse Rock or something.
I had no idea who this Jefferson Davis was or why his birthday was marked off on our wall calendars. I don’t think that I asked my Mom or Stepdad at the time because I already knew that their answer would be the exact one that I would receive when I came across a word that I didn’t know: Look it up for yourself.
Maybe I went to the public library to look up exactly who this Jefferson Davis was. Perhaps I put my little investigations on hold until my aunt and uncle bought an encyclopedia. At some point around the age of nine, maybe ten, I found out exactly who Jefferson Davis was: president of the confederate states of america; a collection of states that seceded from The Union because they wanted to own Black people; the entire reason for the Civil War.
That much I did know.
What I wondered then and still wonder is: How in the he*l did a wall calendar giving a place of some prominence to the former president of the confederacy wind up in our house?
Especially since now I’ve learned that our old life insurance company was a prominent Black-owned insurance company (h/t to Mom as of 3:10 pm, today).
It’s just a wall calendar, some will say.
But one of the correspondence courses that I took in history a few years back was exactly about the significance of “found objects” (however small) and their significance in the documenting of certain times and places.
Given that insurrectionist Jefferson Davis has returned to the news as a result of the case involving section 3 of the 14th amendment to the United States, I’ve thought a lot about some of those wall calendars from nearly fifty years and how those calendars recording Jefferson Davis as a president were, actually, a debasement of history, over 100 years after the end of the Civil War.
I consider the...anomaly of those wall calendars to be indicative of how the myths of the confederacy and the lost cause permeated the understanding of American history and even, to an extent, Black history then—and now.
Even before Herodotus recited his histories of the Persian Wars before crowds at the Olympic Games, the Buddha said something to the effect that one should not simply accept the authorities on a subject; it is the responsibility of a person to investigate things and life for oneself.
That is my charge: to investigate, to not passively accept the history that I am given, but to do historia.
And historia must be done, I have learned, in matters great and small and seemingly as insignificant as a wall calendar.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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AP English teacher Mary Wood was once punished for having her class read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ acclaimed book “Between The World and Me.” Last year, two students in Wood’s class at Chapin High School in South Carolina complained to the school board about her lesson.
They stated that “Between the World and Me” made them ashamed to be white (the book discusses racism in America). Furthermore, it indicated that Wood was in violation of a state proviso that bans teachers from causing students “guilt, anguish or … psychological distress” due to their race.
Days after the complaint, Lexington-Richland School District Five officials made Wood stop teaching the book. Additionally, parents and residents demanded that she be fired. However, that didn’t deter her from having her students learn Coates’ work.
The school’s new principal—a Black man—gave Wood permission to teach the book once more. Per The Washington Post, she revised her curriculum so it wouldn’t violate the state proviso. Parents reviewed her lesson, gave them the chance to have their child opt out and included a conservative perspective contradicting Coates’ work.
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Last June, the Supreme Court handed down a sweeping decision abolishing race-conscious admissions programs at nearly every college and university in the country, with one notable exception: military service academies.
The Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard applies to civilian schools, but the Court also said in a footnote that it was not deciding whether academies such as West Point or the Naval Academy may continue to take steps to diversify their student bodies that the decision forbade in other schools. That footnote referred to the “potentially distinct interests that military academies may present,” but didn’t clarify what the six Republican justices who joined the Harvard decision think these “distinct interests” might be.
Now, however, this undecided question is before the Supreme Court in a new shadow docket case known as Students for Fair Admissions v. United States Military Academy West Point (Students for Fair Admissions, the plaintiff in both cases, is led by Edward Blum, a former stockbroker who is now the driving force behind many lawsuits seeking to abolish policies intended to advance racial equity).
The West Point case is distinct from the Harvard case, however, in that it presents a conflict between two competing values that the Court’s current Republican majority genuinely cares about.
On the one hand, the Republican justices are hostile to virtually any policy that takes account of race, regardless of whether that policy exists to advance white supremacy or to eradicate its legacy. The Court’s decision in Harvard compares that school’s former admissions program, which sought to diversify its campus by giving a slight preference to some applicants from underrepresented racial groups, to the Jim Crow school segregation regime struck down in Brown v. Board of Education (1954).
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In the wake of the resignations of two university presidents; campaigns against diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and a Supreme Court ruling ending affirmative action, conservatives are vowing that their crusade against higher education is far from over.
Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, who played a role in smearing critical race theory and in pushing out Harvard President Claudine Gay last month, told students at the University of Colorado Boulder recently that America must “lay siege to the institutions” to root out radical liberal policies that were established in the 1960s — an idea he’s been repeating for years. According to Rufo, those policies include diversity and inclusion initiatives that are bringing America down today.
At a time when colleges and universities are facing criticism from all sides over rising tuition costs and resulting student debt, decreasing enrollment, and admissions challenges, conservatives want to spearhead the changes that lie ahead for the institutions. But the desire of Rufo and others to remake higher education in their conservative vision isn’t new.
According to historian Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, who is the author of Resistance from the Right: Conservatives and the Campus Wars in Modern America and casts a sometimes critical eye on the conservative assault on higher education, the playbook has existed for decades.
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In a dense layer of green thousands of feet above sea level, cedar, podo and hegeina trees pattern the landscape, thick moss hanging from their branches and feathery lichen attached to their barks. Numerous streams and rivers flow between them, plunging over steep waterfalls. Buffaloes, bushbucks and monkeys roam in search of pastures.
This is the Aberdare Range, a forest and mountain range in central Kenya that’s one of the country’s main water sources and a key wildlife habitat.
But it may not remain the same.
The Kenyan government wants to build a 32-mile tarmac road to connect two counties, and the country’s environmental agency, the National Environment Management Authority, issued an environmental impact assessment license for the project last month. The project would cut through 15 miles of closed canopy forest and likely increase vehicle traffic into animal paths.
Residents are optimistic the project could improve their lives. But scientists and conservationists fear irreparable damage to the ecosystem. Threatened tree species could get cut down, animals could get hit by vehicles, the road would cut across moorlands — fragile areas for water catchment — and invasive species and pollutants could enter the park through vehicles.
Those in favor of the project, including Kenyan President William Ruto, say it carries economic benefit, arguing that by directly connecting the agricultural counties of Nyeri and Nyandarua, the road would increase trade and uplift livelihoods. Most Kenyans live on a few dollars a day, and in the rural, agricultural areas where the roads will connect, the proposed project has supporters.
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Tens of thousands of people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are living in temporary accommodation and waiting for government help after the country experienced its worst flooding in six decades.
More than 300 people have died and 280,000 households in more than half the country have been forced to leave their homes since heavy rains started at the end of November. More than 1,500 schools, 267 health centres, 211 markets and 146 roads have been damaged.
In January, the government declared a hydrological and ecological catastrophe after the Congo River overflowed, flooding the capital, Kinshasa.
The country’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, who won his second term in office in December after a contested election, last week ordered ministers to deal with the crisis.
Last Saturday, the minister for humanitarian action, Modeste Mutinga Mutuishayi, was dispatched to oversee the distribution of blankets, pots and tents to 900 households in the capital.
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Police in Sierra Leone are investigating the deaths of three girls who underwent female genital mutilation (FGM).
Adamsay Sesay, 12; Salamatu Jalloh, 13; and Kadiatu Bangura, 17, died during initiation ceremonies in the country’s North West province last month, according to local reports.
Aminata Koroma, the executive secretary of the Forum Against Harmful Practices (FAHP), an organisation working to end FGM in Sierra Leone, said the girls’ parents and those who cut them were in police custody.
FGM involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia, and is considered a violation of women’s and girls’ human rights. In 2012 the UN passed a resolution to ban it, but it is still practised in about 30 countries.
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WELCOME TO THE TUESDAY PORCH
IF YOU ARE NEW TO THE BLACK KOS COMMUNITY, GRAB A SEAT, SOME CYBER EATS, RELAX, AND INTRODUCE YOURSELF.