Volunteer for the Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver-Velez
I’m one of the very lucky Black Americans who have been able to trace many of my ancestors who were enslaved. When I first got involved in tracking and tracing my Black family history, back in 2003, I got an incredible amount of help from researchers at a website, called AfriGeneas, where I met genealogists who were assisting people who were desperately trying to get past “the brick wall” of the 1870 census — the first Federal census in which formerly enslaved African Americans were officially listed by name.
One of those genealogists was Hollis L. Gentry, a Genealogy Specialist at the Smithsonian Library. She made all of us aware of the fact that there were records — lots of them, at the National Archives, however back then they were not digitized, and not really accessible to the general public. In 2015, that would change, with the announcement that Freedmen’s Bureau records of 4 million former slaves were going to be released.
The Freedmen’s Bureau was organized to assist freedmen in 15 states and the District of Columbia after the war. The bureau opened schools, managed hospitals and gave support to an estimated 4 million slaves. The 1.5 million images released Friday are from the actual reports filed by the 900 agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau who were located across the country.
Hollis Gentry, a genealogist with Smithsonian Institution, said they were very interested in partnering with the church and genealogical groups to make records available to a wider audience. “One of the biggest challenges in researching the Freedmen’s Bureau records are the number of handwritten reports that are in the form of letters. The agents may have been reporting on deaths or marriages.”
“Because the Freedmen’s Bureau was an agency within the government the records have been in the custody of the National Archives and available only in Washington DC.,” Gentry said. “Now 1.5 million images have been scanned in and digitized and we estimate that they contain the names of up to 4 million slaves.
A massive volunteer project was successfully created to make these records available to people who were trying to find their families.
To help bring thousands of records to light, The Freedmen’s Bureau Project was created as a set of partnerships between FamilySearch International and the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS), and the California African American Museum.
The project began on Juneteenth (June 19) 2015 and with the help of more than twenty-five thousand volunteers, was completed on June 20, 2016. As a result of the tireless effort of thousands, the names of nearly 1.8 million men, women and children are now searchable online. Now that the images have been indexed, millions have access to the names of their ancestors, allowing individuals to build their family trees and connect with their heritage.
This is so amazing — and exciting. However, the work is not yet done. There are over a million records that need to be transcribed.
The Museum has collaborated with the Smithsonian Transcription Center to transcribe more than 1.5 million image files from the Freedmen’s Bureau records. The Transcription Center is a platform where digital volunteers can transcribe and review transcriptions of Smithsonian collections. The Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project is the largest crowdsourcing initiative ever sponsored by the Smithsonian. Once completed, the Freedmen’s Bureau Transcription Project will allow full text searches that provide access to both images and transcriptions of the original records. Family historians, genealogists, students, and scholars around the world will have online access to these records. In addition, these transcribed records will be keyword searchable, reducing the effort required to find a person or topic. Transcribing these original documents will increase our understanding of the post-Civil War era and our knowledge of post-Emancipation family life.
I was moved when I saw this tweet.
I know how important and very special it is when you find one of these records.
So if you happen to have some spare time, and want to give a gift of it to help some of us scale that brick wall, become a digital volunteer.
Let your friends know too.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Lawrence Otis Graham recalls where he first met Kamala Harris, last summer, in Martha’s Vineyard. It was at the holiday home of Spike Lee, a film director, who held a $1,500-a-head fundraiser for the woman who is now number two on the Democratic ticket. “She is the new Barack Obama for us,” says the thrilled Mr. Graham, an author and property lawyer from New York. By “us” Mr. Graham means African-Americans, and in particular the glitziest end of African-American high society.
He knows of whom he speaks. He made a name in 1999 by publishing “Our Kind of People”, a sympathetic insider account of the habits, clubs and lifestyles of America’s wealthiest black families. Early on the book, now in its 37th printing, proved controversial. Some whites were ignorant of how black millionaires had thrived, a few of them since the 1870s. “People often don’t think of blacks having different socioeconomic classes,” he says. Some fumed at being publicly named as part of a black aristocracy; others were furious for being left out. Some poorer black readers, in turn, raged at the wealthy.
On average black Americans remain significantly less well-off than whites, including among the richest. Among the top 10% of black earners, for example, the median family has accumulated assets worth $343,160, said a Brookings Institution report in February. For the equivalent top 10% of white families it was more than five times higher, at $1,789,300. By one Federal Reserve measure, around 2% of black families have assets worth more than $1m; over 15% of white ones do.
Yet even if the African-American elite is not huge, it is influential, as a planned televised serialisation of Mr. Graham’s book will show. The most prominent black families long formed invitation-only clubs where they socialised, created professional networks and presented their children at debutante balls.
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Raquetta Dotley looks out of her South Chattanooga apartment and sighs as she thinks about her small neighborhood park shoehorned in next to a cellulose plant and a biofuels factory that processes used grease and lard into animal feed.
Four miles away across the Tennessee River, however, lies the meticulously maintained Coolidge Park, with its stone paver walking paths, fountains and an antique carousel. One key difference between the two areas? Dotley's neighborhood is 90% Black, while the two neighborhoods encompassing Coolidge Park are 75% and 96.5% white, according to Census data.
It's hard, Dotley says, to miss the message her community receives.
"It draws a hard line, like we're not supposed to be over there because they didn't design that for us in the first place," said Dotley, 38. "We can get in our cars and drive a mile and see these nice parks on this river. You start to ask, 'is this intentional,' ask 'why there was more investment into that particular place than our area?'"
It's a pattern repeated across the United States, where the nicest parks tend to be in the wealthiest, whitest neighborhoods, according to a new study by the nonprofit land-access advocacy group Trust for Public Land. Nationwide, parks serving primarily nonwhite populations are half the size of parks serving majority white populations, and are five times more crowded, the report found. And parks serving majority low-income households are, on average, four times smaller and four times more crowded than parks serving wealthy neighborhoods.
While health experts have long called for Black and Latino neighborhoods to have better access to parks and outdoor recreation opportunities, the coronavirus pandemic has shined a spotlight on the interlocking health challenges people living there face — challenges exacerbated by the lack of parks in which to exercise, get fresh air and even reset sleep rhythms.
Experts say the lack of access to parks means people living in dense, urban areas have a harder time getting as much physical exercise as recommended, and are missing out on equally important mental health wellness opportunities. Black and Hispanic Americans also tend to have higher rates of diabetes, obesity and heart disease because they are less likely to go to the doctor or have health insurance, and their overall health is poorer due to systemic poverty.
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Until last year, a majority of Sudanese had lived their entire lives under the presidency of Omar al-Bashir. Africa has 16 of the 48 longest-serving leaders in the world, including the world’s longest-serving nonroyal leader, Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, who has been in power since 1979. These regimes also share a common feature of gross violations of human rights, including those regarding digital rights and freedom of expression online.
But things are changing. On April 11, 2019, the people finally succeeded in dislodging al-Bashir’s regime after protracted mass protests, mobilized through campaigns on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, that spotlighted grave economic hardship. Similar protests that took place between February and April 2019 prevented Algeria’s president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika, from running for a fifth term. These protests, too, were supported by social media.
However, the continent’s dictators have adopted their own digital strategies. A 2019 study from the Oxford Internet Institute revealed that governments in at least seven African countries—Angola, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, Sudan, and Zimbabwe—have started deploying information-control tactics to suppress, discredit, or drown out dissent on platforms. The study found similar social media manipulation by major political parties in South Africa, Nigeria, and Kenya. For example, in Nigeria, the government carried out online attacks on opposition parties and conducted smear campaigns, while in Zimbabwe such oppression consisted of a combination of pro-government and pro-party propaganda, attacks on the opposition parties, and suppression of participation.
When they are unable to control the discourse through manipulation, such governments often employ more illegitimate tools. A 2019 report by Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa found that at least 22 African countries had carried out an internet shutdown in the prior four years. The Democracy Index from the Economist Intelligence Unit categorizes 17 of those countries as authoritarian, while the rest are hybrid systems with poor records on democratic rights.* Governments typically claim that these network disruptions are necessary to protect against disturbances to public order, especially during major political events. However, such shutdowns are never justified.
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Yenguete Anatole, a judoka in Central African Republic, has created a place where Christians and Muslims can train together in martial arts despite the war raging between Séléka militias and the CAR army. “Sport connects people. When we practice sport, we are just human beings,” Anatole says from his studio in Bangui, the capital, where relations between Muslims and Christians are fraught and attended by the ever-present possibility of death. “Courage is part of the moral code of judo. It means you got to go through with this. It means believe in your idea and fight for it.”
Clashes in 2016–17 were so intense that Anatole and his athletes were forced to leave the studio. Months of struggle followed by community and nongovernmental organization aid led to another studio, which opened a few hundred yards from the original one. ”When we are training, we share everything. We forget completely we’re Christians or Muslims,” Anatole says. ”We even switch our kimonos.”
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When a highly infectious disease is the biggest threat to global well-being, islands with small populations have an advantage. They can seal themselves off. The English-speaking islands of the Caribbean have by and large done this. Most have, at least until recently, kept rates of infection low (see chart). Some small islands, such as Anguilla and Montserrat, have no confirmed infections.
But that has not protected the Caribbean from the economic consequences of the pandemic. Much of the region depends on tourism, which has been hit hard. In Jamaica, which with 3m people is the most populous of the Anglophone islands, tourism accounts for 10% of gdp. Its indirect contribution is much higher. Remittances, another big source of income, especially for Jamaica, have slumped as workers in rich countries have lost their jobs. The drop in energy prices will offset part of these losses in most Caribbean countries, which are oil importers. Trinidad & Tobago, however, depends on exports of gas.
The islands’ economies are likely to contract by a tenth or more this year. The Central Bank of Barbados, an especially prompt reporter of data, says the country’s economy contracted by 27% in the second quarter compared with the same period last year. More than a fifth of workers filed for unemployment benefit.
Governments now face an agonising choice. Should they keep their countries relatively closed to contain the pandemic, or open them back up to revive their economies, at the risk of spreading the virus? They must also watch out for the weather. Forecasters predicted that the storm season, which runs from June to November, would be unusually active. A major hurricane would make matters far worse for any island it strikes.
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On what has become a solemn date in Tulsa, a group of Black leaders met with Mayor G.T. Bynum on the first of June. It was the 99th anniversary of one of the deadliest race riots in American history, when a Black neighborhood in the city was destroyed by a white mob in 1921.
Those gathered at City Hall to applaud the mayor’s commitment to police reform included a community organizer named Greg Robinson II and the twin sister of Terence T. Crutcher, an unarmed Black Tulsan who was shot and killed by a white police officer in 2016.
In a matter of weeks since the City Hall meeting, though, Mr. Robinson and Mr. Crutcher’s sister, Tiffany Crutcher, have turned into two of the mayor’s fiercest political rivals, as Mr. Bynum has lost support among many Black residents.
Mr. Bynum, a white moderate Republican, apologized for telling a national news outlet that the death of Mr. Crutcher, who had his hands in the air through much of the confrontation with officers, had more to do with drugs than with race. And he angered many Democrats who once supported him by welcoming President Trump’s campaign rally in June, an event that health officials said helped lead to an uptick in coronavirus cases.
Tulsa’s mayoral election is Tuesday, and as voters prepare to cast their ballots, a crowded field of candidates are trying to unseat Mr. Bynum. Among them is Mr. Robinson, who has been gaining momentum in his bid to become Tulsa’s first Black mayor. Ms. Crutcher has signed on as Mr. Robinson’s senior campaign adviser.
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Voices and Soul
“… I wish I could write
of you as something that would break if I held it
living for too long O grief-cousin phantom-chain
wind-throne blade-choir What is death to the children
of the forgotten… “
- Julian Randall
”The Book of Yeezus”
by Justice Putnam, Black Kos Poetry Editor
When I was much younger, and not weathered wise by enough close scrapes to have exhausted enough cool cat lives to staff a really Cool Cat Big Band in a cool cat obsidian sky, I took a twenty day zig zag summer auto tour through the Big Valley interior of California, with its ragged tectonic foothills and bone dry lake basin flooded here and there, when they flooded orchards and other crops that fed the world from an aquifer not yet poisoned and consumed almost entirely. Gas was pretty cheap, if you call thirty-six cents a gallon, cheap. I remember the outrage from some true penny pinchers in the family when a gallon of gas raised a quarter cent from 17 cents a gallon. Even then, though, the idea of depleting resources cheaply insulted my youthful certainty of right and wrong, especially since the skies were already fouled and the waterways a risk to life and limb. I would discuss this with my history professor father, how could people not see that the internal combustion engine would spew such poison and be responsible for such carnage? He did point out something I took to heart. When the auto first gained preeminence in a horse and buggy economy, cases of diphtheria dropped drastically. Other fecal-borne diseases and ailments diminished. And I noticed that on my auto tour that summer. Everywhere I traveled, I came across graveyards. Old graveyards, sometimes neglected, sometimes sporadically maintained, but if one was raised in an academic family, it seemed reasonable to look up the town records and match the dates on the tombstones. Indeed, when the auto took over the tasks of farm work and transportation, the diseases attributable to a horse drawn economy waned and mostly disappeared. One other thing I noticed, though, were the amount of children killed by a cycle of flu over decades, and then a huge spike in deaths during the 1918 pandemic. I could barely see their names, the etched stone worn smooth by wind and grit, but even though I could mostly research who the families were from town and county property records, they would remain unknown to me. Most, I realized, were forgotten long before their demise.
I was in France for the Fiftieth Anniversary of D-Day, and I went with French family and friends to the National Cemetery near Normandy Beach before the big festivities. I walked among the alabaster white crosses and the occasional Star of David in the US section for an hour or so, when I asked to be directed to the French section. The French Empire was long and brutal and many died for her cause and many were conscripted from many lands, and they lay dead there. Most of the Sengalese Tirailleurs, for instance, killed in the Battle of Reims in 1918, rested in a meticulously manicured lawn of alabaster crosses and crescent moons. So were all the dead there, not just for the D-Day memorial, but every day, and all year, by common French citizens, from lands around the world.
We have a short memory in America. We forget martyrs from a week ago, let alone those dead from centuries. And we certainly have shown little care for those who fought valiantly and returned home to the segregated lunch counter, or the predatory loan shop foreclosing on grandma’s two bedroom one bath home she lived in since the shipyards sent ships she welded together overseas.
So I guess it’s easy then to forget all the race riots and lynchings, all the neighborhoods and businesses razed by fire for being too uppity, all the hands up don’t shoot, all the I can’t breathe, all the shots in the back while the kids cry in the back seat because the kids were forgotten by a paramilitary you won’t ever forget. They won’t allow it. But it is our duty as fellow humans, I would argue, to remember the forgotten and to know them before they are. It is a moral imperative to embrace our neighbors and revel in their history and pain and survival and flourishing. America is Beautiful, if we remember to work at it.
An arrow does its own form of singing I like to believe
this means nothing is ever too far
from the bird that it was I tender the dark
with a hum we cannot die in a legion
of spells for the Black boys who learned
to make the light sorry All I have ever wanted
is to be the wound you neon
All I have ever wanted is to die beautiful
in hands I could mistake for yours
All seasons are becoming the season
of my isolation The green sputters long
into December so I think we are all less invested
in loyalty these days O you gilded Amistad
the mouth I’d forgive without question froths
with an armada of golden-hulled ships Excess
I too pretty the interruption when I cannot bear
the elegy any longer I don’t know how not to love
what would kill me without noticing I can be
ferocious with my ugly I can be the knife chanting
silver through the abrasion I wish I could write
of you as something that would break if I held it
living for too long O grief-cousin phantom-chain
wind-throne blade-choir What is death to the children
of the forgotten One day too my mother will die
and my loneliness will be a hyperbole of ravens
all of which will sing like fugitives Glory Glory
how much I’ll miss her While yours anthem in the wrong
direction I will probably still love you then Glory Glory
how easy I march in defense of another man who wants me dead
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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.
