by Kathleen Cross | Aug 16, 2008 | Uncategorized |
Calling a few adventurous anti-racists…
I am conducting an experiment, and I need the help of ten people of various ethnic backgrounds who are willing to participate.
The experiment will simply entail wearing a (free) t-shirt that features a photo of an abolitionist hero with the message “I’ll choose my own heroes, thank you.” Participants must agree to post about reactions to the shirt.
There are two different t-shirts in the experiment. Both feature white American abolitionists. One of the t-shirts features a picture of John Brown , the other a picture of James and Lucretia Mott. See samples of each shirt below.
Of course, the text on the shirt would indicate that the individual depicted there is indeed someone you would choose as a hero — if that is not the case, you would not be an appropriate candidate for this experiment. I am looking for participants who would choose John Brown and/or James and Lucretia Mott as individuals they would refer to as heroes.
The shirt is free to ten selected participants who write to me at [email protected] Please include a brief paragraph about your interest and/or involvement in anti-racist issues, indicate your ethnicity(ies), and tell me why you are interested in this experiment. Also please include a mailing address, and indicate which of the shirts you would prefer (and why).
Front of John Brown T-shirtBack of John Brown T-shirt
Back of John Brown T-shirt
Front of James and Lucretia Mott T-shirt
Back of James and Lucretia Mott T-shirt
by Kathleen Cross | Jul 20, 2008 | Uncategorized |
Did you know there was a white woman who was murdered by the Klan because of her involvement in the American Civil Rights Movement?
Viola Liuzzo with her children
Did you know she was a wife and mother of five children?
Did you know that among her last statements to her husband before she died was that the struggle for civil rights for black Americans was “everybody’s fight?”
Did you know the day after she was murdered, President Lyndon Johnson called her husband Jim to say, “I don’t think she died in vain because this is going to be a battle, all out as far as I’m concerned,” and Jim responded, “My wife died for a sacred battle, the rights of humanity. She had one concern and only one in mind. She took a quote from Abraham Lincoln that all men are created equal and that’s the way she believed.”
That woman was Viola Liuzzo (1925-1965). She sacrificed her life for Civil Rights.
Viola Fauver Liuzzo belonged to the NAACP at the height of the civil rights movement. In 1965, she marched with Martin Luther King from Selma to Montgomery. After the march, Liuzzo and her black co-worker, Leroy Merton, shuttled marchers to the airport. They were spotted by four Ku Klux Klansmen (one of whom was on the FBI’s payroll) who followed the pair and shot them. Liuzzo died instantly. Merton survived.
Can someone explain to me why this woman’s photograph isn’t on the wall in every classroom in America?
Please read the article below. Viola Liuzzo once said to a friend “…You and I are going to change the world. One day they’ll write about us. You’ll see.”
They did write about her. Now, if only more folks would read about her, she may get the hero status she deserves:
Viola Liuzzo: ‘We’re going to change the world’
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
Published Mar 2, 2005 1:49 PM
After years, decades, centuries of struggle, the Black civil rights movement celebrated one of its greatest triumphs on March 25, 1965. On that historic day, some 25,000 pro testers of all nationalities marched into Montgomery, Ala.–a former capital of the slave-owning Confed eracy in the 19th century.
The protesters were completing a four-day march from Selma, Ala. An attempt to march the same route earlier in the month to protest the Feb. 18 killing of African American voter-rights activist Jimmy Lee Jackson had been met with intense repression. On Sunday”–March 7, 1965–Alabama state troopers on horseback had tear-gassed and mercilessly clubbed 600 women, men and children as they marched peacefully across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
Viola Liuzzo
After this outrage, civil-rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King sent out an appeal across the country for all who supported the African American freedom movement to come to Selma.
One of the thousands who answered that call was Viola Liuzzo, a 39-year-old white woman from Detroit. On the evening of March 25, as she was ferrying an African American marcher back to his home in her car, a carload of Ku Klux Klan members forced her car off the road, shot and killed her.
Liuzzo was the only white woman to give her life during the Black civil-rights movement of the 1960s. With that sacrifice, she joined a handful of white men, like the Rev. James Reeb, killed in Selma earlier the same month.
She also joined the hundreds of thousands, the millions, of known and unknown Africans and African Americans who had fought and died for their freedom—from the 40 who fell in battle against South Carolina slave owners at Stono River in 1739, to Jimmy Lee Jackson. Jackson, a 27-year-old farm laborer and pulpwood cutter, who was shot down on Feb. 18, 1965, at a voter-rights protest in Marion, Ala., as he attempted to protect his mother and grandfather from the clubs of the state troopers.
A recently released film, “Home of the Brave,” dir ected by Paola di Florio, attempts to document Liuzzo’s life and legacy. It does give a glimpse into the background of this almost unknown anti-racist fighter, but without fully exploring all the forces that shaped her.
Courage in the struggle
What experiences led Liuzzo to reject racism and segregation, and to journey South into struggle?
She was born in 1925 into a coal-mining family in Pennsylvania. Her father made 50 cents a day when he could find work. He received no compensation from the mine owners after he lost a hand in an accident. As the family quickly sank into poverty and moved from town to town through Tennessee and Georgia, Liuzzo saw firsthand the violence and degradation of racism toward African Americans.
During World War II the family moved North to find jobs. Her father worked at a bomber plant in Ypsilanti, and her mother at a Ford plant in Detroit. Liuzzo found wartime work in a cafeteria, married, and became close friends with Sarah Evans, an African American woman through whom she joined the NAACP.
Liuzzo organized locally for an end to discrimination in education and for economic justice. She was arrested twice and insisted on a public trial to bring attention to these causes. (Joanne Giannino, Dictionary of Unitarian and Universalist Biography)
According to Liuzzo’s daughter, Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe, “My mother was raised in the South and she followed the whole labor story.” She noted that the FBI files from the investigation of Liuzzo’s death show Liuzzo wrote letters “to protest the government’s witch-hunt of the labor unions.”
Liuzzo resisted her oppression as a woman as well. When she went back to school as a high-school dropout, working-class housewife and mother of five, she wrote, “I protest the attitude of the great majority of men who hold to the conviction that any married woman who is unable to find contentment and self-satisfaction when confined to homemaking displays a lack of emotional health.”
After the death of one of her children at birth, she broke with the Catholic Church because it decreed that unbaptized babies spend eternity in “limbo.” She joined a local Unitarian Universalist Church where many of the members had been Freedom Riders in an earlier struggle against segregation in public transportation.
In an interview, Evans later said of her friend: “Viola Liuzzo lived a life that combined the care of her family and her home with a concern for the world around her. This involvement with her at times was not always understood by her friends; nor was it appreciated by those around her.”
Smearing a radical
After Liuzzo’s death, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover began a smear campaign against her. She was red-baited and accused of sexual immorality, in particular with African American men.
An FBI informant, Gary Rowe, was implicated in her death. He was in the car on the night of her killing with Klan members subsequently charged with her murder. The three Klansmen were acquitted by the state, but later served 10-year federal sentences for violation of Liuzzo’s civil rights. Rowe was never charged for any crime and escaped into the Federal Witness Protection Program.
Of the Liuzzo documentary, director di Florio observed: “I experienced my own loss of innocence. It hadn’t occurred to me before making this film that reckless collection of data, inconsistent accounts of the incident, and flat-out lies about Viola Liuzzo could all be part of ‘official documents.’ As I began to meet with leaders in the field of government, politics and history, I realized that this was quite common, in fact. What happened to Liuzzo could happen to any of us.” (Emerging Pictures)
Di Florio’s film shows Liuzzo’s life and also focuses on her legacy. Unfortunately, the documentary dishonors Liuzzo’s sacrifice by implying that her death and the smear campaign that followed somehow led her sons down a reactionary path. The youngest, Tony, became second in command of the Michigan Militia. The oldest, Tommy, joined white “survivalists” in Alabama. The film shows an effigy meant to represent an
African American hanging from a noose in their campground.
This is truly heart-wrenching information, given that one of the most touching scenes in the documentary is the TV footage shot immediately after Liuzzo’s death, when 14-year-old Tommy says to reporters, “She wanted equal rights for everyone, no matter what the cost!”
But the film doesn’t explore the larger economic and social factors that inexorably shape the lives of every child in her or his own historical period, no matter what their parents’ politics.
Liuzzo’s legacy
Liuzzo’s oldest daughter, Mary Lille boe, offers the beginning of an explanation more rooted in the material reality of workers’ lives: “The issues we face are well beyond the immediate. Both the Demo crats and Republicans are capitalist and are wrong. I know this lesser-of-two-evils argument and I think it is very narrow in its vision….
“We saw what the government was capable of doing when it felt threatened by what my mother stood for. The organizations that were supposed to defend workers did nothing. The militias developed because workers, like our family, were abandoned.”
“We need something new. Socialism is a dirty word in this country because it threatens people at the top. I don’t think it’s an accident that people today are attracted to my mother’s story.”
Liuzzo herself was full of hope, and conscious that the future would include more than just her story.
According to Sarah Evans, Liuzzo would often say: “Sarah, you and I are going to change the world. One day they’ll write about us. You’ll see.”
It is worth noting that “Home of the Brave” gives no details of Sarah Evans’ political life or history.
Di Florio’s documentary does not show Liuzzo’s vision, or her understanding that the struggle was more than her individual story.
One scene from the documentary captures the necessity of the continuing fight to secure the most basic democratic rights for oppressed nationalities in the United States. At a voting site in Selma during the 2000 election, a Black poll worker sits at a table side by side with an older white poll worker. The latter is asked what he remembers of Viola Liuzzo, and answers after a sour look that he doesn’t think a woman like that should have come to Selma.
The Black man turns to the camera and says that he feels that Liuzzo was a fine woman. And one image of Liuzzo lingers in the mind’s eye: a photograph of her in the line of march, a few miles from Montgomery. She is walking barefooted, carrying her shoes, looking ahead, completely focused on the goal of freedom.
________________________________________
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by Kathleen Cross | Jul 12, 2008 | "race", anti-racist, heroes, i rant, privilege, seriously?, slavery, stereotypes, transformation, young people |
I was returning home to Los Angeles on a flight from Atlanta, where I’d spent a couple of days at a writer’s conference.
Weary from a weekend filled with late night poetry jams and early morning workshops, I boarded the half-empty redeye, found my aisle seat, shoved my bulging carryon bag under the empty middle seat, stretched my legs and thanked the airline gods for arranging an entire row just for me.
I closed my eyes as the last few stragglers made their way to their seats, and got an early start on what I hoped would be a long nap.
“Excuse me, Ma’am.” The voice was deep, the accent, southern.
I opened my eyes to an attractive white man in his early twenties looking down at me. He pointed at the empty seat next to me, shrugged a sheepish apology, and stepped back to let me stand, which I did. He didn’t take the empty window seat. Instead, he plopped his duffel bag near the window and sat himself down right next to me, which meant, of course, that I would have to move my bag.
I reached down and tugged at the strap, but my tightly wedged carryon didn’t budge. “I’ll get that,” he offered. He yanked the bag out, slid it to me and helped me squeeze it under the seat in front of me. It didn’t occur to the guy to just move over to the empty window seat. He flashed a perfect soap opera star smile at me, stowed his bag under the window seat and stretched his legs.
“Hey, what’s this?” He bent over to reach for something on the floor in front of him and came up with an award I had been given at the conference. He read the inscription aloud, “Best Contemporary Fiction,” then looked me over. “Wow,” he said with a raised eyebrow. His expression said my sporty pink jogging suit and Adidas cross trainers didn’t jibe with his vision of what an award-winning author might look like up close. “You’re a writer?”
There goes my nap. I knew in that moment I would spend my five-hour flight locked in conversation. It was inevitable. He would ask me what my book was about and as soon as I said, it’s a novel about a woman who’s half black but looks white,” he would take note of my ivory skin and blue eyes and realize, correctly, that I wrote the book from my own experience. Then the questions would start.
“You’re black? Wow. You don’t look it.” He was immediately intrigued, as are most white people when they meet me. I haven’t completely figured it out, but I suspect their fascination has to do with my apparent whiteness and my paradoxical belonging in the black community (where the majority of people who look like me feel anything but a sense of belonging).
Just as black people often joke that I am a spy infiltrating the white ranks, I suppose white people see me as an insider to the black world—an undercover comrade who can interpret what I’ve seen and experienced in ways they can relate to. That’s the only explanation I have for the ridiculous comments some white folks make when they discover my dual ethnicity.
In addition to the many off-the-wall questions I’m asked (Can you dance like a black person? Why don’t black people swim? Is that penis size thing really true?), white people say things to me they would never say to a more phenotypically obvious black person. For instance, I once had a white woman refer to the black man she had recently stopped dating as “too black.” When I asked what that meant, she explained matter-of-factly, “He’s ignorant and has no ambition.”
In my younger days I bristled at these exchanges, but as I’ve grown older I’ve come to the conclusion that each time I respond to these ignorant questions and statements with some degree of patience, the world becomes a slightly better place. In most cases I find that the decision to practice patience has a positive affect on the outcomes of these exchanges—including the impending conversation with the middle seat taker.
After he introduced himself as Jason, an actor on his way to Hollywood to audition for (who woulda guessed it?) a soap opera, he tugged and nudged me into a conversation that can best be described as Everything Jason Ever Wanted to Know/Say About Black People But Was Afraid to Ask/Get His Ass Whupped. He began the discussion by saying with wide-eyed sincerity, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” He punctuated that idea by adding that he had “even dated black girls.”
While the other passengers slept soundly, Jason and I struggled to keep our voices at a half-whisper as we discussed topic after touchy topic. We talked about the overrepresentation of black people in the criminal justice system. Jason chalked it up to the “fact” that black people are more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. I countered with a government study that found 75% of regular drug users were white and only 8% black; yet 43% of those imprisoned on drug charges were black, and 25% were white. Of course, at the root of that is the fact that blacks are five times more likely to be targeted for arrest than whites for drug crimes (Source: U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services.)
Jason and I discussed the underrepresentation of black students in college. He believed that was “of course” because black kids and their parents don’t value education. I explained that the best predictor of college entry and success is the quality of middle and high school curriculum. White high school students are three times more likely to be taught challenging coursework as blacks and twice as likely to be taught by an experienced teacher with specific expertise in the subject being taught. (Source: The Education Trust, “Achievement in America”)
We talked about interracial marriage. Jason will date, but couldn’t see himself marrying a black woman, though in his experience he found “mixed” kids to be more beautiful and more intelligent than “regular” black kids—a comment that I, being “mixed” was supposed to have taken as a compliment. Of course my counter argument for that ridiculousness was a thorough lesson on white supremacy and how it permeates everything in America – including how we arrive at our decisions about who is “beautiful” and who is “intelligent.”
Although there were many tense moments in our conversation, during which I had to struggle to maintain my calm, by far the most excruciating subject for me to endure was the one we spent over two hours entrenched in—slavery. I was astounded by Jason’s ignorance of the institution itself. Not only did he reiterate my elementary school teacher’s beliefs about slaves being relatively happy family members, he went so far as to repeat a joke he’d recently heard on a talk radio show which callously declared that American blacks shouldn’t be worrying about reparations, but “ought to be happy we aren’t charging them for their ancestors’ cruise over here.”
Jason seemed (keeping in mind he’s an actor) to have no idea that the Middle Passage constituted a holocaust of unprecedented proportions. Even conservative estimates place the number of slaves who died of abuse, disease, suicide and malnourishment during the Atlantic slave trade in the millions. The “cruises” Jason spoke of were months-long torturous voyages during which the “passengers” were chained to one another on stacked wooden bunks with less than a foot of space on either side. The kidnapped Africans who managed to survive day after day of writhing in blood, vomit, menstrual flow and excrement were delivered to the auction block and sold to the highest bidders. Women and girls had no defense against rape and were mated with men they did not know so they would produce children over whom they had no parental rights. Happy to be slaves? I don’t think so.
When confronted with that reality, Jason didn’t think so either.
What was most disheartening to me was that at his age, and with the advances in “multicultural education” this nation has supposedly made a commitment to, I expected the information I was sharing with Jason to have been taught to him in school. I told him about my experience with my elementary teacher Miss Lewis some thirty years previous—about her insistence that her heroes were good people who behaved in accordance with the times in which they lived; about her ignorance of the many anti-racist Americans who did live during those times but did not uphold the status quo; I talked to Jason about how I was impacted as a child by my teacher’s refusal to denounce slavery.
Though Jason was educated two decades after me, he said he had received the same messages my teacher delivered to me. He knew that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves, but when I asked him whether America’s most revered historical icons were racists, his answer was a safe, “I don’t know. It seems like it.” When I reminded him that America was “the Land of the Free” whose credo is “Liberty and Justice for All,” and whose currency is embellished with the phrase “E Pluribus Unum” (Out of Many One) he admitted that the heroes he was taught to admire and emulate did not live up to those ideals.
When asked to name a white American historical figure other than Abe Lincoln who sacrificed life, liberty or livelihood on behalf of human rights for all people, he could not offer Thomas Paine, John Brown, James and Lucretia Mott, Thaddeus Stevens, Henry David Thoreau, John and Jean Rankin, John Howard Griffin, Penny Patch, Viola Liuzzo, or any of America’s other thousands of white anti-racist heroes. WIth the exception of Lincoln, whose commitment to human rights has been furiously debated by historians, Jason had not one anti-racist role model he had ever been taught to look to for education or inspiration.
Upon our arrival at LAX, Jason said our conversation was one that forever changed him. He thanked me for challenging him to think more deeply about his responsibility—not just to denounce racism, white privilege and white supremacy, but to educate himself about it and to be a part of dismantling it. I hope Jason wasn’t pretending, but even if he was, it was that five-hour interaction with a young white man I would not see or speak to again that stands as one of the most frustrating, at times infuriating and ultimately inspiring conversations about black/white race relations I’ve ever experienced.
It was a conversation that sparked the idea for the book I’m currently working on — a learning tool where young people might come to “Know Good White People.”
by Kathleen Cross | Jun 30, 2008 | activists, anti-racist, heroes, human unity, i rant, i rave, money matters, slavery |
LUCRETIA AND JAMES MOTT ARE MY HEROES!
Imagine you lived during a time when the clothes you wore were produced by slave labor. Oh… wait… that’s right… if you’re the average American, (or the average Earthling for that matter) it is highly likely that at least one of the garments you’ve worn in the past week (perhaps what you have on right now) was produced by a worker who earned far less than a living wage. For evidence of this, please read the story below:
Indian ‘slave’ children found making low-cost clothes destined for Gap Kids
Child workers, some as young as 10, have been found working in a textile factory in conditions close to slavery to produce clothes that appear destined for Gap Kids… (click here to read the article)
Knowing this is widespread, and knowing that clothing is not something you can live without…
What would it take for you to commit to never again purchase or wear fabric or clothing that was produced unethically?
I asked myself that question today, and, to be honest with you, I haven’t arrived at a firm resolution yet. I want to change my life so that it mirrors what I know I believe, and yet I’m wondering how hard it might be to find and buy clothing that is cruelty-free. With the price of gasoline going sky high, and my budget already stretched to capacity, can I afford to forego inexpensive clothing for something that is guaranteed to have been produced justly? And then there’s the question of consistency. If I’m going to worry about how my clothing is made, shouldn’t I be worried about how my food is harvested? How about the furnishings in my home? At a certain point it becomes overwhelming — and that is probably why so many of us turn a blind eye.
Which is one of the many reasons I a.d.m.i.r.e. abolitionists Lucretia and James Mott.
In the decades leading to the end of legal chattel slavery in America, James and Lucretia Mott were fierce abolitionists who saw slavery as an evil to be opposed at every opportunity. Not only did they open their home to escaping slaves, the couple refused to use cotton cloth, cane sugar, and other slavery-produced goods.
Lucretia was known for her skill as an orator, and spoke publicly for abolition, despite repeated threats against her home and family.
African American Abolitionist Frederick Douglas wrote of Lucretia:
“Foremost among these noble American women, in point of clearness of vision, breadth of understanding, fullness of knowledge, catholicity of spirit, weight of character, and widespread influence, was Lucretia Mott of Philadelphia. Great as this woman was in speech, and persuasive as she was in her writings, she was incomparably greater in her presence. She spoke to the world through every line of her countenance. In her there was no lack of symmetry–no contradiction between her thought and act. Seated in an anti-slavery meeting, looking benignantly around upon the assembly, her silent presence made others eloquent, and carried the argument home to the heart of the audience.
I shall never forget the first time I ever saw and heard Lucretia Mott…The speaker was attired in the usual Quaker dress, free from startling colors, plain, rich, elegant, and without superfluity–the very sight of her, a sermon. In a few moments after she began to speak, I saw before me no more a woman, but a glorified presence, bearing a message of light and love from the Infinite to a benighted and strangely wandering world, straying away from the paths of truth and justice into the wilderness of pride and selfishness, where peace is lost and true happiness is sought in vain. I heard Mrs. Mott thus, when she was comparatively young. I have often heard her since, sometimes in the solemn temple, and sometimes under the open sky, but whenever and wherever I have listened to her, my heart has always been made better and my spirit raised by her words; and in speaking thus for myself I am sure I am expressing the experience of thousands.”
To learn more about Lucrtia and James Mott visit one of these links:
James and Lucretia Mott: Life and Letters By Anna Davis Hallowell, Lucretia Mott
http://www.gwyneddfriends.org/mott.html
As I read, and write about this awesome woman (and her husband who supported her work), I am inspired to get off the fence I’ve been on for so long. I pledge to educate myself about this issue and work to become a part of the solution.
I am a descendant of slaves whose forced labor produced goods that made rich people richer. Isn’t it a dishonor to them to buy or wear clothing that makes rich people richer at the expense of the disenfranchised and the desperate?
Here’s my poem about it:
For Us, By Us
kneel beside her now
this brown sister
sweat drenched
work weary
perpetually underfed
taste a drop of her sorrow
this Creator’s child
leg shackled
to desperation
freedom be her dread
ache to lift her burden
workhorse woman
baby tied
to bowed back
with rags from massa’s wife
scream out justice for this
soul survivor
hands weary
scarred and wageless
clinging to so-called life
we could end her slavery
invisible daughter
piece-worker
anonymous
sweatshop whore
call her name, haiti
dominca, mexico
she be nafta’s slave
serving two gods
hers, and, yes, brother, yours
condemn her masters
karan, levi,
brooks brothers
and, sadly,
your own f.u.b.u
hey, brother
she’s your sister
your daughter
your mother
hey,
brother
nice
suit
by Kathleen Cross | Jun 23, 2008 | Uncategorized |
I saw the film Traces of the Trade and was impressed most by its courage and its frankness. It is definitely interesting to watch the transformation of the family members as they begin to realize exactly what the term “slave trade” means, and how the buying and selling of human beings impacted their family legacy. I found it both intriguing and inspiring to see how the DeWolf descendants grappled with their “immoral inheritance”.
I see their journey as a metaphor for America herself.
Below are some photos from Tom DeWolf’s website Inheriting the Trade which is the title of his book that grew from his experiences during the making of the documentary. DeWolf describes his story as (in part) …”a story about the legacy of slavery and how it continues to impact relationships among people of different races today.”
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I know I posted about this film last week, but since then, I came across this compelling article by Traces of the Trade filmmaker Katrina Browne, and had to share it.
By Katrina Browne | TheRoot.com
A filmmaker uncovers her family’s past as a Northern slave-trading dynasty.
June 20, 2008–Traveling the country while making a film, I’ve been struck by the fact that the vast majority of white Americans do not consider themselves “racist.” In the North, we especially presume ourselves innocent. I certainly did.
In 1995, when I was 28, and enrolled in seminary in Berkeley, Calif., I received a small booklet from my grandmother. She wanted to be sure her grandchildren knew about our family history. In the midst of stories about artists, writers, ministers and others in our family tree, she included a few brief sentences about our DeWolf ancestors being slave traders in Bristol, Rhode Island.
In researching the historical literature, I was horrified to learn that the DeWolfs, my ancestors, were actually the largest slave-trading dynasty in U.S. history. I don’t think anyone in my family realized the extent of it. The scope of the story had somehow been watered down over the generations. Our relatives, I learned, had developed this “vertically-integrated” model of smart capitalism applied to a cruel, horrific trade. They owned the ships, a rum distillery, bank, insurance company, several plantations in Cuba, and an auction house in Charleston, S.C.
Three generations of my ancestors brought more than 10,000 African people to Northern and Southern states and to the West Indies from 1769-1820 (that we know about for sure). They owned Cuban plantations for decades longer. But they weren’t alone. They were part of a broad-based pattern of Northern complicity in slavery. Average citizens bought shares in slave ships, back then, the way people buy shares in the stock market today. Workers made sails and ropes and shackles. Farmers grew food that fed sailors on slave ships and enslaved Africans in the West Indies. Not to mention that African people were enslaved in the North for over 200 years (how did I miss that in my history books?). And even when that practice ended, Northern textile mills used slave-picked cotton from the South to fuel the Industrial Revolution. And Northern banks and insurance companies kept the wheels in motion.
Receiving the booklet from my grandmother, I was shocked to hear this news about my family. But the bigger shock came in the very next instant: I suddenly realized that I already knew. I had completely buried this painful truth—pushed it far from my consciousness. I still don’t remember how or when I initially found out, but I have a friend who remembers me talking about it in college. The knowledge was clearly influencing me at some level: I had joined the (almost) all-black gospel choir at Princeton University, was devouring literature by black women authors, and in my 20s, I co-founded a multicultural Americorps program, Public Allies. White guilt was guiding me—but blindly, in a sense.
So rediscovering this family history in my late 20s told me a lot—it explained a lot. And discovering the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery explained a lot, too. Parallel complicity and parallel amnesia, and some parallel white liberal guilt maybe?
I was seeing things more clearly now: Slavery was the foundation of the U.S. economy, South and North. Yet the North successfully constructed an identity as pure and heroic abolitionists to cover all this over. It’s understandable. No one wants to be related to bad guys.
But conscience gnaws at you. As I came to terms with the discovery, it also influenced my feelings about a broad range of social issues. If slavery was a national institution, I came to realize, then the legacy of slavery is a national responsibility.
Confronting this history and public policy questions about how to level the still unlevel playing field in this country isn’t just about confronting facts and figures. There is, of course, a tangle of emotions and narratives that need to be addressed.
While in seminary, I wrote a master’s thesis on Aristotle’s theories about the power of Greek tragedies to impact public dialogue. Theater and democracy went hand in hand in Ancient Greece. Important social issues—ripe for public debate—were highlighted in plays. I knew that the role of the North in slavery was a story I needed to tell, and that it should be a personal journey into the uncomfortable emotional terrain of my and my family’s relationship to the legacy of slavery. It needed to be told in an art form that can be experienced on a heart level and collectively; ideally with a chance to talk afterwards.
It became clear to me that creating a documentary film would allow me to show real people dealing with these real issues. I was inspired by Macky Alston’s documentary Family Name and Edward Ball’s book Slaves in the Family, which both came out in 1998. That was also the year in which Joanne Pope Melish released Disowning Slavery, which laid out New England’s “constructed amnesia” about slavery. And so, that same year, I resolved to make Traces of the Trade. Both Alston and Ball were descendants of Southern slave-holders, breaking codes of silence. I, a Northerner, had some truth-telling of my own to do.
I invited family members to accompany me to retrace the Triangle Trade on camera. I told them that as we traveled to Rhode Island, Ghana and Cuba to grapple with this history, that we should all be prepared to make mistakes, to embarrass ourselves as we felt—and perhaps fumbled—our way through the treacherous landscape of slavery, race and class. We’re human, and I wanted to humanize our attempts to face truth and get things right.
People of color I worked with in my 20s had said very directly that it was really important for white people to deal with our baggage with each other. They were tired of holding our hands through it all. It was a plea for us to do our homework, and then come back to the table. So on the journey, making the documentary, we held interracial dialogues in each country, but we also sequestered ourselves in hotel rooms, and talked, and talked, and argued and worked our way through things. Our family history is unique since it’s so extreme, but a lot of what we grappled with was just regular stuff about being white in America.
We argued, for example, about whether it was OK for us to attend certain events in Ghana that were part of a homecoming festival for people from throughout the African Diaspora.
Some of us, including me, felt that we should keep our distance, honoring the painful, sacred journeys that many African Americans were on. Others felt that we were risking being over-sensitive—walking on egg shells, bending over backwards, contorting ourselves out of our own humanity, our right to bear witness to the pain.
We showed rough cuts of the film to lots of people as we were making it, including white people with stories very different from ours. There is obviously a huge diversity in the “white community,” including many stories of struggle to make it in America. So people don’t want to feel like slavery and its legacy are their problem. There is this massive defensiveness and resistance to black anger and to calls for redress, and we felt that defensiveness in our discussions, large and small.
But the playing field is still unlevel. Every indicator shows it.
I’ve learned to trace back and connect the dots. Like to the fact that the federal government created programs such as the G.I. Bill that helped create the white middle class. Access to college education and home ownership is the bedrock for success in this country. Access that was denied to African Americans in the first half of the century has rippled to the present day. Hence, the vicious cycle back and forth of resentments, recriminations, tensions and distrust that manifest in small and large ways and keep the black/white divide painfully in place. Sen. Obama spoke so powerfully in Philadelphia about this “racial stalemate.”
It took nine years to complete Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. As I watch it now, I am struck by the fact that none of us alive today created the profound mess, but we all inherit it. We inherit these mantles that lock us into roles: the “perpetrator” (be guilty or be defensive) and the “victim” (be passive or be angry). Our full human selves contain all those multitudes, as well as something above and beyond.
In the end, I hope the documentary invites Americans into heartfelt and honest dialogue on the core questions that still have such resonance in our society. What is the legacy of slavery—for European Americans, for African Americans and for all Americans? What would repair—spiritual and material—really look like? And what would it take…from all of us?
*****************************************************************************************
Traces of the Trade has its national broadcast premiere on Tuesday, June 24 at 10 p.m. on PBS’s P.O.V.documentary series. (Check local listings.) For further information on how to see the film and how to use it in your community: www.tracesofthetrade.org; www.pov.org.
My cousin Tom DeWolf was inspired to write a memoir of his experience of our journey. Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History, published by Beacon Press, is available now.
(Article courtesy of The Root: http://www.theroot.com )
by Kathleen Cross | Jun 18, 2008 | "race" |
(Photo: My father James H. Kelly | Great-great grandson of James Breeden and his “negro woman”
On February 28, 1825, a white Tennessee farmer appeared before the Hawkins County Court with his enslaved black woman and two children he sired with her, with the intention of petitioning for their freedom. As required by Tennessee law, James Breeden posted a bond of $500 (roughly equivalent to $9,000 today) so that he might be allowed to convince that body of white men that his “negro woman” and her offspring should no longer be considered his property.
Breeden’s argument apparently satisfied the court. Recorded that day was their decision:
“it is therefore considered…that said Negroes…be emancipated, freed and set at liberty.”
Thus, Charlotte Breeden was granted her freedom along with her two young sons, Lelan and Pleasant. When Pleasant reached adulthood he left Tennessee for Jerseyville Illinois where he purchased 40 acres of land, married a black woman named Cordelia Hinton and produced a free-born daughter, Charlottie Breeden, my great-grandmother.
As I am aware of the economic, social, educational, pyschological and other benefits received by my family, I can say without reservation that the act James Breeden committed before the court on that day more than one hundred and seventy five years ago was good, but I have no idea if he was. He did, after all, own my great-great-great grandmother.
I don’t know if James purchased Charlotte on an auction block, or inherited her from a relative — she might have been a gift from a friend, along with a wheelbarrow and some farming implements. Or, perhaps he bought her from an evil neighbor to save her from a life of torment. There is a heavy ache behind my ribcage as I ponder the possibilities, and concede to the reality that I do not, and probably cannot ever know.
Historical records indicate that James Breeden never married nor sired children with anyone other than Charlotte. In his will he provides for her upkeep,
“I will to my negro woman Charlott (that I have freed) one cow and calf for her support, also one sow and pigs to her own use.“
but I don’t know if he loved Charlotte, or held for her any feelings of respect or esteem. I do not know if the sexual act that led to my eventual existence was forced or consensual, torturous or tender.
What I do know is that at a time in American history when it was perfectly legal for James Breeden to do with Charlotte whatever he pleased, he stood before that body of his peers and argued for her freedom. I am grateful to him for that act. Grateful—a word I choose deliberately, fully mindful that I am offering thanks to a white man who both is, and owned, my ancestor.
grateful: grāt fül) adj. 1. Appreciative of benefits received; thankful.
In writing those words, I feel the need to duck and raise one arm protectively in front of me (metaphorically, of course) as I expect someone (who knows the insidious divisions such favors created among the enslaved) to hurl the epithet “house slave” my way.
The first horn lifts its arm over the dew-lit grass
and in the slave quarters there is a rustling—
children are bundled into aprons, cornbread
and water gourds grabbed, a salt pork breakfast taken.
I watch them driven into the vague before-dawn
while their mistress sleeps like an ivory toothpick
and Massa dreams of asses, rum and slave-funk.
I cannot fall asleep again. At the second horn,
the whip curls across the backs of the laggards—
sometimes my sister’s voice, unmistaken, among them.
“Oh! pray,” she cries. “Oh! pray!” Those days
I lie on my cot, shivering in the early heat,
and as the fields unfold to whiteness,
and they spill like bees among the fat flowers,
I weep. It is not yet daylight.
(The House Slave, by U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove)
by Kathleen Cross | Jun 7, 2008 | Uncategorized |
THIS FILM GIVES ME HOPE!
CHECK YOUR LOCAL (PBS) LISTINGS!
I want to write something compelling that will make you want to NOT MISS THIS FILM, but every review I attempt does not do this documentary justice, so I’ll just say TUNE IN to PBS and watch this one — You’ll be glad you did.
[youtube=http://youtube.com/watch?v=32FVxLiXedw]
First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne makes a troubling discovery – her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She and nine fellow descendants set off to retrace the Triangle Trade: from their old hometown in Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba. Step by step, they uncover the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery while also stumbling through the minefield of contemporary race relations. In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade, “Traces of the Trade” offers powerful new perspectives on the black/white divide. An official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
Find out more about this film:
http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2008/traces…
P.O.V. Blog
http://www.pbs.org/pov/blog
Broadcast Date:
June 24, 2008
Clips and Trailers on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/pov2006
Find out about local P.O.V. screening events around the country:
http://www.amdoc.org/outreach_news.php
by Kathleen Cross | May 31, 2008 | Uncategorized |
On a winter’s night in 2004, I was driving down Middlebelt Road in the Detroit suburb of Livonia, Michigan with two black teenagers—my daughter Akira and my nephew Nathan* (*not his real name). As I approached the freeway on-ramp and signaled to turn, I spotted a police cruiser approaching from the opposite direction—and simultaneously caught a flash in my rear-view mirror of Nathan ducking down in the back seat.
“What are you doing?” I asked, slightly irritated at his knee-jerk need to disappear.
“Auntie, they don’t play in Livonia. I don’t want you to get stopped ‘cause of me.”
The ensuing conversation stung me. Nathan made it clear how much he hated police. Hate. The beautiful brown baby boy I’ve watched grow into a handsome, articulate, intelligent, kind-hearted young man could not or would not believe me when I explained to him that all police are not evil.
He proceeded to describe in detail the half dozen times he’d been pulled over for no apparent reason in the past six months. The last stop, in Livonia, was the most ridiculous. The officer actually asked him, “What are you doing here?” No taillight out. No expired tags. No moving violation. No pretense of a crime committed in the area by a black male suspect. Just Driving While Black in suburbia. DWB. It’s a cliché I am well aware of, but never experience myself.
I don’t get pulled over by the police without reason. Ever. I am an ethnically mixed (black/white) woman with white skin and blue eyes, and the police don’t ever suspect me of anything. I was once pulled over past midnight on I-134 in Glendale, California for weaving in and out of my lane while driving fifteen miles per hour over the speed limit. (I had unbuckled my seatbelt and bent to reach for a Luther Vandross CD on the floor.)
When the young white officer who pulled me over approached my window and politely asked if I had been drinking, I laughed and proclaimed matter-of-factly that I don’t drink alcohol. When he asked for my license and registration, I stopped laughing. I had recently misplaced my license, and my out-of-state registration was expired. I smiled sheepishly and explained to the officer that I had just moved to California and seemed to have misplaced my driver’s license while unpacking. He glanced briefly at the expired registration (not in my name) and muttered something to me about the state law regarding change of address. To make a long story short…
…I drove away without a single citation.
Weaving. Speeding. No license. No seatbelt. No proof I owned the car. Nathan would have likely gone to jail.
In America it is an unearned privilege not to fear or hate the police—a privilege I do not take for granted. I want that privilege for my nephew, and for all youngsters like him who are under siege in their own communities. But, that is a privilege I cannot grant; only good police officers can do that. Unfortunately, Nathan is not likely to come in contact with the good ones. I tried to explain that to him.
“I have several friends who are policemen, Nathan. They are good people you will never meet because they wouldn’t pull you over without cause.”
He considered my point, and for a moment I thought I saw a light in his eyes—a light of recognition that what I’d said was true. The light flickered briefly, then died.
“I hate ‘em. All of ‘em.”
Nothing I said changed his mind. Nathan felt he couldn’t afford to trust any of them. To do so would mean letting down his guard, and for a young black man in America, that, in his estimation, would not be conducive to survival.
The following afternoon, as I was seated in front of the television unraveling my nephew’s tightly-braided cornrows, a news report flashed on the screen. Two white Detroit police officers had been shot dead during a routine traffic stop. The suspect, a 23-year-old black man, was in custody.
Nathan was quiet.
I mourned the tragic loss of life aloud. “God, I feel for their families,” I said, referring to the dead police officers, aged twenty-six and twenty-two.
“Yeah,” Nathan grunted. “His too.” He was referring to the perpetrator, a chocolate brown man with a large unkempt afro who was shown standing in court, tears streaming from his eyes, sadly insisting to the judge that he hadn’t meant to kill the officers. I wondered if my nephew could identify with the kind of rage required to empty a gun into two human beings. Nathan answered my question before I could ask it. “I bet they pulled him over for no good reason.” The coldness in his tone alarmed me.
In that moment I prayed silently that by some miracle my nephew’s heart might somehow be unburdened. I knew the “hate” he was articulating was a catchall term he was using to avoid feeling the awful terror he had of police and the hurt and anger he felt toward strangers who summed him up as a threat without bothering to consider his heart. I knew this young man did not hate anyone, and I prayed for a way to reach him with love, to remind him that we are all one under our diverse human wrappers. My prayer was (painfully) answered within the hour, in a manner, and under circumstances I could never have anticipated.
I do not live in Michigan. I had traveled to Detroit from my home in Los Angeles to visit with my mother-in-law. For Mom’s 74th birthday the kids and I were renovating her bathroom and kitchen. Our plan for that afternoon was to put in a few hours of painting. When I had loosened Nathan’s last braid, and he had combed out his hair into a rather large “fro”, I sent him and Akira to the hardware store for some Spackle and a roll of masking tape. During their errand, something hurtful happened to them that brought tears to all of our eyes in the retelling.
At the hardware store they turned down an aisle in the paint department and happened upon a young white woman and her six or seven-year-old daughter. The woman’s attention was focused on a display of paint swatches—she was apparently trying to decide on a color and was intently absorbed in the task. As Nathan and Akira neared her, the woman looked up, saw the two brown-skinned teenagers (and, I suspect, Nathan’s big hair), grabbed her daughter’s hand and rushed from the aisle. She actually ran from them.
Question: Who runs away? Answer: Someone afraid.
Who’s afraid? Someone threatened. Who threatened that woman? Two teenagers participating in a gift of love for their 74-year-old grandmother. What better symbol is there of the sad state of race relations in America than that two-second encounter?
What is saddest is that Akira and Nathan have been raised to believe that all people, regardless of skin color, are members of the same human family—that we are all not only equal, but connected. These two teenagers have known, loved and trusted people of diverse ethnic, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds since they were infants, so it creates a peculiar dissonance for them when they are faced with the reality that not all human beings believe or behave the same.
When that white woman chose to run away from those brown children, she injured them in ways she will never understand. I have no idea what her own child learned in that moment, but I know mine were wounded. Yet, despite the pain and anger that kind of unwarranted rejection always brings, they raised their eyebrows at one another, swallowed their pain and went on about the business of Spackle shopping.
As Akira and Nathan stood in the checkout line waiting for their turn at the register, a tall white stranger entered the store. The man took one look at my nephew’s big hair, contorted his face into an expression of disgust, glared angrily into Nathan’s eyes, then shook his head with obvious contempt. The stranger then walked boldly past, leaving my nephew stunned. Though he has been contending with bigotry his entire young life, for some reason the two incidents back to back were more than he could take.
“I felt my heart drop,” he told me. “I felt a light go off inside me. For real. I promised myself I would not let another white person hurt my feelings—ever. I was beginning to think maybe I should just hate them all.”
No sooner had the thought materialized, Nathan looked up to see another white man passing the checkout line on his way into the store—only, this man did something quite out of the ordinary. The stranger smiled warmly at my nephew, quietly said, “How’s it going?” and walked on past him and down the plumbing aisle.
“He’ll never know what he did,” Nathan said quietly. “That man came across my path at exactly the right moment, you know? It might sound crazy, but his sincerity did something I can’t explain. You were right, Auntie. Some white people are all right.” One corner of Nathan’s mouth turned up in an acquiescent half-smile. “Some policemen might be too.”
A wounded heart, salved with a random, tiny and seemingly insignificant act of kindness.
That stranger will never know what he did for the heart of one young black man in America—a young man whose outlook was changed by a few words spoken by a stranger in passing. Not an exaggerated high five and a patronizing “Yo, what’s happenin’, bro?” but a quiet and sincere, “How’s it going?” Just a tiny act of humanity with the power to restore a young black man’s faith in the human family.
Of course it is silly and irresponsible to conclude from the above true story that the ugly, insidious and far-reaching nature of systemic racism can be solved by white folks randomly smiling at every black black person they see. (That’s a scary, Twilight Zonish thought actually.) The point of the story is that no matter what role (if any) you are currently playing in the fight to dismantle systemic racism — an equally important battle to wage is the one in that organ behind your ribcage.
UPDATE:
A few months after I posted this blog entry, my nephew and a friend were stopped on the street while walking home one night. The police drew guns on them and told them to lay face down on the gravel. The white kid Nathan was walking with was instructed to “crawl away” from my nephew, which he hesitated to do. The friend was then told if he wanted to make it home that night he’d better do as he was told. The white kid did crawl away and my nephew was told to empty his pockets. When they realized that he had only a wallet on him, they were angry. One of the officers told Nathan he was lucky he didn’t “feel like doing all the paperwork” that would come with an officer-involved shooting, and that he was going to “let” him live.
by Kathleen Cross | May 24, 2008 | "race", education, human unity, i rant, seriously? |
I can recall the exact moment my elementary school teacher fell off her greatest-teacher-in-the-world pedestal. It was a high, hard fall—I know because she fell on me, a freckle-faced “mixed-race” girl so blinded by love and admiration for the woman, I couldn’t have possibly predicted her demise.
Miss Lewis* was a youthful blonde with sparkling blue eyes, a warm smile and a voice so calm and soothing, even being chastised by her felt like love. My classmates and I all adored her, though I find it hard to imagine that anyone could have held her in higher esteem than I.
She taught us we could be anything we wanted to be if we worked hard. She challenged us to challenge ourselves. She stocked our bookshelves with reading material above our grade level and introduced us to vocabulary words kids our age weren’t expected to know. She offered five dollars to the first student who could solve the brain-teasing logic problem she posted on the class bulletin board each month, and she maintained an arsenal of fun, challenging games designed to trick even the most resistant among us into learning. And learn we did.
In addition to her ability to motivate us academically, Miss Lewis seemed to genuinely care for each and every one of us regardless of the color of our skin, the brokenness of our homes, or the degree to which we used Ebonics to communicate among ourselves.
I doubt that woman ever suspected she tumbled from greatness one winter morning in 1970. It happened during a history lesson in which our class explored the subject of slavery. I vividly recall opening my textbook to a page with a startling illustration—a drawing depicting slaves hard at work in cotton fields in the South. A dozen or so black people toiling in the sun, their heads wrapped with rags, their clothing tattered, their faces smiling. I raised my hand.
“These slaves are smiling.”
She studied the picture for a moment. “Yes, they are, aren’t they?”
“They’re slaves. Why would they be smiling?”
She didn’t miss a beat. “Well, many slaves led quite happy lives. They were well fed and clothed and had a place to call home. Most slaves adopted their owner’s last name, and were sometimes even considered part of the family.”
Miss Lewis’ sweet smile dripped a poison few of us who had descended from kidnapped Africans could bring ourselves to swallow. Though most of the children in the class were white, there was a handful of “us” who had come in on busses to create the diversity forced integration was intended to achieve. Us fell silent.
One of them didn’t know what slavery was.
“Slavery is when a person isn’t free to do what he or she wants to.” Miss Lewis explained. “Black people were owned by white people, and they had to do whatever they were told. Even if it was something they didn’t want to do.”
“Well, I must be a slave,” a white boy joked. “’Cause my mom and dad make me do stuff I don’t want to everyday.”
Miss Lewis chuckled at his innocent response, but we couldn’t laugh. Our black parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, older siblings, neighbors and ministers had already described slavery to us in graphic detail. We knew about the whippings, mutilations and hangings slaves endured and witnessed. Black women were raped by their white owners and mated with other slaves like farm animals. Children our age were sold away from their families never to be seen again.
“It’s wrong to own people.” I proclaimed with enough conviction, I thought, to make Miss Lewis see the error of her ways.
“Yes, that is true.” She seemed to approve of my outburst, giving me hope that she would take back what she’d said about slaves being happy family members. She dug a deeper hole for herself instead. “It is definitely wrong today. But, back then slavery was legal and people didn’t think of it as wrong.”
Miss Lewis saw our astonished faces and tried to strengthen her argument by throwing in the names of real heroes no child, black or otherwise, would dare to convict. “Why, some of our country’s greatest heroes owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson. George Washington. Benjamin Franklin.” She apologized for them with her tone. “Of course, if they lived today,” she assured us, “they would never dream of such a thing. They were good, law abiding men.”
I remembered the assignment I’d completed a few weeks previous—an essay about the cherry tree and George Washington’s uncompromising honesty. I Cannot Tell a Lie, is what I had titled the paper. I’d received an A+ for describing in glowing detail how Washington was an example of the kind of human being and patriot we should all aspire to be.
Why on earth had Miss Lewis so calmly expected us to believe that the father of our country had no idea it was wrong to own another human being? Good ol’ George would have had to tell a huge whopper to get anyone to believe that—so, I decided, had Miss Lewis.
My peers and I discussed the lesson at length in the school yard, but the subject did not come up in the classroom again. We concluded that we had been abandoned by our beloved teacher in favor of a lie that was designed to protect some old dead white people. We wanted her to protect us. We wanted her to admit that she knew how horrible slavery had been, and that those heroes who had owned slaves knew it was horrible too.
In the days following that lesson, I believe Miss Lewis sensed the shift in demeanor that left us sullen and moody, but I don’t think she realized that a wide chasm of distrust had developed between her and her black students. We continued to benefit from her skills as a teacher, but our admiration for her as a human being was diminished–and each of us in our own way mourned the loss.
I was reminded of that incident many years later as I sat in a Black History class taught by Dr. Darryl Milner at Portland State University. We were required to read a booklet by Thomas Jefferson entitled Notes on the State of Virginia in which we learned that Jefferson believed the black race to be inherently inferior and therefore incapable of co-existence with whites on an equal basis.
In defense of his views, Jefferson wrote that blacks “in reason are much inferior…in imagination are dull, tasteless and anomalous.” He commented on “the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species” and said that blacks “have a very strong and disagreeable odor…seem to require less sleep…” and experience only “transient” grief. Jefferson concluded that “…their inferiority is not merely the effect of their condition in life.”
Most of us knew well the famous 1785 Jefferson quote condeming slavery “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just,” but few, including myself, had ever heard of Notes on Virgina, which Jefferson had penned in 1781. The ensuing discussion in Dr. Milner’s classroom was quite intense. A student who had attended nearby Jefferson High School voiced his outrage and disbelief that his alma mater was named after such an avowed racist.
In Jefferson’s defense, a white student stood and calmly reminded us what Miss Lewis had tried to teach me so many years before. “It’s not fair to judge Jefferson by a moral standard that did not exist during that time. In those days Thomas Jefferson was an example of the best of men.” She seated herself with a flair that said she had no doubt that the professor would have to agree with her.
He did not.
Dr. Milner neither excused nor denegrated Thomas Jefferson, he simply presented us with a lesson on Jefferson’s contemporary, Thomas Paine, a founding father whose views and actions regarding slavery were the very antithesis of Jefferson’s. We had all heard of Paine–his pamphlet Common Sense inspired the Declaration of Independence, and it was Paine who coined the term “United States of America” But we did not know that Paine had been an ardent antiracist who insisted slavery should not be allowed in the new country. In a pamphlet he’d written entitled African Slavery in America he warned:
“That some desperate wretches should be willing to steal and enslave men by violence and murder for gain is more lamentable than strange. But that many civilized, nay, Christianized people should approve and be [involved] in the savage practice is surprising… Our traders in men must know the wickedness of that slave trade, if they attend to reasoning, or the dictates of their own hearts… Most shocking of all is alleging the sacred Scriptures to favor this wicked practise… How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which Providence threatens us?”
Of course Thomas Paine was not the only white American who loathed the institution of slavery (though not one of my elementary school teachers saw fit to mention any of them during our history lessons). In high school we learned of the abolitionist movement, but its participants were always portrayed as the fringe of society. John Brown was depicted as insane, and the Quakers were presented as a group of odd religious zealots.
As it turns out, Miss Lewis’ assurance that “back then slavery was legal and people didn’t think of it as wrong,” is proved untrue by the existence of Thomas Paine and thousands of other white antiracists who listened to their consciences, refused to bow to America’s racist status quo, and instead spoke, wrote, worked, sacrificed, suffered and in some cases died to uphold the ideal of “liberty and justice for all” upon which this country is founded.
In his book Heroes in America Peter H. Gibbon writes:
“In this short life, we wage a daily battle between a higher and a lower self. The hero stands for our higher self. To get through life and permit the higher self to prevail we depend on public models of excellence, bravery, and goodness.”
With the omission of white antiracist heroes from our national history, the message is sent that “good” white people need not bother themselves with issues of racial justice. Thomas Paine would disagree, as would John and Jean Rankin, William Garrison, John Brown (and his sons, Owen, Watson and Oliver), Wendell Phillips, David Ruggles, Susan B. Anthony, Thaddeus Stevens, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Carl Shurz, Albert Einstein, Jessie Ames, Judge Julius Waties Waring, Elizabeth Avery Waring, Viola Liuzzo, John Griffin, Nathan Rutstein, Morris Dees, Peggy McIntosh, Jus Rhyme, Tim Wise, Katrina Brown, Tom DeWolfe… –the list is much longer than most would imagine.
On some positions, Cowardice asks the question, “Is it safe?” Expediency asks the question, “Is it politic?” And Vanity comes along and asks the question, “Is it popular?” But Conscience asks the question “Is it right?” And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must do it because Conscience tells him it is right. – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
*This blog exists to introduce and honor antiracist heroes, to create unity and to inspire personal and civic transformation — it is not a forum intended to denegrate or dishonor anyone — including those whose actions were intentionally or unintentionally harmful. I did not use my teacher’s real name.
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