BLACK MEN AND AMERICANISM: THE CLASSIC STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY

Frederick Douglass my Historic Mentor

The Author

When I was a young idyllic collegian in my twenties I was very much the disillusioned but refocused intellectual who, having grown up in a privileged utopia suddenly realized my affluence was an affront to the very foundation of the flawed but established psychology of some Black peoples and the entire foundation and structure of the aesthetic we understood to be "Americanism.” From the perspective of the non black community and from the ranks of my own peoples… there was a great sense of conflict between the image of Black men and what was considered to be classical image of an American.

Booker T. Washington, Educator, Writer, Intellectual

Hearkening to the 1960s and 1970s when my world was alight with warm and positive imagery of Black Men not only in struggle but also accomplishment I was astounded to find that the rest of America had quite a different image of my kind, “The Black Man”, and I sought to both determine the nature of this misconception and also to establish and define myself positively in spite of it!

In the 1960's the image of the Black man as a militant, insurgent, angry and violent was projected
by media rather than the intellectualism that fueled his struggle for equality in America. 
Black men were portrayed as Anti-American in spite of the fact that they, like every other
ethnic group in this country, fought a hard, diligent and nonviolent battle for their freedom and equality in America. 
The bias against the Black man since slavery held him back from achieving true citizenship
and civil rights and his continued battle for these rights contradicted the American tradition
that rewarded hard work, excellence and struggle.
These rights seemed to be easily awarded to everyone but the Black man, and to newly arriving
populations and ethnicities which lacked the shared history
and tradition Blacks had endured in the long centuries of their oppression here.
The faces of Black men who were intellectuals, professionals and contributors to
American culture were suppressed in leiu of the negative images of Black
men as Anti-American icons!

One might say I was a young militant as a youth; I donned the gear of struggle collecting jewelry and artifacts of African origin rejecting anything, everything of American source…. 

Marcus Garvey's Pan African Liberation flag

Like many Afrocentric men I harbored a romantic desire to abandon America altogether and make a magical cultural connection with the vast world I envisaged as the “Motherland”!   I buried myself in studies and research of African culture, history, art and anthropology and became a walking textbook for African Architecture and art… this was a briefly sustaining but ultimately unfulfilled adventure for me.  It was during this time that I also began to necessarily stumble upon a passion for Black American history especially from the beginning of the 1600’s until roughly after the civil war, up until the First World War  It was my exploration of this era that fundamentally changed my whole opinion and perspective of myself both as a man and also as an American. 

Anthony Burns, Writer, Lecturer and Abolitionist

I had never thought of myself as an American before… My parents would not allow me to pledge allegiance to the American flag or sing the Star Spangled Banner…  I came to view the stars and stripes as a colorful noose precipitously fitted around the neck and spirit of the Black man in America…  My bitterness and regret of slavery and racism further separated me from any reconciliation with that image and ideal!  I did not feel American in any way at all, rather… I felt betrayed but in the end I felt betrayed equally by America as I did Africa!  The more apparent it became that my African ancestors willfully sold my Black American Ancestors into slavery the further I pushed away from the gilded shores of that primordial continent!  Africa to me represented the ultimate lesson in “Betrayal”! 

Harrison Samuel, Writer Lecturer and Abolitionist

While I did not personally blame my African colleagues for this centuries old treachery I did remind them of the awesome debt they owed Black Americans who had not only fully extricated themselves from the very belly of oppression but also had worked diligently on both continents so that Africans could come to America and reap the benefits of the Civil Rights Movement that we engineered!  We were owed immensely in my eyes… Black men were the architects of modern equality forcing America to make good on the lofty egalitarian claims of the Declaration of Independence and we lit a virtual fire of freedom that spread to every corner of the world.  For this global gift to mankind the Black man has never been adequately acknowledged in history... Proponents of the old order have quietly smoldered waiting for a chance to reverse this revolutionary evolution in human history.  America has been the plantation in which the seeds of the Enlightenment, the egalitarian spirit of humanity, reversing Milena of oppression and tyranny has been playing out ever since The Revolutionary War.  The first formidable challenge to this miracle of human cultural development was The American Civil War, ultimately put down in disgrace, the Union restored!  Central to this war was the slave question and during the brief period of reconstruction Black men took their rightful places in congress and local government; they had been rightfully gifted status as bonafide Americans!

Ottubah Cugano AKA Gustav Vassa, Writer, Lecturer and Abolitionist

It was not until one night when I  was writing a mournful poem about the forgotten legacy of my  forefathers who had dies as slaves that  I realized the absolute gravity of my birthright and heritage as an American.  Well, my ancestors built this country on their backs, a free slave labor system enabled America to rise to global dominance less than 100 years after it had declared independence from England.  For a small, struggling agrarian community this was quite an accomplishment but one owed in totality to the physical effort of the African American slave.  My peoples were buried all over this country, unmarked, forgotten… their sweat and tears and blood fertilized the bread basket of this nation and in repayment they were demonized as lazy, shiftless and ignorant, incapable of contributing to the great tradition that we call America… But we now know this is far from truth!  America was built upon the backbone of Black men!  The history of their contributions remains largely buried and history texts educating Americans continue to ignore the extensive legacy of the Black man in America but the news media is all too quick to project a negative image as if Black men are the only ones committing crimes in These United States!  America is all to quick to forget the horrors of slavery but slow to forgive the tenacious effort of Black men to rescue themselves from a hellacious system of racial oppression in this country.  Africa became a romantic but far removed place for me.  I did not speak the language nor was I raised as a citizen of the ancient cosmology of that place.  In my opinion, the term "African American" referred to native Africans who became Americans and also to loosely include American born but African socialized citizens who spoke African languages and were thoroughly indoctrinated in the traditions of their ancestors.  I was not African at all... I was thoroughly American, Black-American. 

In the 1960's and 1970's The image of the Black man was largely communicated in product advertisements
designed to market his patronage.  Many of these products such as Afro Sheen
aimed their ads at creating positive and wholesome images of Black men in America.

It was at this time that I wrote one of my favorite poems entitled, “A Piece of Africa” and it goes…

Everybody wants a piece of Africa,

Like a Fragment of the great Earth-Mother,

Knowing that, to put the pieces together… is to discover,

That Her Power…. Is Power!

I had just completed an architectural design for a sacred space while studying in The School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Hampton University based on my research of traditional African Architecture, religion and spirituality and it had been published in the American Institute of Architects Journal.  The principal structure was domed, based on the mud structures of Cameroon, The Sudan and Tunisia, this was around 1986.  A river was diverted onto the site, symbolically dividing the it into sacred and secular halves.  But the river was further diverted to flow into the structure where a great square pit similar to the structures at Lalibella opened up with the water flowing down over the walls to a pool with a small island in the middle. A small door 50ft below led to a bridge connecting with the island.  Like many African village compounds the complex was contained within a protective wall along which the ancillary buildings were organized leaving the sanctuary as the main focal point within the center of the campus.  I chose the form of the dome, a hyperbolic parabola, because it was one of the most ancient architectural forms to be found in Africa.  Ironically the Egyptians never built round or domed structures save for the granaries, a trad ition which had always intrigued and baffled me until I began to study sub-Saharan architecture realizing that the Egyptian culture moved from the south to the north Mediterranean accounting for the preservation of this common architectural form in the granaries of old, middle and new kingdom in Necropolises and Palace complexes.  I was pleased that I had inaugurated a hybrid Afrocentrically styled architecture and commented on what I felt about the genre of Afrocentric Architecture in several published articles at the time.  I battled my idealised Afrocentric theories with a European critic at Hampton University who could not wrap his head around the use of traditional African architectural forms in contemporary architecture, he clearly failed to realise that Borromini's design for the dome of the Cathedral of Milan was ultimately not his innovation at all but was a common form of structure to be found in contemporary African villages of the day.  Nevertheless, the history books have erroneously credited him with this invention, and to this we attest the dome of St Paul's in London and even the dome of The Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. 

Harpers Weekly often portrayed Black men as absurd carricatures in their series of engravings created during
the reconstruction period known as "Blackville"  These images such as this one
portraying Black Congressmen and Legislators elected to offices during Reconstruction
show Black Officials as lazy and unkempt, unruly and riotous. 
Publications such as this one which could have been largely instrumental in uplifting the image and status of
Black men by portraying them as sensible and credible intellectuals
have continued to ignore the large and growing population of Black intellectual men in America.

At this time I had moved to The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. School of Architecture and Urban Planning and having produced several interesting projects based on Neo-Egyptian, Beaux Arts design.  There I resisted a critic who was less than enamored of my romantic stylistic and mannerist lotus and papyrus reed columns, propylon gates and such.  I took my lead from the marvelous tradition of Beaux Arts Architecture on The National Mall designing a beautiful museum on the site of Hains Point across from one of my favorite McKim Meade and White structures on the campus of Fort McNair.  For one of my final projects I made a departure to Olduvai Gorge exploring the simple and elegant style of the Masai of Tanzania.  There, perched on the edge of The Great Rift Valley, in full view of the very site where Dr. and Ms. Leaky discovered the oldest fossil humanoid remains…. Australopithecus, Zinjanthropus… etc., etc., etc., I had finally closed the gap between America and Africa.  This was America circa “Rodney King” and “O.J. Simpson”, so the racial fires were burning high across these United States…  American had been hurtled into a right wing republican cultural regression ever since Ronald Reagan came into office in 1980.  The image of the Black man in America was at an all-time low and the racist media of America unrelentingly pounded the image of the most ignorant, destitute and depraved Black men into the consciousness of the world in order to justify its racist attack on the social advances of The Civil Rights Movement the same as it had done in order to justify slavery and Jim Crow and the Klu Klux Klan and Neo Nazi movements in America.  This was a time when young black intellectuals could be detained anywhere any time on the street, at the airport, at the train depot in our own neighborhoods.  This was a time when other Black male intellectuals such as myself shared countless stories of encounters with racist and aggressive police who profiled us only to discover that not only were we better educated, and socially connected than they but that we also would not tolerate their ignorance and met it head on and won!  For those who remember, moving back to the 1980's the presidency of Ronald Reagan gave inspiration to a great number of White Supremest, Neo Nazi, Evangelical and other extremist groups.  During this time I personally attended several Anti-Klan Rallies chanting, "Reagan and the Klan go hand and Hand!  Being an enlightened, intellectual Black man in America has been a difficult task to sustain… but I have persevered if not only because I fully understand the full weight of responsibility that lay upon my head, to rectify the suffering and inhumanity endured by centuries of noble and intelligent Black men who died not ever knowing the taste of freedom and equality!

Pamphlets such as these were sold and circulated during Abolitionist Lecture Tours

I remember the very first sentence I spoke to my classes in the fall, my introduction speech and it went something like this:

“I am here because I have to be here, because of a debt I owe to my ancestors who were not as fortunate as me.  I have a torch to pass on to you and a gift and that gift is knowledge.  Do not doubt the power of my conviction or it will be your undoing in this class, know that while I am here to enlighten you and help you that any of you who come between me and my mission will be dealt with by any means necessary!  Now you have heard this expression used before in reference to the honorable Malcolm X. but you have no comprehension of how swiftly I will remove you from my path should you become an obstacle to my mission.  Know that my mission is to fill every mind in this class that is open, with knowledge regardless of race or sex or any other variable!  If I should discover that your mind is not open and that you interfere in the enrichment of other minds you will be removed!.  Know also that whenever such time comes that your mind is become open again to the wisdom and knowledge I have to give you, you may join this class again!”

The Offices of Frederick Douglass' newspaper, "The North Star"
Businesses such as this one kept Black intellectuals, writers and
technicians working and they popularized the positive image of the Black man
as an intellectual.

One of the most difficult tasks in my life was teaching young Black males, males who had not had any positive and strong male role model in their life.  The urban classroom is a battlefield and the Black male is always the one with the most casualties.  Their notions of manhood are half-baked and corrupt, absent of the full body of wisdom handed down from generations of men and gentlemen… it is truly sad.  As a young Black male intellectual I represented the antithesis of everything they had imagined a Black man to be!  I challenged their status quo for evaluating the very nature of manhood.  I represented a powerful man, shaped and molded my father who was born into a poor family but entered college at the age of 16 as did my mother and became a powerful and respected pillar of his community professionally and socially.  He groomed me into that same man, strong, wise, tenacious and humane… an intellectual in my own right! Committed to the furtherance of justice, equality and to the preservation and celebration of the great tradition of Black American men!

Images of Black men during the 1960's riots always pitted against the
arm of law enforcement which was always seen as
holding him back from his self determination in America by the use
of brute force.
The misconception of Black men as naturally violent and rioutous stems
from the Black Codes, Jim Crow and other operant conditioning tactics set into
the law to suppress and subdue Black men. 

It was not until my late thirties that I truly began to fully appreciate that I was a bonafide American.  Suddenly my interest in all things African, though still there shifted to my American legacy.  I dove into every history book and visited every historic site that directly or indirectly involved the shaping of the image and intellectual legacy of Black men in America, I searched the lyrics of Blues and Jazz songs as a wellspring of commentary of the Black man on his condition in America.  My search for the meaning of manhood and Americanism were parallel paths…

Today, without any reservation at all I fully acknowledge that I am in fact an American, dyed in the wool, bonafide, vested by the suffering and contribution of my ancestors who received nothing but hatred and oppression for their gifts to this country.   I begrudge no one these gifts, though they were taken from them with pure malice but hold in me an assurance so deep, and so inspiring so as to transcend the deeds of another day that history has rectified or is in the continual process of rectifying… This is my country, when I walk over its fields I feel the spirit of my ancestors underfoot… When I walk along its shores I feel the anguish of men and women who died yearning to return to homes from which they were stolen… they linger upon these shores bending their will to the motherland… the sea is a powerful grave for countless millions of my peoples… nothing but a sigh is left… the seas have forgotten them the waves carry new messages of hopefulness now that the carnage is done.   I will never forget the way my people have been treated in America, my home, my country… it is a bittersweet partnership but history has healed these wounds in a miraculous way, it has bought black and white peoples together in one common struggle in spite of the odds as Robert Frost said… “And that has made all the difference”!

Today I tell you that I am a Black man and I am also an American Man… 

A  metaphorical interpretation of the American flag.

FIN

Written by D. Vollin on 5-15-12

A MIRAGE OF THE MATURE GAY MAN AS A MALE SPENSTER

The very first time I entered a Gay club I was only 16 years old.  The Bar/Cocktail Lounge was an old established watering hole called “Knob Hill” which has since closed and consisted of a simple Washington, D.C. Row House that had been converted to a bar on the 1^st floor with a small stage at the far end and a series of smaller changing and meeting rooms on the second story.  The bar was sparsely populated with a number of well to do mature men seated vultureously along the narrow ledge running from the entrance well to the middle of the room with a dusty chandelier hanging precariously low over the bar top.   Younger men stood against the wall of this dimly lit saloon waiting to be invited for a drink by one of the older gentlemen.  Fortunately there was a DJ there and lively house music was playing on the small dance floor.  At 16 I was not much of a drinker but loved to dance so that is where my older boyfriend took me, showing me off to the lonely men peering at us from the dark corners of the cheerless bar.  All I cared about was that we were far from the 15 degree winter night just outside the door, a typical 1960’s stock wooden door with three four-sided diamond moldings running up its length finished in a dried out walnut veneer.  This was a typical Gay entertainment establishment of the late 1970’s, cozy, dark, homely and oddly reminiscent of someone’s basement outfitted in wall to wall faux wood paneling and a black, brown and white tiled linoleum floor.  This is the type of club that people who considered themselves to be the “Down To Earth” Washingtonians frequented… a far cry from the more upscale Discotheques all over the city. 

Without a word I scanned the room for any semblance of liveliness, I recognized some of the faces of the men in the room.  There was one of my supervisors from a summer internship, and there was one of my classmates from the all men’s preparatory school my parents I attended.  At that point I didn’t quite get it all but what I did get was the loneliness and desperation that exuded from every molecule of that room.  I secretly thought, “This will not be me at 40, alone, drinking, desperate for company, wasting away in a dark bar waiting for some young man to show me a good time.”  Actually the young men were waiting for the older men to show them a good time as well, it was a balanced system.  For the first time I contemplated the possibility of having to pay a man to like me.  So I decided then and there that by the time I was 40 I would have found a soulmate and married him.  We would have a house and have adopted children and would be always planning vacations and doing family things the way my family did.  The musings of a young idealistic adolescent are amusing in hind sight…

Later that year I would learn more about the true nature of Gay culture; then and now it would be to me a very cold and inhospitable landscape no different from heterosexual culture in that it was filled with lots of lost and lonely people desperately scratching at what they felt might bring them some degree of happiness even if it meant scratching someone else’s eyes, hopes and dreams out in the process…  I survived that ordeal and the holocaust that was soon to follow it in the early 1980’s and 1990’s watching all of those lonely and hopeful faces drop out of sight, out of all recollection.  Although I was fortunate enough to elude it's grasp the sheer dynamic of it altered me mentally… I watched while the entire pool of potential husbands, lovers, soulmates, and partners literally vanished from the earth… Today only a couple of my old acquaintances are still here to remember those times and we have all turned to new times… still with hopes of someday finding love…

I struggled with the image of the mature Gay man with four or five dogs or cats, impeccably dressed at all times, seen only at the most exclusive brunches and luncheons and affairs; Always headed to the tropics or some other exotic location alone…  That, I said, would never be me, I would find a husband and live a happy domestic life and raise a boy and girl to adulthood.  But at 49, single and still waiting to meet my life companion the prospect of becoming a male spinster has crossed my mind even and anon… I often joke with my ex telling him that I will have to move in with him and his husband to take care of me in my golden years as a single man and he has promised that in the event I am correct there will be a very special rocker on the porch just for me and right outside of my bedroom.  I do believe that he will take care of me when I get very old… and I expect I will be quite a piece of work at 95years. 

I recall a song as sung by Nancy Wilson entitled, “Ten Good Years”, in which she says candidly, “You betta light your fire while you still got wood”!  So as I make it to the gym in my fiftieth year of life I do so more so “to let the bastards know I’ve still got it” as Jennifer Lewis says while executing a precarious high kick!  Well, there is every reason now to expect that I will find my soulmate yet.  I have already got six cantankerous turtles to keep me company… and a string of ex’s to look after me and my dear family to support me.  So chances are that even if I do join the ranks of the Gay male spinster I will be happy and well loved…

FIN

Written by David Vollin on 5-1-12

RETHINKING THE RELEVANCE AND LEGACY OF THE CONFEDERATE MOVEMENT IN AMERICA…

During Reconstruction Black Officials Including  Members of Congress Were  Elected.

Many Americans have intense emotions regarding the political confederate movement which occurred during the mid-nineteenth century of American history.  The American Civil War was a terrible but inevitable debacle in which moral and economic values representing thousands of years of human history were finally brought to bear.  When the dust of battle settled the ancient tradition of human slavery as a as a socioeconomic and political system had come to an end and the radical Democratic government, also the first of its kind to gain power in thousands of years, had been restored as a global beacon of freedom.  To some the confederates were lawless rebels who launched a criminal and traitorous assault upon the United States of America.  To others the confederate movement was a revolution against the tyranny of the American government which they perceived as strangling their socioeconomic and political manifest destiny to own human beings as slaves exerting their unquestionable will over them as their divinely appointed genetic superiors.  Whether your sentiments lie with the Confederate Movement and its failed movement to secede from the Union or with The United States Government which sought to sustain the still young and evolving democratic experiment called America you will agree that this episode in American History was being carefully watched by the world as the first great test of the revolutionary, egalitarian ideas of the Enlightenment.   The enlightenment rose to prominence in Europe as an alternative to the ancient order of rule by divine right.  The framers of the American Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were keenly aware of the ideals of the enlightenment and understood that they were soon about to transform the western world as Paris, London and many other European cities had become hotbeds for egalitarian revolution.  The ideals of the enlightenment were rooted in the human quest for freedom and self-determination for the common man, regardless of race or sex and became the trial for a case which had taken many thousands of years of human history to play itself out.  Even if the reader concludes that The Confederate Movement, like The Fascist, Nazi Movement of the twentieth-century, was an evil, immoral and inhumane enterprise that is all the more reason why it should be studied and fully understood from the perspective of The Confederates if only to ensure that it’s politics and philosophy will never again infect and threaten the freedom of free men.

Voting Rights Were Given To Blacks During The Reconstruction Period

In order to truly understand the importance of the Civil War one must literally immerse themselves into the mind of those times.  When the Civil War began in 1861 the new republic of The United States of America was 85 years old and the new French Republic was only 62 years old.  Both the American and French revolutions were the culmination of over 172 years of intellectual unrest which began with the European Age of Enlightenment around 1689.  The fundamental ideals and concepts of The Enlightenment called for a rethinking of the socio-political and religious status-quot.  It challenged the divine right of Monarchs and of the church itself to exert absolute dominion over the lives of common men.  The French revolution was only the first of a long row of dominoes that would eventually be toppled as men struggled to free themselves from political and economic slavery and it was to continue to play itself out into the twentieth-century with the fall of the Nazi German in 1945 and USSR in 1991 approximately 302 years after the Enlightenment and 130 years after The United States of America was founded.   So the concepts founded in The Enlightenment took roughly 323 years to actually play themselves out to the extent that we can experience in 2012; it has been a long struggle and one which is not yet finished; but that is another story…

In Europe The Egalitarian Ideals Of The  Enlightenment Had  Toppled  The French Monarchy

From the seventeenth century on throughout the eighteenth century Europe was a hotbed for the evolving concept of civil rights.  George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams and other founding fathers represented the American contingency of the literati of that age in the colonies and they read extensively literature which was the signature of the age of enlightenment when they could not actually be in Europe.  But when they could escape to Paris and London to personally immerse themselves in this Cultural Revolution these framers of the American Constitution and Declaration of Independence were intimately familiar and sympathetic with the most progressive thinking of the century, a century that had come to look unfavorably on slavery and divine right.   These educated men knew they were but an island in the sea of the day in which slavery was the most lucrative trade; surely they understood that many decades would pass before the gilded rays of the enlightenment could penetrate the fog that encompassed this nation of great humanitarian potential.  Although they went to their graves without being able to see the injustice of slavery lawfully curtailed the act of freeing their slaves upon their death was at the time a unique and radical act of civil disobedience!  Because slaves were property to be inherited by the heirs of the deceased owner to free ones slaves was tantamount to denying the privilege of divine right to future generations and theoretically setting the example by which all rights would be absolved and all slaves eventually freed.  While it is certain that neither of the two former American Presidents George Washington or Thomas Jefferson had thoroughly thought out the loophole which would allow freed slaves to become re-enslaved their heroic act of civil disobedience evinced by freeing their personal slaves upon their death must have sent shock waves through the antebellum south and the north foreshadowing a great war to come... 

This Notice Invited Americans To Hear Ralph Waldo Emersons  Speech Renouncing The Fugitive Slave Act.

Many believe that the confederate movement was one of the first great efforts of the modern world to reverse the great humanitarian progress catalyzed in the egalitarian philosophies of the enlightenment.  The leaders of The Confederate movement were learned men and they were also men of high principles.  The organizers of the confederate movement were well aware of the lofty Ideals of The enlightenment.  They visualized their status within the revised; hybrid-Greco-Roman political structure of The U.S. to be rooted in and justified by the ancient patrician lifestyle together with all of its privileges and exclusivity.   Many of the landed gentry who encompassed the college of slave owners were themselves descended from European nobility and were keenly aware of their princely legacy as divinely preordained to rule not only the lives of lesser white men but most certainly of black men whom they deemed to be of a lesser form of human being than white men. During the period leading up to the Civil War Wealthy Southerners who owned Large Plantations and were slave owners were experiencing the same resistance as European Kings and nobility abroad.  Many European colonies established since before the beginning of the Dutch East India Company in 1500 were at unrest and struggling for freedom.   The world was full of the fire of revolution and sparks that had been kindling since the signing of the Declaration of Independence that had been taking form for decades as a great preparation for secession revealed itself full-blown to an America who must surely have been aware of its preparation.  The Confederacy had its own army, currency, flag, it had elected its own president and political leaders, generals etc.; In the nineteenth-century this would not have been an easy thing to disguise.    Whether a conscious ideological movement or not, the confederacy represented a clear and armed challenge to the philosophical Enlightenment which upheld individual rights and freedoms extended across all races and sexes.  Its failure forever changed the global climate of human rights bringing a bloody end to the political tradition in human history in which the laws of a government could be used to enslave or subjugate a race or group of peoples and deny them the right to participate in the shaping of their own destiny.  As such it must be studied as a critical turning point in the history of mankind itself.   When The United States of America consolidated itself after the Civil War, restoring the rebellious states to their historical union, it became a global benchmark for modern governments of the future.

The laws of The United States are silent to the specific act of secession but treat similar types of action taken against the United States under Chapter 115 of title 18 of the U.S. Code Annotated as acts of, “treason, rebellion, or insurrection, seditious conspiracy and avocation of the overthrow of the government as criminal offenses.”  From a purely legal perspective the confederate secession from The United States Government was an illegal act of treason. 

The opening of The Declaration of Independence reads as follows:

“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

This is the opening argument for secession from the government of England; it declares fundamental and irreconcilable differences between The Thirteen American Colonies and England such that a permanent separation is required.  Doubtless the Authors of the confederacy were consoled by this beautiful opening passage likening themselves to the founding colonies and seeking glorious self-determination from what they felt to be the tyranny of the American government.   But as most documents it is important not to take any one phrase or group of phrases too far out of context lest the central meaning itself be perverted or altogether lost in the effort.

The last passages of The Declaration of Independence read as follows:

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.”

Again, in the eyes of the framers of the confederacy, this poetic but real language would seem to offer clear justification for their secession from The United States.   Again, the organizers of the confederate movement were populated by some of the most prominent lawyers, judges, and intellectuals of the day, many of which had also studied extensively abroad in Europe.   They were no less eloquent or knowledgeable than any northern American lawyers or other political, intellectual counterparts.  We must put aside any bias we may have for the southern states who organized themselves around the confederacy to look at their argument objectively so that we may clearly understand the urgency they felt to remove themselves from what was then emerging as one of the newest and fastest growing political and economic powers of the nineteenth century outside of Europe, The United States of America.

But when we look at the second passage of The Declaration of Independence we find that it takes on another character, one patently inspired by the lofty ideals of The Enlightenment.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Now this is the critical point of divide, the point at which we must be able to place ourselves into the minds of the framers of the confederacy.  These men were undoubtedly slaveholders and descended of a long line of Plantation owners.  The condition and institution of slavery as a fundamental norm of society was planted in every molecule of their being, it was an incontrovertible truth to their way of life and that of their ancestors who founded the southern colonies.  It was their “R’ason D’etre”!  Furthermore, these southern planters, similar to the way European Kings and nobility felt about common people, had come to consider African slaves to be their possessions, chattels, assets afforded them by divine right.  The idea of the American government as a Republic further justified the landowners as superior to those even of European descent, who were not part of the landed gentry, American Aristocracy or Patrician class if you will… Although The Declaration of Independence identifies all men to have been created equally, a southerner would surely not have considered a Black slave to be human or a man of equal stature to himself and thus the point of slavery being somehow unconstitutional was completely unimaginable.  On a certain level one can imagine how a southerner, indoctrinated in the mindset of the time would have completely overlooked even the remote possibility of a Black man or woman as an equal to themselves because virtually every facet of life in the antebellum south reinforced the fact that they were not equal on any field of play.  Every facet of southern life was organized around the theme of racial and economic superiority and inferiority, even poor, uneducated and working class whites were considered to be of lower stature by middle class, upper class and educated whites.  These views of racial superiority would not be substantially challenged by scientific data until around 1913 when the first hominid fossils were discovered in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania in East Africa surprisingly only 52 years after the beginning of the Civil War in North America.  Southerners who seceded from the Union were fighting a war they may have honestly felt was ethically grounded because they did not believe Blacks were their equal as men and had manufactured a socioeconomic system that enforced what we now know to be a cruel, inhuman and unjustified form of institutional racism; but during the mid-nineteenth century the practise of slavery had been established for nearly 300 years In the Americas and in the New World so it was a norm of society like washing ones face in the morning.  To say that southerners were not aware of the mission of Abolitionists to abolish slavery on the grounds that it was ethnically and racially unsound and that a growing number of Americans now considered Black slaves and freedmen to be men and women owed equal stature to whites would be a gross misrepresentation of the times.  Whether southerners tacitly acquiesced to the philosophical arguments of the Abolitionists that bombarded their established way of life, closeting their humanitarian sentiments is unknown but clearly significant enough numbers of southerners became ego-invested in defending rising claims of immorality and inhumanity directed at not only the sale and possession of slaves but the iron-clad system of racial oppression required to maintain that status-quo.  Whether you take the position that the Civil War was fought principally as a humanitarian movement to end the century’s old practise of slavery blemishing the conscience and integrity of America; That it was a calculated move principally driven by the economic greed of the south who had enjoyed a free slave labor system or of northerners who felt intimidated by the economic potential of the south or whether you believe that the War began because the United States Government under Abraham Lincoln simply had to save face by putting down an embarrassing revolution is up you the individual. 

In lieu of the continuing struggle to properly place confederate sentiment into the legacy of the American nation a growing number of Americans have been challenged by the question of whether it is appropriate for the Confederate flag to be flown on State or Federal property; One strategy for examining the validity of the Confederate Movement and its principal symbol, the confederate flag would require as the specific burden of proof, verification that the inherent symbolism of the confederate flag contradicts and challenges the struggle for political, racial and social equality as defined in The Declaration of Independence and as such its use as an American Icon would openly proclaim defiance to the free peoples and government of The United States of America.

The Capitol of The Confederacy At Richmond Virginia

The brand of socio-political stratification intended by The Confederates differed hugely from that of The United States Government.  The Confederate Movement was a continuation of the status-quo; White male landowners and wealthy businessmen would rule as an aristocratic class excluding women, blacks, poor whites and nonwhites of any gender and race from economic, political and social equality.  Not only did the United States Government, at the time of the Civil War, intend to free black slaves but it hesitantly enlisted black soldiers allowing them to fight for the cause of the American government.  After the war, during the Reconstruction Period, Black men were elected to political offices, serving in congress and at every level of government.  I will not herein make any claims that The American government, and the majority of white Americans though they, themselves implemented these progressive measures, were fully on-board with what they ultimately represented but one must acknowledge that they were willing to experiment with this radically forward thinking concept of unilateral equality though it lasted only a short time. 

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Furthermore, in order for The Confederate Movement to maintain and justify its use of free black labor it had to implement a cruel and inhumane system of political discrimination which would deny black men and women the political leverage to extricate themselves from their plight.  In order to justify and enforce slavery southern states systematically polluted and perverted the law to suit their purposes by passing types of legislation such as the fugitive slave act.  These laws served one purpose only, to keep the black man from achieving anything!  The rationale for this blatant racism was rooted in the concept of white supremacy.

The North Was Vehemently Opposed To The Spread Of Slavery 

Even if one wants to be sympathetic to the argument that says when a person is conditioned by a system of racial/sexual inequality from childhood, raised on the dominant side, one cannot be held accountable for being brainwashed!  Owing to the historical accounts preserved in diaries and genealogical records we know that blacks and whites coexisted on a level of intimacy far different from that between their cattle, and other chattels.  Any rational, logical intelligent person who ever interacted with a black slave in the broad range of scenarios from a personal servant to a sexual partner must have surely known that, other than skin color, sex and other racial markers there was no difference between themselves and the slave.

Americans Celebrating Their Ancestral Legacy  As Descendants of Confederates

On this very day in the twenty-first century we we encounter oppressed people newly come to America and tolerate their social inequality and suffering because of apathy but we know that these people eat, sleep, think and function the same as ourselves.  One has to throw in this heavy dose of “Realness” because it transcends time and context, the human experience is universal thing and it alone has not changed during the millions of years of our theoretical evolution upon this planet.  For this reason alone, which every cognizant human being who has ever had a chance to interact with anyone from another race can relate to, the argument of The Confederate Movement utterly fails.  This leaves us to note that, knowing black slaves were really not the inferior savages that racism painted them to be, white southerners nonetheless pursued this end solely for economic gain.  In America, racism has achieved proportions which supersede rational thought.  This leaves the primary justifications for The Confederate Movement to racism and economics, a poor argument for the oppression of millions of people. 

General Lee Surrenders To General Grant Ending The  American Civil War

The outcome of things is sometimes merely what it is at the end of the day and may have no bearing on morality or any lofty ideals though humans like to believe that it does.  In case is unique; it represents a battle between the haves and the have-nots that had been going on since the dawn of our species.  It represents the first successful attempt at true democracy and egalitarianism since ancient times.  America was founded upon principles elucidated in the Enlightenment, a movement that began in Europe and bought to this country by the very luminaries who crafted The Declaration of Independence.  As such America can be viewed as a great charrette, an experiment and a fully articulated movement against the concept of Divine Right, social, political and economic stratification, a movement against a caste system based on birthright, racial and religious status quo’s.  The authors of the Declaration of Independence were aware of the changing popularity of slavery in Europe, they knew that the trend was moving toward an end to slavery but they understood that the economy of young America, unlike that of Europe, was more closely tied to its proliferation for survival.  By the middle of the nineteenth-century America enjoyed the economic successes of the Industrial Revolution and the unfinished business of slavery was gaining momentum both in the north towards abolition and in the south towards secession as a means of preserving the institution of slavery.  The success of the American Revolution had inspired political revolutions around the globe, everywhere, monarchies and centuries-old empires base on Divine right were falling.  By the mid nineteenth-century America, still viewed by the world as the great beacon of freedom and modernity, was under critical fire because of its preservation of slavery.  Slavery remained the last blemish on the conscience of America but it was perceived as the life blood of the south that had got used to it and had invested great energy and cost into its continuation in spite of the obvious;  The Industrial Revolution with its mechanized production capability had rendered manual slave labor obsolete.  Rather than invest in the technological trends of the day and abandon slavery, the southern states chose tradition over pragmatism racism over brotherhood and these obsolete choices defined the parameters marking their eventual decisive loss of the Civil War.  The south organized The Confederate Movement as the first great resistance to the egalitarian ideas of the movement called the Enlightenment ironically within the very country that became the global icon for the manifestation of its lofty revolutionary ideals, America.

Jefferson Davis, President of The Confederacy, With His Wife

The world watched this battle of ideals play out on American soil.  The War of 1812 had nothing on this historic debacle; it was no more than a pot shot from a safe haven in comparison.  The American Civil War was the first significant challenge to the Ideals of the Enlightenment.  Anyone living at that time whether from the north or the south would surely have been aware of the impending doom.  In the mid-nineteenth century, without the aid of factories The Confederate Movement did not manufacture an army complete with forts, uniforms, officers, a flag and its own rebel currency overnight…  Abraham Lincoln saw this battle coming as surely as he was tall, and so did the rest of America and the global community. 

The Confederates Printed Their Own Currency

The secession of the Confederate states from America was a criminal act, a treasonous act perpetrated after many years of careful and deliberate preparation.  The Confederate Movement challenged the very existence of America and its primary icon, the one symbol that survives even its infamous, treacherous history is the confederate flag.  The confederates sacrificed their lives for the cause of slavery and racial inequality.   But what is even more unforgivable, they took the lives of hundreds of thousands of Union Officers who fought for freedom in order supplant The American Government  and establish the Confederate government, a system founded upon racial hatred and oppression manifested in the highest form of inhumanity, the forced enslavement of men, women and children…  The confederate flag was the icon of this great evil much as the swastika was for the Nazis…  No one forced the confederate states to enter into this union in 1776, they did so freely and happily and were thereafter bound by the laws of this great land even if it meant the demise of a long enjoyed tradition of slavery and racism.

Map Of Mid-Nineteenth Century America Showing The Slave States Highligted

So we must ask ourselves why the icon of criminals, traitors and racists whose illegal rebellion was put down would be flown aside the American flag. To do so would be to defile the legacy of those who died and fought for the preservation of the Union, the true defenders and heroes of America who fought and died under the true American flag. 

The Jail Cell At Fort Monroe Where Jefferson Davis Was Imprisoned  For Treason

While I cannot imagine any reasonable justification for the flying of the confederate flag on a government building I can understand why descendants of confederates would want to preserve the legacy of their ancestors.  As Americans we cannot deny them the personal use of this icon on private property.  But on public property, on government property, the confederate flag is nothing short of defilement of the American flag and of the legacy of freedom and struggle that it symbolizes.  The Confederate flag on U.S. land can only be viewed as a defilement and challenge to America itself! 

Fort Monroe Where The Confederate President Was Imprisoned

So let confederate sympathizers raise their infamous criminal flag on their own private property but let them take this icon of disgust, immorality and inhumanity from our sacred temples of freedom and democracy! The history of The Confederate Movement is sewn into the fabric of America albeit as a failed, criminal rebellion and the Civil War should be discussed and celebrated as a great triumph for freedom by the Union Army at a time of critical moral uncertainty in America.  Let the message be clearly sent, “The war was lost by confederates and confederacy, including its most powerful icon, the confederate flag, shall rise no more”!

FIN

Written by David Vollin from 3/8/12

A Rare Daguerreotype Showing Frederick Douglass At An Abolition Rally

CELEBRATING EMANCIPATION DAY 2012: A UNIFYING RITUAL...

This year I have developed my own tradition of simple rituals for the celebration/observance of Emancipation Day.  On April 16, 1862 the Emancipation Proclamation took effect in The District of Columbia and in the Southern Slaveholding states which had illegally seceded from the Union in 1861. 

In my opinion, Emancipation celebrates those enslaved Blacks who died in struggle never knowing the feel of freedom and those who have continued to carry the torch of freedom in the wake of that event of global historical significance. 

I light three votive 3-day candles; one symbolic of the ancestors who died enslaved to be lit on the day prior to emancipation day and a second candle representative of the continuum of struggle by those who have experienced the sweetness and contradiction of our freedom from racial oppression.  The third candle represents the continuum of struggle, agitation and evolution, the cultivation of freedom for all peoples for all ages to come.  In groups at the lighting of the first candle or at some ceremonious time during the day it is appropriate to sing Work Songs and Hymns composed by enslaved ancestors hopeful of someday being freed from slavery.

The first candle is a red candle lit at sunrise of the prior day to Emancipation day and a period of contemplation is offered in respect of the nameless millions who perished in captivity.  The red candle represents the bloodline of our ancestors and the bloodshed of the cruel system of slavery and racial oppression.  When the sun has set on the prior day I have a simple meal comprised of foods that the ancestors would have enjoyed in captivity, “Soul Food”. 

On Emancipation Day the second candle is lit at dawn, it is a black or brown candle whichever is desired, this candle symbolizes the freed Black peoples.   A period of contemplation is observed at the lighting to assess the meaning of freedom.  In groups, at the lighting of the second candle or at some ceremonious time during that day I believe it is appropriate to sing the Black National Anthem. 

The day after Emancipation Day at sunrise the third, green candle is lit.  This last candle signifies the proliferation of freedom.  An invocation should be made to challenge men to cause freedom to grow and prosper by planting and nurturing the seeds of freedom and racial equality.  A period of silent contemplation should be observed to ponder the ways in which one can be an agent for positive change evaluating ones deeds over the past year and making a commitment to expand ones commitment to this cause. 

The candles should be placed in a special place, a safe place, where they can continue to burn uninterrupted until quenched.  Photographs of relatives of all generations both living and deceased or artifacts belonging to them might be arranged around the candles in memoriam of this celebration.  Families should keep special albums and collections of artifacts to be shared during this time of the year.  A family historian should be selected to archive the documents for posterity and to record narrative interviews of family members documenting the heroic events and accomplishments of their lives.  Video interviews of elderly and deceased relatives should be played and enjoyed at this time.  It is important to interview the elders of our families while they can still share their life's adventures.

The use of red, black/brown and green candles is no coincidence, it is a symbolic gesture borrowed from the Black liberation movement of the 1950's through 1970's.  The use of these colors ties together the concurrent history of civil rights in the  mid nineteenth century and the mid twentieth century.  The enormous power of icons, such as the American Flag itself and the African American Liberation Flag, are important tools for the preservation of history and consciousness within a memorializing ceremonies of Emancipation's Day.  Like the erection of permanent monuments to African Americans and their struggle, the legacy of such practices serves primarily to create solidarity and universality of thought and intent for a cause that is righteous but underwhelmingly observed by many Black Americans.

But Emancipation Day should not be just a solemn memorial for a violent past and tumultuous present and future it should also be a festive time and people should add feasts and galas, picnics and parties to commemorate this time.  It should inspire hope and engender friendship and community extending beyond the nuclear family and into the world…  After all, whether history duly credits it or not, the American civil rights movement of The United States was like a clarion call spreading the hopefulness of freedom and inspiring nations around the globe to follow in our lead, much as the American Revolutionary War had inspired the globe before it...

This is my way of celebrating Emancipation Day… It is the result of many long years of contemplation and comparison to other Emancipation and other traditions, such as the Jewish Passover for example, that memorialize the culmination of a period of socio-political struggle.  Like anything new, this is merely an idea and has much tweaking and refashioning to be done.  It is my opinion that all great traditions began in this way and have been refined and redefined over the long years of human history.  Whether history will look back upon my suggestion on how Emancipation Day might be observed is unknown but let this stand for the record as having been shared with the ages for their seasoned consideration...

FIN

Written by David Vollin

AGITATE!

AGITATE!

AGITATE!