Category Archives: race

Of Mice and MAGA

Posted on by
Reply

The situation would be hilarious if it wasn’t so frightening.

We have a President who daily seems to get more petty, more vengeful, and less understanding of the country he unfortunately was elected to lead.

Example one:  One of the many lies that dominated his speech to Congress last week, lost in the avalanche of other irresponsible claims and accusations, came when he congratulated hit man, Elon, for uncovering a federally-financed program to change the gender of mice.

My friend Derry Brownfield would call stuff such as this, “ignorance gone to seed.” The mental Kudzu that is this administration’s crop is as invasive to democracy as the real weed is to the southern countryside.

The program that produced this totally-undeserved presidential scorn has to do with transgenic mice, which are used in biomedical research to study how human tissue reacts to disease and the cures or potential cures for those diseases. Do not expect Trump to ever correct himself.

In fact, it’s his newest factoid and he’ll beat the blood out of transgender mice.

Second: Trump has cut off $400 million in grants and other federal funds to Columbia University because some pro-Palestinian demonstrations took place on the campus. He also has threatened  cutoffs to other schools that allow “illegal” protests. Forget the First Amendment’s protection of speech and the right of assembly. If Prosecutor, Judge, and Jury Donald Trump decides events or words are “illegal” in his mind, then they’re illegal and he again will demonstrate his capacity for retribution aimed at those who think differently than he does—-assuming he thinks at all.

The third, and far more egregious thought this man had is the late-week decision to erase history from the Pentagon’s records.

That kind of thing usually was a matter for Soviet Premiers in the 20th Century and for conquering tribes thousands of years ago. Chipping off all of the carved words and records of deeds of former rulers was fairly common when their land was conquered. It has continued in a material sense in areas of the Middle East infected with the Taliban and other brutal bands.  Erase the history of a people. Erase their culture. Erase the people.

In his rabid drive to erase anything from the public mind that encourages equal opportunity,  Defense Secretary—Pete Hegseth—has ordered, as the Associated Press says, “tens of thousands of photos and online posts“ that emphasize Diversity, Eqality, and Inclusion removed from the department database.

When the AP published its story last week, and when officials confirmed this looney program, more than 26,000 images had been slated for removal with an outlook that the total removals might reach six figures.

The main priority might be the most childish of all—remove ALL content in that archive that was published during the Biden administration, regardless personhood.

Erasing history—and that’s what this is—has eliminated the stories of a lot of people who overcome the prejudices of their day long before DEI became an epithet.  But they’re being erased because they are not one of “us,” as defined by our President.

By far the most inane victim of this purge of the image files is the elimination of images of Enola Gay. THE Enola Gay, the B-29 that dropped the first atomic bomb in world history in 1945. So far, however, the current administration has not towed the real airplane out of the Smithsonian installation at Dulles International Airport and broken it up. .

The airplane already has survived a decades-long controversy over whether it should be put on public display, not because of it’s “gayness” but because some felt displaying it would glorify the use of nuclear weapons against human beings.

The rabid rush to eliminate images of the first women, the first black person—the first minority of any kind—to achieve something notable in military service has put a spotlight on the bomber which is named for pilot Paul Tibbets’s mother. The spotlight also has been put on people who are committed to narrowness in thought, in speech, and in their corrupted definition of leadership.

One of the targeted photos is of Marine Corps PFC Harold Gonsalves, a Mexican-American who threw himself onto a Japanese grenade at Okinawa to save the lives of others. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. But he has a Hispanic name and that appears to be enough to erase him from that database of history.

Author Richard Cohen comments in his book, Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped History,  observes, “History has ever been a harbor for dishonest writing—a home for forgers, the insane or even ‘history-killers’ who write so dully they neutralize their subjects…

”Most countries at one time or another have been guilty of proclaiming false versions of their past. The late 19th-century French historian Ernest Renan is known for his statement that “forgetfulness” is ‘essential in the creation of a nation’—a positive gloss on Goethe’s blunt aphorism, ‘Patriotism corrupts history.’ But this is why nationalism often views history as a threat. What governments declare to be true is one reality, the judgments of historians quite another. Few recorders set out deliberately to lie; when they do, they can have great impact, if only in certain parts of the world.”

We are seeing the truth of Cohen’s remarks in the lies being circulated in Washington that seek to modify, if not destroy, our past as well as corrupt our present.

-0-

The Meritocracy

Posted on by
Reply

We are waiting to see the day the Trump administration’s efforts to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion do two things.

  1. Proclaims Black History Month will not be recognized.
  2. Eliminate the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Black History Month began as “Negro History Week” in 1926 at the urging of one of our nation’s greatest Black historians, Carter G. Woodson, and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, with Woodson saying it was important to the cultural survival of Blacks within the broader White society.  The week was observed in the February week when the birth of Abraham Lincoln was celebrated.

He commented, “If a race has no history, it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. The American Indian left no continuous record. He did not appreciate the value of tradition; and where is he today? The Hebrew keenly appreciated the value of tradition, as is attested by the Bible itself. In spite of worldwide persecution, therefore, he is a great factor in our civilization.”

The Black United Students group and Black educators at Kent State University proposed in 1969 that the week-long celebration become Black History Month.  The first observance was in 1970.

President Ford endorsed it as part of the national Bicentennial celebrations in 1976.

But with the arrival of the second Trump term, Black History Month appeared to be on somewhat shaky ground.  One of the first things Trump did when resuming office was to sign an executive order ending “all discriminatory programs, including illegal DEI and ‘diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility’ mandates, policies, programs, preferences, and activities in the Federal Government.”

Within a matter of days, agencies were circulating memos, many of them announcing in terms similar to the line used by a Justice Department memo, “These programs divided Americans by race, wasted taxpayer dollars, and resulted in shameful discrimination.”

To the surprise of some, Trump did sign a proclamation recognizing Black History Month at the start of February calling on American citizens and public officials to “celebrate the contributions of so many black American patriots who have indelibly shaped our Nation’s history.”

EEOC:

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission exists but President Trump has rendered it useless, as he has the National Labor Relations Board.

Acting quickly after resuming office, he fired then-Chairman Charlotte Burrows, a Biden appointee who became the first chairman ever fired by a President. He also canned Commissioner Joycelyn Samuels, one of his own appointees from 2020, leaving only two members of the five-member commission. Trump appointee Andrea Lucas was named the acting chair. She is identified as a strong opponent of DEI programs, which she says promote reverse discrimination. The also is known as a critic of legal protections for transgender people. Her term expires July 1.

Failure to reappoint her or to name a successor will leave only Kalpana Kotagel on the commission.  Kotagel is an African-American employment attorney appointee of President Biden. Her term expires in 2027, potentially leaving the commission with no members.

Kotagel is doomed.  She’s the kind of person Trump loves to hate. As a private attorney, she specialized in DEI cases, particularly involving the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and has represented clients in other civil rights employment actions. Four years ago she worked with the Transgender Defense and Educational Fund when Aetna Insurance Company granted access to breast augmentation surgery for male policyholders who underwent surgery to become women. She also is a member of the Advisory Board Office of Equity and Inclusion at the University of Pennsylvania.

Trump criticized the EEOC in his first term as ineffective and took no steps to make it so. The commission’s staff has been cut by more than 40% by Congress.

About the same time he was ravaging the EEOC, Trump fired National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Jennifer Abruzzo, a Biden appointee, and Democratic board member Gwynne Wilcox, leaving the NLRB also with just two members and three vacancies, thus unable to do any business.

In place of these and other programs created to insure qualified people have equal chances to become employed, Trump trumpets the meritocracy, saying people should be hired on the basis of merit, not race or other factors. But he has dismantled the agencies that were established to make sure that everybody was considered on their merits.

And he has celebrated the month by firing a lot of Black American patriots—including, just last week, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—who are shaping our present.  Someday our present will be someone else’s past.  We hope those of the future are harsh in their judgments of our present and the President who is making it.

Governor Parson has pardoned my killer.

Posted on by
1

I was Robert Newsom, a middle-aged widower-farmer in Callaway County who bought a 14-year old girl slave and raped her whenever I wanted, including in the farm wagon on the way home from the sale.  She had two children with me and was expecting a third when I went to her cabin in June of 1855 looking for more sex.

She beat me to death because I had ignored her protests against my abuse. and had warned me not to come to her cabin. She burned my body to hide what she had done.

This is not a tale of reincarnation. I died in the second act of a three-act reader’s theatre production of Song of the Middle River, written by Thomas D. Pauley III, a longtime professor at Lincoln University that I got to know and appreciate late in his life. He was at the performance, just short of his 90th birthday.

(MU professor and distinguished actor Clyde Ruffin, who played George—the slave in whom Celia sought refuge—and Griot, who told the story; MU Theater student Valerie Raven-Ellen Backstrom* as Celia; and Bob Priddy)

The State Historical Society, produced three readers’ theatre productions that were performed at Boonville’s historic Thespian Hall. This one was performed on February 6, 2009.

Celia was hanged on December 21, 1855 for killing Newsom.  She’s referred to in various accounts as Cecilia Newsom because slaves often were given the last names of their owners no matter what their real names were.  But she was never considered part of the family—just property.

As Newsom, I played someone whose wife had died in 1849. Some say we had fourteen children in the 37 years we were married. Others list ten.  By the time she died, I owned 800 acres of farmland southwest of Fulton. About half of the families in Callaway County owned at least one slave, and about one out of every three people in the county were property then.

Several counties along the river in central Missouri had high percentages of enslaved population, earning the area the title of “Little Dixie.”  Ten percent of all of the people in Missouri were enslaved then; thirteen percent of all families had at least one slave. The slave population was closed to 115,000 and there were 24,300 slave owners. The 1860 census put a monetary value on slaves—$44.2 million. That’s the equivalent of about $1,578,320,000 today.

It was not uncommon for owners of female slaves, even young ones, to define “property” and “property rights” broadly, to say the least. After she beat him to death, she burned his body and buried the ashes and other remains.

Reports indicate her defense attorney used an 1814 law protecting women from sexual assault but the judge ruled that Celia, as a slave was not legally recognized as a citizen and as a slave, her status as a woman was not recognized in the law, a ruling underlined a few years later when the Supreme Court ruled Dred Scott had no right to sue for his freedom because black people would never be considered citizens.

She was hanged. Nobody knows where she’s buried. But now Governor Parson has pardoned her and in doing so has placed a new spotlight on justice for those our society has considered—and in some cases still does consider—different and therefore not deserving of having the rights the rest of us have.

One of her descendants, Alan Turner, said at the recent commemoration of her execution in Fulton, “It’s worth mentioning  that if Celia’s act of self-defense occurred today, she most likely would not have been executed. Robert Newsom would be convicted of a crime instead”

Each year, some of Celia’s descendants gather in Fulton to remember her case. They hope Callaway County will take notice of what happened to Celia and that the legislature will pass a bill requiring schools to make her story part of the learning process.

Legislation has been filed for the session starting soon.  But it might be difficult to pass in an era where many loud voices think the most important this is to post the Ten Commandments in school and teach about the Bible.

They seem to be afraid that they will lose something if their children learn about all of our history.

Despite them, we are slowly being taught about the time when many of our ancestors were not good enough to be considered citizens—-and when some of our residents are deemed not worthy of living here.

The descendants hope a monument to Celia can be erected in Fulton to remind all of us of what our culture once was and to make us uneasy today when it is easy to condemn others as non-citizens or to look at them as lesser than ourselves.

A year or so ago, a monument was erected in St. Louis honoring enslaved people who sued for their freedom and the white attorneys who helped some of them win. It sprang from work beginning more than thirty years ago when the local records preservation program began at the state archives. Then-archivist Ken Winn recalled (Rescuing History – Rediscovering the St. Louis Freedom Suits – FREEDOM SUITS MEMORIAL FOUNDATION (stlfreedomsuits.org) the discovery of the documents involved in 300 lawsuits and more than 350 people:

Unfortunately, the verdicts frequently go unnoted in the case files, but of these 300 cases it would appear nearly half of the enslaved plaintiffs won their lawsuits. This is remarkable because the plaintiffs could not testify on their own behalf and were forced to rely on white lawyers and judges and needed white witnesses to help them. They risked physical harm, harassment, and intimidation from those who wished to keep them in bondage. 

All of these suits did not happen in only in St. Louis. A slave named Sant won his suit in Boone County; we don’t know if there were more filed in other counties but it would be no surprise if some ere.

In Greene County, Millie Sawyers finally won her freedom on a third attempt in 1836.  But after she won her freedom, a mob took her from a home and beat her badly. Some of those involved are considered founders of Springfield.  It’s thought she survived but she disappears from the historical record after that.

A play called “The Milly Project” was created and performed in Springfield a few years ago. It later was turned into a documentary film.

We had an outstanding discussion about the memorial and about The Milly Project in a podcast for the Missouri Bar more than  a year ago. (‘Is It Legal To…?’: Missouri’s Freedom Suits, ‘The Milly Project’ (mobar.org)

Our state and nation are great at building statues to men. We have a few showing women.  But monuments to slaves?  Hardly any. We need them.

In Boonville, a statue of Hannah Cole commemorates her as the first white woman to settle on the south side of the Missouri River in central Missouri.  There probably was a second woman who was with her—a sister-in-law named Phoebe—but she’s overlooked.

And so is Lucy, a third woman, Hannah’s slave, given to her as a wedding present according to some accounts, who stayed with Hannah until she died and is buried near her mistress in a cemetery south of Boonville although the exact locations are uncertain. She would have been the first black woman in that part of the state (there might have been a male slave but that history is even more cloudy that hers).There’s not statue nor is there any marker nothing that she probably was on the same pirogue that came across the river with Hannah and her sister-in-law, that she braved the hostile conditions of 1810 just as the white women did. But there is nothing either in the city or in the cemetery that says she existed.

On December 1, 1862, Abraham Lincoln told congress, “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise —with the occasion…”

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free honorable— alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just — a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.

On the larger scale, Lincoln’s words are fitting for our times.  But in terms of today’s discussion, his comment that, “In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free” is particularly appropriate, then as part of s second revolution, and today as a warning against accepting any form of tyranny—within or without.

When I was Robert Newsom that night on the stage of the oldest continuously operating theatre west of the Alleghenies—it opened nineteen months after Celia was hanged—her story became part of my story.  Whether we like it or not, her story is part of the nation’s story.

Alan Turner said in Fulton a few days ago, “There’s a saying that time heals pain, and that is true to an extent, but some pains transcend generations and never completely heal.” Unfortunately, each generation seems to find someone new on whom to inflict the pain of inequality.

So, Justice has finally come for Celia, thanks to Governor Parson. But the search for justice remains for many and for some, the pains and the search are ongoing.  And as long as that is happening, the desire in our Constitution for a more perfect union remains unfulfilled.

*(Photo Credits: State Historical Society of Missouri and The Missouri Bar. Valerie has since 2009 become an award-winning playwright, illustrator, author, and teaching artist. She is based in Chicago)