Tag: Black History

Who Was Crispus Attucks?

College of Political Knowledge

Subject:  Black History

February and time for African-Americans to be praised for their contributions to mankind…..personally, I think it should be all the time and not just a month a year…..but who am I to change things up?

Ever hear of the Boston Massacre?

Crispus Attucks became the first casualty of the American Revolution when he was shot and killed. Although Attucks was credited as the leader and instigator of the event, debate raged for over a century as to whether he was a hero and a patriot, or a rabble-rousing villain. The debate notwithstanding, Attucks, immortalized as “the first to defy, the first to die,” has been lauded as a true martyr, “the first to pour out his blood as a precious libation on the altar of a people’s rights.”

Attucks’ occupation made him particularly vulnerable to the presence of the British. As a seaman, he felt the ever-present danger of impressment into the British navy. As a laborer, he felt the competition from British troops, who often took part-time jobs during their off-duty hours and worked for lower wages. Historians definitely place Attucks in Boston in March of 1770. Assuming that the Boston Gazette advertisement did refer to him, he would have been about 47-years old.

A fight between Boston rope makers and three British soldiers on Friday, March 2, 1770 set the stage for a later confrontation. After dusk on Monday, March 5, 1770, a crowd of colonists confronted a sentry who had struck a boy for complaining that an officer was late in paying a barber bill. As anger escalated, a church bell rang, which drew people out of their homes. The British soldiers of the 29th Regiment of Foot were called to duty. In turn, townspeople responded by hurling snowballs and debris at the soldiers. A group of men led by Attucks approached the vicinity of the government building with clubs in hand. Violence soon erupted, and a soldier was struck with a thrown piece of wood. Some accounts named Attucks as the person responsible. Other witnesses stated that Attucks was “leaning upon a stick” when the soldiers opened fire.

Five Americans were killed and six were wounded in what came to be called the Boston Massacre. Attucks was the first one killed; he took two bullets in the chest. Rope maker Samuel Gray and sailor James Caldwell also died in the incident. Samuel Maverick, a 17-year-old joiner’s apprentice, died the next day. Irish leather worker Patrick Carr died nine days later. Attucks’ body was carried to Faneuil Hall, where it lay in state until Thursday, March 8, when he and the other victims were buried together.

He should be held up as a martyr and a leader of the revolution……his name should be the first name remembered about the Boston Massacre…..and not some footnote in obscurity…..

There Are Idiots And Then There Is Mississippi

I have not been the kindest person to the Mississippi state government, my state, they pretend and promise so much and deliver nothing……I guess we could say that about a lot of politicians but Mississippi can take the prize…….every politician in the state ran on an education promise and it has been that way for 40 years and yet the state still has one of the worse educational records in the country and yet the voter keeps believing the lie…….maybe that is a good indictment of their educational standards.

The latest session just started and has already made the news……

By Jerry Mitchell, Clarion Ledge

More than a half century ago, Mississippi created a state Sovereignty Commission to block enforcement of federal laws.

Now two key state lawmakers are introducing legislation to attempt to do much the same thing. House Bill 490 would create a committee to help neutralize federal laws and regulations “outside the scope of the powers delegated by the people to the federal government in the United States Constitution.”

Robert McElvaine, professor of history at Millsaps College, said all this bill will accomplish is to put Mississippi up for ridicule. “ ‘The Neutralization of Federal Law’?” he said. “I am astounded to see such a measure introduced in the 21st century. Do the authors of the bill see Mississippi as part of the United States?”

He pointed out that the issue of state sovereignty “was settled by a terrible war 150 years ago as well as by numerous Supreme Court decisions.”

Read More…

Are you really surprised?  No matter what law is enacted in DC there will always be a movement to circumvent it by the states and always it is under the pretext of the 10th amendment…….a contrarian’s favorite part of the Constitution.  Really does not matter which political group is in power….it is always the 10th that is used to justify any and all opposition to Washington…….

But wait!  There is more from  the great state of Mississippi…..

(Newser) – Mississippi has officially ratified the 13th Amendment to the Constitution—a mere 148 years after the amendment outlawing slavery cleared Congress and was sent to state legislatures for approval. Mississippi’s legislature voted to ratify the amendment in 1995, but it never became official because the state never notified the United States Archivist, the Clarion-Ledger reports. The oversight was cleared up after a doctor saw the movie Lincoln and did some research into when different states had ratified the slavery ban.

The doctor—a recent immigrant from India—and a colleague contacted state officials, who sent in the paperwork to finally make ratification official. The next-to-last state to ratify the 13th Amendment, Kentucky, did so in 1976. “We’re very deliberate in our state. We finally got it right,” says state Sen. Hillman Frazier, the Democrat who introduced the resolution to ratify the amendment in 1995. It passed the Mississippi Senate and House unanimously, with some lawmakers abstaining.

Better late than never….I guess…….I bet you thought it was a done deal…the banning of slavery……..now you see why I say, “if you visit Mississippi set your watch back 150 years”…….goes to show what happens when no one is watching….

Gabriel’s Rebellion

College of Political Knowledge

Professor’s Classroom

Subject:  Black History/Early American History

It is February and the country celebrates Black History Month……..I try, in some small way, to give some history that may not be widely known, people, incidents, etc……..

We all know the history of slavery in this country or we should if not already…..all the cruelty, all the inequality and the bad stuff we are taught in school.  But you would think that if it was as bad as we are taught there would have been a rebellion or two…..at least you would think, huh?  Then why was there NO armed opposition to the practice of slavery?

I will bet that there is not a handful of people who know the name of Gabriel……thanx to the Encyclopedia Brittanica…….his name may be better known and his place in history……..

Gabriel, also called Gabriel Prosser    (born c. 1775, near Richmond, Va. [U.S.]—died September 1800, Richmond), American bondsman who planned the first major slave rebellion in U.S. history (Aug. 30, 1800). His abortive revolt greatly increased the whites’ fear of the slave population throughout the South.

The son of an African-born mother, Gabriel grew up as the slave of Thomas H. Prosser. Gabriel became a deeply religious man, strongly influenced by biblical example. In the spring and summer of 1800, he laid plans for a slave insurrection aimed at creating an independent black state in Virginia with himself as king. He planned a three-pronged attack on Richmond, Va., that would seize the arsenal, take the powder house, and kill all whites except Frenchmen, Methodists, and Quakers. Some historians believe that Gabriel’s army of 1,000 slaves (estimates range from 2,000 to 50,000), assembled 6 miles (9.5 km) outside the city on the appointed night, might have succeeded had it not been for a violent rainstorm that washed out bridges and inundated roads. Before the rebel forces could be reassembled, Governor James Monroe, already informed of the plot, ordered out the state militia. Gabriel and about 34 of his companions were subsequently arrested, tried, and hanged.

Sad to say that this was a wake up call to whites……it help usher in more restrictive and cruel penalties against blacks….it help the masters to tighten their grips so that the slaves could not learn about anything other than the land they had to work.  Gabriel tried but all he did was make things a bit worse than they already were…..after the Civil War things got better but were NOT good……it took the Civil Rights Movement to finally free the slaves…..but they will never be truly free until “REAL” equality is accomplished and in today’s political climate that does not look at all promising.

I believe that if you are going to teach about slavery then everything should be taught……

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty…”  We all know where those words are printed….but at times they are just that “WORDS”…….that had NO meaning when it came to the practice of slavery.

 

Who Was Toussaint?

College of Political Knowledge

Subject:  Black History

Remember a few years back there was this uproar from the radical Right about Hollywood star Danny Glover of Lethal weapon fame for his meeting with that bastard Chavez of Venezuela?  Of course it was painted that he was supporting Chavez and was spitting in the face of America…consorting with our enemies and such…..the truth is the Mr. Glover wanting to do a  movie and could not find financing in the US and found a sympathetic ear in Chavez….the movie was about the life of Toussaint, who according to historians lead the slave revolt in Haiti which culminated in the independence of Haiti from France……..

Now speaking of Toussaint……

February is Black History Month and I like to keep with my tradition of posting on people that may not be recognizable to the American people but nonetheless were important individuals in their own right….

The year is 1791……..after the French revolution of 1789 which did not effect the island nation all that much but in the ensuing years…….

‘Ouverture, Toussaint (c. 1743–1803), Haitian patriot and revolutionary leader. A self-educated former slave, François Dominique Toussaint-L’Ouverture joined the Haitian Revolutionin 1791 and became its foremost general, defeating both French and British forces. In 1802, he was betrayed and captured, and he died imprisoned in France.

A short history of Toussaint is from the website, historywiz.com……..

The remarkable leader of this slave revolt was Toussaint Breda (later called Toussaint L’Ouverture, and sometimes the “black Napoleon”). Slave revolts from this time normally ended in executions and failure – this story is the exception.It began in 1791 in the French colony of Saint Dominique (later Haiti). Though born a slave in Saint Dominique, Toussaint learned of Africa from his father, who had been born a free man there. He learned that he was more than a slave, that he was a man with brains and dignity. He was fortunate in having a liberal master who had him trained as a house servant and allowed him to learn to read and write. Toussaint took full advantage of this, reading every book he could get his hands on. He particularly admired the writings of the French Enlightenment philosophers, who spoke of individual rights and equality.

In 1789 the French Revolution rocked France. The sugar plantations of Saint Dominique, though far away, would never be the same. Spurred on by such Enlightenment thinkers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the early moderate revolutionaries considered seriously the question of slavery. Those moderate revolutionaries were not willing to end slavery but they did apply the “Rights of Man” to all Frenchmen, including free blacks and mulattoes (those of mixed race). Plantation owners in the colonies were furious and fought the measure. Finally the revolutionaries gave in and retracted the measure in 1791.

The news of this betrayal triggered mass slave revolts in Saint Dominique, and Toussaint became the leader of the slave rebellion. He became known as Toussaint L’Ouverture (the one who finds an opening) and brilliantly led his rag-tag slave army. He successfully fought the French (who helped by succumbing to yellow fever in large numbers) as well as invading Spanish and British.

By 1803 Napoleon was ready to get Haiti off his back: he and Toussaint agreed to terms of peace. Napoleon agreed to recognize Haitian independence and Toussaint agreed to retire from public life. A few months later, the French invited Toussaint to come to a negotiating meeting will full safe conduct. When he arrived, the French (at Napoleon’s orders) betrayed the safe conduct and arrested him, putting him on a ship headed for France. Napoleon ordered that Toussaint be placed in a prison dungeon in the mountains, and murdered by means of cold, starvation, and neglect. Toussaint died in prison, but others carried on the fight for freedom.

Years later, in exile at St. Helena, when asked about his dishonorable treatment of Toussaint, Napoleon merely remarked, “What could the death of one wretched Negro mean to me?”

A sad commentary on a brave man that lead his people and his country into the light of freedom….it is equally sad that little is known about this man and his accomplishments…..maybe this post will help people understand how important this man was to Haiti and to the whole civil rights movement…..

Who Was First?

College of Political Knowledge

Subject:  Black History/American History

It is Black History Month, where the accomplishments and achievements of Afro-American citizens have had on the country…we celebrate our diversity and our citizens……

Last year I wrote a post about the Father Of The Civil Rights Movement”….Thomas Paine (go to search and type in Paine’s name and read his contribution and why I say that)…..this year I ask which was the first state to issue a abolition act?

Since I find Paine an interesting and forgotten Founder….it plays into the question…..

The answer for those who are not aware of this……it was the state of Pennsylvania…..the Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition of Slavery Act of 1780….and with this act the “preamble”, if you will, was said to be written by Thomas Paine while he was employed by the Pennsylvania Assembly……the “preamble” is as follows:

When we contemplate our abhorrence of that condition to which the arms and tyranny of Great Britain were exerted to reduce us, when we look back on the variety of dangers to which we have been exposed, and how miraculously our wants in many instances have been supplied, and our deliverances wrought, when even hope and human fortitude have become unequal to the conflict, we are unavoidably led to a serious and grateful sense of the manifold blessings, which we have undeservedly received from the hand of that Being from whom every good and perfect gift cometh. Impressed with these ideas, we conceive that it is our duty , and we rejoice that it is in our power to extend a portion of that freedom to others which hath been extended to us, and release from that state of thraldom to which we ourselves were tyrannically doomed, and from which we now have every prospect of being delivered. It is not for us to inquire why in the creation of mankind the inhabitants of several parts of the earth were distinguished by a difference in feature or complexion. It is sufficient to know that all are the work of an Almighty Hand. We find in the distribution of the human species that the most fertile as well as the most barren parts of the earth are inhabited by Men of complexions different from ours and from each other; from whence we may reasonably as well as religiously infer that He who placed them in their various situations, hath extended equally His care and protection to all, and that it becometh not us to counteract His mercies.

Not only was Paine there in the original fight for the emancipation of slaves….but his words were strong and eloquent, just as they were in Common Sense that lead Americans to demand independence…….and the birth of the nation……

Few history books tell the whole story of the fight for freedom for the slaves……take nothing away from people like MLK or Malcolm X or Harriet Tubman or Douglass or any of the champions of freedom for the oppressed…..but in the same vain…take nothing away from those that worked tirelessly with no credit for the work they did……

Granted Thomas Paine is NOT a black person but he did more in the early days of the republic to free the slaves than any other of the Founders and he should be remembered for the work that he did…….

“The Slavery Clause” (Black History Month)

Professor’s Classroom

Subject:  American History/Declaration of Independence/Black History

Come my children and you shall hear…

The BS that is fed to your ear……

Sorry, had to get a little poem in there….

We are in Black History Month and I would like to help everyone understand the work that went into dismantling the institution of slavery….and that not all that is being taught is the whole history of the lives and contributions of African-Americans……

During the first draft of the Declaration of Independence there was a clause, known as the anti-slavery clause, and when the first draft was presented to the membership, it was opposed by the Southern colonies, go figure and has been said it was deleted from the final draft to get the Southern colonies to approve of the DoI.

This is the wording of the slavery clause in the first draft of the DoI:

He [King George III] has waged cruel War against human Nature itself, violating its most Sacred Right of Life & Liberty in the Persons of a distant People who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into Slavery in another Hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their Transportation thither. This piratical Warfare, the opprobrium of infidel Powers, is the Warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain. He has prostituted his Negative for Suppressing every legislative Attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable Commerce, determining to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, and that this Assemblage of Horrors might want no Fact of distinguished Die, he is now exciting those very People to rise in Arms among us, and to purchase that Liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former Crimes committed against the Liberties of one People, with Crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Now the common belief and the history that is taught would have us believe that Jefferson wrote the first and final draft…..I am sorry but it would seem that if this idea was truly one of Jefferson’s he would have fought harder to keep it in the document….he did not!

It has been said and taught that Jefferson cursed the institution of slavery and that he did not like the fact that it existed…….historians would have us believe that he hated it so much that he freed his slaves later in life……..a slight exaggeration……he did free slaves…he had 22 and on his death bed freed 3….one of whom was a slave named Hemmings…..(wink wink)…that means that 19 we still slaves when Jefferson died…does not sound like someone who hated the institution…..Many of the founding fathers are said to have hated slavery, while still keeping slaves to do their bidding.

But I have a hard time believing that these guys were all that anti-slavery when comments like these were said:

“I have supposed the black man in his present state might not be [equal to the white man]; but it would be hazardous to affirm that equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.” –Thomas Jefferson to Chastellux, 1785.

“Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people [blacks] are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.” –Thomas Jefferson:

“The improvement of the blacks in body and mind, in the first instance of their mixture with the whites, has been observed by every one, and proves that their inferiority is not the effect merely of their condition of life.” Thomas Jefferson: Notes on Virginia

Sorry people but it does not sound like Jefferson believes that ALL MEN are created equal….to me……

If Jefferson did not write the slavery clause then who?

The first person that comes to mind is the forgotten father of independence…Thomas Paine…….I know no one is being taught this information….so ask why…..

Paine arrived in the colonies on November of 1774 and by early 1775 had written and published, African Slavery In America” which was a harsh condemnation of the institution.  And shortly after that the first anti-slavery association was established in Philadelphia.  If anyone can say that they either wrote or influenced the slavery clause of the DoI it would be Paine.

Thomas Paine can accurately be called the Father of the Abolitionist Movement in America….of all the founding fathers he alone can say that he was opposed to slavery from his first sight of it in America and that he was the FIRST to openly condemn enslavement of a people.

Paine deserves better than the treatment history has given him…he deserves the acknowledgment that he was truly an American patriot and a Founding Father…..to deny him in dissertation of American history is to deny the principles and and beliefs that make this a great country.  Academia has done all in its power to eliminate or marginalize Paine and his contributions to the cause of independence….and so far they have been successful and Americans are the worse for not knowing his story.

Who Is The Father Of Civil Rights?

Professor’s Classroom

Subject:  American History/Black History

February is Black History Month and I would like to write about a person that gets NO respect when it comes to history.  We can teach all about Douglass and Dred Scott and Harriet Tubman and Martin Luther King, Jr, and I do not want to take anything away from these important figures in the fight against slavery and champions of civil rights, but there are those people that began the fight even earlier than mentioned.

The very beginning of the history of this country was a pivotal time and it could have been a historic time in the anti-slavery movement….wait!  Until 1775, there was NO anti-slavery movement.  There may have been those people that thought it was a despicable practice but if they did they kept their thoughts and opinions to themselves…that is until the arrival of one Thomas Paine, who later became famous for his pamphlet, “Common Sense” which is credited for the whole independence movement.

In November of 1774 Paine arrived in the Colonies from England with a letter of introduction from Ben Franklin.  He then set about acquiring work as a printer and writer.  One of his first published works was an essay entitled “African Slavery In America”….in which he set about condemning the practice harshly….one of the first to do so publicly in the Colonies.  History teaches us that several of the founding fathers detested the practice and even cursed it privately, but NONE did anything about it.  Paine did!

Shortly after the publishing of Paine’s condemnation of slavery, the first anti-slavery society was formed in Philadelphia in the Sun Tavern on Second Street in April 1775.

Later in our history it was Abraham Lincoln that gave us the Emancipation Proclamation, but if you read Paine’s anti-slavery essay you will see that Lincoln had the second proclamation;  he was not that original.

Everyone is taught that 22 September 1862, Lincoln issued the first Emancipation Proclamation and no where is the essay by Thomas Paine taught or even remembered.  For without Paine the anti-slavery movement would have been longer in coming to the forefront of American society.

Once again I say that I am NOT trying to lessen or ignore any of the people and their attempts in the area of civil rights, only that everyone involved should be acknowledged and celebrated and held in high esteem for ending an institution that makes people slaves……

A Black History Menu

We are in the middle of celebrating Black History Month…where people learn about the lives, accomplishments and history of African-Americans in American history……

NBC is celebrated Black History month with a special menu:

Fried Chicken

Collar greens w/ smoked turkey

White rice/Black eyed peas

Jalapeno cornbread

A special meal to let people know the diet of African-Americans—sorry but if I was black I would be offended by this stereotyping….Hell…I am offended by this overt comment on black Americans…..

Black History Month is celebrated to show the diversity and accomplishments off ALL that fought for civil rights and especially those in the early years that fought against the institution of slavery….and this “special” menu is just an ignorant move but an unfeeling and uneducated group……