Henry Highland Garnet, pastor, abolitionist, and diplomat
Henry Highland Garnet
Commentary by Black Kos Editor ChitownKev
In late November 1881, as the ship Mayumba sailed up the West African coast picking up various cargoes, the ship’s medical officer, 22-year old Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, was exhausted and ready to return to England. Doyle then made acquaintance with (and probably treated) an elderly and “dignified” black man who took a cabin at one of the ports. The black man immediately struck Doyle as “the most intelligent and well-read man whom I met on the Coast” and they enjoyed each other’s company for three days, discussing a wide range of literary and historical topics (for example, a biography of American historian John Lathrop Motley written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.).
I suspect that the “dignified” and “well-read” man, the American ambassador to Liberia and former abolitionist, Henry Highland Garnet, is known to some here on The Porch. I’d never heard of him until I read an introduction to a volume of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories that mentioned the Doyle/Garnet encounter of late 1881, three months before Garnet’s death. And I certainly read nothing of Garnet in any of the history books; usually, the only black abolitionists mentioned in history books nowadays are Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman and, to a lesser extent, Sojourner Truth.
While I am aware of two biographies of Garnet written by Joel Schor and Earl Ofrai Hutchinson, I could only locate those in my local university library. Dr. Sterling Stuckey’s Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory & the Foundations of Black America has a wonderful chapter of analysis on Garnet covering most of Garnet’s life from his beginnings as a slave in Maryland through his abolitionist period and his 26 years as pastor in New York’s Shiloh Presbyterian Church to his appointment and acceptance of the diplomatic post in Liberia in 1881.
My attention was drawn, though, to two specific items collected by historian Herbert Apthaker in his seven-volume A Documentary History of the Negro in the United States (which has now become a must for my personal library) both for their historical content and the relevance to modern discussions of race/privilege, especially those that show up here at The Great Orange Satan from time to time.
And it is to those documents that I now turn.
The first document is, appropriately enough, Garnet’s rollicking and militant “An Address to the Slaves of the United States,” delivered during the National Negro Convention in Buffalo, New York in August 1843. Garnet’s fusion of biblical rhetoric with the indictment of and inherent sinfulness of the American slavery, and the nonviolent and violent means that have been used by American blacks and even “the combined powers of Europe” is extraordinary even for one reared on the oral and literary traditions of black eloquence (i.e. James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois); it is easy to see here the truth of what Sir Arthur Conan Doyle referred to decades later. But on this after America, yet again, informs black people that we still don’t have any rights that a white man is bound to respect, these lines really get my stomp on:
…If the scale was turned, and black men were the masters and white men the slaves, every destructive agent and element would be employed to lay the oppressor low. Danger and death would hang over their heads day and night. Yes, the tyrants would meet with plagues more terrible than those of Pharaoh. But you are a patient people. You act as though, you were made for the special use of these devils.
[I am noting the irony here that Officer Darren Wilson, the person who may have had a physical encounter with a young black man, Mike Brown, told the grand jury that when Mike Brown charged at him that Mike Brown looked like “a demon;” as if Wilson could not have looked like a demon to Brown as well…alas, we will never know.]
I have never held the opinion that white people (as a whole) were inherently “devils.” I do, however, understand those black people who do think that way about white people (after all, they have the evidence on their side, don't they?), especially at these times (even today, as I walk around and I see mostly white people, I'm wondering what’s really going on in their minds and what they really think about the events in the news cycle.). I do believe though, that white people would not put up with a half or a quarter or 10% or even 2% of what gets dished out to blacks and browns and LGBTs in this country on a regular basis. After all, that's what “Second Amendment solutions” are for?
At least if you’re white.
Naturally, to invoke past slave uprisings and, indeed, to encourage more of them did not sit well with the abolitionist establishment of that time, including Frederick Douglass (who did not speak to Garnet for decades). But it was the response of noted abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman that earned the fullest extent of Garnet’s ire and the second document here.
I have looked into the archives of The Liberator but I can’t pinpoint exactly how Chapman's response and criticisms of Garnet’s speech in those pages. However, I have read Garnet’s response to Chapman and…boy, does some of this sound familiar:
I was born in slavery, and have escaped, to tell you, and others, what the monster has done, and is still doing. It, therefore, astonished me to think that you should so desire to sink me again to the condition of a slave, by forcing me to think as you you do. My crime is, that I have dared to think, and act, contrary to your opinion...If it has come to this, that I must think and act as you do, because you are an Abolitionist, or be exterminated by your thunder, then I do not hesitate to say that your abolitionism is abject slavery.
In this case, you can pretty much substitute "black" or "African American" for "slavery" and the word "white progressive" for "Abolitionist" and the analogy holds.
Whether it's a crisis such as the grand jury decision not to indict Officer Wilson for a crime regarding the mur...uh, death of 18 year old Mike Brown or any number of problems plaguing black communities all over this country, there are quite a few ("hordes") of "nice white progressives" that attempt (in a nice, rational way) to tell black people what to think and how to think it. I've noticed repeatedly at this site and other place within and outside of the blogosphere, any black person that states any contrary thought or opinion against whatever the Party Line happens to be (regardless of their experience or their backing up their POV with empirical evidence, then it tends to get personal real quick with a few "nice white progressives."
I'd like to imagine that Henry Highland Garnet, a man who in many ways, was the prototype for W.E.B. Dubois, is looking from The Better Place, slightly grinning, maybe even laughing but definitely shaking his head and saying (to himself) plus ça change...
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News by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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A St. Louis County grand jury has brought no criminal charges against Darren Wilson, a white police officer who fatally shot Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, more than three months ago. New York Times: Protests Flare After Ferguson Officer Is Not Indicted.
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The decision by the grand jury of nine whites and three blacks was announced Monday night by the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert P. McCulloch, at a news conference packed with reporters from around the world. The killing, on a residential street in Ferguson, set off weeks of civil unrest — and a national debate — fueled by protesters’ outrage over what they called a pattern of police brutality against young black men. Mr. McCulloch said Officer Wilson had faced charges ranging from first-degree murder to involuntary manslaughter.
Word of the decision set off a new wave of anger among hundreds who had gathered outside the Ferguson Police Department. Police officers in riot gear stood in a line as demonstrators chanted and threw signs and other objects toward them as the news spread. “The system failed us again,” one woman said. In downtown Ferguson, the sound of breaking glass could be heard as crowds ran through the streets.
As the night went on, the situation grew more intense and chaotic in several locations around the region. Bottles and rocks were thrown at officers, and windows of businesses were smashed. Several police cars were burned; buildings, including a Walgreens, a meat market and a storage facility, were on fire, and looting was reported in several businesses. Gunshots could be heard along the streets of Ferguson, and law enforcement authorities deployed smoke and gas to control the crowds. In St. Louis, protesters swarmed Interstate 44 and blocked all traffic near the neighborhood where another man was shot by police this fall.
Before midnight, St. Louis County police officers reported heavy automatic gunfire in the area where some of the largest protests were taking place. Flights to Lambert-St. Louis International Airport were not permitted to land late Monday as a safety precaution, officials said.
Mayor James Knowles III of Ferguson, reached on his cellphone late Monday, said he was there and wanted to see National Guard troops, some of whom were stationed at a police command center, move to protect his city. “They’re here in the area,” he said. “I don’t know why they’re not deploying.”
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Very interesting read. A new research suggests that different racial labels conjure up very different images. Pacific Standard: White Americans Draw Distinctions Between African-Americans and Blacks.
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In the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, a research team led by Emory University’s Erika Hall argues that “the racial label ‘black’ evokes a mental representation of a person with lower socioeconomic status than the racial label ‘African-American.’”
“The content embedded in the black stereotype is generally more negative, and less warm and competent, than that in the African-American stereotype,” the researchers write. “These different associations carry consequences for how whites perceive Americans of African descent who are labeled with either term.”
Hall and her colleagues demonstrate this phenomenon, and its implications, in a series of experiments. In the first, 106 white Americans were given a list of 75 traits such as “athletic,” “aggressive,” and “bold,” and asked to choose the 10 they felt were most descriptive of a specific group of people they were randomly assigned to evaluate. One-quarter of them selected the best traits for blacks, while others did the same for Africans-Americans, whites, and Caucasians.
“The stereotype content for blacks was significantly more negative than for African-Americans,” the researchers write. “In contrast, the stereotype content for African-Americans did not significantly differ in perceived negativity from that of whites.”
In the second experiment, 110 whites were randomly assigned to view, and complete, a profile of a male Chicago resident who was identified as either black or African-American. They estimated the black person’s income and education level to be lower than that of the African-American’s, and were far more likely to think of the African-American as being in a managerial position at his workplace.
In another experiment, 90 whites “expressed more negative emotions” toward a 29-year-old crime suspect when he was identified as black rather than African-American. The results suggest “the label black elicits more negative emotions than the label African-American,” the researchers write, “but African-American does not elicit positive emotion.”
Hall and her colleagues note that their findings have strong implications for the criminal justice system. “The choice of racial labels used in courtroom proceedings could affect how jurors interpret the facts of a case and make judicial decisions,” they write. “Black defendants may be more easily convicted in a court of law than African-American defendants.”
NAACP rally. (Photo: Rowan Fairgrove/Flickr)
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One reason that so many collectively plugged their ears against a decade of dismal revelations about Bill Cosby is that he made lots of Americans feel good about something we rarely have reason to feel good about: race The New Republic: Bill Cosby rape allegations; Why America Took So Long To Awake.
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One of the reasons that Bill Cosby has been a beloved American comedian for six decades is that he offered one of the most soothing versions of the story of race in America. He was a history-making entertainer whose successes emblematized racial progress within the entertainment industry. He was the first African American man to land a leading role on primetime television drama in “I Spy.” Cosby had a doctorate in education, and brought the stories of black city kids to television with “Fat Albert”; he was a staple on public television with the “Picture Pages” segments on PBS that are my earliest television memory.
His most indelible creation was “The Cosby Show,” the blockbuster Thursday night sitcom that in 1984 provided the nation with an aspirational vision of a loving, successful, upper-middle-class black family. Scores of African Americans have written both appreciatively and critically about what “The Cosby Show” meant to them over the years. As a white girl from a predominantly white suburb who was rarely allowed to watch primetime television, I can still recall my surprise when, 30 years ago, my parents informed me that we were all going to sit down and watch the premiere of “The Cosby Show” together.
White people loved “The Cosby Show,” especially liberal white people. They loved it because it was a great, funny, well-written, and beautifully performed television show. But also because it offered a warm vision of a world in which shared experience might help Americans of all colors to see past racial divisions and instead focus on the places where they connected.
“Cosby” offered white audiences an education in some elements of black culture: Here was a family that hung work by black artists on its walls, that listened to Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder, that proudly attended historically black colleges and reminisced together about the March on Washington. Some of it was familiar to me from my own family, which made me—a white kid who saw plenty of people on television who looked like me—feel connected to this television family that did not look like me. It felt good.
This was always part of Cosby’s plan. In the 1960s, he said of his comedy act, “A white person listens … and he laughs and he thinks, ‘Yeah, that’s the way I see it too.’ Okay. He’s white. I’m Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike. Right?” So I figure I’m doing as much for good race relations as the next guy.”
“The Cosby Show” was a show about black people that was fundamentally and unequivocally friendly to whiteness and to white people. The Huxtables had white friends. (Wallace Shawn played Cliff’s friend and neighbor.) Cliff, a doctor, had white patients. Clair, a lawyer, had white clients and white colleagues; the kids had white friends.
But in addition to what it had, there was what “The Cosby Show” lacked: Any suggestion that white people were culpable in the history of racism that the show addressed mostly through reference to mid-twentieth-century activism. White audiences were never made to feel bad about themselves or confront any hard questions about how they had benefitted from American systems from which black Americans had not benefitted.
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11 years ago TNR published this ground breaking piece pointed out the institutionalized segregation of Greek life in Alabama. Protests broke out on campus as students demanded increased integration. A handful of students of color were then accepted into the traditionally all-white sororities, but in March of this year the student senate rejected a resolution supporting racial integration of sororities and fraternities, and an April Buzzfeed report showed that little has changed on campus. The New Republic: This Student Took on University of Alabama's Segregated Sororities. It Didn't Turn Out As She'd Hoped.
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By noon, however, Twilley was put together and standing in front of the Delta Zeta house, a neoclassical mansion on sorority row. And at twelve o'clock sharp, the doors opened and the young women gathered in the foyer burst into song: "Delta Zeta is the best! Pledge Delta Zeta!" Twilley was ushered in and handed a glass of ice water. For 15 minutes she made small talk with the women who would determine whether she was Delta Zeta material. Then it was on to Zeta Tau Alpha for another round of singing and small talk. Then Alpha Delta Pi, and then Chi Omega. By eight that evening, Twilley had visited 15 sorority houses and had the same conversation 15 times. "They ask where you're from, you ask where they're from. They ask what you're majoring in, you ask what they're majoring in," Twilley recalled. "That's about all you can really do in 15 minutes." Save for some small touches—Zeta Tau Alpha put strawberries in their ice water; Phi Mu gave the rushees a house tour—there was little to differentiate one sorority from the next. "All of them seemed pretty much the same," Twilley said.
There was also little to differentiate Twilley from the 730 other University of Alabama women going through rush last fall. A tall, pretty girl with a fondness for shopping malls and the Jeep Grand Cherokee her father bought for her, Twilley blended right in to the roiling mix of social ambition and social privilege. But Twilley did differ in two ways. For one thing, unlike the vast majority of rushees, who are admitted into sororities as freshmen, this wasn't Twilley's first time through. She had tried—and failed—to join a sorority the year before. Which may have had something to do with the other thing that set Melody Twilley apart: She is black.
The University of Alabama was founded in 1831, but it did not enroll its first black student until 125 years later; she lasted three days before being expelled "for her own safety." In 1963 the university integrated for good, with then-Governor George Wallace making his famous "stand in the schoolhouse door" in defiance of federal marshals escorting two black students to register for classes. Since then, the university has made some impressive strides—today blacks constitute 14.5 percent of the undergraduate student body, making the university one of the most integrated state schools in the South—but social integration has been more elusive. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the university's Greek system, which is almost completely divided by race. A few of the school's eight historically black fraternities and sororities have had a handful of white members over the years, but the 37 traditionally white fraternities and sororities have not been as welcoming. Indeed, when Melody Twilley stood in front of the Delta Zeta house last September, it was believed that no white fraternity or sorority at the University of Alabama had ever offered membership to a black student. More remarkably, aside from a handful of faculty and administrators, no one at the school seemed to care—least of all its black students. And the segregated Greek system is not just a campus issue. That's because in insular Alabama, where the friendships and connections that matter most in life are often made during the four years you spend in Tuscaloosa, if you can't enter the university's white Greek system, you're unlikely to enter the state's political and economic elite.
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Somewhere Joesph McCarthy is smiling. This trend is the latest thing black people are not allowed to do. The Root: Virginia High School: No, Our Principal Wasn’t Throwing Up Gang Signs.
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Lawrenceville, Va., high school is trying to protect its principal against accusations that he was throwing up gang signs in a photo taken with students, WRIC reports.
Brunswick High School Principal Warren Bell can be seen in the sharply criticized photo, making a hand gesture while standing next to five students, who were also gesturing.
But according to the report, Bell was actually trying to signal to the teenagers that he wanted them to settle down because apparently they were loudly joking around in the school restroom, Dora Wynn, the superintendent, told the news station.
"When the principal saw that the students were posing and making inappropriate gestures, he motioned for the students to stop what they were doing," she said in a statement. "A student snapped a picture just as the principal was gesturing for the students to stop. That picture is construed by some as showing the principal was engaging in inappropriate conduct when, in reality, he was attempting to stop the students from continuing their inappropriate behavior."
Principal Warren Bell (far right) and students
WRIC ABC 8 NEWS SCREENSHOT
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Voices and Soul
by Justice Putnam
Black Kos Poetry Editor
One of the American Myths about Thanksgiving is how a bounty of riches was bestowed and shared; that God's goodness shone down from above and anointed all with an infinite Grace. It's nice to think so. It's nice to think that benevolence and friendship forged the bessemer of this Nation.
If only it were true.
The truth is that this nation was forged with the white-hot ingots of conquest, genocide and slavery; there is a reckoning and it will be discussed at...
The Powwow at the End of the World
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after an Indian woman puts her shoulder to the Grand Coulee Dam
and topples it. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the floodwaters burst each successive dam
downriver from the Grand Coulee. I am told by many of you
that I must forgive and so I shall after the floodwaters find
their way to the mouth of the Columbia River as it enters the Pacific
and causes all of it to rise. I am told by many of you that I must forgive
and so I shall after the first drop of floodwater is swallowed by that salmon
waiting in the Pacific. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims upstream, through the mouth of the Columbia
and then past the flooded cities, broken dams and abandoned reactors
of Hanford. I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after that salmon swims through the mouth of the Spokane River
as it meets the Columbia, then upstream, until it arrives
in the shallows of a secret bay on the reservation where I wait alone.
I am told by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall after
that salmon leaps into the night air above the water, throws
a lightning bolt at the brush near my feet, and starts the fire
which will lead all of the lost Indians home. I am told
by many of you that I must forgive and so I shall
after we Indians have gathered around the fire with that salmon
who has three stories it must tell before sunrise: one story will teach us
how to pray; another story will make us laugh for hours;
the third story will give us reason to dance. I am told by many
of you that I must forgive and so I shall when I am dancing
with my tribe during the powwow at the end of the world.
-- Sherman Alexie
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