“This country is desperately sick”
Commentary by Black Kos Editor Denise Oliver Velez
Civil rights activist and heroine, Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer was interviewed in Mississippi, by George Foster, for “The Heritage of Slavery”, which was Part Five of the seven part 1968 CBS documentary series, “Of Black America.”
She was 51 years old, and had seen and experienced pain, suffering and virulent racism. She had been beaten, arrested and threatened with death for having had the audacity to attempt to register to vote. She never gave up her fight for voting rights and equal rights for black people in this country.
Her words — still send chills up my spine.
There was a rough transcript posted to comments under the video clip:
"Mississippi’s still a very rough place. You know, people not just walking up like they used to do in the past. Walking out, shooting a man down, get him maybe two or three hundred people carrying out and lynching you.
But it’s in a most subtle way, you know, they let you starve to death, not give you jobs.
These are some of the things happening right now in Mississippi.
You see Mississippi’s not actually Mississippi’s problem, Mississippi is America’s problem.
Because if America wanted to do something about what has been going on [in] Mississippi it could have stopped by now.
It wouldn’t have been in the past few years, between 40 and 50 churches bombed and burned. You see, and this leads me to say all of the burning and bombing that was done to us and the houses, nobody ever said too much about that and nothing was done.
But let something be burned by a black man and then, my God, you know.
You see, the flag is drenched with our blood. Because you see so many of our ancestors were killed because we have never accepted slavery.
We had to live in it, but we never wanted it.
So we know that this flag is drenched with our blood.
So what the young people are saying now [is] give us a chance to be young men, respected as a man, as we know this country was built on the black backs of black people across this country.
And if we don’t have it, you’re [not going to] have it either because we’re [going to] tear it up.
That’s what they’re saying.
And people ought to understand that, I don’t see why they don’t understand that.
They know what they’ve done to us all across this country.
They know what they’ve done to us.
This country is desperately sick, and man is on the critical list.
I really don’t know where we go from here."
Hattip to DoReMi who also offered a transcription
I hear those words, and I think — racism and white supremacy are America’s problem. Like Mrs. Hamer, I wonder, where do we go from here?
We now have a new attempt to open American’s eyes to the foundational nature of slavery and how it has shaped the lives of us all, no matter our racial classification.
The 1619 Project. It was my topic on Sunday, in “1619. The 400th anniversary of the real founding of America.”
I cannot recommend it more forcefully.
I just want to point out today, the history of a major network’s attempt to address this — 51 years ago. In 1968 most Americans only had three major networks to choose between. CBS had a huge viewership.
Of Black America
Of Black America was a series of seven one-hour documentaries presented by CBS News in the summer of 1968, at the end of the Civil Rights Movement and during a time of racial unrest (Martin Luther King had been assassinated that spring and riots in many cities had followed). The groundbreaking series explored various aspects of the history and current state of African-American community.
Part 5
Part five of a seven-part series on black America. This program deals with the current attitudes of white and black Americans toward the black American heritage. The program opens in Charleston, South Carolina, focuses on "the romance of the unequal past which still infatuates and torments," with interviews with several southerners. Includes an explanation of the slave trade, a shot of the Old Slave Mart Museum, and an interview with black activist Bill Saunders. Includes a talk with "Ebony" editor Lerone Bennett. The program closes with a view of Chicago South Side's "Wall of Respect."
The Heritage of Slavery — in two reels, CBS News, Film Associates.
When I look at black interviewer George Foster attempting to remain neutral and not react to the benevolent racism spouted by Charleston slaveholder descendant Mrs. Lionel Leg, I want to give him a medal.
Mrs. Lionel Leg:
So Daisy was my little playmate, my maid, my friend, and the daughter of old Catherine, who was a cook that we adored. So all those years we played together and everyone was happy. We never heard of all these things we hear about today. And there were nearly a hundred, enormous rice plantation with many animals around, and a beautiful old house and about a hundred Colored people there. But we loved them. They were our friends, and then it’s no disgrace to say they’re like children. When we say they are like children, it’s because they are like happy children, some of them, because they like to sit in the sun rather than work hard, and they’d rather play than work.
Interviewer:
If you could, would you paint a picture for us of what it was like on the plantation in your early days.
Mrs. Lionel Leg:
It was a lovely happy time, living in open spaces with many lovely Colored people and animals and flowers and fields. My father had everything thoroughbred, from the pigs, horses, the dogs and the people had to be thoroughbred. And we would get into a buggy with him and drive to the plantation from what we call the pine land, where we lived. And we would spend, every Saturday this was, we would spend the day, and old Fortune, I can see him now, he would give us dinner. And we would have a heavenly time. And old April, he was the dairyman, that’s all he did, all he did was to skim the cream off of these great big boards of clabber and put them in the wooden churn and churn this marvelous fresh butter. That was April’s job. He didn’t do anything else, but love us and and skim the cream.
The networks tried. CBS tried.
During this period of what Variety termed "video's rush to black," each network produced at least one distinguished series surveying a wide variety of relevant topics. None was more striking than the seven-part CBS production, Of Black America!
This series had a two-fold purpose: to illustrate to white viewers the ramifications of chronic American racism, and to show African American their legitimate place in the United States and in the world.
Here we are, more than 50 years later — trying again.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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Historian and author Edward E. Baptist explains how slavery helped the US go from a “colonial economy to the second biggest industrial power in the world.” Vox: How slavery became America’s first big business
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Of the many myths told about American slavery, one of the biggest is that it was an archaic practice that only enriched a small number of men.
The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters, one that did not touch the rest of the United States. Slavery, the argument goes, was an inefficient system, and the labor of the enslaved was considered less productive than that of a free worker being paid a wage. The use of enslaved labor has been presented as premodern, a practice that had no ties to the capitalism that allowed America to become — and remain — a leading global economy.
But as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue. Slavery, particularly the cotton slavery that existed from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War, was a thoroughly modern business, one that was continuously changing to maximize profits.
To grow the cotton that would clothe the world and fuel global industrialization, thousands of young enslaved men and women — the children of stolen ancestors legally treated as property — were transported from Maryland and Virginia hundreds of miles south, and forcibly retrained to become America’s most efficient laborers. As they were pushed into the expanding territories of Mississippi and Louisiana, sold and bid on at auctions, and resettled onto forced labor camps, they were given a task: to plant and pick thousands of pounds of cotton.
The bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset, and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity. In 60 years, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved person increased 400 percent. The profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world, and made the South its most prosperous region. The ownership of enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region.
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The 1619 Project made conservatives tell on themselves. Slate: Who Got the Maddest About the New York Times’ Slavery Coverage?
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Over the weekend, the New York Times rolled out the printed version of The 1619 Project, a sprawling historical-journalism project devoted to changing the way Americans currently understand and discuss the legacy of slavery in this country. The premise was that slavery was not a passing and painfully corrected mistake, but a foundational feature of all aspects of life in this country—and that therefore the black experience is at the center of the American experience.
Conservative pundits were not happy to see this. Right-wing intellectual heavyweights such as Newt Gingrich or right-wing intellectual junior middleweights such as Erick Erickson spent the past few days obsessively tweeting or yelling at you from your TV screens to make sure America knew that the New York Times was trying to—well, that part was not entirely clear.
For white conservatives, accepting that the United States wouldn’t exist without slavery would mean acknowledging that the Founders were not the creators of an infallible civic religion, which sets the limits on all modern claims for justice. It would mean that liberty was, in practice, as much a matter of exclusion as inclusion, and that success and prosperity owe more to centuries of exploitation than to God’s blessing of an exceptional people.
But their political project depends on not even considering those possibilities. And so their response was equal parts furious and vague, a barrage of arguments that discussing this country’s history is the last thing this country needs: the Times was being divisive, or it was being nihilistic, or it was implementing a secret scheme to make Americans vote against Trump by claiming that racism was an ongoing problem.
Mostly, they wanted to express that they were very personally angry. The fact that they took a wide-ranging examination of slavery’s lasting ills as an attack on themselves was a fairly obvious confession. Here are a few of the different categories of criticism under which they spent the weekend telling on themselves, in the name of complaining about the project:
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Under the corrugated-iron roof of the Bong Intellectual Centre, a tea house in Gbarnga in northern Liberia, the air is thick with anger. Dozens of people sit on plastic chairs, discussing politics. They complain that their businesses are failing, corruption is rising and food prices have doubled in recent months. “The hungry man is an angry man,” says Augustin Jalla, a 55-year-old social worker. “If something does not change there’s going to be an uprising.”
That is alarming talk, in a country that suffered an on-and-off, 14-year-long civil war that killed about 250,000 people—almost a tenth of the population at the time—and destroyed the economy. Liberia’s conflict also devastated the region. The country’s former president, Charles Taylor, started or fuelled wars in three neighbouring countries: Sierra Leone, Guinea and Ivory Coast.
After the fighting stopped in 2003, the world poured in aid to support Liberia’s transition to democracy and to prop up the administration of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a wily World Bank veteran who was elected president in 2005. By 2010 the west African nation was receiving $360 in aid per person. Helping to keep the peace was a un mission that cost more than $500m a year.
Since then, however, the world has lost interest. By 2017 aid had slumped to just $132 per person. In 2018 the un’s peacekeepers packed away their blue helmets and went home. Left in their wake are a failing economy and a weak state that has been hollowed out by corruption and is still riven by enmities.
Start with the economy. Between 2010 and 2014 growth was galloping along at 6-8% a year and was forecast to go into double digits. Then the country was hit by two enormous shocks. The first was an outbreak of Ebola in 2014 that killed almost 11,000 people in the region, scared off investors and aid workers and caused a recession. The second was the withdrawal of peacekeepers, whose average annual budget was equal to almost a quarter of Liberia’s gdp between 2007 and 2018. The imf expects growth of 0.4% this year.
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KHARTOUM, Sudan—It is little surprise that the celebrations for Sudan’s new transitional constitution, which was initialed on Sunday, were somewhat muted in the streets of Khartoum.
Many protest leaders say they knew they had been outmaneuvered from the start—that Sudan’s security establishment had actually defeated the country’s revolution back on April 11, the same day that the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir was officially removed from office in the face of massive demonstrations. As more than a million people marched and waved Sudanese flags in Khartoum’s dusty streets to celebrate Bashir’s departure, the country’s military was in the midst of a plan that had been in the works for at least a year. Sudan’s security establishment, led by the country’s elusive former intelligence chief Salah Gosh, ousted Bashir and quickly reached out to sympathetic opposition leaders to negotiate a transition. But by steering the talks, the army preserved its status—and, for now, its dominance.
According to Alex de Waal, the head of the World Peace Foundation, the military takeover in April was the restoration of politics during Bashir’s era, except with a new political business manager in the person of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, known as Hemeti. Although Sudan has received an injection of cash from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, Hemeti’s leadership makes Sudan more unstable than it was under Bashir’s regime, de Waal says.
It is not surprising that Sudan’s military was able to outlast the country’s revolution. In fact, the way in which Sudan’s junta suffocated the country’s democratic movement is ripped from the playbook of intransigent militaries that have endured and over come revolutions the world over.
Sudan’s new authority was evident at the signing ceremony. Hemeti, the head of the country’s feared Rapid Support Forces paramilitary group, which is accused of a slew of atrocities, hinted at his commitment to rule of law as he showcased the final document.(Hemeti held the new constitution upside down.) However the story of how Sudan’s military kept power began at least a year and a half earlier, when Gosh was already considering a change in power.
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Omar al-Bashir ruled Sudan for 30 years, overseeing a bloody and oppressive regime. On Monday, his corruption trial began — a symbol of Sudan’s extraordinary, if shaky, political transition toward democracy.
Ahead of its deposed leader appearing in court, on Saturday Sudan’s military and civil leaders formally signed a power-sharing deal that’s intended to bring democratic elections to the country in three years.
It’s a remarkable moment for Sudan, a country scarred by dictatorship and civil war. Al-Bashir took power in a 1989 coup and maintained his grip on the country for 30 years despite international pressure over Sudan’s support of terrorism and perpetration of genocide in the Darfur region.
The Sudanese had protested their government before, but had not succeeded in putting lasting pressure on the government — until this year. Demonstrations began in December 2018 after al-Bashir ended government fuel and wheat subsidies, causing gas shortages and a spike in food prices.
The protests turned into an outlet for people’s broader frustration and fury with al-Bashir, and transformed into a more organized political movement, led by professionals, students, and women and fueled by social media. The sustained challenge to al-Bashir’s government led to his downfall in April.
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A GenForward Project survey says across lines of race and ethnicity, millennials are deeply concerned about the relationship between police and the people they are supposed to serve and protect. Color Lines: Millennials Overwhelmingly Support Criminal Justice Reform
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According to the latest survey from the University of Chicago’s GenForward Project, millennials are concerned about the relationship between police and the people they are supposed to serve and protect. More than 40 percent of the people surveyed said that criminal justice issues will influence who they vote for in the 2020 election.
The survey tapped more than 3,400 people ages 18 to 36, and it also found that the majority (57 percent) of millennials, regardless of race or ethnicity, agreed that police treat Black and Latinx people worse than Whites. Though the survey doesn’t include thoughts on police violence, it was conducted in the weeks leading up to the fifth anniversary of Eric Garner (July 17) and Michael Brown’s (August 9) deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers.
Other key findings from the survey that reveal where young adults stand on policing:
- Black millennials avoid the cops: Black adults are more likely to strongly support criminal justice and policing reforms than others. Less than a third of them trust the police and nearly half said they “always” or “often” go out of their way to avoid contact with the police or other law enforcement, compared to just over a quarter of White young adults.
- Millennials are divided on how communities stay safe: The majority of Black (60 percent) and Latinx (52 percent) young adults disagree that communities are safer when we send people to prison who are convicted of certain nonviolent offenses. Meanwhile, the majority of Asian American and Whites agree that communities are safer when nonviolent offenders are imprisoned. They all support policies that eliminate the cash bond system, which locks many people of color behind bars.
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There’s no mistaking the elaborate tattoos that cover Tyrone Lamont Allen’s forehead and right cheek.
But when Portland police suspected Allen was involved in four bank and credit union heists, and none of the tellers reported seeing tattoos on the face of the man who robbed them, police digitally altered Allen’s mugshot.
They covered up every one of his tattoos using Photoshop.
“I basically painted over the tattoos,’’ police forensic criminalist Mark Weber testified. “Almost like applying electronic makeup.’’
Police then presented the altered image of Allen with photos of five similar-looking men to the tellers for identification. They didn’t tell anyone that they’d changed Allen’s photo.
Some of the tellers picked out Allen.
The practice came under fire this week in a federal courtroom in Portland as Allen’s attorney argued that the manipulation allowed police to “rig the outcome” of the photo lineup.
The standard law enforcement tool is under ongoing scrutiny. This example floored Jules Epstein, a law professor at Temple University and leading national authority on eyewitness testimony.
In his 40 years as a lawyer and law professor, Epstein said he’s never heard of something so blatantly suggestive.
“It’s unbelievable to me that police would ignore the fact that no teller has described a person with glaring tattoos and make this man into a possible suspect by covering them up,” he said. “They’re increasing the risk of mistaken identity.’’
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Voices and Soul
by
Black Kos Poetry Editor Justice Putnam
Tragedy and Redemption are constants in Caribbean culture, permanence and faith are tested by land-leveling hurricanes and island-forming tectonic shakings of economics and magma. Permanence is but smoldering paper and faith can be snapped like a heated red rib on a firebed of myth and hunger. Redemption and Renewal is sometimes found in the tragedy of greed that is often gloried as the pursuit of God. Or it could simply be putting the land back to what the ancients husbanded and tilled for generations to come.
In Trinidad, three men appeared
in court on August 15, 2017,
charged with having bird
parts in their possession.
They were caught
near the Caroni Bird Sanctuary
by a team of game wardens.
The wardens happened to be
“conducting surveillance” in
the area when they spotted the
men with the dead birds.
The men attempted to escape
in a boat.
They were caught.
They were granted bail. The case
was adjourned.
Drones have been
brought in to protect
the birds. The Ministry of
Agriculture has conducted
test flights in Trinidad. Here
is the DNA of the scarlet ibis
rendered as a barcode:
The desire to eat the scarlet ibis
has long haunted man. Fat ibises
are preferred over lean egrets.
Even the indigenous peoples
of America prized the
bird flesh. They made
special expeditions for
their eggs. In fact, in their
quest to eat ibis meat, the
first peoples accidentally
discovered the islands of
the Caribbean. The birds made
new land. The natives carried
baskets with eggs and emaciated
fledglings. They cooked the
eggs even if addled or in an
advanced state of decay,
according to one writer. So
that birds of all stages of
life floated in a sky of yelks.
Soup, richly spiced with
death and Spanish pepper.
Yet the scarlet ibis, if
allowed a return to its former
glory, can bring about the
annihilation of all mammals.
Among its plumage, the bird
harbors pathogenic bacteria,
no match for human medicine.
Man, for good reason, is
their prime predator.
— Andre Bagoo
from “Ibis”
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