Forgotten Women of Black History: Claudette Colvin

Right now I think I hear a collective "Claudette who?"

Claudette Colvin was a US Civil Rights activist who preceded the much more famous Rosa Parks by almost a year. For the very same "anti-social" behavior.

On March 2, 1955, Claudette Colvin became the first person arrested for resisting segregation in the public transit system of Birmingham, Alabama. It was too bad for her that she was an unmarried pregnant teenager at the time -- because of that, the local NAACP was reluctant to make her the test case. They preferred to wait a while, until the more socially-acceptable Rosa Parks made her own scene on the bus.

Colvin, however, kind of had the last laugh: She was one of the original plaintiffs in Browder v. Gayle, which resulted in the finding that segregation on city buses was unconstitutional in the United States, a decision that was ultimately affirmed by the US Supreme Court.

It's too bad that she never really got the respect and the accolades that she deserved. I hope that by publicizing her courageous stand, even at this late date, we can take a small step in correcting that.

Forgotten Men of Black History: Dwight Johnson

February is Black History month, regardless of how much a bunch of whiny entitled racist assholes grumble about there not being a "White History Month". (Hint: It's because every fucking month on the calendar is "White History Month")

Generally I like to feature someone in my Forgotten Men of Black History posts who has overcome incredible odds, who survived an actively hostile society, who had the pluck and the righteousness and the zeal and the determination to rise, in spite of how badly the deck was stacked against him.

And sometimes not. This is one of those times.

Dwight Johnson is not really a household name any more, but he was on everyone's lips in the spring of 1971. Dwight Johnson was a Vietnam veteran who was awarded the Medal of Honor (sometimes erroneously referred to as the Congressional Medal of Honor) by President Lyndon B. Johnson himself in November 1968, for actions in Vietnam in February 1967. (That long gap of time between the time of the action and the award of the medal seems significant to me -- but I don't know what it signifies*...)

Things took a dark turn for Dwight Johnson. He was one of the first people to have an identified "Post Vietnam Syndrome" disorder, as PTSD was being called back then (and would be until 1980). Finally, when he had spiraled downwards for long enough, he was shot to death by a store owner in a botched armed robbery attempt on April 29, 1971.

The media ate it up. Black war hero turns armed robber! And what was a deeply personal tragedy for Johnson and his family became a lasting meme of the Vietnam veteran. Suddenly the media had an immediate shorthand stereotype of Vietnam veterans: We were all crazy, walking time-bombs just looking for a place to explode.

It didn't take any time at all for Hollywood to pick up on it. By 1976 the idea of the psychopathic violent loner Vietnam vet was so ingrained in the national consciousness that all Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle had to do was deliver a kind of throwaway line about having been in Vietnam and the audience immediately knew all that it needed to know about him.

The release of both Coming Home and The Deer Hunter in 1978 permanently glued the Disturbed Vietnam Vet into everyone's consciousness. Coming Home was particularly egregious in this, since it presented a false dichotomy -- Vietnam vets are crippled emotionally or else they are crippled physically. There is no in-between.

And by the time John Rambo came along, people were beyond eager to believe him, even down to the part about people spitting on him when he came home from Vietnam (and you all know how I feel about that -- see also this month's Book of the Month).

But we are what we eat, as the saying goes, and we've eaten this shit for so long that we think it tastes good.

So it was kind of "fitting" that the first person to suffer a state execution in 2015 was Andrew Brannan, a Georgia Vietnam vet with PTSD. The only good thing is that we are all now getting so old that the whole psycho-Vietnam-vet meme will die out with us.

Or not. A hundred years from now, "spitting on Vietnam vets" who were "psychotic loner time bombs looking for a place to explode" will be all that history will remember about Vietnam veterans.

Back to Dwight Johnson: It was Dwight Johnson who became the apotheosis of the psycho Vietnam vet and cemented that into the national subconscious. It's sad that if he is remembered at all, it will be for this. Dwight Johnson, I never knew you buddy, but this brew's for you! You deserved better.

More Reading:

• Veterans and Allegories on the Film Reference site
• Hollywood and Vietnam on Film Comment
• From Villain to Hero: The Transformation of the Vietnam Veteran in American Cinema from 1976 to 1988
• Rambo as America: An (Over-the-top) Inter-textual Analysis of America’s Greatest/Worst Film Series
• List of Medal of Honor recipients from the Vietnam War -- especially the Transportation Corps' William Seay, whom I knew slightly; I rode "shotgun" in a convoy over that same highway the day before the ambush.

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* Footnote: I suspect that politics may have had something to do with that. Even though the Medal of Honor is supposed to be "above politics", that hasn't always been the case. For example, Theodore Roosevelt conducted an active -- some said unseemly -- but unsuccessful campaign for it after the Charge up San Juan Kettle Hill. And surprisingly, the one United States "battle" that resulted in the highest number, per capita, of awards of the MOH was ... the Battle of Massacre at Wounded Knee in 1890.

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 4: Jermain Wesley Loguen

Today's Forgotten Man, Jermain Wesley Loguen was born in slavery in Davidson County, Tennessee, in 1813, the son of a white man and a black slave mother.

At the age of 21 he took his master's horse and made tracks north, eventually ending up in Canada. After working a series of jobs in Canada and the US, he eventually settled in Syracuse NY, which was a major stop on the Underground Railroad.

He became a popular abolitionist and was well known. He wrote an autobiography, The Rev. J. W. Loguen, as a Slave and as a Freeman, a Narrative of Real Life.

When the book was published and word of his fame reached his former masters, the wife actually sent him a letter demanding his return or the payment of $1000.

Loguen's scathing reply, in the form of an open letter published in the anti-slavery newspaper The Liberator, is a classic:

Mrs. Sarah Logue. .. . You say you have offers to buy me, and that you shall sell me if I do not send you $1000, and in the same breath and almost in the same sentence, you say, "You know we raised you as we did our own children." Woman, did you raise your own children for the market? Did you raise them for the whipping post? Did you raise them to be driven off, bound to a coffle in chains? . .. Shame on you!
But you say I am a thief, because I took the old mare along with me. Have you got to learn that I had a better right to the old mare, as you call her, than Manasseth Logue had to me? Is it a greater sin for me to steal his horse, than it was for him to rob my mother's cradle, and steal me? . .. Have you got to learn that human rights are mutual and reciprocal, and if you take my liberty and life, you forfeit your own liberty and life? Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?
If you or any other speculator on my body and rights, wish to know how I regard my rights, they need but come here, and lay their hands on me to enslave me.. . .
Yours, etc. J. W. Loguen

(As quoted in Howard K. Zinn's A People's History of the United States)

Outside Agitators = "Reds"

Outside agitators. Yeah, that's who to blame for the unrest in Wisconsin. Not those victimized-by-commies state employees who, up to now, were happy to just have a job...

Jesus, could it get any more blatant? Case in point: I grew up in Oklahoma in the 1950s, where "everyone" knew that the "negroes" were a bunch of happy-go-lucky-but-lazy chuckleheads who could barely manage to tie their own shoes, even while they were shining yours, and who were just fine with their second-class-citizen lot in life, until those goddam "outside agitators" (aka "Reds" -- e.g.., communists, socialists, liberals, voting rights reformers, civil rights activists, etc. etc.) got them all stirred up against their benign benefactors in the white race. After all, everyone knew that the "negroes" were just a shade above the animal level, and they were run basically by their lowest emotions. No wonder that they were easy prey for those goddam Red agitators...

Jesus, it would be funny if it weren't so fucking seriously pathetic. "Outside agitators"? Really, governor?

Here's an appropriate quote from The Grapes of Wrath:

[Tom Joad:] "Well, I was there. They wasn't no agitators. What they call reds. What the hell is these reds anyways?"
Timothy scraped a little hill level in the bottom of the ditch. The sun made his white bristle beard shine. "They's a lot of fellas wanta know what reds is." He laughed. "One of our boys foun' out." He patted the piled earth gently with his shovel. "Fella named Hines- got 'bout thirty thousand acres, peaches and grapes- got a cannery an' a winery. Well, he's all a time talkin' about 'them goddamn reds.' 'Goddamn reds is drivin' the country to ruin,' he says, an' 'We got to drive these here red bastards out.' Well, they were a young fella jus' come out west here, an' he's listenin' one day. He kinda scratched his head an' he says, 'Mr. Hines, I ain't been here long. What is these goddamn reds?' Well, sir, Hines says, 'A red is any son-of-a-bitch that wants thirty cents an hour when we're payin' twenty-five!' Well, this young fella he thinks about her, an' he scratches his head, an' he says, 'Well, Jesus, Mr. Hines. I ain't a son-of-a-bitch, but if that's what a red is- why, I want thirty cents an hour. Ever'body does. Hell, Mr. Hines, we're all reds.'" Timothy drove his shovel along the ditch bottom, and the solid earth shone where the shovel cut it.
Tom laughed. "Me too, I guess." His pick arced up and drove down, and the earth cracked under it. The sweat rolled down his forehead and down the sides of his nose, and it glistened on his neck. "Damn it," he said, "a pick is a nice tool ( umph ), if you don' fight it ( umph ). You an' the pick ( umph ) workin' together ( umph )."

Yeah, when it comes down to supporting the Working Man against the Corporations, we're all "Reds".

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 3: George Washington Williams

George Washington Williams was a soldier, minister, writer and diplomat. His greatest feat is one that has been totally forgotten today. Read on.

George Washington Williams was born in Pennsylvania in 1849 and at the age of 14 he joined the Union Army under an assumed name, where he managed to get into some of the final battles of the Civil War. Following the war, he went to Mexico and joined the rebel army which was fighting to overthrow the Emperor Maximilian. He was commissioned a lieutenant, brushed up on his Spanish, and finally returned to the US in 1867.

He must have loved military service, since he immediately rejoined the army and was sent to the Indian Territory (Oklahoma), where he was wounded in 1868. After getting out of the army because of his wound, he attended Howard University and then the Newton Theological Institute; he became the first African-American to graduate from there.

He was ordained a Baptist minister, moved around the country, then studied law, and became the first African-American elected to the Ohio State Legislature. He was well-connected enough to be appointed Consul General to Haiti by President Chester A. Arthur, although he never served.

Williams was also the author of a sprawling and somewhat long-winded two-volume 1883 History of the Negro Race in America, which is available for download from Project Gutenberg at Volume 1 and Volume 2.

But what he is should be most noted for -- and sadly forgotten for -- was his journey to the so-called Congo Free State to investigate the conditions "on the ground" in King Leopold's personal African domain.

What he found shocked and appalled and sickened him: Brutality, repression, slavery, physical disfigurement (slaves who failed to meet production quotas lost their hands) and various other "crimes against humanity", for which he sent an accusatory open letter to King Leopold of Belgium, who owned and ran the Congo as his personal fiefdom -- there was no official Belgian colonization of the Congo; Leopold owned it outright and reaped the huge financial benefits of the reign of terror that was the Congo "Free" State.

It was Williams' report and this open letter that first revealed to the world the atrocities that had been hidden in Leopold's "heart of darkness". Finally with public opinion turned against him Leopold abandoned his personal stake in the Congo and the government of Belgium took it over as a colony in 1908.

Williams' trip to Africa and the worldwide effect his J'Accuse! had on Leopold is fascinatingly told in great detail in Adam Hochschild's highly-recommended book, King Leopold's Ghost.

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 2: Henry Ossian Flipper

Today's Forgotten Man is Henry Ossian Flipper, the first African American to graduate from the US Military Academy at West Point.

Flipper was born into slavery in Thomasville, Georgia, in 1856. He attended Atlanta University (under the protection of the presence of the United States Army during the Reconstruction period) and while he was still a freshman he was appointed to West Point by Representative James Crawford Freeman (who, despite his last name, was not of African-American descent...).

Flipper, a member of the Class of 1877, joined four other
African-Americans at West Point. They were harassed and ostracized by the white cadets, to the point that the other four eventually dropped out. Flipper was left to eat his meals alone, study alone, and attend class with cadets who refused to speak to him.

Regardless of the hardhips he was forced to endure (Jackie Robinson's seem to pale by comparison), Flipper graduated West Point in 1877 and was commissioned a lieutenant in the US Army. He was assigned to the 10th Cavalry Regiment and was the first African-American to command a troop of Buffalo Soldiers.

Read the entire history of Flipper, and especially the part that the appropriately-named William Rufus Shafter (aka "Pecos Bill") played in kicking Flipper out of the Army with the officer-equivalent of a dishonorable discharge, which happened apparently only because Shafter hated seeing black officers. BTW, Fort Shafter in Hawaii is named for this racist pig of a general, as is the town of Shafter, California.

Anyway, Flipper spent the rest of his life trying to contest the charges brought against him on Shafter's behalf, and trying to overturn his discharge. Flipper died in 1940, but the battle was fought on by his descendants and others, who finally were successful only in 1999 when Bill Clinton finally pardoned Henry Flipper.

This pardon resulted in a bust of Flipper being on display at West Point, along with an annual award to the cadet who exhibits "leadership, self-discipline, and perseverance in the face of unusual difficulties." Indeed...

Fortunately for history, Henry Ossian Flipper was also an accomplished writer, and his autobiography, The Colored Cadet at West Point, is available for download in a variety of formats from Project Gutenberg.

Still I Rise: Our 2nd Book of the Month

In honor of Black History Month, I've decided to add a second Book of the Month. Still I Rise, by Roland Laird and Taneshie Nash Laird, illustrated by Elihu "Adofo" Bey, was originally published in 1997 with the subtitle A Cartoon History of African Americans.

This new, revised and updated version no longer has that subtitle; instead it's now subtitled A Graphic History of African Americans. My best guess is that "cartoon" has, over the ensuing years, taken on a tone that is not seen as "serious", and that "graphic" -- as in the "graphic novel" genre -- is the new descriptive buzzword for a serious story that is hand-illustrated in the classic comic book format.

Nevertheless, this is a valuable book for anyone who wants an "easy way" to learn about African-American history. I highly recommend that parents get this book for their children (minimum age, I would guess, would be about ten or so -- the concepts are probably too sophisticated for kids younger than that), since they mostly likely are not getting a good grounding in African American history in their schools.

Here's the Wikipedia article on the book. It's a bit critical of the illustrations, which are flat and not very inspiring, but we're not really looking at it for the pictures...

"Forgotten Men" of Black History 1: Homer Plessy

He's not really "forgotten": His names lives on in a weird kind of "infamy" -- after all he was on the losing side in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case which officially established the segregationist "Separate but Equal" doctrine of race relations in this country that held sway from 1896 until it was reversed and repudiated by Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.

But just who was Homer Plessy?

Home Plessy was born in New Orleans in 1862 and grew to adulthood in the Reconstruction Era, when black people could sit anywhere they wanted on the streetcars, marry whomever they pleased, and attend integrated schools. But that was with the protection of the US Army, which enforced on a reluctant defeated-but-unbowed South equal rights and protections for former slaves and blacks in general.

But with the Compromise of 1877 -- known forever after as the Corrupt Bargain -- that installed Rutherford B. Hayes in the White House despite the fact that he was the loser in the popular vote (sound familiar, anyone?), Reconstruction ended, the Yankee armies left, and the states of the former Confederacy were free to go back to their segregationist ways. It didn't take long to resegregate the schools, the marriage laws, and especially, in Plessy's case, the trains.

Home Plessy was, according to the official record, 7/8 white and 1/8 black, or, in the parlance of the day, an "octoroon". There is some disagreement over the exact percentages, but for this case, that doesn't matter. What does matter was that he had that infamous "one drop of Negro blood" and was therefore considered to be black. As in Not White. As in You Have to Sit in the Back of the Bus. Or, in Plessy's case, in a whole different train car.

In 1890 the City of New Orleans had, belatedly when considered with the rest of the south, instigated the separate train car rule. The Citizens Committee of New Orleans recruited Plessy to test the law. Because he looked white, he could purchase a ticket for the "whites only" car without any protest. He could even ride the whites only car without fear of being molested, because he looked white:

But of course under the law he was Not White. When the conductor asked him if he was "colored" he admitted that he was and allowed himself to be arrested and charged. The case was a cause célèbre at the time, and culminated in the Plessy v. Ferguson SCOTUS decision that enshrined in US law the racist doctrine of Separate but Equal. Only one justice, John Marshall Harlan of Kentucky, from ironically a slaveholding family, dissented from the majority. But man oh man, what a dissent:

The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power. So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty. But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved...
If evils will result from the commingling of the two races upon public highways established for the benefit of all, they will be infinitely less than those that will surely come from state legislation regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race. We boast of the freedom enjoyed by our people above all other peoples. But it is difficult to reconcile that boast with a state of the law which, practically, puts the brand of servitude and degradation upon a large class of our fellow-citizens, our equals before the law. The thin disguise of 'equal' accommodations for passengers in railroad coaches will not mislead any one, nor atone for the wrong this day done.

The problem as Harlan pointed out so eloquently, was that the separate facilities for black people were never, in any way, shape or form, equal to those of the whites. I grew up in rural Oklahoma, and attended segregated schools. The white kids had a nice one-story brick neo-colonial school while the black kids -- on the other side of the tracks, naturally -- had an old three-story firetrap that looked like it had already been condemned before the Civil War...

Sidebar: In a weird kind of synchronicity, John Marshall Harlan had a grandson and namesake, John Marshall Harlan II, who also served on the US Supreme Court, from 1955 to 1971. Illness forced him to retire from the court, which then allowed Richard Nixon to appoint William Rehnquist to the bench. And it was the same William Rehquist who had stated in a memo in 1952, when he was clerking for Justice Robert Jackson: "I realize that it is an unpopular and unhumanitarian position, for which I have been excoriated by 'liberal' colleagues but I think Plessy v. Ferguson was right and should be reaffirmed.... To the argument ... that a majority may not deprive a minority of its constitutional right, the answer must be made that while this is sound in theory, in the long run it is the majority who will determine what the constitutional rights of the minority are."

But enough digression. Let's get back to Plessy.

But actually, there isn't much left to tell. After the famous court case, he faded back into relative obscurity, and he lived out the remainder of his life in New Orleans. He died in 1925 at the age of 61. Finally, in 2009, a historical marker was erected at the site of his arrest:

Book of the Month: Roots

Since this is Black History month, I thought we'd kick it off with Roots: The Saga of An American Family by Alex Haley.

Roots was first published in 1976 and became a television "event" the next year, a miniseries that was broadcast over seven consecutive nights. I saw the television series, but somehow I had not managed to read the book at the time.

Now I have corrected that oversight, and that's why it's the book of the month, despite the controversies over parts of the book that may have been plagiarized from another author (a court case settled that portions of Roots were identical to some sections in another book) and the historical problems -- whether Haley actually found the ancestral village of Kunta Kinte, and whether his characters were "real" people.

Roots is a densely packed historical fiction that illustrates the basic evil -- but also the confusions, the complexity, and the complications -- of the slavery system. As Thomas Jefferson said, slavery was dehumanizing for both slave and master; even the "best" master was still a slaveholder, and even the "best" slave was still held in perpetual bondage.

There are always differences between books and the movies made from them, but one the major differences between Roots the book and Roots the miniseries was that, as best as I can recall anyway, not much if anything was made of Kunta Kinte's religion before he was kidnapped out of Africa. In the book he was a devout Muslim, and therefore his captivity and enslavement by the "infidels" (i.e., Christians) is seen to be even worse, especially when as punishment he is forced to work with the plantation's pigs.

Haley researched the book for nearly ten years, and it shows. The African segments especially -- which take up much more space in the book than they did on the screen -- seem to be right on the money, and they stack up well against the best of other African writers, such as South African Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer and her powerful July's People.

When it comes to the depiction of slavery in the United States, nothing else comes close to Roots ... with the possible exception of the actual stories told by the former slaves themselves. In the 1930s, as part of the Federal WPA Writers' Project, some 2500 Slave Narratives were gathered by interviewing the aging former slaves who had been freed by the 13th Amendment. Most of these slave narratives are available for free download from the Gutenberg project. They make for some pretty sobering reading, and they ought to be required for those in the government -- and out of it (are you listening, Toad?) -- who think that the constitutional three-fifths of a person for a slave was just fine and the 13th Amendment, along with the rest of the constitution, doesn't really mean what everyone thinks it means (are you listening, Scalia & Thomas, et al on SCOTUS?)...

Black History Month

February each year is Black History Month, and it's a time for reflection, remembrance and consideration of the African-American experience, to honor some of the pioneers of American History who just happened to be Black.

I know that some of my "fans" (The Toad and his moronic minion come to mind immediately, but there have been others) are already pissing and moaning and whining: "This is raciest [sic] ... there ain't no White History Month!"

But they don't get -- and will never understand -- that every goddamn month of the year is "White History Month". It's like that old saying, A fish is the last one that's going to understand the principles of water... So, short form, screw The Toad and his toadies. I'm gonna celebrate Black History Month.

BTW, on the other side, it's also been a staple of Black comedians for years: "It figures; they gave us the shortest month of the year..." But there are actually some solid historical reasons for the choice of February.

So watch for some more posts during the course of the month that will celebrate and bring to the fore some of the "forgotten men" of African-American history and their contributions to the world in which we live.