Roger O Green

Three-fifths of a person

“Representatives… shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.”

When I was vamping while waiting for the speaker for an Adult Education class during Black History Month at my church, I preemptively pointed out that the reason we STILL talk about these issues is that they are not always that well known.

Making a very tangential point, I mentioned in passing the Three-Fifth Compromise. I took this on faith that everyone knew what I was talking about. It was in the original US Constitution:

Article 1, Section 2:
“Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other Persons.”

Those “all other persons” were slaves. It was not changed until the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress on June 13, 1866, and ratified on July 9, 1868.

However, there were a couple of people who did not know this piece of Americana. So the conversation inadvertently proved the point.

“Black history IS American history” has become the mantra of both who want to continue Black History Month, and those who think it’s “been done.” The latter say, “We know about George Washington Carver and Martin Luther King already.”

To that end, I recommend checking out Filling In the Gaps in American History, which is “a collection of biographies, experiences, commentaries and behind the scenes looks at events in American History dealing with people of African descent that are generally not recorded in history texts.”

Jacqui C. Williams, FIGAH founding director, writes: “There were artists, inventors, activists, educators, women, and men of faith, cowboys, stagecoach drivers, law enforcement officers, entrepreneurs and more who contributed to the creation and development of this land over and above the labor of those enslaved. I did not read of them in my history classes…”

Speaking of history, All Over Albany did a piece on Stephen Myers for Black History Month.

And I came across Civil Rights: Holding the Hands of History. It’s a Facebook Community Page about Viola Liuzzo by her daughter Mary Liuzzo Lilleboe. Viola Liuzzo was a white Detroit housewife who was shot to death by Ku Klux Klan members following the voting rights march in Alabama, the march depicted in the movie “Selma.”

From there, I found the blog of Tara Ochs, who plays Viola in the movie. Check out, especially, her posts from 2014 forward.

The Gospel according to the Beatles, Sunday, March 1

There will be musical revue of The Gospel according to the Beatles on Sunday, March 1 at 12:15 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 362 State Street.

There will be a musical revue of The Gospel according to the Beatles on Sunday, March 1 at 12:15 p.m. at First Presbyterian Church, 362 State, corner of Willett Street in Albany, across from Washington Park in Albany, NY. It is an original musical adaptation by director Christy D’Ambrosio, performed by the youth of the church. The narrative is based upon the book The Gospel According to the Beatles, written by Steve Turner.

Orchestration is provided by Christian Diefendorf. Instruments provided by Christopher Trombley, John Keal Music. Theatrical Ramp designed & constructed by John Myers. Costumes provided by The Costumer.

G is for the Greens

NO ONE left IBM in those days, and certainly not for some likely short-term government job.

I grew up in Binghamton, which is in the Southern Tier section of New York State, not far from the Pennsylvania border. I had, and have, two sisters, Leslie Ellen Green, born about 16.5 months after my birth, and Marcia Elayne Green, born a little more than five years after me.

We grew up with our parents, Leslie Harold Green and Gertrude Elizabeth (nee Williams) Green, at 5 Gaines Street in the city’s First Ward. When I was born, my parents lived upstairs in the two-family dwelling, but soon my parents moved to the first floor, and my paternal grandparents, McKinley Green and Agatha (nee Walker) Green then lived upstairs.

The house was owned by my maternal grandmother, Gertrude (nee Yates) Williams, who lived a half dozen blocks away at 13 Maple Street with her baby sister Adenia (Deana) Yates. Our house was a small place, with a living room, two bedrooms, kitchen, and what was essentially a large hallway.

After Marcia was born, when the girls were destined to get the second bedroom, my father built a couple of walls in the hallway to create a very small bedroom for me. He painted the solar system on my ceiling.

Our mother worked at McLean’s department store downtown, first as an elevator operator, then later in the bookkeeping department. Although we were supposed to attend Oak Street Elementary School, since we went to Grandma Williams’ house for lunch, it was determined that we would instead go to Daniel Dickinson school instead. This, of course, had a profound effect on us in terms of who our childhood friends were, a surprising number of which we still are in touch with.

Our father had several jobs: truck driver, florist, painter (both artistic and sign painting). He had a job working at IBM for about six years. It was at night, and it wasn’t particularly intellectually stimulating, moving inventory on some conveyance.

When Dad quit his job to work for something called Opportunities for Broome, a project funded the US Office of Economic Opportunity, my ninth grade homework teacher, Mr. Joseph, told me that my father was crazy. NO ONE left IBM in those days, and certainly not for some likely short-term government job. Frankly, I thought it was a great decision, and time proved this to be correct.

Grandma Green died in 1964. She was one of my Sunday school teachers, and she taught me how to play the card game Canasta. I taught my Aunt Deana how to play canasta, and we also played 500 rummy and other card games; she died two years after Grandma Green. I played bid whist and pinochle with my parents.

Each of my parents was an only child. This meant that my sisters and I never had uncles, aunts, or first cousins. This makes our tribe rather small these days, with our parents deceased, and each of my sisters and I each having just one child, a daughter.

The first e-mail I ever wrote

I sent some e-mail to a few people, including my colleague who was sitting in his desk perhaps three meters away. The adviser thought this was daft.

Something I had forgotten:

When our work office was first going to get electronic mail, sometime c. 1995, it was all a bit mysterious as to what we would use it for. We all went to some computer lab, where it was explained what it was and how to send it. We were instructed to create messages. One of my colleagues wrote to me, “How did I get here?”, which is the first e-mail I ever received. I replied, “Same as it ever was.”

These, of course, are references to the Talking Heads song Once In A Lifetime, which was then stuck in my head, and now I’m going to stick in YOUR head. (If that link doesn’t work, try this one.)

Some things I remember:

I know we could NOT have gotten to the World Wide Web before January 1995 because our director at the time gave a talk about the Kobe, Japan earthquake, showing what was available on the web. I was annoyed that other offices in our building had email and web access before we did since we had what I felt was a more direct need.

Long before the e-mail etiquette has been codified – no SHOUTING, e.g. – there would be some unpleasantness about the “tone” of a message. There was a real learning curve, with some hurt feelings.

One of the business advisers from one of our outreach centers came to visit us in the central office, c. 1997. Their office did not yet have e-mail; given how ubiquitous it is now, I know that’s hard to believe, but was nevertheless true. I sent some e-mail to a few people, including my colleague who was sitting at his desk perhaps three meters away. The adviser thought this was daft. “He’s right here! Why don’t you just tell him?”
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I had a dream the night after the “forgotten” info was revealed to me, and it featured a song giving the days of the week:

It’s Sunday
Monday Tuesday
It’s Wednesday Thursday Friday
Saturday

I realized the tune was What You See Is What You Get by the Dramatics. Here’s the Soul Train rendition, which cuts off too soon, but is more fun to watch. I’m a sucker for the rolled tongue effect.

Not to be confused with WYSIWYG.

Unknown heroes: Charles Hamilton Houston and Lloyd Gaines

Lloyd Gaines had been denied entrance to the law school at the University of Missouri because he was black.

NAACP HISTORY: CHARLES HAMILTON HOUSTON

Born in Washington, D.C., Charles Hamilton Houston (1895–1950) prepared for college at Dunbar High School in Washington, then matriculated to Amherst College, graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1915.

From 1915 to 1917, Houston taught English at Howard University. From 1917 to 1919, he was a First Lieutenant in the United States Infantry, based in Fort Meade, Maryland. Houston later wrote:

“The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.”

In the fall of 1919, he entered Harvard Law School, earning his Bachelor of Laws degree in 1922 and his Doctor of Laws degree in 1923. In 1922, he became the first African-American to serve as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.

The Lloyd L. Gaines Collection

Lloyd Lionel Gaines was born to the Gaines family in northern Mississippi in 1911. One of eleven children, seven of whom survived illness and accident, he moved with his widowed mother and siblings to St. Louis after the premature death of their father. They found a better, although not easy, life for themselves in Missouri. Gaines excelled in his studies graduating as valedictorian in 1931 from Vashon High School. At Lincoln University in Jefferson City, he graduated with honors and was President of the senior class, while participating in many extra-curricular activities and working to pay for his schooling.

Charles Hamilton Houston Wikipedia article

Through his work at the NAACP, Houston played a role in nearly every civil rights case before the Supreme Court starting in 1930… Houston’s plan to attack and defeat Jim Crow segregation by demonstrating the inequality in the “separate but equal” doctrine from the Supreme Court’s Plessy v. Ferguson decision as it pertained to public education in the United States was the masterstroke that brought about the landmark 1954 Brown decision [argued before the Supreme Court by Houston disciple Thurgood Marshall].

In the documentary “The Road to Brown”, Hon. Juanita Kidd Stout described Houston’s strategy, “When he attacked the “separate but equal” theory his real thought behind it was that “All right, if you want it separate but equal, I will make it so expensive for it to be separate that you will have to abandon your separateness.” And so that was the reason he started demanding equalization of salaries for teachers, equal facilities in the schools and all of that.”

The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow

Lloyd Gaines… had been denied entrance to the law school at the University of Missouri because he was black. Instead, Missouri offered to pay his expenses for law school outside the state.

Charles Hamilton Houston, one of the few African Americans to graduate from Harvard Law School, argued that Missouri was obligated to either build a law school for blacks equal to that of whites or admit him to the University of Missouri. The U.S. Supreme Court agreed in Gaines v. Canada (1938). The Gaines decision breached the walls of segregation.

A Supreme Triumph, Then Into the Shadows

Lloyd Gaines was moody that winter of 1939, acting not at all like a man who had just triumphed in one of the biggest Supreme Court cases in decades… he left his apartment house on March 19, 1939, never to be seen again. Had he not vanished at 28, Lloyd Gaines might be in the pantheon of civil rights history with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall and other giants.

Lloyd Gaines Wikipedia article

In 2006, Gaines was granted an honorary law degree by the University of Missouri and the Supreme Court of Missouri named him an honorary member of the Missouri Bar.
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