Black History Month Archives - Page 3 of 5

2015 in review

All men and women living on the Earth.
Ties of hope and love,
Sister and brotherhood,
That we are bound together

This is the thing that Jaquandor does on December 31, but I do on January 1.

Did you keep your New Years’ resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

If I made one, it was to do less. I failed miserably, except when I had to because of the hernia operation, which felt really good, actually.

Did anyone close to you give birth?

Not that I recall.

Did you attend any weddings?

Affirmative: Ron and David, just a couple of weeks ago.

Did anyone close to you die?

Well, yes, three people in the first six weeks of the year. Jimmy Rocco, who was in my church choir, and Bonnie Deschane, who cleaned our house for a while, and Robert Yates, my mom’s first cousin, who was closer in age to me than her. I think it made the winter far more difficult. And the average of 12F in February, cf the normal of 19F, didn’t help.

What countries did you visit?

None and I would like to change that someday.

What would you like to have in 2016 that you lacked in 2015?

World peace. Or some approximation thereof.

What was your biggest achievement of the year?

Surviving November.

What was your biggest failure?

Not finding someone to whom I could delegate a specific task.

What was the best thing you bought?

Marvel Masterworks book of The Defenders comic book, written by Steve Gerber.

Whose behavior merited celebration?

Anyone who acts with caring and compassion in the midst of fear and paranoia.

Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

And speaking of fear and paranoia, let’s just put it this way: I’m more distressed by the political supporters of a particular political candidate than I am with the candidate.

Where did most of your money go?

The house, specifically the bathroom renovation.

What did you get really excited about?

Learning new stuff, often through this here blog.

Compared to this time last year, are you happier or sadder?

I have to admit, sadder.

Thinner or fatter?

Yo-yo much of the year.

Richer or poorer?

Richer, marginally. We had pledged a chunk of money for our church’s elevator, and that is paid off.

What do you wish you’d done more of?

Reading books.

What do you wish you’d done less of?

I’d like to say “watching the news”, but I don’t want to be beholden to false narratives, so I watch more, from various sources.

How did you spend Christmas?

Christmas Eve means singing at church, so that. Eventually, we go to the in-laws.

Did you fall in love in 2015?

You betcha.

How many one-night stands?

Jaquandor: “Now, that’s not the kind of question a gentleman answers! (Another stock answer!)”

What was your favorite TV program?

The Good Wife, CBS Sunday Morning, JEOPARDY!

Do you hate anyone now that you didn’t hate this time last year?

Hate hurts the hater. Now, intense dislike, I have a few.

What was the best book you read?

The Heart of Christianity by Marcus J. Borg. This will require a review, eventually. But kudos to Jaquandor for Stardancer.

What was your greatest musical discovery?

I blame someone from church, who put two Bruno Mars songs on a mixed CD, one of which was Uptown Funk. But more important, and on the same mix, is the song Glory, from the movie Selma. The more I listen to it, the more I appreciate it. Some lyrics:

The biggest weapon is to stay peaceful
We sing, our music is the cuts that we bleed through
Somewhere in the dream, we had an epiphany
Now we right the wrongs in history
No one can win the war individually
It takes the wisdom of the elders and young people’s energy
Welcome to the story we call victory
Comin’ of the Lord, my eyes have seen the glory

What did you want and get?

Out of Corporate (frickin’) Woods, and working downtown.

What did you want and not get?

An office with a door, which was bitterly disappointing beyond belief.

What were your favorite films of this year?

Selma; Love & Mercy; Inside Out.

What did you do on your birthday?

I thought I would have written about this, but I can’t find it. I had my annual hearts game with friends Broome, Mary, and Orchid. Lifelong friend Karen came up because of work that evening, regaling us with stories about Johnny Cash, Paul McCartney, and elevators.

How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2015?

See these stories. This is about five minutes longer than what I care about in terms of fashion.

What kept you sane?

My dads’ group in church.

Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, George Takei.

What political issue stirred you the most?

Congress couldn’t even limit guns to those on terror watch lists, because FREEDOM, which epitomizes my despair that ANYTHING will happen to make guns less available to people who ought not to have them.

Who did you miss?

Madre, padre.

Who was the best new person you met?

Our acting presbyter, and a young woman at a church dinner.

Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2015:

Doing the right thing sometimes backfires.

Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

After the Charleston shooting, James Taylor sang Shed A Little Light in Columbia, SC. The lyrics:

And recognize that there are ties between us,
All men and women living on the Earth.
Ties of hope and love,
Sister and brotherhood,
That we are bound together
In our desire to see the world
Become a place in which our children
Can grow free and strong.
We are bound together by the task
That stands before us
And the road that lies ahead.
We are bound and we are bound.

Connecting the historical dots: Ferguson to Charleston

“People should not spend their days mourning relatives they never knew from a war that ended 150 years ago, especially if that feeling is so paramount that it outweighs the sense of brotherhood they might feel toward fellow humans who are alive…”

At my relatively diverse, but still primarily white, church, I am the de facto organizer for Black History Month each February. I’ve noticed that 2016 will mark the 90th anniversary of what what was Negro History Week, designed by Carter G. Woodson in 1926. “Besides building self-esteem among blacks, [it] would help eliminate prejudice among whites.”

I think the argument that the United States is “post-racial”, now that Barack Obama has been elected President twice, has been pretty well negated by the events of the past six years. There are those who will seriously argue that because Obama, and for that matter, actress Halle Berry, had white mothers, they shouldn’t be considered black. Anyone passingly aware of the historic obsessive nature of the US government to define race Continue reading “Connecting the historical dots: Ferguson to Charleston”

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.

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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How ‘Respectability Politics’ Muted The Legacy Of Black LGBT Activist Pauli Murray

That damn song about ancestors

My parents are gone and have joined my ancestors, and there is no one else in an earlier generation in my lineage.

Right after I got back to Albany, after my mother’s funeral in February 2011 in Charlotte, NC, I attended the church service of my current congregation. It was Black History Month, and I had helped organize the events but did not participate much in them. I’m standing in the congregation, rather than singing in the choir when we got to do Lift Every Voice and Sing.

I’m singing it, as I’ve done dozens of times in the past. We get to the lyrics:
Out from the gloomy past,
Till now we stand at last

And I start sobbing uncontrollably. Don’t know if anyone, except The Wife, noticed, but I was unable to sing anymore.

I’m reminded of this because it’s always the last song we perform at my church in Black History Month, and I am still unable to get through the song without crying at some point, and that had not been an issue before 2011. I think it’s that “adult orphan” thing, that my parents are gone and have joined my ancestors, that there is no one else in an earlier generation in my lineage – my parents were both only children – and somehow I’ve become the eldest member of my tiny little tribe on earth, the children and grandchildren of Les and Trudy Green, who were married March 12, 1950, in Binghamton, NY.

LISTEN to Lift Every Voice and Sing.