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The Curse of Canaan (or Ham)

The explanation that black Africans, as the “sons of Ham”, were cursed, possibly “blackened” by their sins, became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries.

When we were investigating some aspects of black history this year at church, I was intrigued by the fact that, for a time in the mid-17th century, slavery based on race wasn’t really codified in the United States. There were white indentured servants and black slaves, but the former were often given ever-changing terms of servitude, making them functionally little better off than slaves.

In the 1670s, Bacon’s Rebellion “demonstrated that poor whites and poor blacks could be united in a cause. This was a great fear of the ruling class — what would prevent the poor from uniting to fight them? This fear hastened the transition to racial slavery.”

The status of blacks in Virginia slowly changed over the last half of the 17th century.“The black indentured servant, with his hope of freedom, was increasingly being replaced by the black slave.” So why bother with indentured servants who, after 7, 18, or 21 years [would have to be freed], when you could have Africans serve their lifetime, and serve in perpetuity through their children?

But HOW was the idea of permanent black enslavement developed? In part, from the Bible. Specifically from Genesis 9, starting with verse 18. After Noah has too much wine, “Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father and told his two brethren outside.” Noah curses Canaan (not Ham) to be the lowest of slaves “to his brothers,” specifically to Ham’s brothers, Japheth and Shem.

From the Wikipedia:

While Genesis 9 never says that Ham was black, he became associated with black skin, through folk etymology deriving his name from a similar, but actually unconnected, word meaning “dark” or “brown”…

The explanation that black Africans, as the “sons of Ham”, were cursed, possibly “blackened” by their sins, was advanced only sporadically during the Middle Ages, but it became increasingly common during the slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries. The justification of slavery itself through the sins of Ham was well suited to the ideological interests of the elite; with the emergence of the slave trade, its racialized version justified the exploitation of African labour.

Read Black Slavery as the “Curse of Ham”: Bible Truth or Racist Apologetic?

The notion that blackness is equal to sin, used to “prove” black people’s “natural” inferiority, and lack of moral character, also shows up in the Book of Mormon, published in the 1820s (2 Nephi 5:21):

And [God] had caused the cursing to come upon them, yea, even a sore cursing, because of their iniquity. For behold, they had hardened their hearts against him, that they had become like unto a flint; wherefore, as they were white, and exceedingly fair and delightsome, that they might not be enticing unto my people, the Lord God did cause a skin of blackness to come upon them. And thus saith the Lord God; I will cause that they shall be loathsome unto thy people, save they shall repent of their iniquities.”

Sometime in the last few years, a good Christian woman, who reportedly has studied the Bible carefully, indicated, more or less out of the blue, that I was descended from Ham. Yet, in spite of my “cursed state,” the love of Jesus Christ was still available to me. Circumstances warranted that I had no opportunity for reply.

THIS is my reply: lady, your “Biblical history” is BS.

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

Mom, 40 years ago: taking care from far away

This is the fourth anniversary of my mom’s death today.

After my sister Leslie and I left my grandmother in Charlotte, NC with my parents and my sister Marcia in January 1975, I went back to Binghamton, NY, and stayed in my grandmother’s house. She had a coal stove, and I had SEEN her operate for years. But seeing and doing were two different things, and soon, the fire went out, and the pipes froze.

I was pretty depressed after the breakup of my marriage to the Okie, so I mostly watched television. I mean hours at a time. My grandma’s set got only one station, WNBF-TV, the CBS affiliate. So I watched the soap operas As the World Turns, The Edge of Night, Guiding Light, and Search for Tomorrow. Don’t remember watching any game shows except Match Game. Viewed the bulk of the CBS nighttime schedule, except perhaps the movies. And, heaven help me, I watched Hee Haw, which by that point was in first-run syndication. I told you I was depressed.

Usually on Thursday evenings, and occasionally other nights, I’d visit my friend Carol (not to be confused with my wife Carol), washed up, watched TV at HER house (The Waltons). The then-current travails of her life probably kept me sane.

Occasionally, I’d walk downtown to the library, if it wasn’t too cold. Don’t remember reading books, though I did read the newspaper. I DO remember listening to the LPs on the record player. One time I was playing the first side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road, and I cranked up the volume louder and louder. The song I Want You (She’s So Heavy) ends abruptly, which I knew from plenty of previous plays; at that moment, however, I thought briefly that I had died.

The electricity at my grandma’s house was spotty. I had a space heater that I could not run with the refrigerator, lest I blow the circuit. Didn’t matter; the house was so cold, I didn’t NEED the refrigerator. I DID need the space heater, though, and the colorful quilt that kept me from freezing.

One night in February, I woke up with a start. The quilt had caught fire, having fallen on the space heater. It generated an acrid stretch, which might have killed me, if the fire, which I was somehow able to smother, hadn’t.

A day or two later, I called my mom in North Carolina and told her this story. And she told me that she knew this had happened. She woke up from a dream, or a vision, and called me mentally to wake up, and I did. This is NOT the type of tale my mother generally told, so I believed her, believe her still.

This being the fourth anniversary of her death today, I want to say, “Thanks, Mom. I love you, too.”

Binghamton, Albany: looking back at the places I’ve lived

Maurice Ravel played at at Vincentian Institute in Albany in 1928!

I have said before that I’m not much for nostalgia. Yet, this year, I have joined two Facebook groups that are looking back at people and places from the cities’ past.

One group is I AM FROM BINGHAMTON, NY. The group was created in 2008.

This picture is of McLean’s department store in downtown Binghamton, one of two stores – the other was Fowler’s – that anchored downtown Binghamton for decades. McLean’s was located on Court Street at the corner of Chenango Street, across from City Hall.

My mother worked at McLean’s, first as an elevator operator, then as a bookkeeper for many years. My sisters and would go downtown, often walking from home, to visit her, or to walk up Chenango Street to eat at some restaurant called the Olympia (?) Tea Room, or to see a movie at the Strand or the Riviera.

Later, my mom worked at Columbia Gas as a bookkeeper, also on that first block on Chenango. Most of the place mentioned are long gone. There’s a Boscov’s where Fowler’s was, but it is possibly the rattiest looking store in the chain. How can I have forgotten that the CVS drug store, was once Hamlin’s before it got bought out?

Closer to my home, we went to the G&H Diner frequently because my mother had neither the time, the inclination, or the talent to cook; how did I forget that place on the corner of Front and Franklin Streets? On the other hand, I never knew about Binghamton’s Buried Stream of the First Ward, MY old neighborhood.

Ross Park Zoo is still around, and still with a carousel. But I had forgotten that it used to have a train to ride around.

I WAS able to add to the discussion. As a Cub Scout, I discovered, on a tour of Crowley’s, the dairy producer. that one building was linked to the building across Conklin Avenue underneath the road. When I was eight, this was exceedingly cool.

When I was a kid, I appeared a couple local daily TV shows in Binghamton on WNBF-TV, Channel 12, maybe TV RANCH CLUB or OFFICER BILL. Or possibly, both. Here’s a LINK to an INTERVIEW with BILL PARKER, the host of those two shows and much more. My buddy John notes that his “VOICE still resonates the same after all these years!” (November 7th 2014, 46 minutes).

This is WAY cool: an amazing historical view of downtown Binghamton from 1950 that itemizes all of the business on a street map of the center of the city. Incidentally, there are two rivers in Binghamton, the Chenango, running north/south, and the Susquehanna, running east/west. The house numbers start from the river they are perpendicular to.

Of course, there is sometimes a tendency to idealize the past. This is a picture of a Ku Klux Klan rally from the mid-1920s, in front of Binghamton City Hall, which is right across from McLean’s. From one participant’s information, they tried to re-market themselves as a “service organization” to attract new members and downplayed their racial motives. They were still anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant as well as anti-black, and tried to form a boycott of Endicott Johnson shoe manufacturers if George F Johnson didn’t fire his immigrant work force; George F ignored them.

This is a piece of local history I had heard about, second-hand. But to actually SEE it on streets I have walked was astonishing. The fiction that the Klan existed/exists only in the southern US. From the Wikipedia: “At its peak in the mid-1920s, the organization claimed to include about 15% of the nation’s eligible population, approximately 4–5 million men.” Reportedly, from 1923 to 1928, Binghamton was the NYS headquarters for the KKK.

(Unfortunately, the KKK thread, which was quite civilized, was removed from the page by the administrator, presumably as too controversial.)

Also, in 1948, Binghamton had a comic books burning.

I got the picture below from my friend Carol of the remains of the school I attended from K-9, 1958-1968, Daniel Dickinson, taken May of 1973, when I was away at college at New Paltz. I was unaware this was about to take place until long after it was razed, and it broke my heart. The area is now apartments.

By contrast, the Facebook page Albany… the way it was, run by Al Quaglieri, whose byline I remember from Metroland, the arts weekly, involves discoveries of things I never knew. Maurice Ravel played at at Vincentian Institute in 1928! Even Albany before dozens of homes were razed, and the Empire State Plaza was built was new to me, since I didn’t move here until 1979.

I was able to participate in one recent conversation. Al doesn’t always remember some of the places that have come and gone. But I remember, fondly, the Shades of Green vegetarian restaurant on Lark Street, around the corner from Washington Avenue. I went there a lot when I worked at FantaCo in the 1980s.

You should check out the Albany group archive, a “gigantic photo library – over 10,000 images that you can search.”

So these pages provide me an interesting convergence of history and memory, and, yes, perhaps nostalgia.

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Pronounce This: Upstate New York