slavery Archives - Ramblin' with Roger

Book review: African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley

Wilkes-Barre, PA

On July 7, at the Albany Public Library, I spoke about the book African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley: 1778-1990 by Emerson L. Moss, published by the Wyoming Valley Historical and Geological Society and the Wilkes University Press in 1992.

Why am I reporting on such an obscure book? In part, it’s because it’s been in my collection for a while. Also, it mentions by name a couple of my ancestors.

First off, what is the Wyoming Valley? “It is a historic, industrialized region of Northeastern Pennsylvania consisting of Lackawanna, Wyoming, and Luzerne counties, with Luzerne being the largest in terms of both area and population. The region is historically notable for its role in fueling the American Industrial Revolution through its many anthracite coal mines. As a metropolitan area, it is known as the Scranton–Wilkes-Barre metropolitan area, after its principal cities. With a population of 567,559 as of the 2020 United States census, it is the fifth-largest metropolitan area in Pennsylvania, after the Philadelphia metropolitan area, Greater Pittsburgh, the Lehigh Valley (Allentown-Bethlehem), and the Harrisburg–Carlisle metropolitan statistical areas.”

While not specifically an ethnography, it does “explore cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. It also… involves examining the behavior of the participants in a given social situation and understanding the group members’ own interpretation of such behavior.”

Breakdown

Chapter I is The Early African-American Experience in America, 1619-1896, which traces the timeline from the origins of slavery in the future USA to the dreadful Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case. It occurred to me that 35 years ago, knowledge about slavery, especially in the non-black community, was rather sparse. Most of them weren’t reading Lenore Bennett’s Before The Mayflower.

Charles Miner was a pioneer civil rights advocate, elected to the US House of Representatives in 1824 (yes, he was white).

Chapter II, The African-American in Pennsylvania, 1639-1887, noted that William Penn, who founded the future state, was a slaveholder. In 1700, PA passed Black Codes, though a few religious groups opposed the bigotry.

There is a fascinating debate in Congress, including by H.B. Wright from Luzerne County, about why blacks were unfit for war, and that black soldiers would make white soldiers leave the service.

Chapter III, Early African-Americans in the Wyoming Valley, noted that a 1798 census showed 11 slaves and 13 free non-whites in Luzerne County. Nevertheless, there was a strong anti-abolitionist streak in the area, as well as a vibrant Underground Railroad system. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 made things even more troubled. Black people could not vote until after the Civil War.

Chapter IV, Religious Life, and Chapter V, Education, were often intertwined because state laws and local regulations made it difficult to establish schools, leaving churches to fill the gap. Chapter VI, Organizations, focused on social entities such as lodges and the NAACP. and certain YMCAs, where black folks could participate freely.

Relative

Chapter VI is titled First Families Remembered. The first listed was the Patterson Family. As I wrote about here, Samuel Patterson, my great-great-grandfather, who fought in the 5th Massachusetts Colored Cavalry during the American Civil War. Oddly, neither his wife nor his mother is mentioned by name. S.J. later had a very successful tile company. Another family listed was the Patience family, a couple of whom married Pattersons, unsurprisingly.

The Afterward was titled “The Community Today,” which was rather critical of the lack of progress. Appendix A, Remembrances of Blacks in the Wyoming Valley, contained bios of several folks, including some 19th-century weddings. Appendix B (local black members of the US military) and Appendix C (Black business in the Wyoming Valley in 1910) both mentioned SJ Patterson. There were additional sections about medical, legal, religious, and sports figures.

The book is a robust look, especially at Luzerne County black life. Sometimes, one could extrapolate from the specific examples in this book to other northern communities with small but robust black populations.

Surely, the pride in local accomplishments applies to places I’ve lived.

“The Missouri Compromise!”

Maine statehood

I was heading to take the bus to attend my choir rehearsal one cold February evening. Even several dozen meters away, I could hear someone at my stop, saying, repeatedly, “Do you know about the Missouri Compromise? Remember the 14th Amendment!”

It turned out to be a young Black woman, maybe 22(?), who was chanting it, stopping for about ten seconds between recitations. The folks at our bus stop generally ignored her, but some at the stop across the street started yelling, “Shut up!” or a variant.

Since I had to walk past her, I ALMOST replied, “Yes, I do! The Missouri Compromise of 1820 allowed Maine to enter the Union as a free state and Missouri to enter as a slave state. It set a precedent for the next 30 years or so. I even wrote a bit about it.” But I opted against. You can read how Henry Clay shepherded the bill here, and the bill’s wording here.

HCR

Then, on March 14, Heather Cox Richardson posted a piece titled “Happy Birthday, Maine.” You can access it on Substack here. In part, she wrote:

“Mainers were angry that their statehood had been tied to the demands of far-distant slave owners, and that anger worked its way into the state’s popular culture. The opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 meant that Maine men, who grew up steeped in that anger, could spread west.

And so they did.

“In 1837, Elijah P. Lovejoy, who had moved to Alton, Illinois, from Albion, Maine, to begin a newspaper dedicated to the abolition of human enslavement, was murdered by a pro-slavery mob, who threw his printing press into the Mississippi River.

“Elijah Lovejoy’s younger brother, Owen, had also moved west from Maine. Owen saw Elijah shot and swore his allegiance to the cause of abolition. ‘I shall never forsake the cause that has been sprinkled with my brother’s blood,’ he declared. He turned to politics, and in 1854, he was elected to the Illinois state legislature. His increasing prominence brought him political friends, including an up-and-coming lawyer who had arrived in Illinois from Kentucky by way of Indiana, Abraham Lincoln…”

“Congress passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act, overturning the Missouri Compromise and permitting the spread of slavery to the West.” HCR wrote that the repercussions of that 1854 action included the creation of the Republican Party by 1856. When he ran for President in 1860, Lincoln picked Hannibal Hamlin of Maine to be his running mate.

So, the Missouri Compromise was the beginning of much anti-slavery fervor, which helped define the issue before the Civil War.

S. Epatha Merkerson is 70

Isaac Hawkins Hall

The actor S. Epatha Merkerson played Lieutenant Anita Van Buren in 390 episodes of the long-running procedural Law and Order, from 1993 to 2010. I thought she was very credible in playing someone who had to deal with some added burdens in the workplace. She talked about the wigs she wore for the show.

I got the sense that Alex Trebek was a big fan of hers when she appeared on Celebrity JEOPARDY in 1999.

But she’s done a lot more. Epatha was nominated for two Tony Awards. She was up for Best Actress In A Play in 2008 for Come Back, Little Sheba, and Best Featured Actress In A Play in 1990 for The Piano Lesson.

I did not know that she was Reba in 16 episodes of Pee-wee’s Playhouse, primarily because I never watched the show. Currently, she plays Sharon Goodwin on Chicago Med, a program I’ve watched exactly once.

Georgetown

What I did see her in was the Freedom Tales episode of Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., which first aired on February 5, 2019. It reran early in 2022.

One of the most significant findings was that an ancestor of Epatha, Patrick Hawkins, was one of 272 people enslaved by the Jesuit priests of what is now Georgetown University who were sold to two planters in Louisiana in 1838. Money was tight for the educational institution. There’s a pretty good Wikipedia page on the subject.

WETA, the PBS station in DC hosted a screening and discussion of the episode. here’s a five-minute clip. Also, read Sister Melannie Svoboda’s blog.

“Despite her success, Merkerson recounted how she had ‘always wanted to know’ where her family came from. When she asked her grandmother to tell her about their ancestors, her grandmother responded, ‘It’s painful. You don’t need to hear any of this.'” This is not an unusual response.

“The ‘inventory’ compiled by the Jesuits for the sale listed the name of every slave. On the list were five of Patrick Hawkins’ relatives, his wife Letty, his son Peter, and his father Isaac. Georgetown recently renamed the Former Jesuit Residence after Isaac Hawkins following student protests over its original name that honored one of the Jesuits involved in the sale.

“Brought to tears, Merkerson responded, ‘They have names…they have names. They’re not just faceless people.'”

Reunion

At the end of the episode, S. Epatha Merkerson attended a reunion of the GU272 Descendants Association. “GU272 is dedicated to preserving the memory, commemorating the lives, and restoring the honor of the GU272 enslaved people sold by the Maryland Province Jesuits in 1838 and those who were enslaved before, during, and after the sale by the Society of Jesus. As Descendants, we commit to reconciling our ancestors’ enslavement, reconnecting families, and renewing ties lost.”

Epatha said on the Finding Your Roots episode that maybe she’ll be able to take courses at Georgetown. Implicit was that she should be able to take them for free.

Doctrine of Discovery: papal bull

European Christian governments could lay title to non-European territory

**From https://www.redletterchristians.org/called-to-respond-dismantling-the-doctrine-of-discovery/**

The Anti-Racism Task Force at my church has been holding a series of online discussions. One involved the Doctrine of Discovery. I was vaguely aware of it. From the material:

The Doctrine “originally came from Papal bulls issued in the 1100s by popes, providing permission for Christian explorers to take land from non-believers and do with those people whatever they wanted. (e.g.Crusades, slavery, etc.)”

Daniel N. Paul created a First Nations history, worth reading in its entirety. He starts with a quote from Thomas Aquinas’ rationalization. “On the part of the Church, however, there is mercy which looks to the conversion of the wanderer… after [a couple of tries] that, if he is yet stubborn, the Church no longer hoping for his conversion, looks to the salvation of others, by excommunicating him and separating him from the Church, and furthermore delivers him to the secular tribunal to be exterminated thereby from the world by death.”

The Gilder Lehrman website describes in detail “The Papal Bull ‘Inter Caetera,’ issued by Pope Alexander VI on May 4, 1493… [It] played a central role in the Spanish conquest of the New World.” This follows a similar series of bulls by Pope Nicolas V a few decades earlier justifying the Portuguese slave trade.

The American version

The Wikipedia entry, also useful, notes: The doctrine… is a “concept of public international law expounded by the United States Supreme Court in a series of decisions, most notably Johnson v. M’Intosh in 1823. Chief Justice John Marshall explained and applied the way that colonial powers laid claim to lands belonging to foreign sovereign nations during the Age of Discovery. Under it, European Christian governments could lay title to non-European territory on the basis that the colonisers travelled and ‘discovered’ said territory.”

Look at the whole thing, which helps to explain the Monroe Doctrine and most especially Manifest Destiny. A legal debate found the Native Americans “to be in violation of international law through their resistance to Spanish exploration and missionary activities. By resisting Spanish incursions, Indians were, according to Vitoria, provoking war with the Spanish invaders, thus justifying Spanish conquest of Indian lands.”

I also highly recommend the links at the Upstander Project.

In a quick search, you’ll find a number of churches, governments, and other organizations repudiating the idea of the Doctrine of Discovery. These bodies recognize that the philosophy is not well known, and difficult to understand. But they recognize they’ve been advantaged, and that it still has an impact on modern-day dealings.

The Unitarians lowlight one of their own, Joseph Story. He was an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court at the time of the Johnson v. M’Intosh decision. The United Church of Christ addresses “Why it still Matters Today.” A group of Anabaptists noted: “Dismantling the Doctrine of Discovery can seem overwhelming for a lot of people. Here you can find a few foundational components to help break it down.”

This is a big topic, far beyond what I can fairly address here. But I believe it is worth your while to investigate.

Edgar exercise: slavery, BLM, Obama

black people are not a monolith

For my last Times Union blog post this month, even after my goodbye piece, I reposted the first part of my February 5 piece from this blog, about asking three different people (living or dead, famous or not) ONE question.

Edgar, a contrarian who most TU bloggers became familiar with, wrote:

I’d ask Antonio Johnson how it felt to be an African American AND the first American owner of a slave (John Casor).

This actually did happen. “John Casor, a servant in Northampton County in the Virginia Colony, in 1655 became the first person of African descent in the Thirteen Colonies to be declared as a slave for life as a result of a civil suit.”

This predated the large-scale codification of slavery in the future United States by race, in the 1670s and later. Would Johnson’s singular act cause him distress over what became mass enslavement of black people in the years to come? Interesting question and of course unanswerable.

I’d ask Republican President Lincoln how it felt to free Democrats slaves.

Since formerly enslaved people had not yet received the right to suffrage, I don’t know what “Democratic slaves” means. That said, I’ve been recently helping my daughter with American history. It’s clear that Lincoln wanted the states of the Confederacy to rejoin the Union as soon as was feasible. His second Vice-President, Andrew Johnson, WAS a Democrat.

Black Lives Matter

I’d ask Martin Luther King if he approved of the violence perpetrated by members of the “some lives matter, depending on skin color” movement which has abandoned his highly effective peaceful protests against racism.

As is his wont, Edgar has twisted the meaning of Black Lives Matter. That said, he asks a legitimate question about tactics. Yes, there were non-violent actions on the part of demonstrators back in the 1950s and 1960s. The other side – i.e., law enforcement – was often not as pleasant. See Selma, March 7, 1965, e.g. And when America saw the actions of Southern police, the nation was outraged.

“Some 2,000 people set out from Selma on March 21, protected by U.S. Army troops and Alabama National Guard forces that [Lyndon] Johnson had ordered under federal control.’

The Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956 took over a year, and it involved legal maneuvering. The Little Rock Nine integrated the high school in 1957 with the help of federal troops. In other words, the force of law and/or people with weapons.

MLK’s nonviolent campaign was much less successful when he moved North. And he died by violence.

Black Lives Matter started in 2013 and was largely ignored. It wasn’t until America could finally be ready to see for itself a black man being murdered by a white cop that people seriously started saying, “Oh, THAT’S what they’ve been talking about!” A whole lot of people of various races demonstrated for BLM in 2020. Most of them were peaceful.

Some folks were not. They may have calculated that it was 65 years since Rosa refused to give up her seat, and over half a century since Martin was murdered. How long, and by which tactics, will we be free?

King said, “A riot is the language of the unheard.” What do you do when you keep saying it, and they’re still not hearing it? I suspect MLK would understand, even if he disapproved of the tactic.

Barack

And of you, I’d ask, do you think that, in your lifetime, we’ll have had a black president… as a bonus question.

When Barack Obama walked the streets of Chicago, people saw a black man. From the NIH: “African Americans in the US typically carry segments of DNA shaped by contributions from peoples of Europe, Africa, and the Americas.” Obama’s racial profile is different from most black Americans. But to suggest he isn’t black is disingenuous. And a boringly divisive trope.

It’s been my theory that some thought that he, as a child of a white mother, wouldn’t be too black. But he kept disappointing them by doing “black” things such as singing Al Green and promoting Hamilton, a musical with a mostly black cast.

Know that many white parents – Halle Berry’s white mom, for one – made sure their children would know how to negotiate this country as black persons, if only because that’s how they’d be perceived in America anyway.

Ibram X. Kendi said recently on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah that black people are not a monolith. We have a diversity of experiences. Barack Obama’s is one experience. And Edgar doubting his “legitimacy” as a black person does not make it less so.