What Others are Saying about African American Core Values: A Guide for Everyone
"In what has obviously been a labor of love, Richard Rosenfield compiles a useful compendium of folk wisdom which, while coming out of the African American community, is of profound relevance to all Americans. Reaching across the generations and spanning the range from academic to popular discourses, Rosenfield reproduces here one nugget of insight after the other. All of our young people need to read and reflect upon this invaluable book."
--GLENN C. LOURY, Merton P. Stoltz Professor of the Social Sciences in the Department of Economics at Brown University, and author of Race, Incarceration, and American Values
"It was a great idea to edit such a book, and a major contribution."
--JAMES P. COMER, Founder and Chairman of the School Development Program at the Yale University School of Medicine's Child Study Center, and author of What I Learned In School: Reflections on Race, Child Development, and School Reform
African American Core Values: A Guide for Everyone serves as a poignant collection of hard-fought common sense values that every American--no matter their color--can benefit from. The values of self-reliance, hard work, education, and the willingness to endure to overcome obstacles were once common in the black community. It is books such as this one that can help bring these values back."
--REVEREND JESSE LEE PETERSON, Founder and President of Brotherhood Organization of a New Destiny, and author of From Rage to Responsibility: Black Conservative Jesse Lee Peterson and America Today
"I was struck by the academic possibilities of this compilation. Educators, counselors and scholars would find it very useful. Having these ideas collected in one place and accessible would be very convenient for those who are speaking to, or working with, young people."
--JOHNNETTA B. COLE, Director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, President Emerita of Spelman and Bennett Colleges, Chair of the JBC Institute, and author of Gender Talk: The Struggle For Women's Equality in African American Communities
A great piece of work. Every student, of every color, should read this. It should be part of the social studies curriculum."
--ANDREW D. WASHTON, author of What Happens Next? Stories to Finish for Intermediate Writers, Teachers College Press, Columbia University
African American Core Values
A Guide for Everyone
Compiled by
Richard M. Rosenfield
Published by Richard M. Rosenfield at Smashwords
AFRICAN AMERICAN CORE VALUES: A GUIDE FOR EVERYONE
Copyright 2012 by Richard M. Rosenfield
Smashwords Edition
Thank you for downloading this ebook. It remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoy it, please encourage your friends to acquire their own copy of the ebook or print edition. Thank you for your support.
All author royalties from this edition will be donated to a nonprofit organization.
To the memory of my parents,
Samuel and
Sylvia,
and to
Yael and Sam
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Note
on the Ebook Edition
Preface
Introduction
Part
I: Background
Chapter
1: Oppression
Chapter
2: Opportunity
Chapter
3: Self-Reliance
Part
II: Core Values
Chapter
4: Marriage
Chapter
5: Education
Chapter
6: Work
Part
III: Obstacles
Chapter
7: Crime
Chapter
8: Conformity
Chapter
9: Passivity
Biographical
Notes
About
the Author
Notes
Acknowledgments
I appreciate all the library workers who made it possible for me to find books, especially in the system of the New York Public Library.
Many friends have supported my efforts by giving me articles and books, criticizing sections of the manuscript, and simply by asking how it was going. I thank all of you, especially Ansell, Bernie, John, Jules, Maximo, Andrea and Paul.
Years before publication I was lucky to receive feedback from Anne C. Beal, Johnnetta B. Cole, Abigail Thernstrom, and Faye Wattleton. Although these authors did not know me, they graciously responded to my request for their opinions. Their encouragement meant more to me than they could have known.
Most helpful of all was the patience, feedback, encouragement, and love I received from Yael and Sam.
Note on the Ebook Edition
I submitted the final text of the print edition of African American Core Values to the publisher before recognizing that our national economy was seriously troubled. Considering the current hard economic times, sections in that edition, about African American economic progress, may impress some readers as overly positive. To me, the message of the first edition remains valid: the core values that enabled African Americans to advance, under conditions much worse than those seen today, continue to foster well-being and progress, for everyone. The wisdom in African American literature is timeless. Consequently, this edition has only a few minor changes.
This ebook does not contain the Name Index or citations for the quotes. Please see the print edition for that information.
Preface
Working as a school psychologist for thirty years, from rural North Carolina to New York City, I saw many achieving African American students who clearly would succeed in the workplace. But I was more concerned with those who were not performing well and were vulnerable to remaining poor throughout their lives. News reports suggested that most African Americans were poor. The media implied that the solution was for government officials to start programs and stop the discrimination in our country. This viewpoint left ordinary people such as my students and most adults with no direction, nothing to do.
Jewell
Jackson McCabe
Here we are in the twenty-first century, with
no generational plan for the cultural equity and creation of wealth
that we are committed to.
Nathan
McCall, on middle-class black people who want to help:
Like
me, they feel frustrated and so overwhelmed by the complex web of
problems facing African Americans that they don’t know where to
begin.
I searched for answers in books by African Americans. They wrote that they were making much more economic progress than the media indicated. They identified a set of three core values that contributed to their success: marriage, education, and work. These writers convinced me that if more young people believed in and lived by those values, more would avoid poverty and achieve well-being, and the movement to economic equality would broaden and accelerate.
But in many homes, those values were not fully recognized or passed on. Most of the parents I worked with were single mothers, grandparents, older sisters, foster parents, aunts, and uncles. Many were spending all their time and energy just keeping a roof over everyone’s head and keeping their kids fed, clothed, in school, and out of trouble. They tried their best to instill wholesome values, but it’s a difficult job. They often were not as effective as they wanted to be.
African American Core Values is a resource for black youth and the people who raise, teach, and influence them. It is a compilation of focused self-help quotations from approximately two hundred years of African American writing and speaking. It guides young people, affirms their efforts, and warns of potential obstacles. It also takes them through a major part of American history in the authentic, poignant voices of those who experienced and shaped that history.
People other than African Americans can also benefit from these quotations. Young people of all races experience many of the same challenges. The insights in black literature can help all teens and young adults avoid problems in life and take advantage of opportunities.
Adults of all races can benefit as well. A theme that runs through the literature is that African Americans feel misunderstood, misperceived. Shelby Steele wrote of "white blindness." Ralph Ellison’s protagonist thought, "I am invisible….they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination—indeed, everything and anything except me." Miles Davis reacted to misperceptions by suggesting that white people "read a book and learn something." I read and learned from former slaves to contemporary multimillionaires, from radicals to corporate presidents, from athletes and rap artists to Ivy League professors, from the revered elders to twelve-year-old Myesha. They explained what they lived through as black people and what they value. Their testimony helped me understand, and it can help anyone who is open to learning.
I suggest that readers use these quotations as a first source, and then go to the writers and books that interest them. Reading the original texts is the best way to understand and be inspired by black literature.
Students can enhance their reading experience by searching for favorite quotations, writing or speaking about what their favorites mean to them, and deciding how they can act on those values.
Some of the most impressive quotations come from women, but the majority are by men. Throughout the centuries, relatively few black women have had the chance to write or be published, and, when they did, they often wrote novels. 1
Marian
Wright Edelman, JD
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth
represent the thousands of anonymous women whose voices were muted by
slavery, segregation, and confining gender roles throughout history.
In addition to hundreds of quotations from African Americans, a small number from white and non-Americans are included.
I use the terms African American and black because it is my perception that today most Americans of African descent use and prefer those words.
Going against custom, I place speakers’ names before their statements. I feel that reading the quotation while knowing who expressed it sometimes makes its significance more impressive. For instance, encouragement to vote from someone who fought and suffered to gain voting rights has a special impact.
Because the primary goal is economic, I present examples of African Americans who are successful and wealthy. But no one on these pages says that money is the best thing in life or that it brings happiness. Instead, men and women speak of the pleasures of living with one’s spouse and children, of learning and reading, of the sense of accomplishment that work gives them, and of the fulfillment they obtain from exercising individual freedom.
W. E. B. Du Bois once asked, "Would America have been America without her Negro people?" The quotations in this book make it clear that the creativity and productivity of black Americans have enriched this nation. For me, an America without African Americans would be a colder, poorer, duller place. I hope that African Americans and people of other races find this compilation to be useful.
Introduction
African Americans have been using the core values of marriage, education, and work to climb the economic ladder and to enable their children to climb even higher. As more people embrace these values, more are likely to succeed.
Juan
Williams
The good news is that there is a formula for getting
out of poverty today. The magical steps begin with finishing high
school, but finishing college is much better. Step number two is
taking a job and holding it. Step number three is marrying after
finishing school and while you have a job. And the final step to give
yourself the best chance to avoid poverty is to have children only
after you are twenty-one and married. This formula applies to black
people and white people alike.
The poverty rate for any black man
or woman who follows that formula is 6.4 percent.
Dr.
Maya Angelou, on the importance of both parents raising their
children:
This is critical, because more often than not, people
who come from homes where two parents are present will be supported
by the family, will receive more education, will earn their degrees,
will more than likely go on to become a part of the middle and
upper-middle class. And more than likely, those who come from the
single-parent homes will not make it as far.
Glenn
C. Loury, PhD
There is also good reason to think that the
attitudes and values communicated to youngsters via the cultural
milieu of their particular communities of origin—attitudes
about work, family, and education—serve to promote group
differences in economic attainment in adulthood.
Appreciating the progress African Americans have made requires knowing what they have overcome, and when. From 1619 until 1865, when the Civil War ended, most of the Africans who were brought here and their descendants lived in slavery. They supported others but did not have the opportunity to acquire the knowledge and skills for taking care of themselves in terms of managing finances or independently obtaining housing, food, and clothing.
After emancipation, black Americans typically were sharecroppers, living and working on isolated southern farms, in desperate poverty, without civil rights, and often without adequate nutrition, medical care, or schools.
From the early 1900s until around 1970, the Great Migration brought millions of African Americans to the modern, urban, industrialized North. These immigrants were separated from the support of family, friends, and their familiar way of living—a traumatic change. They had to cope with northern-style discrimination, including segregation, unequal rights, and limited opportunities at school and work.
Roger
Wilkins, JD, 1994
Blacks arrived on the North American
continent in 1619. For almost 250 of the ensuing 375 years we had
slavery or something very close to it. And for a century after that
we had Constitutionally sanctioned racial subordination. We have had
something other than slavery or legal racial subordination for only
twenty-nine years.
Debra
J. Dickerson, JD
By the migration’s end, America was a
changed place: its northern cities teemed with hopeful blacks who
were no longer serfs but were still far from equal. Black America was
changed as well; a century after the end of official slavery, five
minutes past sharecropping, they were only half southern and less
than a quarter rural. Finally, they were also something like free.
Thomas
Sowell, PhD
The race as a whole has moved from a position of
utter destitution—in money, knowledge, and rights—to a
place alongside other groups emerging in the great struggles of life.
None have had to come from so far back to join their fellow
Americans.
Lorraine
Hansberry’s "Mama" from A Raisin in the
Sun:
When you starts measuring somebody, measure him
right, child, measure him right. Make sure you done taken into
account what hills and valleys he come through before he got to
wherever he is.
Measuring shows that from seemingly endless oppression, that gave most black Americans little chance to avoid being poor, 75.7 percent had risen above the poverty line by 2006. 2
Married couples gained the most, and many had become prosperous. By 2003, 23.6 percent of African American married couples had an annual income between $50,000 and $74,999, and an additional 29.9 percent had an annual income of $75,000 or more. 3 By 2006, 92.9 percent of married-couple African American families were above the poverty line. 4
Marriage enriches these couples by enabling them to bring in more than one paycheck while decreasing expenses such as housing costs. At least as valuable, it is a way for a man and woman to go through life with an intimate friend and partner. But most important, from a developmental and educational viewpoint, it gives their children all the resources of two parents working together to raise them.
Education also contributes to the progress. By 2006, 80 percent of African Americans eighteen and older had graduated high school or gone further. 5 This is close to the graduation rate of the overall American population, 84.6 percent. 6 All aspects of the education gap have not been eliminated, but African Americans are moving in the right direction. For today’s young people, schooling will pay off like never before. The Census Bureau recently estimated that African American full-time workers with high school diplomas will earn $1,000,000 throughout their work lives. Those with college degrees will earn $1,700,000, and those with advanced degrees $2,500,000. 7
The progress and the opportunity for further gains are unprecedented. Just a few decades ago, most African Americans were restricted to low-skilled jobs, such as laborers and maids. Major corporations rarely hired black workers; when they did, it was only to interact with black consumers or to be "window dressing"—giving the false impression of a diversified workforce. Segregation kept black athletes out of major league sports.
Now, billionaire Robert L. Johnson is the founder of Black Entertainment Television and the film company Our Stories. He is the majority owner of the NBA Charlotte Bobcats, and also owns a hedge fund, a private equity firm, a hundred upscale hotels, gambling ventures, and banks; and he is a philanthropist.
Oprah Winfrey rose from childhood poverty and abuse to become the Emmy Award–winning host of the highest-rated television talk show ever—and a billionaire. Ms. Winfrey is an Academy Award–nominated actor, a magazine publisher, a book critic, and one of the most influential and generous people in the world.
Until E. Stanley O’Neal retired as Merrill Lynch chairman and CEO in 2007, he oversaw the investment of $1,600,000,000,000—yes, trillion—of people’s money. 8 O’Neal’s grandfather had been a slave.
Kenneth Chenault is president and CEO of the world’s most prestigious credit card company, American Express.
Ann M. Fudge is chairman and CEO of international Young & Rubicam Brands and its largest division, Y&R Advertising.
Richard Parsons was recently president and CEO of Time Warner, the world's largest media and entertainment conglomerate.
Franklin Delano Raines recently served as chairman and CEO of Fannie Mae, the third-largest corporation in America.
Ruth J. Simmons, PhD, daughter of a janitor, is president of Ivy League Brown University.
Shonda Rhimes, screenwriter, director, and producer, is the creator and executive producer of the Emmy and Golden Globe Award–winning television series Grey’s Anatomy.
In addition to being a medical doctor, Mae Jemison is a chemical engineer and former astronaut.
Benjamin S. Carson, MD, is the director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital. His practice includes traumatic brain injuries, brain and spinal cord tumors, achondroplasia, neurological and congenital disorders, craniosynostosis, epilepsy, and trigeminal neuralgia. His research has generated over ninety neurosurgical publications.
U.S. Congressman John Conyers Jr. has served as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee
U.S. Congressman Charles Rangel has served as chairman of the powerful Ways and Means Committee.
Colin Powell has held the nation’s highest-ranking military post, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and was secretary of state.
Condoleezza Rice, PhD, is the current secretary of state.
Black athletes have broken racial barriers and excelled at most sports, including Tiger Woods in golf and Venus and Serena Williams in tennis.
And Barack Obama is the President of the United States of America.
These are exceptional achievers, so the values of marriage, education, and work do not fully account for their success. But as a group, they are very well-educated and hardworking. Public sources indicate that all but Ms. Winfrey had married parents (although Dr. Carson’s father left the family when his son was eight years old, Congressman Rangel’s father left when his son was six, and President Obama’s father left when his son was two). Many single parents raise their children well, but, as Dr. Angelou and others have seen, children raised by both parents are more likely to succeed in school and the workplace.
African Americans have been succeeding.
Susan
L. Taylor
Included among us is the largest group of educated,
affluent people of African ancestry anywhere in the world. We were
born for this hour.
We are the most blessed generations of Black people anywhere in the world. We have everything we need to take charge of our lives and to move our people forward.
Marriage, education, and work are self-help values. They require confidence and faith in oneself, not in politicians or anyone else.
Jim
Brown
All that matters is to see more and more black people
mobilized and working toward constructive self-help goals.
If in my lifetime I can see that this idea really has taken hold, then I will have the satisfaction of knowing that true freedom—as black men and as black Americans—will finally be within our grasp.
Johnnetta
B. Cole, PhD
I also know that when African Americans really
want to do something, we are quite capable of figuring out the how.
No doubt, as more of us embrace the concept of self-help, we will
come up with all kinds of variations on the theme. Of course,
following through on the tried-and-true methods and developing new
ones will, to some extent, hinge on being inspired with right and
righteous motivations.
Bill
Cosby, EdD and Alvin F. Poussaint, MD
When African
Americans are committed to something, they make it happen.
A self-help strategy based on values may not seem potent because values are just ideas in someone’s mind. But Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. knew that ideas could strongly influence behavior. He was fond of Victor Hugo’s insight: "There is no greater power on earth than an idea whose time has come."
Cornel
West, PhD
Ideas can be used in such a way that it promotes the
enhancement and advancement of poor people in general, and Black
people in particular.
Lerone
Bennett Jr.
The most urgent problem of the hour is ideological
clarity. In fact, strategic thinking of a depth and intensity
unparalleled in our history has become a matter of life and
death.
What are we doing
Why are we doing it?
Will what we
are doing take us where we want to go?
And where do we want to go?
Until we reach a tentative conclusion on this point, nothing real can
be done.
Oprah
Winfrey
Our beliefs can move us forward in life—or they
can hold us back.
Instilling constructive values in young people will require more than a book because some of those who need guidance will not seek it. Family members, friends, teachers, mentors, writers, musicians, and artists can be more active in bringing wholesome messages to young people.
Glenn
C. Loury, PhD, on advocating self-help:
There are truths which
need to be spoken, and repeated, and reiterated—even when
unpopular—until one’s fellows begin to listen, and
consider, and finally accept.
Knowing the backgrounds of these writers and speakers makes their words more meaningful and vibrant. The Biographical Notes contain information on every person who has three or more quotations included in this book. Of course, fuller biographical information is available on the Internet and in books. Three legendary historic figures who are quoted are Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.
As a teenaged slave, Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) was so rebellious that his "owner" hired a "slave breaker" to crush his spirit. Young Frederick fought and defeated the man. Although schooling was forbidden and learning to read was punishable by death, Douglass became a reader. He believed that reading was the key to his escape. As a free man, Douglass hid fugitive slaves in his home and made powerful speeches that helped bring an end to the institution of slavery. His 1852 Fourth of July speech should please anyone who enjoys hearing truth spoken to power. 9 Frederick Douglass edited a newspaper, The North Star, which pointed the way to freedom. His words remain today, still pointing in that direction.
W. E. B. Du Bois, PhD (1868–1963), was Afrocentric before the word existed. He grew up singing the songs of his Bantu great-grandmother and spent his final years in Ghana, where his body is buried. From young adulthood until the age of ninety-five, Du Bois fought for the rights of African Americans. Alice Walker wrote that Du Bois showed a "consistent delight in the beauty and spirit of black people." Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, President of Ghana, told the people of his nation, "We mourn the death of Dr. William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, a great son of Africa.…He was an undaunted fighter for the emancipation of colonial and oppressed people.…a real friend and father to me.…a great African Patriot."
Du Bois’s confidence in black people is reflected in his writing.
W.
E. B. Du Bois, PhD, 1920
Europe has never produced and never
will in our day bring forth a single human soul who cannot be matched
and over-matched in every line of human endeavor by Asia and Africa.
Before Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., PhD (1929–1968) became a civil rights leader, it was not safe for Southern black people to drink from a "white" fountain, attempt to register to vote, or join the NAACP. Reverend Ralph Abernathy said that before King, it was "peculiar for the Southern Negro to stand up and look a white man in the face as an equal." King played an important part in changing those conditions. Along with voter registration workers, bus boycotters, sit-in participants, freedom riders, and freedom summer volunteers, he fought for access to public facilities, voting rights, and other civil rights. Today, black Americans have access to public facilities, the right to vote, and substantial political power; it is hard to believe that there was a time of white fountains and fearful black people.
The first time King’s house was bombed, his father, King Sr., advised him to moderate his civil rights activities, saying, "It’s better to be a live dog than a dead lion." But the young reverend chose to continue fighting. Today, black people all over America experience less discrimination and greater opportunity because of this lion.
In Part I, "Background," African Americans tell of the oppression they have experienced, the progress they have made, and their strategy of emphasizing opportunity to achieve further gains. In "Self-Reliance," they assert that they are the people who are most willing, able, and responsible for helping themselves.
In Part II, the core values are presented in the sequence of marriage, education, and then work, in keeping with the natural progression of married parents producing children who go to school and then to work.
In Part III, "Obstacles," African Americans argue against factors that impede progress. They discourage crime and drug use, recognize that conformity limits their individual freedom, and warn against passivity.
Part I Background
Chapter 1: Oppression
Knowledge of the oppression black Americans have endured is conducive to progress.
James
Baldwin
In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor
blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire
to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present
coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly
as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.
Thuvia
Jones, student
If young Black people today better understood
what came before them, it would be easier for us to understand how
far we’ve come and how to get where we’re going.
Thomas
Sowell, PhD
Neither Europeans, Asians, or Africans escaped the
fate of being slaves or the guilt of being enslavers.
Reverend
Martin Luther King Jr., PhD
Who are we? We are the descendants
of slaves. We are the offspring of noble men and women who were
kidnapped from their native land and chained in ships like beasts. We
are the heirs of a great and exploited continent known as Africa. We
are the heirs of a past of rope, fire and murder. I for one am not
ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman
that they could inflict this torture upon us.
Frederick Douglass characterized the slaveholders’ acts of injustice and cruelty as "crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages."
John
W. Blassingame, PhD
Taken on board the ship, the naked
Africans were shackled together on bare wooden boards in the hold,
and packed so tightly that they could not sit upright.
The foul and poisonous air of the hold, extreme heat, men lying for hours in their own defecation, with blood and mucus covering the floor, caused a great deal of sickness.
A number of them went insane and many became so despondent that they gave up the will to live.
Mary
Gaffney, former slave
That was all the slave thought about,
then: not being a slave. Because slavery time was hell.
Wallace
Turnage, on being a teen slave punished for escaping:
So they
brought me out and took me over to the whiping house. And the man
that whiped asked my Master did he want me whiped, the old man said
yes. So they had my pants off and tied me in the ropes that was tied
up against the wall So that the criminal might be clear the floor and
could not look behind himself to see what they were doing to him.
So they tied the rope around my legs and arms. And they had a strap there about two or three leathers thick. and they hit me thirty lashes with that strap. They would hit me Ten licks and then let me cool off a while and then give me Ten more. Now when the man that whiped me had hit me Twenty licks he asked my Master would that do. he said, give him ten more, and every lick took the skin off.
Frederick
Douglass
The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and
where the blood ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip
her to make her scream, and whip her to make her hush; and not until
overcome by fatigue, would he cease to swing the blood-clotted
cowskin.
Sojourner
Truth, former slave
I know what it is to be taken in the barn
and tied up and the blood drawn out of your bare back, and I tell you
it would make you think about God. Yes, and then I felt, O God, if I
was you and you felt like I do, and asked me for help I would help
you—now why won’t you help me?
Charlie
Moses, former slave
He whipped us till some jus’ lay
down to die.
Mary
Prince, former slave
I then saw my sisters led forth, and sold
to different owners; so that we had not the sad satisfaction of being
partners in bondage. When the sale was over, my mother hugged and
kissed us, and mourned over us, begging of us to keep up a good
heart, and do our duty to our new masters. It was a sad parting; one
went one way, one another, and our poor mammy went home with nothing.
I wish I could find words to tell you all I then felt and suffered. The great God above alone knows the thoughts of the poor slave’s heart, and the bitter pains which follow such separations as these. All that we love taken away from us—Oh, it is sad, sad! And sore to be borne!
Sis
Shackelford, former slave
Had a slave jail built at the
crossroads with iron bars ‘cross the windows. Soon as the
coffle get there, they bring all the slaves from the jail two at a
time and string ‘em along the chain back of the other po’
slaves. Everybody in the villages come out—especially the wives
and sweethearts and mothers—to see their sold-off children for
the last time. And when they start the chain a-clanking and step off
down the line, they all just sing and shout and make all the noises
they can, trying to hide the sorrow in their hearts and cover up the
cries and moaning of them they were leaving behind. Oh, Lord!
Despite the viciousness, it was in the slaveholders’ interest to limit the physical harm to slaves and to keep their families intact.
John
W. Blassingame, PhD
Dependent on the slave’s labor for
his economic survival, the planter ordinarily could not afford to
starve, torture, or work him to death.
Most masters were neither pitiless fiends nor saints in their relationships with slaves.
Paula
Giddings
Family relationships among American slaves both
discouraged rebellion and runaways, and encouraged a self-sustaining
reproduction of the labor force.
Sarah
Debro, former slave
Marse Cain was good to his niggers. He
didn’t whip them like some owners did, but if they done mean,
he sold them. They knew this so they minded him. One day Grandpappy
sassed Miss Polly White, and she told him that if he didn’t
behave hisself that she would put him in her pocket. Grandpappy was a
big man and I ask him how Miss Polly could do that. He said she meant
that she would sell him, then put the money in her pocket. He never
did sass Miss Polly no more.
John
W. Blassingame, PhD
If only the actions of masters are
considered, 67.6 percent of the slave unions were unbroken. In other
words, in spite of their callous attitudes, masters did not separate
a majority of the slave couples.
Howard
Dodson
Indeed, a study of the 1850 and 1860 manuscript
censuses suggests that a larger percentage of adult slaves compared
with southern adult free whites were or had been married at the time
of death.
Although the slaveholders had weapons and power, many slaves rebelled and escaped. Nat Turner led a fierce rebellion in Virginia in 1831. Harriet Tubman escaped, and then returned to the South and led slaves to freedom. She also planned and executed a military raid with Union troops that freed more than seven hundred slaves. 10
* * *
Surely, slaves were buoyed by hopes of freedom, a benevolent freedom conducive to recovery from centuries of ordeal. It is unfortunate that the freedom that came was so limited.
W.
E. B. Du Bois, PhD
The slave went free; stood a brief moment
in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery.
Patsy
Moore, former slave
When freedom come, folks left home, out in
the streets, crying, praying, singing, shouting, yelling, and
knocking down everything. Some shot off big guns. Then come the calm.
It was sad then. So many folks done dead, things tore up, and
nowheres to go and nothing to eat, nothing to do. It got squally.
Folks got sick, so hungry. Some folks starved nearly to death. Times
got hard.
Jake
Goodridge, former slave
The Yankee soldiers give out news of
Freedom. They was shouting around. I just stood around to see what
they was gonna do next. Didn’t nobody give me nothing. I didn’t
know what to do next. Didn’t nobody give me nothing. I didn’t
know what to do. Everything going. Tents all gone, no place to stay
and nothin’ to eat. That was the big freedom to us colored
folks. I got hungry and naked and cold many a time.
Patsy
Michener, former slave
They was turned out with nowhere to go
and nothing to live on. They had no experience in looking out for
themselves and nothing to work with and no land.
Pauli Murray wrote that as her grandfather, Robert G. Fitzgerald, traveled in Virginia in 1866, he saw "straggling caravans of homeless Negroes still roaming the roads in search of shelter, food and work"
They plodded along barefoot or with rags bound around their feet and ankles. They wore odds and ends of cast-off clothing, faded and patched beyond recognition. Some had on sewed-up gunny sacks tied about the waist with cord.
White men were determined that black men give them the same unquestioned obedience they had exacted before the war; black men were equally determined to be "treated just like white men."
Mary
Frances Berry, JD, PhD and John W. Blassingame, PhD
Almost
immediately after the war the planters turned to sharecropping
arrangements with black farmers.
Generally penniless, they obtained advances on their wages or shares of the crop. Since they were illiterate, the planters often overcharged and cheated them. The result was perpetual debt, compulsion, violence, oppression, and de facto slavery.
Dorothy
Sterling
It was common practice, many testified, for employers
to dismiss them without pay as they neared the end of their contract
year.
Henry
Robinson
I know we been beat out of money direct and indirect.
You see, they got a chance to do it all right, ‘cause they can
overcharge us and I know it’s being done. I made three bales
again last year. He said I owed $400 the beginning of the year. Now
you can’t dispute his word. When I said "Suh?" he
said "Don’t you dispute my word; the book says so."
When the book says so and so you better pay it, or they will say "So,
I’m a liar, eh?" You better take to the bushes too if you
dispute him, for he will string you up for that.
Mary
Frances Berry, JD, PhD and John W. Blassingame, PhD
Later
this system was augmented by the convict lease system, in which
planters either paid the fines of black prisoners or were permitted
to work them until their sentences were served.
Angela
Y. Davis
Through the convict lease system, black people were
forced to play the same old roles carved out for them by slavery. Men
and women alike were arrested and imprisoned at the slightest
pretext—in order to be leased out by the authorities as convict
laborers. Whereas the slaveholders had recognized limits to the
cruelty with which they exploited their "valuable" human
property, no such cautions were necessary for the postwar planters
who rented Black convicts for relatively short terms. "In many
cases sick convicts are made to toil until they drop dead in their
tracks."
* * *
Some of the emancipated slaves found ways to succeed. Racist whites sometimes reacted by lynching them.
Pierce
Harper, former slave
If they got so they made good money and
had a good farm, the Klu Klux would come and murder ’em. The
government builded schoolhouses and the Klu Klux went to work and
burned ’em down. They’d go to the jails and take the
colored men out and knock their brains out and break their necks and
throw ’em in the river.
There was a colored man they taken. His name was Jim Freeman. They taken him and destroyed his stuff and him ’cause he was making some money. Hung him on a tree in his front yard, right in front of his cabin.
Ida
B. Wells-Barnett investigated lynchings and found that they
were:
An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth
and property and thus keep the race terrorized and "keep the
nigger down."
Much of the racist violence aimed to dominate and intimidate.
Margaret
Walker, PhD
Before I was ten I knew what it was to step off
the sidewalk to let a white man pass; other wise he might knock me
off. I had had a sound thrashing by white boys while Negro men looked
on helplessly. My father was chased home one night at the point of a
gun by a drunken policeman who resented seeing a fountain pen in a
"nigger’s" pocket.
Anonymous,
seventy, on the death of her father, a blind musician:
A carload
of young crackers from somewhere ran him down in front of our house.
They were just playing with him, but when he didn’t run, the
one at the wheel got mad and ran right over him. He didn’t die
for a week, but he was out of his head. I was twenty-one. He died on
my birthday.
[He] was the only person I ever knew who thought I was sweet.
Patrice
Gaines
I was watching the news a couple of weeks later and saw
that a Birmingham church had been bombed, killing four girls. Three
of them were fourteen years old, like me. I imagined what it was like
for them, sitting in Sunday school one moment and blown to death the
next.
David
Bradley
In 1997, near a town called Independence, Virginia,
two white men kidnapped a black man named Garnett Paul Johnson, hung
him on a cross, soaked him with gasoline, burned him to death, and
then beheaded the body with a dull ax. A year later, near a town
called Jasper, Texas, three white men kidnapped a black man named
James Byrd Jr., spray-painted him white, chained him to the bumper of
a pickup, and dragged him until his body parts were distributed along
two miles of country road.
Mamie
Till-Mobley, 2003
Emmett Louis Till, my only son, my only
child, was kidnapped, tortured, and murdered at the hands of white
racists on August 28, 1955. That was so many years ago, yet it seems
like only yesterday to a mother who needs no reminders.
Hardly a moment goes by when I don’t think about Emmett.
* * *
Racists targeted civil rights workers.
Stanley
Crouch, on Robert Moses:
Moses would walk into the most
dangerous of towns, calmly stride up to a door, and begin talking
about registering to vote. He would be arrested and beaten, then
released. He would wash up, check his teeth, his glasses, change
clothes, and go back out to register people to vote.
Taylor
Branch
Four students and a white professor from Tougaloo
College staged a sit-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in
Jackson. It lasted for three hours, which gave converging reporters
plenty of time to record the details. A mob of young whites took
turns slathering the demonstrators with ketchup, mustard, and sugar—a
scene graphically depicted in the next issue of Newsweek.
After dragging them off the stools only to watch them return, the
whites doused them with spray paint and then, growing annoyed, began
sporadically to beat them. The tormentors darted forward to pour salt
into the professor’s head wound after someone clubbed him to
the floor.
U.S.
Congressman John Lewis, on the 1965 Bloody Sunday march in
Selma:
There was mayhem all around me. I could see a young kid—a
teenaged boy—sitting on the ground with a gaping cut in his
head, the blood just gushing out. Several women, including Mrs.
Boynton, were lying on the pavement and the grass medium. People were
weeping. Some were vomiting from the tear gas. Men on horses were
moving in all directions, purposely riding over the top of fallen
people, bringing their animals’ hooves down on shoulders,
stomachs, and legs.
Reverend
Martin Luther King Jr., PhD, on Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth:
Back
at Christmas 1956, Shuttlesworth’s home was bombed and
completely demolished. In the winter of 1956, his church, Bethel
Baptist, was dynamited by racists, and later in 1957, Shuttlesworth
and his wife were mobbed, beaten, and stabbed. They were also jailed
eight times, four times during the Freedom Rides.
Unita
Blackwell, civil rights activist
You couldn’t trust
nobody because the police was the Klans. The police was burning the
cross in my yard.
Have you ever been in a
condition where there is no place you can
call for help?
Paula
Giddings
Fannie Lou Hamer and Annelle Ponder were arrested in
Winona and viciously beaten with leaded leather straps. Hamer was
permanently debilitated by the assault and disfigured so badly that
she wouldn’t let her family see her for a month. Ponder, one of
two SCLC voter-education teachers stationed permanently in
Mississippi, was also brutally beaten. Hamer had overheard Ponder’s
guard in the adjacent cell:
"Cain’t you
say yessir, nigger? Cain’t you say yessir,
bitch?"
Then Ponder’s voice: "Yes, I can say
yessir."
"Well, say it," the guard said.
"I
don’t know you well enough," Ponder retorted.
And then
Hamer heard the strokes. "She kept screamin’, and they
kept beatin’ her," said Hamer, "and finally she
started prayin’ for ’em, and she asked God to have mercy
on ’em because they didn’t know what they was doin’."
Some days later, a SNCC worker went to see Annelle Ponder in jail. Her face was so swollen that she could scarcely talk, the worker reported. "She looked at me and was able to whisper one word: Freedom."
Myrlie
Evers-Williams, widow of civil rights activist Medgar Evers:
I
know what it is like to be in court and watch the man accused of
murdering your husband and witness the Governor of Mississippi walk
in, sit down, shake hands and proudly slap the accused man on the
back.
Rosa Parks, on her reaction to the murder of Reverend
King:
Mama and I wept quietly together.
* * *
African Americans have been stereotyped and segregated.
Margaret
Walker, PhD
In movie after movie black people, individually
and collectively, were demeaned and dehumanized, portrayed as naked
savages, animals, stupid clowns or buffoons, and imbecilic servants,
criminals, and children.
As a child, reading the history books in the South, I was humiliated by some unhappy picture or reference to a Negro. Such items made me burn all over.
Shelby
Steele, PhD
Black skin has more dehumanizing stereotypes
associated with it than any other skin color in America, if not in
the world. When a black presents himself in an integrated situation,
he knows that his skin alone may bring these stereotypes to life in
the minds of those he meets and that he, as an individual, may be
diminished by his race before he has a chance to reveal a single
aspect of his personality.
Judge A. Leon Higginbotham Jr., on the Supreme Court’s 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision upholding the "separate but equal" doctrine of segregation:
This single decision legitimized the worst forms of race discrimination, which then became the law of our nation for six decades.
Reverend
Martin Luther King Jr., PhD
If you wanted to visit a church
attended by white people, you would not be welcome.
Mary
McLeod Bethune, 1936
The cultural advantages of the concert,
lectures and public discussions are closed to him.
Langston
Hughes, 1946
At least a hundred times (making a conservative
estimate) I have been refused service in public restaurants in
strange cities.
Coretta
Scott King
Blacks were required to sit and stand at the rear
of the buses, even if there were empty seats in the front section,
which was reserved for whites. Furthermore, blacks had to pay their
fares at the front of the bus, get off and walk to the rear to
reboard through the back door. Drivers often pulled off and left them
after they had paid their fares.
Jo
Ann Gibson Robinson
Old black men and women were even forced
to get out of seats so that white school children could sit down.
Juan
Williams, on Birmingham, Alabama:
In 1962 the city closed
sixty-eight parks, thirty-eight playgrounds, six swimming pools and
four golf courses to avoid complying with a federal court order to
desegregate public facilities.
Langston
Hughes, on "the beloved Juliette Derricotte":
Injured
in a wreck on a Southern road, that cultured woman was denied
hospital treatment at the nearest white hospital. By the time a Negro
hospital was found miles away, she was dead.
Patricia J. Williams, JD
When my sister was in the fourth
grade, she was the only black child in the class. One Valentine’s
Day, when the teacher went out of the room, all her white classmates
ripped the valentines she had sent them and dumped them on her desk.
It was so traumatic that my sister couldn’t speak again in that
class, she refused to participate: so completely had they made her
feel not part of that group.
* * *
Educational opportunities have been restricted.
Mary
Frances Berry, PhD and John W. Blassingame, PhD
The
blacks’ passion for education in the 1860s was equaled by the
whites’ desire to deny or limit the education they received.
During the early years of Reconstruction, southern whites burned
schools (thirty-seven in Tennessee in 1869) and regularly insulted
and whipped white teachers of blacks.
Audrey
Edwards and Craig K. Polite, PhD
"Separate"
school accommodations typically meant wretched ones for blacks. It
was not uncommon to find black schools overcrowded, housed in shanty
shacks with no heat or running water, textbooks worn and outdated. In
1930 the average expenditure per school-age child was $45 per white
pupil and $14.95 per black pupil.
Cornel West, PhD, said that with few exceptions, blacks were kept out of the elite white universities until the late 1960s.
* * *
Black people have also faced discrimination in the workplace.
Mary
McLeod Bethune, letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt,
1937:
Our Country opens wide the door of opportunity to the youth
of the world but slams it shut in the faces of its Negro citizenry.
Whitney
M. Young Jr., Chicago, 1960s:
Bricklayers, electricians,
plumbers, and heavy equipment operators are among America’s
highest-paid workers. Almost none of the union locals in these fields
admits Negroes; some have admitted a token handful. The most
qualified Negro worker has practically no hope of finding a job
without a union card in thousands of communities and hundreds of
occupational categories.…
Whatever grudging concessions the system was willing to make for European immigrants, it absolutely refused to grant them to the black man. The earlier immigrants may have realized that their ten-hour day of ditch-digging or sweatshop labor would not result in riches for themselves, but they had ample evidence that their efforts would pay off for their children. They knew that the system was open-ended and that whatever they scraped together for a son’s education would pay off in his freedom, if not their own. The black labored as hard, but he knew that he could only hope to bequeath his shovel to his son; he knew the system was closed, and that a black man dared not hope.
Henry
"Hank" Aaron
I remember sitting out on the back
porch once when an airplane flew over, and I told Daddy I’d
like to be a pilot when I grew up. He said, "Ain’t no
colored pilots." I said, okay, then, I’ll be a ballplayer.
He said, "Ain’t no colored ballplayers."
Jackie
Robinson
After two years at UCLA I decided to leave. I was
convinced that no amount of education would help a black man get a
job.
Larry Elder, JD, on a friend in employment recruiting:
She
has clients that have told her not to send over black people: "Don't
send me somebody black no matter how qualified. I don't want them in
my house."
* * *
In answering the call and serving our nation in wars, African Americans have suffered imprisonment, torture, lifelong injuries, and death, depriving their families of providers and loved ones.
Mary
McLeod Bethune
Negro women give their sons to their country
with as much enthusiasm and loyalty as other women.
Kareem
Abdul-Jabbar
African American soldiers had served with the
highest distinction in nearly every major conflict since the
Revolutionary War.
For example, the African American 761st Tank Battalion was awarded the Presidential Unit Citation for Extraordinary Heroism for its role in defeating the Nazis. Battalion members were awarded two hundred ninety-six Purple Hearts, eleven Silver Stars, and seventy Bronze Stars, and Staff Sergeant Ruben Rivers was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. 11 Sergeant Rivers’ medal citation reads:
Though severely wounded in the leg, Sergeant Rivers refused medical treatment and evacuation, took command of another tank, and advanced with his company in Guebling the next day. Repeatedly refusing evacuation, Sergeant Rivers continued to direct his tank's fire at enemy positions through the morning of 19 November 1944. At dawn, Company A's tanks began to advance towards Bougaktroff, but were stopped by enemy fire. Sergeant Rivers, joined by another tank, opened fire on the enemy tanks, covering company A as they withdrew. While doing so, Sergeant River's [sic] tank was hit, killing him and wounding the crew.
How has America responded to the patriotic military service of African Americans?
John
Hope Franklin, PhD, on the conclusion of World War I:
Returning
Negro soldiers were lynched by hanging and burning, even while still
in their military uniforms. The Klan warned Negroes that they must
respect the rights of the white race "in whose country they are
permitted to reside." Racial conflicts swept the country, and
neither federal nor state governments seemed interested in effective
intervention.
Fannie
Lou Hamer
They would go in the service and go through all of
that and come right out to be drowned in the river in Mississippi.
Ned
Cobb, aka Nate Shaw
I’ve had white people tell
me, "This is white man’s country, white man’s
country." They don’t sing that to the colored man when it
comes to war. Then it’s all our country, go fight for
the country. Go over there and risk his life for the country and come
back, he aint a bit more thought of than he was before the war.
James
Baldwin, on the African American World War II veteran:
You
must put yourself in the skin of a man who is wearing the uniform of
his country, is a candidate for death in its defense, and who is
called a "nigger" by his comrades-in-arms and his officers;
who is almost always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to
do; who knows that the white G.I. has informed the Europeans that he
is subhuman (so much for the American male's sexual security); who
does not dance at the U.S.O. the night white soldiers dance there,
and does not drink in the same bars white soldiers drink in; and who
watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more
human dignity than he has ever received at their hands. And who, at
the same time, as a human being, is far freer in a strange land than
he has ever been at home. Home! The very word begins to have a
despairing and diabolical ring. You must consider what happens to
this citizen, after all he has endured, when he returns—home:
search, in his shoes, for a job, for a place to live; ride, in his
skin, on segregated buses; see, with his eyes, the signs saying
"White" and "Colored," and especially the signs
that say "White Ladies" and "Colored Women";
look into the eyes of his wife; look into the eyes of his son;
listen, with his ears, to political speeches, North and South;
imagine yourself being told to "wait."
John Hope Franklin, PhD, referred to his brother, Buck Jr., who was traumatized by discrimination in the United States Army in World War II:
He had been drafted by a segregated army and had served his country more honorably than that country had served him.
* * *
With lethal violence, large numbers of whites have rioted against smaller numbers of African Americans. Whites rioted against blacks in New York City in 1863, in East St. Louis in 1917, Washington DC and Chicago in 1919, Detroit in 1943, and in other cities at other times. 12 Rioters killed between forty and three hundred African Americans in the prosperous, predominantly black Greenwood section of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921. 13
Brent
Staples
By the time the Oklahoma National Guard marched into
Greenwood, in the late morning of June 1, virtually all of black
Tulsa had gone up in smoke and ash. About 1,200 buildings were burned
or looted or both. For months afterward, black Tulsans would
encounter white people on the streets wearing familiar clothing and
jewelry looted from black homes.
Debra J. Dickerson, JD
Police and soldiers often took part
in the riots.
* * *
The government has used the right of eminent domain to dismantle African American and other residential areas to make room for public projects. Seneca Village, which existed in New York City from 1825 to 1857, was removed for the construction of a section of Central Park. This was a biracial community, although predominantly black, including two churches and a school. African American men who lost their land also lost their qualification for precious voting rights. New York compensated homeowners for their property, but many residents felt that the compensation was inadequate and sued in state court. 14
From 1932 to 1972, the United States Public Health Service passively observed over four hundred black men with syphilis while their health deteriorated. The agency did not inform the men of the diagnosis, counsel them to avoid spreading the disease, or give them penicillin when it was found to be an effective treatment. In 1974, the Health Service responded to a class-action suit by providing cash awards to the seventy survivors and to the heirs of the men who had died. 15
State laws forbidding black and white people from marrying or having sex together were in effect until 1967. 16
The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair displayed pygmies brought from Africa. In 1906, the Bronx Zoo in New York City displayed Ota Benga, a pygmy, in the monkey house. 17
* * *
African Americans have spent more time in slavery than in freedom. Much of their time in "freedom" was under conditions that severely restricted their social and economic advancement. They have written that it also harmed their sense of hopefulness.
Charlayne
Hunter-Gault
I’m sure that slavery and all the other
things that followed in its wake have had some deeply scarring
psychological effects, and we’ve got to deal with those.
J.
L. Chestnut Jr., JD
I told an emotional crowd in a black
church in Opelika in east Alabama that in black America it is common
to hear what can’t be done. Too many of us are obsessed with
the impossible. Four hundred years of slavery and segregation have
had an awesome impact on the black mind.
In India, a baby bull elephant is tied by the leg to a tree. He tries to free himself, can’t and eventually gives up. A grown elephant is a massive creature, strong enough to uproot a tree, yet he can be restrained by a little rope tied to a sapling. It is the elephant’s mind, not the rope, that enslaves him.
Derek
S. Hopson, PhD and Darlene Powell Hopson, PhD
When
people are convinced they cannot succeed, no matter how hard they
work and regardless of what they do, they usually stop trying. Even
minor obstacles become overwhelming. They no longer feel in control
of their destiny and accept defeat. This passive condition is called
learned helplessness.
When
he was a child, friends of Clarence Thomas often said:
The
man ain’t goin’ let you do nothin’, why you even
tryin’?
Reverend
Jesse Lee Peterson
Racism was all around me, I thought, and I
began to wonder what was the point of trying to work hard and do well
if "Whitey" was just going to take it all away from me
anyway.
I was passive, expecting the government and politicians to create ways for me to succeed.
Bill
Cosby, EdD
And victims, we know, feel helpless and behave as
if their destiny is completely controlled by others. Worse, a victim
does not accept responsibility for himself or herself, blaming others
for his or her predicaments and failures. A victim’s attitude
is epitomized by the African-American student who fails a physics
exam and blames it on the professor’s racism even though the
student did not prepare for the examination.
Louis
W. Sullivan, MD
The tragic truth is that the language of
"victimization" is the true victimizer—a great
crippler of young minds and spirits. To teach young people that their
lives are governed—not by their own actions, but by
socio-economic forces or government budgets or other mysterious and
fiendish sources beyond their control—is to teach our children
negativism, resignation, passivity and despair.
Derrick Bell
Drug-related crime, teenaged parenthood, and
disrupted and disrupting family life all are manifestations of a
despair that feeds on self.
* * *
What can be learned from this experience of oppression? African Americans have written of their appreciation of the sweetness of freedom and of the need to make the most of it.
Wallace
Turnage, free man
The next morning I was up early and took a
look at the rebels country with a thankful heart to think that I had
made my escape with safety after such a long struggle; and had
obtained that freedom which I desired so long. I Now dreaded the gun,
and handcuffs and pistols no more. Nor the blewing of horns and the
running of hounds; nor the threats of death from the rebel’s
authority. I could now speak my opinion to men of all grades and
colors, and no one to question my right to speak.
Annette
Gordon-Reed, of Peter Fossett, who became a caterer:
After his
emancipation Fossett and his family, as did millions of other blacks,
picked up their lives and went forward, taking with them the lessons
of family loyalty, the importance of self-improvement, and faith.
There is no better lesson that we can learn from the lives of the
enslaved. If we want to be worthy of them, we must learn it.
Bill
Cosby, EdD and Alvin F. Poussaint, MD
It is important
to understand the legacy of slavery, but it is even more important to
transcend it, to break the psychological shackles that still bind us.
Mamie
Till-Mobley
We cannot afford the luxury of self-pity. Our top
priority now is to get on with the building process.
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