BLACK HISTORY: rage reasons against this system of thought!

Read the letter Coretta Scott King wrote opposing Sessions’s 1986 federal nomination 

“Anyone who has used the power of his office as United States Attorney to intimidate and chill the free exercise of the ballot by citizens should not be elevated to our courts,” King wrote in the cover page of her nine-page letter opposing Sessions’s nomination, which failed.
“Mr. Sessions has used the awesome powers of his office in a shabby attempt to intimidate and frighten elderly black voters. For this reprehensible conduct, he should not be rewarded with a federal judgeship.”'

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10208301313479060&set=a.1092946052452.2015693.1490550709&type=3&theater

Constance Baker Motley was the first Negro woman elected to the New York Senate (1964), and appointed to a Federal Judgeship (1966). In this capacity she was the first Negro woman elected to the New York Senate (1964). 

"Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., was interrupted while reading the words of Coretta Scott King on the Senate floor this week. Warren was reading a 1986 letter King wrote in opposition to the confirmation of Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, then a U.S. attorney in Alabama, to a federal district judgeship...King sent the letter to Senate Judiciary Chairman Strom Thurmond, a fierce segregationist. She asked him to make the letter a part of the hearing’s formal record, but he didn’t. The 10-page letter was essentially lost until last month, when The Washington Post obtained and published a copy of it."

https://www.democracynow.org/.../silenced_twice_by_the...

Dr. Frances Cress Welsing's core message to Negroes.

Lynching in America [2.]

Fighting for Freedom: The Civil War and its Aftermath

When 11 Southern states seceded from the Union to form the Confederate States of America and sparked the Civil War in 1861, they made no secret of their ultimate aim:  to preserve the institution of slavery. In the words of Alexander H. Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, the ideological “cornerstone” of the new nation they sought to form was that “the negro is not equal to the white man” and “slavery and subordination to the superior race is his natural and moral condition.”¹⁰

Congress officially authorized the Union army to accept black soldiers on July 17, 1862. But national leaders largely considered the Civil War “a white man’s war” and the Union was reluctant to use black soldiers in combat. Northern military personnel, politicians, and President Abraham Lincoln himself expressed fear that armed black soldiers would ruin white soldiers’ morale, be harmful to the war effort, or as one Ohio Congressman warned, prove so essential that victory would weaken white supremacy. “If you make [the black man] the instrument by which your battles are fought, the means by which your victories are won,” the congressman argued in his plea against black soldiers in combat, “you must treat him as a victor is entitled to be treated, with all decent and becoming respect.”¹¹

As the war dragged on and the Union incurred more casualties,¹² objections to black combat troops faded. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, which applied only to those enslaved in the Confederate states, provided that black soldiers would be accepted into all military positions.¹³
The navy gained 19,000 black sailors and 179,000 black men joined the army, making up 10 percent of its troops. Some 40,000 were killed fighting for the United States.¹⁴

Black Union soldiers included men who had been free in the North before the war, black men who had lived free in the South in the midst of slavery, and some who escaped slavery after the war began and joined the fight in hopes of guaranteeing their freedom and winning that of others. But acceptance into the military did not mean equal treatment. As the war against the Confederacy raged, black soldiers also had to fight for equal pay and rations that the War Department promised during recruitment. A black soldier from Pennsylvania reported that his unit was overcome with despair upon learning they would be paid less than white soldiers, and many protested by refusing to accept any payment. Despite protests and pleas from leaders including Frederick Douglass, Congress refused to pass legislation equalizing black and white soldiers’ pay until 1864.¹⁵

Black participation was far less common, more complicated, and more staunchly resisted on the other side of the conflict. The Confederacy was based on a belief in white supremacy and black inferiority and a commitment to continue slavery. The Confederate army refused to enlist or arm black soldiers even as the turning tide of the war led some Confederates to urge that enslaved black people should be ordered to fight just as they were ordered to work. Some enslaved black men were taken to the battlefield as servants for Confederate officers, but formal black enlistment in the Confederate army was prohibited until a desperate and largely inconsequential act of the Confederate Congress authorized black Confederate military service on March 13, 1865, just weeks before the Confederacy surrendered. As historian Leon Litwack wrote:

Few slaves were ever enlisted [in the Confederate Army], and none of them apparently had the opportunity to fight. Had the Confederacy managed to raise a black army, it would seem unlikely, particularly after 1863, that it could have fought with the same sense of commitment and self-pride that propelled the black troops in the Union Army. When he first heard of the act to recruit blacks for the Confederate Army, a Virginia freedman recalled, he had suddenly found himself unable to restrain his emotions. “They asked me if I would fight for my country. I said, ‘I have no country.’”¹⁶

The Civil War ended with the Confederacy’s surrender in the spring of 1865. The formal, nationwide end of slavery came in December 1865 with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits slavery “except as punishment for crime.” The legal instruments that ended racialized chattel slavery in America nonetheless did nothing to address the myth of racial hierarchy that sustained slavery. Black people were free under the law, but that did not mean whites recognized them as fully human. Nationwide but particularly in the South, white identity was grounded in the belief that whites are inherently superior to African Americans.

After the war, whites reacted violently to the notion that they would now have to treat their former human property as equals and pay for their labor. In numerous recorded incidents, plantation owners attacked black people simply for claiming their freedom.¹⁷ Many surviving black veterans returned to the South, where they had lived — many in the status of slave — before the war. Carrying hopes of starting farms and finding loved ones lost for years or even decades, these veterans frequently faced grave danger from violent attacks and racist laws designed to restore the racial hierarchy. The success of African Americans as trained soldiers challenged the idea that black people were fit only for servitude and undermined a central tenet of white supremacy. With their military training, black soldiers “represented both a viable alternative source of community leadership and a direct physical threat to white supremacy when they came home.”¹⁸

After a brief period, the victorious federal government gave up on Reconstruction and withdrew from the South in 1877, abandoning its duty to protect newly freed black people and enforce the citizenship rights they now held. Exploitative systems of convict leasing and sharecropping impeded economic progress and returned many black people to a status very similar to slavery. President Andrew Johnson took office following President Lincoln’s assassination and adopted policies that opposed black voting rights, restored Confederates’ citizenship, and allowed Southern former rebels to reestablish white supremacy and dominate black people with impunity.¹⁹

The Fourteenth Amendment, which was ratified in 1868, established that all persons born in the United States, regardless of race, are full citizens of the United States and the of the states in which they reside, and are entitled to the “privileges and immunities” of citizenship, including due process. Though a hopeful development, the Supreme Court quickly dismantled the amendment’s promise in The Slaughterhouse Cases and U.S. v. Cruikshank.²⁰ As a result, African Americans accused of violating the racial order were met with violence and terror; they received little protection from local officials, and they had no claim to federal assistance.

Black veterans were seen as a particularly strong threat to racial hierarchy and were an early target of discriminatory state laws. To eliminate black gun ownership, which had reached unprecedented levels during the war due to black military service, states including Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi passed laws that made it a crime for an African American to possess a firearm.²¹

Florida’s Black Code of 1866 prohibited black people from possessing “any Bowie-knife, dirk, sword, firearms or ammunition of any kind” and made violations punishable by public whipping.²² Mississippi’s statute declared “that no freedman, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her country, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife.” Whites were free to own and carry firearms, but law enforcement officials were stationed at train stations to seize black veterans’ guns when they arrived; veterans who did not comply were beaten and some were even shot by police.²³

Southern newspapers fueled whites’ fears of black veterans by publishing sensational accounts of so-called “race wars”: conflicts between supposedly innocent white police and drunk and armed former black soldiers intent on starting trouble. In May 1866, after whites attacked the black community in Memphis in what became known as the Memphis Massacre, the white-owned Memphis Argus published an editorial blaming the massacre on black gun ownership. The editorial board wrote:

Again the irrepressible conflict of races has broken out in our midst, and again our streets are stained with blood. And this time, there can be no mistake about it; the whole blame of this most tragical [sic] and bloody riot lies, as usual, with the poor, ignorant, deluded blacks. . . . [W]e cannot suffer the occasion to pass without again calling the attention of the authorities to the indispensable necessity of disarming these poor creatures, who have so often shown themselves utterly unfit to be trusted with firearms. On this occasion the facts all go to show that but for this much-abused privilege accorded to them by misguided and misjudging friends, there would have been no riot . . . The universal questions asked on all corners of the streets is, “Why are not the negroes disarmed?”²⁴

The violence in Memphis is now widely acknowledged as a racially-motivated massacre. Dozens of black people were raped, injured, or killed, and many black homes, churches, and schools were destroyed by fire. The two white casualties were killed by white rioters.²⁵

As the white Southern press decried their access to weapons and state legislatures strived to disarm them, black veterans were in dire need of protection.26 In 1868, the Secretary of War reported to Congress that black soldiers in Kentucky, “[h]aving served in the Union Army, were the special objects of persecution, and in hundreds of instances have been driven from their homes.”27 Peter Branford, a United States Colored Troops veteran, was shot and killed “without cause or provocation” in Mercer County, Kentucky, while numerous other veterans were threatened, beaten, and whipped merely for attempting to locate their families and rebuild their lives after the war.

At Bardstown in Nelson County, Kentucky, a mob brutally lynched a United States Colored Troops veteran. The mob stripped him of his clothes, beat him, and then cut off his sexual organs. He was then forced to run half a mile to a bridge outside of town, where he was shot and killed. The terror inflicted upon black veterans by Southern whites served to perpetuate the racial caste system and maintain power in the hands of whites after the defeat of the Confederacy.29

[to be continued] 

Colored soldiers. The 54th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry at the Second Battle of Fort Wagner, South Carolina, 1863.

Learn More: Houston Riot of 1917

FIGHTING FOR our freedom!

Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans

“It is impossible to create a dual personality which will be on the one hand a fighting man toward the enemy, and on the other, a craven who will accept treatment as less than a man at home.”¹

The end of the Civil War marked a new era of racial terror and violence directed at black people in the United States that has not been adequately acknowledged or addressed in this country. Following emancipation in 1865, thousands of freed black men, women, and children were killed by white mobs, former slave owners, and members of the Confederacy who were unwilling to accept the anticipated end of slavery and racial subordination. The violent response to freedom for former slaves was followed by decades of racial terror lynchings and targeted violence designed to sustain white supremacy and racial hierarchy.

No one was more at risk of experiencing violence and targeted racial terror than black veterans who had proven their valor and courage as soldiers during the Civil War, World War I, and World War II. Because of their military service, black veterans were seen as a particular threat to Jim Crow and racial subordination. Thousands of black veterans were assaulted, threatened, abused, or lynched following military service.

The disproportionate abuse and assaults against black veterans have never been fully acknowledged. This report highlights the particular challenges endured by black veterans in the hope that our nation can better confront the legacy of this violence and terror. No community is more deserving of recognition and acknowledgment than those black men and women veterans who bravely risked their lives to defend this country’s freedom only to have their own freedom denied and threatened because of racial bigotry.

- Bryan Stevenson, Director

Colored infantry soldiers from the Civil War era.

Looky here, America
What you done done —
Let things drift
Until the riots come.
Now your policemen
Let your mobs run free.
I reckon you don’t care
Nothing about me.
You tell me that hitler
Is a mighty bad man.
I guess he took lessons
From the ku klux klan.
You tell me mussolini’s
Got an evil heart.
Well, it mus-a been in Beaumont
That he had his start —

Cause everything that hitler
And mussolini do,
Negroes get the same
Treatment from you.
You jim crowed me
Before hitler rose to power —
And you’re STILL jim crowing me
Right now, this very hour.
Yet you say we’re fighting
For democracy.
Then why don’t democracy
Include me?
I ask you this question
Cause I want to know
How long I got to fight
BOTH HITLER — AND JIM CROW. 

- Langston Hughes, Beaumont to Detroit: 1943² 

Soldiers in the 'Nam

ADAM'S EVE and MARILYN MONROE

Marilyn Monroe in Laurel Canyon in 1953. Photo by Milton Green.

Marilyn Monroe as many already know holds my admiration and my fascination with how and possibly why she was so compelling a beauty. Could it be a combination of pathos, and delicate humor that played against the racial hatred of the time she was alive that crossed over the racial divide held fast by terror of the repercussions of crossing over to talk to, at the least, and at the most to seek a permanent relationship with this white woman, with such a one that grips my senses?

Too many words. She was fine, playful and was the sexual being she could not hide from. Her influence plays its part every year since she died of whatever took her life. Was it too much attention, sadness, lack of what she needed, or the abuse of being Marilyn Monroe or being the wife of white men, and idolized by men, period?

In the 1950's when Marilyn Monroe was alive the Iron Curtain held West Germans prisoner as well as East Germans hostage to an ideology not fit for a good life. The wall Trump wants to put up entombs white Americans in their paranoia, and their deep fears they vehemently deny exist in their thinking and decision making. Marilyn Monroe, like countless white women of her time, before her time, and long after are bound by the social mores their white men insist upon them to stay on this side of their opinion of people, and stand in this, and behave thus because you are better than them!

"Look at Eve!" they shout at their rebelling wives. But what they cannot conceive is Eve was awake before Adam and had a grasp on everything he missed in his prior romps around the garden of Eden.

Let's move out of the volatile subject of race because white men largely incapable of seeing outside that realm have already blanked out. If we do that they get tricked into thinking we are getting down to business now, and they don't have to multi-task and think about historical stuff, ramifications of actions, karma, or weigh their souls against the dynamic they created. That being said do men need to move out of the way? Do we? Are we in the way of what we see, out of touch with what we should know and unaware of what women know and understand about what is around us, and within them?

Adam basically cut himself off from a set of truths he needed to be the man for Eve's well being. Well, maybe that wasn't fair. God created Adam. He was alone in the garden. He had access to everything he needed except knowledge outside of an immediate state. He knew enough to name animals. That meant he was in touch intuitively, but that wasn't enough as Eve's presence showed him. The story goes that God felt Adam's loneliness. Adam probably was watching animals couple and copulate. He could not have known what they were doing, but his instinctual knowledge triggered a response within that felt indescribable. Its presence was pressure and to releave that pressure Adam could not articulate so, mercifully God put him to sleep and out of his body to remove a rib and created Eve.

Now, old Hebrew stories speak of Adam's first wife, Lilith. In hush tones of voice throughout the ages her name was whispered. Intuitive souls, like mine, felt something forbidding about Lilith and sequestered her somewhere in the shadows of a forbidden forest, or a dark cold cave beneath the earth before we discovered the Earth is our Mother! She wasn't compliant. She was strong and opinionated. She must have been. That was the tone of voice used by the few who talked about her legacy. What condemned her was her fierceness, lack of fear and a deep power to prevail against elements Adam was intellectually incapable of hearing, and understanding because he was undeveloped in ways only a woman's touch, a woman's powers from her womb could stimulate into action, and powers to develop him into the fullness of man!

What Adam did not have was creative energies in his employ. Esteem he had. Knowing? Well, let me stop myself there. Life was not his ally. In this era of spiritual development the Hebrew people had not themselves evolved beyond this level of consciousness, if the Hebrew story is indicative of a time in their evolutionary history. Accepting that let's say Adam was simple as a man in the embryonic stage of growth between formlessness and form somewhere and not criticize him but try and understand our individual level of consciousness. After all, if this creation story is yours by adoption then we are joining ourselves in a growth process parallel with Adam, if we are men.

Now, Eve as the second wife had judgment coming towards her because she did not conform to the order of Hebrew man's estimation of women's place. It seems this way in retrospect, but inside of their present she was in order. When she was created Adam was asleep. He had never had the weight of responsibility, nor the release after sex so we cannot say how long he slept, but from a sacred woman's point of view did he give her the time she needed to explore the garden in depth with attention to details he did not consider and discover the layers concealed from Adam's perception, but open to her in the life of the garden? If so, then here is where the story becomes mean because when he awoke she was his surprise and he was baffled with no idea of what to do, or say or how to compose himself and he could not go into an arena within himself to pull up inner strength because life for him did not require it.

It gets mean because this is where men have taken it upon themselves to judge Eve condemning her for the curse of work, toil, hard work without end because she gave the fruit to Adam to eat and become like gods! The truth is the story from her perspective. When Adam woke up she saw his erection and sat on it. This awakened and woke Adam up: the strongest creative energy on the planet!

The first awakening of Adam was when God created him. The second awakening was when Eve had him enter her body! His exploration of Eve was the most powerful testament of Life. The whole of Creation was stirred within him and Eve was able to unveil many things previously held away from Adam because he was both unprepared and not initiated from within for the deeper mysteries of Creation within the body of, the punany of Eve. Adam learned before and during his orgasms birth comes through the womb at every level of Creation. The female copulation with the male within the Creator is best told as a child's story using math.

The Creatress is Mother. She has the womb that births all of existence. Within her instantaneous being was born as The Creator who is Father. He is the dividing of the Zero. From this copulation come all numbers with their meanings and significant powers to create. This she bore into Adam's being. From him came no resistance. How could he? What man can resist in this embrace giving his virginity to the right woman? All Adam could do was submit and awaken to receive in the giving up of his seed.

Now, in your critical mind you want to get analytical and say this mathematical equation is not of the Hebrew mystery teachings. It isn't but it is because these things are universal within all Life, therefore the strict boundaries of law in religion flounder about in this instance because they stump and stop growth, which is the lesson of all I have shared, and speculated about. Adam lived before religion and church and synagogue. His advantage was that and the fact that the sacredness churches pretend to have lives in each fold and flower and tingling sensation within Creation! So, his sexual experiences penetrated him into and with the deep mysteries of the garden, hence all of the universe.

The Bible says Jesus was the second Adam. Leaving that alone I will only say that the woman who penetrated Jesus opened up the same and different things within him. His wife, as required by Rabbinical law, equaled the status of Eve's capacity to penetrate her man with the energies of Creation awakening from slumber that which was mighty and slept within him! By this stage of human history the adherents to the release of Adam's seed within Eve have slept with the idea that holy men do not and are better off without women in their beds as help mates and co-creators in the energy work their missions in life are. The way this leads back to Marilyn Monroe is obvious and easy to connect to these stories.

For the 20th century, Marilyn Monroe is the vision, the exquisite, the ideal preference of what is envisioned to be the social persuasion of a people who need to believe that history should be written with them as the progenitors of humanity when they are not, not with their recessive genes. Pliant, easy on the weakest sense of manhood the image of Marilyn Monroe was left, by appearance, for all men to have access to, but all men weren't to afford her, or capable to gently attend to her secret tears. She was sexually available because she appeared naïve and complaint because she could be put in her place by force of words, or anger as her husbands so easily did with cruelty. This has been a socially accepted practice by many cultures and she submitted to it with regret in silence. In a nut shell this is how Eve is presented to us in Sunday school, and enforced daily by numerous means and examples.

This is why Lilith was not able to be Adam's wife. She couldn't put up with it. So, a question comes up asking if the standard understanding of Eve is accepted and is opposed to strength and spiritual powers women are imbued with from the Most High what value do women have? Perhaps the answer is in the dismissive theology of Eve being the weaker vessel made weak by not telling the creation story from her perspective. Is this a good place to stop? No. This is a good place to begin to reexamine the value of what we believe and reexamine the structures we live by as men and as women, of marriage and the social construct of race white people have created to raise themselves above morality as they took apart the African spirituality they interpreted as a means of acquisition of power and resources from the Earth they cannot see as Mother.


Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
Jan. 8, 2017

Maat Petrova in paradise. (2014)

Maat Petrova's mystical self.

Ah, the Good ol' days!

Mirror. A Girl With No Face.

Ok let's be honest now. The presidency of 46-1 will be considered a success by conservatives because it will achieve it's real and primary purpose--the symbolic... re-ensconcing of a white male in the strongest political position on earth. The building of the wall is immaterial. The return of industrial jobs to the mid-west is inconsequential. The greatest accomplishment will be the return of a white man to the office after a black man politically, culturally, administratively and even stylistically knocked the ball out of the park. This had to be done. And it had to be done not by any white male--not a liberal, not a conservative. It had to be done by an in-your-face, power-hungry, condescending billionaire who lives a privileged life, demands a privileged life, and makes taxpayers support his privileged life. This was necessary to his main voting base, that class of white males who suffer from "aggrieved entitlement."

But remember as well that white ladies across all educational strata voted for 46-1, rather than vote for another white female, manifesting the greatest case of Stockholm Syndrome witnessed in human history. The greatest accomplishment for the unemployed white blue collar worker is that he can vicariously live through 46-1.

As for me, I continue to resist. I personally cannot stomach a billionaire who doesn't contribute 1 red cent to the Easter Egg Roll on the White House Lawn, allowing it to come up short of eggs. Even at my little church in Palo Alto the parents made sure everyone got some eggs, taught the fast kids who were hoarding eggs to share with others, and low-and-behold, fashioned some of the plastic eggs to contain money. I hear one kid left with forty bucks! (I wish I were a kid again!) The billionaire who said he would rebuild the inner cities and would bring in the best people to his administration couldn't even stage a social event for DC area kids at the White House. Ok, we know next year it will get done.

But this year we saw the truth--the true absence of the man's heart, and the disconnection of his family from the families of Washington and the nation. If he really cared, even if the government had messed it up, he would have philanthropically donated the eggs himself. But this person is incapable of giving his money to anything that doesn't benefit him directly...he only staged the donation of $77K of his presidential salary to the Dept. of the Interior, while we pay $3 million in taxes each week to send him golfing at his resort in Florida. It's all obscene, really. But the fact that conservatives are not concerned with this waste of federal tax dollars on one white guy is telling. It tells us that 46-1 is a success to them. As the perfect model of white power and privilege, he is achieving their purpose very well, thank you.

by Emil Thomas, pastor Jerusalem Baptist Church

April 18, 2017

Kathleen Burke, Grace Bradley, Lona Andre and Mari Colman ride bikes, with mallets.

“POLO-A-LA-MODE….Hollywood is indulging in a new form of the old game. Bicycle polo has been inaugurated by this team consisting of Kathleen Burke, Grace Bradley, Lona Andre and and Mari Colman at the Paramount Studios.” – May 18, 1933

Ann Sheridan, Kathleen Burke, Grace Bradley and Frances Drake taking some target practice, 1935.  

Nostalgia has hues. Whites view themselves in an historical context as the pureness of white. Black Africans see the red blood spilled by whites, and gold as the resource they dug into the earth for, and green and brown as the colors of the Land of the Blacks. And the indigenous peoples of Turtle Island, to make a good observation, see red, white and blue as a never ending nightmare. Red is the blood shed by the white people to take our lands and blue is the vastness, not of the sky, but the enormity of the lies the whites told, and tell. Green is the color of the land they cannot see as mother; blue the nature of creation they neither respect, nor believe is sacred. 

When we all look back on times past we of the darker hue do not lie to ourselves. Whites do and often. 

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories
April 18, 2017

Misty Copeland, a principled dancer of note.

Misty Copeland achieved her goal of being named the first black principal with the American Ballet Theatre (ABT) in June, but her ambitions extend beyond that. She mentors young dancers at the company and works with its Project Plié, which aims to increase ethnic and racial diversity in ballet. "It's not just a case of helping young people to believe that ballet is open to them. It's also about getting organizations to understand how to work with different communities." - anon

Race, Rage, Revenge

Chicago Code BLUE

Four Black people kidnapped a handicapped white man, who could not protect himself and tortured him, beat him and filmed the assault. The country is in an uproar. When two Black girls names and faces showed up on the news as two of the perpetrators my mouth dropped in astonishment first because they were Black, and at the same time the horror of them being women was shattering.

Brittany Covington (who filmed the felony assault) and her older sister Tanisha Covington and friends were all officially charged with the following: Hill was charged with aggravated kidnapping, hate crime, aggravated unlawful restraint, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon, robbery, residential burglary; Cooper was charged with aggravated kidnapping, hate crime, aggravated unlawful restraint, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and residential burglary; Brittany Covington was charged with aggravated kidnapping, hate crime, aggravated unlawful restraint, aggravated battery with a deadly weapon and residential burglary; Tanishia Covington was charged with aggravated kidnapping, hate crime, aggravated unlawful restraint and aggravated battery with a deadly weapon. These are someone's children and grandchildren.

When I look at this I see the reflection of the country. I see what we taught them and what we applaud: violence and taking from others. It is how the West was won and the East was taken: blood, and murder, deception and aggression. When it is our Colored daughters it speaks against and points to what ails not only the soul of the country, but what ails the souls of Black folks!

But, the country is full of contradictions and erratic behavior and white people clamoring for a chance to ring these Colored girls up on charges of a hate crime. It is a hate crime, but the clamor for it puzzles me as much as it did when white Americans clamored for President Obama to say the words: radical terrorism. It was odd. It didn't feel comfortable and it was hard to measure why placing a name upon something was more important than solving a problem, or probing into why something is what it is and so forth.

I will not sign a petition to make this crime a hate crime. It will solve nothing, It is only suppressing an urge for killing the girls that many want to do. Part of the outrage is at the misunderstanding of self, and the individuals left alone in this society. Miseducated children become something in life we are all terrified of and being an American means pretending that what is staring us in the face isn't really there. Why there is surprise that children will be cruel in reverse enrages our young people because they keenly feel abandoned into a system of education that excluded the vital parts of their development. If they aren't surprised at the large numbers of killers and sadists and sexual deviants we graduate each year from high school why are we?

If I do anything, and I will, I will do better at what I am doing in the development of children and young adults in my part of this country: the Washington DC metropolitan area.

Why'd I say that? I opened up a shit storm of reaction from white men!

Jeff Mayhugh  out of his mouth said, "Going to jail for them would be like going to a family reunion. Now they get to spend time with their momma." "gaz chamber please." another said. "Hang um! In the Gas chamber!" "kill them and their families."

"Set them on fire while we all sit around with popcorn and watch!" a married mother of two small children named Anna put out into cyberspace.

"Typical hoodrat trash." another said. In the midst of this one white man said, "This is a horrible thing.. don't make it worse buy going off the handle.. these people will be brought to justice.. don't take things to far... Hold the Liberal PC police to it.."

Things got dicey when a James Kerstetter got involved reacting to my thoughts beginning with 'I will not sign a petition...' He said, "Of course you won't. It's a hate crime and that fucking trash is getting charged with it too."

"James. OK." I replied. "You obviously didn't read or understand what my reasoning is. Can't go far with this discussion."

"Your right running bear. It's a black and white thing. You see black I see white. Just know that my way of thinking just isn't mine. There are a lot of people tired of the reverse racism. Time to defend ours. Try that shit in my neighborhood I dare ya....."

James McMenamy stepped into the fray and said, "Nobody needs your permission to label this a hate crime. A hate crime is a hate crime regardless of class, color, national orgin, religious beliefs, education or any other pathetic excuse of the offender."

This went on for some time until the host pulled it down because it got uglier and uglier. I was sadden by it all because I have been involved in live face to face, fact to fiction conversations with white men in the past over volatile subjects centered around race and regret having them because during it all a sadness overtakes me. There is something in denial and rhetoric that manages to hold their fears in at a check point. Black Americans find it easier to vent rage and require historical retribution or compensation for the evil deeds done upon them by white people.

It only saddens me because of the maturity level I am at. Time was I didn't feel sadness, or give a damn about how deep those emotions came from to frame each participants nightmares. So, if one can change and listen to another does the other one whose ears are closed change, or is the dynamic between the two staring at any hope of resolving the issue at hand? Usually no. But, what would happen if we, on opposite sides of the rage of debate, together sat around a table of food, played games and looked at our families and sought out ways to make our children's lives easier?

Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories

Jan. 5, 2017

Artist rendition of young Black womanhood. artist unknown.

Do I Need a Title?

There is a rumble in a story I am going to tell beneath the surface.

Black Americans, I believe, fail their children because parents place their full trust in a system designed for their children's demise. Black people 'adore' white American's contempt. If it were not true the obvious things to protect and develop their children would be done automatically.

Abandoning our children is a deep and conscious decision made daily. Not plunging into why the system of thought about education exists is abnegation of duty. Or maybe Black Americans are lazy. There are other systems of education that fit our children that is not resistant to creativity and is resistant to social engineering. There are other battles to fight within these schools, but it is better to fight those fights with a sense of knowing the control has shifted in your favor. And then there is control. I don't believe, and I am not convinced Blacks are finished with their assigned role of subjugation.

Maybe, Blacks are waiting to be saved, or simply enjoy complaining. The onus is on us to grab the reins of the horse running amok and bring him to a halt. The reins physically control the horse's movement, but the horse studies the rider's soul, and emotions. His determination of the substance of strength or weakness in the rider supports his compliance, or rebellion. Riders know this. It is why some healers use horses to mediate the healing and balancing of disruption, disorder, psychic pain, and trauma in a wide variety of people. Water mediates and tempers the soul, balances fire's propensity to destroy by directing the heat to heal when needed. Understanding the elements are the genius of indigenous cultures. Education, at the level it is, in modern life is not based upon the structures of living in the world as co-creators, and caretakers, or nurturers. It is based on something insidious.   

What would the American education system look like if Black Americans, en masse, moved away from their norm and rode horses instead of walking mules on acreage they don't own? What would change in the social environment if Black people shifted from the slave/mastery mentality into the difficult waters of self-sufficiency, if they trained their own children's spirits?

At the core of the controversy about education is one unanswered question many white people on both ends of the spectrum ask of each other, but avoid asking Black parents: "If Black lives mattered would Colored folks be so dependent upon white's control over their lives?"  

Gregory E. Woods, Grandfather  

Dec. 15, 2016

RACE MATTERS?

RACE MATTERS? IF IT DIDN'T WHY THE CONSTRUCT?


"Why do we need to center a discussion about racism in the white cultural experience? Why do we need to communicate using Western cultural norms? So, we can talk about race, but we shouldn’t talk about race the way a Black person carrying West African culture would talk about it? We should avoid their anger and pain? It would be “better” to talk about it in a way that Western Europeans will be comfortable talking about it?" ~ by John Metta from his article: "It's not about race."

flags of Britain & USA

The question comes from whites. It is an upfront behind your back question that comes up to stave off their participation in the spiritual work of reconciliation between races. It is a defensive one. Why Blacks repeat the question is important to decipher because it too is related to race! On the other surface of the question why does race matter? Why is race so central to life in modern society?

The answer is in our collective histories. Before dialogue, and the spiritual work leading up to atonement a deep study is a prerequisite. However, therein lies a challenge because both sides (black & white) harbor resistance to intellectual exercise. Why that is is steeped in the illusion of the construct of race. - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 9.20.16

Police targeting Black boys as sport.

John Metta thought and wrote this article. It is really well done. He laid out cornerstones and made it easy to go into the center of the disparity intelligently. One of the things he said was said with clarity:

"...Why do we need to center a discussion about racism in the white cultural experience? Why do we need to communicate using Western cultural norms? So, we can talk about race, but we shouldn’t talk about race the way a Black person carrying West African culture would talk about it? We should avoid their anger and pain? It would be “better” to talk about it in a way that Western Europeans will be comfortable talking about it?..."

This is fundamental.

I have spent years getting to a level of being and character development to sit where this man sat the lone dark one in a room of whites not ready to get down, but ready to pose separating their head from their heart. Two sided questions are as deadly as a double edge sword. One thing I learned is that white people as well as other races need to heal and grow painfully into being whole in their own circles before intertwining with other circles. In particular, whites need this. - Gregory E. Woods, Sirmiq Aatuq Wisdom Keeper

Fading Away by Henry Peach Robinson, 1858

Foul People of Horror.

Image captured by William Ukoh

Man stuffed and displayed like a wild animal.

In the early 19th Century, it was fashionable for Europeans to collect wild animals from around the globe, bring them home and put them on display. One French dealer went further, bringing back the body of an African warrior. Dutch writer Frank Westerman came across the exhibit in a Spanish museum 30 years ago, and was determined to trace the man's history.

WARNING: This story contains an image some readers may find disturbing

A decorative chain-link fence in the national colours - blue, white and black - marks the grave of one of the most famous, but least enviable sons of Botswana: "El Negro". His resting place in a public park in the city of Gaborone, under a tree trunk and some rocks, is reminiscent of the tomb of an unknown soldier.

A metal plaque reads:

El Negro
Died c. 1830

Son of Africa
Carried to Europe in Death
Returned Home to African Soil
October 2000

His fame comes from his posthumous travels - lasting 170 years - as a museum exhibit in France and Spain. Generations of Europeans gaped at his half-naked body, which had been stuffed and mounted by a taxidermist. There he stood, nameless, exhibited like a trophy.

Back in 1983, as a university student from The Netherlands, I accidentally came across him on a hitchhiking trip to Spain. I had spent a night in the town of Banyoles, an hour north of Barcelona. The entrance of the Darder Museum of Natural History, behind a trio of leafless plane trees, happened to be next door.

"He's real, you know," a schoolgirl shouted at me.
"Who's real?"
"El Negro!" Her voice blared out over the square - accompanied by the snorts and laughter of her friends.

The next instant an elderly woman stepped out of the hairdressing salon with a cardigan draped over her shoulders. A fragile lady with a pointy chin graced by a few single hairs, she turned a key ring around in her fingers like a rosary. Senora Lola opened up the museum, sold me a ticket and pointed in the direction of the reptile room.

"That way," she ordered. "Then go through the rooms clockwise."

As I was on my way to the Human Room, an annex of the Mammal Room, past a climbing wall with apes and the skeleton of a gorilla, my merriment gave way to a shudder. There he was, the stuffed Negro of Banyoles. A spear in his right hand, a shield in his left. Bending slightly, shoulders raised. Half-naked, with just a raffia decoration and a coarse orange loincloth.

El Negro turned out to be an adult male, skin and bones, who hardly came up to one's elbow. He was standing in a glass case in the middle of the carpet.

This was not Madame Tussaud's. I was not staring at an illusion of authenticity - this black man was neither a cast nor some kind of mummy. He was a human being, displayed like yet another wildlife specimen. History dictated that the taxidermist was a white European and his object a black African. The reverse was unimaginable. I flushed and felt the roots of my hair prickling - simply from a diffuse sense of shame.

Senora Lola didn't have an explanation. She didn't even have a catalogue or a brochure. She tapped a carousel postcard stand and stared at me through her glasses. I took a card of El Negro and read on the back: Museo Darder - Banyoles. Bechuana.

"Bechuana?"

Senora Lola kept staring at me. Head back, chin jutting forward. "The cards are 40 pesetas each," she said.

I bought two.

stuffed man like an animal by white people.

Twenty years later I decided to write a book about El Negro's extraordinary journey from Botswana (Bechuana) to Banyoles and back again.

The story begins with Jules Verreaux, a French dealer in "naturalia", who in 1831 witnessed the burial of a Tswana warrior in the African interior, a few days' travel north of Capetown, and then returned at night - "not without danger to my own life" - to dig up the body and steal the skin, the skull and a few bones.

With the help of metal wire acting as a spine, wooden boards as shoulder blades, and stuffed with newspapers, Verreaux prepared and preserved the stolen body parts. Then he shipped him to Paris, along with a batch of stuffed animals in crates. In 1831 the African's body appeared in a showroom at No 3, Rue Saint Fiacre.

In a review, the newspaper Le Constitutionnel praised the fearlessness of Jules Verreaux, who must have faced dangers "amid natives who are as wild as they are black". This article set the tone, and the "individual of the Bechuana people" attracted more attention than the giraffes, hyenas or ostriches.

"He is small in posture, black-skinned, and his head is covered in woolly frizzy hair," the newspaper said.

More than half a century later, the "Bechuana" popped up in Spain. On the fringes of the world exhibition in Barcelona in 1888, the Spanish vet Francisco Darder presented him in a catalogue as "El Betchuanas", complete with a drawing in which he is seen wearing raffia finery and holding a spear and a shield.

By the 20th Century, having been brought over to Banyoles, a small city at the foot of the Pyrenees, his origins had been largely forgotten - on his pedestal was mistakenly written "Bushman of the Kalahari". In the decades that followed, the link to his Tswana origins faded even further and he became known simply as "El Negro".

At some point, the revealing loincloth that Jules Verreaux had decked him out in was replaced by the Roman-Catholic curators of the Banyoles museum with a more demure orange skirt. His skin was given a layer of shoe polish to make him seem blacker than he was.

Standing in his display case, slightly bowed and with a piercing gaze, El Negro embodied in a poignant and harrowing way, the darkest aspects of Europe's colonial past. He confronted visitors head-on with theories of "scientific racism" - the classification of people according to their supposed inferiority or superiority on the basis of skull measurements and other false assumptions.

As the 20th Century progressed, El Negro became more and more of an anachronism. Not only was there increasing guilt and awareness of the fact that his body and grave had been violated, but as a European artefact from the 19th Century he reflected ideas that had become universally untenable.
Everything began to shift in 1992 when a Spanish doctor of Haitian origin suggested, in a letter to El Pais, that El Negro should be removed from the museum. The Olympic Games were coming to Barcelona that year and the lake of Banyoles was the venue for the rowing competitions. Surely, wrote Dr Alphonse Arcelin, any athletes and spectators who visited the local museum would take offence at the sight of a stuffed black man.

Arcelin's call was supported by prominent names such as the US pastor Jesse Jackson and basketball player "Magic" Johnson. The Ghanaian Kofi Annan, then still Assistant Secretary-General of the UN, condemned the exhibit as "repulsive" and "barbarically insensitive".

But due to heavy resistance among the Catalan people, who embraced El Negro as a "national" treasure, it was not until March 1997 that El Negro disappeared from public view and "Object 1004" was put into storage. Three years later, in the autumn of 2000, he began his final journey home.
Following long consultations with the Organisation for African Unity, Spain had agreed to repatriate the human remains to Botswana for a ceremonial reburial in African soil. The first stage of his repatriation was a night ride in a truck to Madrid.

Once in the capital, his stuffed body was divested of its non-human additions, such as his glass eyes. El Negro was dismantled - as if the film of the preparations that Jules Verreaux carried out 170 years earlier was simply rewound.

His skin, however, turned out to be hard and crusty - it crumbled. Because of this, and because of the treatment with shoe polish, it was decided to keep it in Spain. According to one newspaper report it was left behind at the Museum of Anthropology in Madrid.

So the coffin, destined for Botswana, contained only the skull and certain arm and leg bones.

The remains of the Tswana warrior lay in state for a day in the capital Gaborone, where an estimated 10,000 people walked past to pay their last respects. The following day, 5 October 2000, he was committed to earth in a fenced-off area in the Tsholofelo park.

It was a Christian burial. "In the spirit of Jesus Christ," the priest said with his hand on the Bible, "who also suffered." An awning, supported by two rows of tent poles, protected the guests of honour from the sun.

"We are prepared to forgive," said the then-Foreign Minister Mompati Merafhe to the assembled mourners. "But we must not forget the crimes of the past, so that we don't repeat them."
Blessings were pronounced, there was singing and dancing. Buglers wearing white gloves sounded a last salute.

Subsequently, the grave was neglected for many years, the field around it being used as a football pitch. Lately however, the Botswanan government has restored and enhanced the site with a visitor's centre and explanatory signs.

But in 2016 it is still not known who this "son of Africa" was, what his name was, or exactly where he came from.

An autopsy, carried out in a Catalan hospital in 1995, nevertheless brought some things to light. The man who became world-renowned as El Negro lived to be about 27 years old. When alive, he stood between 1.35m and 1.4m tall (between 4ft 5in and 4ft 7in). He probably died of pneumonia.


~ Frank Westerman is the author of the book "El Negro and me".

16 September 2016

 From the section Magazine