ELDER TALK: Jesus, Belief and Practice

Many have stood at this crossroad with these questions relying less on scholarship, and the probes into the mystical teachings of this walk, and more on other's thoughts on the subjects you raised.

Your first question: "Baptism. Does it mean the Holy Spirit comes into a person automatically?" Your second question suffers with the first question in a tangle of dogma from various sects in Protestantism: "I thought confessing Jesus, as one's Lord and Savior, meant one was born again?" The last question you ask has the embracing fragrance of innocence and honesty. "So how can you get baptized and not get the gift of the Spirit, that I flat out don't get because the Holy Ghost is a gift after all your sins have been washed away through the blood. I thought a gift is just what it is: a gift!"  

My first inclination is to suggest you begin your study, in the Bible, accepting that it is a long process delving into this subject matter. Because the question is fundamental to Christianity. The answers should be more than passable understanding of its progenitor religion, and that worldview needs to be learned to have depth as a follower of these teachings! It is important to have depth with substance, and breaking the tradition of glib answers to profound questions follow Paul's admonishment to "Study to show yourself approved..." and follow suit with your own spiritual practice!  

In easier language, there is a nest from which the answers to your questions flew away from! From animal sacrifices to the quest in the first century Church to rid itself of the vestiges of its Hebrew roots, to the horrible centuries of blood conquest/missionary work, to the 20th century revivals until now; the answers to your questions have been altered by histories of actions, politics, and the business of slave trade maintenance. So, your answers are easily assessable in the Bible, but do you really want to explore the fundamentals of your religious belief, or do you simply want to be sure of your salvation?  

To honor the questions, I am obligated to honor the teaching style of the Rabbi Jesus, who was initiated into his role, into manhood. He comes from not what passes today as a way into the kingdom of God, but from a tradition steeped in probes into the Unknown, with the tradition of study and introspection of their holy books and rituals interlinked with the development of the abstract and the intellect simultaneously!  - Gregory E. Woods, Keeper of Stories 9/18/17 

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

Lynching in America

Lynching in America: Targeting Black Veterans

Introduction

From the end of the Civil War to the years following World War II, thousands of African Americans were the victims of lynchings and other forms of racial terror in the United States, often in violent and public acts of torture that traumatized black communities throughout the country. The terror and violence of the lynching era profoundly impacted race relations and shaped the geographical, social, and economic conditions of African Americans in ways that are still evident today.

Lynching and racial violence fueled the migration of millions of black people from the South into urban ghettos in the North and West during the first half of the 20th century and created a social environment in which racial subordination and segregation was maintained for decades with limited official resistance. This violence reinforced a legacy of racial inequality that has never been adequately addressed and continues to be evident in the injustice and unfairness of the administration of criminal justice in America.

Military service sparked dreams of racial equality for generations of African Americans. But most black veterans were not welcomed home and honored for their service. Instead, during the lynching era, many black veterans were targeted for mistreatment, violence, and murder because of their race and status as veterans. Indeed, black veterans risked violence simply by wearing their uniforms on American soil.³ 

The United States condoned the racial terror and Jim Crow segregation that plagued the entire black population even as it purported to fight for freedom and democracy and against fascism and racism abroad. This report is a supplement to Lynching in America: Confronting the Legacy of Racial Terror that specifically examines the history of racial violence targeting African American veterans in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Between the end of Reconstruction and the years following World War II, thousands of black veterans were accosted, assaulted, and attacked, and many were lynched. Black veterans died at the hands of mobs and persons acting under the color of official authority; many survived near-lynchings; and countless others suffered severe assaults and social humiliation. Documenting these atrocities is vital to understanding the incongruity of our country’s professed ideals of freedom and democracy while tolerating ongoing violence against people of color within our own borders. As veteran and later civil rights leader Hosea Williams said, “I had fought in World War II, and I once was captured by the German army, and I want to tell you the Germans never were as inhumane as the state troopers of Alabama.”⁴ 

EJI believes that understanding the persecution of African American veterans is an important step toward understanding how racial violence and hatred terrorized black Americans in the century following emancipation.

The Myth of Racial Inferiority and the Black Soldier

Throughout our country’s history, African Americans have looked hopefully to military service as a way to achieve racial equality and opportunity.⁵ 

But the dream that donning a military uniform and fighting for national honor would earn black soldiers respect and human dignity conflicted with the status black people in America had held for centuries — and often resulted in disappointment.

The enslavement of black people in the United States for more than 200 years built wealth, opportunity, and prosperity for millions of white Americans. At the same time, American slavery assigned to black people a lifelong status of bondage and servitude based on race, and created a myth of racial inferiority to justify the racial hierarchy. Under this racist belief system, whites were hard working, smart, and morally advanced, while black people were dumb, lazy, childlike, and uncivilized.

The idea that black people were naturally and permanently inferior to white people became deeply rooted in individual’s minds, state and federal laws, and national institutions. This ideology grew so strong that it survived the abolition of slavery and evolved into new systems of racial inequality and abuse. In the period from 1877 to 1950, it took the form of lynching and racial terror.

For a century after emancipation, African American servicemen and the black community at large “staked much of their claims to freedom and equality on their military service, and had cited it as a vindication of African American manhood.”⁶

Fighting for democracy was emblematic of the equality African Americans desired, and by serving their country, black veterans displayed their attachment to the nation and commitment to American values. In the face of this persistent racial hierarchy, and despite being denied full citizenship, many African Americans fought for the United States and for the aspiration that conditions would improve.⁷

Instead, black soldiers who served in the armed forces from the Civil War to World War II, during the height of racial terror and violence, faced hatred and racism even in “peace” time.

On the other side of African Americans’ hopes were whites’ fears that black veterans asserting and demanding equality would disrupt the social order built on white supremacy and the racialized economic order from which many benefitted. Many politicians feared that black veterans would believe they were equal to whites and worthy of more than poverty, poor educational opportunities, and menial labor, and would no longer be satisfied to work on farms for low wages. Southern politicians in particular feared that independent and empowered black veterans would lead other African Americans — especially in the South, where most still lived — to challenge racial segregation and subordination in bold and dangerous ways. In the minds of fearful whites, black veterans’ training in weapons and combat and their success defending the nation in battle were more a threat than a source of pride, and many voiced concerns about how those skills could be used at home. Black veterans epitomized white Southern fears of “a black population that had either forgotten or outright rejected its place in the region’s racial hierarchy.”⁸

The hopeful determination of black veterans seeking equality after military service challenged the defiant determination of white Americans to reinforce white supremacy, maintain racial inequality, and suppress black veterans’ potential as leaders and change agents. During the Civil War, white leaders viewed black soldiers as liable to use violence to destroy the social order. Throughout the lynching era, African American veterans were seen as an increasingly imminent threat to the South’s racial caste system.⁹

This tension made black servicemen targets for discrimination, mistreatment, and violence within the military and for deadly racial terror at home. . . [to be continued] 

SUNDAY Morning services.

Art world of Joy Mollnar titled this piece, Dancing On Sacred Ground

Color struck: America's White Jesus is a global export and false product

by Wesley Muhammad, PhD.


What color was Jesus? Most American Christians—Black and White—would dismiss this question as both irrelevant and unanswerable as the Gospels fail to give us a physical description. The irony is that most of these same Americans in their heart of hearts are pretty confident any way that they know what color Jesus was. They attend churches with images of a tall, long haired, full bearded White man depicted in stained glass windows or painted on walls, and they return home to the same depictions framed in their living room or illustrating their family Bibles.

Further compounding the irony is the fact that America actually has an obsession with the (presumed) color of Christ and has exported her White Americanized Savior around the world, as recently documented by Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey in their book, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (2012).

In fact, the world’s most popular and recognizable image of Christ is a distinctly 19th-20th century American creation. It is true that versions of the “White Christ” appear in European art as early as the 4th century of the Christian era, but these images coexisted with other, nonwhite representations throughout European history. The popularity of the cult of the Black Madonna and Black Christ throughout Europe is evidence of the fact that the European ‘White Christs’ never acquired the authority and authenticity that the White Christ now has globally. This Christ and his authority are American phenomena. As a predominantly Protestant nation Early America rejected the imaging of Christ that characterized European Catholicism.

By the mid-19th century, however, in response to American expansion, splintering during the Civil War and subsequent reconstructing, “Whiteness” took on a new significance and a newly- empowered “White Jesus” rose to prominence as the sanctifying symbol of a new national unity and power. As Blum and Harvey observe:

“By wrapping itself with the alleged form of Jesus, whiteness gave itself a holy face … With Jesus as white, Americans could feel that sacred whiteness stretched back in time thousands of years and forward in sacred space to heaven and the second coming … The white Jesus promised a white past, a white present, and a future of white glory.”

As America rose to superpower status in the 20th century she became the world’s leading producer and global exporter of White Jesus imagery through film, art, American business, and Christian missions, and has thereby defined the world’s view of the Son of God. This globally recognizable Jesus is a totally American product. Indeed, he is an American. Warner Sallman’s iconic image of Jesus called Head of Christ (1941) became the most widely reproduced piece of artwork in world history and its depiction the most recognizable face of Jesus in the world. By the 1990s it had been printed over 500 million times and achieved global iconic status. With smooth white skin, long, flowing blondish-brown hair, long beard and blue eyes, this Nordic Christ consciously disguised any hint of Jesus’s Semitic, oriental origin—and departed from the older European depictions. It both shaped and was shaped by emerging American ideas of whiteness. The beloved White Jesus of today’s world was Made in America.

What, then, did Jesus actually look like? Despite the absence of a detailed description of Jesus’s physical appearance in the Gospels (though John the Revelator saw the risen Christ apparently with wooly hair and black feet, Rev. 1:14-15), there are non-biblical evidences that actually allow us to visualize the Son of God from Nazareth.

Revelation 1:14-15 - King James Version (KJV)
14) His head and his hairs were white like wool, as white as snow; and his eyes were as a flame of fire;
15) And his feet like unto fine brass, as if they burned in a furnace; and his voice as the sound of many waters.

The first century Jewish writer Josephus (37-100 AD) penned the earliest non-biblical testimony of Jesus. He reportedly had access to official Roman records on which he based his information and in his work Halosis or the “Capture (of Jerusalem),” written around 72 A.D., Josephus discussed “the human form of Jesus and his wonderful works.” Unfortunately his texts have passed through Christian hands which altered them, removing offensive material. Fortunately, however, Biblical scholar Robert Eisler in a classic 1931 study of Josephus’ Testimony was able to reconstruct the unaltered testimony based on a newly-discovered Old Russian translation that preserved the original Greek text. According to Eisler’s reconstruction, the oldest non-Biblical description of Jesus read as follows:

“At that time also there appeared a certain man of magic power … if it be meet to call him a man, [whose name is Jesus], whom [certain] Greeks call a son of [a] God, but his disciples [call] the true prophet … he was a man of simple appearance, mature age, black-skinned (melagchrous), short growth, three cubits tall, hunchbacked, prognathous (lit. ‘with a long face’ [macroprosopos]), a long nose, eyebrows meeting above the nose … with scanty [curly] hair, but having a line in the middle of the head after the fashion of the Nazaraeans, with an undeveloped beard.”

This short, black-skinned, mature, hunchbacked Jesus with a unibrow, short curly hair and undeveloped beard bears no resemblance to the Jesus Christ taken for granted today by most of the Christian world: the tall, long haired, long bearded, white-skinned and blue eyed Son of God. Yet, this earliest textual record matches well the earliest iconographic evidence.

The earliest visual depiction of Jesus is a painting found in 1921 on a wall of the baptismal chamber of the house-church at Dura Europos, Syria and dated around 235 A.D. The Jesus that is “Healing the Paralytic Man” (Mark 2:1-12) is short and dark-skinned with a small curly afro - see below.
This description has now been supported by the new science of forensic anthropology. In 2002 British forensic scientists and Israeli archaeologists reconstructed what they believe is the most accurate image of Jesus based off of data obtained from the multi-disciplinary approach. In December 2002 Popular Science Magazine published a cover story on the findings which confirm that Jesus would have been short, around 5”1’, hair “short with tight curls,” a weather-beaten face “which would have made him appear older,” dark eyes and complexion: “he probably looked a great deal more like a dark-skinned Semite than Westerners are used to seeing,” they concluded. The textual, visual, and scientific evidence agrees, then: Jesus likely was a short, dark-skinned Semite with short curly hair and dark eyes.

Colossians 1:15 describes Christ as the “image of the unseen God” and in the Gospel of John (12:45; 14:9) Jesus declares that whoever sees him has seen God. What Jesus “looks like” then is not irrelevant as it is in some way a pointer to God Himself.

Resolve through Knowledge

Scholars -  Tijaniyyah Scholars in Dakar in partnership with The Carter Center's Global Human Rights Project
July 29, 2015·
 

 

The Inheritors heart emoticon Warith heart emoticon Tijaniyyah Scholars convening in Dakar in Partnership with The Carter Center's Global Human Rights Project heart emoticon They know do you??? heart emoticon

“Then We gave the Scripture as inheritance unto those whom We elected of Our servants.” [Qur’an, 35.32]

Abu al-Darda’ (Allah be pleased with him) that the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) said:

“Scholars are the inheritors of the prophets.” [Related byTirmidhi, Abu Dawud, Nasa’i, Ibn Maja, Ahmad, Ibn Hibban, and others] Ibn al-Mulaqqin, Zayla`i, Ibn Hajar, and others seemed it sound (hasan) or rigorously authentic (sahih)]

The knowledge possessed by these scholars is the knowledge deemed beneficial (al-`ilm al-nafi`) by Allah and His Messenger (Allah bless him and give him peace). This knowledge was defined by Imam Ghazali as being, “Knowledge of the way to Allah Most High and the next life.”

It is not just information: rather, it is the way of transforming oneself outwardly and inwardly, in order to become true slaves of Allah, on the path of His Beloved Messenger (peace and blessings be upon him).

This is the “deep understanding in religion” that the Messenger of Allah (Allah bless him and give him peace) praised when he said, “Whomever Allah wishes well for He gives deep understanding (fiqh) in religion.” [Bukhari and Muslim]

This deep understanding (fiqh) was defined by Imam Abu Hanifa (Allah have mercy on him) when he said, “Fiqh is to know one’s self: what is for it and against it.” Deep understanding of religion encompasses all three dimensions of the religion: beliefs (iman), outword actions (islam), and, most importantly, spiritual excellence (ihsan).

The person who possesses this knowledge is one deserving of being called a true scholar (faqih). A true scholar is defined as being, “A person of knowledge (`ilm) who acted (`amal) on their knowledge, so Allah bequeathed them knowledge of what they didn’t know.”

Just Sayin"... from Hajja Ayisha Jeffries Cisse

triracial

An interesting study...

http://linux. library.appstate .edu/lumbee/ 18/DANI003. htm

Provides a brief, helpful discussion of "triracial isolate," a social 
science term, noting at the outset that "many of their members reject 
such labeling, and they are not a single identifiable group. . . . 
The common attributes of these communities have less to do with 
cultural bonds than with similarities in experience and in living 
conditions that unite them in their refusal to accept the United 
States binary racial project" (p. 68). Daniel also notes, in defining 
this concept, that there are approximately two hundred triracial 
isolate groups in the eastern United States (especially the 
southeast); that they have varying amounts of Native American, 
African American, and European American ancestry; and that they tend 
to live (at least, they did during the formation of the community) in 
the edges of towns and in isolate rural areas. He characterizes them 
as pluralistic in terms of their stance toward race, meaning that 
they believe an oppressed group should work to "recover its own sense 
of itself and become more effective as a collective force in the 
world. They envision . . . a process of dissimilation that would 
create intergroup accommodation, or a mosaic of mutually respectful, 
separate social and ethnic pluralities with equal status both in law and in fact" (pp. 119-120).

The specific discussions of the Lumbee are brief, recounting basic 
historical facts. In another section, Daniel discusses an incident in 
1954-1955 involving Allen Platt and family, who moved from Holly 
Hill, South Carolina to Mount Dora (Lake County), Florida. When 
Platt's children started attending school, their classmates 
speculated to their parents, who then talked to the county sheriff, 
about their racial background. The White supremacist sheriff visited 
the Platt home, urging the children to stay out of school until the 
matter could be investigated. The principal, school board, and 
superintendent agreed. The matter escalated into a court case (Allen 
Platt et al. v. the Board of Public Instruction of Lake County, 
Florida). The defendants' case alluded to the fact that on some 
public records, the Platts were called Croatian (Daniel's error for 
Croatan) Native Americans, ". . . and Webster's dictionary defined 
Croatians (sic) as people of blended Native American, European 
American, and African American ancestry" (p. 71). See PLAT001 for 
more details on the Platt case.  

July 23, 2008