dagblog - Comments for "One of the Earliest Memorial Day Ceremonies Was Held by Freed Slaves"

What Memorial Day is really

artappraiser — Tue, 28 May 2019 20:27:01 +0000

In reply to One of the Earliest Memorial Day Ceremonies Was Held by Freed Slaves

What Memorial Day is really about, from a Jelani Cobb thread:

We are our Ancestors' wildest dreams!
— Dr. Halifu Osumare (@hosumare) May 28, 2019

This is the end of my

artappraiser — Tue, 28 May 2019 19:08:20 +0000

In reply to I know what it said. I also

This is the end of my conversation with you on this. Say whatever you like but I am not going to be dragged in.

I would rather spend the time reading or talking on a Henry Gates type level. Not repeating the same shit over and over. I think you are way too invested in simplistic grievance, negativity, tribalism and black and white scenarios without any grey, to the point of masochism. It's just as depressing to interact with you as with any Trump fan.

AA, Gates says that the

rmrd0000 — Tue, 28 May 2019 19:08:14 +0000

In reply to I know what it said. I also

AA, Gates says that the echoes of Reconstruction effect us today and that we have to fight to keep our rights. Thank you for admitting that the fight is ongoing. He says that we have to remember the past to prepare for the present and the future. Thank you again for publishing his words.

He talks about Redeemer governments. Those are the state governments we face today.

So where does your pity olympics fit in?

I know what it said. I also

artappraiser — Tue, 28 May 2019 18:59:30 +0000

In reply to Gates wrote the last

I know what it said. I also saw that particular show with Chris Rock. I also know Gates' work quite well. I am a scholar of 19th C American culture since undergrad years and do try to keep up. As to

Slavery is still with us....

Gates writes and talks waaaaaaaaaay more nuance than you on that and the Reconstruction thing and where we are at with it. He happens to focus on Afro-American because that is his specialization, but like any good historians, he is interested in all the other tribes too, doesn't ignore them. And like Obama and say, Fukuyama, he's not into tribalism and divisiveness like you are. Just the opposite

Just an example. Fresh Air @ NPR.org, April 3

GROSS: Henry Louis Gates is the author of the new book "Stony The Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, And The Rise Of
Jim Crow." It's his companion to the new PBS series he hosts called "Reconstruction: America After The Civil War," which
airs April 9 and 16. Gates also has a new book for young adults called "Dark Sky Rising: Reconstruction And The Dawn Of Jim Crow."

my underliningg of two sentences:

[....]

GATES: Now, you want me to sing it, or you want me to recite it?

GROSS: Would you sing it?

GATES: (Laughter) I don't know. I don't know if I'm in voice.

GROSS: That would be great if you sang it.

GATES: OK, it goes like this. (Singing) Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod felt in the day that hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat have not our weary feet come to the place on which our fathers sighed.

GROSS: Well, thank you. That's more...

GATES: (Laughter).

GROSS: ...Way more than I hoped for.

GATES: (Laughter).

GROSS: Thank you for just actually singing that. What role has that song played in your life?

GATES: Well, this song was written to inspire young black children at a time when there was nothing on the horizon that was inspirational, nothing that would make black people think that the rights our people had been given by the amended Constitution in the 13th, the 14th, and 15th Amendments would ever come back because starting in 1890, those rights had been chipped away by the Redemption governments in the former Confederacy.

So that - the fact that our people never gave up hope, that we never stopped believing that a better day was coming and that if we worked hard enough and prayed hard enough and believed deeply enough, that one day the glories that we saw in Reconstruction would return. And hope against hope, that's what happened.

GROSS: Before we have to end, I'm wondering if you hear any other echoes of Reconstruction or of Redemption - the period of the rollback of rights for African-Americans - if you hear any echoes of that today.

GATES: The issues central to Reconstruction - and let's think about them - citizenship, voting rights, who has the right to vote, who has the right to be a citizen, terrorist violence, the relationship between economic and political democracy - those issues continue to roil our society and our politics right now. Understanding what happened to Reconstruction will help us understand how to keep the rights that we have accrued from being dismantled all over again by the evils of white supremacy.

GROSS: Henry Louis Gates, a pleasure to talk with you again. Thank you so much.

GATES: Thank you, Terry.

Gates wrote the last

rmrd0000 — Tue, 28 May 2019 18:24:53 +0000

In reply to Along the lines of America

Gates wrote the last paragraph in the article. You miss the big picture because you see things as isolated events not as a continuum. What unites the hidden story of the first Memorial Day and Chris Rock’s lack of knowledge about his ancestor is a concerted effort to bury the past. The effort is to minimize the black experience.

The effort to hide the past is also apparent in the suppression of the fact that the Statute of Liberty was in honor of the abolition of slavery, not a tribute to immigrants. There is also the recent discovery of the last slave ship to dock on the shores of the United States. Descendants of those enslaved people were ridiculed for telling the story until the actual remains of the ship were found. Dismal and suppression is part of a long tradition.

We see a similar long tradition in the ongoing battle to control women’s bodies. Like blacks, women had to fight for the vote. Women were ridiculed for demanding their rights. There is an ongoing battle for control in the efforts to abolish women’s right to choose. The last abortion clinic in Missouri is slated to close this week. The battle for control of women’s bodies like the battle to suppress blacks is part of a continuum.

Slavery is still with us and the fight for women’s rights are still with us. There is no pity olympics, there is a recognition of an ongoing battle. #MeToo is one response the The forever war. Reminding people of persistent racism is another battle in the war.

Fortunately, there are activists and members of Congress who understand the continuum are are attempting to fight the good fight.

Read the final paragraph of the article citing Gates again.

Along the lines of America

artappraiser — Tue, 28 May 2019 17:00:55 +0000

In reply to Gates's PBS show Finding Your

Along the lines of America being a special place, what I have seen Gates do with the show is that he does not hide when the person has an ancestor like a slave owner as the ancestor of an Afro-American or a thieving scoundrel ancestor of a Caucasian celebrity or a lowly Cantonese immigrant paid less than whites ancestor of someone Asian. He stresses the incredulity of how quickly we rise over that after multi generations and generations of the same old same old in other countries without any change.

Likewise:

artappraiser — Tue, 28 May 2019 16:50:42 +0000

In reply to Gates's PBS show Finding Your

Likewise:

A memorial of civil war dead by freed blacks was assimilated over decades to a Memorial Day honoring all war dead and to be celebrated by the entire nation. And that is a unifying thing and a wonderful thing. Not a bad thing, not a stealing of a cultural thing. People were touched and they felt similar towards other war dead and wanted to share the commonality of human grief, remembrance, pride in honor....

Just like there is not a separate Black Mother's day, there is just Mother's Day, as everybody has a mother.

Gates's PBS show Finding Your

artappraiser — Tue, 28 May 2019 16:43:33 +0000

In reply to Slavery, the Civil War, and

Gates's PBS show Finding Your Roots is wonderful precisely because it does not focus solely on slavery nor race all the time, 24/7 and does not at all make everything about race. Rather it makes everything about history and how history may have affected all kinds of individuals lives or not as the case may be. Myself, I usually find in the show a very inspiring message about personal empowerment, how one can overcome any family background within a generation or two. And that Americans are often very special people. The show is almost a testament to American Exceptionalism to a fault, in that there's never a tragic bad result, all is eventually overcome, families overcome their circumstance and rise, almost like a Maya Angelou poem. In a way the show is a testament against grievance getting you anywhere. It is also very much a testament to the melting pot. He does his best to show people how their heritage is simply fascinating and complex, definitely NOT A BLACK VS. WHITE THING at all.

Slavery, the Civil War, and

rmrd0000 — Tue, 28 May 2019 14:47:07 +0000

In reply to One of the Earliest Memorial Day Ceremonies Was Held by Freed Slaves

Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction are still with us. There has been a massive effort to remove memories of the past from memory. A black woman finally realized that stories told to her about the ceremony were real. There was similar amazement when comedian Chris Rock found out that one of his ancestors fought in the CivilWarad served in the South Carolina House of Representatives. Rock was informed of the history by Henry Louis Gates.

During an interview with Chris Rock for my PBS series African American Lives 2, we traced the ancestry of several well-known African Americans. When I told Rock that his great-great-grandfather Julius Caesar Tingman had served in the U.S. Colored Troops during the Civil War — enrolling on March 7, 1865, a little more than a month after the Confederates evacuated from Charleston, S.C. — he was brought to tears. I explained that seven years later, while still a young man in his mid-20s, this same ancestor was elected to the South Carolina house of representatives as part of that state’s Reconstruction government. Rock was flabbergasted, his pride in his ancestor rivaled only by gratitude that Julius’ story had been revealed at last. “It’s sad that all this stuff was kind of buried and that I went through a whole childhood and most of my adulthood not knowing,” Rock said. “How in the world could I not know this?”

I realized then that even descendants of black heroes of Reconstruction had lost the memory of their ancestors’ heroic achievements. I have been interested in Reconstruction and its tragic aftermath since I was an undergraduate at Yale University, and I have been teaching works by black authors from the second half of the 19th century for decades. But the urgent need for a broader public conversation about the period first struck me only in that conversation with Rock.

Reconstruction, the period in American history that followed the Civil War, was an era filled with great hope and expectations, but it proved far too short to ensure a successful transition from bondage to free labor for the almost 4 million black human beings who’d been born into slavery in the U.S. During Reconstruction, the U.S. government maintained an active presence in the former Confederate states to protect the rights of the newly freed slaves and to help them, however incompletely, on the path to becoming full citizens. A little more than a decade later, the era came to an end when the contested presidential election of 1876 was resolved by trading the electoral votes of South Carolina, Louisiana and Florida for the removal of federal troops from the last Southern statehouses.

The story continues with us today. Gates ended the article with

But what also seems clear to me today is that it was in that period that white-supremacist ideology, especially as it was transmuted into powerful new forms of media, poisoned the American imagination in ways that have long outlasted its origin. You might say that anti-black racism once helped fuel an economic system, and that black crude was pumped and freighted around the world. Now, more than a century and a half since the end of slavery in the U.S., it drifts like a toxic oil slick as the supertanker lists into the sea.

When Dylann Roof murdered the Reverend Clementa Pinckney and the eight other innocents in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., on June 17, 2015, he didn’t need to have read any of this history; it had, unfortunately, long become part of our country’s cultural DNA and, it seems, imprinted on his own. It is important that we both celebrate the triumphs of African Americans following the Civil War and explain how the forces of white supremacy did their best to undermine those triumphs—then and in all the years since, through to the present.

http://time.com/5562869/reconstruction-history/

We are not dealing with isolated events, we are dealing with a deep routed problem.The fact that events have been hidden from our view means that we have certainly not had enough discussions about race.