The Racist History of Laws Against "Loitering"

It's amazing how much information can be squashed into three or four minutes of film. It's also amazing how brutally cold-blooded and intentional White Supremacist oppression has been as it developed its stranglehold on North America over the past few hundred years. The next time somebody who's been taught to believe they're "White" says "racism" is a thing of the past or they "just don't see color," show 'em this little video.

Bloody, But Unbowed

Emory Douglas/2016 (by permission)

It's taken me a while to catch my breath. That one-two punch last November was a doozy and though I've been meeting my responsibilities (which are many), my psyche went down for the count and has been lying on the canvas in the ring ever since, trying to figure out if I can make it to the locker room on these jelly legs or do I need to jump in a cab and head straight for the border. There's something to be said for living to fight another day.

I've been lying still with my eyes closed, as it were, reminding myself that this is not new news. White Supremacy. the patriarchy, capitalism, and a cold-blooded commitment to power held by a handful of old White men combined with an almost stunning lack of consciousness in the mass public over the past 250 years has delivered us to the present like an express train to hell. And for the last fifty years of that period, I've been watching it all unfold like a Grade B movie. Yet -- no matter how you've trained -- a well-placed upper cut that catches you off-guard can rock your world, even if you're the better fighter.

Still, as I often tell my students, it's not what happens. It's what happens after that. Watcha gonna do?

Loretta Ross: On the Origin of the Term "Women of Color"

So-called "White" people (whatever "White" is perceived to be) have a tendency to discount whatever People of Color say or even People of Color themselves before they open their mouths. Listen (really listen) to Loretta Ross for just three minutes and you'll see why that practice is stupid and even, quite possibly, dangerous. This woman obviously brings great intelligence, insight, and analysis to the table. She should be at the table more often and much, much more publicly.

Montgomery, Alabama: Then and Now

Mural at Southern Poverty Law Center Civil Rights Memorial Center 

Another Martin Luther King, Jr., Day has come and gone. There was a time on this blog when I posted on every holiday or historical point of interest related to the socially-constructed political notion of "race." There was a time I just "had to" weigh in on every news story featuring a Black person, especially a Black person victimized by White Supremacy. But after 571 posts, it occurs to me now that I've pretty much said a lot of what I have to say. And the same shit keep happening over and over. Other people will cover that stuff and, by and large, I just comment on it on Facebook. Today, I have options. That doesn't mean I'm done as a blogger (obviously). It just means I've come to realize that this process has morphed (as everything does) and I have developed my own little niche in the blogosphere. Or at least that's the way I see it.

Sometimes, I'm busy (as most of us are). Sometimes, I'm going through something (as everybody does from time to time, some of us more often than others). Regardless, if you want to know what I think about some aspect of "race," a summary perusal of this site can help you find it on here somewhere.

But since I think about oppression rather a lot and oppression related to "race" more than most -- especially more than most folks that look like me -- I do still (and probably always will) find things I feel the urge to write about in this manner. Recently (January 18th, to be exact), I found myself in Montgomery, Alabama, and made it a point to tear myself away from the business at hand long enough to make my own little civil rights tour in honor of Martin and all the other predecessors in this on-going struggle for justice. This post is the result.

Hopeful Note #1: The Election of Chokwe Lumumba

I'm opening my ninth year blogging on White Supremacy and the socially-constructed, political notion of "race," by referencing some truly hopeful notes at this point in our history. The first hopeful note is that Chokwe Lumumba, former Vice President of the Republic of New Afrika and co-founder of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, was elected Mayor of Jackson, Mississippi, last June. The event registered not only nationally, but around the world. And The Jackson Plan is now capturing the interest of a wide range of knowledgeable people -- experts and otherwise -- who want to imagine the possibility of forward motion to a better community and a better world for everybody.

Posted above is a YouTube video of Larry Hales of the Workers World Party offering his take on the historical context and the importance of Lumumba winning the election and the possibilities inherent within the Jackson Plan.

Akinyele Omowale Umoja: We Will Shoot Back

The Malcolm X Grassroots Movement turned me onto a set of five YouTube videos showing Akinyele Omowale Umoja discussing his book on Black armed resistance in the southern United States entitled We Will Shoot Back (NYU Press, 2013). Since it's not out in paperback yet, this may be the book that makes me buy a Kindle. Can't wait, can't wait, can't wait to read it. Ooooo-eeee!

Emmanuel Jal: Cush

A couple of years ago, I learned of a man named Emmanuel Jal. He had just published a bestselling book about his experiences as a Sudanese child soldier who had wound up going to school and, ultimately, became an ambassador for peace through his rap music. I mentioned him in a post at the time because I had read his book (which I highly recommend), Sudan was in the news at the time, and I have a long-standing attachment to that country.

A few days ago, I received an email tipping me to Jal's newest album, entitled See Me Mama. One of the cuts from the album is featured above, reminding us that the human race in general and, most particularly, our darker brothers and sisters, share a rich history dating back to the kingdom of Cush.

Louis CK On The Historical Context Of White Supremacy

A couple of days ago, I re-posted Brotha Wolf's discussion of Whiteness in the U.S. I'm certain some White folks would be more than a little defensive about the essays he chose to present. So I'm posting a short YouTube video today to let Louis CK add his two cents. Humor about White Supremacy is the equivalent, I guess, to making children's medicine bubblegum-flavored so it's easier to swallow. Come on, kiddies, open wide.

On This Day in History

The perception that many people in the United States have is that Africans were helpless victims of their own inability to protect themselves from their "betters" (that would be the White Europeans, of course) and that, as a result, they sort of "deserved" whatever came after that. The 30 million or so who died crossing the Atlantic from abuse, disease, starvation, suicide, or just being thrown overboard so the White slavers (all God-fearing men, needless to say) could avoid prosecution for the crime of being slavers were just collateral damage, as it were. Mutinies on slave ships with the exception of The Amistad have been largely ignored. And the African-American uprisings that have occurred in the past one hundred years have invariably been called "riots" and used to suggest that Black folks are just...well...like that ...you know?

"We called ourselves the children of Malcolm"

In honor of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, which celebrates its 45th year this month; in remembrance of all the brothers and sisters (Black and White) who struggled, suffered and died to advance the goals and aspirations of the Party; and in solidarity with those brothers and sisters (Black and White) who remain in the belly of the beast in prisons and jails throughout the not-just, not-legal system in the United States because of their political beliefs and most particularly Albert "Shaka" "Cinque" Woodfox and Herman "Hooks" Wallace who have spent their last forty years in solitary confinement, I am posting this recent interview with Billy X, one of the earliest organizers for the Black Panther Party. Learn more here or here.

Angola (the Prison, not the Country)

It appears that I'm gearing up to do some more posts on the criminal justice system here in Louisiana and some of the cases that highlight it's...shall we say...peculiarity? I realize that it's not just Louisiana. I recently watched "Conviction", for example, the movie released just last fall about Kenny Waters, who did eighteen years on a life sentence for a robbery/murder he didn't commit. The payoff of $3.4 million came, of course, but eight years after Waters died of head injuries sustained in a 15-foot fall that occurred when he was taking a short cut on the way to his brother's house for dinner six months after his release. He had earlier said he was suffering from anxiety attacks, but the fall was considered an accident. Still, we'll never know.

This weekend, I'll be viewing "American Violet", the fictionalized account of the real life case of Regina Kelly, a single mother who took on and beat the District Attorneys in Hearne, Texas, after 28 innocent African-Americans were arrested for dealing drugs there. This was only a year after the infamous Tulia, Texas, case, by the way, wherein 15% of the local Black population was arrested for drug dealing, subsequently sharing a six million dollar settlement because, yet again, it was all a big, orchestrated lie.

On This Day in History

On March 7, 1932, according to This Week in History, a publication of PeaceButtons.info, a Ford [Motor Company] Hunger March began on Detroit’s east side and proceeded ten miles, seeking relief during the Great Depression. Facing hunger and evictions, workers had formed neighborhood Unemployed Councils. Along the route, the marchers were given good wishes from Detroit Mayor Frank Murphy as well as two motorcycle escorts, and thousands joined the marchers along the route.

At the Detroit city limit, however, the marchers were met by Dearborn police and doused by fire hoses. Despite the cold weather, they continued to the Employment Office at the Ford River Rouge plant, from which there had been massive layoffs. Five workers were killed and nineteen wounded by police and company “security” personnel armed with pistols, rifles and a machine gun.

Dave Moore, one of the marchers that day (photo above), said, “That blood was Black blood and White blood. One of the photos that was published in the Detroit Times, but never seen since, shows a Black woman, Mattie Woodson, wiping the blood off the head of Joe DiBlasio, a White man who lay there dying...It’s been 75 years, but when you drive down Miller Road today, your car tires will be moistened with the blood that those five shed.”

The Real Truth Behind the Murder of MLK

"The issue is injustice...Let us rise up tonight with a greater readiness, let us stand with a greater determination, and let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be."

This quote is from a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., to the sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee, the day before he was shot and killed by an off-duty Memphis police officer.

You hadn't heard? You find it horrible to imagine? You don't want to believe me? Check out what Dick Gregory and Steve Cokely have to say about it (prepare to be seriously shocked, depressed, disappointed and angry):

Study Malcolm, Garvey, Huey

Five years ago today, I created this blog on the socially-constructed, political notion of race. I've had a few two-month hiatuses during that time and I've seen some of the best come and then go. And I understand. But for whatever reason, I can't seem to walk away.

At five years, it's the longest commitment I've ever had. Longer than any job. Longer than any marriage. And if I don't stop soon, I may not be able to.

Last week, I got a notice of "unusual activity" on my gmail account and was blocked from entering it. They asked me for a phone number in order to send me a "verification code." More than a little wary and basically unwilling anyway, I sent out some questions to a computer savvy young person I know. But before I could get an answer, I discovered that my blogger account was also blocked.

I went into such an instant tailspin that I gave them the phone number without another thought. Hell, I'd have given them my bra size if they'd asked for it. You're my peeps. And the thought of being pushed into never-never land without a chance to say good-bye was more than I could bear.

The day may come, Faithful Readers, but it looks as if they'll have to carry me out of here. Everybody has a niche. And I'm busy on a number of fronts. But this blog is apparently my foxhole. And after five years, I may be chained to this laptop. I hope so.

So I'll go into the next five putting Dead Prez in the spotlight tonight as they tell us why it's important not just to know, but to study the truths handed down by those who went before. Upward and onward. There is nothing to fear but fear itself.

A Narrative About A Narrative

Time is an interesting thing. First of all, of course, it's one more of those social constructions. I mean, it didn't exactly come as part of the life-on-Earth starter kit. There was most certainly, I would imagine, a period early on when humans just lived in the moment. Indigenous people living traditionally still do, from what I understand. But as for us, we wear watches and calibrate gestation and are interminable consumers of calendars which all become obsolete annually. We wear time like spandex, allowing it to constrain us and demand of us lest it leave us, somehow, inexplicably, behind.

The fact is, though, that frustrating as all this often is, it is quite interesting sometimes to consider our and other people's lives in the temporal context, juxtaposing them to see where they meet or influence each other. For example, in 1970, when Angela Davis was arrested in New York City, I was in San Francisco, stretching my wings as a radical and absolutely unaware of her. How could I have been unaware of her?

In any case (unbeknownst to me), she was on the cover of Life magazine that summer and now, a copy of that cover hangs on my home office wall between a photo of the Angola 3 and a painting of a woman Zapatista. She's one of my heroes. And today, I'm reviewing her presentation of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave Written by Himself, brought out this year -- forty years after her arrest -- by City Lights, the highly respected San Francisco publishing house. It's a veritable kaleidoscope of magical coincidences, is it not? But I'm not finished yet.

See, this exact date in 1838 was the day Frederick Douglass broke through to freedom, escaping his bonds on his second try, at the age of twenty or so (he couldn't know for certain). Asked what it felt like to be free that day, Douglass wrote to a friend, "I felt as one might feel upon escape from a den of hungry lions. Anguish and grief, like darkness and rain, may be depicted; but gladness and joy, like the rainbow, defy the skill of pen or pencil."

And so, I approach this task -- a simple review of the book -- with just such a lack of confidence that I can possibly communicate what I think of a book with so many reference points for me.

On This Day In History

On this day in 1964, Nelson Mandela stood before the Supreme Court in Pretoria, South Africa, against the urgings of his lawyer, and made the following statement before being sent to prison for twenty-seven years:

“During my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal for which I hope to live and to see realised. But, my lord, if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”

Faubourg Treme': the Untold Story of New Orleans

"Faubourg Treme': The Untold Story of Black New Orleans" has been out since 2008 and appeared on PBS as early as January of last year. So initially, I was befuddled as to why they would offer me a preview copy at this late date. But living only 45 miles from New Orleans myself these days and making it a point to get there as often as possible, I followed through and requested the preview copy they offered, thinking I could at least write about it for Black History Month, mentioning that it would appear on PBS stations nation-wide during February.

As the weeks passed, however, and February came, I thought I had missed the cut and erased the email making the offer, sending only an apology that I wouldn't be reviewing the film as I hadn't gotten to see it. Then it arrived.

And now I find, after watching it three times in a week, that I don't know where to begin. It's beautifully produced and the music alone, heavily influenced and imbued throughout, I suspect, with Executive Producer Wynton Marsalis' genius, is worth the sixty minutes it takes to watch the film. But the story it tells crawled up inside me during my first viewing (after which I stared for some time at the blank television screen) and despite the subsequent viewings and more than three pages of notes, I can't seem to process it the way I normally might. It's more than a film. It's a love song. And if I ever buy a house again in life (which I have said for some time I wouldn't), it will likely be in Faubourg Treme' and I will feel that I've come home.

Films aren't supposed to carry that much weight if you're at all sophisticated. I tend to be, it is true, "an all or nothing kind of person," as my daughter once gently reminded me. That's why I rarely review anything I don't like. Why waste my time? But this is hardly my first time at the Black history party. And I've managed to watch a number of excellent films without wanting to sell the family farm and set up shop in a location with the problems of the Treme' (pronounced Tre-MAY). So why this one?

I mean, it hardly pulls any punches, what with the opening scenes of the destruction filling the neighborhood streets after Katrina, the discussion of how taxi drivers beg not to go to the Sixth Ward (the area's more recent identifying designation), the litany of how death stalks its more poverty-stricken residents, and the description of the wholesale attack on the area in the name of Redevelopment (better known colloquially as the I-10 overpass running right down Claibourne Street -- originally an oak-shaded promenade).

So what about this film is so compelling? The spirit of the tale. And to understand that, you're going to have to watch it yourself. Still, I can share a bit about it to encourage you, I hope, to move in that direction. It should be seen and discussed and heralded and, in truth, its website reports that it has been. So maybe there's nothing left to say except "Ditto." But you know me better than that.

The story interweaves the entire history of the Faubourg Treme' (the word faubourg meaning a suburb divided into small plots and Treme' being the name of the man who originally owned the area) with its more recent evolution. How filmmaker Dawn Logsden and New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter Lolis Eric Elie managed to cover it all so elegantly without being confusing or making it seem rushed is beyond me. The film moves back and forth between drawings and old films from the sometimes long distant past (the area was settled two hundred years ago) and the streets and people just pre- and post-Katrina. And some of the connections are downright magical.

Elie, for example, hired 75-year-old Creole carpenter Irving Trevigne to restore an old house in the Treme' a few years before the infamous hurricane hit. Trevigne is charming and real-er than real when he first talks about how "anybody can build a new house; I like to take an old one and watch it come back to life" and then later describes with bitter and somewhat bewildered sadness what it was like during segregation to always be addressed as "boy," while going home to the Treme' with all its Black and White residents living right next door to each other, sharing their lives, but being separated at school and in church by law.

Irving Trevigne's ancestor, Paul, it turns out, edited the L'Union, the first African-American daily in the U.S. from his printshop in the Treme'. Veteran actor Lenwood Sloane, founder of the Louisiana Living History Project, plays the editor in scenes that thread through the documentary, speaking the words the earlier Trevigne published in the mid-1860's, words every bit as poetic and commanding as those of Martin Luther King, Jr., at his best.

Proclaiming the Declaration of Independence as the basis for their platform, L'Union editor Trevigne demanded full citizenship, including land, education, and the vote for free people of color, a group heavily represented in the area even then because slaves were allowed to make money, buy their freedom, and move around at will in New Orleans. In fact, local African-Americans, under the encouragement of Trevigne and the organizational tutelege of what was boldly called The Citizens Committee, had forced the de-segregation of public transportation in the city by 1867. And over the next decade, a Louisiana legislature that was more than half Black passed the most progressive state constitution in the country. Even the schools were de-segregated. Until Plessy v. Ferguson, that is.

Actually, Plessy v. Ferguson, the famous case that established the legality of separate-but-equal accomodations for White people and all others was initiated in New Orleans. It was The Citizens Committee's response to the White man's boot landing resoundingly back onto the necks of African-American people when the federal troops left the South after Reconstruction. Homer Plessy was chosen for his White appearance and his Black heritage to board the Louisiana Railroad car where he was subsequently arrested because he refused to go instead to the car reserved for Black folks. When the case reached the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justices decided that "separate but equal" accomodations (which were, needless to say, rarely if ever anything close to equal and sometimes garishly and obviously unequal) satisfied completely the legal requirements of the U.S. Constitution related to U.S. citizens of varying skin tones.

The people of the Faubourg Treme' were devastated. Almost over night, 95% of the Black voters in Louisiana were purged from the registration files. Black children were thrown out of integrated schools using physical force and all educational programs for children of color past the fifth grade were shut down. Still, Paul Trevigne was intransigent. "If [our movement] did not succeed," he wrote, "it is because it was premature...Oh, the Courts, it is true, denied the demands of our people, but future generations will remember." And they have.

Lenwood Sloane believes that "New Orleans is living history...the presence of the past." Wynton Marsalis, describing how the heartsick Treme' residents took those feelings and pushed them through a horn, suggests that, for New Orleanians, every improvisational jazz riff simultaneously serves as "a moment that has never happened," even while also being "a moment that has always happened." "Our rich history doesn't shield us from our problems," explains Louisiana Poet Laureate Brenda Marie Osbey, "but it does help us deal with them."

Nevertheless, the bitter sorrow floats to the surface as the film demonstrates how continued legislated oppression, discrimination, and targeted "redevelopment," led only to the final stunning shock of poorly engineered levees creating a disaster of incalculable horror further exacerbated by a severely lacking governmental response. "I sincerely hope nobody ever asks me to say the Pledge of Allegience or sing God Bless America or any of those other dumbass songs ever again," declares trombonist Glen David Andrews. "because I don't feel like an American citizen. I know I'm not a citizen in the eyes of the Powers-That-Be."

Still, Osbey seems to reflect the long dead editor who had such faith in the ideals of the people of the Faubourg Treme' when she says in a post-Katrina reflection: "It's a great catastrophe truly, but it isn't a greater disaster than we are a people. And that's what has to come through -- that we hold onto this city for who we are and what we are and that everywhere we go, we take this city with us. We take the spirit of this city with us, the spirit of this city's heroes with us, and the will to live and fight again."

In doing my homework to write this post, I discovered the probable reason I was offered a review copy of this extraordinary documentary. HBO has sunk serious money into an up-coming series entitled "Treme'" and co-created by David Simon and Eric Overmyer (the pair that gave us "The Wire"). So, if you really want to have a clue when the time comes (projected for mid-April), you would do well to see "Faubourg Treme': the Untold Story of Black New Orleans" first, if at all possible and you haven't already. But I'll warn you now; this is powerful stuff coming out at an interesting time in history. And courage, I think, is catching.

Goodbye, Columbus?

I'm back from New York City now and will be posting my usual human rights piece later today since this is the 27th. But in the meantime, I just had to upload the photo above. It's me (of course) in Central Park...er...waving hello...as it were...to the statue commemorating that brutally violent Euro-centric slaver and child rapist Columbus for "discovering" the Western Hemisphere. Hee hee.

The photo credit for this one goes to my daughter's significant other (the socialist) who had no problem with it. My daughter, on the other hand, loooooong since tired of Mommy's outrageous public behavior, slipped away to a bench while the festivities were occurring.

History Lessons

If you've never been turned onto This Week in History, you might want to check it out. I learn plenty. For example, this week I learned that on this day in 1847:

"Several hundred citizens of Marshall, Michigan, helped former slaves escape to Canada rather than be returned to their 'owner' by bounty hunters. Adam Crosswhite and his family, escaped Kentucky slaves, were tracked to the abolitionist town of Marshall by Francis Troutman and others. Both black and white residents detained the bounty hunters and threatened them with tar and feathers. While Troutman was being charged with assault and fined $100, the Crosswhites fled to Canada. Back in Kentucky, the slaveowner stirred up intense excitement about 'abolitionist mobs' in Michigan."

I also learned that on this day in 1969:

"In Detroit, African-American auto workers, known as the Eldon Avenue Axle Plant Revolutionary Union Movement, led a wildcat strike against racist practices and poor working conditions at the Chrysler plant.

"Since the 1967 Detroit riots, black workers had organized groups in several Detroit auto plants critical of both the auto companies and the United Auto Workers union leadership. These groups combined Black-Power nationalism and workplace militancy, and temporarily shut down more than a dozen inner-city plants. The most well-known of these groups was the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement, or DRUM. They criticized both the seniority system and grievance procedures as racist. Veterans of this movement went on to lead many of the same local unions."

See what I mean?

Am I Not Human?

Last month, I agreed to be a part of a movement to focus on human rights violations on the 27th of each month. Since today is the 27th and also, as it happens, the day most people in the United States call "Thanksgiving Day," I have decided to feature a listing from the Peace Buttons "This Week in Peace and Social Justice" newsletter. On November 29th, 1864:

"A U.S. Army cavalry regiment under Col. J. M. Chivington (a Methodist missionary and candidate for Congress), acting on orders from Colorado's Governor, John Evans, and ignoring a white surrender flag flying just below a U.S. flag, attacked sleeping Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians, killing nearly 500, in what became known as the Sand Creek Massacre. Captain Silas Soule, however, not only refused to follow Chivington's lead at Sand Creek, but ordered his troops not to participate in the attack.

"The Indians, led by Black Kettle, had been ordered away from Fort Lyon four days before, with the promise that they would be safe. Virtually all of the victims, mostly women and children, were tortured and scalped; many women, including the pregnant, were mutilated. Nine of 900 cavalrymen were killed. A local newspaper called this 'a brilliant feat of arms,' and stated the soldiers had 'covered themselves with glory.'

"At first, Chivington was widely praised for his 'victory' at the 'Battle' of Sand Creek, and he and his troops were honored with a parade in Denver. However, rumors of drunken soldiers butchering unarmed women and children began to circulate and Congress ordered a formal investigation of the massacre. Chivington was eventually threatened with court martial by the U.S. Army, but as he had already left his military post, no criminal charges were ever filed against him."

You can read the Congressional testimony of an eye-witness here.

This should give us all something to think about and talk about as we pass the stuffing...