The Harlem Hellfighters

 

From the Washington Post,a book review of "‘The Harlem Hellfighters,’ written by Max Brooks and illustrated by Caanan White," written by Michael Cavna, on 1 April 2014  -- There is a tale told, perhaps most often by Mel Brooks himself, that the comedy legend entertained the troops during World War II. Oh, not our troops. The Nazis. The man who later wrote that funny would-be flop “Springtime for Hitler” serenaded distant German troops between defusing land mines in Europe. The Nazis may have trumpeted propaganda through loudspeakers, but Brooks countered by blaring, “Toot, Toot, Tootsie! Goodbye.” Even in the hell of war, young Melvin (nee Kaminsky) Brooks — that farce of nature — knew how to mine the moment for entertainment.

Fortunately for us, the great writer-performer’s gift for spinning wartime narrative is genetic. Son Max Brooks is proving a master of the form. Brooks the Younger broke into comics with his best-selling “Zombie Survival Guide,” helping to usher in the current wave of fascination with the flesh-eating undead. And he rode the crest of that trend when his“World War Z” became a Brad Pitt blockbuster. Now Brooks’s new graphic novel, “The Harlem Hellfighters,” shines a literary klieg light on a woefully overlooked chapter of World War I.

The 369th Infantry Regiment was an all-minority (African American and African Puerto Rican) unit that proved crucial in the trench warfare of 1918. The 369th — dubbed the Harlem Hellfighters by its foes — was in combat longer than any other U.S. unit. Yet while backing President Wilson’s battle cry of making the world “safe for democracy,” the 369th fought racism every step of the way — not only in the European theater, but also while training in the American South.

Brooks tells their riveting tale by creating some fictional members of the unit and depicting actual heroes, including Lt. James Reese Europe, the bandleader who helped introduce Europe to jazz. The winning effect is that no matter how far specific characters venture into narrative invention, the novel marches in time with the history books.

What gives “Hellfighters” its most poignant traction is not how foreign mortar fire wounds the flesh, but rather how the home-front racism does. Soldiers are beaten by countrymen in South Carolina, against the larger backdrop of lynchings. And once overseas, the 369th is restricted from fighting alongside white American soldiers. The great irony is that while Gen. John J. Pershing seeks to deny the 369th any battlefield glory, a Hellfighter becomes the first American awarded France’s Croix de Guerre.

”The Harlem Hellfighters” by Max Brooks and Caanan White. (Broadway/Broadway)

Bolstering Brooks’s storytelling muscle is the high-contrast black-and-white art of gifted Caanan White, whose graphic grit evokes Joe Kubert and “Sgt. Rock.” The illustrator zooms in on the brawn, sweat and tears of trench warfare. His sinewy tension and egalitarian bleeding remind that all flesh, no matter the tint, is all too mortal. White’s grid work is forever shifting, as his overlapping panels shuffle like snapshots fallen from a scrapbook, and his full “splash” pages are so visually engaging that the greedy reader wishes he’d provided yet more of them.

“The Harlem Hellfighters” is a powerful comic that may do more than any previous work to illuminate the heroism of the 369th. And now that Sony and Will Smith have optioned the film rights, perhaps an entire nation will come to salute its sacrifice. [source: The Washington Post, Cavna is the writer/artist behind The Washington Post blog “Comic Riffs.”]

The Harlem Hellfighters

Namibia Genocide and the German Second Reich

As reported by the Washington Monthly Magazine's September/October 2011 Issue, in an article entitled, "Heart of Dunkelheit: Germany’s other genocide," by Paul Hockenos --  By the time the German emperor Wilhelm II ascended the throne in the summer of 1888, it was clear that Germany had arrived late to the Great Game of European Imperialism. England, France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, and Belgium had long laid claim to hefty chunks of Asia, South America, the Mideast, and parts of Africa, but Germany’s holdings were mostly limited to small commercial colonies in Africa and Asia founded by private German traders. Kaiser Wilhelm, alternatively insecure and belligerent, pushed to expand these holdings and acquire others, desperate to be on par with his colonial peers. Moreover, Germany aspired to export the Fatherland beyond cramped central Europe. Every year large numbers of its booming population were emigrating to the Americas, where they became lost to Germany forever. Some lightly colonized lands in southwest Africa, in particular, were seen as insular locations perfect for nurturing a kind of New Germany, one that preserved the volkisch ethos that was rapidly disappearing in a modernizing, industrial Europe. Germany could then also rely upon these colonies for raw materials, export markets, and military manpower in times of war.

For this vision to succeed, vast tracts of free land were required to lure Germanic emigrants to the rough African countryside and the trials of pioneer life. The primary obstacle was that ancestral people like the Herero and Nama tribes already lived on the choicest land, many of them on a great, arable plateau with plentiful fresh water and surrounded by the boundless Namib and Kalahari deserts.

 

Germany's Genocide of the Herero: Kaiser Wilhelm II, His General, His Settlers, His Soldiers, By Jeremy Sarkin

Too little has been written about this period in German history; there is, however, a growing literature—in German and English—on Germany’s mass murder of the Herero and Nama peoples in southwestern Africa between 1904 and 1907. South African legal scholar Jeremy Sarkin presents a compelling case against Germany and in favor of reparations for today’s Herero (for whom he acts as legal counsel) in his book Germany’s Genocide of the Herero. Another new contribution is The Kaiser’s Holocaust, by Anglo-Nigerian author David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen, a Danish-born historian living in Africa. Both these titles make much the same argument, in line with current scholarship, namely, that the German empire’s onslaught against these tribes-people clearly constitutes genocide, and that many of its elements—like supremacist racial theories, the quest for Lebensraum, Social Darwinism, and even the use of concentration camps—reemerged later in the Nazi Reich.

German authorities in Africa during the 1880s displayed no particular knack for colonial governance. Indeed, the handful of German settlers there—as well as powerful nationalistic lobbies back home—kicked up a storm, demanding better farming land and a more decisive subjugation of the natives. Initially, German administrations employed the conventional tools of colonial rule to divest the tribes of their property: dirty tricks, fraud, extortion, and brute force. Yet the Herero in particular, a tribe of cattle herders, were defiant and armed, quickly serving up the Germans a full-scale revolt that was no match for the protectorate’s modest Schutztruppe.

The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism, by David Olusoga and Casper W. Erichsen

To quell the Herero uprising, the Kaiser turned to General Lothar von Trotha, a husky, bald-pated Saxon with a thick handlebar mustache and black leather riding boots. A hardened military man harboring a ferocious hatred of black Africans, von Trotha had crushed previous uprisings in Germany’s eastern African colonies and elsewhere. In May 1904, he was named commander in chief of the Kaiser’s army in German South West Africa—what is now Namibia—with 6,000 well-trained reinforcements as well as the latest in European armaments, including mounted rapid-fire machine guns, light portable artillery, and repeating rifles.

Von Trotha didn’t mince words about his objectives. “All the tribes of Africa share the same mentality, in that they only retreat when confronted by violence,” he wrote to the German military high command. “My policy was and is, to apply such violence with the utmost degree of terrorism and brutality. I will exterminate the rebellious tribes with rivers of blood.”

“With an enormous army standing idle under his colors,” write Olusoga and Erichsen, “the rising of the Herero offered Wilhelm II and Germany the rare opportunity to showcase her military might and underline her status as a colonial power.” In contrast to the civilian governor he was replacing, von Trotha understood that his mission, sanctioned by the Kaiser, was not simply to put down the uprising, but to annihilate the rebellious Herero, whom he described in his diary as “Unmenschen”—nonhumans. The Herero would be punished, and a message would be sent to Germany’s possessions everywhere about the consequences of dissent and the inevitability of the white man’s subjugation of inferior races.

Von Trotha planned from the beginning to rid the entire territory of the Herero once and for all. Without giving negotiations a thought, he had his forces encircle the Waterberg—the expansive plateau named “Water Mountain” by the Dutch—where an estimated 50,000 Herero, about two-thirds of the tribe’s total number, either lived permanently or had fled to during the hostilities. The Herero, expecting talks or even contemplating leaving the territory for good, had had no warning when artillery shells and grenades began raining down on their encampments on August 11. The massacre, now known as the Battle of Waterberg, continued all day, until the Herero warriors finally broke through the German lines bordering the Kalahari Desert—which was exactly what von Trotha had intended.

The Herero fighters, women, children, and their cattle rushed headlong into the vast desert sands (in present-day Botswana) with the Germans in pursuit. Von Trotha had given the order that no prisoners be taken. For weeks German soldiers hunted down the refugees, executing them on sight. One German guide present at the Waterberg siege described what he witnessed:

 

 African prisoners of war were transported to Swakopmund concentration camp or Windhock concentration camp by train or on foot: colonial book 1907

After the battle all men, women, and children who fell into German hands, wounded or otherwise, were mercilessly put to death. Then the Germans set off in pursuit of the rest, and all those found by the wayside and in the sandveld were shot down and bayoneted to death. The mass of the Herero men were unarmed and thus unable to offer resistance.

By the time the Germans tracked down the last survivors, the brutal sun and lack of nourishment had already taken their toll, as one German private described: “The greater part of the Herero nation and their cattle lay dead in the bush, lining the path of their morbid march. Everyone among us realized what had happened here.”

But von Trotha wasn’t finished. He divided up his units, putting half along the desert’s perimeter to shoot any Herero trying to make it back to their homeland and water sources, while the other half conducted mopping-up operations elsewhere in the territory. The general’s Vernichtungsbefehl (“extermination order”) of August 2, 1904—which today survives in the Botswana National Archives in Gaberone—is the most incriminating single piece of evidence illustrating the Germans’ intention to completely eradicate the local population. The edict, signed by the “Great General of the Mighty Kaiser,” reads,

The Herero people will have to leave the country. Otherwise I shall force them to do so by means of guns. Within the German boundaries, every Herero, whether found armed or unarmed, with or without cattle, will be shot. I shall not accept any more women or children. I shall drive them back to their people otherwise I shall order them to be shot.

This proclamation, argue Olusoga and Erichsen,was the explicit and official confirmation of the policies that most of the German units had followed since the battle of Waterberg. The aim of the conflict was to eradicate the Herero as an ethnic group from German South West Africa, either by extermination or by their wholesale expulsion from the colony.

The authors call the document “an explicit, written declaration of intent to commit genocide.” The Germans pinned the proclamation on the backs of Herero women and children refugees, ordering them to bring in any of their people still living in the desert. Most experts gauge that between 60,000 and 90,000 Herero were killed—roughly 75 to 85 percent of their total population. The German troops returned from the long killing raids physically exhausted and emotionally shattered.

Some of the protectorate’s civilian administrators argued that the colony needed local tribespeople as a steady supply of free labor power. So in German South West Africa in early 1905 the first concentration camps of the twentieth century opened. A German missionary there wrote that the Herero prisoners, mostly women and children,were placed behind a double row of barbed wire and housed in pathetic structures constructed out of simple sacking and planks.… From early morning to late at night, on weekends as well as holidays, they had to work under the clubs of the overseers until they broke down.

The missionary was appalled at the cruelty and the “brutish sense of supremacy that is found among the troops and civilians here.” The prisoners who survived the grueling conditions of the camps— mortality rates were as high as 70 percent—were hired out to private companies and local farmers as slave laborers.

The ethnic cleansing of the Herero wasn’t the end of the Germans’ killing mission. The fate of the Herero caused the Nama people, initially on better terms with the colonialists, to rise up. Unlike the unsuspecting Herero, the Nama sensed what was in store for them and waged a fierce guerilla war against von Trotha’s forces; in the end, the losses inflicted on the Germans prompted von Trotha’s recall to Berlin. Nevertheless, 10,000 Nama would lose their lives before the killing and internments finally stopped in 1907. Wilhelm II lavished praise on von Trotha for his loyal service to the Fatherland, bestowing on him the highest military accolade of the day.

In the aftermath of the 1904-07 campaign, the colony exploded in size, although it never lived up to expectations as a New Germany or a lucrative economic asset. “With the Herero and the Nama decimated and the survivors reduced to virtual slaves,” write Olusoga and Erichsen, “German South West Africa truly belongs to the Germans.” By 1908 the colony had seized forty-six million hectares of land from the region’s tribes. Five years later, there were 1,331 German farms, compared to just 480 before the Herero and Nama wars. The size of the white population grew from 300 settlers in 1891 to 5,000 in 1904 and 15,000 in 1913. Even if the settlers were never able to shrug off the superficiality and materialism of modernity the way nationalist ideologues had foreseen, the community was an ethnically pure society that lived according to white supremacist convictions.

While German ownership of South West Africa, as with its other colonies, came to an abrupt end with World War I, the genocide’s beneficiaries mostly remained in the territory. South Africa took control of the area, and the region’s inhabitants suffered under the apartheid system for another seven decades. Namibia only gained its independence in 1990.

In the growing scholarship on genocide, which has expanded the category beyond the Holocaust, the destruction of the Herero and the Nama is now commonly regarded as the first genocide of the twentieth century. Whether or not the Kaiser explicitly envisioned— and, as Sarkin claims “orchestrated”— the tribes’ complete eradication, he and other top officials in Germany certainly were well aware of the atrocities of 1904-07, and thus share the responsibility. Von Trotha was by no means a rogue figure operating on his own, as some observers have tried to argue.

Nevertheless, it is a mistake to equate the African genocide with the Holocaust as such, which the unfortunate title of Olusoga and Erichsen’s book does. There are enough significant differences between the means and volume of the Nazis’ mechanized slaughter of six million Jews and the 1904-07 massacres to distinguish them from each other. But since Olusoga and Erichsen don’t even attempt to make this argument, one might assume the title wasn’t their idea, but rather that of the Faber and Faber marketing department.

Professional scholars are, however, attaching greater legitimacy to the links between the German-run colonizing of Africa and the ideology of the Nazi dictatorship. The imperial Germans’ rationale for Lebensraum, for example, was explicitly articulated at the turn of the century and drove the German colonial enterprise. The Nazis didn’t invent this discourse, they picked up on it—and applied it closer to home, in eastern Europe.

In the same spirit, Olusoga, Erichsen, and Sarkin all illustrate how dominant racist thinking had become in Wilhelmine Germany. Von Trotha understood his mission as a “race war,” no less than did Adolf Hitler. Crass Social Darwinist ideas of biological supremacy and survival-of-the-fittest theories had won out over the ostensibly humanitarian, nineteenth-century logic of colonialism as a mission to civilize backward Africans. The Germans under von Trotha went on to pioneer a society in South West Africa based on racial laws. The concentration camps built to house the Herero served as field laboratories for racial science. The German scientists, who believed utterly in the need to have racial purity, used the Herero prisoners as human guinea pigs, conducting gruesome medical experiments on the tribespeople who had been either worked to death or killed by disease— another domain that became later associated with the Nazis.

Today, the descendants of the Herero survivors in Namibia live an unhappy existence of poverty and social exclusion, the legacy of the colonial tragedy. Much of the land confiscated at the time is still in the hands of German owners. In 2004, on the 100th anniversary of the Waterberg massacre, the German government publicly apologized for the atrocities committed in Germany’s name. But it still refuses to pay the Herero reparations. This cause is one Jeremy Sarkin has made his own, and hopefully these fine books will aid the Herero’s case in the world’s courts of justice. (source: The Washington Monthly)

Namibia - Genocide and the Second Reich


Namibia - Genocide and the Second Reich [Real Genocides] from RNA INTERNATIONAL on Vimeo.

Germany's Second Reich Skeletons In The Colonial Closet

Sick, dead, hanged man: The origin of the skull in the Freiburg University cellars is grim. But justifies this silence and inaction? Photo: Thomas Kunz

Skeletons in the closet

As reported by The Badische-Zeitung, written by Heiko Wegmann, on 14 November 2009  --  The Freiburg University held a macabre heritage: skulls from colonial times. With the return she is in no hurry.

At first glance, the long shelves look harmless, standing in a basement of the University of Freiburg, equipped with clean white boxes. However, in layered them a macabre legacy: 1600 human skulls. Enter the name Alexander Ecker Collection. Many visitors do not find their way in this cool, bright yellow tiled room in the college building II. Before the new boxes were purchased, you probably had to hold your breath, because most of the skull were just around openly. Some hang list, some are labeled by hand. Among them are also twelve skulls from the former colony of German Southwest Africa, now Namibia, which were obtained during the German colonial period (1884-1919). Last year they were - in addition to 47 skulls from South Africa, the store in the Medical Historical Museum of the Charité in Berlin - a topic ARD report, the thoughtfulness, amazement and consternation caused in Germany and Namibia.

"After the article was sent," says the Namibian ambassador to Germany, "assured the Executive Board of the Charité, to have initiated its own investigation to determine the origin of the skull in its collection." His authority had achieved protests and solidarity of spectators and some German non-governmental organizations. "This," said the diplomat, "indignation was expressed particularly about the spread of this well known in Germany for some people matter."

 

In Namibia itself triggered the revelations "shock and disbelief" from themselves Gertze recalls. In October 2008, the Herero and Nama traditional leaders turned to their government. You should ask the German government to return the skull and the transfer of all associated costs. The Namibian government made the claim as its own, set up a committee and made contact with the German government. And since then? According to the ambassador, the Foreign Office while supporting the return, but would have taken different from the Charité, neither the University of Freiburg, other institutions concerned with the Embassy contact. "How does the process of making the remaining human remains here in the archives nationwide locate will go depends of course also very critical of the willingness of the other German institutions for cooperation from."

Although the University of Freiburg, 2004, on the initiative of its archive manager Dieter Speck pulled himself together after decades of silence and repression to a new attitude and decided that it was in principle in ill-gotten collection pieces ready to redemptions - on request and on an individual basis. On returns, it did not come so far, however. In the case of Namibia became involved about the Freiburg Peace Forum and the colonial history freiburg-postkolonial.de initiative and asked the university to ensure a dignified repatriation to Namibia. But so far, the University insists rather formalistic it, it needed an official request from the Namibian embassy, instead of making itself known university itself.

Spokeswoman Eva Opitz announced now at least on questions of BZ to the elucidation of the origin and identification of the skulls from Namibia as well as the larger number of Australian skulls in the Uni-shelves should be operated with a Volontariats- or PhD position. Australia had already in the 1990s - initially unsuccessful - efforts to the identification of human remains in Freiburg collections. Sweden, Great Britain and other countries have meanwhile returned to Australia skull in recent years, and we ask that Australia remains from Germany.

In Namibia now came again moving in the matter. Two representatives of affected groups gave the government a petition. Chief Dawid Frederick for the Nama and the Paramount Chief of the Herero, Kuaima Riruako, calling it again to return the skull. The Federal Republic was to give accurate information about their origin, age and sex, and explain what was done with them. Riruako said that about 60 skulls should not be as announced by the government buried in the national "Heroes Acre", but exhibited in a historic Genocide Museum. The MPs Ida Hoffmann announced that a delegation of the two groups will before traveling to Germany to perform traditional rituals honoring the dead. The German Embassy in Namibia stated that they support the petition, have the Charité and the University of Freiburg notified by letter and asked them to contact the Namibian Embassy in Berlin. A Freiburger response is still there.

Given the "skeletons in the closet of the University", the criticism focused on two points: the "racial-scientific" goals of the skull collector and former methods of obtaining the desired "human material". In various anthropological and anatomical collections store in Germany alone, tens of thousands of skulls and other human remains of all kinds of people. Although much of it comes from Germany itself, but was also collected more systematically around the world. The researchers wanted to create the 'Archives of the races ", especially the" endangered "breeds build, in order to draw conclusions on the history of mankind. In the anthropometry constantly surveying new methods were developed to classify "races" and to a hierarchy. And some researchers thought they could infer from the skull shape on mental properties.

That the "white race" is the highest stage of development, one of the basic assumptions of most previous anthropologists. Made outstanding contribution to the radicalization of scientific racism and its subsequent importance to the Nazis has Freiburg anthropo-loge and eugenicist Eugen Fischer (1874-1967). He campaigned as against "race-mixing go" because they had the genetic descent of the German people to the episode.

Against this background is not surprising that the buyer of the research subjects in the colonies vorgingen little squeamish. Adventurers, scientists, merchants and soldiers tipped over decades the University archives, and many a private collection. The expedition of the Duke Adolf Friedrich of Mecklenburg, after Eastern and Central Africa surveyed in 1907/08 fewer than 4,500 people - partly against the resistance - and took over 1,000 human skulls to Berlin. The skull store today, probably in New York Natural History Museum.

The Freiburg Alexander Ecker Skull collection dates back to the year 1810, when an African in Freiburg died of tuberculosis. His skull made ​​with so-called Chinese-skulls the basis of 1850 by its namesake, the Freiburg anatomist and anthropologist Alexander Ecker (1816-1887), established collection. Eugen Fischer was personally responsible for the collection from 1900 to 1927. He had them sent numerous skull and soft tissues of the German colonies, including three conserved heads of just executed from the German South Seas. But he also laid hands on himself in what was then German South West Africa. In 1908 he was near Swakopmund graves of Topnaar Nama open and stole their corpses.

But even more cruel methods as grave desecrations were used. During the genocidal colonial war of the Germans against the Herero and Nama from 1904 to 1907 boxes were of the "protection force" sent with Herero skulls at the Pathological Institute in Berlin, where they were to be used for scientific measurements. "The skull, which are exempt from Herero women by broken glass from the meat and ready for dispatch comes from suspended or fallen Hereros," wrote an officer of the German troops 1907th

Anatomical studies of race "Hottentottenköpfen" from prison camps took also a lecturer in Berlin, Paul Barthel. The whereabouts of these war victims skull is not released. If they are available, they could have spread to different places due to the exchange practice between collections. Whether skull of the Charité or the plug-collection of Genocide victims originate, is unknown. Most collections suffer from the fact that precise origin provisions - after two world wars with lost documents and various surroundings - are only possible with expensive research. In Freiburg, the student Daniel Möller has important preliminary work done this last year with the collection and systematic thesis.

Right here see critics as the colonial historian Joachim Zeller an obligation on the German side. The collections would have to make itself publicly, what they have and not wait for requests. The affected former colonial countries were also hardly in the position to make these searches yourself. Zeller already tried in the early 1990s for reconnaissance. At that time he was still fobbed off by the Berlin archives, today the Charité is ready to returns. Last year, she has an agreement with Australia closed, return identified Aboriginal skull for a dignified burial. A model for Freiburg.

The official dealing with the grim scientific heritage acts now widely coyly. However, evidence was also found that there are still scientists in Germany who want to continue with the skull research. So it says on the website of the Museum of Ethnology in Dresden, which has a huge collection of skulls: "The later collected in ethnographically oriented museum extensive skull series, skeletons, plaster casts and hair samples of non-European populations today are scientifically invaluable material." [source: http://www.badische-zeitung.de/freiburg/leichen-im-keller--22379653.html]

King Leopold II: Hidden Holocaust in the Congo

As reported by the UK Guardian, "The hidden holocaust: Was Belgium's King Leopold II a mass murderer on a par with Hitler or a greedy despot who turned a blind eye to a few excesses? A new book has ignited a furious row in a country coming to grips with its colonial legacy," Stephen Bates reports on 12 May 1999 -- As the sun sank slowly over Brussels, its fading rays glinted off the glass domes and towers of the magnificent Victorian greenhouses in the grounds of the royal palace at Laeken. Built to celebrate King Leopold II's acquisition of the Congo a century ago, the greenhouses stretch for more than half a mile and are among the most visible and grandiose remaining symbols of a once enormous African empire, 60 times the size of Belgium. The colony was the largest private estate ever acquired by a single man - and one he never saw.

It is said that when he showed his nephew the greenhouses, the youth gasped that they were like a little Versailles. 'Little?' snorted the king.

Leopold always did think big. But the row over the king's notorious stewardship of his African territories still has the ability to evoke raw emotions in a country trying to come to terms with a brutal colonial past.

The question is: was the spade-bearded old reprobate a mass-murderer, the first genocidalist of modern times, responsible for the death of more Africans than the Nazis killed Jews? Was his equatorial empire, the setting for Conrad's Heart of Darkness and the terrible Kurtz with the human heads dangling round his garden, the scene of a largely forgotten holocaust? The old wounds have been re-opened by the publication of a book called King Leopold's Ghost, by the American author Adam Hochschild, which has brought howls of rage from Belgium's ageing colonials and some professional historians even as it has climbed the country's best-seller lists.

 

Alice Seeley Harris, Manacled members of a chain gang at Bauliri. A common punishment for not paying taxes, Congo Free State, c. 1904. Courtesy Anti-Slavery International / Autograph ABP

The debate over Belgium's colonial legacy could not be more timely. In the realm beyond the palace walls where Leopold's great grandson Albert II is now king, the openly racist extreme rightwing Vlaams Blok, which blames much of the country's ills on coloured immigrants from Africa, is bidding to become one of the biggest parties in next month's elections.

And the planes which soar over the greenhouses as they depart Brussels sometimes carry human cargo - black asylum seekers being unceremoniously deported, occasionally naked and still bleeding, back to Africa. Last September, the Belgian immigration service succeeded in suffocating one of them, a Nigerian woman called Semira Adamu, 20, on board the plane that was to take her home, by shoving her head under a pillow. The police videoed themselves chatting and laughing while they pushed her head down. It took them 20 minutes to kill her.

The history of Leopold's rule over the Congo has long been known. It was first exposed by American and British writers and campaigners at the turn of the century - publicity which eventually forced the king to hand the country which had been his private fiefdom over to Belgium.

But Hochschild's book has hit a raw nerve for a new generation with its vividly drawn picture of a voracious king anxious to maximise his earnings from the proceeds of rubber and ivory.

It is clear that many of Leopold's officials in the depots up the Congo river terrorised the local inhabitants, forcing them to work under the threat of having their hands and feet - or those of their children - cut off. Women were raped, men were executed and villages were burned in pursuit of profit for the king.

But what has stuck in the gut of Belgian historians is Hochschild's claim that 10 million people may have died in a forgotten holocaust. In outrage, the now ageing Belgian officials who worked in the Congo in later years have taken to the internet with a 10-page message claiming that maybe only half a dozen people had their hands chopped off, and that even that was done by native troops.

They argue that American and British writers have highlighted the Congo to distract attention from the contemporary massacre of the North American Indians and the Boer War.

Under the headline 'a scandalous book', members of the Royal Belgian Union for Overseas Territories claim: 'There is nothing that could compare with the horrors of Hitler and Stalin, or the deliberate massacres of the Indian, Tasmanian and Aboriginal populations. A black legend has been created by polemicists and British and American journalists feeding off the imaginations of novelists and the re-writers of history.' Professor Jean Stengers, a leading historian of the period, says: 'Terrible things happened, but Hochschild is exaggerating. It is absurd to say so many millions died. I don't attach so much significance to his book. In two or three years' time, it will be forgotten.' Leopold's British biographer, Barbara Emerson, agrees: 'I think it is a very shoddy piece of work. Leopold did not start genocide. He was greedy for money and chose not to interest himself when things got out of control. Part of Belgian society is still very defensive. People with Congo connections say we were not so awful as that, we reformed the Congo and had a decent administration there.' Stengers acknowledges that the population of the Congo shrank dramatically in the 30 years after Leopold took over, though exact figures are hard to establish since no one knows how many inhabited the vast jungles in the 1880s.

It is true too that some of those reporting scandals had their own knives to grind. Some were Protestant missionaries who were rivals to Belgian Catholics in the region.

Yet Leopold certainly emerges as an unattractive figure, described as a young man by his cousin Queen Victoria as an 'unfit, idle and unpromising an heir apparent as ever was known' and by Disraeli as having 'such a nose as a young prince has in a fairy tale, who has been banned by a malignant fairy.' As king, he did not bother to deny charges in a London court that he had sex with child prostitutes. When the bishop of Ostend told him that people were saying he had a mistress, he is reputed to have replied benignly: 'People tell me the same about you, your Grace. But of course I choose not to believe them.' His wiliness in convincing the world that he had only humanitarian motives in annexing the Congo, in persuading the Belgian government essentially to pay for his purchase and in buying up journalists, including the great explorer Henry Morton Stanley, to promote his cause show both cunning and skill.

 

Henry Morton Stanley

Emerson claims Leopold was appalled to hear about the atrocities in his domain, but dug his heels in when he was attacked in the foreign press. He did indeed apparently write to his secretary of state: 'These horrors must end or I will retire from the Congo. I will not be splattered with blood and mud: it is essential that any abuses cease.' But the man who (as Queen Victoria said) had the habit of saying 'disagreeable things to people' was also reputed to have snorted: 'Cut off hands - that's idiotic. I'd cut off all the rest of them, but not hands. That's the one thing I need in the Congo.' Although few now defend him, strange things happen even today when the Congo record is challenged. Currently circulating on the internet is an anguished claim by a student in Brussels called Joseph Mbeka alleging he his thesis marked a failure when he cited Hochschild's book: 'My director turned his back on me.' Daniel Vangroenweghe, a Belgian anthropologist who also published a critical book about the period 15 years ago, says: 'Senior people tried to get me sacked at the time. Questions were asked in parliament and my work was subjected to an official inspection.' At a large chateau outside Brussels in Tervuren is the Musee Royal de l'Afrique, which Leopold was eventually shamed into setting up to prove his philanthropic credentials. It contains the largest African ethnographic collection in the world, rooms full of stuffed animals and artefacts including shields, spears, deities, drums and masks, a 60ft-long war canoe, even Stanley's leather suitcase.

There is one small watercolour of a native being flogged, but a visitor would be hard-pressed to spot any other reference to the dark side of Leopold's regime. Dust hangs over the place. A curator has said changes are under consideration 'but absolutely not because of the recent disreputable book by an American'.

The real legacy of Leopold and of the Belgians who ran the country until they were bloodily booted out in 1960 has been the chaos in the region ever since and a rapacity among rulers such as Mobutu Sese Seko which outstripped even the king's. Leopold made £3m in 10 years between 1896 and 1906, Mobutu filched at least £3bn. When the Belgians left there were only three Africans in managerial positions in the Congo's administration and fewer than 30 graduates in the entire country.

Vangroenweghe says: 'Talk of whether Leopold killed 10 million people or five million is beside the point, it was still too many.' I asked Belgium's prime minister, Jean-Luc Dehaene, about the Congo legacy this week. 'The colonial past is completely past,' he said. 'There is really no strong emotional link any more. It does not move the people. It's part of the past. It's history.' (source: The UK Guardian)

Britain's Debt To Slavery

From the UK Guardian, "Britain's massive debt to slavery: Today the records that detail just how much the trade in humans benefited the UK will be made public,"by Catherine Hall, on 27 February 2013 -- Forgetting the violence, pain and shame that is an inevitable part of any country's historical record is a critical aspect of a nation's history. This disavowal of the past is an active process: forgetting Mau Mau, for example, and the brutality of the British response to it was done deliberately by occluding the archival record; it was only revealed by the patient work of determined survivors and dedicated historians.

Forgetting Britain's role in the slave trade began as soon as the trade was abolished in 1807. The abolitionist Thomas Clarkson's celebrated history of the campaign to end slavery focused on the work of white humanitarian men and their role in building a successful movement. He neglected not only the activism of black and female abolitionists but also the horrors of the trade itself, which he knew intimately.

A similar process took place in relation to emancipation in 1833. As soon as chattel slavery was abolished in the British West Indies, Mauritius and the Cape, the British began to congratulate themselves on their generosity. Abolition was redefined as a demonstration of Britain's commitment to liberty and freedom, and its claim to be the most progressive and civilized nation in the world.

In the language of the day, abolition was to wash away the sins of the nation. Yet the freedom that was granted by the imperial parliament to enslaved men and women was a relative one. They were to be "apprenticed" for four to six years – to work unpaid on the plantations for their former masters – while they "learned to labour". It took five more years of resistance in the Caribbean and campaigning "at home" to achieve "full freedom" in 1838.

What is more, £20m (equivalent to 40% of state expenditure in 1834) was paid in compensation by the British government to the slave owners to secure their agreement to the loss of "their" property – despite the fact that the moral basis of the campaign against slavery was that it was wrong to hold property in people. The "value" of the enslaved was judged according to the levels of their skill and the productivity of the colonies where they lived. An enslaved man in British Guiana was thus worth more than one in Jamaica, where productivity had declined; and men were worth more than women. This was yet another moment in the commodification of human beings – not now sold in the slave market but their price determined by colonial officials and settled in government offices.

Detailed records were kept of all those who claimed for compensation and those archives, never systematically studied before, throw new light on how the slavery business contributed in significant ways to Britain becoming the first industrial nation. Today, the encyclopedia that we have created using these archives goes online with free public access. It records the 46,000 individual claims which were made for compensation together with the information we have collected on the 3,000 or so Britons who lived in Britain but had property in people. These men and women (and there were a considerable number of women who lived off slave-ownership) were anxious that their identities as slave owners be forgotten. And until now they had been very successful.

Some of the direct descendants of slave owners are well-known: George Orwell, Graham Greene and Quintin Hogg – not to speak of the banks and legal firms built on slavery's profits. In focusing on slave owners, our purpose is not to name and shame. We seek to undo the forgetting: to re-remember, as Toni Morrison put it; to recognize the ways in which the fruits of slavery are part of our collective history – embedded in our country and town houses, the philanthropic institutions, the art collections, the merchant banks and legal firms, the railways, and the ways we continue to think about race. Slave owners were actively involved in reconfiguring race after slavery, popularizing new legitimations for inequality that remain part of the legacy of Britain's colonial past. Captain Marryat, the son of a leading slave owner, and one of the most popular writers of naval fiction and children's stories, systematically racialised "others", creating hierarchies in which white Anglo Saxons were always at the top.

Across the Caribbean a movement is building for forms of restitution for the gross inequalities and underdevelopment that have persisted since the days of slavery. Their focus is on the state and governmental responsibility. In demonstrating Britain's debt to slavery, one of the ways in which modern Britain has benefited from and been disfigured by its colonial past, we hope we are contributing to a richer, more honest understanding of the connected histories of empire than is to be found in the parochialism and obsfuscations of Michael Gove's "island story" (source: The UK Guardian)

Legacies of European Colonial Slavery from UCL European Institute on Vimeo.

Race Riots Circa 1919

 

Washington, DC 1919

As reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, in the Washington Post, "'Red Summer,' by Cameron McWhirter, is about racial violence in the year 1919," on 14 July 2011 -- Human memory being both short and unreliable, most Americans today who know anything about the history of race riots in this country probably assume that “the greatest period of interracial strife the nation has ever witnessed” took place in the 1960s and ’70s: riots set off by the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., by police violence against blacks in Los Angeles and elsewhere, by agents and opponents of the Black Power movement. Those were indeed bad times. But the comment above was made by the prominent historian John Hope Franklin about the summer of 1919, known, according to Cameron McWhirter, as “the Red Summer because it was so bloody.” He writes:

“The violence enveloped towns, counties, and large cities from Texas to Nebraska, Connecticut to California. Though no complete and accurate records on the months of violence were compiled, analysis of newspaper accounts, government documents, court records, and NAACP files, show at least 25 major riots erupted and at least 52 black people were lynched. Many victims were burned to death. Riots were often over in hours, but some immobilized cities like Chicago, Washington, Knoxville, and Elaine, Arkansas, for days. Millions of Americans had their lives disrupted. Hundreds of people — most of them black — were killed and thousands more were injured. Tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes or places of work. Businesses lost millions of dollars to destruction and looting. In almost every case, white mobs — whether sailors on leave, immigrant slaughterhouse workers, or southern farmers — initiated the violence.”

‘Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America’ by Cameron McWhirter. Henry Holt.

McWhirter, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who has also worked at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Detroit News, has done a capable job of rescuing the story of the summer of 1919 from oblivion. His prose doesn’t exactly sing, but he writes competent journalese, and he clearly is a dogged researcher. He has added to our understanding not merely of the long and appalling history of interracial violence in the United States but of one of our more difficult times: the period, measured more in months than in years, between the end of World War I and the beginning of the brief euphoria known as the Jazz Age.

It was an unhappy and confusing time. What Woodrow Wilson and many others had foolishly and naively called “the war to end war” had left the world in turmoil and this country bitterly divided along many lines: between isolationists and internationalists, between wets and drys, between whites and blacks, between patriots and anarchists, between liberals and communists. As was to be the case a quarter-century later, at the end of World War II, black Americans who had fought for their country came home to find that the rights for which they had risked their lives on the battlefields of Europe were still denied them in their native land, not merely in the South but in the North.

 

Tulsa, OK 1921

Black veterans’ anger did not set off the violence that tore the country apart between April and November of 1919, but it did contribute to a slowly growing sense of militancy among blacks, especially in cities. There had been a number of organizations working on behalf of black rights, but mostly they were toothless, and too often they were mere cat’s paws for paternalistic whites. That certainly was true of the NAACP until three exceptionally determined and able African Americans — W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson and Walter White — asserted themselves and began to steer the organization in a more active, assertive direction. As McWhirter points out, even as African Americans were suffering devastating discrimination and violence, “an unprecedented political awakening” was taking place:

“In 1919, blacks began to broadly challenge the long-held premise that they must exist in this country as inferiors. Led by the NAACP and other groups, they began to assert themselves as equals — many for the first time in their lives. They started fighting in legislatures, courtrooms, and the streets to become full partners in the American democratic experiment.”

 

Omaha, Nebraska 1919

Make no mistake, though, they were up against formidable and implacable forces. The release of black veterans into the work force, combined with the heavy black migration from the rural South to the big cities of the North, put them in direct competition for jobs with other underprivileged groups, many of them immigrants. Many white soldiers and sailors who had not yet been mustered out of the service harbored strong anti-black feelings — they often insisted, entirely without foundation, that blacks had been incompetent servicemen — and leaped at opportunities to beat blacks. In the Southern countryside, of course, Jim Crow was still going strong, along with the strong right hand with which it was enforced: lynching. Though popular mythology (especially in the white South) had it that black men were lynched for crimes against white women, “NAACP research found that most lynching victims were not killed for rape or attempted rape.” Indeed, “only 14 of the 77 black men lynched in 1919 were accused of assaulting a white woman,” and the odds are that most, if not all, of those accusations were trumped up.

The first of the year’s major urban riots took place in Washington, “black America’s leading cultural and financial center” but a city where blacks “trod more carefully than their counterparts in northern cities, as the District was middle ground between North and South.” On the evening of July 17, a white woman claimed two black men “jostled her and tried to take her umbrella.” Two days later, “several hundred white sailors and workers marched from the Washington Navy Yard . . . into the nearby neighborhood, beating any blacks they encountered.” The attacks moved into the retail center and then to the heart of the government. The New York Tribune reported:

“Before the very gates of the White House Negroes were dragged from streetcars and beaten up while crowds of soldiers, sailors and marines dashed down Pennsylvania Avenue, the principal thoroughfare in the downtown section, in pursuit of the fleeing Negroes. In one instance a restaurant, crowded with men and women diners, was invaded by a crowd of uniformed soldiers and sailors in search of Negro waiters.”

 

Chicago, IL 1919

Finally, President Wilson, who had no friendly feelings for black Americans, reluctantly ordered federal troops brought in, and they got things calmed down after several days of violence. “No one ever determined a final tally of death and injuries,” McWhirter writes. “Conservative reports listed seven killed: four blacks, three whites (one of them [a] police detective). Hundreds were injured; an untold number later died.” Not until 1968 would the Nation’s Capital again undergo racial violence of such ghastly intensity.

On and on the grim procession marched: Chicago (“Thirty-eight people — 23 blacks and 15 whites — were killed. At least 537 were seriously wounded”), Knoxville, rural Arkansas and Georgia and Mississippi. That it is one of the most shameful periods in our history is beyond question. Yet McWhirter is right to insist that during this same time, forgotten though it may be, “Black America awakened politically, socially, and artistically [as] never before.” The first stirrings of what became the Harlem Renaissance were felt, and seeds were planted that bore fruit in the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s. As McWhirter says, if you explore the whole story of those troubled months, you are left not thinking of America’s bald and cruel failings, but of its astounding and elastic resilience. “The Red Summer” is a story of destruction, but it is also a story of the beginning of a freedom movement. (source: Washington Post)

The Red Summer of 1919

From the The Chicago Tribune "'Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awakening of Black America' by Cameron McWhirter: McWhirter vividly explores post-World War I racial violence," by Eric Arnesen, on  18 November 2011 -- As World War I drew to a close in late 1918, the noted black author and activist James Weldon Johnson posed the issue that was on the minds of many African-Americans: Would their support for the war effort, on the battlefields of Europe and in the factories of the United States, translate into improvements in the "status of the Negro as an American citizen?" At that historical moment, blacks' status could be described as second-class — or worse. Their bill of complaints was painfully long: They were denied the vote in the South, trapped in a system of sharecropping that precluded economic mobility, excluded from countless workplaces, denigrated as biologically and culturally inferior, subject to harassment and violence, and relegated to segregated facilities that were palpably inferior to those of their white counterparts. Black wartime participation had raised "many high hopes" about the possibilities for change. "Now comes the test," Johnson announced.

Indeed, much had already changed over the course of the war. Half a million southern blacks had migrated to the North and industrial workplaces, long closed to black labor, opened their doors under the pressure of labor shortages. Black servicemen fighting in Europe encountered a white population often less hostile than American whites. The talk of a "New Negro" appeared in print and was heard on the streets. Civil rights protests erupted in the North and South. It was not unreasonable for African-Americans to think — or at least hope — that wartime gains would be maintained and even extended.

Instead of rewarding black Americans for their military service or even acknowledging their patriotic sacrifice, however, white Americans resolved to restore the pre-war status quo. Southern states cracked down hard on black protest organizations. The summer of 1919, argues journalist Cameron McWhirter, witnessed the "worst spate of race riots and lynchings in American history." From April to October, American cities exploded in an orgy of violence whose extensive bloodshed led Johnson to name it the "Red Summer." "Though no complete and accurate records on the eight months of violence were [ever] compiled," McWhirter notes, "at least 25 major riots erupted and at least 52 black people were lynched" in those months. "Millions of Americans had their lives disrupted. Hundreds of people — most of them black — were killed and thousands more were injured. Tens of thousands were forced to flee their homes."

Taking Johnson's phrase for his title, McWhirter vividly explores the dynamics of that season's bloodletting and the responses it elicited from black Americans. Postwar racial violence and politics are hardly new subjects for American historians, who have produced numerous studies on individual riots and lynchings, but McWhirter is among the few to look at the violence as a whole. He weaves together the multiple outbreaks into a single, highly readable (if, given its subject, sometimes painful) narrative.

The triggering events were many, some real, others imagined. In Washington, daily newspapers fanned the flames with lurid, exaggerated, or even fabricated accounts of black crime. In Chicago, postwar unemployment, labor conflicts, housing shortages, and heat provided the context for the massive violence that followed the stoning death of a young black swimmer who crossed an invisible line separating whites from blacks in Lake Michigan. Whites in Omaha, Neb., physically attacked their mayor before destroying the local courthouse to seize and then lynch a black man accused of assaulting a white woman. In Phillips County, Ark., black sharecroppers' efforts to organize a union to secure fair end-of-year settlements precipitated what one contemporary called "a crusade of death" that left hundreds dead.

In many instances, the press and public officials only made matters worse. Shortly before the nation's capital erupted into a "race war," the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) denounced four local newspapers for "sowing the seeds of a race riot by their inflammatory headlines." Arkansas journalists falsely claimed that officials had suppressed a "deliberately planned insurrection" aimed at a "general slaughter of white people." Making no secret of their opposition to black rights, white southern politicians blamed black sharecroppers and called the NAACP "an association for the promotion of revolution." For their part, federal officials believed, without evidence, that Bolshevik and other "agitators" instigated the violence. President Woodrow Wilson stood on the sidelines, doing nothing.

Antiblack riots were nothing new, but the postwar African-American response was, McWhirter argues. White rioters now confronted "black men and women transformed by their experiences during the war." In Washington and Chicago, they set up barricades to protect their neighborhoods while marksmen "manned rooftops with rifles." In Knoxville, Tenn., armed blacks established a perimeter at their community's edge and shot out street lights to impede white attackers. The New York Times found that "[p]ractically every one of the 10,000 Negroes in Omaha was armed and . . . ready to fight for his life and home" during that city's riot. Beyond resisters in the streets, McWhirter's true heroes are the members of the NAACP, whose importance in this era is often overlooked by historians. As its ranks quickly skyrocketed to almost 85,000, the organization tirelessly campaigned against lynching, riots, and segregation, giving an eloquent voice to black aspirations and setting the groundwork for future victories.

If "Red Summer" captures the big picture, the narrative is marred by occasional errors and exaggerations. Booker T. Washington's pronouncements, even at the height of his power, hardly "had the impact of papal bulls among blacks." Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association had few "members with socialist tendencies" and Garvey did not found the African Blood Brotherhood. And the IWW was the Industrial – not International – Workers of the World.

McWhirter stakes a lot on the significance of a single year, raising the larger question of precisely what transpired in black politics immediately after the war. "Black America awakened politically, socially, and artistically like never before," he finds. That a shift was taking place is undeniable. But to conclude that "1919's historic importance was that it was the start of a process – a great dismantling of institutional prejudice and inequality that marred American society" overstates the suddenness of the change in black America's mood. The fight "in legislatures, courtrooms, and the streets to become full partners in the American democratic experiment" hardly began in 1919, as "Red Summer" suggests; the "New Negro" first emerged in earlier years.

The "many high hopes" of the war years that James Weldon Johnson identified may have been dashed after World War I, but rising black expectations underscored a growing commitment to challenging the nation's hypocrisy. McWhirter's anatomy of the year's violence and African-American responses to it make for poignant reading and the stories he tells are powerful ones that deserve to be remembered. (source: The Chicago Tribune)

The Lynching of Jesse Washington In Waco, TX

 

Lynching of Jesse Washington (1916)

According to the Texas Historical Society -- JESSE WASHINGTON LYNCHING. Of the 492 lynchings that occurred in Texas between 1882 and 1930, the incident that perhaps received the greatest notoriety, both statewide and nationally, was the mutilation and burning of an illiterate seventeen-year-old black farmhand named Jesse Washington by a white mob in Waco, Texas, on May 15, 1916-an event sometimes dubbed the "Waco Horror." Washington was arrested on May 8, 1916, and charged with bludgeoning to death fifty-three-year-old Lucy Fryer, the wife of a white farmer in Robinson, a small community seven miles south of Waco. After confessing that he had both raped and murdered Mrs. Fryer, Washington was transferred to the Dallas County Jail by McLennan county sheriff Samuel S. Fleming, who hoped to prevent mob action at least until the accused could have his day in court.

Washington's trial began in Waco on May 15, in the Fifty-fourth District Court, with Judge Richard I. Munroe presiding over a courtroom filled to capacity. After hearing the evidence, a jury of twelve white men deliberated for only four minutes before returning a guilty verdict against the defendant and assessing the death penalty. Before law officers could remove Washington from the courtroom, a group of white spectators surged forward and seized the convicted youth. They hurried him down the stairs at the rear of the courthouse, where a crowd of about 400 persons waited in the alley. A chain was thrown around Washington's neck, and he was dragged toward the City Hall, where another group of vigilantes had gathered to build a bonfire.

Upon reaching the city hall grounds, the leaders of the mob threw their victim onto a pile of dry-goods boxes under a tree and poured coal oil over his body. The chain around Washington's neck was thrown over a limb of the tree, and several men joined to jerk him into the air before lowering his body onto the pile of combustibles and igniting a fire. Two hours later several men placed the burned corpse in a cloth bag and pulled the bundle behind an automobile to Robinson, where they hung the sack from a pole in front of a blacksmith's shop for public viewing. Later that afternoon constable Les Stegall retrieved the remains and turned them over to a Waco undertaker for burial.

Though lynching violated Texas law, no members of the Waco mob were prosecuted. However, the foreman of the jury that convicted Washington criticized local law officers for failing to prevent the lynching, and a special committee of Baylor University faculty passed resolutions denouncing the mob. A black journalist, A. T. Smith, editor of the Paul Quinn Weekly, was arrested and convicted of criminal libel after he printed allegations that Lucy Fryer's husband had committed the murder. Other blacks in the Waco area condemned the Fryer killing and remained conciliatory toward the white population.

Although the Nation, the New Republic, and the New York Times severely condemned the lynching, only a few Texas newspapers denounced the Waco mob. The Houston Post, Houston Express, Austin American, and San Antonio Express printed critical editorials, but the Dallas newspapers made few comments. The Waco Morning News expressed regret for the incident but resented the "wholesale denunciation of the South and of the people of Waco" by the national press. The most important demonstration of outrage emanated from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which launched a full-scale investigation of the affair and employed the incident as a cause célèbre in the organization's crusade for a federal antilynching bill. A photographer's pictures of the lynching strengthened the argument. Although the American entrance into World War I delayed the NAACP campaign until 1919, the "Waco Horror" remained a vivid indication that though the frequency of lynchings had begun to decline in the United States after 1900, those incidents that still occurred often were characterized by extreme barbarity.

James M. SoRelle, "JESSE WASHINGTON LYNCHING," Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/jcj01), accessed October 11, 2014. Uploaded on June 15, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

A Labor of Love, A Labor of Sorrow

LABOR OF LOVE, LABOR OF SORROW

The New York Times, "The Family Came First," by Toni Morrison, published on 14 April  1985  --  AFTER slavery, when fresh-born blacks ceased to represent a supply of unpaid labor, agents of the law, the economy, the academy and the Government began to view the black family as problematic in every way. The education of black children, the employment of black adults, housing, medical care, food - whites suddenly began to regard these normal needs as insupportable burdens, and supposed solutions to ''the problem'' of the black family destroyed some families and disfigured others.

That blacks in America were able to maintain families at all and that these families endured after the Civil War is amazing. Perhaps because of this unexpected survival, historians usually treat the black family as a special phenomenon or trivialize it beyond recognition. Not so in ''Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow,'' Jacqueline Jones's perceptive, well-written study of black women in the labor force from slavery to the present.

Black Women, Work, and the Family From Slavery to the Present. By Jacqueline Jones. Illustrated. 432 pp. New York: Basic Books

Placing the black family center stage in such a history as this is itself a singular idea, for which we owe the author gratitude. Miss Jones, who teaches history at Wellesley College, has made a valuable contribution to scholarship about black women on several counts. ''Labor of Love, Labor of Sorrow'' exorcises several malignant stereotypes and stubborn myths, it is free of the sexism and racism it describes, and it interprets old data in new ways.

Miss Jones shows how the need to maintain family life shaped the work habits and choices of blacks in general and black women in particular. Examining black women as laborers is one thing; examining this labor force in the context of its life-and-death struggle to save the family is quite another. The attempt to annihilate black families was so spirited that every effort to protect those families was seen as nothing less than sabotage. A male slave who ducked off the plantation to go fishing was perceived as a loafer rather than a provider. Similarly, after slavery, when free black women stayed at home to care for their children (a duty and virtue for white women), they were said to be ''doing nothing'' and to have ''played the lady'' by demanding that their husbands ''support them in idleness.''

Like a silent, underground river, family priorities run through the work choices blacks made after and during slavery. ''Freed blacks resisted both the northern work ethic and the southern system of neoslavery,'' Miss Jones writes. ''The full import of their preference for family sharecropping over gang labor becomes apparent when viewed in a national context. The industrial North was increasingly coming to rely on workers who had yielded to employers all authority over their working conditions. In contrast, sharecropping husbands and wives retained a minimal amount of control over their own productive energies and those of their children on both a daily and seasonal basis. Furthermore, the sharecropping system enabled mothers to divide their time between field and housework in a way that reflected a family's needs. The system also removed wives and daughters from the menacing reach of white supervisors. Here were tangible benefits of freedom that could not be reckoned in financial terms.''

Though slave women are stereotypically thought of as house servants, 95 percent of them were fieldworkers who had the same workload as men. And contrary to the notion that black women during slavery regarded kitchen work as a ''promotion'' from fieldwork, most sought the latter to be farther away from white supervision and closer to their own families. Deliberate ineptitude in the kitchen seems to have been the easiest route out of the big house. And this maneuver was echoed in the refusal of black domestics to ''live in'' when they reached the city.

Of signal importance is that blacks often decided to migrate to urban centers to get better education for their children - a priority equal to (if not greater than) the hope of more and better work. Another manifestation of the priority of the family is that blacks repeatedly chose collectivism based on kinship over ''individualistic opportunity.'' Miss Jones does justice to this seldom recognized characteristic of black people and suggests that this collectivism accounts for the rapid spread of black protest in the 1960's.

Once again the myth of the emasculating black matriarch is deftly punctured here. Miss Jones supplies more evidence (there seems never to be enough to get rid of the myth) showing that during and after slavery black women were not the lone protectors of their families and black men traditionally risked their lives trying to defend their wives and children. The author's refusal to assert female competence at the expense of male roles is refreshing.

Historians usually speak of white women as though they primarily supported black causes. Other than Miss Jones, few writers have mentioned that white women could be as racist as their men. Appropriately, Miss Jones distinguishes the kind of white women who cried ''Lynch her!'' to black schoolgirls in Little Rock, Ark., from those who worked hard on black causes.

Rather than simply looking at data, Miss Jones sees them. In so doing, she has turned an arc light on several dark and unexplored corners. There is a marvelous passage on dressing up - how important ribbons, hats, shoes and colorful dresses were to impoverished black women. Films, plays, newspaper cartoons and advertisements once joked about the way black women dressed up, and white women sometimes felt outrage at, and contempt for, black women's choices of fashion. In the mid-1860's, in Wilmington, N.C., Miss Jones writes, quoting an observer, white women took ''great offense'' at black women's wearing veils and gave up the style altogether.

The book contains a surprising analysis of how Ebony magazine - a magazine dominated by men at its inception - encouraged black women by closely chronicling their accomplishments. There is a discussion that links the way black women nourished the civil rights movement with the way they protected and encouraged runaway slaves. Feeding runaways with provisions stolen from the mistress's pantry during slavery grew into giving banquets for civil rights activists during the 1960's. Spirituals sung in clandestine slave services became rallying songs at protest meetings.

THOUGH she provides a context for joining the African past to the Afro-American present, Miss Jones is not at all optimistic about the future. She believes that the black woman's unprecedented strength can no longer ward off the quite precedented assaults on the black family. But in calling for ''a massive public works program (and) a 'solidarity wage' to narrow the gap between the pay scales of lower- and upper-echelon workers,'' she is exchanging one dependency for another. If Miss Jones is right, if the traditional ''make a way out of no way'' resourcefulness of black women can't save the black family and blacks are still at the Government's mercy, then they face their gravest danger yet.

Fully half this book is devoted to strategies slaves and newly freed women used to balance labor with family. As well done as it is, this section is the luxury we pay for by having less of Miss Jones's scholarship about events of the 1970's and 80's. The sections of the book that deal with more recent history merely track events without offering insights into them. Perhaps a separate text is needed to tell us exactly how, among modern blacks, the expression ''Hey, mama'' took on sexual connotations; how marriage came to be perceived as a barrier to self-fulfillment; and how black children came to be viewed as the Typhoid Marys of poverty rather than the victims they in fact are. Such an analysis is outside the scope of this book but not beyond Miss Jones's gifts.  (source:The New York Times)