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The Augusta News-Review - February 13, 1975
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1975 BLACK HISTORY WEEK IS AN APPROPRIATE TIME
TO EDUCATE THIS NATION ON THE FACT THAT BLACKS,
BEFORE THE EMANCIPATION PROCLAMATION’S INK WAS
DRY, WERE THIRSTING AFTER KNOWLEDGE, EVEN
BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR GUNS WERE SILENCED.
One goal of the Freedmen’s Bureau was to establish schools in
the war beleagued South. In its five short years of life, with the
help of religious and philanthropic groups, it founded 4300
schools, from the elementary grades through college. With tuition
free, and often schoolbooks too, over a quarter of a million
Blacks were able to start their education. Early in the Civil War,
when the Sea Islands off South Carolina had been captured by
the Union forces, Yankee schoolmarms had headed South to
teach Black children and adults to read and write.
The institution of slavery had kept back the development of
Black people, and the abolitionist and missionary teachers hoped
to demonstrate that the widely held notions~in the North as in
the South-of the inherent superiority and inferiority of races
were dead wrong. Slave codes had forbidden the education of
Blacks, and the vast majority were therefore illiterate. The
teachers were joyously welcomed by the Blacks everywhere.
Within a few years some schools had progressed so rapidly that
they were training Blacks to go out and teach.
All this was before there was a snobbery Black “Bourgeoisie”
to polarize the group. Probably a majority of the teachers who
came South were abolitionists. These veterans of the anti-slavery
crusade were also the backbone of the Freedmen’s aid societies
that helped raise funds, recruit teachers, write textbooks, and
open the schools in the South. Their zeal was notable, and
necessary, for they had to overcome some obstacles in the first
years of freedom. One was the fact that the children were raised
in homes almost completely without cultural stimulus. They
knew little or nothing of the world beyond the plantation or the
village boundaries.
Many has never seen a book or newspaper; some did not know
right from left, or had no concept of time. Yet they learned to
read well and swiftly under the guidance of teachers who cared.
But it was outside the school walls that the greatest barrier to
education stood. It was the grim resolve of many Southern whites
that these “aliens,” these Yankee schoolteachers should not
meddle with “their” Blacks.” The “nigger teachers”, as they were
called, were suspected of spreading notions of political and social
auality. They were often ostracized, insulted, whipped, and their
loolhouses burned.
Perhaps one of the best-known instances of the Black’s
powerful desire for education is the story of Booker T.
Washington. Born a slave in Virginia, he never slept in a bed or ate
at a table until after Emancipation. In his autobiography, “Up
From Slavery”, he tells how he used Webster’s Speller to teach
himself to read, and attended the first colored school opened in
the neighborhood by a Northern Black. For five years, from the
age of nine, he worked from 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. in a coal mine, went
to school, and returned to the mine for another two hours.
(ONE OF THE FREEDMEN’S AID SOCIETY MOST
ILLUSTRIOUS ALUMNUS)
Ida B. Wells was one of the most passionate voices of protest in
this period. She was born in Mississippi four years after the end of
the Civil War. At fourteen, while a student in a Freedmen’s Aid
Society school, she lost both parents and took over the support
of four younger sisters and brothers. Somehow she managed to
get more schooling while still carrying this burden. Later she went
as a teacher to Memphis and began to write a local Black paper,
the “Living War”. Finally she quit the classroom to edit her own
paper, “The Free Speech.” Her courageous fight against racial
injustice brought her many readers in the Mississippi Delta until
1892, when she exposed white businessmen who had instigated
the lynching of three young Blacks, who were competitors of the
white men.
A mob wrecked her press during the night and she was forced
to flee the city. She carried her anti-lynch crusade to New York,
writing for the Age and publishing her “Red Book”, the first
definitive study of lynching in the United States. In 1892 she
went to England to raise international support for the campaign,
and the next year to Chicago where she began organizing Black
youth and women’s clubs. She married a lawyer, Ferdinand
Barnett, founder of the city’s first Black newspaper. At
twenty-five she said, “Our work has only begun; our
race-hereditary bondsmen-must strike the blow if they would be
free/’ With her husband she worked uncesingly against the mob
mama, running great risks to report social injustices on the scene
and to defend its victims. The result of one of her investigations
of a double lynching is contained in a brilliant article she wrote in
1910.
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February is a month when many Blacks across the Nation are
focusing on Black heritage considerations. Before Blacks can
“integrate” they must first “concentrate” for only two distinct
substances can come together as co-equals. The essence of
Blackness must be understood and appreciated by a majority of
Blacks before sound progress will be made.
However, Non-Blacks or whites have some work to do on the
essence of whiteness and institutional racism before they can
become truly humans in this sick racist society. The noted Black
author Nathan Wright included in his book entitled “Let’s Work
Together” twenty tasks for whites as set forth by his brother
Benjamin Wright.
“Twenty Tasks for White People” by Ben Wright is the message
he delivers to white business and civic leaders. Those tasks will be
here presented so that right thinking Blacks and whites can reflect
upon them. They are as follows:
1. Study your own historically rooted role in the vast amount
of racism that exists in America today by (a) requiring that Negro
and African history and culture be taught in our school systems
at all levels; (b) encouraging church groups, cultural groups, civic
groups, civic organizations, etc., to have series of discussions on
American history in relation to Black people so that adults will
also learn to understand themselves.
2. Associate yourself with thinking Black people who accept
their own blackness. In this way, Black people in every enterprise,
rather than simply being imbued with the thinking current in the
system that has brought us to our present chaos, can contribute
creatively to that thinking.
3. Recognize that governments are not meant to be efficiency
systems for building robots but should be “People-oriented” or
“community-oriented” enterprises in which the people affected
are consulted on - and are in some large measure in control of
- programs and other efforts designed to meet their
needs.
4. Examine or re-examine our educational system to see if it is
meeting the needs of whites and Blacks in the light of the vastly
different and continually changing economic and social
conditions in our country. White people must realize that, if they
don’t force some racial changes in our educational system, it is
they who will carry the primary burden of increased taxes for
welfare, police and fire protection and the incalculable costs of
continued urban unrest.
5. Recruit and train better men to police our cities for the
good of both white and Black. To allow an uneducated policeman
or uniformed person to make professional human-relations
Black Empowerment
By Dr. Nathaniel Wrig/u, Jr.
XL human rights activist
\\ V Learning Tips for Black Youth
BMim
For the past decade and more, there has been a mounting
disillusionment among black youth and their parents concern
ing the kind of formal education which has been given black
young people in our public schools. In the face of their dismay,
large numbers of black students have given up almost entirely
on the school system. In the place of a necessary optimism and
eagerness for learning there has been increased cynicism and
doubt. This latter fact, while fully understandable in many
circumstances, leads to nowhere.
What, then, can our black youth do?
Prescribing precisely for others can be an unhelpful exercise,
nmnmmn
Prescribing precisely for others can be an unhelpful exercise.
Still there are some general principles to which one might refer
and in the light of which make much more considered and less
self-defeating judgments. When I have had black youth and
their parents ask for suggestions, I have made a few which may
in spirit be helpful to many othes.
I—One of the most widespread problems which plague and
bother our black youth is the apparent conflict between the
attitudes and beliefs of their teachers and what the students
feel is fair. Teachers often reflect in both their demeanor and
in what they say in the classrooms the inherited anti-black or
racist aspects of our pro-white American culture or way of life.
To this kind of complaint, our black young people perhaps
need to be reminded of several things. One is that their own
primary learning purpose is to acquire, at least on the high
West
Black History is Featured Every
Hfeek in The Black Press,
Speaking
Out
By
Roosevelt Green, Jr.
decisions just won’t work.
6. Support programs of self-development of Black people. As
long as Black Americans do not join together to carry their full
load in this nation and be rewarded justly, many of their
responsibilities will rest on the shoulders of white America.
7. Devise ways by which both the image of Black people
among others and among themselves will be improved. As long as
Black people are regarded by others and themselves as nothing or
as “others,” Black people will have little opportunity or incentive
to try to become anything more than a drain on our society.
8. Work through churches and other organizations to help
fellow whites understand that it is in the interest of all that all of
our society be desegregated. All men are threatened when the
dignity of any man is lessened.
8. Try to eliminate the degrading welfare system as we know it
today. All men should have some kind of responsibility- even if it
is clearly “make-work” - before they receive any money. Earning
for self spells dignity. Every man should be allowed this path to
dignity. Only the completely disabled should be given assistance
without a large measure of concomitant responsibility.
10. Establish urban planning departments that include
competent “people-oriented” whites and Blacks.
11. Rethink job-training and hiring policies in industry,
business, and government. Our education system has failed many
of our adults, and these agencies must take up the slack until
necessary educational reforms are made. A complqtely new
system of “community colleges” could be established for
reeducation of all adults who want it whether or not they even
finished primary school.
12. Demand that labor unions stop discriminating, that banks
alter their lending practices, that stores alter the higher price
structures that are sometimes apparent in branches in Black
communities.
13. Facilitate Negro investment in business and especially in
housing. People who own something are not prone to destroy it.
Any people - if not included equitably in the system - will tend
to disrupt and destroy. All that Black people want is a ray of
hope, some beginning at fulfillment and promises.
13. Support all self-help organizations like the Urban League,
CORE, N.A.A.C.P., S.C.L.C., S.N.C.C., and others that may be
purely local.
15. Accept your own inadequacies as white people. Only in
this way may your own growth into greater self-sufficiency be
assured.
16. Organize white leadership to respond to and encourage the
new mood of self-awareness and self-respect among the leadership
of the Black community and to combat rampant racism in the
white community.
17. Reflect on your own personal part in continuing the white
culture patterns on political, social, and economic bases.
18. Do your part to help America grow into maturity for the
sake of its own internal peace and the greater good that this
nation can and must represent to the world.
19. See opportunities to fulfill your best hopes and to preserve
your best principles.
20. Compensate for abuses that our historically
white-controlled and white-defined society has created, in every
enterprise in which we are engaged.
I hope these twenty tasks will provide much discussion and
insight into the tremendous problems involved in Black and
Non-Black relations.
Harambee!!!!
school and college level, the learning tools and approaches of
those who teach them. Black students are not in school, in this
sense, to learn their teachers’ agenda but to acquire whatever
skills they have to impart.
On another level, black students should keep in mind a
second goal; that is, to simply meet the set standards and to
acquire the paper credentials needed to move ahead to survive
in our society. Once we have passed these often cruel and some
times inherently non-productive obstacle courses, we can be in
a far better position to “call the shots” for our own children and
to change the system itself, making it serve a far more humane
purpose than it now does.
As painful as it can be and sometimes is, black young
people need to learn the same lesson that their parents before
them had to learn; namely that there isn’t anything for free in
life. Or, as some put it, “there is never nothing for nothing.”
For every thing in life, that is worth having there is a price
which must be paid.
2—Another thorny problem which increasing numbers of
all students, regardless of race, are facing today centers around
what are technically called verbal skills. Students today, in
their speaking and writing habits, have a strong tendency to
want to “do their own thing.”
With black students, “doing their own thing” often leads to
bitter and unending debate as to hether “Black English” rather
than “White English” should be used. Unfortunately, this
formulation of the problem may be misleading. Black youth
TO BE
EQUAL /13M
I f
»y ir
Vernon E. Jordan Jr.
BLACK HISTORY WEEK & THE HISTORIANS
Black History Week is an annual event, usually celebrated in
schools with special discussions on Black history and great Black
figures of the past and present. By and large, it is a positive step
toward heightening the consciousness of Black and white children
of the great contributions made by Black Americans to our
common history.
What makes this year’s Black History Week somewhat different
from the past is that the core experience of Black history itself
has come up for re-evaluation by historians. And this new
re-evaluation tells us a lot more about the current climate of
attitudes toward Blacks than it does to enlighten us about the
past.
One of the most talked about studies of the past year was a
book purporting to change our view of slavery by using
computer-based studies. The authors, Robert Fogel and Stanley
Engerman, come up with the rather startling conclusions that the
slave experience was not as bad as previous historians had painted
it.
Their motives appear to be based on the feeling that portraits
of docile slaves and brutal masters have to be revised in the light
of their supposed new findings. They claim that it is wrong to
blame the present plight of Black people on the slave experience,
that it is more clearly the discrimination of the post-slavery
period right on up to our own day that best accounts for
Black-white disparities.
On that last point most can agree, but by portraying Blacks
entrapped in slavery as relatively content, their masters as benign,
and the entire wretched system as relatively humane, the authors
just set up a new mythology as wrong as the openly pro-slavery
historians of the early 1900 s were.
If the system was all that good, why did so many Blacks run
away? If they were fed as well as the authors claim, why are
plantation records so full of stories about slaves stealing food?
Why are there so many eyewitness accounts of brutality and
neglect? Most important today, why was such a book written and
why has it found such wide acceptance? ‘
Other historians have ripped apart many of the authors’
assumptions. They’re pointed out how they’ve fed statistics from
one or a few plantations in one part of the country at one
particular time, and come up with fancy mathematical
projections that led them to generalized - and wrong -
statements about slavery.
I’m willing to leave the technical discussions to their peers,
who have held numerous conferences and written many learned
articles largely disproving this new revision of history. My
primary concern is the rush with which the media and the public
adopted a revision of the past that serves to soothe America’s
guilt and to rob contemporary Blacks of one of their moral claims
against the nation.
Scholarship always reflects the times. No matter how far into
the past it delves, it tells us as much about the times in which it
was written as about the dim past. During the years of open
segregation and the institution of Jim Crow, the dominant
scholars were neo-Darwinists who saw life as a battle in which
only the fittest will survive - and you know who that would be.
Later scholars, living in a more democratic era, reflected the
stirrings of the civil rights movement of the fifties and sixties and
revisionist historians of that period changed the view of the past j
to take into account the feelings and needs of Black people for I
the first time. I
Now, the wheel seems to be turning again. Not only are some
historians going back to benign views of evil times, but the
academic world is churning out studies purporting to show that
education won’t improve the outlook for Black children, that
integration doesn’t work, that Black have lower IQs, that - well,
you get the idea.
What all this says to me is that the moral climate of America is
changing from one charged with the seeking of justice to one
seeking to cover up the need for change. And in the vanguard of
this new cover-up are schalars who should be devoting their skills
to helping to build a humane society, not creating false pictures
prettifying an evil past.
need to be encouraged, in every reasonable way possible, to be
creative. One of the major methods of creativity is the use of the
sub-cultural forms of expression in speech and in the arts.
Some of us may have shared in an experience which is fairly
common in the northeastern states where Jewish communities
are prevalent. It is a refreshing event when, is talking with a
Jewish person, to hear it said. “Well, there is something that
seems to go to the heart of what we are trying to say. I can’t say
it just right in English. But there is a Yiddish expression for
it. ..”
People create at their best in using the forms of expressions
acquired at the family hearth, from the parents’ knees and from
the sub-cultural group’s places of worship and play. Have not
our black young people the right to say, both in school and out
side of it, “well, there is a black expression for it, too! ” We are
a tri-racial people of Black African, White European and
Original American stock. We should at least be bi-lingual, if
not tri-lingual in our speech.
Wejneed conventional English for the purpose that it serves
as a tool for survival in a white dominated world. For our own
personal well-being, growth and inegrity, we need at all times
a reasonable opportunity to be ourselves.
3—Finally, our black youth need to learn to be political
while they are in school. All of life is politics and formal school
ing is a part of life.
Our black youth need to discover that in politics we never
burn bridges; for those persons with whom we may earnestly
disagree on one day may have the precise resources to save us or
to take us where we need to go tomorrow.
A revolutionary uses “all means necessary” for his or her
cause. In a deeply significant sense, every black person must
work for revolutionary changes in American life both for our
own fulfillment and for the in-depth cleansing which our
nation needs.
THE AUGUSTA NEWS-REVIEW
PUBLISHED EVERY THURSDAY
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