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The Augusta News-Review - February 13, 1975 ■Walking M I itSS ■ ■Dignity ■ 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. K SUBSCRIBE E TODAY Bj PAKXM3 U AUGUn’A.OMXOAMm K City St One year (In county) *.OO jRU Ono year (out of county) MOO Page 4 r W 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 Mallory K. MillenderEditor and Publisher Audrey Frazier Society Editor James Stewart Circulation Manager* Frank Bowman Advertising Manager Mailing Address: Box 953 Augusta, Ga. Phone Second Class Postage Paid Augusta, Ga. 30901 SUBSCRIPTION RATES Payable in Advance * One Year in Richmond Countyss.oo tax ind. 6 Monthss2.so tax ind. One Year elsewhereS6.oo tax Ind. ADVERTISING DEPARTMENT Classified Advertising Deadline 12 noon on Tuesday Display Advertising Deadline 12 noon on Tuesday New* Items Printed Free AMALGAMATED jj IF] I IL .I up PUBUSHERS, INC. Ibl bwl mK/ tMVBKMM. ADVCk... a MPWfMMTarI Vt» • NEW TOR* • CHICAGO *$ pF *