Notes:
From Stomp!
p 7 “Many blacks intellectuals . . . took up the banner of
equality in their newspapers and regularly lampooned Booker T. Washington as a
puppet of whites.”
Isn’t this part of the problem? It’s the same problem that
has been going on for eons. The Welsh couldn’t successfully repel the English
because they couldn’t get over their differences and work together. The Native
Americans couldn’t successfully repel the incoming Europeans because they
couldn’t get over their differences and work together. I’m not sure that I
agree that blacks needed to band together to repel anyone, but a solid, unified
voice would have perhaps been better than several voices, among them criticism
of their own. On the other hand, it is something of a continuance of the way
people are. After all, slavery has existed in nearly every culture that has
left any type of record so it certainly isn’t unique to the United States and
therefore had been around for a long time before the first Africans were
brought to the Americas. Most Africans who were sold to the nefarious slavers
were captives of war and only about ten percent actually came to the US; most
were delivered to the Caribbean.
p 3 “It is not we who kidnaped, raped, and ravished a
people.” Nikki Giovanni. This statement is patently false. It may be true that
those in the United States who are of African descent did not kidnap, rape, or
ravish a people, but it is certainly as true that their ancestors did as any of
ours did. Slavery has existed for eons and has often involved some of the
unpleasant things people are able to do to one another including torture of
various types, sexual exploitation and even death.
from The PHRR:
Carter G. Woodson, The
Migration of the Talented Tenth
Interesting. As near as I can discover, this was written
between 1910 and 1918. Much of my family lived in California, Washington and
Utah at the time. How aware were they of the happenings on the other side of
the country?
One of the first things I noticed as reading this is that
Woodson refers to the people about whom he is writing as ‘black’ or ‘Negro,’
not ‘African-American. I stand in firm opposition to political correctness
because for the most part, it seems rather stupid to me. If a ‘black’ person is African-American, what
the heck am I? What the heck is a ‘person of color’? I’m not albino so maybe I
qualify. I have a cousin whose father has African heritage, maybe he qualifies.
My oldest daughter’s father is from Mexico, maybe she qualifies. I believe that
black is black, white is white, green is green, and so on. Besides, when
discussing people, are any truly black? Or white? Even albinos aren’t truly
white. What I have seen is a delicious array of brown and tan of many hues and
shades, and I think it is beautiful. Another thing that really stood out to me
is when the author says, when talking about the Negro in northern cities having
a liberty but not equality, ‘’leads them to think that they are citizens of the
country.” This, to me epitomizes the whole feeling I get from reading this
which is sadness. Of course these people, these former slaves and children of
former slaves, are citizens. They live here, their progenitors lived here. They
have the same right to citizenship as anyone. I see a group of people here who
have fairly recently been freed from an oppressor except that they haven’t,
really. While they have gained their freedom, they still must fight for it and
the rights that accompany it because freedom is not something freely given by
those who have been forced into it. I can understand why they, as a people,
would have wanted to leave the south; they had been the slaves, those in
‘authority’ wanted to keep them where they were physically and emotionally and
keep them dependent because that’s what they, the oppressors, were. Going north
surely would be better. Except that the people there weren’t any better and had
a hard time accepting anyone who looked/spoke/acted differently than they do.
What a bad, almost no-win situation.
Marcus Garvey, Africa
for the Africans
p. 17 “’brainless intellectuals’”
p. 23 “You have to treat this world as the world treats
you;” “What else can you expect but to give back to the world what the world
gives to you,”
p. 25 “The thing to do is to get organized; keep separated
and you will be exploited. . .” “Ask me personally the cause of my success, and
I say opposition;”
Well now. The overall feeling I get from this piece is of hope
which is odd because I also detect a definite undercurrent of latent brutality.
I really appreciate some of the wording Garvey chose. On page 17, I like his
use of ‘”brainless intellectuals.” In reading this, I notice that he almost
exclusively uses the term ‘Negro’ (I am tempted to strike the ‘almost’ because
while I have not noticed that he uses ‘black’ in going over this selection the
second time, I may have missed something); West Indian Negro, American Negro,
Negro race. He does use the term ‘white race’ which in some ways I find curious
given his propensity for using Negro. Some of the words I picked out which I
don’t recall seeing often in more recent writings are: ‘bombastic’ (p 20); ‘mandatories’
(p 18); ‘bamboozling’ (p 17); ‘maligned’ (p 22); ‘connive’ (p 25). The man had
a good vocabulary and hold on the English language and knew how to use it.
While the picture he paints in the last section is one of
beautiful hope, “I have a vision of the future, and I see before me a picture
of a redeemed Africa, with her dotted cities, with her beautiful civilization,
with her millions of happy children, going to and fro,” I do not think that his
vision was very realistic or that it had much chance of actually coming to pass.
He said more than once that, rather than following the golden rule and doing
unto others as you’d have them do unto you, they needed to treat the world the
way the world treated them. I think he believed very firmly that ‘what goes
around, comes around.’
He mentioned that “The thing to do is to get organized; keep
separated and you will be exploited. . .” which is what I mentioned in discussing
Woodson’s writing as major fault of many people.
Mary White Ovington, On
Marcus Garvey
Garvey was a dreamer and a great orator. Realistic, he did
not seem to be. This is what I would expect to see in a biographical article.
It seems straight to the point and offers some real observations. It appears, from this selection and his, that
Garvey thought the only way to solve racial tension was to completely segregate
the races.
from Stomp!
As with most of what I’ve read thus far for this class, one
of the first things I notice is the hope. Shortly after, the despair. There
must be opposition in all things so in spite of the fact that the hope and
despair may seem to contradict each other, in a way, they also complement one
another. When I think of the struggles faced by these people and other groups
who faced persecution, I feel as if I’m being drawn into a huge whirlpool (and
I don’t mean the washing machine kind or refrigerator or any other appliance)
that grows ever narrower and ever faster.
If there is a repeated image here, it would be a twofold
image of battle. A battle fought partly by words and partly one which caused
the blood of many, often innocent, to be spilt. Lynch. The Encarta dictionary
defines lynch in this way: “to seize somebody believed to have committed a
crime and put him or her to death immediately and without trial, usually by
hanging.” To me, the word brings to mind the deaths of innocent people accused
of things they would never have done; people accused simply because they are in
a position to be a scapegoat; senseless deaths that have been brought about
simply because one group of people has a different skin color, way of speaking,
belief system than another.
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