Repost: Black History Month: Matthew Henson

In 1878, at age twelve, Matthew Henson walked from his home in Washington, D.C. to Baltimore to get a job as a cabin boy on the merchant ship Katie Hines. The captain of the ship wasn't sure about hiring a twelve-year-old boy, but when Matthew told him that he was an orphan, Captain Childs relented.

Educated by Childs in in seafaring, math, history, and geography, Matthew Henson travelled to China, Japan, North Africa and the Black Sea, but when Captain Childs died, Henson gave up the sea—partially because the racism of some white sailors prevented him from furthering his career—and took a job as a clerk at a furrier in Washington, D.C. where he met Robert Peary, an officer in the U.S. Navy Corps of Civil Engineers.

Henson shared Peary's love of adventure, and so Robert Peary offered him a job as his personal assistant on an expedition to Nicaragua. Matthew Henson spent the next two years in Central America with Peary, honing his skills as a mechanic, navigator and carpenter. It was there that Peary, desperate to become the first man to reach the North Pole, offered Henson a job as a messenger at the League Island Navy Yard, with an eye toward having Henson available for future ventures. Henson accepted, and two years later, in 1891, Peary was granted  leave from the Navy to further explore Greenland and Henson joined him.

Henson accepted without hesitation, although it caused friction with his new bride, Eva Flint. Only married two months, Hensen left her to join Peary, and four others—including Dr. Frederick Cook and Peary's own wife—on an expedition of Greenland. Matthew Henson spent the next eighteen years travelling with Peary throughout the Arctic as the only remaining member of Peary's original team.

In Greenland, Henson's carpentry skills were used to construct a two-room house, dubbed Red Cliff House, which would serve as the expedition's headquarters. The following spring, Peary and his men left the camp, crossing Greenland from west to east to reach the northernmost point of the island. Henson was injured on the trip and returned to Red Cliff House.

At headquarters, there was conflict with another man, John Verhoeff, whom Peary declared insubordinate and had left behind on the expedition. Verhoeff resented a Black man taking his place on the team  and also resented the local Eskimo population. Matthew Henson, on the other hand, saw the value the native people had to offer, and quickly learned the Eskimo language, Arctic survival skills and local culture; this knowledge was vital in future expeditions.

In 1895, Henson, Peary and Hugh J. Lee finally discovered Greenland's northernmost point. Close to starvation because they couldn't find the food they'd hidden along the way under all the new snow, they continued onward, finally reaching the northern corner of Greenland. Peary had hoped to travel further, but the lack of food forced them to turn back and forced them to use the dogs that had once pulled their sleds as food.

Henson and Peary tried for the Pole several times over the next few years. In 1902, six Eskimo helpers died, the food ran out, and their progress toward the north was blocked by melting ice. In 1906 the team returned again, this time in a new ship, the Roosevelt, named for the new president, designed to cut through the ice. With this new ship, the expedition was able to get closer to the Pole than any other human being—within 174 miles—but melted ice blocked the final distance.

In 1908, they tried one final time, once more on the Roosevelt; with Peary in his 50s, and Hensen in his 40s, both men knew they were getting too old to continue much longer.

The men on the team knew that not all of them would reach the Pole, but Peary had stated from the beginning that "Henson must go all the way. I can't make it there without him." Robert Peary, Matthew Henson and 4 Eskimo men reached the pole on April 6, 1909, travelling four hundred and thirteen miles in sixteen days.

It took until July for the Roosevelt to free itself from the ice and head south. On August 17th the ship put in at Etah, Greenland where Peary and Henson heard some rather startling news: Dr. Frederick A. Cook, the same man who had been with Henson and Peary on an earlier Greenland trip, claimed that he had reached the Pole on April 21, 1908, a full year before Peary's party.

Henson interviewed the two Eskimo men that supposedly had gone with Cook. They admitted they had never gone more than 20 miles out on the icepack, and an examination of Cook's sledge showed it had hardly been used. It seemed obvious the Cook was telling a bold-faced lie.

But Cook took full advantage of the lie, and by the time Peary returned to the U.S., Cook had received several honors in Europe and his success was accepted by the public until the National Geographic Society investigated and determined Cook's claim was a hoax. A sea captain came forward and testified that Cook had paid him to produce sextant readings consistent with being taken at the North Pole. That, along with Matthew Henson's discoveries, lead to Cook being dishonored and Peary, eventually, honored as the first man to reach the North Pole.

Hensen, however, as a Black man, got little recognition at all. It wasn't until 1937—nearly thirty years later—that he got the credit he deserved. In that year he was made an honorary member of the famed Explorers Club in New York, and in 1946 he was honored by the U.S. Navy with a medal. His most-prized award, though, was a gold medal from the Chicago Geographic Society.

Matthew Henson died on March 9th, 1955, and was buried in a small plot at the Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. In 1987, Dr. S. Allen Counter, a Henson biographer, led a movement to have the remains of both Henson and his wife moved to lay adjacent to Robert Peary in Arlington National Cemetery, a more fitting location for an American hero.

On the seventy-ninth anniversary of the discovery of the North Pole, Matthew Henson was laid to rest near his old friend, Robert Peary, and on his tombstone is a quote from his autobiography:

The lure of the Arctic is tugging at my heart.

To me the trail is calling.

The old trail.

The trail that is always new.

Architecture Wednesday: Tintagel Church Conversion

It looks idyllic, living in a converted chapel along the Cornish coast just minutes from Trebarwith Beach.

The Old Chapel is for sale for a hair under $700,000 USD … less than the cost of a one-bedroom London flat and stretches across 2,200 square feet in the village of Trewarmett, Tintagel.

Tintagel and Trebarwith and Trewarmett, oh my; but Tintagel is famous for its ruined clifftop medieval castle, which legend says was home of King Arthur.

This unique  property, built with quarried stone dating back to the 19th century, has been converted, with character intact, into a three-bedroom home with an ‘upside-down’ layout; bedrooms are on the lower level, while the main floor houses an expansive living, kitchen, and dining area set beneath the chapel’s spectacular ceiling, with beams and ornate diagonal wood paneling between the rafters. In addition, Gothic arched windows offer panoramic views over Cornish fields and the rugged coastline in the distance, while long timber floorboards run the length of the room.

The gallery floor is a bedroom and a sleeping loft set beneath the roof, offering an up-close look at the ceiling panels. There are two additional bedrooms on the lower ground floor, featuring sash windows and a large landing area currently used as a games room.

It’s rough and rugged and historic but those arched windows and those views … for 700K? That price alone could get me into a church!

As always, click to emBIBIGGERate ...

The Spaces

Repost: Black History Month: Ida B. Wells-Barnett

An uncompromising woman, Ida B. Wells-Barnett was a fearless anti-lynching crusader, suffragist, women's rights advocate, journalist, and speaker.

Although enslaved prior to the Civil War, Ida's parents were able to support their seven children after the war because her mother and father were skilled workers—as a cook and carpenter. When Ida was fourteen, however, Yellow Fever killed her parents and youngest siblings, and Ida took it upon herself to keep the family together. She took a job as a teacher, working to continue her own education at nearby Rust College.

It was in Memphis, where Ida moved to live with aunt and younger sisters, that she first began to fight—literally—for racial and gender justice. In 1884 the conductor of the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company asked Ida to give up her seat to a white man—she was ordered into the smoking, or "Jim Crow," car.—and she told the man …

“I refused, saying that the forward car [closest to the locomotive] was a smoker, and as I was in the ladies' car, I proposed to stay. . . [The conductor] tried to drag me out of the seat, but the moment he caught hold of my arm I fastened my teeth in the back of his hand. I had braced my feet against the seat in front and was holding to the back, and as he had already been badly bitten he didn't try it again by himself. He went forward and got the baggageman and another man to help him and of course they succeeded in dragging me out.”

Ida Wells was forcefully removed from the train as the white passengers applauded.

Back home in Memphis, she immediately hired an attorney to sue the railroad and won her case in the local circuit courts. But the railroad company appealed to the Supreme Court of Tennessee, and it reversed the lower court's ruling. This was the first of many struggles Wells engaged, and from that moment forward, she worked fearlessly to overturn injustices against women and people of color.

Her suit against the Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad Company gave rise to a new career as a journalist. Many newspapers wanted to hear the story of the 25-year-old schoolteacher who stood up against white supremacy. Her writing career blossomed in papers geared to African American and Christian audiences.

In 1889 Wells became a partner in the Free Speech and Headlight, the newspaper owned by Rev. R. Nightingale—the pastor of Beale Street Baptist Church. He "counseled" his large congregation to subscribe to the paper and it flourished, allowing her to leave her position as a schoolteacher.

In 1892 three of her friends—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Henry Stewart—were  lynched because their grocery store, People's Grocery Company, had taken away customers from competing white business. A group of angry white men thought they would "eliminate" the competition so they attacked People's grocery, but the owners fought back, shooting one of the attackers. Moss, McDowell and Stewart were arrested, but a lynch-mob broke into the jail, dragged them away from town, and brutally murdered all of them.

Ida Wells  wrote in The Free Speech:

“The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. There is nothing we can do about the lynching now, as we are out-numbered and without arms. The white mob could help itself to ammunition without pay, but the order is rigidly enforced against the selling of guns to Negroes. There is therefore only one thing left to do; save our money and leave a town which will neither protect our lives and property, nor give us a fair trial in the courts, but takes us out and murders us in cold blood when accused by white persons.”

Many people took Wells' advice and left town; others in the Black community organized a boycott of white-owned businesses to try and stem the threat, the terror, of lynchings. Ida's newspaper office was destroyed as a result of her stories of the murder of her three friends and she opted to leave Memphis for Chicago, where she continued her blistering attacks on Southern injustices, especially through investigation to expose the fraudulent "reasons" given to lynch Black men, which by now had become a common occurrence.

In Chicago, she developed numerous African American women’s organizations, but she remained diligent in her anti-lynching crusade, writing Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases. She was also a tireless worker for women's right to vote and marched in the 1913 march for universal suffrage in Washington, D.C. Not able to tolerate injustice of any kind, Ida B. Wells, along with Jane Addams, successfully blocked the establishment of segregated schools in Chicago.

In 1895 Wells married the editor of one of Chicago's early Black newspapers, Attorney F. L. Barnett, and announced she would retire to the privacy of her home.. She didn’t stay retired for long; she continued to write and to organize, and in 1906 she, along with W. E.B. DuBois and others, further the Niagara Movement—a civil rights organization that fought against racial segregation and disenfranchisement for African Americans—and she was one of two African American women to sign "the call" to form the NAACP in 1909.

As late as 1930, disgusted by the nominees of the major parties to the state legislature, Wells-Barnett decided to run for the Illinois State legislature, making her one of the first Black women to run for public office in the United States.

A year later, she passed away after a lifetime crusading for justice.

I wonder what she might have said about a woman running for president in 2008, about a Black man becoming president in 2008 and I like to think she was smiling and saying:

"I told you so."

Meme Dump

Repost: Black History Month: Whitewashing Slavery

I've been telling friends around town, and those in Miami and California and other places, about my blog. Most have been supportive. But some, mostly here in Smallville, were a bit shocked that I, a white.....a pale white man--would write about Black history. And they remain confused even when I tell them about the man in the bank who didn't get Black History Month.

Everyone I've talked to says they learned all there is about Black history in school.

Then I came across this story, and I realized they haven't learned about Black history because it's being untaught, whitewashed, at our historical.

There's a museum in Raleigh, North Carolina, the Joel Lane Museum House [right] that was owned by a very wealthy, prominent Raleigh family who owned some 6,000 acres.

Oh yeah, they owned slaves, too; slaves who cooked and cleaned and worked in their fields, but the museum doesn't seem inclined to mention them. The folks who run the Joel Lane House Museum are, quote, "uncomfortable talking about the practices that allowed wealthy owners to prosper."

Imagine how the slaves must felt.

But if you're uncomfortable talking about the slaves who were bought and sold like farm goods, who worked in the fields from sun-up till sun-down all day, every day, all year, the slaves who lived in squalor so you could live in splendor, the slaves who fed your children and washed your sheets and tucked you in at night, by all means, leave them out of the story.

It's not like they were people, anyway.

And, apparently, this isn't a new thing. Apparently at many North Carolina plantations the talk of slaves and what they did and how they lived, is put aside for discussions on "architecture, furnishings and gardens," you know, important stuff.

This here's my favorite quote, from a woman named Belle Lang, who works at the Joel House Museum. She says, "It's a hard thing to talk about, because there's very little good you can say about it....It's just awkward. It's such a black period in our history."

Very little good you can say about it? Really Belle, because I thought slavery was great.

Capturing people in their own countries and piling them up in boats like living cargo, transporting them across the seas to be sold as household appliances and farm implements, to be beaten and sold and raped and treated like shit.

There isn't anything good to talk about? But, as you say Belle, and I'll forgive your pun, it was a "black period" in history.

And, I love this one, too: there are some of these plantation tours that present the image of the "happy slaves cared for by benevolent masters." At one such plantation, Darshana Hall Plantation, they are telling stories of lovely slave-owners hiring doctors to tend to their slaves and even giving them a pond so they can fish!

Slavery has been Disney-fied in North Carolina. The costumes! The music! the chains!

Hiring a doctor to tend to the slaves did not benefit the slaves, it benefited the owners. The same way you hire a veterinarian to check your horses and cows so you can make your money. Slaves were treated far worse than farm animals.

Meredith Hall, who owns Darshana, believes the story of slavery is important, but doesn't think all owners were cruel: "I think that there's a real misconception of slavery; it was a relative thing … This family tried to treat people well. They kept the families together. ... They had a pretty good reputation with regard to slavery."

Good reputation regarding the imprisoning of people to do your labor for pennies, to serve as concubines for pennies, to be bought and sold. Good reputation my ass.

Now, not all these tourist plantations are whitewashing slavery.

The Stagville Plantation [left], near Durham, saw a 100% increase in visitors from 2007 to 2008. But they make the story of slavery a major portion of the tour and of the discussion of plantation life in the Old South. Almost half the visitors to Stagville are black, and "[o]ne group came from Senegal to see where their ancestors were taken."

Can you imagine that same group going to the Joel Lane House, or Darshana, and discovering that, according to guides and guidebooks, slavery didn't exist at the plantation or, if it did, all were happy campers, loving a life in captivity where you weren't allowed education—lest you get too smart for your britches—and weren't allowed to vote, speak, think, o feel anything the master didn't want you to think or feel?

History is cyclical. Go back and look, and you'll see the same things happening over and over and over again, because we didn't learn from the mistakes. And if we continue to whitewash slavery, then the knowledge of it, the horrors of it, will disappear.

All the easier to bring it back.

from The News Observer

I Loathe February: Mom

I  remember many things about my Mom.

The Mom who baked things for school.

The Mom who made the best Clam Chowder on rainy winter days.

The Mom who painted.

The Mom who laughed.

The Mom who loved you no matter what.

The Mom who, as soon as Carlos and I moved in together, would introduce him as her son-in-law.

The Mom who was married to my Dad for over 50 years.

The Mom whose greatest day every year was Thanksgiving and her whole family was near.

The Mom who was a Nurse.

The Mom who loved to travel.

The Mom who taught me to love books.

I love my Mom.

I miss my Mom.

Every day.

Repost: Black History Month: Shirley Chisholm

In 1972, thirty-seven years before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, there was Shirley Chisholm. Black, Female. Running for president.

Shirley Chisholm was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1924, but was just three, when she was sent to live with her grandmother on a farm in Barbados. It was there that she received much of her primary education; the Barbadian school system stressed the traditional British teachings of reading, writing, and history. Chisholm credits much of her educational successes to this well-rounded early education.

Chisholm returned to New York when she was ten, during the height of the Great Depression. Life was not easy for the Chisholm’s in New York, and Shirley's parents sacrificed greatly for their eight children. Chisholm attended New York public schools and was able to compete well in the mainly white classrooms. She attended Girls' High School in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn and won tuition scholarships to several distinguished colleges. However, unable to afford the room and board, and at the urging of her parents ,she decided to live at home and attend Brooklyn College.

While studying to be a teacher, Chisholm became active in several campus and community groups, developed an interest in politics and learned the arts of organizing and fund-raising. She developed a deep resentment toward the role of women in local politics, which, at the time, consisted mostly of staying in the background and playing a secondary role to their male equals. Women were secretaries, and got the coffee, for men who ran for office. Chisholm, through campus politics and her work with the NAACP, found a way for her voice, her opinions, to be heard.

Graduating with honors from Brooklyn College in 1946, Chisholm began work as a nursery school teacher and later as a director of schools for early childhood education. She became politically, and vocally, active with the Democratic Party, earning a reputation as one who challenged the traditional roles of women, African Americans, and the poor. In 1949, she married Conrad Chisholm, and the couple settled in Brooklyn.

After a successful career as a teacher, Chisholm decided to run for the New York State Assembly. Her ideals were perfect for the times; it was the mid-60s, the civil rights movement in full swing, and all across America activists were working for equal civil rights for everyone, regardless of race. In 1964 Chisholm was elected to the assembly.

During her service in the assembly Chisholm sponsored fifty bills, but only eight passed. One of the successful bills she supported provided assistance for poor students to go on to higher education, while another provided employment insurance coverage for personal and domestic employees. Still another bill reversed a law that caused female teachers in New York to lose their tenure if they took maternity leave.

In 1968, Chisholm decided to run for the U.S. Congress. Although her opponent was the well-known civil rights leader James Farmer, Shirley Chisholm won the election and began a lengthy career in the U.S. House of Representatives.

As a Congresswoman, Chisholm focused her attention on the needs of her constituents, while serving on several House committees: Agriculture, Veterans' Affairs, Rules and Education, and Labor. When she was assigned to the Forestry Committee, Chisholm protested her appointment and said that she wanted to work on committees that dealt with issues that affected her district. Forestry issues had little or no importance to the people she represented in Bedford-Stuyvesant. During the Vietnam War, Chisholm was one of the first, and the most outspoken, to protest the amount of money being spent on defense, while social programs suffered. Chisholm argued that money should not be spent for war while many Americans were hungry, poorly educated, and without adequate housing.

Chisholm was also a staunch supporter of women's rights. Early in her career as a congresswoman, she took a stand on abortion and supported a woman's right to choose. She also spoke against traditional roles for women professionals, arguing that women were capable of entering many other professions. Black women especially, she felt, had been pushed into stereotypical roles, or conventional professions, such as maids and nannies; roles white women no longer wanted. Chisholm supported the idea that Black women needed to escape, not just by governmental aid, but also by self-effort. Her antiwar and women's liberation views made Chisholm a popular speaker on college campuses in the late 60s and early 70s.

In 1972 Chisholm decided to run for President. In addition to her interest in civil rights, she spoke out about the judicial system in the United States, police brutality, prison reform, gun control, drug abuse, among other topics. While Shirley Chisholm did not win the Democratic nomination, she did win an impressive 10 percent of the votes within the party. As a result of her candidacy, Chisholm was voted one of the ten most admired women in the world.

After her unsuccessful presidential campaign, Chisholm continued to serve in the House of Representatives until 1982. As a member of the Black Caucus, she was able to see the growth of black representation in the Congress grow.

In 1982, Shirley Chisholm announced her retirement from Congress.

While continuing her teaching after retiring from public life, Chisholm taught politics and women's studies at Mt. Holyoke College in Massachusetts; she was also the visiting scholar at Spelman College.

In 1987 she retired from teaching altogether.

Chisholm continued to be involved in politics by cofounding the National Political Congress of Black Women in 1984, working on Jesse Jackson's presidential campaigns in 1984 and 1988.

In 1993, President Clinton nominated Chisholm for the position of Ambassador to Jamaica, but Chisholm, because of declining health, turned down the nomination.

She was the nation's first Black congresswoman.

She was the nation's first Black presidential candidate.

She stood up for African Americans.

She stood up for the poor.

She stood up for women.

She fought against war.

She was a teacher.

She was a remarkable woman.

The Funny Papers

Michael de Adder, Rick McKee, Ella Baron, Mike Luckovich, Drew Sheneman, David Horsey, Pedro X Molina, Gary Huck, RJ Matson, Joep Bertrams, JD Crowe, Marc Murphy