I am not a fan of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. There, I said it! Now I realize that I am not ‘woke’ like so many others around me . . . and sure, you can call me what you wish, but I warn you — I am use to weaponized name calling. I do not like the activists racially toned Marxist socialism and I do not approve of their radical social strategy. Burning down
government buildings along with the economic lives of small-town shop owners is not a good moral ‘fit’ for me. Maybe it is for you. Of course, you can read the M4BL for yourself, just as I have, and come to your own conclusions, but I would suggest a sedative to calm your nerves before reading.
I am, however, a fan of Black History Month. It creates an intentional space in the year to
educate ourselves on the issues, stories and struggles of the black community for racial equality and hopefully be inspired to dialogue and action, whether personal or public. Black history is important history and so this month I have been doing my own reading on a few figures of the past that are a part of my larger reading interests — so this blog will be intentionally different from past ones. The two stories to come share a commonality, but more about that later.
Consider the inspiring story of Army Sgt William Harvey Carney, who on May 23, 1900,
became the first African American to receive the Medal of Honor in United States history.
Born into slavery, in time his family was redeemed and moved to Massachusetts. Carney wanted to give his life in service to God and His church but when the Civil War broke out, he determined that serving in the military to bring freedom to others was equally important.
In March of 1863 Carney was assigned to Company C, 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry Regiment — the Union Army’s first official black unit. On July 18 of that same year, Carney’s regiment led the charge on a sinister looking Fort Wagner near Charleston, South Carolina.
And sinister it was. Before the soldiers was a foreboding water filled ditch, 10 feet wide and five feet deep. Besides razor-sharp palmetto stakes (abatis) driven into the ground, there were buried land mines and fourteen cannons, including a 10-inch Columbiad, able to throw a 128 pound shell against any one who dared to threaten the fort walls, themselves a staggering 30 feet high.
In the light of the setting sun, the 54th advanced through the gates of hell and the deadly enfilade of multi-barreled Regua guns and churning smoke against a well prepared Confederate army. When the unit’s color guard was killed, just paces away from Carney, he quickly grabbed the falling regimental flag – a symbol of the Union, and leading the charge inspired others to follow.
The ensuing maelstrom and crush of battle was so intense that one survivor called it "a carnival of Death”.
“The genius of Dante could but faintly portray the horrors of that hell of fire and sulphurous smoke.”
Union Officer
Though terribly wounded himself he would later remark, "Boys, I only did my duty; the old flag never touched the ground!" Carney’s exemplary action, in spite of iron ball and cannister shot and his unswerving fidelity to the flag, contributed to Union forces ultimately winning the day, though not that day! On September 7, 1863, after two months of grueling siege work the Confederate garrison withdrew, abandoning the fort for fear of imminent loss and proving in clear tones that black soldiers were the fighting equals of any of their white counterparts.
Not many years later, in 1897, the 54th became a national legend and icon, memorialized by
Augustus Saint-Gaudens in his Shaw Memorial monument on Boston Common and later a 1960 poem by Robert Lowell and the 1989 movie ‘Glory’. I confess that even as I relive Carney’s selfless actions with the 54th , I get goosebumps!
“. . . don’t make them soldiers, because if you make them soldiers, if they can stand on the field of battle with white men — if that is true, then the whole theory of slavery is wrong, and this Confederacy cannot endure.”
Confederate General Harold Cobb to Jefferson Davis
More recently I have been reading about another figure that emerged prior the American Civil War. Yale University historian and Pulitzer-prize winner, David W. Blight’s book, Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom, comes the masterful, breath-taking story of a slave . . . turned fugitive . . . turned freeman . . . turned orator . . . turned abolitionist . . . turned ambassador who become the most important African-American intellect of the 19th century and a tireless advocate for black civil and political rights.
Blight’s book, a life-time in the making, is compelling and absorbing reading for anyone
interested in how “the long and dark history” (Douglass) of the violent injustices of race and
slavery became the seed-bed for, as one described it, “a lyrical prophet of freedom, natural
rights and human equality”. Perhaps I can whet your appetite here for just a brief moment.
The beginnings of this truly great American story originated just yards away from the muddy banks of the Tuckahoe River, itself located across Chesapeake Bay on the Eastern shore of Maryland, when “Frederick Augustus [Washington Bailey], son of Harriet, Feby. 1818” was born, one of thirty slaves owned by Aaron Anthony, a brutal “old master.” Only after escaping to freedom did Frederick change his last name to Douglass.
Douglass never knew who his father was and his memory of his mother he says, “is scanty”.
Though she had seven children, like many slave women, she was hired out to other farms,
working long days in the fields and when possible travelling long into the night to see her
children living miles away. Douglass remarks that he had never seen his mother in daylight. Not long after being taken to the Wye House to live, his mother died. He was seven.
“I take few steps in life, without feeling her presence; but the image is mute, and I have
no striking words of her treasured up”
At the Wye plantation, Douglass discloses that he was introduced to “the realities of slavery” — dropped off to a new future, one where he endured abuse at the hands of the plantation’s old, violent and lecherous overseer, Anthony; a place where those with power committed crimes with “as much impunity as upon the deck of a pirate ship”. It was during these years, living most days “in a state of nudity”, using an oyster shell as his spoon and sleeping in a closet, that Douglass discovered the magic of words and in time would fully master his Master’s language.
“Everybody in the south wants the privilege of whipping somebody else.”
Frederick Douglass
In 1826 Douglass was sent to Baltimore, the largest concentration of free persons of color in the United States (14,000), to live and serve the family of Hugh and Sophia Auld. It was here that he received perhaps his greatest gift, a gift unlawful for blacks in Maryland — the gift of literacy.
His first book was the Bible and the text was the Book of Job where the main character was a metaphor for his own life. Later Douglass discovered and came to own his own copy of ‘The Columbian Orator’ with its powerful dream-like words ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’ and ‘tyranny’. Later he would write:
“The silver trumpet of freedom had aroused my soul to eternal wakefulness. Freedom
now appeared, to disappear no more forever. It was heard in every sound, and seen in
every thing. It was ever present to torment me . . . I saw nothing without seeing it, I
heard nothing without hearing it, and felt nothing without feeling it. It looked from every
star, it smiled in every calm, breathed in every wind, and moved in every storm.”
(Bondage, 118-119; Narrative, 68-69)
It is said that preachers fascinated Douglass, especially as they stirred the hearts and minds of others with clarity and honesty. It was in his teenage years in Baltimore that he had his spiritual awakening, a conversion to “faith in Jesus Christ, as the Redeemer, Friend and Savior of those who diligently seek him”. Though later in life his faith would be sorely tested, it was a gift he would never lose. I can only imagine the hypocrisy Douglass must have seen when his owners prayed loudly at meal times while he was the daily object of Methodist cruelty.
“I have been the slave of religious and irreligious slaveholders, and … I regard the greatest calamity to be that of belonging to a religious slaveholder. I have found them the most mean, the most exacting, the most cruel.”
Frederick Douglass, London, England September 4, 1846
The religious hypocrisy did not stop there. When Douglass turned sixteen, he was sent toward Covey, a savage, sadistic professional slave breaker with the “fierceness of a wolf”. Covey would whip the young slave mercilessly throughout the day and have him sing hymns during family devotions in the evening. Yes, the church and the slave plantation stood together.
Then came September 3, 1838, the day Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey made his escape! He was twenty years of age. Dressed to look like a sailor, and carrying ‘free papers’ given to him by a retired black sailor called Stanley — Douglass boarded a train and began, as Blight offers, “the most famous escape in the annals of American slavery.”
“I appear before you this evening as a thief and a robber. I stole this head, these limbs, this body from my master and ran off with them.”
Frederick Douglass, (on his escape from slavery)
To read the rest of Douglass’ life through the lens of David Blight’s book is to be inspired -
body, soul and spirit! Blight has excelled in giving his readers never before word pictures of
Douglass, the master orator in his tireless work against segregation, his support for women’s suffrage, his fight for emancipation and his strong opposition to socialism. The ideas and principles that this ‘Father of the Civil Rights Movement’ articulated before and after the American Civil War have made him the most feted black American in history, possibly surpassing, even that of Dr. Martin Luther King.
Did you know that in 1888, during the Republican National Convention, he became the 1st African American to receive a vote for President of the United States? No, it was not Obama!
There is so much to admire about Douglass, but perhaps I admire most his use of words to drive home his conscience to the American public and politicians. Precise, poignant, and hauntingly accurate in description and gifted with a voice that was rich with the sonorousness of its cadences, Douglass was a virtuoso, like Cicero and Lincoln.
Consider his “What to a slave is the 4th of July?” speech delivered in 1852, what some have
called the greatest antislavery speech — ever!
“What to a slave is the 4th of July?” I answer: “a day that reveals to him, more than
all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
“He [Negro] has been a citizen just three times in the history of this government, and it has always been in time of trouble. In time of trouble, we are citizens. Shall we be citizens in war, and aliens in peace? Would that be just?”
Frederick Douglass
Perhaps even more moving are the riveting words Douglass spoke at the Annual Meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, days before the end of the Civil War. Though I readily admit I do a dis-service both to Douglass and you for not citing the speech in its entirety, I ask your indulgence.
"Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists,
“What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do
nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! I am not for tying or fastening them on the tree in any way, except by nature’s plan, and if they will not stay there, let them fall. And if the Negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also.
All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
If you see him on his way to school, let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him
going to the dinner table at a hotel, let him go! If you see him going to the ballot- box,
let him alone, don’t disturb him! If you see him going into a work-shop, just let him
alone — your interference is doing him a positive injury.
Gen. Banks’ ‘preparation’ is of a piece with this attempt to prop up the Negro. Let him fall if he cannot stand alone! If the Negro cannot live by the line of eternal justice, so beautifully pictured to you in the illustration used by Mr. Phillips, the fault will not be yours, it will be his who made the Negro, and established that line for his government. Let him live or die by that. If you will only untie his hands, and give him a chance, I think he will live.”
I am stirred by Douglass’s words, for the mortal sin of slavery is a terrible thing for which
there can be no compromise by any son or daughter of Adam. I trust you feel the same.
I indicated that the stories of Army Sgt William Harvey Carney and Frederick Douglass share a common connect. Frederick Douglass’ sons, Lewis Henry and Charles Remon enlisted in the Union army and joined that same famous 54th Massachusetts Regiment.
Lewis fought at the battle of Fort Wagner along side William Carney as they stormed the parapets together. On the eve of battle, Lewis wrote to his wife Amelia, giving us insight into the great cause for which he was fighting: “Should I fall in the next fight killed or wounded I hope to fall with my face to the foe.” Difficult to imagine that folks questioned the bravery of the 54th because of race, yet such was their prejudice.
It is Black History Month! Do not let it pass by without having some personal encounter with the great stories and noble characters of African American history, as they struggled to see Jefferson’s 1776 words fulfilled in their lifetime, “… that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” We are certainly not there yet! “Only Saying...”
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