Showing posts with label Black History Month. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Black History Month. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 21, 2019

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives- ***Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- James Baldwin’s “Going To Meet The Man”- Come Ready, Brother

Click on the headline to link to a "YouTube" film clip of "James Baldwin: The Price Of The Ticket."

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book Review

Going To Meet The Man, James Baldwin, Vintage International, New York, 1995


I have been, as is my wont when I get “hooked” on some writer, on something of a James Baldwin tear of late, reading or re-reading everything I can get my hands on. At the time of this review I have already looked at “Go Tell It On The Mountain”, the play “Blues For Mr. Charlie”, “Tell Me How Long The Train’s Been Gone”, and “The Fire Next Time”. Those works, well written and powerful reminded me of why I was crazy to read everything that Baldwin wrote when I was a kid. I do not recall then having read any short stories by Baldwin, at least none that were memorable like one of the stories, “Sonny’s Blues”, in this “Going To Meet The Man” compilation.

Now great writers, and I hope at this point in our common American literary experiences no one need argue James Baldwin’s place in the canon, sometimes are capable of writing both great novels and short stories. Baldwin seems to be in that category, although off of this selection it may be a bit premature to make that judgment because most of the material appears to have been “first drafts” of later, full novelistic treatments. For example, “The Morning, The Evening, So Soon”, the subject matter of which is the fame of a expatriate black actor-singer who despite that fame is still subject to all the racial taunts and tensions of a stay-at-home performer. (I am writing this review just after the passing away of the pioneer black singer/actress/black liberation fighter, Lena Horne.) That subject gets fuller treatment in "Tell Me How Long The Train's Been Gone."

Other subjects that get a preliminary workout here are the deep religious experience of Baldwin’s fundamentalist Protestant youth, “The Outing” that will get a full-blown treatment in “Go Tell It On The Mountain.” Of course, the subject of homosexuality, and bi-sexuality, are obliquely presented in several stories, Baldwin, along with Gore Vidal being something of American literary pioneers, if not honored as such at the time, on the subject. And of course, as with all of Baldwin serious work, we are treated to various manifestations of the ever present “race” question; interracial sex and marriage; degrees of blackness; white racism; black attitudes toward white racism; and the purposeful insularity of the white world in dealing, or nor dealing, with these questions, then and now.

What you want to get this particular compilation for though, as I mentioned above, is for “Sonny’s Blues”. Now it is almost impossible to find any writer, any American writer at least, worth his or he salt who came of literary age in the 1950s who was not influenced, even if only around the edges, by “be-bop” jazz. Baldwin is no exception, although his race is not the only reason for that statement. The rhythm of the cool, abstract, high white note “be-bop jazz” that sent audiences into a frenzy of delight are a simple companion to the sparser, less lyrical literary beat of 1950’s writing. Mailer, Kerouac, and most of the New York intellectual crew feasted, and feasted well, on that inner sound. But, nobody got it righter than James Baldwin in “Sonny’s Blues.”

What seemingly starts out as another one of Baldwin’s epistles on, literally, brotherly love; that of two brothers, one, Sonny, several years younger than the other, who “grew up” in Harlem, grew away from each other by choice or circumstances,, reunited when now famed jazz pianist brother, Sonny, got caught up trying to reach that “high white note” via the “horse” drug connection that also has been associated with bop, turns into one of the best expositions of what jazz meant to the listener, and to the artist struggling to find his inner voice, that I have ever read.

The last several pages, in counterpoint to the first several, are truly lyrical as Baldwin puts in words on the printed page what a struggle it was for Sonny, and his fellow band members in New York cafe society, to “make the gods listen." And to make the heavens cry out for the high side of the human experience. You or I could try to write such lines for two hundred years and we could not get it right. Kudos, James.

Friday, May 03, 2019

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives- ***Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Works Of James Baldwin-"Go Tell It On The Mountain"

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives-   ***Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Works Of James Baldwin-"Go Tell It On The Mountain"

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for James Baldwin's novel, "Go Tell It On The Mountain".

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book Review

Go Tell It On The Mountain, James Baldwin, Dell Publishing Co., New York, 1952


One of the side events of the 2008 American presidential elections, the one that resulted in the election of the first black president, was the widespread exposure of the role of the black church as a central social, political and religious institution in the black community, for good or evil. That centrality, the subject matter of black writer James Baldwin’s first novel back in the early 1950s and from there carried back by him to his youth in the 1930s, is longstanding. Moreover, the black church and its activist clergy, despite it long role as adhesive, healer, protector and face of the black community is not an unambiguous legacy as Baldwin, very wickedly, and profoundly demonstrates here.

Baldwin uses the old tried and true novelistic devise of using a two-tier plot structure to delve into the lives, the loves, the likes and lies of two generations of a black family, a family that although it found itself in the North, in the black metropolis of Harlem, had deep and continuing roots in the old worn-out land of the South that most of the characters fled, willingly or unwillingly, at some point. The first tier discusses the present status of most of the main figures, including the transparently autobiographical John and his “father”, Gabriel, a born-again Christian preacher, a character not unknown in the black community. The second takes place through personal recollections in a store front, primitive Christian church, also not an unknown phenomenon in the black community, or the white one for that matter.

The details of the various relationships of the very mixed clan can best be appreciated by the reader. What I would note here, as I have noted elsewhere when discussing James Baldwin’s work, is his ear for the various voices of the black community even though he himself seemed, by the facts of his biography to have been fairly removed from the mainstream of the black community. He clearly knows “religion” and the role it plays in the community. Also of the teutonic struggle between the old ways of the de jure segregated South and the de facto segregated North. While I am more devoted to the works of Langston Hughes as an exemplar of black literary blues, James too knows that condition. James can sing those chords. And the late Norman Mailer was not wrong when he noted that his contemporary, Baldwin, in 1950s America was “one of our few writers”. I will say amen to that.

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives - Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Works Of James Baldwin-Blues For Mr. Charlie

The Fire This Time-In Honor Of James Baldwin Whose Time Has Come Again-From The Archives -  Books To While Away The Class Struggle By- The Works Of James Baldwin-Blues For Mr. Charlie

Recently I have begun to post entries under the headline- “Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By” and "Films To While Away The Class Struggle By"-that will include progressive and labor-oriented songs and films that might be of general interest to the radical public. I have decided to do the same for some books that may perk that same interest under the title in this entry’s headline. Markin

Book/Play Review

Blues For Mr.Charlie, James Baldwin, Dell Publishing Co., New York, 1964


I have written a number of commentaries in this space on the subject of the heinous murder by “white trash”, allegedly for whistling while black at a white woman, of black teenager Emmett Till down in small town Mississippi in 1955. The firestorm raised over the horrible deed, including the not guilty verdict by an all white jury, by his mother and others in the wake of the verdict did much to galvanize Northern opinion, black and white, for the then brewing black civil rights struggle that would dominate the first half of the 1960s. Mississippi put the world on notice that not only adult black men were subject to the “white is right, blacks get back” free-fire zone but black children as well.

Working such an inflammatory subject into literary form would seem to be right up the alley for one of the premier black writers of the period, James Baldwin. Moreover, unlike some of the more exclusively literary types who hibernated in New York during the Eisenhower 1950s, Baldwin was a committed and articulate advocate of black rights. And a voice for righteous black rage, although not necessarily of a revolutionary bent. Thus, when prodded by the subsequently slain Mississippi civil rights leader, Medgar Evers, to do a treatment on the Till case, Baldwin had to step up to the plate and throw some fire into the flames.

Rather than attempt a novelistic treatment which could, on reflection, diffuse the emotional impact of the subject behind much eloquent verbiage Baldwin created a three act play which, as his stage directions indicate, would do more than a novel to bring home the intense racial animosities that centuries of racial tension had engendered. Although some of the characters seem like stock figures now: the black "Uncle Toms" who smoothed the way for the white power structure; the “white trash” who had no stake in the society except not to be, mercifully, black; the uppity black “agitator” who had been to the North and learned Northern de facto segregation ways there which provided just a little more elbow room if no less danger; the black clergy preaching, ever preaching, forbearance; the thoughtful black woman who knows that the life expectancy of a black man, and hence part of her happiness can sometimes be counted in days; and, the sympathetic "liberal" white Southern who also held the system together by not going beyond well defined bounds that would upset his fellow whites, in high place and low.

Hey, we all know what the jury verdict was in the Till case. We also know even before turning the first page of this play what the verdict will be in the death of the black man by a white in this case , modeled as it is on the Till case. We also know this, that over fifty years after the event been no real justice in the Till case. We know as well that James Baldwin, if he were alive today, might very well still be able to write about some current Till case. And, finally, we know this anytime the racial question in Mississippi in the 1950s and 1960s, or later, came up- Nina Simone may have said it more lyrically than Baldwin, perhaps, but they both make the same point. Mississippi goddam.

Sunday, April 14, 2019

*The Civil War: The Second American Revolution- Honor Abraham Lincoln!-An Encore Guest Commentary-

Click On Title To Link To Gary Wills' "New York Review Of Books" Article Entitled "Lincoln's Black History" For A Different Take on Mr. Lincoln.

February Is Black History Month

Guest Commentary-An Encore Repost On Abraham Lincoln's Birthday

Workers Vanguard No. 938
5 June 2009


The Civil War: The Second American Revolution

Honor Abraham Lincoln!

By Bert Mason


The following was written as a contribution for a Spartacist League internal educational series.

February 12 marked the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Since the days of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, revolutionaries have held Lincoln in high esteem. His world-historic achievement—the single most important event in American history
—was to lead the North in a horrendously bloody civil war that smashed the Southern Confederacy and abolished slavery in the United States. In “Comments on the North American Events” (7 October 1862), Marx wrote with characteristic eloquence:

“Lincoln is a sui generis figure in the annals of history. He has no initiative, no idealistic impetus, no cothurnus [dignified, somewhat stilted style of ancient tragedy], no historical trappings. He gives his most important actions always the most commonplace form. Other people claim to be ‘fighting for an idea,’ when it is for them a matter of square feet of land. Lincoln, even when he is motivated by an idea, talks about ‘square feet.’ He sings the bravura aria of his part hesitatively, reluctantly and unwillingly, as though apologising for being compelled by circumstances ‘to act the lion.’…

“Lincoln is not the product of a popular revolution. This plebeian, who worked his way up from stone-breaker to Senator in Illinois, without intellectual brilliance, without a particularly outstanding character, without exceptional importance—an average person of good will, was placed at the top by the interplay of the forces of universal suffrage unaware of the great issues at stake. The new world has never achieved a greater triumph than by this demonstration that, given its political and social organisation, ordinary people of good will can accomplish feats which only heroes could accomplish in the old world!”

Many opponents of revolutionary Marxism, from black nationalists to reformist leftists, have made a virtual cottage industry out of the slander that “Honest Abe” was a racist or even a white-supremacist. The reformist who impugns Lincoln for his bourgeois conceptions, which in fact reflected his time, place and position, does not hesitate for a moment to ally with unctuous “progressives” today who praise “diversity” while fighting tooth and nail to maintain the racial oppression and anti-immigrant chauvinism that are endemic to this most brutal of imperialist countries.

Take the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP). In Cold Truth, Liberating Truth: How This System Has Always Oppressed Black People, And How All Oppression Can Finally Be Ended, a pamphlet originally published in 1989 and reprinted in Revolution (17 February 2008), the RCP writes:

“It is a lie that ‘Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves’ because he was morally outraged over slavery. Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves (and not all the slaves at first, but only those in the states that had joined the southern Confederacy) because he saw that it would be impossible to win the Civil War against that southern Confederacy without freeing these slaves and allowing them to fight in the Union army.

“Lincoln spoke and acted for the bourgeoisie—the factory-owners, railroad-owners, and other capitalists centered in the North—and he conducted the war in their interests” (emphasis in original).

Aside from the scurrilous suggestion that Lincoln was not an opponent of slavery who abhorred that “peculiar institution,” the RCP rejects Marxist materialism in favor of liberal moralizing, denying that against the reactionary class of slaveholders and the antiquated slave system, the Northern capitalists represented a revolutionary class whose victory was in the interests of historical progress. Presenting the goals of the North and South as equally rapacious, the RCP neither sides with the North nor characterizes its victory as the consummation of a social revolution.

Indeed, the Civil War—the Second American Revolution—was the last of the great bourgeois revolutions, which began with the English Civil War of the 17th century and found their culmination in the French Revolution of the 18th. For the RCP, however, there is no contradiction whatsoever in condemning Lincoln as a representative of the 19th-century American bourgeoisie while doing everything in its power to embrace bourgeois liberalism today—from its antiwar coalitions with capitalist spokesmen to its implicit support for the Democratic Party and Barack Obama in the name of “drive out the Bush regime.”

Abraham Lincoln: Bourgeois Revolutionary

In the preface to his 1859 book, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Karl Marx wrote that in studying the transformation of the whole immense superstructure that arises from revolutionary changes in the economic foundation:

“It is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic—in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social formation is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.”

The American Civil War was a bourgeois revolution, and Lincoln was both bourgeois and revolutionary at the same time—with all the contradictions this implies. Because the task of the Second American Revolution was to eradicate an antiquated social system based on chattel slavery and erect in its place the dominion of industrial capitalism based on wage labor from one end of the North American landmass to the other, it could not eradicate every form of class and social oppression—the hallmark of all propertied classes throughout the history of class society. As materialists, Marxists do not judge historical figures primarily based on the ideas in their heads but on how well they fulfilled the tasks of their epoch. While Lincoln had bourgeois conceptions—how could it be otherwise!—he was uniquely qualified to carry out the task before him, and in the last analysis he rose to the occasion as no other. That is the essence of his historical greatness.

While bestowing begrudging praise on Lincoln’s achievements with the left hand, the leftist critic often takes it back with the right. Lincoln, the critic will admit, opposed slavery; he came to see that a hard war was necessary and prepared to issue his Emancipation Proclamation. However, the critic is more concerned with Lincoln’s attitudes than his deeds: Lincoln was not John Brown, he was not Frederick Douglass, he was not Marx and Engels, he was not even as left-wing as his Treasury secretary Salmon P. Chase. For example, while Lincoln agreed with John Brown in thinking slavery wrong, he could not excuse Brown’s violence, bloodshed and “acts of treason” in attempting to seize the arsenal at Harper’s Ferry to spark a slave rebellion on the eve of the Civil War. Finally, the critic will argue, while Marx and Engels from 3,000 miles away knew that the American Civil War was about slavery, Lincoln and the Republicans sought to ignore the root of the problem and wage the conflict on constitutional grounds to save the Union. Such facts are indisputable, but they must be seen in their historical context.

In his Abraham Lincoln (2009), James M. McPherson remarks:

“Only after years of studying the powerful crosscurrents of political and military pressures on Lincoln did I come to appreciate the skill with which he steered between the numerous shoals of conservatism and radicalism, free states and slave states, abolitionists, Republicans, Democrats, and border-state Unionists to maintain a steady course that brought the nation to victory—and the abolition of slavery—in the end. If he had moved decisively against slavery in the war’s first year, as radicals pressed him to do, he might well have fractured his war coalition, driven border-state Unionists over to the Confederacy, lost the war, and witnessed the survival of slavery for at least another generation.”

Facing innumerable pressures when the war broke out in April 1861, Lincoln grappled with how to respond to them. But the pressures—as intense as they were—were not merely strategic in nature. As the president of a constitutional republic, Lincoln believed that it was his duty to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. While he detested slavery, he believed it was not his right to abolish it. That ideology flowed from the whole bourgeois constitutional framework of the United States.

In the first year of the war, Lincoln pursued a policy of conciliating the four border slave states—Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri—in an effort to retain their loyalty to the Union. Marx and Engels criticized this policy because it weakened the Union’s war effort and emboldened the slaveholders. However, did this policy stem from disdain for the enslaved black masses or from a desire on Lincoln’s part to let bygones be bygones—i.e., coexist with the slave South? No. It flowed from the whole previous history of the United States. In 1776, 1800 and even as late as 1820, the North and South had similar values and institutions. With the Industrial Revolution, however, the North surged ahead in virtually every area—railroads, canals, literacy, inventions—while the South stagnated. Yet the two regions remained part of the same nation, setting the stage for compromise after compromise. For a whole historical period, Lincoln was hardly alone in seeking détente. In 1848, even the more left-wing Salmon Chase rejected the view espoused by radicals in his Liberty Party that the Constitution empowered the government to abolish slavery in the states, preferring a bloc with antislavery Whigs and Democrats that would agitate merely for keeping slavery out of the territories.

While he conciliated the border states for a time, Lincoln stood firm against secession, countering his cabinet members’ willingness to compromise in the face of the Confederacy’s belligerence. After his fateful election in 1860, which set the stage for the secession of the Southern states and the Civil War, Lincoln reined in his future secretary of state William H. Seward for advocating support to the Crittenden Compromise, an attempt to allow slavery to flourish anywhere south of 36°30'. Then Lincoln rejected Seward’s proposal to abandon Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina, harbor. Had it not been for Lincoln’s relentless efforts to goad his officers to fight and his stubborn support for Ulysses S. Grant in the face of substantial Northern opposition, the North might not have vanquished the slavocracy in that time and place. Lincoln’s resoluteness, his iron determination to achieve victory and his refusal to stand down to the Confederacy are hallmarks of his revolutionary role and enduring testaments to his greatness.

Borrowing from today’s terminology, one could argue that Lincoln began as a reformist, believing that the reactionary social system in the South could be pressured into change and that the institution of slavery would eventually wither on the vine. But he underwent a radical shift when bloody experience in the crucible of war—combined with the mass flight of the slaves to the Union lines—taught him that the nation could be preserved only by means of social revolution. In contrast to this remarkable personal transformation, the Great French Revolution required a series of tumultuous stages to reach its revolutionary climax, a protracted process that was marked by the domination of different and antagonistic groupings—from the Girondins to the Montagnards to the Committee of Public Safety. The Mensheviks were also reformists, but they didn’t become revolutionaries but counterrevolutionaries.

Was Lincoln a Racist?

Although it is beyond dispute that Lincoln occasionally appealed to racist consciousness and expressed racist opinions, the record is not as cut-and-dried as the typical liberal moralist or his leftist cousin will assert. Before a proslavery crowd in Charleston, Illinois, during the fourth debate with Stephen A. Douglas on 18 September 1858, Lincoln declared:

“I will say, then, that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say, in addition to this, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.”

Yet two months earlier in Chicago, Lincoln had insisted, “Let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man, this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position; discarding our standard that we have left us. Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout this land, until we shall once more stand up declaring that all men are created equal.”

However, more important than these words were Lincoln’s actions in defense of the slaves, the freedmen and the black troops in the Union Army. For example, in the autumn of 1864, pressure mounted for Lincoln to consummate a prisoner exchange that would exclude black soldiers. Some Republican leaders warned that Union men “will work and vote against the President, because they think sympathy with a few negroes, also captured, is the cause of a refusal” to exchange prisoners. Ignoring these threats, Lincoln’s agent in the exchange negotiations asserted, “The wrongs, indignities, and privations suffered by our soldiers would move me to consent to anything to procure their exchange, except to barter away the honor and the faith of the Government of the United States, which has been so solemnly pledged to the colored soldiers in its ranks” (James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom [1988]).

That’s not all. Confronting growing defeatist sentiment in the North, the grim prospect of defeat in the impending 1864 presidential elections and a cacophony of demands to abandon the Emancipation Proclamation from Democrats and even staunch Republicans, Lincoln stood firm. In response to fulminations such as “Tens of thousands of white men must yet bite the dust to allay the negro mania of the President,” Lincoln responded, “If they [the black soldiers] stake their lives for us they must be prompted by the strongest motive—even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.” Emphasizing the point, he maintained, “There have been men who have proposed to me to return to slavery the black warriors of Port Hudson & Olustee to their masters to conciliate the South. I should be damned in time & in eternity for so doing. The world shall know that I will keep my faith to friends & enemies, come what will.”

In the last months of the war, the emancipation of the slaves began to raise broader political and economic questions. When reports filtered northward of General William Tecumseh Sherman’s indifference toward the thousands of freedmen that had attached themselves to his army, Lincoln’s war secretary Edwin Stanton traveled to Savannah, Georgia, in January 1865 to talk with Sherman and consult with black leaders. As a result of Stanton’s visit, Sherman issued “Special Field Orders, No. 15,” which granted the freed slaves rich plantation land belonging to former slaveholders.

Indignantly protesting that Lincoln valued the restoration of the Union over the emancipation of the slaves, the RCP cites his famous letter to Horace Greeley of 22 August 1862, which declared: “My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that.” The RCP neglects to add that a month later, on September 22, Lincoln issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. Commenting on this momentous event, Marx called Lincoln’s manifesto abolishing slavery “the most important document in American history since the establishment of the Union, tantamount to the tearing up of the old American Constitution.”

What was more important for Lincoln’s cause, Union or emancipation? The very question betrays a subjective idealist approach that ignores the objective reality of the time. The two tasks had become inextricably intertwined in the reality of a war that pitted a modern industrial capitalist mode of production in the North against an archaic agrarian slave system in the South. Restoration of the Union required emancipation, and emancipation required a Union victory. For embodying and melding those two great tasks, Lincoln will forever occupy an honored place in history.

Much Ado About Colonization

An oft-repeated theme among Lincoln’s detractors is that the 16th president—a racist to his bones, they assert—was dedicated above all else to deporting the freed black slaves to distant shores. The most caustic purveyor of this timeworn slander is Lerone Bennett Jr., executive editor emeritus of Ebony and the author of Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln’s White Dream (2000). Bennett shrieks that “Abraham Lincoln’s deepest desire was to deport all black people and create an all-white nation. It’s—sounds like a wild idea now and it is a wild idea, but from about 1852 until his death, he worked feverishly to try to create deportation plans, colonization plans to send black people either to Africa or to...South America, or to the islands of the sea” (interview with Brian Lamb, 10 September 2000, www.booknotes.org/transcript/?programID=1581).

Lincoln did not invent the idea of colonization. Schemes to remove black people from the United States went back to the American Colonization Society, which was founded in 1816. Very much a product of his times, Lincoln was long a supporter of colonization because he believed that the ideal of racial harmony in America was impossible. Although reprehensible and misguided, Lincoln’s colonization schemes were motivated not by racist antipathy toward black people but by his perceptions of enduring white racism in America. In the course of meeting with black leaders at the White House on 14 July 1862, Lincoln declared:

“You and we are different races. We have between us a broader difference than exists between almost any other two races. Whether it is right or wrong I need not discuss, but this physical difference is a great disadvantage to us both, as I think your race suffer very greatly, many of them by living among us, while ours suffer from your presence. In a word, we suffer on each side. If this is admitted, it affords a reason at least why we should be separated….

“Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people. But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race. You are cut off from many of the advantages which the other race enjoy. The aspiration of men is to enjoy equality with the best, when free; but on this broad continent not a single man of your race is made the equal of a single man of ours. Go where you are treated the best, and the ban is still upon you.”

— cited in “Report on Colonization and Emigration, Made to the Secretary of the Interior, by the Agent of Emigration” (1862)

It is therefore not surprising that Lincoln advocated colonization most strenuously at the very moment that he was preparing his Provisional Emancipation Proclamation following the watershed Union victory at Antietam, which Marx said “decided the fate of the American Civil War.” With his colonization proposals, Lincoln sought to sweeten what many whites considered the bitter pill of black emancipation.

However indefensible the idea of colonization was, Lincoln insisted that it must be voluntary. Even then, blacks overwhelmingly rejected colonization as both racist and impractical, holding anticolonization meetings in Chicago and Springfield to protest it. Indeed, Frederick Douglass declared in September 1862: “Mr. Lincoln assumes the language and arguments of an itinerant Colonization lecturer, showing all his inconsistencies, his pride of race and blood, his contempt for Negroes and his canting hypocrisy.” One of the administration’s two concrete moves to implement colonization, the Île à Vache fiasco, led to the deaths of dozens of freed blacks. However, when Lincoln learned of the disaster, he did the honorable thing and ordered the Navy to return the survivors to the United States.

Besides free blacks and Radical Abolitionists, many other contemporaries of Lincoln were incensed at his colonization efforts. Publications like Harper’s Weekly considered the proposal to resettle millions of people to distant shores insane. In Eric Foner’s words, “For what idea was more utopian and impractical than this fantastic scheme?” (“Lincoln and Colonization,” in Our Lincoln: New Perspectives on Lincoln and His World, ed., Eric Foner [2008]).

By the waning days of the war, Lincoln’s utterances on colonization—if not his attitude—had evolved. In a diary entry dated 1 July 1864, Lincoln’s secretary John Hay remarked, “I am glad that the President has sloughed off the idea of colonization.” But much more to the point than attempts to decipher Lincoln’s attitudes is the indisputable fact that Lincoln’s policies on the ground were progressively rendering his colonization schemes a dead letter. Foner writes that in 1863 and 1864, Lincoln began to consider the role that blacks would play in a post-slavery America. He showed particular interest in efforts that were under way to establish schools for blacks in the South Carolina Sea Islands and in how former slaves were being put to work on plantations in the Mississippi Valley. In August 1863, he instructed General Nathaniel P. Banks to establish a system in Louisiana during wartime Reconstruction in which “the two races could gradually live themselves out of their old relation to each other, and both come out better prepared for the new.”

Historian Richard N. Current wrote, “By the end of war, Lincoln had abandoned the idea of resettling free slaves outside the United States. He had come to accept the fact that Negroes, as a matter of justice as well as practicality, must be allowed to remain in the only homeland they knew, given education and opportunities for self-support, and started on the way to complete assimilation into American society” (cited at “Mr. Lincoln and Freedom,” www.mrlincolnandfreedom.org). Indeed, on 11 April 1865, following Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, Lincoln gave a speech in which he declared that literate blacks and black Union Army veterans should have the right to vote in a reconstructed Union—an early step toward the 14th Amendment and citizenship for the freed slaves.

A dishonest charlatan that considers Lincoln no better than Hitler, Lerone Bennett brings the very concept of scholarship into disrepute. In disgust at Bennett’s diatribes, one critic, Edward Steers Jr., sarcastically titled his review, “Great Emancipator or Grand Wizard?” And McPherson wrote that while Lincoln “was not a radical abolitionist, he did consider slavery morally wrong, and seized the opportunity presented by the war to move against it. Bennett fails to appreciate the acuity and empathy that enabled Lincoln to transcend his prejudices and to preside over the greatest social revolution in American history, the liberation of four million slaves” (“Lincoln the Devil,” New York Times, 27 August 2000).

Honor Lincoln— Finish the Civil War!

At times, Frederick Douglass was highly critical of Lincoln’s moderation and his relegation of black people to the status of what he called “step-children.” But Douglass also saw another side of the 16th president. In his autobiography, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1882), the great abolitionist wrote of his meeting with Lincoln at the White House in 1864:

“The increasing opposition to the war, in the North, and the mad cry against it, because it was being made an abolition war, alarmed Mr. Lincoln, and made him apprehensive that a peace might be forced upon him which would leave still in slavery all who had not come within our lines. What he wanted was to make his proclamation as effective as possible in the event of such a peace.… What he said on this day showed a deeper moral conviction against slavery than I had ever seen before in anything spoken or written by him. I listened with the deepest interest and profoundest satisfaction, and, at his suggestion, agreed to undertake the organizing of a band of scouts, composed of colored men, whose business should be somewhat after the original plan of John Brown, to go into the rebel States, beyond the lines of our armies, and carry the news of emancipation, and urge the slaves to come within our boundaries.”

Rather than weigh the “good” Lincoln against the “bad” in search of the golden mean, Marxists must seek to understand that he was a bourgeois politician in a time of war and revolution—“a big, inconsistent, brave man,” in the words of W.E.B. Du Bois (cited in Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Was Lincoln a Racist?” The Root, available at www.theroot.com/views/was-lincoln-racist).

With the election of Barack Obama as America’s first black president, bourgeois media pundits are acting as if he is the reincarnation of Abraham Lincoln. Billboards show a huge portrait of Lincoln with Obama’s face superimposed on it. Obama takes the presidential oath on Lincoln’s Bible. Liberal students go a step further, preferring Obama over Lincoln because Lincoln, they assert, was a racist who would have disapproved of a black president. In fact, U.S. imperialism’s current Commander-in-Chief has as much in common with the bourgeois revolutionary Abraham Lincoln as British prime minister Gordon Brown has with the great English revolutionary Oliver Cromwell or French president Nicolas Sarkozy has with the French revolutionary Maximilien Robespierre.

In condemning Lincoln as a racist and besmirching his supreme role in the liquidation of slavery, fake leftists like the RCP surely must have a hard time with Marx’s November 1864 letter to Lincoln on behalf of the First International congratulating the American people for his re-election as president (see accompanying box). By declaring that the European workers saw the star-spangled banner as carrying the destiny of their class, was Marx forsaking the red flag of communism? Not at all. For Marx and the workers of the Old World, Lincoln’s re-election guaranteed the irreversibility of the Emancipation Proclamation; it meant that the Union Army—first and foremost its “black warriors”—did not fight in vain. And they understood that with the demise of the slave power, the unbridled growth of capitalism would lay the foundation for the growth of the American proletariat—capitalism’s future gravedigger.

At bottom, the impulse to denounce Lincoln and to minimize his monumental role in history denies that political people—even great ones—are constrained by objective reality. If only poor Lincoln had not lacked the necessary will to eradicate all forms of racial oppression! As Marx explained, “Mankind thus inevitably sets itself only such tasks as it is able to solve, since closer examination will always show that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution are already present or at least in the course of formation” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [1859]). The elimination of racial oppression in all its forms was not possible in 1861 or 1865 because the objective means to accomplish it were not yet present—the unfettered growth of industrial capitalism in America and the development of the working class.

Lincoln accomplished the task placed before him by history: the abolition of slavery. He could do so despite, and because of, the conceptions in his head. The task of Trotskyists—revolutionary Marxists—is different. Our aim is proletarian revolution. Our perspective is revolutionary integrationism. While opposing every manifestation of racist oppression, we underline that liberating black people from racial oppression and poverty—conditions inherent to the U.S. capitalist system—can be achieved only by establishing an egalitarian socialist society. Building such a society requires the overthrow of the capitalist system by the working class and its allies. This is possible only by forging a revolutionary, internationalist working-class party that champions the rights of all the oppressed and declares war on all manifestations of social, class and sexual oppression. That task will be fulfilled by a third American revolution—a workers revolution.

Friday, March 15, 2019

*From The Archives Of "Women And Revolution"-Black Freedom, Women's Rights and the Civil War

Click on the headline to link to a "Wikipedia" entry for black abolitionist Sojourner Truth.

Markin comment:

The following is an article from the Spring 1989 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.

**********

Black Freedom, Women's Rights
and the Civil War

This article is based on a talk given by W&R associate editor Amy Rath at a public forum held 5 April 1988 at Howard University. For additional historical material on women in the anti-slavery struggle, see "The Grimke Sisters: Pioneers for Abolition and Women's Rights" (W&R No. 29, Spring 1985) and "Harriet Tubman: Fighter for Black Freedom" (W&R No. 32, Winter 1986).

The talk discusses the movement for women's rights in the U.S. prior to the Civil War, its link through the radical abolition movement with the fight against black slavery, and the destruction of that link to produce the antecedents of the present "feminists." It centers on the ideology of the antebellum abolitionists, the most far-sighted of whom saw that all democratic struggles were vitally linked and that deeply revolutionary changes would be required to establish equality. These men and women were not Marxists but bourgeois radicals of their time; for many, the primary political motivation was religion.

Northern anti-slavery activists espoused "free labor" and accepted the idea that if legal barriers to equality were removed, the American dream would be possible for anyone, given talent and hard work. In antebellum America, in the context of steady immigration and an expanding frontier, a propertyless farmhand could perhaps acquire land of his own, while a (white) laborer might look to becoming a small-scale employer of labor in a generation. But if the "free labor" ideology imagined a democratic political system of economic equals based on a society of skilled artisans and yeoman farmers, this model rapidly became a fiction. A capitalist class of Northern industrial, finance and railroad capitalists had the ascendancy. Though still a predominantly agricultural country, America was the fastest-growing industrial power (with the second-highest industrial output, after Britain). America was already the world's technological leader, very much feared as a competitor by Britain, birthplace of the Industrial Revolution.

The slave society of the South existed in the framework of a powerful Northern industrial sector which purchased staple crops from the South, first of all cotton. The rich plantations which possessed the South's best land and dominated the region politically were built on a pre-capitalist class relationship of black chattel slavery; at the same time they were part of a money economy in the world's most dynamic capitalist country. The conflict of social systems between the ever more powerful North and the backward South was a profound contradiction heading for collision, exacerbated by America's undemocratic "states' rights" political system which had given the South disproportionate control of the national government (especially the presidency and Supreme Court) since Independence.

The Progressive Bourgeoisie and the Limits of Reconstruction


The "irrepressible conflict" exploded in the Civil War, in the course of which Lincoln, the Northern bourgeoisie's ablest political leader, found himself obliged to go much further than he had intended in the direction of adopting the emancipation program of the abolitionists. Fifteen years before, abolitionists had been viewed as an isolated, if noisy, crew of radical fanatics.
The Civil War smashed slavery and left behind in the South a chaotic situation and four million ex-slaves who had been promised "freedom." But the war and its aftermath underlined that a truly egalitarian radical vision of social reconstruction already could not be promoted by a capitalist ruling class.

In her talk, comrade Rath emphasized the birth of a "feminist" women's movement as a rightward split at a crucial moment in American history: the era of "Reconstruction." Reconstruction posed a possibility of socially revolutionary transformations in the South: the regional ruling class, based on the ownership of land and slaves, had been militarily defeated; under the occupying Northern power, political rights were exercised by the former slaves and those willing to be allied with them.

Reconstruction brought not only black enfranchisement but significant democratic reforms: the 1868 South Carolina constitutional convention drafted the state's first divorce law, while Reconstruction legislatures established the South's first public schools and went to work on liberalizing the South's draconian penal codes and reforming the planters' property tax system (which had taxed the farmer's mule and the workman's tools while all but exempting the real wealth—land). But the Northern capitalists betrayed the promise of Reconstruction, allowing it to be physically smashed by forces such as the Ku Klux Klan, even though that meant the destruction of the Republican Party in the South.

Replacing slavery, a new system of racial subordination took shape: a refurbished system of labor discipline through such measures as one-year labor contracts and "vagrancy" laws to bind ex-slaves to the plantations, and a rigid system of Jim Crow segregation. The defeat of Reconstruction shaped the postwar South into modern times: the sharecropping, the poll taxes, convict labor (the chain gang), the "separate but equal" unequal facilities.
While the woman suffrage leaders described in comrade Rath's talk took a stand against the great democratic gains that hung in the balance, many women mobilized by the anti-slavery movement served honorably in Reconstruction, for example as freedmen's schoolteachers who risked their lives to participate in freeing black people from the chains of bondage.

During Reconstruction, debate raged over the agrarian question: the radical demand raised by the freed-men and destitute white Unionist Southerners that the secessionists' estates be confiscated and distributed to them. Some abolitionists saw that racial democracy could not be achieved if a class of whites continued to own the land where a class of blacks were laborers. They argued for justice to those who had been slaves (who created the wealth of the plantations, beginning by clearing the wilderness).

But the tide had turned: the triumphant Northern rulers would not permit such an attack on "property rights" (especially as Northerners directly and Northern banks were coming to own a good deal of Southern property). Fundamentally, the federal power reinvested political power in the hands of the former "best people" of the old Confederacy. In the sequel, intensive exploitation of black agricultural labor, rather than industrial development or capital investment in the modernization of agriculture, remained the basis of the Southern economy.
What was the alternative? Working-class power was shown by the 1848 and 1871 upheavals in Europe to be the alternative to bourgeois rule, as Marx and Engels explained from the Communist Manifesto onward, but conditions were not mature even in Europe for the small proletariat to seize and wield state power. In mid-19th century America, the Northern bourgeoisie under the pressure of a revolutionary Civil War possessed a genuinely progressive side, the basis for the abolitionists' support for the Republican Party. The abolitionists' great debates revolved around how far out in front of the progressive bourgeoisie they should be. There were "radicals" and those with a more "realistic" appraisal of what the Republican Party would support. Today, more than a century after Reconstruction, that debate is transcended. The ruling class long since passed firmly over to the side of reaction; the federal government is no defender of the oppressed. Those who look to find support for an egalitarian program in any wing of the ruling class are doomed to disappointment. To complete the unfinished democratic tasks of the bourgeois revolution is a responsibility of the modern working class.

When the post-Civil War suffragettes chose to focus on the narrowest political rights for middle-class women and turn their backs on the rights and survival of the most desperately oppressed, they prefigured all of today's "constituency" and "reform" politics which refuse to attack the profound class inequalities ingrained in capitalist society. Sojourner Truth's classic "Ain't I a Woman" speech (see below) today stands as a powerful indictment of these ladies as much as of the outright sexists she was debating. Those who renounce the revolutionary content of the demand for women's liberation so as to advance their schemes for election of female politicians or advancement of women in academia are direct descendants of those first "feminists" who refused to challenge the power structure of their time on behalf of justice for two million of their sisters who were freed slaves.

But there is another women's movement: the women who have joined in the front ranks of every revolutionary struggle on this planet, from the 19th-century radical abolitionists to the women workers who sparked the Russian Revolution to the communist women of today. When the October Revolution of 1917 smashed the old tsarist society in Russia, militant women were among the first recruits to communism in dozens of countries where women were oppressed by semi-feudal conditions and "customs." Young women radicalized around questions like women's education, the veil, wife-beating, religious obscurantism, arranged marriages, etc., recognized a road forward to uprooting social reaction and building a society freed from sexual, racial and class inequality. Our heroes are the revolutionary women who have shared in making all of revolutionary history, from the first moment that slaves rose up against the Roman Empire to the great struggles of today.

It was 1863, and the bloodiest war ever fought by the U.S. was raging. Abraham Lincoln had finally realized he must pronounce the destruction of slavery as the North's goal in this civil war. On 22 September 1862, his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation declared that on the first of January, 1863, all slaves in the Confederacy "shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free." Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not free the slaves in the border states loyal to the Union, it turned the tide of battle. The war was now indisputably a war to end slavery, not simply to repair the Union. Soon thereafter, the government began to enlist blacks into the army; these ex-slaves and sons of ex-slaves tipped the military balance in favor of the Union. It was a matter of time until black soldiers singing "John Brown's Body" marched into Charleston, South Carolina—the "soul of secession," as Karl Marx called it-after Sherman's march through Georgia to the sea.

In May of the revolutionary year 1863, the first convention of the Women's Loyal National League met in New York City. Its most eminent speaker was a woman whose name is little known today: Angelina Grimke" Weld. As part of her address she gave a keen analysis of the war:

"This war is not, as the South falsely pretends, a war of races, nor of sections, nor of political parties, but a war of Principles; a war upon the working classes, whether
white or black; a war against Man, the world over. In this war, the black man was the first victim, the workingman of whatever color the next; and now all who contend for the rights of labor, for free speech, free schools, free suffrage, and a free government...are
driven to do battle in defense of these or to fall with them, victims of the same violence that for two centuries has held the black man a prisoner of war "The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free."

—Gerda Lerner, The Grimke Sisters from South Carolina

A resolution was presented: "There can never be a true peace in this Republic until the civil and political rights of all citizens of African descent and all women are practically established." Angelina Grimke' defended it against those who thought it too radical:
"I rejoice exceedingly that that resolution would combine us with the negro. I feel that we have been with him— True, we have not felt the slaveholder's lash; true, we have not had our hands manacled, but our hearts have been crushed I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours."

It was only after the Civil War that an ideology arose which was later named "feminism": the idea that the main division in society is sex. In response to the debate over the role of the newly freed slaves in U.S. society, the leaders of the woman suffrage movement—Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—sided with the counterrevolutionary assault on Reconstruction. The birth of bourgeois feminism was part of a right-wing process which shattered the vision of the left wing of the revolutionary democracy into separate, feeble bourgeois reform movements.

The Second American Revolution

The Civil War was one of the great social revolutions in the history of the world, destroying the slaveholding class in the South and freeing the black slaves. Not only Marxists saw that. The best fighters of the day—the Grimke sisters, the great black abolitionist Frederick Douglass, the Radical Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens—knew that the war would have to become a revolution against slavery before the North could win. They hated the feudalistic society of the South, with its degraded slaves, its cruelty, its arrogant, leisurely gentlemen planters, its impoverished rural whites, its lack of education, industry and general culture. The radical abolitionists wanted to wipe away that society, and also saw much wrong in the North, such as the subservience of women, and legal and social discrimination against blacks. Their ideology was to create a new order based on free labor and "equality before the law," a concept brought to the U.S. by the Radical Republican Charles Sumner out of his study of the 1789 French Revolution.

In Europe after the French Revolution the status of women was the most visible expression of the contradiction between capitalist society and its own ideals. But in the U.S. that was not so true, because of chattel slavery. The United States—the first country to proclaim itself a democratic republic—was the largest slaveholding country in the world, a huge historical contradiction which had to be resolved.

The Industrial Revolution

It was the Industrial Revolution, fundamentally, that generated what William Seward called the "Irrepressible Conflict." In broad historical terms the Industrial Revolution had created the material conditions for the elimination of slavery in society. Technological and social advances made possible a much more productive capitalist agriculture and industry. In 1854 the abolitionist clergyman Theodore Parker described slavery as "the foe to Northern Industry—to our mines, our manufactures, and our commerce...to our democratic politics in the State, our democratic culture in the school, our democratic work in the community" (quoted in James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom).

The Industrial Revolution had a contradictory effect on the condition of women. Production of goods had been primarily through cottage industry, but with the invention of the spinning jenny, the power loom and the steam engine, cottage industry was ended. The men left home to go to the factory, while women stayed home to do the housework, raise the children and to buy at the local store what once they had made at home.

Women's labor ceased to be productive labor in the strict Marxist sense. This is the material basis for the 19th-century ideology of the "women's sphere." While the material advances of the Industrial Revolution made life easier for women, it also locked them into the stifling confines of domesticity in the isolated nuclear family. Women also worked in factories, but even in the industries in which they were concentrated (in textile production they made up two-thirds of the labor force) generally they worked only for a few years before getting married.

The Fight for Women's Legal Rights

Slaves were a class, but women are a specially oppressed group dispersed through all social classes. Although all women were oppressed to some extent because of their position in the family, the class differences were fundamental between the black slave woman and the slave plantation mistress, or the Northern German-speaking laundress and the wife of the owner of the Pennsylvania iron mill. "Sisterhood" was as much a myth then as it is now. Women identified first with the class to which they belonged, determined by who their husbands or fathers were.

Before the Civil War, women were basically without any civil rights. They couldn't sue or be sued, they couldn't be on juries, all their property and earnings went to their husband or father. Although women did have the vote for a few years in New Jersey and Virginia after the American Revolution, this advance was quickly eliminated. (This was part of a general right-wing turn after the Revolution, when suffrage was restricted gradually through property qualifications. In New York State, for example, with some restrictions blacks could vote up to about 1821.) For the wealthy upper-class woman, this lack of legal rights loomed as a terrible injustice because it prevented her from functioning as a full member of the ruling class (Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the mother of American feminism and the daughter of a judge, felt this keenly). For the working-class or slave woman, if her property legally belonged to her husband it didn't seem a problem— she didn't have any property.

Though the legal question was a small matter for poor and slave women, nevertheless legal injustice is not insignificant for Marxists, and it is bound up with multi-layered social oppression. This was true for the position of women in pre-Civil War society. Until the 1850s wife-beating was legal in most states. Divorce was almost impossible, and when it was obtained children went with the husband. The accepted attitude toward women was assumption of their "inferiority," and the Bible was considered an authority. When anesthesia was discovered in the 1840s, doctors opposed its use for childbirth, because that suffering was women's punishment for Eve's sin.

The Anti-Slavery Struggle and Democratic Rights

But how were women to fight for equal rights in this society divided between slave and free? Angelina Grimke' was precisely correct when she said, "until the negro gets his rights, we will never have ours." It was necessary to destroy chattel slavery, which was retarding the development of the whole society. The movement for women's rights developed in the North out of the struggle to abolish slavery. It could hardly have developed in the South. In the decades before the war, in response to the growing Northern anti-slavery agitation, the South was becoming more reactionary than ever: more fanatical in defense of the ideology of slavery and more openly repressive. There were wholesale assaults on basic democratic rights, from attacks on the rights of the small layer of free blacks, who were seen as a source of agitation and insurrection, to a ban on the distribution of abolitionist literature.

In the South, there were no public schools. It was illegal to teach slaves to read, and almost half of the entire Southern population was illiterate. But in the North over 90 percent of the residents could read and write. Girls and boys went to school in about the same proportions, the only country in the world where this was true. So while in the North women teachers were paid less than men, and women factory hands received one-quarter the wage of men, in the South there were few teachers at all, and few industrial workers.

As a young slave in Maryland, and later while he was trying to earn a living as a refugee in New Bedford, Massachusetts, Frederick Douglass came to understand the common interests of all working people in the South, slaves and free blacks and whites. He learned a trade on the docks, where he experienced racist treatment from white workmen, who saw black labor as a threat to their jobs. But Douglass realized that the position of the workmen, too, against their boss was eroded and weakened by slavery and racism. As Marx said, "Labor cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded." And indeed, the working-class movement met with little success in the antebellum U.S., whereas after the war there was an upsurge in unionism and labor struggle.

The vanguard of the abolitionist movement—the radical insurrectionist wing—believed in the identity of the interests of all the oppressed. John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, the great activist of the Underground Railroad, and the Grimke sisters were all inspired by a vision of human equality based in revolutionary democracy. Although their egalitarian principle was based on a religious view and ours is based on a Marxist understanding of society, we honor their essential work in leading the anti-slavery struggle. The abolition of slavery did profoundly alter the United States, it did open the road to liberation by making possible the development of the proletariat and its revolutionary vanguard, which will establish justice by abolishing the exploitation of man by man.

The Grimke Sisters of South Carolina

Penetrating insights into the situation of women in pre-Civil War America came from women who were committed abolitionists. Sarah and Angelina Grimke are examples, as is Sojourner Truth who is better known today. The Grimke sisters were unusual members of the ruling class who defected to the other side. As daughters of one of South Carolina's most powerful slave-holding families, they had grown up in luxury, but left the South because of their revulsion for slavery. The Grimke sisters became famous in 1837-1838 as agents of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The power of their personal witness of the atrocities of the slave system drew huge audiences. The sisters were quick to point out that as upper-class white women, they had seen only the "better" treatment of the house and city slaves, and not the more brutal treatment of plantation hands in the fields. But one of the things they did know about was the sexual exploitation of women slaves and the brutal breakup of black families through the slave trade.

Because the sisters addressed the issues of sexual exploitation frankly and often, it was one of the issues the opposition used to try to shut them up. The clergy complained that the Grimke's brought up a subject "which ought not to be named"—how dare these delicate .blossoms of Southern womanhood talk about sex! The very idea of women speaking publicly represented an attack on the proper relationship between the sexes and would upset "women's place" in the home. Contemporary observers were shocked by the sight of women participating actively in the debates of the anti-slavery movement, as they did especially in New England, the birthplace of radical abolitionism. The Grimkes replied by pointing out that the same argument was used against abolition itself: it would upset the established order of social relations. They effectively linked up women's rights and emancipation of the slaves.

Sojourner Truth: "Ain't I a Woman?"

Black women got it from both sides, as the life of Sojourner Truth shows. She was born a slave around 1797 in New York State and was not freed until 1827, under the "gradual emancipation" provisions of the state law. As a slave she was prevented from marrying the man she loved, who was brutally beaten for daring to visit her (they were owned by different masters). They were both forcibly married to other slaves. Her son was sold South as a small child, away from her. After she was freed, she lived a backbreaking existence in New York City, one of the more racist cities in the North and a center for the slave trade.

Sojourner Truth went to all the women's rights conventions. The famous story about her dates from 1853. The usual crowd of male hecklers had almost shut down the proceedings. The women were unable to answer their sneers of how delicate and weak women were. Sojourner Truth asked for the floor and got it, despite the opposition of a lot of the delegates to the presence of a black abolitionist. You have to keep in mind what this woman looked like in this gathering of ladies: she was six feet tall, nearly 60 years old, very tough and work-worn. She said:

"The man over there says women need to be helped into carriages and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages or over puddles, or gives me the best place—and ain't I a woman?
"Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted and gathered into barns, and no man could head me—and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man—when I could get it—and bear the lash as well! And ain't I a woman? I have born...children, and seen most of 'em sold into slavery, and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me—and ain't I a woman?"

—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle

Sojourner Truth put her finger on the heart of the contradiction between the stifling idealization of women and their oppression as housewives and mothers and exploitation as slaves and workers.

Women's Rights and the Abolitionist Movement

Support for women's rights was tenuous within the politically diverse anti-slavery movement. Many free-soilers were not anti-racist; some opposed slavery because they didn't want blacks around. Even some of the most dedicated abolitionists argued that "women's rights" could harm the anti-slavery cause, and in 1840 a split in the American Anti-Slavery Society was precipitated by the election of a woman to the leading body.
That same year at an international anti-slavery meeting in London, women members of the American delegation were denied their seats. In the audience was the young Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Out of this experience she decided to begin organizing for women's rights. Eight years later, in 1848, at Seneca Falls, New York the first women's rights convention in the world was held. At first Stanton wasn't going to put forward the vote as a demand—she was afraid it was too extreme. She had to be argued into it by Frederick Douglass. It was the only demand that didn't get unanimous support at the meeting; it was considered too radical.

The role of Douglass was not an accident. The best fighters for women's rights were not the Elizabeth Cady Stantons and the Susan B. Anthonys—the ones who "put women first"—but the left-wing abolitionists. The most militant advocates of black equality, the insurrectionist wing, the prophets of the Civil War, were also the most consistent fighters for women's rights, because they saw no division of interest between blacks and women. Frederick Douglass not only attended all the women's meetings, arguing effectively for full equality for women, but he brought the message elsewhere. He put forward resolutions for women's rights at black conventions, and they were passed. He used to advertise the meetings in his paper and print reports on the proceedings. His paper's motto was, "Right is of no Sex—Truth is of no Color—God is the Father of us all, and we are all Brethren."

The Fight Over the 14th Amendment

Stanton and Anthony had suspended their woman suffrage campaign for the duration of the war. They circulated petitions for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, which became the 13th Amendment. After the war Stanton and Anthony set up an Equal Rights Association to agitate for the vote for both blacks and women. They thought because of the broad social upheaval the time was ripe for woman suffrage. But this proved not to be the case.

The question here was citizenship rights under capitalist law, specifically voting. Compare it with how voting rights and citizenship were looked at in another revolution at the same time: the 1871 Paris Commune, the first proletarian revolution (whose example dramatically reinforced ideological conservatism among the American bourgeoisie). The Commune subsumed nationality and citizenship to class considerations. Anybody who got elected from the working class, whatever country they were born in, sat on the legislative body of the Commune, while the industrialists and the bourgeois parliamentarians fled the city and were "disenfranchised" as their property was expropriated.

This was not on the agenda in the United States in the 1860s. The historical tasks of the Civil War and Reconstruction were to complete the unfinished bourgeois revolution, to resolve questions like slave versus free, national sovereignty and democratic rights. In his novel Gore Vidal calls Lincoln the Bismarck of his country, and this is justified. For example, before the Civil War, each state printed its own money. Greenbacks were first made by the Union to finance the war. The Supreme Court regularly said, "the United States are." Only after the war did this country's name become a singular noun—one national government.

But the big question was what to do with the newly emancipated slaves, and this question focused on two things: land and the vote. The debate over the vote represented, in legal terms, a struggle to determine what "citizenship" meant in relation to the state. Many Northern states did not allow blacks to vote, either. The 14th Amendment, which was passed to answer this question, says that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are citizens of the nation and of the state in which they live, and that states can't abridge their "privileges and immunities" or deprive them of life, liberty, or property without "due process of law" or deny them "equal protection of the laws."

The Republican Party, which was founded as an anti-slavery party, contained within it many shades of political opinion. It has been argued that the only reason the Republicans gave the vote to blacks was to maintain political control over the states in the conquered Confederacy. This was true of some Republicans, but the men who politically dominated Congress during the period of Radical Reconstruction were committed revolutionary democrats, as observers of the time said of Thaddeus Stevens, who was called the "Robespierre, Danton, and Marat of America." There were good reasons for Douglass' loyalty to the Republicans, given after much early hesitation and sometimes combined with scathing criticism.

But there were a lot of contradictions. The party that was trying to implement black rights was also the party that was massacring the Indians in the West, breaking workers' strikes in the North, presiding over a new scale of graft and corruption, and trying to annex Santo Domingo. In the fight to replace slavery with something other than a peonage system which mimicked bondage, the land question was key. And the robber barons—the moneylords, the triumphant ruling class-rapidly got pretty nervous about the campaign to confiscate the plantations and give them to the blacks. It was an assault on property rights, in line with what those uppity workers in the North were demanding: the eight-hour day, unions, higher wages. The ruling class was quite conscious about this; an 1867 New York Times editorial stated:

"If Congress is to take cognizance of the claims of labor against capital...there can be no decent pretense for confining the task to the slave-holder of the South. It is a question, not of humanity, not of loyalty, but of the fundamental relation of industry to capital; and sooner or later, if begun at the South, it will find its way into the cities of the North.... An attempt to justify the confiscation of Southern land under the pretense of doing justice to the freedmen, strikes at the root of all property rights in both sections. It concerns Massachusetts quite as much as Mississippi."

—Eric Foner, Politics and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War

This question was not resolved quickly, but over a couple of decades. But to collapse a lot of complex history, the revolutionary tide receded under the weight of triumphant capitalism. In 1877 Union troops were withdrawn from Southern occupation as part of the compromise making Rutherford B. Hayes president. The Civil War did not establish black equality, and the 14th and 15th Amendments which codified in law the war's revolutionary gains were turned into virtual dead letters. Nor did the Civil War liberate women, not even in a limited, legalistic sense. They continued to be denied even the simple right to vote (although in some districts in South Carolina in 1870, under the encouragement of black election officials, black women exercised the franchise for a brief time).

From the defeat of Reconstruction was spawned the kind of society we have now. On top of the fundamental class divisions in the U.S. is pervasive and institutionalized racial oppression. The black slaves were liberated from bondage only to become an oppressed race/color caste, segregated at the bottom of society— although today, unlike the immediate aftermath of Reconstruction, blacks also constitute a key component of the American proletariat.

The Birth of American Feminism

Many Radical Republicans were critical of the 14th Amendment, which was a true child of compromise. Sumner called it "uncertain, loose, cracked, and rickety." Opposition centered on a loophole that allowed a state to opt for losing some representation in Congress if it chose to restrict black suffrage—and Southern states exploited this concession. But what Elizabeth Cady Stanton didn't like about it was that for the first time, the word "male" appeared in the Constitution. And this fight was the birth of American feminism.

Of course the 14th Amendment should have given women the vote, and the importance of suffrage for black women was not inconsiderable. But a Civil War had just been fought on the question of black freedom, and it was indeed the "Negro's Hour," as many abolitionists argued. The biggest benefit for women's rights would have been to struggle for the biggest expansion possible in black freedom—to campaign for the land, for black participation in government on the state and federal level, to crush racism in the North, to integrate blacks in housing, education, jobs—to push to the limit the revolutionary possibilities of the period. But Stanton and Anthony sided with the right-wing
assault on the revolutionary opening that existed. They wrote:

"Think of Patrick and Sambo and Hans and Ung Tung who do not know the difference between a Monarchy and a Republic, who never read the Declaration of Independence or Webster's spelling book, making laws for [white abolitionists] Lydia Maria Child, Lucretia Mott, or Fanny Kemble."

Stanton and Anthony embraced race-hatred and anti-immigrant bigotry against the Irish, blacks, Germans and Asians, grounded in class hostility.
They took this position at a time when blacks in the South faced escalating race-terror. The Ku Klux Klan was founded in 1866 to terrorize Southern blacks; hundreds were murdered. Republicans of both colors were targeted, and a special object of Klan hatred was the schoolhouse and the schoolteacher (many of them Northern women). In the North as well there was a struggle over the vote, over integrated schools. There was a fight to end Jim Crow in the Washington, D.C. trolley system (after the law desegregating streetcars was passed there in 1865, Sojourner Truth herself went around the capital boarding the cars of companies that were refusing to seat blacks). The freedmen's struggles for a fundamental transformation of race relations triggered in the North what some historians have called the first racist backlash. Frederick Douglass' home in Rochester, New York was burned to the ground; Republican and abolitionist leaders routinely received death threats.

So in this period of violent struggle over the race question, the feminists joined forces with the Democrats, the political party of the Klan and the Confederacy, who hoped to exploit the women's issue against blacks. Henry Blackwell (Lucy Stone's husband) argued that white women voting in the South would cancel out the black vote. Stanton and Anthony teamed up with George Train, a notorious racist, who financed their newspaper, Revolution. They adopted the slogan "educated suffrage"—that is, a literacy test for voters—which was deliberately formulated against non-English-speaking immigrants and ex-slaves.

Frederick Douglass made a valiant attempt to win the feminists over to support for the amendments at a meeting of the Equal Rights Association in 1869, where he argued for the urgency of the vote for blacks:

"When women, because they are women, are dragged from their homes and hung upon lamp-posts; when their children are torn from their arms and their brains dashed to the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their homes burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter schools; then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot."

—Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle

At this convention Douglass proposed a resolution which called the 15th Amendment the "culmination of one-half of our demands" while imploring a redoubling of "our energy to secure the further amendment guaranteeing the same sacred rights without limitation to sex." But by this point, a split was inevitable. The feminists blamed the Republican Party and the abolitionists for the defeat in Kansas of an 1867 referendum on woman suffrage. They decided that "men" could not be trusted, and for the first time argued that women must organize separately for their own rights. They even flirted with male exclusionism. The movement split in two, one maintaining a formally decent posture on the race question as a cover for doing nothing. The main wing led by Stanton and Anthony wanted to address broad issues, but their capitulation to racist reaction defined them.

They claimed the ballot would solve everything. Their paper was printed in a "rat" office (below union scale). Anthony urged women to be scabs to "better" their condition, then whined when the National Labor Congress refused to admit her as a delegate! Stanton said it proved the worst enemy of women's rights was the working man.

After Reconstruction went down to defeat, the first "feminists" dedicated themselves to the reactionary attempt to prove woman suffrage wouldn't rock the Jim Crow boat. But in the South, the restabilization of a system of overt racist injustice set the context for all social questions. In the South, any extension of the franchise was feared as a threat to "white supremacy" stability. By 1920, when woman suffrage was passed nationally— largely because of World War I which brought women into industry and social life—not a single Southern state had passed the vote for women, although almost every other state had some form of it.

Today, the bourgeois feminists like to hark back to the struggle over the 14th Amendment as proof there must be a separatist women's movement. They claim Stanton and Anthony as their political mothers. Let them have them! We stand in a different tradition: the heritage of Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, the Grimke sisters, of revolutionary insurrectionism against the class enemy. Today, to complete the unfinished tasks of the Civil War and emancipate women and blacks from social slavery requires a communist women's movement, part of a multiracial vanguard party fighting for workers power in the interests of all the oppressed.

Thursday, February 28, 2019

*A Case Of Black Pride- "The Great Debaters"

*A Case Of Black Pride- "The Great Debaters"-February Is Black History Month


Commentary

February Is Black History Month

The Great Debaters, starring Denzel Washington, directed by Denzel Washington, produced by Oprah Winfrey, 2007

Although there is some confusion, if not controversy, surrounding the facts on which this commercial film "The Great Debaters" is based it is nevertheless a well-done piece of cinema. When one says the name Denzel Washington, who starred in and directed the film, and adds the imprimatur of Oprah Winfrey as producer then those factors alone usually insure a well thought out presentation. Add in a slice of pre-1960's civil rights movement Southern Jim Crow black history surrounding the extraordinary abilities of the debate team at Wiley College, a small black Texas college, and the headline of this entry - "A Case Of Black Pride"- tells the tale.

The subject matter of this film: the trials and tribulations of a debate team as it tries to make its mark in the intellectual world would not, on the face it, seem to be a natural subject for a two hour film. Nor would the fact that this debate team was composed of and led by the black "talented tenth" of the 1930's, including James Farmer, Jr. who would later will fame as a main stream "establishment" civil rights leader (and the scorn of younger black militants in the 1960's). However it does. The glue here is the performance of Denzel Washington as the somewhat mysterious hard-driving Northern black intellectual (and friend of Langston Hughes whose work in Spain in the 1930's I have explored elsewhere in this space). Professor Tolson, however, is more than some eccentric college don because he has enlisted in the struggle (or was sent, probably by the Communist or Socialist Party who were both organizing this strata of the agrarian working class in the South at the time) to organize the desperately poor black and white Texas sharecroppers. That story is also a subject worthy of separate discussion at a later time.

As the story unfolds we get a glimpse at black college life in the 1930's with its marching bands, its social life and its pecking orders. What that part of the film looked like was the universality of the college experience, except here everyone was black. The mere fact of being in college in the 1930's, at the height of the Great Depression meant that these student were training to be part of the black elite. Along the way, however, a different reality intrudes, as we are also exposed to black life in the South- Jim Crow style, even for W.E.B. Dubois' "talented tenth". Two of the most dramatic scenes in the movie are when Reverend James Farmer, Sr., by all accounts an extremely learned man if somewhat distant father, is humbled by some local "white trash"-for merely driving while black and the seemingly obligatory gratuitous lynching of a black man that the debate team witnessed in its travels. Powerful stuff.

The controversy surrounding the facts, if that is the case, is the question of whether the centerpiece of the 1935-36 debating season, a debate with the august Harvard University team actually occurred and whether the subject matter of this seminal debate was on the virtues and vices of civil disobedience. This would hardly be the first, and will probably not be the last, commercial film to "juice up" the story in order to create better dramatic tension. In short, to make it a "feel good" movie for the black and progressive audiences that I assume it was intended to reach. That should not take away from the achievements of this debate team, the courage of Professor Tolson in organizing Southern sharecroppers or the hard reality of "lynch law" in the Jim Crow South of the 1930's. Well acted, well thought out and well-intended it deserves a careful watching. Do so.

Note: There is a DVD out in 2008 entitled "The Real Great Debaters Of Wiley College" that I will review when I get a copy of the film.

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass- A New Biography-In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859 *For Frederick Douglass On His 200th Birthday- Songs To While Away The Class Struggle By- James Weldon Johnson's "Lift Every Voice And Sing"


Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass- A New Biography

Click on link to hear a serious biographer of Frederick Douglass the revolutionary abolitionist who broke with the William Lloyd Garrison-wing of the movement when the times called for remorseless military fighting against the entrenched slave-holders and their allies. This from Christopher Lydon’s Open Source program on NPR.
https://player.fm/series/open-source-with-christopher-lydon/behind-the-leonine-gaze-of-frederick-douglass

This is what you need to know about Frederick Douglass and the anti-slavery, the revolutionary abolitionist fight. He was the man, the shining q star black man who led the fight for black men to join the Union Army and not just either be treated as freaking contraband or worse, as projected in early in the war by the Lincoln administration the return of fugitive slaves to “loyal” slave-owners. Led the fight to not only seek an emancipation proclamation as part of the struggle but a remorseless and probably long struggle to crush slavery and slaver-owners and their hanger-on militarily. Had been ticketed at a desperate moment in 1864 to recreate a John Brown scenario if they logjam between North and South in Virginia had not been broken. Yes, a bright shining northern star black man.    






February Is Black History Month

Lyrics

The first verse is the one most commonly heard.

Lift every voice and sing,
'Til earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of Liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise
High as the listening skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on 'til victory is won.



Stony the road we trod,
Bitter the chast'ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat,
Have not our weary feet
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way that with tears has been watered,
We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from the gloomy past,
'Til now we stand at last
Where the white gleam of our bright star is cast.



God of our weary years,
God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who has by Thy might
Led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee,
Lest, our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand,
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.




Monday, February 25, 2019

Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass- A New Biography-In Honor Of John Brown Late Of Harpers Ferry-1859 *For Frederick Douglass On His 200th Birthday- Poets' Corner- Weary Blues, Indeed- The Poetry Of Langston Hughes-Daybreak In Alabama

Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass- A New Biography

Click on link to hear a serious biographer of Frederick Douglass the revolutionary abolitionist who broke with the William Lloyd Garrison-wing of the movement when the times called for remorseless military fighting against the entrenched slave-holders and their allies. This from Christopher Lydon’s Open Source program on NPR.
https://player.fm/series/open-source-with-christopher-lydon/behind-the-leonine-gaze-of-frederick-douglass

This is what you need to know about Frederick Douglass and the anti-slavery, the revolutionary abolitionist fight. He was the man, the shining q star black man who led the fight for black men to join the Union Army and not just either be treated as freaking contraband or worse, as projected in early in the war by the Lincoln administration the return of fugitive slaves to “loyal” slave-owners. Led the fight to not only seek an emancipation proclamation as part of the struggle but a remorseless and probably long struggle to crush slavery and slaver-owners and their hanger-on militarily. Had been ticketed at a desperate moment in 1864 to recreate a John Brown scenario if they logjam between North and South in Virginia had not been broken. Yes, a bright shining northern star black man.    




Click on the title to link to a "Langston Hughes" Web site for more information about his work and about his biography.





Book Review

February Is Black History Month

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes, Langston Hughes, drawings by E. McKnight Kauffer, Alfred F. Knopf, New York, 1977


Do you want to hear the blues? Do you want to know what the blues are? Then listen to the songs of Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Charley Patton, Son House and that whole crowd that gave us the classic plantation country-driven blues back in the days. And, read the poetry of the artist under review here, Langston Hughes. Oh sure, Brother Hughes has prettified the expressions and the form (although he has also mastered the double-entente, especially in sexual matters, that the previously mentioned artists made into an art form all its own) for a more upscale, literary audience, but he KNOWS the blues. Just check out the section of poems here under the title “Shadow Of The Blues”.

Unquestionably, old Langston had his ear to the ground for any and all rumblings coming out of the black community during, roughly, the middle third of the 20th century. From the fearsome, no existence Jim Crow South that blacks were leaving in droves to the semi-Jim Crow North where the complexities of modern life still left the black man and woman down at the bottom of the heap Hughes gives voice to their frustrations and dreams, deferred or otherwise. Despair, luck, no luck, hoping for any luck, once in a while luck. Life on the edge, life on top for a minute, life filled with bumps and bruises. It is all there in this little sampler of his works.

Of course, not all is unrelenting struggle. And Hughes has a high old time with the doings, nothing doings, the to-ing and fro-ing of a Harlem Saturday night (and Sunday morning)...leading to those old Monday blues as developed in the section entitled “After Hours”. Here one can hear the post-World War II change in tempo, as well, with the shift in voice from those old time country-driven blues to the be-bop jazz sound of the 1950s.

That, in the end, well almost the end, is the great sense that Hughes possessed and why he still speaks to those of us who are interested in that period of American life, life as led by the working classes and the black working class in particular. But this reviewer, whose book reviews in this space tend to have some political edge to them, would be remiss if he didn’t point out here, as he has in the past, his favorite image of Langston Hughes. That was of a photograph of him taken as the editor, during the Spanish Civil War, of the newspaper of the American Abraham Lincoln Battalion of the 15th International Brigade, that band of “premature anti-fascists”, organized by the Communist International, who volunteered to fight for the Republican side in Spain. That picture tells more than anything tells the why of the strong effect of Langston Hughes’ poetry on me and why he is rightly honored every February during Black History Month.


Dream Deferred

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?


*Poet’s Corner- Weary Blues, Indeed- The Poetry Of Langston Hughes


Daybreak in Alabama


When I get to be a composer

I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama.