By Kate Clifford Larson

Harriet Tubman was barely 5 feet tall and didn’t have a dime to her name.

What she did have was a deep faith and powerful passion for justice that was fueled by a network of Black and white abolitionists determined to end slavery in America.

“I had reasoned this out in my mind,” Tubman once told an interviewer. “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death. If I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.”

Though Tubman is most famous for her successes along the Underground Railroad, her activities as a Civil War spy are less well known.

As a biographer of Tubman, I think this is a shame. Her devotion to America and its promise of freedom endured despite suffering decades of enslavement and second class citizenship.

It is only in modern times that her life is receiving the renown it deserves, most notably her likeness appearing on a US$20 bill in 2030. The Harriet Tubman $20 bill will replace the current one featuring a portrait of U.S. President Andrew Jackson.

In another recognition, Tubman was accepted in June 2021 to the United States Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall of Fame at Fort Huachuca, Arizona. She is one of 278 members, 17 of whom are women, honored for their special operations leadership and intelligence work.

Though traditional accolades escaped Tubman for most of her life, she did achieve an honor usually reserved for white officers on the Civil War battlefield.

After she led a successful raid of a Confederate outpost in South Carolina that saw 750 Black people rescued from slavery, a white commanding officer fetched a pitcher of water for Tubman as she remained seated at a table.

A different education

Believed to have been born in March 1822 in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was named Araminta by her enslaved parents, Rit and Ben Ross.

“Minty” was the fifth of nine Ross children. She was frequently separated from her family by her white enslaver, Edward Brodess, who started leasing her to white neighbors when she was just 6 years old.

At their hands, she endured physical abuse, harsh labor, poor nutrition and intense loneliness.

As I learned during my research into Tubman’s life, her education did not happen in a traditional classroom, but instead was crafted from the dirt. She learned to read the natural world – forests and fields, rivers and marshes, the clouds and stars.

She learned to walk silently across fields and through the woods at night with no lights to guide her. She foraged for food and learned a botanist’s and chemist’s knowledge of edible and poisonous plants – and those most useful for ingredients in medical treatments.

She could not swim, and that forced her to learn the ways of rivers and streams – their depths, currents and traps.

She studied people, learned their habits, watched their movements – all without being noticed. Most important, she also figured out how to distinguish character. Her survival depended on her ability to remember every detail.

After a brain injury left her with recurring seizures, she was still able to work at jobs often reserved for men. She toiled on the shipping docks and learned the secret communication and transportation networks of Black mariners.

Known as Black Jacks, these men traveled throughout the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic seaboard. With them, she studied the night sky and the placement and movement of the constellations.

She used all those skills to navigate on the water and land.

“… and I prayed to God,” she told one friend, “to make me strong and able to fight, and that’s what I’ve always prayed for ever since.”

Tubman was clear on her mission. “I should fight for my liberty,” she told an admirer, “as long as my strength lasted.”

The Moses of the Underground Railroad

In the fall of 1849, when she was about to be sold away from her family and free husband John Tubman, she fled Maryland to freedom in Philadelphia.

Between 1850 and 1860, she returned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland about 13 times and successfully rescued nearly 70 friends and family members, all of whom were enslaved. It was an extraordinary feat given the perils of the 1850 Slave Fugitive Act, which enabled anyone to capture and return any Black man or woman, regardless of legal status, to slavery.

Those leadership qualities and survival skills earned her the nickname “Moses” because of her work on the Underground Railroad, the interracial network of abolitionists who enabled Black people to escape from slavery in the South to freedom in the North and Canada.

As a result, she attracted influential abolitionists and politicians who were struck by her courage and resolve – men like William Lloyd Garrison, John Brown and Frederick Douglass. Susan B. Anthony, one of the world’s leading activists for women’s equal rights, also knew of Tubman, as did abolitionist Lucretia Mott and women’s rights activist Amy Post.

“I was the conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years,” Tubman once said. “and I can say what most conductors can’t say; I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.”

Battlefield soldier

When the Civil War started in the spring of 1861, Tubman put aside her fight against slavery to conduct combat as a soldier and spy for the United States Army. She offered her services to a powerful politician.

Known for his campaign to form the all-Black 54th and 55th regiments, Massachusetts Gov. John Andrew admired Tubman and thought she would be a great intelligence asset for the Union forces.

He arranged for her to go to Beaufort, South Carolina, to work with Army officers in charge of the recently captured Hilton Head District.

There, she provided nursing care to soldiers and hundreds of newly liberated people who crowded Union camps. Tubman’s skill curing soldiers stricken by a variety of diseases became legendary.

But it was her military service of spying and scouting behind Confederate lines that earned her the highest praise.

She recruited eight men and together they skillfully infiltrated enemy territory. Tubman made contact with local enslaved people who secretly shared their knowledge of Confederate movements and plans.

Wary of white Union soldiers, many local African Americans trusted and respected Tubman.

According to George Garrison, a second lieutenant with the 55th Massachusetts Regiment, Tubman secured “more intelligence from them than anybody else.”

In early June 1863, she became the first woman in U.S. history to command an armed military raid when she guided Col. James Montgomery and his 2nd South Carolina Colored Volunteers Regiment along the Combahee River.

While there, they routed Confederate outposts, destroyed stores of cotton, food and weapons – and liberated over 750 enslaved people.

The Union victory was widely celebrated. Newspapers from Boston to Wisconsin reported on the river assault by Montgomery and his Black regiment, noting Tubman’s important role as the “Black she Moses … who led the raid, and under whose inspiration it was originated and conducted.”

Ten days after the successful attack, radical abolitionist and soldier Francis Jackson Merriam witnessed Maj. Gen. David Hunter, commander of the Hilton Head district, “go and fetch a pitcher of water and stand waiting with it in his hand while a black woman drank, as if he had been one of his own servants.”

In that letter to Gov. Andrew, Merriam added, “that woman was Harriet Tubman.”

Lifelong struggle

Despite earning commendations as a valuable scout and soldier, Tubman still faced the racism and sexism of America after the Civil War.

When she sought payment for her service as a spy, the U.S. Congress denied her claim. It paid the eight Black male scouts, but not her.

Unlike the Union officers who knew her, the congressmen did not believe – they could not imagine – that she had served her country like the men under her command, because she was a woman.

Gen. Rufus Saxton wrote that he bore “witness to the value of her services… She was employed in the Hospitals and as a spy [and] made many a raid inside the enemy’s lines displaying remarkable courage, zeal and fidelity.”

Thirty years later, in 1899, Congress awarded her a pension for her service as a Civil War nurse, but not as a soldier spy.

When she died from pneumonia on March 10, 1913, she was believed to have been 91 years old and had been fighting for gender equality and the right to vote as a free Black woman for more than 50 years after her work during the Civil War.

Surrounded by friends and family, the deeply religious Tubman showed one last sign of leadership, telling them: “I go to prepare a place for you.”

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Kate Clifford Larson, Brandeis University

Read more:

• Harriet Tubman: Biden revives plan to put a Black woman of faith on the bill
• Faith made Harriet Tubman fearless as she rescued slaves
• Harriet Tubman film does not deserve the Twitter hate

Kate Clifford Larson received funding from the National Park Service and the Maryland Department of Natural Resources and Department of Tourism 

Feature Image: A portrait of Harriet Tubman in 1878.
Library of Congress/Getty Images

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The actual day was June 19, 1865, and it was the Black dockworkers in Galveston, Texas, who first heard the word that freedom for the enslaved had come. There were speeches, sermons and shared meals, mostly held at Black churches, the safest places to have such celebrations.

The perils of unjust laws and racist social customs were still great in Texas for the 250,000 enslaved Black people there, but the celebrations known as Juneteenth were said to have gone on for seven straight days.

The spontaneous jubilation was partly over Gen. Gordon Granger’s General Order No. 3. It read in part, “The people of Texas are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free.”

But the emancipation that took place in Texas that day in 1865 was just the latest in a series of emancipations that had been unfolding since the 1770s, most notably the Emancipation Proclamation signed by President Abraham Lincoln two years earlier on Jan. 1, 1863.

As I explore in my book “Black Ghost of Empire,” between the 1780s and 1930s, during the era of liberal empire and the rise of modern humanitarianism, over 80 emancipations from slavery occurred, from Pennsylvania in 1780 to Sierra Leone in 1936.

There were, in fact, 20 separate emancipations in the
United States alone, from 1780 to 1865, across the U.S. North and South.

In my view as a scholar of race and colonialism, Emancipation Days – Juneteenth in Texas – are not what many people think, because emancipation did not do what most of us think it did.

As historians have long documented, emancipations did not remove all the shackles that prevented Black people from obtaining full citizenship rights. Nor did emancipations prevent states from enacting their own laws that prohibited Black people from voting or living in white neighborhoods.

In fact, based on my research, emancipations were actually designed to force Blacks and the federal government to pay reparations to slave owners – not to the enslaved – thus ensuring white people maintained advantages in accruing and passing down wealth across generations..

Reparations to slave owners

The emancipations shared three common features that, when added together, merely freed the enslaved in one sense, but reenslaved them in another sense.

The first, arguably the most important, was the ideology of gradualism, which said that atrocities against Black people would be ended slowly, over a long and open-ended period.

The second feature was state legislators who held fast to the racist principle that emancipated people were units of slave owner property – not captives who had been subjected to crimes against humanity.

The third was the insistence that Black people had to take on various forms of debt in order to exit slavery. This included economic debt, exacted by the ongoing forced and underpaid work that freed people had to pay to slave owners.

In essence, freed people had to pay for their freedom, while enslavers had to be paid to allow them to be free.

Emancipation myths and realities

On March 1, 1780, for instance, Pennsylvania’s state Legislature set a global precedent for how emancipations would pay reparations to slave owners and buttress the system of white property rule.

The Pennsylvania Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery stipulated “that all persons, as well negroes, and mulattos, as others, who shall be born within this State, from and after the Passing of this Act, shall not be deemed and considered as Servants for Life or Slaves.”

At the same time, the legislation prescribed “that every negroe and mulatto child born within this State” could be held in servitude “unto the age of twenty eight Years” and “liable to like correction and punishment” as enslaved people.

After that first Emancipation Day in Pennsylvania, enslaved people still remained in bondage for the rest of their lives, unless voluntarily freed by slave owners.

Only the newborn children of enslaved women were nominally free after Emancipation Day. Even then, these children were forced to serve as bonded laborers from childhood until their 28th birthday.

All future emancipations shared the Pennsylvania DNA.

Emancipation Day came to Connecticut and Rhode Island on March 1, 1784. On July 4, 1799, it dawned in New York, and on July 4, 1804, in New Jersey. After 1838, West Indian people in the United States began commemorating the British Empire’s Emancipation Day of Aug. 1.

The District of Columbia’s day came on April 16, 1862.

Eight months later, on Jan. 1, 1863, President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation that freed the enslaved only in Confederate states – not in the states loyal to the Union, such as New Jersey, Maryland, Delaware, Kentucky and Missouri.

Emancipation Day dawned in Maryland on Nov. 1, 1864. In the following year, emancipation was granted on April 3 in Virginia, on May 8 in Mississippi, on May 20 in Florida, on May 29 in Georgia, on June 19 in Texas and on Aug. 8 in Tennessee and Kentucky.

Slavery by another name

After the Civil War, the three Reconstruction Amendments to the U.S. Constitution each contained loopholes that aided the ongoing oppression of Black communities.

The Thirteenth Amendment of 1865 allowed for the enslavement of incarcerated people through convict leasing.

The Fourteenth Amendment of 1868 permitted incarcerated people to be denied the right to vote.

And the Fifteenth Amendment of 1870 failed to explicitly ban forms of voter suppression that targeted Black voters and would intensify during the coming Jim Crow era.

In fact, Granger’s Order No. 3, on June 19, 1865, spelled it out.

Freeing the slaves, the order read, “involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves, and the connection heretofore existing between them, become that between employer and hired labor.”

Yet, the order further states: “The freed are advised to remain at their present homes, and work for wages. They are informed that they will not be allowed to collect at military posts; and that they will not be supported in idleness either there or elsewhere.”

The meaning of Juneteenth

Since the moment emancipation celebrations started on March 1, 1780, all the way up to June 19, 1865, Black crowds gathered to seek redress for slavery.

On that first Juneteenth in Texas, and increasingly so during the ones that followed, free people celebrated their resilience amid the failure of emancipation to bring full freedom.

They stood for the end of debt bondage, racial policing and discriminatory laws that unjustly harmed Black communities. They elevated their collective imagination from out of the spiritual sinkhole of white property rule.

Over the decades, the traditions of Juneteenth ripened into larger gatherings in public parks, with barbecue picnics and firecrackers and street parades with brass bands.

At the end of his 1999 posthumously published novel, “Juneteenth,” noted Black author Ralph Ellison called for a poignant question to be asked on Emancipation Day: “How the hell do we get love into politics or compassion into history?”

The question calls for a pause as much today as ever before.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Kris Manjapra, Tufts University

Read more:

• Juneteenth: Freedom’s promise is still denied to thousands of blacks unable to make bail
• There was a time reparations were actually paid out – just not to formerly enslaved people
• African Americans have long defied white supremacy and celebrated Black culture in public spaces

Kris Manjapra does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

The post Juneteenth: Celebrating the history of emancipation appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

Whenever I tell high school students in classes I visit that I appreciated learning about slavery as a child growing up in the Caribbean, they often look confused.

Why, they ask, did I like learning about slavery given that it was so horrible and harsh? How could I value being taught about something that caused so much hurt and harm?

That’s when I tell them that my teachers in St. Thomas – and my fourth grade history textbook – didn’t focus just on the harsh conditions of slavery. Rather, they also focused on Black freedom fighters, such as Moses Gottlieb, perhaps better known as General Buddhoe, who is credited with leading a nonviolent revolt that led to the abolishment of slavery in the Danish-ruled West Indies on July 3, 1848. The historic date is now observed and celebrated in the United States Virgin Islands as Emancipation Day.

The holiday – and the lessons I learned about it – instilled in me a sense of cultural pride and gave me a better appreciation for the sacrifices that Black people made for freedom. It also encouraged me to always push on when faced with challenges.

The reason I bring this up is because I believe Juneteenth – which commemorates the date in 1865 when Union troops notified the last remaining slaves in Texas that they were free – holds similar promise for Black students throughout the United States.

Students often tell me that they’re not learning much about slavery beyond the suffering and harsh conditions that it involved. As a historian who specializes in how slavery is taught in K-12 classrooms, I believe there are several ways educators can incorporate Juneteenth into their instruction that will give students a broader understanding of how Black people resisted slavery and persevered in spite of it. Below are just a few.

Start early, but keep it positive

As early childhood experts assembled by the National Museum of African American History point out in a guide they created to help develop lessons about Juneteenth, children in the U.S. will probably hear about slavery by age 5. But lessons about slavery at that age should avoid the pain and trauma of slavery. Instead, the lessons should celebrate and teach stories of Black culture, leadership, inventions, beauty and accomplishments. This, the authors of the guide say, will better equip children to later hear about, understand and emotionally process the terrible truths about slavery.

“Juneteenth events can be wonderful opportunities to introduce the concepts of slavery with a focus on resilience and within an environment of love, trust, and joy,” the guide states.

Focus on Black resistance

Many Juneteeth celebrations not only commemorate the end of slavery, but they also honor the generations of Black men and women who have fought to end slavery and for racial justice. As Black history education professor LaGarett King puts it, Black people have always “acted, made their own decisions based on their interests, and fought back against oppressive structures.” Stressing this can help students to see that although Black people were victimized by slavery, they were not just helpless victims.

Juneteenth provides opportunities to acknowledge and examine the legacies of Black freedom fighters during the time of slavery. These freedom fighters include – but are not necessarily limited to – Frederick Douglass, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner and Sojourner Truth.

Connect Juneteenth to current events

Juneteenth can also be a way for educators to help students better understand contemporary demands for racial justice. That’s what George Patterson, a former Brooklyn middle school principal, did a few years back at the height of protests that took place under the mantra of Black Lives Matter.

Patterson has said he believes that when students study Juneteenth, they are “better equipped to understand the historical underpinnings of what’s going on in the streets and to put the demands being made in context.”

Teachers need not wait for Juneteenth to be included in textbooks in order to draw lessons from the holiday.

“If it’s not in the textbook, then we need to introduce it, we need to teach it,” Odessa Pickett, a teacher at the Barack Obama Learning Academy in Markham, Illinois, stated during an interview about teachers infusing Juneteenth into their lessons. “We need to bring it to the forefront.”

Educators can make Juneteenth about so much more than the end of slavery. Teaching lessons about the holiday offers an abundance of opportunities about what it means to fight for freedom and maintain a sense of self-determination in the face of oppression.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world. It was written by: Raphael E. Rogers, Clark University

Read more:

• How Black Americans combated racism from beyond the grave
• 6 books that explain the history and meaning of Juneteenth
• Juneteenth celebrates just one of the United States’ 20 emancipation days – and the history of how emancipated people were kept unfree needs to be remembered, too

Raphael E. Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

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By Leticia Callista

<leticia@curzonpr.com>

Cristiano Berti’s new book, Boggiano Heirs, tells the stories of the Boggianos, a group of enslaved people owned by Antonio Boggiano, a wealthy Italian merchant residing in Cuba in the early 19th century, whose surname was imposed upon many enslaved people and transmitted to their descendants up to this day.

In the early 19th century, slavery was widespread in Cuba. Racism was also a rampant issue as the Cuban society was divided into classifications according to one’s proximity to Whiteness, defining a woman of mixed African and European descent as a mulata, of mixed Indigenous American and European descent as a mestiza, of mixed White and mulata descent as a tercerona, a descendent of mixed White and tercerona descent a cuarterona and so on in the numerous possible combinations.

By the time Antonio Boggiano arrived in Cuba, it was fairly easy for him to amass enough money to purchase a coffee plantation near the city of Trinidad – in an area named San José de los Puriales – along with slaves who were forced to exert labor to cultivate it.

The enslaved people endured poor living conditions and harsh treatment, particularly those who worked in sugar plantations. Poor sanitary conditions, scarcity of medicines and overcrowding made the enslaved people more vulnerable to epidemics. Due to the hardships the enslaved faced, their lifespan was cut short – those in sugar plantations had a lifespan that averaged around 10 years, while those in coffee plantations had a comparatively higher lifespan.

Those who attempted to flee, known as cimarrones, were often captured and returned to slavery after being subjected to terrible punishments. According to customary law, the only reliable way to freedom was through its purchase. As few had the means to do so, many had their fates sealed as slaves. Fortunately, some of Boggiano’s slaves did precisely this: They bought their own freedom.

While the Cuban Boggianos of this era carry Antonio Boggiano’s surname, they do not directly descend from his lineage. Instead, the book explores other possibilities, such as the customary practices in Spanish colonies that baptized enslaved people under the surname of their enslaver.

Today, the only tangible relic of Antonio Boggiano’s many businesses and properties is a white marble altar found in Santísima Trinidad’s Church. However, the author emphasizes that the marble altar is not particularly interesting compared to the immaterial legacy constituted by the transmission of his surname that can be found among many Afro-Cubans to this day.

The result of five years of research, Cristiano Berti’s “Boggiano Heirs” is primarily an artist’s book but takes the form of a historical essay. His recent projects involve the publication of an artist’s book, along with works created using the typical mediums of contemporary art. 

The book closes with a conversation with American art critic and author Seph Rodney on art and the representation and memory of slavery:

“You turned toward the mystery of the Boggianos to see what they could tell you about the wider developments within the Caribbean. I think it’s valuable that you have uncovered a hushed history of entrepreneurship, travel, exploitation, enslavement, aspiration, intermixing of cultures and ethnicities, and laborious self-possession.”

Boggiano Heirs is distributed in the U.S. by IDEA Books and produced thanks to the support of the Italian Council’s programme for the international promotion of Italian art, under the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture. 

Cristiano Berti (Turin, 1967) is a visual artist who mainly works with the mediums of photography, video and installation. Using an array of sources, Berti weaves together the stories of Boggiano and the people he owned as slaves. Uniting everything is the surname Boggiano, imposed on the slaves and still widespread in the Afro-Cuban community. 

The book uses the mystery of the Boggianos to understand wider developments within the Caribbean, uncovering a hushed history of entrepreneurship, travel, exploitation, enslavement, aspiration and intermixing of cultures and ethnicities.

The book is part of a larger project titled Futile Cycles: Boggiano, which include two other works developed by Berti: a wall installation depicting two large family trees, in which the people born in Africa stand at the apex, branching out through marriages that took place in the first half of the 19th century, and a video in which some stories collected by the author in the area where Antonio Boggiano’s coffee plantation once stood intersect with the conversation a family of Afro-Cuban Boggianos.

The result of five years of research, Boggiano Heirs is primarily an artist’s book, but takes the form of a historical essay. 

Berti found the inspiration for Boggiano Heirs from the research conducted on Gaggini, which led him to discover the existence of Antonio Boggiano, who was an intermediary in the commission to the sculptor of two fountains for the city of Havana.

Due to its historical and artistic relevance at an international level, the book won the support of the Italian Council programme operated by the Italian Contemporary Creativity Directorate General of the Ministry of Culture. 

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Dear Editor:

I read The Cincinnati Herald articles “The Emancipation Proclamation in practice: A Timeline” parts 1 and 2,  which briefly tells us the history around the issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation (EP) and how good it is for us as Americans. 

I compared the articles to what I read some years ago in the book “Forced into Glory: Abraham Lincoln White Dream” by noted historian Lerone Bennett Jr.

The articles didn’t tell us that POTUS Lincoln used the N-word in private and public all the time, but he had the slaves best interest at heart when issuing the EP, the articles allude to. 

Was Lincoln the Great Emancipator?       

Did the EP free the millions of slaves in the Confederacy? 

NO to both questions.Two years and one month after the EP was issued by Lincoln, 95% of slaves in the Confederacy, about 4 million slaves, were still kept in slavery. This was 2 months before the end of the Civil War.

The EP also allowed “border states” and Union-held territories of Kentucky, Maryland, Missouri, Delaware,  Tennessee, Virginia, Louisiana to keep the slaves in slavery, as if the EP wasn’t issued.

Some saw the EP as a war document, because the last sentence of the EP authorizes the recruitment of Negro men to serve in the armed forces. Over 100,000 Black men joined and fought for the freedoms every Americans, except us can enjoy. Please read what Jeff Davis, President of the Confederate States, said about the EP.

I enjoyed reading the articles, but I thought it made the EP more important than it really was. History is the author of the articles story of events. However, that doesn’t make it truthful.

Douglas Springs

Cincinnati

Editor’s Note: The Brooklyn Historical Society blog features a series of blog posts called “The Emancipation Proclamation: Americans Respond.” An excerpt from the blog follows:

It should not surprise readers that the President of the Confederate States of America did not respond positively to the Emancipation Proclamation.

In a long and florid speech to the Confederate Congress on January 13, 1863, President Jefferson Davis portrayed the proclamation as a crime against humanity that would be decried and reviled throughout history.

Jefferson said in his speech, titled Journal of Confederate Congress, Volume 3, pages 13-14, “We may well leave it to the instincts of that common humanity which a beneficent Creator has implanted in the breasts of our fellow-men of all countries to pass judgment on a measure by which several millions of human beings of an inferior race, peaceful and contented laborers in their sphere, are doomed to extermination, while at the same time they are encouraged to a general assassination of their masters by the insidious recommendation ‘to abstain from violence unless in necessary self-defense.’ Our own detestation of those who have attempted by the most excrable measure recorded in the history of guilty man is tempered by a profound contempt for the impotent rage which it discloses.  …”

Several things are notable about Davis’s speech. First, to Jefferson Davis and other proponents of slavery, the Emancipation Proclamation was a de facto call for slave rebellion. 

Armed rebellions were actually relatively uncommon in the antebellum American south as compared to other slave societies. But events like Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion and, of course, John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry lived in infamy among slaveholders and their supporters. The violent Haitian Revolution, which began with a slave revolt and ended the establishment of the Black-led Republic of Haiti in 1804, terrified the slaveowning classes, especially in Black-majority areas like South Carolina.

To tie emancipation to violent rebellion, Davis quoted one line from Lincoln’s proclamation – “to abstain from violence unless in necessary self defense.” Davis implied that this is tantamount to endorsing Black-on-White violence in the Confederacy.

This endorsement of self-protection and personal self-determination was a very radical statement for Lincoln to make considering the centuries during which slaveowners were granted physical control over their chattel. Today, we can look to this clause to reflect how far Lincoln had come from his much more hesitant criticisms of slavery, including his previous endorsement of gradual manumission and of colonization.

Finally, Davis dramatically declared that the Emancipation Proclamation “doom[ed]” black Americans “to extermination.” Davis’ belief in the inferiority of African Americans was so great that he believed that emancipation would only disrupt their “peaceful and contented” lives, leading to their inevitable demise. Whether this would occur over a longer period time, or whether emancipation would prompt this extermination at the hands of White slaveowners defending themselves during a slave insurrection remained unclear.

What is of course most important is just how mistaken Davis was. Enslaved people did leave plantations in large numbers after the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. But they rarely acted violently, and instead chose to head towards the United States Army to contribute their labor to something new: the Union cause. That, of course, created new opportunities for inequality.

Editor’s Note: The views expressed in this commentary piece do not necessarily the express the opinions of The Cincinnati Herald.

The post The emancipation proclamation: Myths and realities revealed appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

By Nancy Sullivan

Director

Transformations CDC

Color barriers have outlasted slavery in the US: equal access to voting, education and jobs, secure land tenure, protection from arbitrary detention and even torture or death.

Did you know that hundreds of Mauritanians have come to Cincinnati in recent months to escape racism in their own country? Many of them flew to Brazil, then made the almost unthinkable walk 4,200 mile trek through seven countries to the US-Mexico border; not all made it. Others with a little more money flew to Ecuador or Peru and took multiple buses north. At the US border they look for Border Patrol agents so they can apply for asylum. Our new neighbors passed their initial “credible fear” interview, (the government’s screening for migrants seeking asylum), and traveled to Cincinnati, one of the largest two Mauritanian communities in the US.

Why would they leave everything behind in fear for their lives, rather than seeking an escape from poverty or corruption? Although Mauritania, a former French colony in northwest Africa, outlawed slavery in 1981, but in practice it still exists. The ruling elite, (the former slave holders), are light-skinned Moors associated with the northern part of the country. The rest of the population live in the Sub-Saharan region and are very dark-skinned. Malnutrition is one way to assess the difference: 3.6% of the Arab population is malnourished, but over twice as many Black Mauritanians suffer from malnutrition. They have been subject to atrocities for generations: in 1990, to celebrate the country’s independence from France, Moorish soldiers took 28 of their fellow soldiers, all Black, and hanged them.

Today 50-75,000 Black Mauritanians are literally stateless: in 1989 during a power play the year before independence they were expelled from their own country. Many ultimately returned, but have been unable to get legal identity cards because of lost birth certificates or “bureaucratic errors” from the forced expulsion. Without the ID they can’t vote, reclaim stolen property or assert their legal rights. Recent immigrants report that White Mauritanians increasingly expropriate Black land, force people into domestic servitude or to work as unpaid fisherfolk. There is no legal recourse. I’ve seen bystander videos of police and military, (dominated by the lighter-skinned Moors), arbitrarily throwing grenades into civilians’ homes or viciously beating old men.

Cincinnati and Columbus have the largest Mauritanian populations in the US, so in June community organizers planned a meeting to explain to the newcomers the next steps in the asylum process. They rented a huge hall in a Sharonville motel, expecting 200 recent arrivals. Instead, 500 showed up. 

Because there is no emergency shelter to accommodate them, most are living with already-established Mauritanian families. Right now 19 young men are living in the home of the president of the Mauritanian Association. He explained that over the past two years he has housed 200 people. Many of his associates who still bear the scars of torture from Mauritanian jails have similarly opened their homes and their hearts to their countrymen.

Are there African Americans in Cincinnati who could also provide temporary homes to several asylum seekers? 

Or teach English as a second language or computer literacy or perhaps drive a newcomer to their immigration lawyer or a clinic? 

Would your church take up a collection to assist families who are feeding and housing newly-arrived Mauritanian (and other Africans and Haitians) until they can get on their feet?

Contact badgmur@gmail.com if you have ideas or want to help.

The post Escaping racism: Mauritanians flee to Cincinnati to seek asylum appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

A social, spiritual, and economic famine was imminent in Africa, and it has persisted to this day, Cochran claimed without providing any evidence to support his rhetoric.

By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

In a videotaped lecture that many called out as teeming with self-hate, a former Atlanta fire chief ridiculously opined that it was God’s divine plan that permitted Americans to enslave Africans.
NBC News reported that Kelvin J. Cochran, who is Black, lectured at a Georgia Department of Labor event honoring Black History Month.
The outlet noted that Cochran explained how his religious beliefs were consistent with the nation’s founding.
The network reported that Cochran began “his patriotic speech” by claiming that the United States “has been a part of God’s divine plan from the beginning of time.”
Later, he mentions slavery, implying that the entirety of American history is “His story.”
God was not taken aback by slavery in the United States, Cochran argued.
The enslavement of Africans in the Americas was sanctioned by God, who “in his sovereignty” allowed it to happen, he asserted.
A social, spiritual, and economic famine was imminent in Africa, and it has persisted to this day, Cochran claimed without providing any evidence to support his rhetoric.
Hence, God was responsible for the Middle Passage slave trade that delivered six million Africans to the Americas, he said.
It also was God’s divine design to enslave the nation of Israel, as Cochran put it, and God’s sovereignty “enabled Africans to be brought to America in bondage.”
Cochran referred to the Bible, namely Genesis, where God foretold that Abraham’s offspring would be imprisoned and tormented for four hundred years.
He said slave owners were committed to educating their slaves about religion, and that slaves would often congregate outside of churches in order to listen in on the worship services.
Cochran sent copies of his self-published Bible study book, “Who Told You That You Were Naked?” to his employees in 2013.
The book reportedly contains statements like “naked,” “wicked,” and “ungodly” as it described sinners as gay and those who have sex outside of marriage.
Homosexuality, he added, was a “sexual perversion on par with bestiality.”
The fire department suspended Cochran without pay for 30 days in November 2014 for failing to obtain approval or provide sufficient notice prior to the publishing of the book, which had been flagged as a concern by an assistant fire chief in October 2014.
Cochran was let go in January 2015 after a campaign he launched following his suspension. He claimed he was terminated because of his religious views.
The Atlanta City Council voted in October 2018 to settle Cochran’s claim, paying him $1.2 million.
Cochran currently works as a senior fellow and vice president of the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conversative and religious group that represented him in the lawsuit against the city.
“Here’s the bottom line,” Cochran asserted.
“We all got here on different boats, but now we’re in the same boat. I thank God for America and I thank God for American history,” he said.

Abraham africa Alliance Defending Freedom American History Bible bondage City Council divine plan economic enslaved enslavers famine fire chief Genesis God’s Plan Kelvin Cochran lecture patriotic rhetoric Self-hate slave masters slavery social Speech Spiritual “Middle Passage”

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September is International Underground Railroad Month

By Diana Porter

International Underground Railroad Month acknowledges the significance of the interracial Underground Railroad for its contribution to the eradication of slavery in the United States and as a cornerstone for the Civil Rights Movement that continues today in the Black Lives Matter movement. 

This year, the exhibit in College Hill is in Dow’s Corner 5903 Hamilton Ave. Also, September 18 was local Underground Railroad history day, with activities at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center.

College Hill had an active community of abolitionists who were agents on the Underground Railroad. The well-documented “Escape of the 28” from Boone County, Kentucky in 1853 came through College Hill. The twenty-eight freedom seekers found refuge here and were safely transported by Black and White abolitionists on their journey to freedom in Canada. They were greeted in Canada by teacher, nurse, and abolitionist Laura Haviland and Henry Bibb, the editor of the first Black newspaper in Canada, the Voice of the Fugitive.

The College Hill Historical Society and HamiltonAvenueRoadToFreedom.org exhibit honors the courageous stories of those who emancipated themselves from slavery, the stories of the Black and White abolitionists who aided them, and the people who documented, interpreted and shared these stories from the Underground Railroad.  We see that the journey continues today.

The College Hill Historical Society and HamiltonAvenueRoadToFreedom.org have an exhibit in a storefront for September at Hamilton and Cedar Avenues in College Hill.

The Road to Freedom through Cincinnati 1820–1860 

In the early years of the 19th century, Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner and many other enslaved people led open rebellions against the institution of slavery. However, most resistance to slavery took the form of trying to run away. At first it was the younger, stronger men who succeeding by keeping ahead of the slave catchers and their dogs to emancipate themselves. These were unassisted escapes; daring freedom seekers setting off north orienting themselves by walking near a transportation route or following tributaries leading to the Ohio River.

The law was not on the side of those escaping, nor on the side of those helping them. In Ohio and other states created from the 1787 Northwest Territory, owning slaves was prohibited but it was still against the law to aid those escaping their bondage.  Despite these laws, many abolitionists felt called to do more than talk about ending slavery.

As word got back about the best routes north and as free Black communities north of the Ohio River were large enough to hide these runaways, a larger, interracial network of assistance was formed.   

Cincinnati’s Black population was centered in ‘Bucktown,’ an area on the eastern edge of the city, below the hillsides of Cincinnati’s basin and near the slaughterhouses. Those fleeing north were drawn to this area because they felt safer here. Black churches were their first help. The Allen A. M. E. Temple dates back to 1808 and was burned down three times by proslavery gangs. The Zion Baptist and the Union Baptist Churches regularly hid slaves in their basements. If the slave catchers were moving in quickly, White abolitionists would aid them by transporting them out of the city or giving them disguises or cover by accompanying them so that they might use public transportation and be “hidden in plain sight.” While free Black families were often the first point of contact to those escaping enslavement, their stories were not collected by the historians in the late nineteenth century and are now emerging through new research and scholarship.

An interracial network in Cincinnati, known as the Underground Railroad, continued to grow and be more capable of successfully and quickly assisting larger groups in their flight. Lane Seminary in Walnut Hills had been a transportation hub for many seeking freedom in the 30’s and early 40’s.  Harriet Beecher Stowe gathered the background for her novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, from her home near Lane Seminary.   Conductors drove freedom seekers from Walnut Hills to one of the many next houses north of the city.  John Van Zandt, who lived in Glendale, was caught in 1842 assisting nine slaves escaping from Boone County Kentucky on their journey north.  Although well defended before the Supreme Court by Salmon P., Chase, Van Zandt was found guilty in 1847, died a pauper the same year and was buried in Wesleyan Cemetery. The route from Walnut Hills was becoming too well known to remain safe.

Mt. Pleasant (now called Mt. Healthy) was the earliest village established along the Hamilton Road (its first name; after the mid-1830s it became the Cincinnati and Hamilton Turnpike, or Hamilton Pike). By 1810 there were two taverns in Mt. Pleasant, along with shops for necessities, at the midpoint of this well-traveled route between Cincinnati and the Butler County town of Hamilton, Ohio. By the late-1830s Charles Cheney, as president of the Cincinnati and Hamilton Turnpike, was appointing tollgate keepers who were friendly to Underground Railroad transport. The Cheneys, and other Mt. Pleasant residents such as the Lane and Hastings families were receiving frequent nighttime visits in the 1830s and 1840s. With a growing free Black community, there were opportunities for fugitives to blend into the community during the day and receive respite on their way north. Oral tradition from one local descendant of a former slave recounts that fugitive slaves were given safe overnight haven in the homes of the White abolitionists, and in the morning the fugitives would be fed and provisioned for their journeys in the home of her ancestor, to be ferried north in the carriages and wagons of participating White farmers.

The route north through Glendale disappeared with the arrest and trial of VanZandt.  

Once Levi Coffin moved to Cincinnati in 1847, he joined the Vigilance Committee formed to protect free Blacks in the city.  This  brought him into contact with many in the free Black community and connected them to a new route through Cumminsville, College Hill, Mt. Healthy and northwest through his former Quaker community of Newport, Indiana (now Fountain City).  This route to Canada was safer, used Black and White conductors in Indiana and Michigan, and could accommodate the larger groups that came to Cincinnati after the Fugitive Slave Act.  The Quaker community in Oberlin, Ohio, defined another route north, and led to the port of Sandusky.

When large groups escaped together, newspapers called them “slave stampedes.” On April 2, 1853, there was such an escape, named by Levi Coffin as “The Company of Twenty-Eight Fugitives” whose route was what is now Hamilton Avenue with an overnight stay in College Hill.  This was the largest and best documented flight to freedom across the Ohio River at Cincinnati, but was just one of many escapes on this important Underground Railroad route in the 1850s.

The post Hamilton Avenue was the Road to Freedom appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

By KIMBERLEE KRUESI and CHEYANNE MUMPHREY Associated Press

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — Recognition of Juneteenth, the effective end of slavery in the U.S., gained traction after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. But after an initial burst of action, the movement to have it recognized as an official holiday in the states has largely stalled.

Although almost every state recognizes Juneteenth in some fashion, many have been slow to do more than issue a proclamation or resolution, even as some continue to commemorate the Confederacy.

Lawmakers in Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Tennessee and other states failed to advance proposals this year that would have closed state offices and given most of their public employees paid time off for the June 19 holiday.

That trend infuriates Black leaders and community organizers who view making Juneteenth a paid holiday the bare minimum state officials can do to help honor an often overlooked and ignored piece of American history.

“Juneteenth marks the date of major significance in American history. It represents the ways in which freedom for Black people have been delayed,” said Democratic Rep. Anthony Nolan, who is Black, while arguing in favor of making Juneteenth a paid holiday in Connecticut on the House floor. “And if we delay this, it’s a smack in the face to Black folks.”

Juneteenth commemorates when Union soldiers brought the news of freedom to enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, in 1865, two months after the Confederacy had surrendered in the Civil War and about 2 1/2 years after the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in Southern states.

Last year, Congress and President Joe Biden moved swiftly to make Juneteenth a national holiday. It was the first time the federal government had designated a new national holiday since approving Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1983. Yet the move didn’t result in an automatic adoption from most states.

In Alabama, Republican Gov. Kay Ivey issued another proclamation marking Juneteenth a state holiday earlier this week after state lawmakers refused to take action on a bill during their legislative session even after she voiced strong support for making it a permanent holiday back in 2021. The state closes down for Confederate Memorial Days in April.

Similarly, Wyoming’s Republican Gov. Mark Gordon issued a statement last June saying he would work with lawmakers to make it a state holiday but no legislation was filed during the 2022 session.

In Tennessee, Republican Gov. Bill Lee quietly tucked enough funding — roughly $700,000 — to make Juneteenth a state paid holiday in his initial spending plan for the upcoming year.

Despite the bill gaining traction in the state Senate, GOP legislative leaders maintained there wasn’t enough support for the idea even as Tennessee law currently designates special observances for Robert E. Lee Day, Confederate Decoration Day and Nathan Bedford Forrest Day.

“I asked many people in my district over the last few days, well over 100 people, if they knew what Juneteenth was and only two of them knew,” said Republican Sen. Joey Hensley, who is white and voted against the proposal. “I just think we’re putting the cart before the horse making a holiday that people don’t know about.”

In South Carolina, instead of working to approve Juneteenth as a holiday, Senate lawmakers unanimously advanced a bill that would allow state employees to choose any day they want to take off instead of the Confederate Memorial Day currently enshrined as a paid holiday in state law. However, the House sent the bill to a committee where it died without a hearing when the Legislature adjourned for the session.

At the same time, many of these Republican-led areas have advanced bills limiting what can be taught about systematic racism in classrooms, while also spiking proposals aimed at expanding voting rights and police reform.

This year, nearly 20 states are expected to close state offices and give most of their public employees time off. At least six states officially adopted the holiday over the past few months, including Connecticut, Colorado, Georgia, Maryland, South Dakota, Utah and Washington. A bill introduced in California passed the Assembly and moved to the Senate this month, and individual cities such as Los Angeles have already signed proclamations making Juneteenth official.

“Becoming a state holiday will not merely give employees a day off, it will also give residents a day to think about the future that we want, while remembering the inequities of the past,” said Democratic Del. Andrea Harrison, who sponsored the Juneteenth legislation in Maryland this year. “It will help us to reflect how far we’ve come as a nation, how much more we need to do as humankind.”

Attempts to give Juneteenth the same deference as Memorial Day or July Fourth didn’t begin to gain traction until 2020, when protests sparked a nationwide push to address race after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the deaths of other Black people by police officers.

“George Floyd protests against police brutality brought awareness to Juneteenth because there were people of all races learning about its significance for the first time following a public push to self-educate and learn more about Black history, culture and injustices,” said Tremaine Jasper, a resident and business owner in Phoenix who has attended Juneteenth celebrations across Arizona with his family.

Some cities in Arizona, including Phoenix, have declared Juneteenth an official holiday, paying city employees and closing municipal buildings. However, lawmakers are not currently considering statewide recognition.

“There are so many other important issues that we need to tackle — education, political issues, reparations — before we prioritize making Juneteenth a statewide holiday,” Jasper said, noting that those looking to celebrate know where to go.

Jasper, who was born and raised in Arizona, said it is going to be an “uphill battle” to get the state to recognize Juneteenth because there is not a large enough Black population outside of its largest cities to make the push.

Arizona was also slow in recognizing Martin Luther King Jr. Day, not doing so until 1992. It was one of the last states to officially recognize the civil rights leader.

___

Associated Press writer Susan Haigh in Hartford, Connecticut, contributed to this report. Mumphrey reported from Phoenix and is a member of The Associated Press’ Race and Ethnicity team. Follow her at https://twitter.com/cheymumph.

The post Despite push, states slow to make Juneteenth a paid holiday appeared first on The Cincinnati Herald .

By Stacy M. Brown
NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
@StacyBrownMedia

Federal and state governments, including California, failed to protect Black artists, culture-makers, and media-makers from discrimination and simultaneously promoted discriminatory narratives.
Further, state governments memorialized the Confederacy as just and heroic through monument building while suppressing the nation’s history of racism and slavery.
Government actions at every level across the country, including California, have directly segregated, and discriminated against African Americans at work.
After intensive research, the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans reached those conclusions and made concrete recommendations to compensate those affected.
The group issued its interim report to state legislators on June 1.
Separate from the federal proposal pushed by Texas Democratic Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the report surveyed ongoing, and compounding harms experienced by African Americans because of slavery.
It also studied the lingering effects the slave trade had on America.
The report includes a set of preliminary recommendations for policies that legislatures in the Golden State could adopt to remedy the harms.
Officials plan to release a final report next year.
“Federal and state policies like affirmative action produced mixed results and were short-lived,” Task Force members wrote in the report.
“African Americans continue to face employment discrimination today in the country and California,” members wrote.
They determined that the American government at all levels, including in California, has historically criminalized African Americans for social control and maintaining an economy based on exploited Black labor.
“This criminalization is an enduring badge of slavery and has contributed to the over-policing of Black neighborhoods, the school to prison pipeline, the mass incarceration of African Americans, a refusal to accept African Americans as victims, and other inequities in nearly every corner of the American and California legal systems,” the report authors stated.
“As a result, the American and California criminal justice system physically harms, imprisons, and kills African Americans more than other racial groups relative to their percentage of the population.”
The authors continued:
“The government actions described in this report have had a devastating effect on the health of African Americans in the country and California.
“Compared to white Americans, African Americans live shorter lives and are more likely to suffer and die from almost all diseases and medical conditions than white Americans.
“Researchers have linked these health outcomes in part to African Americans’ unrelenting experience of racism in our society. In addition to physical harm, African Americans experience psychological harm, which can profoundly undermine Black children’s emotional and physical well-being and academic success.”
The Task Force has recommended several remedies, including:
• Implement a detailed program of reparations for African Americans.
• Develop and implement other policies, programs, and measures to close the racial wealth gap in California.
• Provide funding, and technical assistance to Black-led and Black community-based land trusts to support wealth building and affordable housing.
• Establish a cabinet-level secretary position over an African American/Freedmen Affairs Agency tasked with implementing the recommendations of this task force.
They said the agency would identify past harms, prevent future harm, and work with other state agencies and branches of California’s government to mitigate the wrongs.
The Task Force suggested policies to the Governor and the Legislature designed to compensate for the harms caused by the legacy of anti-Black discrimination and work to eliminate systemic racism that has developed because of the enslavement of African Americans in the United States.
The authors recommended that the agency include the following:
• A branch to process claims with the state and assist claimants in filing for eligibility.
• A genealogy branch to support potential claimants with genealogical research and to confirm eligibility.
• A reparations tribunal to adjudicate substantive claims for past harms.
• An office of immediate relief to expedite claims.
• A civic engagement branch to support ongoing political education on African American history and to support civic engagement among African American youth.
• A freedmen education branch to offer free education and to facilitate the free tuition initiative between claimants and California schools.
• A social services and family affairs branch to identify and mitigate how current and previous policies have damaged and destabilized Black families.
• Services might include treatment for trauma and family healing services to strengthen the family unit, stress resiliency services, financial planning services, career planning, and civil and family court services.
• A cultural affairs branch to restore African American cultural/historical sites; establish monuments; advocate for the removal of racist relics; support knowledge production and archival research; and provide support for African Americans in the entertainment industry, including identifying and removing barriers to advancement into leadership and decision-making positions in the arts, entertainment, and sports industries.
• A legal affairs office to coordinate a range of free legal services, including criminal defense attorneys for criminal trials and parole hearings; free arbitration and mediation services; and to advocate for civil and criminal justice reforms.
• A division of medical services for public and environmental health.
• A business affairs office to provide ongoing education related to entrepreneurialism and financial literacy, offer business grants, and establish public-private reparative justice-oriented partnerships.
Click here to view the report.

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