Marian's Blog

My greatgrandfather, Thomas Gudger, who died in Chanute, Kansas, 1913

Today I am writing to remember and honour Thomas Gudger, father of my maternal grandmother and her three brothers. I never met any of my grandmother's brothers.  Thomas Gudger died on this day in March 1913, in a place called Chanute in the U.S. state of Kansas. One day he went to his job in the local cement plant and this act of responsibility ended his life. He was 34 but already a widower with four children. He'd lost my great grandmother, his wife, in childbirth in Tennessee, yet he made an heroic effort to keep his family together and give them a better life. As Black Appalachian people, my great grandfather (called mulatto but whose family was tri-racial - Black American/African, American Indian and white/European), his maternal uncle (also "mulatto") and other family members, moved to Chanute in 1911 or 1912 from their Tennessee-North Carolina mountain home. Less than twenty four hours after my grandfather's death, crushed to death at his job, the local newspaper published the front page story: Thomas Gudger, colored, killed; four little children left without parents. The article, which eventually I will transcribe, states uncategorically no one was present at the time of the "accident." At the same time, curiously, this statement wasn't a quote attributed to any official such as, say, local police. The article contains no comments from any local authorities. Is it also coincidence the headline and article seem to read like a warning? Was it intended as a warning to other Blacks who might attempt to settle and work in this part of southeast Kansas? I think of renowned photographer Gordon Parks whose family, in the same general period of the early 1900s, fled southeast Kansas and its anti-Black racism. For the rest of my life I will wonder how many Black Americans, over decades and centuries, have lost their lives; how many of our loved ones have been murdered in our country, the USA, with total impunity and with continued anonymity for the perpetrators and the places that enabled, even rewarded, them. Much more often than our society thusfar has acknowledged our family members lost their lives for what we now call racially motivated reasons. We love you always, Grandpa Gudger.

The international conversations Black America's not having: Reading Yvonne Bynoe

Came across an interesting article from nearly a year ago: author Yvonne Bynoe's Black America After Jim Crow: Still Feels Like Segregation, published on AlterNet. (They have good stuff and deserve your consideration of $upport.)

For decades I've been having "frank and candid" conversations, personal and public, with Black folks from around the world outside the USA, as well as with my folks here at home. I agree with much but not all of what Bynoe writes. I remember a surreal moment in the Kenyan government representative's speech at the U.S. 4th of July diplomatic event in Nairobi a few years ago. Johnnie Carson, a Black American, was ambassador. But I'll save this for another time.

"What has not occurred are frank and candid conversations between native Black Americans and immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean that aim to update the public face of "Black America." These dialogues would first need to acknowledge the unique cultures and histories of the various groups, while forging relationships based on our shared interests and challenges in this country as people of African descent." - writer Yvonne Bynoe

Fannie Lou Hamer's long road to Denver, the 2008 Democratic National Convention

The 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver marks a mere forty (40) years since Fannie Lou Hamer became the first post-Reconstruction Black American official delegate of a U.S. national political party convention. So many other things about the 1968 Democratic National Convention have been allowed to overshadow this historic fact for Black Americans. Virtually no one mentions this or the fact that Hamer was the first woman ever to be a political convention delegate from her state of Mississippi. This is all poetic justice but perhaps especially the latter, yet what good is justice when few heed and respect it, or keep the flame alive?

We live in a time when there's a tangible sense of sleepwalking in U.S. society. 2008 is the anniversary of Mrs. Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party finally gaining official inclusion in the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. This was a culmination of fights and of sacrifices made by Mrs. Hamer and thousands more, fights we've been told and once believed were truly over. Yet August of 2007 came and went with no mention of it being the 45th anniversary of the same woman's courageous though initially unsuccessful struggle to register to vote in her state and in her country. That day was the 31 August 1962. Forty-five years later, no news, no mention, no national commemoration.

History hasn't given up on us, yet. 2009 is the 45th anniversary of Mrs. Hamer's historic and moving speech to an otherwise oblivious credentials committee at the 1964 Democratic convention in Atlantic City. This was the convention where the president of the United States, Mr. Johnson, as delegated to Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale, maneuvered into obscurity Mrs. Hamer and the human rights issues she and others had come to AC to represent. This is where she gave the speech in which she said "... I question America."

"... All of this [intimidation, beatings, sexual humiliation] is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings, in America?"

Mrs. Hamer has been in my mind a lot lately, leading me to compare days not so long ago with today. Back then I was a child yet forced to negotiate an early comprehension of my people's collective resolve to march and protest, to die and risk injury against the kinds of violation I had yet to feel. In those years I eagerly learned the names and independence dates of anglophone African countries. Looking back I doubt my Nigerian and and Kenyan and Ghanaian homologues learned enough, if anything, about me. I can only wonder what Miss Fannie might think and what she'd dare say about the Democrats now aspiring to be president; a field of candidates with no one really like Mrs. Hamer. But today in the Americas, we're sleepwalking through so many issues.

So where's my white folks??? Cheney and Barack Obama related

To be honest the only real news about Dick Cheney and Barack Obama being related is that yet again we see a person from a different background is treated quite differently from we
Black Americans.

Just like the central yet undiscussed fact that he bears his own family's African name (which by definition of our experience, Black Americans do not) Barack Obama's blood tie with Dick Cheney is not through enslavement. Instead it's through white families up to and including his mother, who conceived him with a continental African, from Kenya, to be precise.

What of we millions of Black Americans? Up to the present no white American (nor European) politico has yet bragged of or publicly mentioned their family relations with us. And yet that area is such fruitful turf! Through my own arduous and emotionally tortuous family research I've connected with maybe two or three white relatives from my mother's family. Luckily, they've been good people. Mind you, a bit like Mr. Obama, these folks were not slaveholders. They are not related to my family through slavery, but through my white female ancestors in Tennessee and North Carolina. In another part of my family, my maternal grandfather confided to me forty years ago how his white cousins came to eat and play at his mother's home in Leavenworth, Kansas. But when they turned twelve, with no warning, they just stopped coming. My grandfather added that some of the white kinfolk moved from Leavenworth to New London, Connecticut where they took jobs at a federal naval base. This was 60 years ago, at least.

Major Owens unveils Black Caucus Members' opinion survey

The Congressional Black Caucus annual legislative conference ends tomorrow, Saturday. Monday, Oct 1st, I plan to attend "A New Challenge to the Congressional Black Caucus", my former boss Major Owens' Library of Congress think-tank panel on the CBC and his forthcoming book, The Peacock Elite: A Subjective Case Study of the Congressional Black Caucus. I'm interested in the results of Mr. Owens' opinion survey that he's asked his former colleagues - Black Caucus members (Members of U.S. Congress) to complete. Monday's panel includes current Congresswoman Maxine Waters (Los Angeles, California); former CBC members, Oakland (Cali) Mayor Ron Dellums and attorney Louis Stokes; author and Univ. of Maryland political science prof Ron Walters; and author Michael Eric Dyson, now on faculty at Georgetown University. I have not yet seen results of the congressional opinion survey, though I'm certain we'll hear more on Monday. Since retiring last January after 24 years representing Central Brooklyn, NY's 11th congressional district, Mr. Owens is now a distinguished visiting scholar in the Library of Congress's Kluge Center.

3 votes shy: Dems Baucus, Byrd & GOP halt S. 1257, DC Voting Rights

I couldn't believe the news at mid-afternoon today that on a 57 "yes" to 42 "no" voice vote, the U.S. Senate today failed to endorse S. 1257. This bill finally would have given Washington, the District of Columbia its own voting representation in the House of Representatives. Can any Americans truly be proud of, or indifferent to, this outcome?

This probably is particularly sobering for 87 year old, former Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke, a Republican who is Black. Despite his best bi-partisan efforts, today's vote split along party lines. With eight exceptions, other Republicans voted against 1257 despite the fact that its major compromise would have given Utah one more congressional seat.

Don't bother USA with facts? Dalits: India's own "Black" population

In Minneapolis in the late 80s or early 90s, along with two other persons of colour (Vincent who is Dalit and a U.S. Latina lady from St. Paul whose name I don't immediately recall), I initiated an "emergency" panel made up of the three of us to engage and question the Brazilian pedagogist, Paulo Freire. Interestingly, Mr. Freire's wife also sat in on the panel, next to her spouse, but I think she listened. Freire is the author of the classic, Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The occasion was the afternoon session of an all-day adult literacy conference and the venue may have been Augsburg College. Vincent, the Mexican American lady and myself appeared to be the only persons of colour in attendance. Or at least that's the way the whole thing came off, which is why I proposed to the organisers the change in the scheduled afternoon session which eventually was accepted. Fast forward. 21 June of this year Washington Post (finally) ran a front-page article on the ongoing suffering still inflicted by society upon the Dalit people of India. For years I've wanted to discuss this with people like Deepak Chopra, Ravi Shankar, Sonia Gandhi (who is italiana, by the way), and all the "shris", yogis and yoginis running around Europe and the U.S. A couple of years ago I learned from a young Asian Indian woman living in the US that "desi" is a term by which some Indians and other south Asians prefer to call themselves these days. In certain circles - Silicon Valley par exemple - people from India have become quite "popular", along with yoga, the domestically infamous H1B U.S. immigration visas and 'outsourcing' of all kinds of formerly domestic consumer services, to places most of us never will see.

People of color voted majority Dem, most Whites Republican

Here are statistics political pundits and others need to chew on. A Latino colleague sent me this NYTimes link to a fascinating exit survey on the November 2006 U.S. midterm House of Reps election. According to Edison Media Research & Mitofsky International, overall White women and men voted 52% Republican. Every counted group of people of colour voted majority Democrat.

I say every counted group because for some reason Edison/Mitofsky chose to exclude American Indian voters. Edison/Mitofsky also condescendingly refers to people of colour as "non-whites". To put it bluntly, both of these things stink and in future posts I'll be following these issues: the constant, daily exclusion of American Indian people from virtually every U.S. poll and everything else, and the use of this idiotic, pejorative negation "non-white".

Regarding votes for Democrats, whites voted just 48% compared to Black voters who cast 89% - eighty-nine - for Democrats, Latinos ("Hispanics") 70% Dem and Asians 62%. Although Edison/Mitofsky refers to people collectively as "non-whites", they seem to have "forgotten" to publish the average of these votes for Blacks plus Latinos plus Asians. So I took the liberty of doing it. The totals are about 73% for Democrats to about 27% for Republicans among all voters of colour. NYTimes says the polling firm interviewed more than 13-thousand voters as they exited 249 polling places.

Re-connecting Africa with herself: 1619 Angola and Congo to Virginia

Re-connecting Africa with her history and her people means re-connecting Europe (and the Middle East) with its own history, too. "About 350 slaves were bound for Veracruz [Mexico], when the ship was robbed of its human cargo off the coast of Mexico in 1619 by two unidentified pirate ships..." Sandra sent me the link to Lisa Rein's Sunday, 3 September Washington Post article, Mystery of Va.'s First Slaves is Unlocked 400 Years Later. This was no "mystery". The countries who held these records for the past four centuries did not care. In fact, they've been evasive, hostile and secretive about this chapter of their own history. The Africa-Europe-Virginia story of 30 Africans cast ashore at Jamestown in 1619 from a Dutch-flagged ship is part of the larger story of 350 Angolans and Congolese among the tens of millions of Africans deported on ship after ship to the Americas over 300 years. Since then we have been kept apart from Africa. Apartheid. Forced to live apart forever. These Africans lived apart in the Americas, separated to the present day from Africa and each other. They were kept apart even inside every society into which they were shipped like goods. "They passed through a slave fortress at the port city of Luanda, still Angola's capital." ... continued

New York's Chris Owens for Congress on 12 September 2006

Let me draw your attention to blogdiva Liza Sabater's recently posted pro-Chris Owens' take on Sept 12th's key race for the successor to my former boss, U.S. Congressman Major Owens. Major, "the first professional librarian elected to Congress", is retiring after about 12 productive terms in Congress over 24 years. He was elected in 1982 in the district where in 1968 the late Hon. Shirley Chisolm became the first Black and Caribbean American woman elected to Congress. Today there are 4 candidates in this majority Black/Brown district. "Majority colored" as Liza calls Central Brooklyn's 11th Congressional District. The people are mostly English-speaking U.S. Black American, mostly English and Kreyol/Haitian-speaking Caribbean, and Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican who, by the way, are Caribbean. The candidates: Chris Owens, Carl Andrews, Yvette Clarke, and David Yassky. Why did I believe I'd heard ages ago that Yassky had pulled out of the race? Folks say he hopes to split the colored majority vote. If it's true that's a highly cynical strategy in a district like this for a candidate who happens to be a white, Jewish male. I really hope vote-splitting does not occur. Sabater elaborates on each candidate in her Daily Gotham blog. My view is that Chris Owens happens to be the most qualified, transparent and the most effective progressive in the race. Frankly, he knows more about how Congress works than do his three opponents, combined. He also happens to be a son of Major Owens, but don't make the mistake of thinking he's trying to take a "free ride". No. Chris Owens has his own merits that make him the candidate of choice to succeed his dad - and to provide important political continuity in Washington at a time when Democrats are coming back from behind. This year's election is a referendum on the future of Brooklyn and her colored majority population. Hopefully this future will be decided in favour of the people of Brooklyn, by the clear-thinking will of eligible 11th District Brooklyn voters who take the time and cast their respective ballots, Tuesday, 12 September 2006.