W.E. Littlejohn © 2023
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Vice President, Kamala Harris
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Vice President
Kamala Harris gave a passionate and forceful July speech,
in Jacksonville, Florida, rebuking the divisive tactic put forth by Florida’s
conniving governor, politicians and the Republican-controlled Department of
Education (DOE) that claimed enslaved Africans – thinking, feeling humans held hostage;
held against their will - “benefited” from Europeans’ organized slavery.[i] She didn’t take what amounted to a scandalous insult,
laying down. But, I wish she’d made it clear
that those kidnapped Africans were endowed with impressive knowledge of trades,
as journalist, Gillian Brockell declared in her analysis, "Note to Florida and DeSantis: Enslaved Africans were already
skilled." With that, I wish the Vice President had enlightened her
audience and the world with uncontested receipts. Receipts such as the intellect
and skills of Onesimus, thought to be an Akan society family member in what is
now Ghana. One among the twelve million stolen
Africans (three million died), Onesimus introduced
inoculation against disease - specifically smallpox - to an Anglo Saxon/British
enslaver in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1716. Fake news, you say? Here are links to just a few of the
Internet’s over two million receipts:
v Onesimus
v African roots of inoculation in America: Saving lives for three centuries
v How an Enslaved African
Man in Boston Helped Save Generations from Smallpox
v
Confronting Smallpox:
How an Enslaved Man Helped Spur the First US Vaccine Study
This
is just one of thousands of examples that show “White
people were, and still are the only beneficiaries of slavery,” as Dr. E. Faye Williams,Esq
declared in the Philadelphia
Tribune and multiple media outlets.
I wish Vice President Harris had told Florida’s prejudiced,
ignorant clans that, before the unfortunate were kidnapped (even by their own
people) and enslaved by the English, Portuguese, Dutch, French, Spanish and the English colony of Rhode Island, each of which brutally
stripped Africans of their identities – names, languages, rituals, and humanity - “The peoples of West Africa had rich and
diverse histories and cultures centuries before Europeans arrived. Africans had kingdoms and city-states, each
with its own language and culture. The empire of Songhai and the kingdoms of
Mali, Benin, and Kongo [now the Republic of the Congo; the Kingdom of Kongo existed
from the 14th to the early 19th century] were large and powerful with monarchs heading complex political
structures governing hundreds of thousands of people. In other areas, political
systems were smaller, relying on agreement between people at the village
level. Art, learning and technology
flourished, and Africans were especially skilled with medicine, mathematics,
and astronomy. In addition to domestic goods, they made fine luxury items in
bronze, ivory, gold, and terracotta for both local use and trade.”[ii] That statement on the Jim Crow
Museum’s website parallels National
Geographic’s,
October 1996 issue, along
with stunning photographs, that reported
“Goldworking
was already a well-honed art when
Portuguese first anchored off Ghana’s coast in the late 1400s.” So did Smithsonianmagazine.com’s
banner, “West African Gold: Out of the Ordinary.” Even the former president,
Ronald Reagan, glowingly acknowledged Africa’s nation, Mali, as being supreme
in knowledge and skills in this YouTube clip:
President
Reagan's State Dinner Toasts for President Moussa Traore of Mali on October 6,
1988.[iii]
In responding to the Ancestors’ call for us to speak
up, professional basketball player, Kyrie Irving stepped up on instagram and shouted: "They Stole Scientists, Doctors, Architects, Teachers...
And Made Them Slaves!",
in opposing the slavery “benefit” claim.
Irving’s “Doctors” reference reveals,
again, Onesimus and the thousands of African women and men who knew how
to administer various medicinal herbs to heal illnesses and wounds. That knowledge and skill was passed on to the
impressively brave and undefeated Harriet Tubman who
understood the botanical world and used herbal medicines from forests to keep healthy
the hundreds of African hostages she helped escape enslavement, and, as
a spy during the Civil War,
to treat soldiers’ wounds. Ancestral
African herbal knowledge and skills were later passed on to African American geniuses
like George
Washington Carver, a pioneer in botany.
Defending
their new African American history
standards, two members of Florida’s workgroup “cited 16 individuals” who, they say, developed valuable skills
while in bondage. To the contrary, “Several of the individuals cited weren’t
ever enslaved, and there’s little evidence that those who were [enslaved]
learned any relevant skills for their ‘personal benefit’,” Jamelle Bouie
penned in her New York Times article, Ron
DeSantis and the State Where History Goes to Die.
Lacking
substance in their fabrication, Florida’s governor and DOE cited “blacksmithing”
as a skill Africans/African Americans supposedly “benefited” from under the
inhumane yoke of enslavement. Yeah,
right. I wouldn't have been surprised if DeSantis had proclimed that "victims of lynchings got to keep the rope,"
a quip from Washington Post’s book editor, Ron Charles’s commentary, “Texas New School book law is rated R -
ridiculous.” First, let’s define
“blacksmithing,” because, believe it or not, not everyone knows all that that
craft entails. “A blacksmith is a metalsmith
who creates objects primarily from wrought
iron or steel,
but sometimes from other metals
[such as gold], by forging the metal, using tools
to hammer, bend, and cut.”
In
their zeal to minimize African intelligence, didn’t know or ignored the fact
that, centuries prior to Europeans’ arrival and later destructive colonialism,
there was “a major cavalry culture in
West Africa,” evidenced in CuChullaine O’Reilly’s Africa’s
Forgotten Cavalry Kingdoms,
and informs readers that Professor
Robin Law’s
research indisputably shows the timeframe being “somewhere between the seventeenth century B.C. and the tenth century
A.D.” This long suppressed truth radically
reshapes “a major portion of how equestrian history is taught and perceived,”
Law wrote. Law’s and O’Reilly’s work
demonstrates that numerous West African Kingdoms, including nations now called
Ghana and Mali, employed tens of thousands of horses, primarily for military
purposes. Consequently, it follows that it’s
highly likely many among stolen Africans possessed the skill to repair and
forge horseshoes, and, although rare, but “not
unknown,” metal stirrups, helmets and armor. In addition, leather craftsmen fashioned
saddles. Clearly, Africans - our
Ancestors - were already skilled in the blacksmithing trade
as well.
Again,
all this ingenuity in the sciences (i.e., astronomy) and trades occurred centuries
before – one more time, centuries before - Europeans’ (and
Arabs’) destructive kidnapping and colonization quests.[iv] (Some scholars suggest this prized
intelligent/strategic activity was taking place while Europeans were still
foraging around in caves.)
Long
lost are other useful skills and knowledge that over three million Africans took with them
when they died during the forced agonizing and brutal march from their country's interior to the ocean’s
edge, and while held in "barracoons" (cages or pens) like animals and being abused as Europeans prepared ships to sail to other African ports, including far southeast to Mozambique, Africa and Madagascar to kidnap more people. The route of a Dutch
“slave” ship, Gideon, is documented
on the New Netherlands Institute website.
Then, there were those
who died and their bodies thrown overboard during the agonizingly terrifying months and months of mental, emotional and spiritual
torture while sequestered in chains in disgustingly filthy, dark, dank/stank
holes of horrendous “slave” ships rolling their watery way to the Caribbean islands – from Cuba, to
Jamaica, to Guyana; to South America – from Brazil to Honduras, Panama, Peru, and to the “new” world (not yet named “America.").[v] The mortality rate also soared when some Africans died in revolts (many of which were led by women according to researcher Rebecca Hall).[vi] Others, in resistance to being stolen, jumped. Choosing to drown. Reaching their destination,
African women, men, and possibly children ((including infants still breast feeding
or "sucklings" which are
recorded to have been on the Dutch ship Gideon.), while jailed in pens, were
“seasoned.” "Seasoning" included branding each hostage with hot branding irons, bringing their
flesh to a sizzle. One database shows that, between 1514 and 1866, Europeans made 36,000 trips to Africa to drag
men, women, teenagers, and children, kicking, fighting, crying and screaming, from their families and
homeland.
Long lost are the African souls that died
on the one
thousand ships
that were shipwrecked. The Henrietta Marie, the
only English “slave” ship located (the shackles were first found in 1972), sank in
the Florida Keys on its second return trip from selling kidnapped Africans in the
Caribbean, in 1700. A Portuguese
ship, São José,
carrying kidnapped men, women and children, destined for Brazil, sank “near the Cape of Good Hope” of South
Africa in 1794, was found in 2014.[vii]
As
is historically typical of enslavers, Europeans have falsely claimed credit in
their literature, text books, media and marketing, that the many, many, many
valuable skills and knowledge our kidnapped Ancestors brought with them and
were forced, under duress, to use, like blacksmithing, belonged to them (Europeans). Florida’s governor and his allies, like their
European/American ancestors, are attempting to claim credit and erase “knowledge of African societies” and high
achievements, as columnist Sundiata Kita
Cha-Jua observed in his essay, Warping History.
A
warped history is intentionally scrubbed of truths, like the fact that Europeans plundered (and
continue to plunder) African resources - humans, minerals and artifacts (sadly
with the help of some greedy African traitors…traitors exist in every ethnic
group). Massive looting and broken
promises have resulted in much of the corruption and poverty witnessed in Africa
today and around the world, including Haiti.[viii] Proof of notorious wholesale theft of African
nations’ artifacts is seen where, recently, the United States “returned 23 stolen Benin Bronzes to Nigeria through
the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, the National Gallery of Art,
and the Rhode Island School of Design.” Benin
Bronzes were also looted during the British invasion of Benin in 1897. France was to return “26
looted artifacts and artworks to Benin,” in 2021. In 1922, Germany
returned “22 historic bronze sculptures to Nigeria as
part of efforts to address what its foreign minister called its ‘dark colonial
past.’" Germany's Foreign Minister, Annalena Baerbock, said “Germany and other European countries must listen to those who were the
victims of colonial cruelty and work toward making reparations.” The assassinated Guyanese historian,
political activist and academic, Walter Rodney mapped out European’s historic destruction on the African continent in his
groundbreaking book, How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa.
A
person doesn’t have to read Rodney’s definitive literary work, or any other
critical literature, to know that slavery was a massively heartbreaking,
tearful, sullied, savage undertaking that included raping young girls and women
(maybe even boys and men), torture, snatching babies from their mothers and
selling them; selling mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, aunts uncles,
friends and neighbors and all manner of love ones away from each other, causing
generational
trauma or, as Dr. Joy Degruy
termed it, “post traumatic slave syndrome.” Non-readers only need a DVD or streaming
service to watch any one of a number of movies on slavery’s unimaginable
tragedies, like Django
Unchained. “How is
it,” the Vice President hotly queried,
“that anyone could suggest that in the midst of these atrocities, that there
was any benefit to being subjected to this level of dehumanization?” Were we to collect the copious tears that
flowed from soul-crushing grief over those kidnapped and sold and those who
missed them, the gallons of the salty liquid might be greater than the
Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Antarctic and Southern Antarctica oceans combined.
I
wish, like a dogged attorney, the Vice President had shouted to the heavens that,
in addition to the knowledge and skills shown in the foregoing paragraphs,
Africans were ALREADY skilled in creative arts - the “talking drum,”
(an African invention), engineered steel drums,
now a staple in Caribbean Calypso music, basket weaving, sculpting, dying
fabric in indigo which was highly prized, and the sales of which benefited only European/White American enslavers
and their offspring and foregoing generations.[ix]
Creative
arts also included agriculture and culinary skills. In “…South
Carolina and Georgia [Europeans/Americans] discovered that rice would grow well in the moist, semitropical county
bordering their coastline,” Dr.
Johnnetta Cole wrote in her personal rebuttal, Florida’s
New Middle School Academic Standards Will Harm All of Florida’s Children,
to
the false claims pitched by Florida’s governor and his allies. With “…no
experience in how to cultivate rice,” they “forced [the operative word is “forced”] enslaved Africans who knew how to plant, harvest and process this
difficult crop, to do so.”
Moreover,
Africans taught White enslavers how to grow and prepare okra, yams, black-eyed peas, peppers, watermelon and other
food staples that had been cultivated in Africa, again, centuries before any
European arrived.
“SLAVERY WAS NOT A JOBS PROGRAM!!!” Sen.
William Hurd (R. Texas)
exclaimed in national media, slamming Florida’s governor’s and DOE’s false
“benefit” narrative. I didn't expect to
hear those words from a Republican. I
nearly fell down in a fit of surprise, as my Ancestors used to say. Unlike today’s divisive Republicans, Hurd
spoke like those Republicans that, before and after the Civil War, were
comprised of abolitionists - Black and White, named and unnamed, many of whom
revealed in Beverly Jenkins’s novel - who abhorred slavery and Jim Crow "laws";
who risked their lives to assist Africans/African Americans escape bondage and secretly
fashioned Underground Railroad “stations,” including in Iowa Yes, Iowa.
Those “back in the day” Republicans (fought against the then Southern Democratic Dixiecrats,
many, if not all, of whom were members of venomous white supremacist hate-breeders
- from the KKK to the White
Citizen Council - that lynched thousands upon thousands of African American
men, women and, yes, some children, as well as some Whites,
and Mexicans.[x]
In her meticulous and diligent reporting,
esteemed journalist Ida
B. Wells’s Southern
Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), A
Red Record documented “that more than 10,000
African Americans had been killed by lynching in the South between 1864 and
1894.” ((Oddly, the Equal Justice Imitative
(EJI) reports White Americans lynched “4,400”
African Americans “during the period
between Reconstruction and World War II.”))
In The
Beast in Florida: A History of Anti-Black Violence, author Marvin Dunn wrote, “Florida lynched more black people per capita
than any other state…in the period between 1880 and 1930 - more than twice the rate of Georgia, Mississippi
or Louisiana.” Typically,
Whites
profited (benefited) from these blood-curdling murders of African American
citizens through the mass production of lynching
postcards,
purchased and mailed around the world. ((The
United States Postal Service (USPS) didn’t ban mailing privileges of these
gruesome-imaged materials until 1908.))
Florida’s governor’s and his allies’ perverted “benefit”
vision
is a national agenda negatively impacting
school children and teachers.
That agenda is ensured by William
Barclay Allen, a Black male, who helped frame Florida’s new African American history curriculum,
and who has “repeatedly spoken out
against Affirmative action.” That
agenda is also executed through “education” products such as Studies Weekly,
“a national social studies publication” that
formulate and facilitate lesson plans “on
history, government, and society in a newspaper format,” consumed weekly by
educators in K-12 schools. Of course,
there’s no mention that slavery is “the
blood-soaked bedrock on which the United States was built,” as a Southern Poverty Law Center representative
said in a 2018 interview titled “Why
Schools Fail to Teach Slavery’s Hard History,” on National Public Radio’s (NPR) All Things Considered. Studies Weekly, recently, deleted race from a
Rosa
Parks story. Educationweek.org,
a watchdog resource for K-12 education news and information, reported that “hundreds
of issues [have been] flagged in Studies Weekly lessons” regarding
race and African/African American history, and that Education Week’s 2018 internal
review “of Studies Weekly’s widely used
materials found more than 400 examples of racial or ethnic bias, historical
inaccuracies, age-inappropriate content, and other errors in the materials….” The review also flagged “biased language or age-inappropriate content, such as descriptions of
graphic violence….” Maureen
Costello, director of Teaching Tolerance (a project of the Southern Poverty Law Center told
Education Weekly, ‘We start laying down
these false narratives in elementary school’.” Consequently, children will, and in
many cases already do, suffer from political and education whitewashers’ diabolical
agenda of deleting or modifying truths
concerning African/African American’s rich historical heritage and endurance.
The intent
of the plethora of lies, of course, is to condition generation after generation
of children to never know that slavery was an abyss of subjugation,
pain and traumatizing dehumanization.
(But, we should never forget that deletion and modification, even
outright lies about history is what those controlling the dissemination of
information do. Millions of children and
I grew up being told that Christopher Columbus discovered America.
The proven fact that he never set foot on this
continent came to light in the 980s. Exposure
of that and hundreds of other “fake news,” picked up steam around the mid-1990s
when verifiable text like James W. Loewen’s truth-telling, Lies
My Teacher told Me - Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong was published in 1995. His exposé is just as relevant today![xi]
An issue of a major, dire concern among educators
who are told to sell the slavery “benefit” lie, is that some White children, in
contrast to feeling any shame or embarrassment as detractors assert, feel more
empowered and are motivated to insult Black children and boast they (White
child) are the “master,” and the Black child is “their slave.” “Sometimes,” one teacher shared in the Education Weekly review, “it gives
students the idea to call black students slaves or tell them to go work in the
field…” "In the ways that we teach and learn about
the history of American slavery," wrote Southern Poverty Law Center
(SPLC) authors of their new
report,
"the nation needs an intervention."
As the highly regarded Civil Rights
icon Rev. Jesse L.
Jackson
penned, How
we see the past reflects how we live in the Present.
Thank God
and Goddess for African and African American museums, credible literature, credible
websites, etc. that diligently document our Ancestors' richness, endurance and
survival. Hopefully, more children will be exposed to, again, credible truth-telling treasures.
Were it not
for Florida’s governor’s and his allies’ poison infecting so many children, as Vice
President Harris and Dr. Jonnetta Cole pointed out, their tired and tacky
divisive message would be boring, even funny.
Tied, tacky and boring because their conniving spirit isn't
new. Their conspiracy is centuries old. Just as Jews have heard Holocaust deniers, and
Native Americans and Indigenous people – globally - have lived through the
whitewashing of their people being slaughtered and being called “savages” in
western movies and television programs, Africans/African Americans have heard
some form of the “benefits” farce millions of times –over 400 years.
Thankfully, along with the advocates for our Ancestors
mentioned in this post, the fire in my belly refuses to take this obnoxious messiness lying down. Our
Ancestors waited for us to speak up. I’d
like to think that some of us did. Hence,
in defending our Ancestors, the Congressional Black Caucus has put the Florida governor and his allies on notice
and are pushing the White House, Department
of Justice, and the Department of Education to investigate this new curriculum, stating that,
“The
Congressional Black Caucus condemns in the strongest language any school
curriculum that would suggest that enslaved Africans benefited in any way from
slavery. This revisionist telling of
American history approved by the Florida State Board of Education is a shameful
disservice to Florida’s students and tantamount to gaslighting of the highest
order.”[xii] Also,
in defense of our Ancestors, the oldest African American fraternity, Alpha
Phi Alpha pulled its convention (and money projected for 2024) out of Florida, and the NAACP issued a travel advisory for the
state of Florida, “to African
Americans, and other people of color regarding the hostility towards African
Americans in Florida.”
Lastly, I wish Vice President Harris had informed
the world that, for most people on this planet, slavery is in their ancestry. Nearly all ethnic groups – Asian, Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, East Indians and Europeans
- have ancestors who were enslaved at one time or
another in history. Specifically,
Europeans, Vikings
“from Scandinavian countries enslaved
other Whites.”[xiii] With that, the VP could have referenced the
enslavement of Italians. The name,
DeSantis is Italian. If he had any
knowledge of the history of his own ethnic
group’s slavery history, he would know (but probably deny) that his Italian
Ancestors were once enslaved, documented here that “slavesin Italy were indigenous Italians,” and dramatized in the movie Spartacus,
about Italian “slaves’” uprising. Knowing this, would he and his allies say that
slavery benefited them?![xiv] [xv]
[i] A little
over two months later after the Vice President’s address on August 26, 2023, a
hate-filled White, 21-year-old murdered three African
Americans
at a Dollar General store, in Jacksonville, FL. Those murders
occurred one day after the 63rd anniversary of Ax
Handle Saturday,
when 200 Ku Klux Klan members, armed with ax handles, attacked African Americans
holding a peaceful sit-in protesting Jacksonville’s segregation. Police stood idly by
watching the beatings until members of a Black street gang called “The
Boomerangs” attempted to protect those being attacked. At that point, police
night sticks joined the baseball bats and ax handles. Images of Ax handle
Saturday
[ii]
Regarding astronomy, the book Conversationswith Ogotemmêli (1930s/40s) documents the ability of members of the Dogon society in Mali and
their ability to see the dwarf star Sirius-B, an achievement that took place
before the first telescope was able to view.
The Dogon, with a population between
400,000 and 800,000, are an ethnic group indigenous to the
central plateau region of Mali, in West Africa, south of the Niger bend, near
the city of Bandiagara, and in Burkina Faso.
[iii]
Ronald Reagan is also noted for
cutting social programs that helped people who were living in poverty, and for
signing the war
on drugs act in 1986,
that resulted in African Americans being targeted and imprisoned for using or
selling crack cocaine, the product of which was imported into Black
communities.
[iv]
“The Arabs and the Europeans
were invaders, colonizers and enslavers, who imposed their alien religions on
Africa. Neither Islam nor Christianity is indigenous to Africa,”
wrote Nobel Prize winner/playwright and author of Of Africa, Wole Soyinka declared. And, “while the Arabs enslaved Africans in
the north and east; Europeans enslaved Africans along the Atlantic [West].” The terrifying and humiliating experiences of
the millions of Black men, women and children swept into the abyss of the
African holocaust or MAAFA is reported to have begun
around 650-AD when Arabs invaded and raped Africa over 800 years before
European invasion.
[v] The reason the word
“slave” is in quotes is because I denounce that label, as well as “master’ and
the phrase “slave trade.” Anyone kidnapped and held against their
will is a hostage. I cringe when I hear African Americans
exclaim “we came from slaves.” Despite having been enslaved also, rarely, if ever, do Jews broadcast “we
came from slaves.” I stopped
calling my Ancestors “slaves” 30 years
ago, and shared my thoughts in my essay, IDENTITY
& LANGUAGE ~ Why I Don't Call My Ancestors "Slaves". It victimizes the victim and contains the
problem of inferring that Africans’ plight was intrinsic; their own fault. The word “slave” also dismisses the act of
stealing and victimizing thinking, feeling humans, and minimizes the
unimaginable brutality and cruelty described in the chilling hostage oral
(“slave”) narratives in Bullwhip
Days. That word affects Black
children’s’ sense of self while also affecting other, non-Black children’s’
view of them. The word “hostage,” on the other hand,
definitively points the finger to the villainous acts of Arabs, other Africans
and Europeans. See also
Perlego.com.
[vii] Henrietta Marie. Pulitzer Prize–winning African-American
journalist, Michael Cottman's book, Shackles
From the Deep,
brings to life the inhumane history of kidnapped Africans on “slave” ships, “through underwater exploration, detective
work, and the author's personal journey.” Insurance companies, like Lords
of London,
covered investors’ losses of ships and human “cargo.” See YouTube video - Placing
the Henrietta Marie Monument, 1993;
and National Geographic’s “Sunken
Slave Ship and the Search for Answers.” Scholars calculate
that of the 12 million humans kidnapped, 3 million souls expired, not only from shipwrecks, but also from . “seasoning”
Distinguished photographer
Ayana V. Jackson (https://www.ayanavjackson.com/), visualized
a “mythical aquatopia populated by descendants of pregnant African women thrown
(or who jumped) overboard into the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage.” Jackson’s “monographic exhibition,” From
the Deep: In the Wake of Drexciya (https://africa.si.edu/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/from-the-deep-in-the-wake-of-drexciya-with-ayana-v-jackson/),
“includes animation, immersive video,
installation, sound, and scent,” and “creates
a series of haunting, yet profoundly beautiful and empowering encounters that
draw upon African water spirits from Senegal to South Africa.” YA
author, Natasha
Bowen imagined in her highly praised book “Skin of the Sea”
mermaids who collects “the souls” of those thrown overboard from “slave” ships or
who jump into the ocean, during the harrowing and horrifying captive journey.
[viii] Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 1804, Haiti became the first country where
African hostages rose up to defeat their colonial oppressors. Even after the revolutionaries won their
freedom, colonial subjugation continued as Haiti was forced to pay huge sums to France, costing
the new country an estimated $560 million over seven decades by today's standards. The US also contributed to draining Haiti's resources through the denial of bank loans, military
occupation, and outright theft. Haiti continues to be exploited and, to
date, has never recovered. National
Public Radio (NPR) called it 'The Greatest
Heist In History': How Haiti Was Forced To Pay Reparations For Freedom. Reparations
advocates point to examples like Haiti's that illustrate why reparation demands are
based on sound foundations. The New
York Times
calculated an estimated amount Haiti has lost due to France’s and other
colonial powers continued financial exploitation.
[ix] I
learned about Africans’ unique blue-black indigo dyeing techniques in Beverly
Jenkins’s )
creative and moving historical/romance novel, Indigo. Female
African/African American children and adult hostages, on South Carolina’s South
Sea islands plantation, were forced to extract the dye from small, green leaves
of Indigofer tinctoria plants, after which they mascaraed with their feet. Their hands, “immersed to their wrists,” twisted and squeezed the acrid smelling
dye through cotton cloth. Their feet and
“…the palms and backs of [their] hands…” were “permanently [dyed] indigo,” Jenkins wrote. Jenkins dramatically captures this
rarely discussed commodity in slavery, and introduces readers to Underground
Railroad’s heroes and she-roes, whose names aren’t as notable as the “good trouble”-making African American
abolitionists Harriet Tubman, William Still, and Robert Purvis of the Philadelphia
Antislavery Society. Her
novel also paints some steamy love scenes and, stunningly, references a free
African American man who actually “sold
himself into slavery” for his deep love for an enslaved Black woman whose
enslaver refused to let him purchase her freedom. An actual witness of this unusual, almost unbelievable
occurrence is relayed in the book Bullwhip Days.
LINKS TO INDIGO INFO
[xi] Children and I were also drilled
into thinking that Marco Polo, in his travels, visited China. A recent study titled, “Did
Marco Polo Go to china?” by Frances Wood, proves the myth is just that,
an unsubstantiated myth.
[xiii] Viking Age. Sea-faring
Norsemen
depicted invading England. The Viking
Age in Scandinavian history is taken to have been the period from the earliest
recorded raids by Norsemen in 793 until the Norman conquest of England in 1066.[63]
Vikings used the Norwegian Sea and Baltic Sea
for sea routes to the south. The Normans were
descendants of those Vikings who had been given feudal
over lordship of areas in northern France, namely the Duchy
of Normandy, in the 10th century. In that respect, descendants of the
Vikings continued to have an influence in northern Europe. Likewise, King Harold
Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king of England, had Danish ancestors. Two
Vikings even ascended to the throne of England, with Sweyn
Forkbeard claiming the English throne in 1013 until 1014 and his son Cnut
the Great being king of England between 1016 and 1035,
[xv] One
more thing (as Columbo used to say), Florida’s governor also rails against the concept of “woke.” “Woke” is not a mystery. But, for anyone caught up in the orchestrated
confusion that Florida’s governor and his allies have caused, “woke” simply
means “awareness.” Its people opening
their eyes to socio-political-economic injustices committed on Africans in
America and throughout the Diaspora and all people around the globe, and caring
enough to choose to actively make
positive changes and getting in “good
trouble” to do better. (Again, a nod
to the honorable John Lewis.
In rallying his ignorant troops, DeSantis boasted, “We fight the woke in the legislature.
We fight the woke in the schools.
We fight the woke in the corporations.
We will never ever surrender to the woke mobs,” and “Florida is where woke goes to die.” This asinine rant echoes the hate-filled words
of the late Republican governor of Alabama, George Wallace,
who, nearly 70 years ago, proclaimed there would never be integration in that
southern state. He may as well have said
Alabama is where integration goes to die.
Yet, years later, in a wheelchair, Wallace rescinded his damning
proclamation not long before leaving this earthly realm. So, another note to DeSantis and his allies –
Karma don’t play; What goes around comes
around! Sometimes more than
once. “When you know better, you [should] do better.” It’s not
complicated.
***
