Juneteenth 2021: The quest for historical facts across America

The Monday Musings

Juneteenth in the Tar Heel state

News reports that the Latta Plantation in North Carolina was subjected to intense scrutiny this past week due to its plans to focus on "displaced Southern white refugees" as a part of its Jueneteenth observances provides yet another teachable moment for the cynics and hypocrites who oppose the full teaching of American history on the one hand, while trumpeting historical myths and lies that have been taught for decades on the other. 

Juneteenth celebrant circa 2019

Juneteenth has long been a celebration that commemorated June 19, 1865, the day when enslaved Blacks in Texas learned that the Civil War was over and that they were free per the Emancipation Proclamation that President Abraham Lincoln, by then deceased, had enacted back in 1863. While many Southern communities learned of these facts earlier and still hold commemorative events heralding the same, over the past few decades, a universal "Juneteenth" has gained in popularity to remind all of the bloody path to freedom for Black people. 

Ergo, one must be an extreme cynic, idiot, or a combination of the two to think that a seminar on white slave owners and overseers who lost their physical property, human property, or livelihoods when slavery ended should be examined on Juneteenth. As a long time scholar of history, I do find this subject to be important, mind you, because the same serves as the underpinnings of white grievances that back then led to the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, the establishment of Jim Crow laws, and white backlash against Black people that led to massacres, lynchings, the erection of statues, memorials, and the naming of schools, streets, and military forts to honor Confederate leaders. But such matters should be studied another day in my opinion—not on Juneteenth.

As mentioned above, white grievances based upon myths and lies still exist, and each time some “white-washing” leader or social media expert tries to bash the telling of the truth about white supremacy and its lingering legacy, such is but another example of the same folks trying to pretend as if modern-day whites are the real victims of racism and in danger of being marginalized in America—which is patently absurd!

Thus, I pose a few questions on the first day of Juneteenth Week to examine these absuridites as follows:

1. If someone repeatedly raped and impregnated your mother, would you be ok with them having statues or murals made in their honor simply because that someone accomplished noteworthy achievements?

2. If someone viciously beat your grandmother and grandfather and made them work for no pay, would you be ok with reading sanitized stories about them in your history books that omit the inconvenient truths simply because that someone held a position of prominence?

3. If someone kidnapped and sodomized your daughter, impregnating her and selling her and her child for profit to sex traffickers by night, would you consider them "otherwise good people" simply because they were a judge, governor, or even a president by day? 

4. If someone prevented your parents from finding work; made or defended laws that allowed your parents to be beaten, jailed or harassed for no reason at all; kept them from voting, from eating at a restaurant or going to a movie theater because they did not like the color of their skin, would you be ok with attending a school or playing on a field or in a park that is named in that someone's honor?

If you answered “no” to these questions, but you still believe that celebrating slave owners and Jim Crow supporters in public is ok, while learning about their wicked misdeeds is not ok, then I implore you to go look in the mirror and know that the image looking back at you is a racist bigot—and THE main problem with race relations in America!

Remembering the Real Alamo

Chances are that if you are my age or older, you probably remember your school days lessons about "The Alamo," the old Spanish mission turned Fort where early American "heroes" like Davy Crockett, Jim Bowie, and William Travis made their last stand against Mexican armies under the command of General Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana in 1836. You probably recall the phrase "Remember the Alamo," and whether it was a Disney or some other movie and TV versions, at some point you have watched those so-called "legends" shoot, kill, and stab oncoming Mexican soldiers en masse before dying dramatically on screen in the “greater cause of American freedom.”

Hollywood has made many films about The Alamo

But what if I told you that those "legends" died not in the course of "American freedom" per se, but died to have their freedom to own enslaved Blacks to plant, pick, and export cotton, the "King Crop" that in the 19th Century, found more (white) millionaires per capita in the Deep South than any other region in the industrialized world? If you didn't know that, don't get down on yourself because the phrase “history is what the winners make it” applies in our collective lack of knowing!

So yes, truth remains stranger than fiction and as this Washington Post article bears witness to the more "hidden" aspects of the history of the Alamo, the truth of the matter is that when Texas broke off from then Spanish Mexico to become an Independent nation, they did so because Mexico had gradually eradicated slavery in the early 20th Century. When white settlers in what would become Texas refused to comply with Mexican law forbidding enslavement, men like Travis, Bowie, Crockett, and Stephen F. Austin, the revered Texan who wrote at the time that "Texas must be a slave country--circumstances and unavoidable necessity compels it,” chose violent resistance to Mexico's abolitionist aims. This hard-core fact paints a far different picture than the rosey, "the Texans just yearned to be free" narrative that textbooks, teachers, and popular media have routinely (and falsely) conveyed about the Alamo!

That slavery was the root of Texas' "Independence" should come as no surprise when considering that due to technological advances such as the cotton gin, daily cotton production by enslaved Blacks increased 400 percent from 1801 to the eve of the Civil War in 1860. The profitability of this “industry” was so exorbitant that it dispels one of the common myths (lies) told by Confederate sympathizing "scholars" for over a century, which is that slavery would have "died out" eventually in the United States. A lie when considering that the biggest political battles of the mid-18th Century centered upon expanding slavery into the Midwest and Western territories that had yet to be formed into states of the Union.  

Even after the Civil War, cotton was a major part of the American economy well into the 1940s, thus the rise of “Slavery by Another Name” a/k/a “Sharecropping”

Another myth (lie) that has been told is that the per capita Southern millionaires that I referenced above were relatively few, and that the rest of the United States did not really benefit from the "Peculiar Institution" of Slavery. On this point, Dr. Edward E. Baptist, a history professor at Cornell University, opines "The...myth about this is that there was not a tight relationship between slavery in the South and what was happening in the North and other parts of the modern Western world in the 19th century. It was a very close relationship: Cotton was the No. 1 export from the US, which was largely an export-driven economy as it was modernizing and shifting into industrialization. And the slavery economy of the US South was deeply tied financially to the North, to Britain, to the point that we can say that people who were buying financial products in these other places were in effect owning slaves and were certainly extracting money from the labor of enslaved people."

Artistic rendition of Davy Crockett at The Alamo

Lest we forget that profits meant more than people back then (and now), and when we remember the Alamo, that we remember that those revered white men died to derive even greater profits from the enslavement of Blacks. If upon learning this (perhaps for the first time) you still have greater sympathy for the white slavers that died at the Alamo than the Mexican soldiers fighting to force an end to the slave trade in what was still their country, then I implore you once more to head to your closest mirror—and observe the racist bigot looking right back at you!

Texas lawsuit on Covid-19

Staying deep in the heart of Texas for the final Monday Musing, a Federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by employees of Houston Methodist Hospital who argued that the hospital's requiring its employees to be inoculated with a Covid-19 vaccine to remain employed was discriminatory and violated their right to privacy. 

United States District Judge Lynn Hughes, appointed to the bench by President Ronald Reagan in 1985, disagreed, arguing in his dismissal order that "The hospital’s employees are not participants in a human trial. Methodist is trying to do their business of saving lives without giving them the Covid-19 virus. It is a choice made to keep staff, patients and their families safer.”

Anti-mask protesters circa 2020

I agree, Judge Hughes! Those hard hearted souls in America who continue to believe that the Coronavirus is a “hoax” and that the vaccines are dangerous have every right to believe whatever foolishness floats their boats—but they do not have a right to buck against the dictates of local government or a private employer, especially when said employer is in the business of saving lives!

The irony that this suit was brought in Texas reminds me of those old school Texans who refused to comply with Mexico's anti-slavery ordinances—or the Emancipation Proclamation issued by President Lincoln in 1863—until they were forced to comply. And while I don't think that it will take physical force at any hospitals in the South to inoculate all workers as the same will either comply or get fired, the very fact that the South lags behind the rest of America in the number of people vaccinated continues to show that common sense—and selflessness—remain in short supply in Dixie.

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