A sermon by Dr. Walter Skip Earl
August 29, 2010
OPENING WORDS
Forty-seven years ago yesterday, on August 28, 1963, before a huge crowd of African and other Americans gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. said:
In a sense, we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the "unalienable rights" of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness". It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds."
But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so, we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
No "bombs bursting in air", the Negro National Anthem, Hymn 149, "Left every voice and sing." Please stand in body or in spirit.
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READING:
Our reading this morning comes from the jacket (show) previews of Clarence E. Walker's 2009 University of Virginia press, MONGREL NATION, The America Begotten by Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings. The term "mongrel" is usually used as a derogatory term for "Mixed Race" .
The first quote is from Annette Gordon-Reed, New York Law School and author of THE HEMINGSES OF MONTICELLO: An American Family.
America has indeed been a mongrel nation, not just in terms of blood, but in terms of culture and politics, from the very beginning. Walker very rightly challenges the assumption that the Jefferson-Hemings liaison was either unusual or exceptional.
Secondly, from the author himself, Clarence E. Walker, Professor of History at the University of California, Davis and also the author of WE CAN'T GO HOME AGAIN: An Argument about Afrocentrism.
The debate over the affair between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings rarely rises above the question, "Did they or didn't they?" But lost in the argument over the existence of such a relationship are equally urgent questions about a history that is more complex, both sexually and culturally, than most of us realize.
(T)he relationship between Jefferson and Hemings must be seen not in isolation but in the broader context of interracial affairs within the plantation complex. Viewed from this perspective, the relationship ..was fairly typical. For many , this is a disturbing realization because it forces us to abandon the idea of American exceptionalism and reexamine slavery in America as part of a long, global history of slaveholders frequently crossing the color line.
More than many other societies—and despite our obvious mixed-race population—our nation has displayed particular reluctance to acknowledge this dynamic....From Jefferson's time to our own, the general public denied—or remained oblivious to—the possibility of the affair. Historians, too, dismissed the idea, even when confronted with compelling arguments by fellow scholars. It took the DNA finds of 1998 to persuade many (although to this day, doubters remain).
The president's apologists, both before and after the DNA findings, have constructed an iconic Jefferson that tells us more about their own beliefs—than it does about the interaction between slave owners and slaves. Much more than a search for the facts about two individuals , the debate over Jefferson and Hemings is emblematic of tensions in our society between competing conceptions both of race and of our nation. (underlining is mine)
This sermon is not meant to be a history lesson. Nor is it meant to be a summary of the contents of MONGREL NATION.
Rather, it is my RESPONSE to having read the book. It is my attempt to react to the thesis of Clarence Walker's latest book within the time frame of these next 15 to 20 minutes. And I appreciate your sharing this with me by listening.
I want to talk about only two themes from this book. #1: There is not such thing as "HISTORY". There are only historians.
And #2: The ideas about degrees of blackness is a creation by white people. "Black is an invention of whiteness."
First: lets consider the concept that there is no history, only historians.
I consider myself a historian of sorts: I majored in History at Randolph Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. In college, the most prominent historian (frequently called, "one of the major biographers of the 20th century) was DOUGLAS SOUTHALL FREEMAN, a Virginian and son of a Confederate veteran. He was the author of the text for both of the basic history classes. So, while in one of those delightful Richmond "used book stores", I willingly paid a few bucks for Robert Selph Henry's THE STORY OF THE CONFEDERACY, (copywrite@ 1931 the year before I was born) BECAUSE the forward to this "Revised edition: was by Freeman.
Douglas Southall Freeman writes on page 3 of the Forward:
One of the results of the American Civil War—THOUGH NOT THE AVOWED PURPOSE FOR WHICH IT WAS FOUGHT—WAS THE ABOLITION IN THE UNITED STATES OF CHATTEL SLAVERY, AN INSTITUTION WHICH THE HELLENIC World (that is the Greek world) WOULD HAVE TAKEN FOR GRANTED AS ORDAINED IN THE NATURE OF THINGS BUT AN INSTITUION WHICH, BY 1860S, THE WORLD HAD OUTGROWN.
Douglas Southal Freeman was a brilliant scholar so he was bound to know... THAT STATEMENT IS A LIE. Greek and Roman slavery would have been shocked at the brutality of American slavery. Greek slaves, were indeed "captive people" from wars or purchased. BUT children of slaves, by birthright, because Greek citizens, not slaves to their parent's masters who without conscience could sell the children permanently away from their parents. Their children were born as free-people with fully citizenship. Also Greek and Roman slaves had specific responsibilities that did not negate earning personal income outside their master-duties.
For example, I was working with Earthwatch in Pompeii, Rome exploring a magnificent "Hellenized" temple to the Egyptian goddess ISIS, who "was a friend of slaves and the down trodden" So we meet Freeman's 'slave definition' for Rome, Hellenized-Greek and Egypt. Did these ancient cultures "take for granted" that slavery "was ordained in the nature of things", including permanent slavery for both you and your heirs. Of course not, and Freeman had no basis for his claim other then his own biases.
The ancient lentil over the door to the Temple of Isis tells about the rebuilding of this temple following its destruction in the 65 ce earthquake. The lentil states that "the six year old son" of a slave named Numerous was responsible for the entire reconstruction of this temple to the goddess ISIS, protector of slaves, and the downtrodden. Numerous was a Greek-Egyptian slave of a Pompeii Senator. The Senator allowed this slave, Numerous, to "moon-light" by setting in his seat in the Senate and voting in the frequent absence of his Master. With the extra money, he bought his own freedom and after the earthquake damage, repaired the temple. But the ex-slave Numerous was still not a Roman so he rebuilt the temple in the name of his six year old son who, of course, was born free in Pompeii with all the rights of a Roman citizen, including the right to build a temple to a foreign goddess: the protector of slaves.
Does that sound like American slavery, Dr Freeman, that you thought was "ordained in the nature of things"? "Born in America" for children of slaves meant additional property for the slave owners.
Sufficient evidence from Folklore makes clear that young plantation white boys could "sow their wild oaks" among captive female slaves, and if they impregnated them, so what, that increased the value of the family's property. Southall Freeman is bound to have known that but his histories do not speak the words. There is no history, only historians.
When I think of the unbearable cruelty of American slavery that Douglas Southall Freeman is so nonchalant about, I want to make a pun on his credentials as a historian:
Dr. "South all"..... "Free-man"
After the Civil War, when it was no longer legal in America to enslave new born children, Jim Crow simply forced them into ghettos that denied equal education, restricted travel, and Mongrelized multi-cultural families so that they could not become inter-racial family kinfolk.
Folklore is not the only evidence that we were a mixed-race country at our founding and had always been a "mongrel" nation. Read the recorded sermons of ministers in eighteen century churches, contemporary with Jefferson. A minister in Charles City County, Virginia complains that "the country swarms with mulatto bastards." ....and he knew that it takes two to make a bastard....and two races to make a mulatto.
Most all of our continental southern neighbors recognized multi-racialism. Spain, like England is a country in Europe that came to the "new world" where the old (Indians) and the new (Spanish) intermarried and comfortably became Hispanics (the Cubans, for example and most south American countries). Race lines were crossed and assimilated into a biracial history and a biracial nation...except in America...where we invented only two groups, "White" and "degrees of color" with the direct help of white historians.
But anyone, even Jefferson, could observe that with such vast numbers of mulattos in the population, we were not an all white nation.
Black historian Natham Huggins, says simply, black people, "did not exist in the world that mattered." (p60)...and I add in the world of white historians.
White historians and white religion cooperated by making white good and black bad. There is a gospel hymns that says, "though your heart is as black as coal, Jesus can make it white as snow." So coal is black and evil; and snow is white and good!! I doubt if Jesus of Nazareth made any pronouncements about snow.
You can have a black heart or be in a black mood and you can have the pure white of a blushing bride and know that all the angels in heaven are white.
Black and white are absolute colors. You cannot really have a light black a dark white. So whites had to invent a strange rule that if you are white you are white and if you are black, you have degrees of blackness, all the way to the edge of "white". The President has a black father and a white mother. That's 50% white and 50% black but we are taught not to think of him as a white man with a black father but as a black man....period. At 50% he is still too dark to be white. So he does "pass", proudly, as a black man.
And the reason for that is somehow we believed "that interracial sex was bad and engaging in it was a sign of loss of character and morally wrong which could never befall a Founding Father" (p68) such as Jefferson.
The resulting "half-breeds", seen as considerably less that "half" white, "may" be well cared for but almost never recognized as "part of the family", as in the 20thcentury case of Strom Thurmond, for example.
How could this 100% white and shades of black for all mixed race descendants have make sense?
Recent reexamining "work on master-slave relations" in 18th century Albermarle County (the location of Monticello) reveal a statement by a Virginia judge noting that interracial sex was "Imprudent (though not uncommon)." (p26)
Similarly, the 18th century Pastor Johann Bolzius (wrote) that "white men live in sin with negresses and father half black children who walk around in large numbers to the shame of the Christian name."(p 27). It seems that it was impossible to see half-black as also half-white so whites invented gradation of blackness associated with privilege. For example, no light skinned Hemings blacks ever worked a lower plantation status than servants in the big house.
Walter Francis White, for 25th years a dynamic force in the NAACP (the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) said,
I am a Negro. My skin is white, my eyes are blue, my hair is blond. The traits of my race are nowhere visible upon me. But I am not white.
I don't know if Walter White meant he was not allowed to be white or whether he meant that given the unrestrained violence of the white KKK in his life, he preferred to pass for Black.
In the land of the free, four centuries later, a person should have a right to respect all of the multiple sources of their blood line without any social or political restrictions. It should make no difference.
There are two pictures on the front of the bulletin. Please take a minute and look at these two faces. If you had to make a decision, which face would you most likely choice as a friend? Which face would you be most comfortable with...or like best... or take home to meet your family? And why?
Most non-biased historians concede that Sally Hemings was technically white but her slavery status required her to pass as black, which was considered a detriment. That's not really important except to help break thru the myths of qualifying degrees of "blackness." I lean toward a belief that in all likelihood Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson were in love. She is said to be as beautiful as Jefferson deceased wife who was Sally's half-sister. We know that three of their children (Beverly, Eston and Harriet) born (now verified by DNA studies) to their 38 year relationship were accepted, probably unknowingly, into white 18th century culture.
What a shame that Thomas Jefferson, with all of his vocabulary of freedom and unalienable rights, and Sally Hemings could not have openly claimed to be the "founding parents" of the country.
To borrow a phrase from Mark Twain, the discussion of Jefferson and Hemings has been mostly a "Chloroform in print." An anesthetic designed to blot out the place of race, slavery and sex in Jefferson's world and to create a white national myth.
The whole idea of 'blackness' is an unfair white invention. Why is it that a single drop of white blood would not make you white, if a single drop of black blood can make you black?
So how did we get to this point and how do we change the thinking? In the beginning, we were a mixed race country with a myth about whiteness and a negative myth about blackness.
Please look at the pictures again on the bulletin front. How did you evaluate them? Many of you saw right away that race was NOT a factor because both pictures, with different tints, are the same man.
When will we finally be able to see race and color as nonchalantly as we see the color of a person's hair? Let's march toward cashing that check, upon demand, to give us ALL the riches of freedom and the security of justice.
Its really just one more step. END
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CLOSING WORDS Dr Martin Luther King Jr (August 28. 1963} Lincoln Memorial
With this faith, we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood .
With this faith, we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.
And this will be the day—this will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with new meaning:
MY COUNTRY 'TIS OF THEE,
SWEET LAND OF LIBERTY, OF THEE I SING.
LAND WHERE MY FATHERS DIED,
LAND OF THE PILGRIM'S PRIDE
FROM EVERY MOUTAINSHIP, LET FREEDOM RING !
AND IF AMERICA IS TO BE A GREAT NATION, THIS MUST BECOME TRUE.
Shalom. Amen.