Dissident Veteran For Peace

Here are few excerpts from Katie Halper's and Matt Taibbi's recent interview with Adolph Reed, Jr.:

Reed: Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality ... even those inequalities that appear or ... manifest themselves as racial disparities. Because the struggle against racism is exactly parallel to the struggle against terrorism … It can go on forever, because the enemy is an abstraction that you can define however you want to define it, at the moment that you wanted to find it.

Matt Taibbi: There's a line in her [i.e. Robin DiAngelo's] book that I missed originally: "I believe that white progressives caused the most daily damage to people of color." ...

Reed: ... the other thing I thought was just in listening to her was that an image that came to my mind was Viola Liuzzo, right? The wife of a postal worker, from Detroit, who went down to Selma in 1965 to participate in the voting rights March and to participate in organizing the voting rights March. And she got herself killed by the Klan. In the context of that, with DiAngelo, I thought, "Oh, so that's what she was doing, she was just trying to out-woke the black people." I don't even know what to say to shit like that, I really don't. It's pretty repugnant.

... I've been puzzling with addressing the question of why so much anti-racist discourse now depends on analogy with slavery and Jim Crow. And that's ultimately because ... Well, to be honest, because the political as well as the intellectual concern of the people making these arguments is exactly the same as the political and intellectual concerns of the defeated Confederates who established and propagated lost-cause ideology, the myth of the Solid South, and put all those Confederate monuments up because they were committed to a racialist understanding of the world for the purpose of undermining any possibility of a political-economic challenge coming from the lower class, basically.

That's the same reason that people making the race-reductionist arguments today can't really move without drawing links between this moment and slavery and Jim Crow. Just as the 19th century former Confederates were committed to a white supremacist narrative, these people are also committed to a white supremacist/anti-white-supremacist narrative for the same reasons: to keep political economy off the table, and to advance their particular class program, just as the planter class was in the 19th century.

... so my tank is basically full now from white people in particular telling me that I don't understand the depth and intensity of racism, and its effects and this and the other, not because they're violating a normative or an epistemic principle of mine, but because they're violating theirs, by the shit that they argue. They technically don't have the right to say shit to me. So why is it I'm the only POC that you can tell that he's got it wrong?

See also:"Why Black Lives Matter Can’t be Co-opted" by Adolph Reed, Jr.

Labels: Adolph Reed Jr., class, history, politics, quotations, race

On December 8, 2020, I wrote about the State of Texas' motion in the Supreme Court to allow it to file a complaint over alleged problems in the 2020 election in several states. Back then I made two observations relevant to the present post.

First, I said: "I think the State of Texas should have standing but that is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition and it's motion comes awfully late." Second, I said: "If, as seems likely, the Supreme Court refuses to hear this complaint then it's probably game over for all the election challenges."

The Supreme Court did indeed reject Texas' motion. Here's the full text of the Court's unsigned order:

The State of Texas's motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.

Now, it's clear Texas does not have an interest in how other states elect their own state officials. But the notion that they have no "judicially cognizable interest" in how other states elect the one President and VP of all of the United States defies logic and facially undermines constitutional republicanism. I'm not suggesting there were no reasonable grounds to deny Texas' motion but, rather, that the one the Court came up with was unreasonable. 

Supporters of Biden like to mention that many of the federal judges denying 2020 presidential election challenges have been Trump appointees. The implication is that the legal challenges have been so hollow that even Trump loyalists had to reject them.

There may truth to this but it doesn't follow that because Trump nominated these judges that they would necessarily do him any favors. That is the whole point of lifetime appointments for federal judges—to try to insulate them from political influence.

Also, Trump "relied on outside conservative legal organizations and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell" to select and manage the confirmation of his judicial nominees. Moreover, these are people who were on the judiciary career path long before anyone took a Trump presidency seriously and who always knew they would likely be on the bench long after Trump was gone. They might even despise Trump but were willing to accept a nomination (or, possibly, reject an election lawsuit) to advance their own careers and political commitments.

Thus, there are scant grounds to think Trump necessarily got special or even fair consideration of his post-election legal complaints. I'm not saying he was treated unfairly but that you cannot infer much from the fact that some Trump judicial appointees rejected his election claims.

###

The January 6, 2021, Capitol rioters are criminals who should be prosecuted. They are also fools and idiots who played right into the hands of the "progressive" authoritarians and their program of racism and repression.

Trump has now been impeached a second time on purely political grounds—they're afraid he'll beat them in another election. Barring a miraculous transformation I hope Trump quietly retires to another, far away country.

In any event, I read the new article of impeachment and it presents no sound legal basis to claim that Trump criminally incited the rioters. If prosecutors believe there is probable cause that Trump committed a crime then they should seek an indictment.

Instead, the Democrats and their media allies are simply hyping and milking the riot for every political advantage they can extract no matter how dishonest the effort. Referring to the upcoming impeachment trial, Jonathan Turley writes: "A private citizen is being called to the Senate to be tried for removal from an office that he does not hold." 

The Democrats had some conceivable legitimate grounds to impeach Trump while he was president though not on events connected to Russia or Ukraine. For instance, the assassination of Iranian general Qasem Soleimani was, arguably, illegal under US and international law. It was also dangerous and counter to American strategic interests. Yet, because that attack was perceived to be in Israel's interests impeachment was never on the agenda for it.

Trump might also have been impeached for his attempt to suborn Mike Pence to violate the Constitution and federal law by unlawfully interfering with the certification of Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. But, no, to impeach Trump for that would draw more unwanted attention to Pence who refused Trump's entreaties and followed the law while also undermining the Dems specious and profoundly hypocritical claims that for members of Congress to lawfully object to certification "borders on sedition or treason" and such.

###

The election of Donald Trump was always a symptom of the larger problems of, in no special order, economic inequality, toxic consumerism, empire, corporate globalization, Democratic race grifting for power, and the corruption of the media and political elites. Trump ran on a campaign that showed awareness of some of these problems but he was seemingly always a con man exploiting the justified grievances of millions of Americans. He betrayed them and never rose to the call of his office or of history.

Unfortunately, Trump's disastrous term has only worsened matters and emboldened "progressive" authoritarians to step up the repression of their political enemies, including the White working class, in general (which is not to say the GOP were ever their allies). This is Trump's fault, the fault of his many enemies, and, to no small extent, the fault of voters duped by him.

Biden claims he wants to unify the country but—and I hope I'm wrong when I say this—that's a lie to judge from so many of his other utterances and policy plans. When I saw recent photos of the unprecedentedly large military presence in the Capitol for the inauguration I was reminded of all the unpopular, repressive governments the US has propped in foreign countries over the years. Are chickens coming home to roost?

Virginia National Guard members in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 13, 2021 (U.S. Air National Guard photo by SSgt Bryan Myhr).

New Jersey National Guard members in Washington, D.C. on Jan. 12, 2021 (U.S. Air National Guard photo by MSgt Matt Hecht).

See also: Anointing Biden & Election Irregularity Allegations IV

 

Labels: Biden, class, Democrats, Empire, Iran, Israel, law, media, military, politics, race, repression, Supreme Court, Trump, voting

In the current American context reparations refers to the idea of forcing people who never owned slaves to pay compensation for slavery to people who never were slaves. Newsweek recently reported the estimated cost of reparations, according to one 2020 study, was "$6.2 quadrillion as of 2018" which "divided by 40,909,233 Black non-Hispanic descendants of the enslaved, could result in a total reparations payment per descendant of $151.63 million."

And don't get any ideas about a discount if one of your ancestors died fighting against slavery during the Civil War. The study's authors have that covered, too: 

... some reparations opponents point to the federal government's expenditures in blood and treasure to end slavery through the Civil War as a form of reparations already rendered. This argument suffers from two major problems. First, ending an injustice is not the same as making reparations for its enduring effects. Second, more than 200,000 Black soldiers, including slaves and free, fought and died disproportionately to earn the freedom of the enslaved. The moral credit for this self-liberation goes to them, not to the federal government that had permitted their enslavement for so long.

With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris poised to possibly begin relocating to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and 1 Observatory Circle, respectively, next January it's worth thinking a bit more about reparations.

Apparently, Biden's chronologically impaired thinking has, shall we say, quickly evolved on the issue. He reportedly said in 1975: "I don't feel responsible for the sins of my father and grandfather. I feel responsible for what the situation is today, for the sins of my own generation. And I'll be damned if I feel responsible to pay for what happened 300 [sic] years ago."

In a 2019 presidential debate Biden gave a muddled response when asked: "What responsibility do you think that Americans need to take to repair the legacy of slavery in our country?" However, by February of this year Biden was on board with a proposal by Cory Booker (he of not inconsiderable, say 45%, European ancestry) "to study reparations and make a judgment whether or not what they should be and what they should do". Then Biden publicly stated about two months ago that he is in favor of "slavery reparations".

Kamala Harris, the privileged daughter of not one but two PhD possessing immigrant parents, co-sponsored Booker's legislation. She also reportedly supports reparations when she's not hiding in the "study it" column.

It's worth pointing out that the idea of slavery reparations is not new. I do not intend here to go all the way back to 1865 and Special Field Orders, No. 15. Given its limited scope and purpose, it is debatable that the order was intended as reparations for slavery. No, my goal is much more modest and I wish only to go back about five decades.

In 1969, James Forman of the Black Economic Development Conference (and formerly of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) "interrupted services at New York City's Riverside Church to demand $500 million in reparations from white churches to make up for injustices African Americans had suffered over the centuries." These demands were in accord with the BEDC's "Black Manifesto".

As Jason L. Riley put it:

Civil-rights organizations rejected the idea, which the NAACP's assistant director called "an illogical, diversionary and paltry way out for guilt-ridden whites." Bayard Rustin, who organized the 1963 March on Washington and was one of Martin Luther King's closest advisers, was another vocal skeptic of blacks cashing in on the tribulations of long-gone forebears. "The idea of reparations is a ridiculous idea," Rustin said. "If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he's dead and gone and nobody owes me anything."

Rustin, profiled in this blog in 2006, called the demand for reparations "preposterous" and accused Forman of "hustling, begging." Rustin continued: "Furthermore, I don't believe that any black man in this country wants to be given a thing—just the opportunity to work, to work and take care of his family." Times have changed, Bayard.

Labels: Bayard Rustin, Biden, Black America, class, economics, history, Obama, politics, race, slavery, White folks

I am persuaded myself that the good sense of the people will always be found to be the best army. They may be led astray for a moment, but will soon correct themselves. The people are the only censors of their governors: and even their errors will tend to keep these to the true principles of their institution. To punish these errors too severely would be to suppress the only safeguard of the public liberty. The way to prevent these irregular interpositions of the people is to give them full information of their affairs thro’ the channel of the public papers, and to contrive that those papers should penetrate the whole mass of the people. The basis of our governments being the opinion of the people, the very first object should be to keep that right; and were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter. But I should mean that every man should receive those papers and be capable of reading them. I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did any where. Among the latter, under pretence of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. This is a true picture of Europe. Cherish therefore the spirit of our people, and keep alive their attention. Do not be too severe upon their errors, but reclaim them by enlightening them. If once they become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I, and Congress, and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves. It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.

Source: Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Edward Carrington, January 16, 1787.

Labels: class, government, Indians, media, politics, quotations, Thomas Jefferson, United States, US Founding Fathers

Labels: class, economics, media, police, police repression, politics, race, Tucker Carlson, video

I think Michael Moore has gone far down hill since his Roger & Me days but in 2016 he proved he hasn't completely lost touch with working-class America. I did not know this until today but Moore predicted Donald Trump's 2016 victory a week before the election and he nailed the reasons why many people voted for Trump.

Labels: class, politics, Trump, video, voting

Years ago I was honored to unexpectedly be asked to share a speaker's platform with Adolph Reed, Jr. at a labor conference. I had admired his writing for some time. While I don't fully endorse all of his positions, I still think he has one of the most compelling approaches to class and race in American discourse and sheds more light than heat (and, believe me, he puts out a lot of heat) on the Rachel Dolezal affair. Below are a few excerpts from his "From Jenner to Dolezal: One Trans Good, the Other Not So Much".


By far the most intellectually and politically interesting thing about the recent "exposé" of Spokane, WA, NAACP activist Rachel Dolezal’s racial status is the conundrum it has posed for racial identitarians who are also committed to defense of transgender identity. ... Their contention is that one kind of claim to an identity at odds with culturally constructed understandings of the identity appropriate to one’s biology is okay but that the other is not ...

This brings me to the most important point that this affair throws into relief. It has outed the essentialism on which those identitarian discourses rest ... The essentialism cuts in odd ways in this saga. Sometimes race is real in a way that sex is not – you’re black only if you meet the biological criteria (whatever they’re supposed to be) for blackness. 


There is a guild-protective agenda underlying racial identitarians’ outrage about Dolezal that is also quite revealing ... The charge is what those making it want to be true; they assume it’s true because they understand black racial classification as a form of capital.


... the Dolezal issue has captured such attention only because it rankles the sensibilities of those who essentialize race ...


... race politics is ... the politics of the left-wing of neoliberalism.


... the more aggressively and openly capitalist class power destroys and marketizes every shred of social protection working people of all races, genders, and sexual orientations have fought for and won over the last century, the louder and more insistent are the demands from the identitarian left that we focus our attention on statistical disparities and episodic outrages that "prove" that the crucial injustices in the society should be understood in the language of ascriptive identity.


The fundamental contradiction that has impelled the debate and required the flight into often idiotic sophistry is that racial identitarians assume, even if they give catechistic lip service ... to the catchphrase that "race is a social construction," that race is a thing, an essence that lives within us.


The transrace/transgender comparison makes clear the conceptual emptiness of the essentializing discourses, and the opportunist politics, that undergird identitarian ideologies. There is no coherent, principled defense of the stance that transgender identity is legitimate but transracial is not, at least not one that would satisfy basic rules of argument. The debate also throws into relief the reality that a notion of social justice that hinges on claims to entitlement based on extra-societal, ascriptive identities is neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness. In insisting on the political priority of such fictive, naturalized populations identitarianism meshes well with neoliberal naturalization of the structures that reproduce inequality.

Reed concludes his article by saying: "It may be that one of Rachel Dolezal’s most important contributions to the struggle for social justice may turn out to be having catalyzed, not intentionally to be sure, a discussion that may help us move beyond the identitarian dead end." I really hope that's true but, sadly, I see very little evidence of it.

Labels: Adolph Reed Jr., class, gender, identity, quotations, race, Rachel Dolezal

Son, if you're going to marry a white woman, then marry a rich one, because those white-trash women are just Indians with bad haircuts.

Source: "One Good Man" in The Toughest Indian in the World by Sherman Alexie (Grove Press, 2001) p. 226.

Labels: art and literature, class, Indians, quotations, race, White folks

All aristocrats idealize the common folk, as long as they keep stoking the boilers.

Source: Character of Bertrand Russell in Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein at 52:30.

Labels: art and literature, class, quotations, video

The image below (click to enlarge) is from "Transparency: America's Wealthiest Religions. An earlier "tranparency" gives the following proportions of the US population in 2008:

• Baptist 15.8%
• Jewish 1.2%
• Catholic 25.1%
• Generic Christian 14.2%
• Muslim 0.6%
• Mainline Christian 12.9%

"

Labels: class, religion, statistics, United States

I was having a conversation with a man today who marveled at how often the most exploited people are the quickest to put hand on heart and wave the flag. I agreed and noted that the mistake many people make is to conflate the country with the government. Rulers like us thinking that way but the country is simply not the government nor is the flag the government has chosen to represent the country necessarily worthy of allegiance, especially in a country like the United States of America where there is not a democracy but rather a representative oligarchy—where 'our' elected officials, in actuality, represent powerful elites. Below are some further musings, if you will, on patriotism, by Leo Tolstoy and the US Congress.

Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most unquestionable significance is for the rulers nothing but a tool for attaining their ambitious and selfish ends, and for the ruled a renunciation of human dignity, reason, and conscience, and a slavish submission to those who are in power. Thus is patriotism actually preached, wherever it is preached. ... Patriotism is slavery. —Leo Tolstoy, "Christianity and Patriotism," The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy, Vol. 20, (D. Estes & Co, 1905).

(a) Designation.— September 11 is Patriot Day.
(b) Proclamation.— The President is requested to issue each year a proclamation calling on—
(1) State and local governments and the people of the United States to observe Patriot Day with appropriate programs and activities;
(2) all departments, agencies, and instrumentalities of the United States and interested organizations and individuals to display the flag of the United States at halfstaff on Patriot Day in honor of the individuals who lost their lives as a result of the terrorist attacks against the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001; and
(3) the people of the United States to observe a moment of silence on Patriot Day in honor of the individuals who lost their lives as a result of the terrorist attacks against the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001. --36 US Code § 144

Labels: class, critical thinking, patriotism, politics, Tolstoy, United States

In "Indians at home – Indians in Cornwall, Indians in Wales, Indians in Ireland," I wrote about how one member of the Anglo-America elite equated the indigenous people of North America and the indigenous Celtic peoples of Great Britain and how tools of Anglo-American colonialism were first tested in Europe.

In an 1897 article Myron Eels compared Indians to the "lower class of whites." He wrote:

I should say of the greatest part of those under forty-five years of age, that if they had white skins, talked the English language,--and if a part of them had abandoned their belief in their medicine men,--as some have not done,--if they travelled in boats instead of canoes, if their women wore hats or bonnets on their heads, if they were neater, they would be called civilized, at least as much so as the lower class of whites.

I got this quote from Indians in the Making: Ethnic Relations and Indian Identities around Puget Sound by Alexandra Harmon (Univ. of California Press, 1998) pp. 122-3. For Harmon, this illustrates how much "Indians remained aliens" and, certainly, that is so but I can't help but notice, too, just how little, to Eels' mind, separates Indians from the "the lower class of whites." One wonders about the gulf that separates them from upper class Whites like Eels.

Labels: class, history, identity, Indians, race, United States, White folks

In Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy John le Carre has the Soviet double agent Bill Haydon say: "In capitalist America economic repression of the masses is institutionalised to a point which not even Lenin could have foreseen ..." (p. 365 of the 2002 Pocket Books paperback edition). A listener referenced this line in an e-mail comment to the Diane Rehm Show during a segment with William Greider (48:39). This view has much to commend itself given the taxpayer-financed bailout of corporate giants, growing homelessness, the mortgage foreclosure crisis, the dismal state of America's corrupt labor unions, and the fact that the US has the largest prison population in the world.

See also: "In hard times, tent cities rise across the country" by the AP.

Labels: art and literature, class, Lenin, poverty, repression, United States

The George Carlin bit above is self-explanatory but the video montage (YouTube deleted the original montage video) below from John Carpenter's 1988 film, They Live (THEY = The Hierarchy Enslaving You), could stand a little explanation. The 'sermon' soundtrack is from the opening scenes which feature a Christian minister preaching in a Los Angeles park until the police stop him. Part of the text of the Street Preacher's (his name in the film's closing credits) sermon is taken from Paul's epistle to the Romans (3:13-18), which, in turn, hearkens back to Isaiah 59. Here are some of the representative verses from Romans 3: "... they use their tongues to deceive. The venom of asps is under their lips. Their mouth is full of curses and bitterness. ... in their paths are ruin and misery ... There is no fear of God before their eyes."

12 Sep 2021 addendum: As noted in Reason, more than four years ago, John Carpenter issued a Tweet that said: "THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism. It has nothing to do with Jewish control of the world, which is slander and a lie." Okay, it's pretty clear who the "yuppies" and capitalists are but who do the alien ghoul overlords disguised as humans represent in the film?

Elsewhere, Carpenter has said the film was a critique of Ronald Reagan, his policies, and the 1980s cultural milieu. All of this make perfect sense and is persuasive but how do Carpenter's ghouls fit in and why are they aliens?

By the way, I read Jonathan Lethem's book about the film (mentioned in the Reason article) and thought Lethem did a poor job. Among other things, he makes no mention of the opening sermon by the Street Preacher and, thus, he does not analyze it's biblical origins or its relevance to the film's overall theme.

Labels: class, critical thinking, culture, film & television, repression, United States, video

Brownfemipower writes:

... otherwise, black men could’ve own slaves and had their very own Master’s house ...
But they can’t, they don’t and they didn't. And the *reason* why, is because of the MARKET.
How could Black people own slaves and live in a beautiful plantation house when they were busy being forced to participate in the market as animals and live stock to be sold for profit for the Master?

Her remarks are part of a discourse on an Audre Lorde speech wherein she famously claims "... the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house." This discourse is, in turn, a part of BFP's critique of a blog post by Hugo Schwyzer.

Below is a comment I've tried twice to post to BFP's blog. The first time there were only 4 or 5 comments and the second time there were 31. When I last checked, there were 52 comments but mine was not among them. I've had comments posted to her blog before and so it's hard not to conclude that BFP is using her brown, femi power to squelch a view she doesn't want on her blog, which is certainly her right.

Any way, below is a slightly edited version of my comment. I've now added some formatting and links and taken out the quote from BFP that appears above.

Ummm, but Black people did own slaves. As Larry Koger notes in Black Slaveowners, "In Louisiana, Maryland, South Carolina, and Virginia, free blacks owned more than 10,000 slaves" in 1830. According to Philip Burnham, that same year, throughout the South 3,775 free Blacks owned 12,760 slaves. He also notes that Blacks in several states of the North still owned slaves in 1830, too.

One of the first people in North America to own another person as a chattel slave for life was a Black man. According to Burnham, in 1655, a Virginia court ruled that John Casor, against his will, was the permanent property of Anthony Johnson.

In the early 1800s Anna Madgigine Jai Kingsley was enslaved in Africa at the age of about 13 and brought eventually to North America. Her master made her his wife and when she and her children were freed in 1811 she went and bought her own slaves to run her own plantation in addition to helping run her husband Zephaniah's plantation, which upwards of 200 slaves. I've visited the plantation, it's just north of Jacksonville, FL. Anna Kingsley and others owned slaves because they often came from slave-owning cultures in Africa and because they could.

I would now add two things: In Anna Kingsley's will of 1860, she left four slaves to her daughter--they were all under the age of 18. Slave ownership by Blacks in America is not only explained by their roots in slaveowning cultures in Africa but also by their roots and experiences in a slaveowning culture in America. That's kind of what I was getting at when I said "they could" but the matter deserves some clarification.

Last revised: 1/7/2008

Labels: class, history, identity, race, slavery, United States

Yesterday, I finished reading Adrian C. Louis' 1995 novel, Skins. Rudy and Mogie, the book's two main characters, are both "full blood" Lakota (aka Sioux) Indians and Vietnam combat veterans. I've long pondered the devotion to the US armed forces by many Indian people. They are hugely overrepresented in the ranks of veterans and the active duty military and almost every powwow one goes to begins with an honor guard composed of Indian veterans; sometimes, even bearing individual military branch flags.

Louis has some ideas about what explains this attachment to the very military that, years before, was used to kill and dispossess so many Indians. While watching the PBS documentary Last Stand at Little Big Horn (co-written by James Welch and narrated by N. Scott Momaday) last night it was driven home to me that the poor and immigrant soldiers, including the "Buffalo soldiers," who drove the Lakota from their lands in the late 1800s were not much different from the Lakotas who fought for the US in Vietnam or, for that matter, the Lakotas who took control of what became Lakota territory in the 1700s. Here's a quote from Black Hawk--a Lakota veteran of the 1876 battle of the Little Big Horn--from the film: "These lands once belonged to the Kiowas and the Crows but we whipped those nations out of them and in this, we did what the White men do when they want the lands of Indians." Indeed, as a result the US Army was assisted by Crow scouts in their campaign against the Lakota. And so it goes.

Labels: art and literature, class, Empire, history, identity, Indians, race, United Nations

During the Great Depression, the Carter Family—A. P., Sara, and Maybelle—became national stars of American music. These Appalachian mountain folk helped transform music and the music business. They recorded their first song in 1927 in Bristol, Tennessee and by 1938 their music was being "blasted all over the world" from Mexico on "the most powerful of the Border Radio stations", XERA. Interestingly, their publicists presented them as the picture of marital bliss but Sara separated from her husband, A. P., in 1933 and divorced him in 1936.

During the Great Depression, in 1930, the Carters recorded "No More The Moon Shines On Lorena"—the sad story of the courtship and forced parting of two slaves. According to the liner notes from the 1995 Rounder Records CD The Carter Family: Worried Man Blues, the song was copyrighted in 1889 by Louis Stabb.

No More The Moon Shines On Lorena

Way down upon the old plantation
Old Massey used to own me as a slave
He had a yeller gal he called Lorena
And we courted where the wild bananas waved

For long years there we courted
And we were as happy as one
And my hard work for did Massey
And the happiness of life had just begun

No more the moon shines on Lorena
As we'd sit and watch the coons among the corn
And the possums laying on the wild bananas
And the old owl a hootin like a horn

One day I called to see my dear Lorena
I thought she would meet me at the gate
But they took her away to old Virginy
And left me to mourn for her fate

For years I have longed to see her
And the thoughts of her was ever in my head
One day Massey read me a letter
Telling me that Lorena she was dead

Repeat chorus

But I know that her soul has gone to heaven
And there she is ever free from pain
And to her a brighter crown is given
And no more she will wear the darkie's chain

Repeat chorus

Lyrics provided courtesy of Bluegrass Lyrics.Com!


Sung in the first-person, "No More The Moon Shines On Lorena" may seem an unlikely choice for a trio of White musicians from Poor Valley, Virginia but it is likely that the Carters knew ex-slaves and were sympathetic to the oppression Black people had endured under slavery and Jim Crow. The oldest, A. P. was born in 1891, just 26 years after the end of the Civil War. The Carters also teamed up with the Black Blues guitarist Lesley Riddle in 1928. Riddle and A. P. travelled together collecting songs and Riddle taught songs and guitar techniques to Maybelle.

The Carters were born and raised in a part of the South that, in the years before the Civil War, was riddled with abolitionists and had largely opposed secession. My own mother's maternal grandparents came from Hawkins County, Tennessee, just one small mountain ridge (Pine Ridge) to the south of, and in the same Holston River watershed, as the Carter Family's home--about 40 miles apart. A branch of the Underground Railroad ran through the area.

According to "Anti-slavery and Quakers in East Tennessee:"

East Tennessee was largely anti-slavery in its sentiments and politics. Because the economy was not based on the type of agriculture that required slave labor and because of abolitionism, prompted by religious and moral convictions, opposition to slavery emerged very early. In 1797, one year after Tennessee became a state, the Friends Society, more commonly known as the Quakers, began to organize opposition to slavery. This was the work of Elihu and Elijah Embree, sons of a Quaker minister who came to East Tennessee from Pennsylvania in 1790. Elihu, an iron manufacturer, owned slaves as a young man but by the time he was thirty, was an ardent abolitionist. By 1815, he was a leader in the abolitionist society organized in Greene County.

Embree first published The Emancipator in April of 1820 in Jonesborough (Washington County). The monthly periodical was the first publication in the United States devoted exclusively to the antislavery cause. He called slaveholders "monsters in human flesh" and argued vehemently against additional slave-holding states being allowed in the Union. Embree's condemnation of slavery was as harsh as any including the better-known abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, who began publishing his newspaper, The Liberator, in the 1830s. By the time The Liberator was first published, there were 25 anti-slavery societies in Tennessee with a membership of about 1000.

The 1939 Federal Writers' Project's Tennessee: A Guide to the State notes:

There had, however, always been a fairly strong anti-slavery element in Tennessee, and when the first constitution was adopted in 1796 nearly 2,000 Tennesseans petitioned the convention to abolish slavery after 1854.

As early as 1797 the Knoxville Gazette was urging that an abolition society be organized. The Manumission Society of Tennessee was formed in 1815 at Lost Creek, Jefferson County, by the Reverend Charles Osborn, who later established, in Ohio, the Philanthropist - a journal partly devoted to anti-slavery propaganda. An early member of the Manumission Society was Elihu Embree. Though a [former] slaveholder, Embree founded the Manumission Intelligencer, a weekly which was succeeded by his monthly Emancipator. These were the first periodicals in the United States exclusively devoted to abolition. After Embree's death in 1820, Benjamin Lundy took up the work and began publishing the Genius of Universal Emancipation in Ohio. In 1822 Lundy transferred his paper to Greeneville, Tennessee, and continued his activities there until 1824, when he moved to Baltimore to collaborate with William Lloyd Garrison. Out of these efforts grew many anti-slavery societies. Most of the early pioneer preachers were strong abolitionists, and "as late as 1827, East Tennessee alone contained nearly one-fifth of all anti-slavery societies in the United States and nearly one-sixth of the total membership." ...

And according to the Tennessee Newspaper Project:

By far the best known and most infamous anti-slavery editor and printer was William Gannaway Brownlow, whose gubernatorial likeness, known as the spitting portrait because of the post-war legislators' habit of anointing it with tobacco juice as they descended the stairs in the Capitol, was removed to the safer confines of the Tennessee State Museum in 1987. Brownlow was a man of strong opinions, and one never had to wonder which side of an issue he favored. He began the Tennessee Whig in Elizabethton in 1839, then moved it to Jonesboro in 1840 as simply the Whig. In 1851, he changed the name to Brownlow's Whig and moved the paper to Knoxville, where it was published until 1861, when the Civil War made it both inconvenient and imprudent to remain in Tennessee any longer. At this time Brownlow moved his family north, then returned in 1863 to revive the Whig. From 1865 until 1869, he took a hiatus from publishing to become the state's Reconstruction governor.

See also:

• LoC: Abolition, Anti-Slavery Movements, and the Rise of the Sectional Controversy
• The Carter Family Memorial Music Center
• NPR: Country Music's First Family
• Digital Library of Appalachia: Carter Family

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