I gave blood today (thank you, Stanford Blood Center!), which always puts me in a good mood and gives me reason to reflect on Charles Drew, the surgeon who developed blood-preservation processes such as the separation of plasma that made blood banks possible.
Charles Drew (Drew is sitting on the table on the right). Collection of the National Library of Medicine.
His research came just in time to save thousands of lives in World War II–the “Blood for Britain” program sent US blood donations to English soldiers and civilians, and would not have been possible a few years earlier. However, when the US entered the war, the US military requested that the American Red Cross only accept blood from whites, and they complied. When humanitarian groups protested, the policy was changed so that all blood was accepted, but it was segregated so that white people would receive only white people’s blood, black people only black people’s, a ludicrous and dangerous form of discrimination that Drew publicly protested.
Drew died at age 45 in a car accident. The legend that he bled to death for lack of medical treatment–specifically, being refused blood–at a whites-only hospital is just that, an urban legend that sounded probable enough but, according to reliable witnesses, was not true. It got its legs not only because the painful irony makes a compelling story, but because of its plausibility: African-Americans were routinely turned away from hospitals, with many deaths as a result. Spencie Love, author of One Blood, pairs the story of Charles Drew with that of Maltheus Reeves Avery, another man who died of car-accident injuries in the same county, in the same year, because the hospital to which he was taken–a different one–had no remaining “black beds.”
A bright spot in the story, however, is that hundreds of millions of people have received donated blood since the development of the blood bank. It is a safe bet that if you’re reading this, someone you love is alive today because of Drew’s research.
You write today’s post: who’s your favorite black writer?
I asked my wife and she didn’t hesitate: “James Baldwin.” I thought Octavia Butler would have given him a run for his money, since Joy is a big sci-fi reader and loves Butler.
Both of those would be high on my list, as is August Wilson, but I’ll say Toni Morrison for the way she gets inside so many different kinds of people in creating her characters.
Over to you.
(ETA: Thanks, Thea. I’d originally written “Olivia Butler,” may OB’s spirit forgive me!)
Michelle Alexander’s recent book, The New Jim Crow, picks up the tale told by Slavery By Another Name. As she writes in her eloquent opening paragraph:
Jarvious Cotton cannot vote. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather, he has been denied the right to participate in our electoral democracy. Cotton’s family tree tells the story of several generations of black men who were born in the United States but who were denied the most basic freedom that democracy promises—the freedom to vote for those who will make the rules and laws that govern one’s life. Cotton’s great-great-grandfather could not vote as a slave. His great-grandfather was beaten to death by the Ku Klux Klan for attempting to vote. His grandfather was prevented from voting by Klan intimidation. His father was barred from voting by poll taxes and literacy tests. Today, Jarvious Cotton cannot vote because he, like many black men in the United States, has been labeled a felon and is currently on parole.
She goes on to write, “An extraordinary percentage of black men in the United States are legally barred from voting today, just as they have been throughout most of American history.” Today’s disenfranchisement of African American men has come about through a system that is formally color-blind: the criminal justice system.
In the era of colorblindness, it is no longer socially permissible to use race, explicitly, as a justification for discrimination, exclusion, and social contempt. So we don’t. Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color “criminals” and then engage in all the practices we supposedly left behind [with Jim Crow]. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans.
And the new criminals–almost ten times as many as there were before the “war on drugs” was declared–are disproportionately black. Here are some things I thought before I heard Alexander speak last November, and what I now believe to be the truth.
What I thought before: black people use and sell drugs at a rate disproportionate to their numbers in the population. Sure, there’s racism in the criminal justice system, but one reason the prison population is disproportionately black is that African-Americans commit a large percentage of crime.
What I think now: black and white people use and sell drugs at about the same rate. The National Institute of Drug Abuse reports of its studies of secondary-school students: “Contrary to popular assumption, at
all three grade levels African-American students have substantially lower rates of use of most licit and illicit drugs than do Whites. These include any illicit drug use, most of the specific illicit drugs, alcohol, and cigarettes.” (Monitoring the Future: National Results on Adolescent Drug Use: Overview of Key Findings, 2006) “Contrary to popular assumption” has to be the biggest understatement of the year. Why was this report not the top story of every newspaper in the country?
What I thought before: the “war on drugs” was declared because drug use was on the rise. It’s misconceived, but we had to do something about all that crack.
What I think now: drug-related crimes were falling when Reagan declared the war on drugs in 1982. The word “crack” was barely known–it certainly was not a media buzzword, or an epidemic of black neighborhoods.
What I thought before: the penal population has gone up somewhat over my lifetime.
What I think now: In the past thirty years, the population in the penal system has not risen gradually or modestly, but rocketed from 300,000 to over 2,000,000.
What I thought before: the United States’s high rate of imprisonment is due at least in part to its having a higher crime rate than other countries.
What I think now: “Between 1960 and 1990 . . . official crime rates in Finland, Germany, and the United States were close to identical. Yet the U.S. incarceration rate quadrupled, the Finnish rate fell by 60 percent, and the German rate was stable in that period” (7). We don’t have a higher crime rate–we just deal with crime via much higher rates of incarceration.
What I thought before: Racism is present in the criminal justice system, the way it is present everywhere. It’s a problem that concerns me, but calling it the equivalent of Jim Crow is nothing more than a rhetorical flourish.
What I think now: The criminal justice system has been pressed into the service of an agenda that has changed form over the years but has not diminished: the social control of racial minorities, especially African-Americans. The means was once Jim Crow; now it is mass incarceration, which is truly, not just rhetorically, the new Jim Crow.
I’m devouring this book, even though every bite burns going down. I can’t recommend it highly enough. If you get a chance to see Michelle Alexander in person, don’t miss it; her presentation was riveting.
I knew that terrible conditions continued to oppress black Americans after Emancipation, of course. I knew that lynchings and the unequal application of the law kept a boot on their necks. I knew, for that matter, that slavery is still going strong around the world. But I didn’t know half the stuff documented in Slavery By Another Name, aired yesterday and available for viewing here now.
If you want to place someone beneath the notice of the public, declare them a criminal–it will give you lots of leeway for abusing them without anyone being willing to intervene. If they haven’t done anything illegal, make new laws that criminalize things they are already doing. The former slaveholding states would tolerate neither the equality of black people with white nor the loss of all that free labor. And so the law against vagrancy–the inability to prove that one has a job–was “dredged up from legal obscurity” and used to sweep black men into prison. (Once again, in our own wave of high unemployment, we have political leaders proposing penalties for being poor: Judson Phillips, president of the Tea Party Nation, recently spoke approvingly of the 18th century law against voting if one did not own real estate. Last November would have been my first election! And actual prison sentences for debt are on the rise, according to this article in the Wall Street Journal, and despite federal debtors’ prisons’ having been abolished 180 years ago.) Defendants were required to pay for the expenses the state incurred in convicting them. If they couldn’t pay the fees to ” the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses,” they were in debt and had to work it off–again, laws created in order to manufacture criminals, i.e., slave laborers. Furthermore, contract laws were in place to penalize anyone attempting to leave a job before an advance had been worked off”–another form of thinly-veiled enslavement, practiced frequently today in countries such as India and the United States.
I wrote 1865-1945 because the author of the book Slavery By Another Name, Douglas A. Blackmon–another journalist with the Wall Street Journal–focuses on the scope of 80 years. It seems to me that this practice is far from over, but that’s for an upcoming post.
For today, please be aware that there are more slaves in the world today than there were in the entire 400 years of the African slave trade. Chocolate and flowers are industries with a lot of slave labor. If you want to give a Valentine to children in West Africa and women in South America, buy the chocolate or flowers that profit their ethical bosses, not the exploiters. Look for the fair trade symbol. One World Flowers is a good option for roses, and your local natural foods store probably carries non-slave-produced chocolate brands, such as Divine,Tcho,Theo, and Equal Exchange. (Whole Paycheck is not my favorite food store, but they are a good source for fair trade chocolate.)
Our country’s biggest contributions to world music are jazz, blues, rock and roll, and hip hop. All four arose largely–in the case of jazz, blues, and hip hop, almost exclusively–from the African-American community. Thanks, black America, for putting my country on the musical map. I especially thank you for funk, too, though I don’t think I can make the case that it has had quite the influence of jazz.
So I don’t think there’s been a decade of US history that was not characterized by black music that would change the musical world. Still, the 20s and 30s were extraordinary. I wrote about some art and poetry of the Harlem Renaissance yesterday and the day before. Another star of the Harlem Renaissance was Duke Ellington, whose music I won’t try to describe; “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” at least when I try it. Ellington himself advised “You’ve got to find a way of saying it without saying it” (great advice for an artist in any medium), so let’s just let the music speak for itself. If you have an Ellington recording in the house, won’t you go put it on and soak up some of your heritage as a world citizen? And if you don’t, here are a few great recordings: Ellington himself playing “In a Sentimental Mood” with John Coltrane:
Or if you like your jazz tamer, and/or like to hear the words, here’s Ella Fitzgerald a few years earlier:
My favorite rendition is when my wife plays it, but I’m sentimental that way.
Romare Bearden, image by Roy DeCarava, (c) Sherry Turner DeCarava 2012, courtesy The DeCarava Archives.
Yesterday I alluded to the music and art of the Harlem Renaissance as well as the poetry. I first encountered the art of Harlem Renaissance artist Romare Bearden when I took a collage class in high school, and when I set up this blog, his was one of the names on my blogroll of artists. He had an amazing gift for texture and color, as well as the juxtaposition that is built in to collage (his most frequent medium), and used them to tell stories, evoke the sound of music, portray a place or people . . . His pieces are complex, accessible, rich in allusions, and both emotional and philosophical.
In Early Morning, for example: the woman’s arms both fit with the rest of her and set up a contrast that speaks of other places, maybe the places where her thoughts are now. The arms are languid, flat like a Matisse collage; they contrast with her tired face, which is portrayed more realistically and itself has a contrast between the Madonna gaze of the eyes and the determined set of the jaw. Her head scarf, apron, and dress speak of the kitchen, while her arms suggest a more romantic setting where she might be dancing, sleeping, or making love. And still, that right arm is not only part of her, but part of the background–of the wall, in fact. As if she is there and not there, as one might be at a moment when duty calls one way and longing another and especially here in early morning, when one’s mind is still half in the night’s dreams. All of that from one figure, and a background figure at that. This is why I feel the way August Wilson does about the effect of Romare Bearden’s pieces: “I was looking at myself in ways I hadn’t thought of before and have never ceased to think of since.”
Only in writing this post did I learn that Bearden’s centennial is being celebrated right now, between September 2011 and September 2012. If you’re near Cincinnati, Tampa, or New York, check out one of the exhibits in honor of this anniversary; looks like others are in the works. Folks in my part of the world, you can see his mural “Berkeley: The City and its People” anytime by popping into the chambers of the Berkeley City Council.
The above is my favorite picture of Bearden. I love the way the photographer, Roy DeCarava (another terrific African-American artist), made the photo look like a collage too.
Joy and I once stayed in a great little B&B in Maryland whose rooms each had a literary theme. (We fantasize about running a place like this sometimes. We’d make it a mystery B&B, with rooms devoted to different authors and sprinkled with clues from their works. We will never do it in this lifetime, because nothing about running an inn appeals to us except brainstorming about how to decorate the rooms. I wonder where you get a Maltese Falcon?) Ours was the Langston Hughes Room: art deco furnishings, a big portrait of Hughes, and, since this is the Book Lovers’ B&B and they know rooms need books, books about Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance. It’s a period I love: its music, poetry, and art. The rebirth of course points to a death and dearth that preceded it: who were the Duke Ellingtons, Langston Hugheses, and Romare Beardens of a generation earlier, whose work was never played or published or shown in a gallery?
Here are three poems from that great flowering of the 20s and 30s.
Angelina Grimke: Trees
God made them very beautiful, the trees:
He spoke and gnarled of bole or silken sleek
They grew; majestic bowed or very meek;
Huge-bodied, slim; sedate and full of glees.
And He had pleasure deep in all of these.
And to them soft and little tongues to speak
Of Him to us, He gave wherefore they seek
From dawn to dawn to bring unto our knees.
Yet here amid the wistful sounds of leaves,
A black-hued grewsome something swings and
swings;
Laughter it knew and joy in little things
Till man’s hate ended all. –And so man weaves.
And God, how slow, how very slow weaves He–
Was Christ Himself not nailed to a tree?
Countee Cullen: Incident
Once riding in old Baltimore,
Heart-filled, head-filled with glee;
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was no whit bigger,
And so I smiled, but he poked out
His tongue, and called me, “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of Baltimore
From May until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all that I remember.
Jean Toomer: Evening Song
Full moon rising on the waters of my heart,
Lakes and moon and fires,
Cloine tires,
Holding her lips apart.
Promises of slumber leaving shore to
charm the moon,
Miracle made vesper-keeps,
Cloine sleeps,
And I’ll be sleeping soon.
Cloine, curled like the sleepy waters
where the moonwaves start,
Radiant, resplendently she gleams,
Cloine dreams,
Lips pressed against my heart.
And that last one makes me have to leave my keyboard and go upstairs to look at my sleeping daughter.
A highlight of last fall’s church schedule was the service in which the poet Everett Hoagland spoke. I don’t think I can describe the value of his poetry better than brother UU blogger Patrick Murfin did: “I commend the essential bravery of Hoagland’s work, which connects the intimate and personal now to the vastness of a historic and global outrage . . . . This is self-knowledge on an epic scale. All of us, regardless of our origins would do well to come to such grips with the long shadows of our own histories.” (Mailbox, UU World, June 2004)
Every time I hear a poet read aloud, I remember that that’s how poetry should be read. When I forget and try to read it silently, it loses at least one dimension, maybe more like two or three. So I urge you to read these poems aloud.
At East/West Beaches
The day night was born
we searched for time and sea-
smoothed fragments of blue, green,
brown bottles. Glass
cleared of gloss
made of man-
and woman-
made fire
and sand
made from
stone, made
from rock, made
from cosmic dust. We
fringed the lips of under-
tow with footprints the waves
redeemed from the firm, wet
shore. We gathered and gave each other
milk white moonstones, aeons
old obsidian, pebbles trans-
lucent as sucked rock
candy and rolled up our jeans in the raw
salty mist. The sun sank into
a violet-lipped quahog, and grit-edged
night opened like a mussel. Under
lacquered, pearly black
light of moonrise we crossed
over a sandbar
into camp
ground
by duned scrub
beach rose. The night day
was born we turned
around and found
no footprints.
Gorée
“necessary and inevitable like the ‘inevitable’ slave past through consciousness like the present”
—Augustino Neto, “The Path of the Stars”
Gorée ten miles off shore beckons
from the western horizon like the landscape
of the troubled dream and we sleepwalk to the ferry.
Twenty thousand-thousand gone through the Gorée trade alone
we are told.
This is a Catholic isle off a Moslem land.
This the church where truth was chained.
Here Jesus died and rose again.
The beads we say are knots of blood.
Here they force-fed us after the trek in chains.
Here men were sold by size, nubile women penned
and prized for comeliness. Mulattoes conceived here,
and their mothers, were boated back to the main-
land to buffer tides of rage. Here children’s
chains are sold as souvenirs; they anchor history
and the mind. Here they took, selected the best;
the rest: lame, old, small and sick were helped
to die.
The writing is on the stockade walls: poster sized
revolutionary rhetoric, Pan-African credos, race
pride logos, reminders, challenges and warnings
written in black by the descendants
of the survivors of the dried blood red walls
of the pastel colonial buildings’
shuttered silence.
We’ve had to come all the way
back to see poetry kill people, blind them,
cause them to cough blood and be crippled
in a French provincial palace of mind,
with a court, an overmonied ten percent
of the population, prospering lords and ladies,
fronting masks. Eighty percent of each dollar spent
on the slave factory island, on a ROOTS tee shirt
goes to France. “See Your Roots” cotton
shirts off bony backs are hawked by hungry hustlers
inside the barracoon’s walls. Bloods at its
doors trade cowry shells for your money or
urge on you a brand new djudju bag—
for fifty Central African francs.
At sunset on Gorée Island, where scavenging
brown hawks wheel above the huge metal cross
atop the island’s highest point, the volcano
sleeps silent as the broken cannon pointed there
over the Middle Passage. . . .
down a long dark corridor a doorless doorway
to the past and future opens
to the surf’s wash and soft thud on the black
boulders. The blue-eyed horizon of this eastern
shore . . .
gone.
You are your shadow silhouetted in the rectangular
frame that is the grave of time, where so much went
underground. You had to, had to, you
had to come all the way back
to the rock fortress, to the slave pens,
get down
on your hands and knees and crawl into
the stone oven of a cell
where the African rebels’ yells and defiance were kept
in solitary. Compressed by silence and circumstance
to diamond-hard blues. Completely black
inside the cell alone, one sees and hears things
clearly in the deep darkness. Overhead are heard
the voices of African-American tourists
calling their mates to, “Come look at this
Tyree. Come see this Dee. . . .” One hears a sea
of twenty thousand thousand voices at once
but also this from the shadows that always crowd
your view-finder, even in the dark:
“Do you tan? The native women are
charming. Does he take MasterCard? How
can they be so resigned? Gee, Gorée is neat fun!”
Inside the cowry shell you hold to your ear
you hear your name and heartbeat;
you finger the humming walls of the
cubicle and chip the tactile darkness
for a keepsake to put in your
djudju bag: ancient black lava rock.
You crawl out into the light
of the setting sun, face the western horizon
and, stripping as you go, hanging your watch
and jeans, western shirt and shoes on your white
shadow, you wade into
the east shore of the Middle Passage—
the hyphen between African
and American—
the surf hisses and steams off you
like water around white hot iron.
You walk out farther, level with your
heart. Farther, until the edge of life
is just over your head. You hold your
breath under water, open your eyes, clench
your fists and let the bellow bubble out
of you.
But you bound off the sand and obsidian
bottom and beat your breath back to the surface. . . .
As we board the ferry back to Dakar
the ghosts of twenty million swarm the wharf;
waifs with open palms and eyes closed by
disease and blindness, with ringworm in their
rusty dreadlocks, beg
for fifty Central African francs.
The Paris of Africa.
At sunset, the sea around Gorée is red;
it recedes revealing twenty thousand-
thousand gone and western rigs drilling
offshore for new black gold.
Later, alone in the bush, squatting
at the base of an ashy baobab, you contemplate
it all: your blue jeans,
the same old cotton, under
the same old sun,
the same old so-called “communes,”
the same old mules,
the same gaunt shadows lengthening
in the light. And how
oppression always
smells the same, looks the same, how
poverty personified is always full
of the same self
hate and hospitality.
You look at, listen to
the little whirlwinds, dust devils
swirling on the dry red road
and think of goopher,
think of vévé.
You take a twig and score
your name under a poem
you are able to read in the deep
red dust:
We are dust.
Rock is the placenta of time. But rock can be shattered.
You cannot break dust; it defies the hammer. Chisels cannot carve up-
on it. Its stuff will not make good statues of your heroes. Heroes are made of it. Blown up? Explosives never destroy it. It cannot be slung or thrown. Primitive
but it can kill you.
“East/West Beaches” and “Gorée” are two in a sequence called “Homecoming,” which you can read here, where there is also a link to his books. You can hear the man himself read here:
Dan Harper, our Associate Minister of Religious Education, and I offered a class at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Palo Alto called Current Issues in Liberal Religion. On January 24, 2012, our topic was “Race and Liberal Religion,” and I gave this presentation.
The stated purpose of the poll tax, in the case of Virginia, was to serve as “an elementary and objective intelligence test.” How so? One who could not come up with the tax lacked the “minimum intelligence for ordering one’s own affairs and participating in those of the state.” The effect, in state after state, was to disqualify black voters in disproportionate numbers.
The Supreme Court, in the decision that struck down the Virginia statute (Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections, 1966), wrote that the state’s only legitimate interest in controlling who votes is to confirm that the voter is qualified. “Wealth or fee paying has, in our view, no relation to voting qualifications; the right to vote is too precious, too fundamental to be so burdened or conditioned.”
Sermons in Stones 
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