This is part of the 4th Monday night series sponsored by
CCDS and our Socialist Educational Project (SEP)
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Honoring Anne and Carl Braden and their stand against white supremacy.
January 24th, 9pm ET, 8pm CT, 7pm MT, and 6pm PT
We are honoring Anne and Carl Braden, lifetime fighters for racial and social justice. In the 1950's, in the height if the cold war, Anne and Carl Braden bought a house for a Black family in a white neighborhood. This is just one example from two lifetimes of fighting for equality and against white supremacy.
We will take this time to remember and learn from people who new them personally. . This fittingly happens on week after the Martin Luther King holiday and just preceding Black History Month. Please join us. (Zoom below)
Panelists:
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Anne Lewis: Anne comes out of a movement to make media that helps create opportunity for social change. She has made documentary films since the 1970¹s and was associate director and assistant camerawoman for HARLAN COUNTY, USA. Other work includes: Fast Food Women, Morristown: in the air and sun, and A Strike and an Uprising in Texas. Anne partnered with Mimi Pickering and Appalshop to make Anne Braden: Southern Patriot. For more information about Anne go to www.annelewis.org
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Catherine Fosl: "I’m a historian and a professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Louisville, where I was also founding director of the Anne Braden Institute for Social Justice Research. I’m the author of three books on social movement history, including an award winning biography of Anne Braden entitled Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the Cold War South (Univ. of Ky Press, 2006)."
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Jim Williams: a native Louisvillian, met Carl and Anne Braden in 1962. He was soon writing for The Southern Patriot and working closely with Carl and Anne, who assisted the formation of the Southern Student Organizing Committee (SSOC). He frequently accompanied Carl on his organizing trips. “Anne never forgave me for leaving Louisville,” he says
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Ira Grupper: Civil Rights worker in 1960’s: N.Y.C., Georgia and Mississippi (SNCC—Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; COFO—Council of Federated Orgs.; MFDP—Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party). His distinguished civil rights jail record in the 1960’s spans both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. Moved to Louisville, Kentucky in 1969 to join the staff of SCEF, the Southern Conference Educational Fund (at the request of its Executive Directors, Carl and Anne Braden).
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When the civil rights struggle engulfed the South, Anne Braden was one of the courageous few who crossed the color line to fight for racial justice. Her history is a proud and fascinating one…Anne Braden is indeed a ‘subversive southerner’—a label she can wear with pride because she spent her life fighting to build a New South, where all our people could live together in freedom and equality.”
~ Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, Sr.
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2022
The year we face, we must believe,
Will not be one to wail and grieve,
But one that clears the poisoned air
And brings us hope and not despair.
We must expunge these viral days
And freely go our chosen ways.
No longer live in Covid’s thrall
Is my fervent wish for one and all.
Seymour Joseph
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CCDS Stands with the Cuban People
All Out to Defend the Cuban Revolution
November 13,2021
On November 15th – the day that Cuba opens up to tourism following the months-long pandemic – the U.S. government has planned actions to subvert the economy and overthrow the government. Cuba’s socialist system with its pro-people policies is enshrined in its constitution after being voted upon by the overwhelming majority of the Cuban people. Thus, Cuban authorities have denied requests by counter revolutionaries to protest on November 15th – actions that are designed to undermine the government’s efforts to rebuild the pandemic-wrecked economy and inhumane U.S. sanctions. This is democracy and sovereignty – the right of the people of Cuba to decide their system of governing and their right to defend it.
The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism stands with the Cuban people and demands that the U.S. government cease its plans for subversion that is mainly supported from outside the country – by right wing politicians of both the Republican and Democratic parties. The subversion is paid by U.S. tax money to the tune of $6.6 million that has funded NGO organizations and individuals on its payroll.
The goal is to inflict maximum suffering on the Cuban people on top of 6 decades of economic warfare. The aim is to force submission to U.S. corporate interests and their desire to regain the lost capitalist, mafia-run paradise they owned prior to 1959 when the US-supported dictator Batista was overthrown.
Even more, the scheme to subvert and destroy the Cuba revolution is supported and connected to far right and fascist organizations internationally – and has been in the works for many years. The plot is not spontaneous as the corporate media would have the U.S. people believe.
Contrast the Biden Administration’s “concern” for human rights with its support for murderous, anti-people regimes in Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras and elsewhere – supported by the same right-wing capitalist forces trying to overthrow the Cuban government.
If the Cuban revolution were overthrown, it would set back all of Latin America at a time when much of the hemisphere is moving to the left with anti-austerity, pro-people governments. It would be a blow against all progressive forces struggling to win programs for the people in health care, education, climate justice, indigenous rights over land and resources, labor rights, racial equality and national sovereignty.
Public opinion polls show that the U.S. people by a large majority support a return to diplomacy and a path towards normalization of relations with Cuba. President Biden was elected with a promise to repeal the onerous sanctions imposed by the Trump administration and a return to diplomacy which includes lifting the embargo. We are waiting for him to live up to his campaign promise.
President Biden, we demand you lift the sanctions on Cuba and tear down the travel ban that prevents people to people contact. CCDS urges its members and friends to:
1) call Members of Congress, and ask them to sign on to a Dear Colleague letter letter to President Biden issued by Reps. McGovern (D-MA), Bobby Rush (D-IL), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and Gregory Meeks (D-NY). It asks President Biden to change U.S. policy towards Cuba and return to diplomacy including the lifting of the embargo.
2) Help mobilize and join protests of U.S. policy in solidarity with Cuba on November 15th.
3) Continue to work to build support for several anti-embargo and travel ban measures that have been introduced in Congress.
4) Keep up the pressure to demand that the Biden administration live up to its campaign promise – lift the Trump sanctions on Cuba and comply with the rule of law of the UN Charter to end the illegal blockade of Cuba. End all financing of NGOs and individuals who are working to overthrow the Cuban government - no tax money for subversion and internationally connected fascist movements!
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COMMITTEES OF CORRESPONDENCE FOR
DEMOCRACY AND SOCIALISM
Statement of Appreciation for the Invitation to Attend the January 10, 2022 Inauguration of the New Leadership in Nicaragua.
Dear Comrades,
We are writing to express our appreciation for your kind invitation to attend the inauguration of the new government of Nicaragua on January 10,2022. We plan on sending a delegate, Karl Kramer, representing CCDS to this important event. The leadership of CCDS wishes to send our congratulations and warm regards to the people of Nicaragua which includes our wishes for a successful future of economic, political, and environmental development. As we state:
“The Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism (CCDS) wishes to express our congratulations on the reelection of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo to serve as leaders of Nicaragua.
We understand that Nicaragua over the last decade has experienced significant economic development, most importantly reducing the numbers of Nicaraguans living in extreme poverty. Nicaraguan policies have also included greater access to health care and education.
We also understand that the recent Nicaraguan election included high levels of voter participation and little or no complaints about election irregularities.
Further, we understand that Nicaragua has reasserted its solidarity with peoples and governments in Latin America and the Caribbean who are committed to progressive social change.
And finally the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism wishes to reaffirm our political opposition to United States interference in the economic and political life of Nicaragua (and all countries in the Western Hemisphere). It is our profoundest desire that the people of Nicaragua have the right to decide their own future without covert interference, economic sanctions, and support for forces outside the country who wish to destabilize it.
We congratulate you on your recent elections and we pledge ourselves to continue the struggle within the United States to oppose any policies that seek to undermine the national sovereignty of the Nicaraguan people.”
In Solidarity,
CCDS Co-Chairs: Gary Hicks, Rafael Pizarro, Harry Targ, Janet Tucker
Presented by: Karl Kramer, member of the National Coordinating Committee, CCDS
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OpEdNews Op Eds 11/4/2021 at 8:39 PM EDT
URL: https://www.opednews.com/articles/The-COVID-19-Pandemic-Ant-by-Steven-Jonas-Anti-maskers_Anti-vaxxers_Covid-19_Health-211104-294.html
"Either this nation shall kill racism, or racism shall kill this nation." (S. Jonas, Aug., 2018)
Qualifications
I am a traditionally trained public health physician. My M.D. (1962) is from The Harvard Medical School, my Master of Public Health degree (M.P.H.), is from the Department of Public Health of the Yale School of Medicine (1967), and I am Certified by the American Board of Preventive Medicine (1971). Do these qualifications mean that I am always right? (Well, just most of the time - joke.) Do some anti-vaxxers, whom I regard as totally non-scientific, have some similar credentials? Yes. But that doesn't make them right.
What my credentials say about me was that, as I said above, I was traditionally trained in public health and preventive medicine, and, as it happens, the bulk of my career was spent as an academic in that field, as a Professor of Preventive Medicine at the Renaissance School of Medicine at Stony Book, NY. I present this information just for your information. What stands behind the positions that I take on the pandemic and the anti-vaxx movement are not my credentials, but my commitment to the science of public health and preventive medicine (the field in which, as noted, I have spent my whole career).
An Introductory Historical Note
Not too many people, other than students of Nazism, know that there was a "left-wing" of the Nazi Party. It was headed by the Strasser brothers, Otto and Gregor. As the beginning of the Wikipedia entry on them says:
"Strasserism ( German: Strasserismus or Straßerismus) is a strand of Nazism that calls for a more radical, mass-action and worker-based form of Nazism hostile to Jews not from a racial, cultural or religious perspective, but from an anti-capitalist basis to achieve a national rebirth. It derives its name from Gregor and Otto Strasser, two brothers initially associated with this position." This is a subject to which I shall return at the end of the column.
Trump, the Republican Right, and the Pandemic.
See also the evidence provided by the one public health physician who managed to stay inside the Trump White House as it engaged in its ongoing destructive behavior, Dr. Deborah Birx. As for the conspiracy theories rampant on the both the Right ("the Chinese," George Soros [see International Jew], Dr. Fauci, and Bill Gates) and the Left ("the Chinese," Bill Gates, "Big Pharma," Dr. Fauci, and the "CDC" [generically]), variations on the "Plandemic" hypothesis (for population control or some such), I am not going to deal with them, except to say that anyone who thinks that Dr. Fauci has the power to "run the pandemic" should look up his job-description.
Some Comments on Vaccination, its Effectiveness, and Side-effects
Does vaccination work to prevent acquisition of this highly infectious disease, transmitted through the air? Yes, most of the time. And when it doesn't prevent infection of a specific individual, in most of those cases it diminishes the severity of the resulting illness.
Does vaccination have side-effects? Yes, it does. In most cases, beyond short-duration tenderness and redness at the injection site, are they primarily annoying rather incapacitating? Yes. As an example, I had the "tireds" for about two weeks after I received my second shot last spring. I had them again for a shorter period of time after I received my booster at the beginning of October. (Oh yes. I received the Pfizer vaccine.)
Have a significant number of people died after receiving the vaccine? The anti-vaxxers say "yes," but don't seem to be able to provide any data supporting their position (at least I haven't seen any, and I am on a couple of left-wing anti-vaxx listservs, so presumably if there were any, it would have been sent around). Again, some folks have said that the death-toll from the vaccine is "massive," but I haven't seen any numbers (and if they were, to be convincing they would have to from reproducible sources). Nevertheless, the claim has been made repeatedly, on both the Left and the Right. But one wonders, in this country why would the CDC not respond as vigorously to that situation as they have to the pandemic? Oh, I know. Because each and every employee at CDC is part of the "plandemic" plot and the really want to kill people beyond those who the virus has killed (at least according to cause-of-death reports, which are "obviously" false).
Might there be some very long-term side effect[s], resulting from this vaccine which is based on an entirely new and different mode of vaccine production? Yes, we are told by the anti-vaxxers, 15 years down the road there is going to be some significant damage, of some (unknown) kind, to the human population who took the vaccine. But of course, we do not they know that to be true. It is indeed speculation. And if that speculation (which has no scientific basis, it's only speculation) proved to be entirely incorrect, then possibly hundreds of millions of persons would have died unnecessarily. Hmm.
On the anti-Vaxxers
From the Left, there are folks like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Well, at least he's consistent. He is against all vaccination, of children anyway, because of the association of certain child-hood vaccines (required for school entrance, by the way) which cause autism. That that is an hypothesis which has been proven to be entirely wrong seems to make no difference to Mr. Kennedy and his allies
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But at least he's consistent. Most other anti-vaxxers, whether form the Left or from the Right seem to be entirely happy with traditional, required, pre-school vaccination programs, and with certain required vaccinations for certain kinds of employment or travel to certain locales (e.g., for Yellow Fever or polio).
Both the anti-vaxx Left and the anti-vaxx Right talk about refusing vaccination as a matter of "personal freedom." Well first of all, it should be made clear that no one, at least on the Public Health side is taking the position that people can be forced to be vaccinated. (And I have seen folks on the Left accidentally or purposefully confuse the public health position that vaccination can be required for, say, certain kinds of employment or entry into certain kinds of public spaces.
But NO ONE on the public health is advocating forced vaccination in primus. That would violate the inviolable principle of informed consent for any medical/public-health procedure. The public health position is that vaccination can be required for certain kinds of employment, for entry into certain public spaces and facilities, and so forth, not that it simply can be required willy-nilly without consent.
To repeat, as is well-known we are dealing here with a highly communicable disease, which can be brought under control in significant part by mass vaccination. BUT, if vaccination-or-not were solely a matter of personal freedom, why should folks not have the freedom to defecate into public water supplies, if it makes them feel good and helps them to express their personal freedom? Or how about the prohibitions against drinking and driving or smoking in forbidden areas? "But it makes me feel good" even to "I can't live without it" don't seem to cut the mustard.
Anti-vaxxers appear to be calling for an immediate end for vaccination programs, in order to save people from being killed by the vaccine. I wonder what the health care delivery systems that were overwhelmed with the COVID sick-and-dying, before the vaccine, would respond to that? But what then would be done for people who want to be vaccinated?
The anti-Maskers
As for anti-maskers, for a disease transmitted entirely through the air, it is the most effective means for reducing transmission. Can masks be uncomfortable? They sure can (I wear mine every time I go outside, double-vaxxed and boostered or no. Comfortable? No. But I wear it.) Ah ha, you might say, so you don't trust the vaccine, eh? Well, no I don't not trust it, but there are exceptions to every rule, so why take a chance? As for right-wing anti-mask mandates/laws, I dealt with that subject at length here: Click Here. As for left-wingers who are against mask mandates because they interfere with their personal freedom, I haven't dealt with that open in any detail, although I do bring up the defecation-in-a-public-water-supply Comparo with them on occasion.
As for the Governor who claimed that masks inhibit God's love from getting into the person (sorry; misplaced that reference) how does he know that God is not a mask-wearer? Then apparently there are one or more anti-mask physicians who refuse, for example, to wear a mask when talking with, for example, an immune-compromised patient, because wearing a mask in any situation makes the doc uncomfortable. Must have forgotten the Hippocratic oath to which one has sworn: "First, do no harm."
As for "do no harm," on a Chris Hayes telecast, at a right-wing talker's "town hall" a questioner asked, in reference to school board mask-mandates, "when do we start using our guns?"
Various
On ivermectin, and other proposed treatments, as THE approach to the pandemic in general, in order to avoid some negative effects that MIGHT (or might not) occur 15 years from now, they all rely on waiting until a patient becomes sick (and infectious). Furthermore, there is the matter of proof, or more important, being able to prove. Randomly allocated double-blind studies which have to take place in persons already ill (where the alternative to ivermectin or other is hospital care which is known to be effective in most cases if caught early enough) cannot be carried out, for obvious ethical reasons. Even if it works, and no even semi- controlled studies to date have shown that it does, it does NOT, indeed cannot, prevent transmission. And further, on the subject, a controlled double-blind study would be very difficult to carry out. In what randomized group of sick patients will be found one-half who will be getting nothing to help them deal with the disease they already have (different from clinical trials of vaccines, where everyone is healthy to begin with)?
As for the effects of Lockdown, should steps have been taken to reduce economic hardship? Absolutely. The (capitalist) world powers moved much too late on this (and I don't think that that happened in China, where the lockdowns were massive and intense --- but I am not sure). But letting the disease run rampant, thus killing millions and overwhelming health care delivery systems and their personnel with the dying and the dead, is not the way to do that. Such an approach would have an even worse effect on the economy!
In summary, the Left anti-vaxxers think that they are it is supporting/benefiting the public's health according to some version of public health science. That version must come from another planet, and maybe the crew of the Good Ship Enterprise will find it someday. It is simply not the public health science to which virtually all public scientists subscribe. Are there a few exceptions here and there? Surely, tell me a human endeavour in which that sort of thing doesn't occur. As for the political Right, it cares not a whit about the public's health (see the cited columns above). It's all about politics, right-wing politics of course, and at this stage of the pandemic, with Joe Biden in the White House, doing anything they possibly can to make him look bad.
Be Careful who You Ally With
Finally, as for allies in the anti-vaxx struggle, of the two "Left-wing" Strasser bothers mentioned at the beginning of this column, Otto left the Party and Germany in 1930 (and somehow managed to survive the War). Gregor remained a Nazi through the early days of the Hitler Dictatorship, while still pronouncing his "left-wing" views. On the Night of the Long Knives, in which many of Hitler's enemies both within and outside if the Party, but still right-wingers, like Ernst Roehm, the Commander of Hitler's private army, the Sturmabteilung, which had fought street battles for him from the early 1920's, and a very close ally, were killed, as the price to be paid to a variety of Nazi supporters in return for the continued support of the Military and the German ruling class . E.g., the SA's dissolution (remember, it was a private army, directly loyal to Hitler) was demanded by the German armed forces as the price of their support for Hitler and his dictatorship. And so, the "leftie" Gregor Strasser, Hitler supporter from the early days in the 1920's, was murdered.
Post-script
A very recent item indicated that "The End is in Sight: Click Here." The most important corollary for declining disease is high vaccination rates. But that is just fact. Does anyone think that anti-vaxxers on the Left --- operating on conspiracy theories of various kinds and fear of some thoroughly unknown and unknowable possible negative outcome of vaccination way down the road (as well as devotion to ivermectin-etc.) --- and anti-vaxxers (anti-maskers as well) on the Right for whom anti-science is in their blood (although I must say that I do not have any scientific support for that statement) and proving to be a very useful political tool --- in responding to that fact (that is the end in sight, with vaccination playing a very important role is that eventually) --- are any of them going to change their position?
Well, since 1969 we know for sure (well most of us do anyway) that the Moon is NOT made of green cheese. So, the answer to the question, for the anti-vaxxers both Left and Right, "are facts going to change my position on the pandemic and how to control it," is the same as the answer to the question "Is the moon made of green cheese?" (Except, I know, I know. There are still some flat-earthers out there, somewhere.)
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Steven Jonas, MD, MPH, MS is a Professor Emeritus of Preventive Medicine at StonyBrookMedicine (NY) and author/co-author/editor/co-editor of over 35 books. In addition to his position on OpEdNews.com as a “Trusted Author,” he is a regular contributor to BuzzFlash.com, and on occasion to Reader Supported News/Writing for Godot and From The G-Man. His own political website, stevenjonaspolitics.com, is an archive of the 1000 or so political columns he has published since 2004, with the current columns being added to it as they appear. He was also a career triathlete, 36 seasons, 256 multi-sport races, and writer on the sport (books and articles). He now is officially retired from racing. Dr. Jonas’ most recent book is Ending the ‘Drug War’; Solving the Drug Problem: The Public Health Approach, Brewster, NY: Punto Press Publishing, (Brewster, NY, 2016, available on Kindle from Amazon, and also in hardcover from Amazon). In 1996 he published a “future history” of the United States entitled The 15% Solution: How the Republican Religious Right Took Control of the U.S., 1981-2022: A Futuristic Novel (Third Version published by Trepper & Katz Impact Books, Punto Press Publishing, 2013, Brewster, NY, and available on Amazon).
That book was purportedly published in 2048, on the 25th Anniversary of the Restoration of Constitutional Democracy in the United States, which occurred following the conclusion of the Second Civil War, which had the ascension to power of the Republican-Christian Alliance/America Christian Nation Party and the apartheid state that eventually created: The New American Republics.
Dr. Jonas has a blind-copy distribution list for his columns. If you would like to be added to it, please send him an email at [email protected].
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Get an Update on the Medicare for All Movement
in a One Hour Zoom!
Activists with any level of involvement in the single payer/Medicare for All movement can get a quarterly update from the Medicare for All Update Group. Our next meeting will be March 16th , 8pm Eastern,7pm Central, 5 pm Pacific Time.
Topics for the next meeting are: Fight Against Medicare Privatization, priorities of the national movement, reports on state single payer movements, and more!
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Chuck Kaufman: A Pillar of Solidarity
Chuck Kaufman, presente! A great comrade and friend to the peoples and just causes of Latin America and the Caribbean has passed on the torch. Chuck Kaufman died on Tuesday, December 28th, and is being remembered for the tremendous impact he made during his decades of anti-imperialist work, organizing to change US-Latin American foreign policy.
Chuck was known for his leadership among North American solidarity organizing with Latin American grassroots movements. It all began when he joined the staff of the Nicaragua Network in 1987, which in 1998 became the Alliance for Global Justice, for which he served as National Co-Coordinator until the time of his passing.
From his bio on AFGJ: “He gave up his successful advertising business out of disgust at Congress’ cowardice during the Iran-Contra scandal. He went on his first coffee picking brigade to Nicaragua that same year. Chuck has been in the front ranks of the movements to support the right of people in Latin America and the Caribbean to dignity, sovereignty, and self-determination. He has led delegations to Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti and Honduras.
Chuck has written and spoken often about US democracy manipulation programs through the National Endowment for Democracy and US Agency for International Development as well as what he calls the need to look to the Abolition Movement as our inspiration to change the culture of US militarism. He is a board member of the Latin America Solidarity Coalition and a leader of the LASC’s effort to build a stronger movement to oppose US militarism and the militarization of relations with Latin America. He was a founder of the Act Now to Stop War and End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition and has spoken at most of the major Washington, DC anti-war demonstrations. He is a board member of the Honduras Solidarity Network and a founder of the Venezuela Solidarity Network. He has a B.A. in Government and Politics from George Mason University. His first political activism was as a high school student in 1969 when he organized student walk-out in four county high schools in his native Indiana.”
At Kawsachun News, we remember Chuck for his tremendous work in providing solidarity with the Nicaraguan people, defending the Sandinista Revolution, and the immeasurable impact of his organizing and truth-telling regarding Nicaragua. Chuck confronted media manipulation head on, including just this year, as Nicaragua held elections. He was also one of very few voices in the United States to vocally oppose what he called the media’s stenography of the State Department in 2018 while Nicaragua fought US-backed failed coup and the terrorism and violence that accompanied it. He immediately denouncedthe OAS-backed coup in Bolivia in 2019.
Alliance for Global Justice and Chuck provided crucial support for Kawsachun News in 2021 and made it possible for us to report on the ground in both Nicaragua and Venezuela. We are extremely thankful for everything Chuck did to help us do this work.
Chuck in Honduras outside of the U.S. Palmerola Air Base in 2011, where he and others were tear gassed on the two year anniversary of the coup.
Deputy Director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, Fred Mills, responded to the news on Tuesday evening, telling us; “Chuck was a pillar of North American solidarity with the peoples of the Americas and never failed to show moral courage when the odds were against us.”
Gloria La Riva of the Party for Socialism and Liberation shared this tribute with Kawsachun News: “It is a shock because he was an invaluable activist, a true revolutionary, one of those lifelong fighters whom Bertolt Brecht named “the essential ones.” I knew him starting in the early ANSWER days after the “endless” war of Bush, 2001. In fact he was one of the first people to join the board of ANSWER Coalition at his office in Washington DC in 2001. He never stopped dreaming of justice and he put those dreams into action, whether organizing a campaign to deliver massive amounts of solidarity aid to Venezuela, or most recently, sending delegations to Nicaragua, to bring Nicaragua’s truth to the U.S. He was crystal clear on the need to stand strong with the revolutionary government. I appreciate having been on his organized delegation in July and his personal attention to see that I got to go to Nicaragua. My heartfelt condolences and solidarity to his colleagues in AFGJ and his family.”
An outpouring of tributes can also be seen on Chuck’s Facebook page, where he actively connected with friends and where he shared his photos and stories of a recent RV cross-country road trip. The trip took him from his home in Tuscon to his birth state of Indiana and beyond.
Director of ANSWER Coalition Brian Becker also took to Facebook to remember Chuck. “He was an important leader in the Steering Committee of the ANSWER Coalition when it was founded three days after Sept. 11, 2001. He was the Co-Director of the Alliance For Global Justice (AFGJ). A wonderful human being —- we will all miss him!”
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In case you missed it:
The Left, Progressives and Social Media
Our 4th Monday in October
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James Campbell: A Life To Remember
By
A tribute to James E. Campbell, a well-known and widely influential leader of the civil rights and socialist movements for the last seven decades. He worked as an actor, writer, and organizer, working with Jack O'Dell, Malcolm X, Betty Shabazz, Bayard Rustin, James Balwin, and many others. He served as an editor of Freedomways magazine and as national co-chair of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism. He passed away earlier this year in Charleston, NC.
Order your copy today here.
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CHANGEMAKER PUBLICATIONS: Recent works on new paths to socialism and the solidarity economy
Remember Us for Gift Giving and Study Groups
We are a small publisher of books with big ideas. We specialize in works that show us how a better world is possible and needed. Click Gramsci below for our list.
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From the CCDS Socialist Education Project... |
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A China Reader
Edited by Duncan McFarland
A project of the CCDS Socialist Education Project and Online University of the Left
244 pages, $20 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
The book is a selection of essays offering keen insight into the nature of China and its social system, its internal debates, and its history. It includes several articles on the US and China and the growing efforts of friendship between the Chinese and American peoples.
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Taking Down White Supremacy
A Reader on Multiracial and Multinational Unity
Edited by the CCDS
Socialist Education Project
166 pages, $12.50 (discounts available for quantity), order at :
This collection of 20 essays brings together a variety of articles-theoretical, historical, and experiential-that address multi-racial, multi-national unity. The book provides examples theoretically and historically, of efforts to build multi-racial unity in the twentieth century.
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NEW NARRATIVE #16: Early New York’s Waterfront Dives, the Emerging Atlantic Proletariat, and the Defeat of a 1741 Working-Class, both Slave, Native and ‘Free,’ Attempting to Put ‘the Bottom Rail on Top’
In 1741, dozens of free and enslaved men of modest or no means, and a few women, all multiracial and multinational, had gathered many times at John Hughson’s New York City tavern. Among other things, they spent a good part of their time plotting an insurrection against the worst of the rich. They hoped to spread some of their wealth about, free some slaves and servants, and make for a better order. It didn’t turn out as expected, and many lost their lives. But that gets us ahead of the story.
As noted earlier, the island where the Hudson River opened to the Atlantic was the home of the Lenni Lenape people, who called it ‘Manhattan.’ The Dutch bought it and took possession of everything, reaching up to Albany. They called it ‘New Netherlands’ and the small but busily growing port at the tip of Manhattan was ‘New Amsterdam.’ Interested in all trade, but especially furs and slaves, with ships of all trading nations coming and going, its population was polyglot, with even the Dutch as simply a large minority.
As such, ‘New Amsterdam’ practiced some tolerance. Even the whipping of slaves required special permission, and slaves had the right to marry, and even to be set free. Some captured Native People were also enslaved, but generally, they were pushed away from the Hudson Valley in all directions. The Dutch put the slaves to work building a wall of upright logs from river to river on the upper end of the lower Manhattan settlement. The idea was to keep the slaves in and Indians and other unwanted intruders out. The boundary was called ‘Wall Street’, and remains to this day, even if its origins in slavery are dimmed memories.
In 1667. across the ocean in Europe, the Treaty of Breda ended the Second Anglo-Dutch war. The Dutch did well, retaining their most prized possessions in the East Indies, while trading off a colony seen as second rate, New Netherlands, to the British. After a few strokes of the pen, the British navy sailed into the Hudson, without resistance, and the whole area became New York, and the port was now New York City. Relative to the times, it was a large town of about 6000, a number which doubled by the turn of the century. At all times, the slaves counted as 20 percent of the residents, and over 40 percent of all households had enslaved servants.
But New York was unique in its dense slavery. There were no plantations, like those in the South, where slaves, in subdivided groups, toiled in rural isolation growing tobacco or rice, and later, cotton. New York’s slaves were a floating force of unskilled day laborers or skilled craftsmen. They loaded and unloaded ships, built the city’s infrastructure, or ran blacksmith or carpentry shops owned by their masters. They actually built the city, even if they had to turn their wages over to their owners. They lived in a back outhouse of their masters, or even in their shops. By the nature of their work, they had to pass freely on the streets among others going about their business. A small but good number of Africans, moreover, were not enslaved but had ‘free’ status, and were able to intermingle with slaves on the street or at work.
The new British overlords were wary and wanted a change, passing several new repressive measures. Beyond a short distance from their master’s home, a pass was required to walk in the streets. Meetings, however causal, of more the three Africans or Native Americans were forbidden. Masters no longer were required to get permission to whip their slaves, nor were slaves allowed to marry among themselves or elsewhere. Most important, in 1711, the city set up an official slave market for buying, selling, or otherwise making labor exchanges regarding slaves. The reason was they wanted a tariff for every transaction--often more than the cash value of the slave concerned--which was difficult to assess and collect if these sales were scattered and unregulated.
The slaves hated the new market and all the new repression. On April 6, 1712, about 20 of them set fire at night to a building on Maiden Lane near Broadway. They drew back in the darkness and waited for a crowd of whites to try putting out the fire. Then they struck, with guns, swords, knives, and whatever weapons they could find, and killed nine whites and injured six more before fleeing. The city’s armed militia quickly captured nearly all of them, and snatched up many more who had nothing to do with it, 70 in all. Six captives committed suicide, knowing the tortures awaiting them. Twenty-seven were put on trial, and 20 were convicted and burned to death alive at the stake. One was ‘broken’ to death on ‘the wheel.’ A pregnant woman was convicted, allowed for her child to be born, then hung. The authorities inflicted harsher repressions citywide following the executions, extending to all people of color, slave or free. Within four years, all free Blacks who owned land had it sold out from under them.
All this is the horrific and interesting backstory to all the plotting and planning going on a few decades later in John Hughson’s tavern. What’s even more intriguing is the immediate context of the tavern, its denizens, and others like it, not that this 1712 history wasn’t on everyone’s mind. Hughson’s lower-class joint was on the waterfront, as were two or three others like it. This meant it also served as a brothel, both for seamen and locals. It also served as a ‘fence,’ a place that trafficked in stolen goods, from the ships and elsewhere. The goods were traded either for cash, alcohol, or other items of value.
A key point needs to be made here about the seamen. Their story is told in depth in many of Marcus Rediker’s books, such as ‘The Many-Headed Hydra.’ His thesis is that the proletariat of the new far-ranging capitalism is born and takes shape on the seas, as well as on land. The ships of the day were both floating factories and prisons, and the ‘motley crews’ were very diverse. Rarely was an English ship operated by all-English seaman, all working voluntarily. Ship’s captains seized their crews from the poor in jail, from drunks in bars, from captured runaway slaves and natives, and from seaman of other countries captured in battles.
Disciplined violently onboard, the seamen formed bonds and overcame language barriers with a Pidgin English. They were paid little, and sometimes not at all, having to wait a year. But by that time, they had been impressed on another ship. In these conditions, the men (and a few women) set aside national differences, color distinctions, and whether you were an escaped slave or Indian. They were cast into a common lot with a strong solidarity. Sometimes they mutinied, seized their ‘factory’, turning it into a workers coop of sorts, a pirate ship. Stealing part of the cargo, to them, was hardly theft, but an indirect way of regaining a bit of their own stolen wages.
So these were the people hanging out in the waterfront taverns of the sort described above. Naturally, they were joined by locals. Women working as prostitutes, local slaves of all colors who had snuck out for the night of drinking and gambling with a piece of their master’s silverware to pay for it, and local ‘free’ laborers looking for a rowdy time apart from the more upscale taverns of their ‘betters.’
So here is one birthplace of a Turtle Island proletariat—multinational. multiracial and conspiring, poorly or wisely, to wreak havoc on some of the rich, free some slaves, and redistribute some wealth in a Robin Hood fashion. If you want to study the history of the USAmerican working class, this is one good place to begin.
Despite their plans and aims, the ‘revolt’ itself didn’t amount to much. In the Spring of 1741, a series of 10 or so fires were set in buildings of the military and the wealthy, usually spaced about three days to a week apart. There was no mass insurrection. Just the opposite took place, a massive roundup of slaves, workers, Indians, in one batch after another, over months. Hughson, his wife, children, and his prostitutes were imprisoned and tortured for information, which led to more arrests and tortures. Some 172 were tried.
“In the end,’ states Wikipedia, “thirty-four people were executed. They included seventeen black men, two white men, and two white women who were hanged as well as thirteen black men burnt at the stake. The bodies of two supposed ringleaders, Caesar, a slave, and John Hughson, a white cobbler and tavern keeper, were gibbeted. Their corpses were left to rot in public. Another eighty-four men and women faced transportation to the brutal conditions of Caribbean slavery while seven white men were pardoned on condition of entering permanent exile from New York."
As time passed, the events were cast in the history books as more of a conspiracy than a revolt, and even much of the conspiracy’s overreach was recast as a cousin of the Salem Witch Trials. Many were unjustly accused and punished. Still, the structures of race and class were herein welded together in New York, both at the top and below. More to Come.
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NEW NARRATIVE #17: The Susquehannocks, the Retreat of France and the Paxton Boys
The Susquehannocks were a native people occupying what is now central Pennsylvania, and the river flowing through there into the Chesapeake Bay shares their name. They had lived there for hundreds of years before the European arrivals. Captain John Smith of Jamestown, Virginia, encountered them in 1608 as he was exploring the northern end of the bay.
The Susquehannock were large-scale agriculturalists. They practiced ‘slash and burn’ farming. This involved clearing the forest by burning down trees and planting crops in their ashes, as nutrients in the soil were depleted. They moved every few decades to refresh the soil. In the late sixteenth century they also absorbed smaller pre-existing native peoples. They were really a confederacy of up to 20 smaller tribes. They were also known for fortifying their villages with log stockades. They grew powerful for a time, but all but disappeared by 1776. But let's not get ahead of the story.
They were Iroquoian-speaking, but no one knows what they called themselves. Their ancestors were likely from the Ohio Valley and migrated centuries earlier over the mountains into the headwaters of the Susquehanna River near where Pennsylvania borders New York. ‘Susquehannock’ in the tongues of their neighbors means ‘people of the flowing muddy water,’ but those near the bay at the south end were also called ‘oyster-eaters.’ and ‘Conestoga,’ after one of their last settlements.
With the arrival of Europeans, their influence both grew and became more precarious. Since they had metal tools when John Smith first met them in 1609, they had likely obtained them through fur trading with the French, both directly and through their Iroquois rivals to the north. Going eastward through the Lenape in New Netherland and New Sweden, they were able to obtain firearms and training from the Dutch, They even obtained a small cannon from the Swedes.
Their location on a major river and its tributaries put them at several trading crossroads. They traveled them on foot, but also used heavy dugout canoes on the many waterways. It also put them in a position to hijack goods meant for others, such as shipments headed westward to the Seneca on the other side of the Allegheny mountains.
Those along the Chesapeake got in early trouble with the Virginians during Bacon’s rebellion. After some Doeg Indians near Jamestown killed some Virginians, some surviving colonists crossed into the colony of Maryland and demanded a meeting with a Susquehannock village settled at a fort on Piscataway Creek, below present-day Washington, DC.
When five local sachems came to the meeting, they were all immediately slaughtered. The Susquehannock then fled the area, but not without taking some revenge on surrounding settlers.
By the turn of the century, into the 1700s, their confederacy and power changed. They were decimated by European diseases, but also violence against them by growing numbers of Scots-Irish settlers moving westward.
The wider context was rivalry between France and Britain for control of the ‘Ohio Country’—the French were being pushed out, but their native allies still persisted in fighting the British. Pontiac, an Ottawa chief, formed a broad confederation to push the British troops and squatting settlers eastward back across the mountains.
The fighting, or its aftermath, reached the town of Paxtang or ‘Paxton’ on the Susquehanna in what is now Dauphin County. It was occupied by Scots-Irish, including the first Presbyterian church in the colony.
A good number of young men, called ‘the Paxton boys’ organized to retaliate. What made them stand out, however, is they didn’t care whether the natives they were killing were involved in the hostilities or not, making no distinctions among tribes, or whether the natives concerned were Christians or not. They simply slaughtered everyone, including the last remnants of the Susquehannock living in the village of Conestoga.
“At about sixty or eighty yards from the gaol, we met from twenty-five to thirty men, well mounted on horses, and with rifles, tomahawks, and scalping knives, equipped for murder,” reads an account in Wikipedia by William Henry of Lancaster. “I ran into the prison yard, and there, O what a horrid sight presented itself to my view!- Near the back door of the prison, lay an old Indian and his women, particularly well known and esteemed by the people of the town, on account of his placid and friendly conduct. His name was Will Sock; across him and his Native women lay two children, of about the age of three years, whose heads were split with the tomahawk, and their scalps all taken off. Towards the middle of the gaol yard, along the west side of the wall, lay a stout Indian, whom I particularly noticed to have been shot in the breast, his legs were chopped with the tomahawk, his hands cut off, and finally a rifle ball discharged in his mouth; so that his head was blown to atoms, and the brains were splashed against, and yet hanging to the wall, for three or four feet around. This man's hands and feet had also been chopped off with a tomahawk. In this manner lay the whole of them, men, women and children, spread about the prison yard: shot-scalped-hacked-and cut to pieces.”
Some 140 surviving natives fled toward Philadelphia to escape the Paxton Boys, who chased them to the outskirts of the city. Benjamin Franklin organized the local militia to protect them, and stopped the Paxton Boys at Germantown. He convinced them to turn their issues into the colonial legislature. But even if delayed, the Paxton Boys had staked out and clarified a new position: the real aim of ‘Indian policy’ was to be reduced to ethnic cleansing, extermination, and genocide against any and all ‘Red Skins.’ More to come.
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Important Lessons from History
from Carl Davidsons Facebook page
follow through the On Line University of the left Facebook page or through Carl's page
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New Narrative #18: Where Are We So Far?
[Graphic Mound-builder village of Native people in Florida.]
This series has provoked a bit of interest, as well as a few questions. What are you trying to do? Where are you going with this?
These are good questions, and for some, I don't have good answers, at least not yet. I'm exploring, on a journey of sorts, to see what we can learn, about ourselves and all else concerned on 'Turtle Island', or North America. Here's what I think we can say so far:
1. North America was never a pure 'wilderness', a land without people, as least in the time frames we're using, since 12,000 BCE or so, but more pointedly since the 1400s CE
2. It was the home of many peoples at various levels of civilization, from hunter-gatherer, agricultural (some quite advanced), and feudal with great cities, libraries, and centers of art and science. It was never 'a land without people' in need of a new people to make it their land from 'virgin soil'.
3. The many peoples who lived here were never in full harmony. There were tribal rivalries, armed conflicts, and alliances of all sorts, and often fluid. In the larger empires, there was class struggle, and anti-empire popular resistance. With the arrival of the 'Great Canoe' peoples from Europe, they were brought into these rivalries and alliances--and the Europeans contended within themselves--Protestant vs Catholic, English vs Spanish vs French vs Dutch vs Swedes--all leaving their marks on how all the peoples of the continent changed and evolved.
4. The Europeans came here mainly to get rich, and also to gain land and power if it helped them get rich. If religion was a concern, it was secondary to that main purpose. There were three main ways to get rich.
5. First, outright theft and looting of existing treasures. Countless gold, silver, and other bejeweled artifacts were taken from palaces and places of worship, and sent back to the 'mother country.'
6. Second was extractivism via trade, especially in furs but also from mining for gold and silver. The latter required both enslavement and, in some cases, the creation of wage labor among the native peoples. It soon meant the expropriation of large numbers of African captives brought to work as slaves, and the development of cash crops of tobacco, sugar, rum, indigo, rice, and cotton. We can call this a period of 'war capitalism' since it was the expansion of mercantilism at the point of a gun, the edge of a sword, or a barrage of cannon, on land and on the sea.
7. Third was settler colonialism, where the aim was not simply to extract wealth with plunder and expropriated slave labor, native or African. Here the aim was to import land-hungry Europeans, largely as indentured servants or unwanted disruptive minorities. These included Puritan theocrats against the established Anglican church or the extreme 'leveler' and 'digger' wings (often Quakers) of the Cromwellian Revolution, or Irish and Scots Irish troublemakers when jails were overcrowded. If they managed to thrive in the New World, they could be taxed and become a market for goods, rather than filling a London poorhouse. Naturally, this meant class struggle within the settlements of European peoples, and well as rivalry among them.
8. There was conflict and encounter with Native Peoples. It took three main forms. One was to establish a moveable 'frontier,' at first only 100 miles or so inland from the Atlantic, and to push the Native People on the other side of it as 'spawn of the devil' in their 'wilderness.' The endpoint was violent expulsion and extermination, growing into ethnic removal and genocide. The second was to negotiate land sales and other types of trade, in a fluid 'peaceful coexistence.' (This was mainly the Quakers, the Moravians, and the French to a degree). Native peoples often found themselves severely weakened by disease and stealing of their people for enslavement, and succumbed to some of these 'treaties' involving their 'hunting ground' lands. And third was a small but still notable number of Europeans and Africans who decided to join the Native tribes and share their way of life, which they often found much better than the misery they faced otherwise.
The history we learn in our schools ignores much if not all of this. The anti-CRT people would like it to stay that way, or rewritten to move back to an even 'whiter' version.
What you can see most often depends on where you're standing. And our official history stands mainly in the shoes of successful settlers and enslavers (the latter called 'planters' in the textbooks), and land stealers (called 'surveyors' in the same books) and celebrates their constant 'manifest destiny' expansion from sea to shining sea.
So these contrarian narratives will continue for a while, and I'll do my best to put us in the shoes of the Native peoples, the enslaved, and the exploited of all hues of skin, both Native and European. We will try rescuing a greater number of stories from the well-designed obscurity some would like to maintain. We'll see where it goes. More to come.
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New Narrative #19: Jemmy, the Stono Rebellion, and Fort Mose in La Florida
[Graphic: Portrayal of the Stono Revolt]
Jemmy was an enslaved worker in 1739 colonial South Carolina. As best as we know, he was born in the Kingdom of Kongo, or what is now called Angola. Influenced by Portugal traders, Kongo’s royalty spread the Portuguese language among its peoples. In the 1400s, it also adopted Catholicism and had an independent relationship with the Vatican. Kongo was a developing feudal order, with many skilled workers and artisans, and a warrior caste. It also had a class of slaves and engaged in the slave trade. Plantation owners around Charleston had a preference for slaves from ‘Angola’, since they were adept at growing rice and had other skills as well.
Jemmy, then, was a Catholic, spoke Portuguese, and was reportedly literate and a skilled fighter. He worked on a plantation near the Stono River, some 150 miles from the colony’s southern border. Across that line was the new colony of Georgia, designed for British prisoners, where slavery was illegal at the time. Another 100 miles or so was the border of Spain’s ‘La Florida,’ considered a backwater without gold or silver, looked on as an extension of Cuba. Florida was where beef cattle were raised and exported to Havana. Saint Augustine was the major fortress town, not far from the Georgia border.
Of interest to Jemmy and a few other Portuguese-speaking slaves he knew near Stono, was the Spanish then held a different policy on slavery than the British. In Florida, if you converted to Catholicism and agreed to join the militia, you would be emancipated and no longer be a slave. The appeal was natural.
‘La Florida’ had been a haven for escaped slaves and retreating Native Peoples for several decades. The Spanish encouraged them, not only to fend off the British, but to strengthen their hold on the indigenous peoples it held in debt peonage on several ‘mission’ plantations. It even gave Africans their own settlement, called Fort Mose (pronounced Mo-SAY). It served as a small autonomous zone and end terminal for an early ‘underground railroad’ running to the south.
We don’t know if Jemmy and his comrades were specifically familiar with Mose, only the attraction of getting to Spanish territory. The fall of 1739, when their masters were still recovering from bouts of malaria, seemed a good time for a rupture. So on Sept 9, his initial team of 20 or so rebelled, killed their masters, set the plantations aflame, and headed south. Their size grew as they marched, growing to around 100. They carried a banner that proclaimed ‘Liberty!’ They burned six plantations and killed about 30 whites in all before they were stopped. According to Wikipedia:
“While on horseback, South Carolina's Lieutenant Governor William Bull and five of his friends came across the group; they quickly went off to warn other slaveholders. Rallying a militia of planters and minor slaveholders, the colonists traveled to confront Jemmy and his followers. The next day, the well-armed and mounted militia, numbering 19–99 men, caught up with the group of 76 slaves at the Edisto River. In the ensuing confrontation, 23 whites and 47 slaves were killed. While the slaves lost, they killed proportionately more whites than was the case in later rebellions. The colonists mounted the severed heads of the rebels on stakes along major roadways to serve as a warning for other slaves who might consider revolt.”
Jemmy was also named ‘Cato’ by his master, and thus the Stono Revolt was sometimes called ‘Cato’s Rebellion.’ There were many more before it, but it was the largest in this period. The enslaver’s immediately enacted harsher rules—the enslaved were forbidden to learn to read or write, or gather among themselves.
It also changed some other practices. Those buying slaves more often sought them from the Caribbean, where they were supposedly ‘seasoned’ first. Or better yet, they were homegrown slaves, who had never known other conditions in life, even those in the Kingdom of Kongo. In the end, Jemmy’s descendants would come to rule for six years or so in South Carolina, during Reconstruction. But that’s far ahead in our stories. More to come.
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NEW NARRATIVE #20: Christian Priber, the Western Cherokee and Early Utopian Communism
{Graphic: Painting of Cherokee 'Kingdom of Paradise' town.]
Christian Priber is not a name we’re likely to come across in the standard American histories of Turtle Island after the European entrance. Save for early histories of Georgia and the hinterlands of the Carolinas now known as Tennessee, where he was a minor if fascinating character, he would be far below the radar.
Yet he fits into an important part of these narratives which aim at telling larger stories sometimes counterfactual to the dominant ‘frontier settler colonialism’ we all learned. One point my accounts imply is that just because something happened, it wasn’t always inevitable—at least not in any strict sense. History, even of the historical materialism school, often has a contingent dimension. There are forks in the road where choices are made. And sometimes there are counter-events that are contradictory but prescient in certain ways. They can be brushed aside as ‘duds’ or 'dead ends’ or praised as ‘ahead of their times.’
Christian Priber (1697-1744) is a case in point. He was a utopian communist who decided the Cherokee people were best suited to his ideas, which, among other things, included forming a wide confederacy of native peoples to resist and defend against the contending forces of European colonialism. He was not alone, and I have earlier noted a few other cases--the Fort Christina commune in New Sweden, the African autonomous zone of Fort Mose, the Albemarle Settlement of intermingled Quakers, Levelers and Native Peoples in North Carolina, and the maroon colonies in the Great Dismal Swamp. Save for the latter, all these were short-lived, even if they made waves for a while. We will discuss more of them going forward.
But let’s return to comrade Priber. He was raised in a middle-class German family well-off enough to get him through Erfurt University where he had studied law and philosophy. He had come to embrace radical notions of natural law, not unlike the radical wing of the Cromwellian 'diggers' in England. He came to oppose not only private property in the means of creating wealth, but also all hierarchical class rule based on such property. His efforts to organize around his outlook found him in deep trouble, first in Germany, and then in England as well, where he had fled. He soon requested, and received, permission to migrate to the new colony of Georgia.
Priber arrived in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1735. Oddly, or so it seemed, he quickly took out an ad to sell all his worldly goods, and did so, save for what he needed to make a journey far inland, to the homeland of the Western Cherokee. He had apparently made a study of these people, and decided they were best suited for his ideas on an ideal social order--but not in the ways that other settler-colonial missionaries had set out on projects of ‘Christianizing savages.’ In this period, the size of the Cherokee was also nearly cut in half by smallpox.
Despite troubles and some differences, Priber liked the Cherokee pretty much as they were. So he set about to transform himself, as best as he could, into one of them. Already a master of four or five languages, he quickly learned Cherokee and worked on learning all about their ways and culture, wearing their clothes, paint and ornaments. Visiting traders found it hard to tell him apart, except when he spoke with them in their own languages. Other young Europeans of the day, down on their luck, had sometimes decided on ‘living among the Indians’ and rarely returning. But few did it with the same approach as Priber.
Over several years, Priber tried to be helpful to the Cherokee. Seeing they were often cheated by traders because they lacked appropriate standards of weights and measures, he created a set and taught them how to use them in transactions. He also taught them how to make and shape iron and even steel for themselves, and projected making gunpowder as well. He encouraged them to welcome all escaping debtors, bondservants or slaves, of any color or nationality. The Cherokee, for their part, adopted him and gave him the title ‘beloved man’ and rejected all English attempts to return him.
The Cherokee already had a communal approach to property and the produce of their farming and hunting. Women already held a degree of power in a matrilineal society where the homes and tools were largely in their collective hands, even while the males were relegated to hunting and warfare. Priber was a bit more radical on ideas of marriage and divorce, arguing his version of ‘free love’, that either men or women should form or dissolve unions at will. It likely raised an eyebrow or two even among the Cherokee, whose children were bound to their mothers and their mother’s siblings. Priber simply argued they were simply the responsibility of all in a given village.
“Women would live with the same freedom as the men; they should be free to change husbands every day; the children who would be born would belong to the republic and be cared for and instructed in all things that their genius be capable of acquiring.” (from the journal of Antoine Bonnefoy, a French trader who met Priber at Tellico, [a large Cherokee town])”
But the wider politics of the ‘Kingdom of Paradise,’ as the Priber project was called, had more impact among its adversaries. First, it was open to all Indians and to be ruled by Indians, an anti-colonial project. Second, Priber argued that the Cherokee should stop any more ceding of land to the Europeans, explaining it was all part of a larger plot to take all of the Native lands. Third, he argued for a broad alliance or confederacy of all Southern native peoples against the Europeans, playing one or another against the other if need be.
When venturing out to win the Creeks to this project, Priber was captured by a small group of them, who sold him to the English, and he ended up in a Georgia jail. But even there, he was undeterred, turning his cell into an evening salon for intellectual discussions with any and all of his more literate captors. By all accounts, they were rather stunned and spellbound by both his ideas and his acting as free even while under lock and key. Eventually, he fell ill and died there. The exact circumstances remain unknown, but his ‘Paradise’, save for a few principles, such as Cherokee welcoming of outlaw rebels, was soon lost as well. More to come.
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NEW NARRATIVE #21: Impressment of Seamen, Class Insurgency and the Knowles Riot in Boston
[Graphic: Boston riot of 1747]
In November 1747, a large insurgency of Boston-based sailors, slaves, and other workers, of English, African and other backgrounds, arose together, seized the city, and held British naval officers hostage for three days. They were demanding the freedom of dozens of their comrades ‘press ganged’ into captivity as would-be sailors on a British warship.
‘No taxation without representation!’ was the major rallying cry we all learned about in school for the 1776 American War of Independence against Britain. I always thought it rather wimpy, something that belonged farther down among a list of outrages or other causes. First, you had to be wealthy enough to pay significant taxes, and second, any of the upper crust sent off to sit in parliament in London was not likely to have matters of the majority--the exploited, the enslaved, and the expropriated—foremost among their concerns.
But what did fire me up as a young student was the stories of the impressment of sailors and their resistance. Perhaps it was because my father was a sailor in WW2 and would tell us stories of his challenges a sea. ‘Impressment,’ moreover, was an odd word, so archaic you had to look it up, along with ‘press gang’ that went with it.
So I dug into it, and the more I learned, the more outrage I could feel. For starters, seamen of any sort in the Atlantic in these years had a hard and dangerous life. They were ‘motley crews’ made up of all nationalities and skin colors, free and escaped slaves. and Native peoples too. They were captured or ‘pressed’ into the ships in what amounted to kidnapping outside the law. Their rations were so poor as to leave them diseased before reaching a port. Captains were permitted to whip them, so long as they avoided the limit of mutiny. And they were paid little, and sometimes not at all. They had at times to wait a year for their pay, and were dead or long gone elsewhere. Once in port, they often tried to escape, and any new targets of ‘press gangs’ often resisted.
Charles Knowles was ‘Admiral’ of the British warship being repaired not far from Boston. His crew was hanging out in town or nearby, and a good number decided to seek other livelihoods as best as they could. The Admiral needed to fill out his crew, so if you were a young laborer of any sort anywhere near the docks, you were a target for kidnapping and made to be a sailor. even if you had never been to sea. The ‘press gangs,’ moreover, killed two laborers who resisted.
So this time, the young men had enough of it. They rebelled and seized several British officers as hostages of their own, demanding the release of those ‘impressed.’ The streets were in turmoil for three days, and the history books call it ‘Knowles Riot,’ after the Admiral. It would be better described as a ‘motley’ class revolt of sailors, laborers, and slaves against their British overlords and any local appeasers.
‘Town officials,’ states Wikipedia, ‘claimed that “the said Riotous Tumultuous Assembly consisted of Foreign Seamen, Servants, Negros & other Persons of mean & vile condition." Some historians believe this was an effort to deflect blame, while others treat it as fact. Hutchinson estimated the crowd's size at "several thousand," remarkable in a city with a population of just 16,000. In addition to sailors and other maritime workers, the crowd likely included most of Boston's militia, as well as some middle-class shopkeepers and merchants, women, and others whose lives were affected by impressment.’
In the end, a bargain was struck, and the hostages were freed and returned to their ship, while the ‘impressed’ Boston residents were also set free. Eleven men were arrested, three were fined and the rest were let go.
One young Bostonian, a budding journalist named Sam Adams, was quite impressed with the entire event. He wrote up an early pamphlet of his own on the matter, fearful of signing it with his own name, using ‘Amicus Patrie’ instead. Using the ideas of John Locke, he argued: "For when they are suddenly attack'd, without the least Warning, and by they know not whom; I think they are treated as in a State of Nature, and have a natural Right, to treat their Oppressors, as under such Circumstances."
What the slaves and free Blacks had to say, however, is unknown. There was no one recording it. Nor do we know the future of all these insurgents as to whether they became ‘settlers’ set against the Native people to their West. Several accounts state that a good number of them were ‘Scotch,’ which could have meant either immigrants from Scotland or the Ulster ‘Scots-Irish.’ In either case, they were likely, if they lived, to have become settlers and dispersers of Native peoples, a life with new contradictions. More to come.
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New Narratives #22: Aliquippa, Logstown, the Mingo and the Ohio Country.
Nearly all of us who grew up here in Aliquippa, Beaver County, Western PA are familiar with Logstown and Aliquippa, the Native American matriarch who is our town’s namesake. Most things we think we know about them, however, are either slightly mistaken or entirely wrong. But that doesn’t make them less important in our ongoing wider tale. [Painting: Cornplanter of the Seneca]
We can start with Logstown. Many of us knew it as part of the town of Aliquippa, on its northern edge. That’s true, but it's not the real and far more important Logstown, which was directly across the Ohio River on a flat between what is now the towns of Baden and Ambridge. By 1750 or so, it was a major Native settlement with a unique history with no single source of population. It was founded by mixed peoples fleeing westward to escape the diseases of the Europeans, and its peoples included the Shawnee, the Lenape and the Mingo, or Seneca, a subset of the Haudenosaunee, or ‘Six Nations.’ All saw the area as their 'hunting grounds.' Game was plentiful due to 'salt licks' in the region.
The French also had a hand in building the town, viewing it as a convenient trading center. Naturally, it wasn’t called Logstown, a later English name, but Chiningué, itself a corrupted French version of ‘Shenango,’ a nearby Native-named river to the north. For the times, it was large, with 50 to 100 structures, depending on the time of the counting, and perhaps 500 inhabitants at most. It had extensive nearby crops of corn, squash beans, and berries.
But Logstown was also a diplomatic post of sorts, where the French, English, and Americans, as well as six or so tribal groupings, negotiated and made deals. Detroit’s commander of ‘New France,’ Pierre Joseph Céloron de Blainville, visited there, as did George Croghan, an Irish fur trader, and Andrew Montour, a Metis interpreter, and George Washington. Washington also met with Aliquippa, the strong Mingo-Seneca matriarch, but her tribe lived a few miles further upriver near what is now McKee’s Rocks.
Washington, as is well known, had his eyes on grabbing ‘the Ohio country,’ the term of the time for all of the lands in Western PA and Ohio situated on the southern and western banks of the Ohio River. The ‘Six Nations’ had supposedly ‘ceded’ them to the British, much to the anger of both the Shawnee, the French and other Native people.
'Queen' Aliquippa was partial to the British but decided to avoid the conflict by moving eastward to central PA, where she died. Serving later under General Braddock, Washington was trounced by the French, the Shawnee, and the Mingo-Seneca under the war chief Guyasuta. The British had made an effort to build 'Fort King George' at the ‘Forks of the Ohio,’ but the French trashed it and built Fort Duquesne.
In a few years, Logstown would be abandoned, but Washington would be back and defeat the French at their new fort, and build Fort Pitt. Guyasuta had met Washington before, calling him ‘the tall hunter,’ and later worked with him against the French. According to Wikipedia, ‘Guyasuta was a major player in Pontiac's Rebellion—indeed, some historians once referred to that war as the Pontiac-Guyasuta War.' The main consistency was his skill at playing one group of Europeans against another.
In the end, Guyasuta saw the independence-seeking ‘Americans’ as more land-hungry and hence more dangerous. In his last years, he aimed at keeping ‘the Ohio Country’ as an independent native homeland, but that battle would have to be taken up by his young nephew, Cornplanter.
Cornplanter called the new American government the ‘Thirteen Fires’ and signed the Treaty of Fort Stanwix with it in Rome, NY, 1784, ostensibly for peaceful co-habitation of lands west of the Alleghenies. But it was soon clear the Americans had other ideas that did not include any sharing.
‘The Six Nations council at Buffalo Creek,’ states Wikipedia, ‘refused to ratify the treaty, denying that their delegates had the power to give away such large tracts of land and asked the Americans for return of the deeds and promised to indemnify them for any presents they had given. The general Indian confederacy also disavowed the treaty because most of the Six Nations did not live in the Ohio territory. ‘
The Ohio Country's native peoples, including the Shawnee, the Mingo, the Lenape, and several other tribes, also rejected the treaty. The stage was being set for much longer and wider battles.
So how did Aliquippa get its name? Until 1900, only a small and sleepy hamlet named ‘Woodlawn’ was there, but as the name suggests, it had a wide pleasant place on the riverfront, which local entrepreneurs turned into an amusement and picnic grounds they named ‘Aliquippa Park.’ When Mr. Jones and Mr. Laughlin decided to build the world’s largest steel mill and adjoining town there, ‘Aliquippa’ seemed more suited. More to come on the ‘Ohio Country’.
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522 Valencia St.
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