Today's Today

"Bloody Sunday"

On March 7, 1965, an estimated 525 to 600 civil rights marchers headed southeast out of Selma on U.S. Highway 80. The march was led by John Lewis of SNCC and the Reverend Hosea Williams of SCLC, followed by Bob Mants of SNCC and Albert Turner of SCLC. The protest went according to plan until the marchers crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where they encountered a wall of state troopers and county posse waiting for them on the other side.

County sheriff Jim Clark had issued an order for all white men in Dallas County over the age of twenty-one to report to the courthouse that morning to be deputized. Commanding officer John Cloud told the demonstrators to disband at once and go home. Rev. Hosea Williams tried to speak to the officer, but Cloud curtly informed him there was nothing to discuss. Seconds later, the troopers began shoving the demonstrators, knocking many to the ground and beating them with nightsticks. Another detachment of troopers fired tear gas, and mounted troopers charged the crowd on horseback.

Televised images of the brutal attack presented Americans and international audiences with horrifying images of marchers left bloodied and severely injured, and roused support for the Selma Voting Rights Campaign. Amelia Boynton, who had helped organize the march as well as marching in it, was beaten unconscious. A photograph of her lying on the road of the Edmund Pettus Bridge appeared on the front page of newspapers and news magazines around the world. Another marcher, Lynda Blackmon Lowery, age 14, was brutally beaten by a police officer during the march, and needed seven stitches for a cut above her right eye and 28 stitches on the back of her head. John Lewis suffered a skull fracture and bore scars on his head from the incident for the rest of his life. In all, 17 marchers were hospitalized and 50 treated for lesser injuries; the day soon became known as "Bloody Sunday" within the black community.

What Freedom

Philip Reid and the Statue of Freedom

One of the most significant contributions by an African American slave in the construction of the Capitol was made by Philip Reid.

When construction of the Capitol began in 1793, Washington, D.C., was little more than a rural landscape with dirt roads and few accommodations beyond a small number of boarding houses. Skilled labor was hard to find or attract to the fledgling city. Enslaved laborers, who were rented from their owners, were involved in almost every stage of construction. Philip Reid may be the single best known enslaved person associated with the Capitol's construction history.

Born around 1820, Reid was an enslaved laborer in the foundry run by the self-taught sculptor Clark Mills, who cast the Statue of Freedom. Mills was a former resident of South Carolina, where he had purchased Reid in Charleston for $1,200. Mills stated he purchased Reid, "many years ago when he was quite a youth... because of his evident talent for the business in which your petitioner was engaged, and paid twelve hundred dollars for him."

Mills brought Reid with him when he moved to Washington in the late 1840s when Mills won the competition for an equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson commissioned for Lafayette Park.

In order to construct the Jackson statue, a temporary foundry was erected south of the White House and, through trial and error, Mills, Reid and other workmen produced the first bronze statue ever cast in America. The accomplishment was extraordinary due to the absence of any formal training of any of the participants.

In 1860, the success of the Jackson statue prompted the secretary of war to give Mills the commission for casting Thomas Crawford's Statue of Freedom for the top of the Capitol's new dome. A financial agreement was reached whereby the government would rent Mills' foundry, pay him $400 a month for his services and pay for necessary materials and labor.

Reid was the only known slave working on Freedom. He worked as a laborer along side James A. Riddle, Peter Coyl, Resin (Rezin) Offutt, and Mikel Shedy (Michael Sheedy). As an enslaved worker Reid was paid directly for his work on Sundays; his owner received the payment for his work the other six days. He was paid at $1.25 per day, higher than the other laborers who received $1 a day.

Reid worked most weeks without a break between July 1, 1860, and May 16, 1861: over that period he was paid $41.25 for 33 Sundays at $1.25 per day, for "Keeping up fires under the moulds." He signed with an X by his name. There are no known images of Reid. (?)

While unable to read or write, Reid was described by Mills as, "aged 42 years, mullatto [sic] color, short in stature, in good health, not prepossessing in appearance but smart in mind, a good workman in a foundry..."

In June 1860, casting of the Statue of Freedom began. The first step was to disassemble the plaster model of the statue into its five main sections in order to move it from the Capitol to the foundry. The model was shipped from Rome to the United States in five main sections, and upon its arrival, an Italian sculptor was hired to assemble the model. However, when the time came to move the plaster model from the Capitol to the foundry for casting, no one knew how to separate it and the Italian sculptor refused to help unless given a pay raise. Fortunately, Philip Reid was there. He figured out that by using a pulley and tackle to pull up on the lifting ring at the top of the model the seams between the sections would be revealed. The statue was successfully separated into its five sections and transported to the foundry.

Philip Reid received his freedom on April 16, 1862 when President Abraham Lincoln signed the Compensated Emancipation Act that released certain persons held to service or labor in the District of Columbia. It is not known if he witnessed the event, but Reid was a free man when the last piece of the Statue of Freedom was put into place atop the Capitol Dome on December 2, 1863.

Author S.D. Wyeth wrote in The Federal City in 1865, "Mr. Reed, the former slave, is now in business for himself, and highly esteemed by all who know him."

Thought to be Reid - unconfirmed

"Black" History

Detroit, 1942

Tim Wise has a good bit when he talks about the push for equity.

A certain strain of white folks are always telling us black folks 'want too much too fast'.

"Black people are enjoying America's freedoms same as regular people."

But it's always been the case that white people think things aren't all that bad - in fact they're pretty good.

• That black kids get the same breaks as white kids, and sometimes better.
• That black people have the same opportunities for career advancement, and wealth building, and social justice as anybody else.

And the black folks know it's not like that. They live a very different reality.

Gallup did a now-pretty-famous study in 1963, asking "How are black people doing in your community?"

A big majority of white people said they thought things were pretty good for black people, and a big majority of black people reported just the opposite.

Research on some history of Public Perception vs On-The-Ground Reality shows the same basic results every time someone has asked the question. 1943, 1883, 1773 - almost always, white people have gotten it wrong, while black people have been way closer to being right.

What are the odds? How likely is it that white people, who've always gotten it wrong, are right this time?

How likely is it that black people, who've been right all along, are somehow getting it wrong?

Here's another one of those things that pisses me off. Either I don't remember it because:

• "It's Mississippi - the American Deep South - what were we expecting?"
• "Toss it on the pile of things we need to address, and I'll get back to ya."

Or maybe because I was relatively comfortable out there in the Sugar Hill Suburbs, so I wasn't required to pay it any mind. I wasn't living it, so I could cluck my tongue and say what a shitty thing, but then go on my merry way and eventually give myself permission to forget all about it.

Mississippi banned ‘Sesame Street’ for showing Black and White kids playing together

In April 1970, members of Mississippi’s newly formed State Commission for Educational Television met to discuss Big Bird and Cookie Monster.

“Sesame Street” had debuted on public TV the previous November, and the earliest episodes would look familiar today: cartoons about the letter O, counting exercises with ice cream cones and Ernie singing in the bathtub.

But the all-White commission decided Mississippi was “not yet ready for it,” according to one member, because it showed Black and White kids playing together. In a 3-2 vote, the commission banned “Sesame Street” from broadcasting on the state-run ETV network.

“The state has enough problems to face up to without adding to them,” an anonymous member of the commission, which was appointed by segregationist Gov. John Bell Williams (D), told the Associated Press.

None of the board’s members would speak on the record about the ban. The commission worried about sinking its fledgling system just as it was launching. At the time, ETV operated only one channel near Jackson, but it had plans to expand statewide after securing hard-won funding. It was allegedly spooked by state lawmakers, who had objected to educational programs promoting integration and could meddle with the commission’s funding. Some had already objected to ETV’s $5.3 million appropriation in the state budget.

“I think it’s a tragedy for both the white and black children of Mississippi,” Joan Ganz Cooney, a television producer who co-created “Sesame Street,” told the AP.

“Sesame Street” had landed in a bleak landscape for children’s TV. Saturday morning cartoons were big business, thanks to ads for sugary breakfast cereals, but during the week, kids were mostly stuck with reruns of “a lot of junk,” as Ganz Cooney put it. Still, children were clearly drawn to television, and hungry for more. Lloyd Morrisett, one of the co-creators of “Sesame Street,” noticed that his young daughter watched test patterns on their television, waiting for something to come on.

“When kids’ TV first started out, it was mostly old cartoons with hosts,” said Linda Simensky, a visiting professor of media studies at the University of Pennsylvania and former head of content for PBS Kids. “And these hosts, in the middle of their hosting duties, would start selling bread.”

She said that among TV executives, “there was sort of this general feeling that kids would watch anything that looks like it’s for kids, and they didn’t want to spend a lot of money.”

In the 1960s, these shows rarely had diverse casts of Black, Brown and White kids. There were exceptions at the local level: Ron Simon, head curator at the Paley Center for Media, points to New York’s “Wonderama” as an example of a show making a “conscious effort of integrating.” But nationally, the landscape was mostly White. It was still so rare to see Black actors of any age on television that Jet magazine published a page of radio and TV appearances by Black entertainers each week, from Eartha Kitt on “Mission: Impossible” to Sammy Davis Jr. on “The Hollywood Palace.”

“Sesame Street” not only wanted to teach children through educational programming they’d actually enjoy — it wanted to specifically target kids from low-income families, who were entering school at a disadvantage. The show was designed with this audience in mind, from the research and writing to the casting.

In addition to many of Jim Henson’s Muppets, “Sesame Street” featured human characters like Bob and Mr. Hooper, both White men, and Gordon and Susan, a married Black couple. Children of all races roamed Sesame Street (which was modeled largely on real-life blocks in New York’s Harlem, Upper West Side and the Bronx), a choice the creators hoped would impart positive images of integration — and give each child watching a chance to see people who looked like them on-screen.

But first they had to hear about it. Ganz Cooney stationed outreach coordinators in different parts of the country to make sure the show was recognizable and accessible to as many children as possible.

That outreach, combined with $4 million in funding from the Lyndon B. Johnson administration and another $4 million in private grants, meant there was “a lot of goodwill surrounding the show” when it began hitting local affiliates in November 1969, said David Kamp, author of “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America.”

“Sesame Street” received rave reviews from public luminaries like Jesse Jackson and Orson Welles, as well as many parents who wrote to newspapers to heap praise on the show.

“My 2-year-old, who can hardly talk, is running around the house identifying letters like H and W and numbers like 9 and 3 since he’s been watching ‘Sesame Street,’” wrote a Los Angeles Times reader from Glendale, Ariz.

And then there was Mississippi.

In fairness, the state was likely not alone in its reluctance to broadcast interracial friendships. When KTAL in Shreveport dropped “Sesame Street” in its second season, claiming it didn’t have the money to air it, a fan wrote to Time, “The ostensible reason was that the show was too expensive. Actually it was too black.”

In the aftermath of the Mississippi decision, letters poured into ETV, protesting the ban. “There will always be people in Mississippi and across the nation who will find an integrated television cast offensive,” read one letter printed by United Press International. “But there are probably more conscientious parents who will put the education of their children ahead of their personal prejudices, and these people should not be denied a choice.” WDAM, a local station based in Laurel, Miss., urged the commission to reverse the vote and offered to air “Sesame Street” itself if ETV wouldn’t.

The board was doubtless embarrassed by the attention, not expecting its “postponement” of the show, as members characterized it, to make news across the country. (The Albuquerque Journal, for example, called the decision a “crying shame,” swiping at Mississippi’s “education levels,” which lagged behind other states.)

“That was kind of a spasm of the old ethos,” Kamp said. “I think most of the country, even in the South, was trending in the other direction.”

ETV scrambled to lift the ban, promising viewers on May 23 that “Sesame Street” would air in a matter of weeks. The show appeared on local TV listings by June 8, and that fall, the board sponsored a special episode.

As part of a 14-city national tour, the cast of “Sesame Street” stopped by Jackson for a free live show on Sept. 6, presented in cooperation with the State Commission for Educational Television. Over the course of an hour, Big Bird and his friends Bob, Susan, Gordon and Mr. Cooper entertained families with songs, jokes and questions, encouraging audience participation.

It was not quite an apology, but a display of an uneasy alliance between a progressive show and a conservative board, all in front of an integrated crowd of ecstatic children.

Worth Noting

It's a little appalling to me that we seem to go out of our way trying to forget the bad things we've done.

I'm not saying we should constantly ruminate on it and beat ourselves up forever because we've caused pain and heartache, but we should be trying to move past whatever it was instead of just putting it out of our minds altogether. How do you learn from something you don't remember?

Here's the story of a guy whose dad was born enslaved in Virginia. He grew up hearing the first-hand recollections of a man who lived some of America's worst history, but never gave up on the promise of a more perfect union.

And something that really sticks in my brain is that we don't even know how many people there are with a background similar to Mr Smith's.

(pay wall)

Daniel Smith, one of the last children of enslaved Americans, dies at 90

He grew up hearing stories from his father, who was born into bondage during the Civil War. Decades later, he marched in Washington and Selma with fellow civil rights activists.

Growing up in the 1930s, Daniel R. Smith would listen to stories from his father, as young boys often do. He was not supposed to hear these stories — they were meant for his older siblings, not for a child as young as 5 or 6 — but after dinner on Saturday evenings he would sneak out of bed and listen to accounts of the “whipping and crying post,” of the lynching tree and the wagon wheel.

These were brutally vivid stories of bondage, for his father had been born into slavery in Virginia during the Civil War and had toiled as a child laborer before making his way north to Connecticut, where the Smiths were among the only African Americans in their town.

“I remember hearing about two slaves who were chained together at the wrist and tried to run away,” Mr. Smith recalled decades later. “They were found by some vicious dogs hiding under a tree, and hanged from it. I also remember a story about an enslaved man who was accused of lying to his owner. He was made to step out into the snow with his family and put his tongue on an icy wagon wheel until it stuck. When he tried to remove it, half his tongue came off.

“My father cried as he told us these things.”

Mr. Smith, who was 90 when he died Oct. 19 at a hospital in Washington, was one of the last remaining children of enslaved Black Americans, and a rare direct link to slavery in the United States. Born when his father was 70, he was part of a generation that dwindled and then all but disappeared, taking with them stories of bondage that were told firsthand by mothers and fathers who, after enduring brutal conditions on Southern plantations, sought to build a new, better life for their families.

Historians say it is impossible to know how many children of enslaved people are left. But while researching her book “Sugar of the Crop: My Journey to Find the Children of Slaves” (2009), author Sana Butler was able to track down about 40 who were still alive. All have since died. Mr. Smith was not featured in the book, although he later met Butler, who helped edit his forthcoming memoir, “Son of a Slave: A Black Man’s Journey in White America.”

His story was “a reminder that slavery was not that long ago,” Butler said. “You talk about the transatlantic slave trade, you talk about Reconstruction, and people really think that it’s history,” something that happened in the distant past and has little relevance today. “Mr. Smith,” she added, “is a reminder that it’s impossible to ‘get over it,’” to move past slavery and act as if it is no longer matters, “because it’s still [present] within these families’ lives.”

It was in part through his father — Abram “A.B.” Smith, who died in a car accident when Daniel Smith was 6 — that he developed a fierce pride and resilience that he carried into his work on civil rights, health care and education. “A lot of Black children grew up in a world where they didn’t know who they were and where they came from,” Mr. Smith told The Washington Post in 2020, “but we were A.B. Smith’s children, and that sustained us through anything.”

After a childhood in which he and his siblings were “poor as church mice,” Mr. Smith served as an Army medic during the Korean War, marched with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in Washington, linked arms with fellow civil rights activists on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, and ran literacy and anti-poverty programs in rural Alabama, where he once outraced a carload of white supremacists on a dark country road, not stopping until he found shelter at a service station.

Raised in a small Connecticut town, Mr. Smith went on to serve as a medic in the Korean War, march for civil rights and work to bring health care to underserved communities. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Mr. Smith later settled in the Washington area, where in the 1970s he ran a federally funded program called the Area Health Education Centers, working to improve health care in underserved communities across the country. His work took him to apartheid-era South Africa, where he met Archbishop Desmond Tutu and, upon his return, said he was propositioned by a CIA officer who wanted him to spy on the African National Congress liberation movement. (Mr. Smith turned him down.)

Decades later, Mr. Smith was standing in the crowd, moved to tears, as Barack Obama was sworn in as America’s first Black president. He was privileged, he said, to be a part of so much history — “A friend of mine calls me the Black Forrest Gump,” he told the Economist last year — and for a time, at least, he thought little about his family’s own history and his legacy as one of the last surviving children of a man who was considered property rather than a person.

“Quite frankly, I’ve just grown up and been busy,” he told The Post. “And I’ve never thought much about it.”

The fifth of six children, Daniel Robert Smith was born in Winsted, Conn., on March 11, 1932. His father was a janitor at a clock factory. His mother, Clara (Wheeler) Smith, was 23 at the time. Little information was available about her life, but Mr. Smith said she was White, with Scotch-Irish and Cherokee ancestry.

After his father’s death, she became a housekeeper and raised Mr. Smith and his siblings with help from a trio of surrogate fathers, including a White veterinarian who gave him a job at his clinic, encouraging Mr. Smith’s lifelong love of animals. He was especially drawn to dogs — Dobermans in particular — and became a member of the county dog obedience training club, taking part in American Kennel Club competitions at New York’s Madison Square Garden, where he was one of only a few Black trainers, according to his memoir.

Although he had hoped to serve in the Army’s K-9 Corps, he was told it wasn’t taking Black soldiers, and instead he served as a medic, drawing on his veterinary training while working at a military hospital in Korea.

By 1955 he was back home in Winsted, where flooding killed nearly 100 people throughout Connecticut in the aftermath of Hurricane Diane. The death toll would have been higher were it not for Mr. Smith, who rescued a truck driver from the floodwaters, an act of heroism that was documented by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter John Hersey, who was covering the storm for the New Yorker.

About two years later, Mr. Smith found himself in another life-or-death scenario while working at a YMCA camp near Winsted. During a trip to a reservoir where he had once gone swimming, he tried to help a young woman who had disappeared into the deep water and was pulled out by another swimmer. Mr. Smith found that she still had a pulse and began performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Then a uniformed police officer began ordering him to stop, insisting that the woman was already dead.

It was immediately clear, Mr. Smith recalled, that the officer was wrong. She still had a pulse. Yet she was White; he was Black. “This remains the most racist incident I have ever experienced in my life,” he wrote in his memoir. “To this day, telling this story brings tears to my eyes. To think that someone would rather have anyone die rather than have her white lips touch my Black mouth. Incomprehensible.”

Mr. Smith graduated in 1960 from Springfield College in Massachusetts and was a psychiatric social worker before being accepted to veterinary school at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama.

By 1963 he had turned from medicine to civil rights, deciding he could contribute more to people than animals. He led an antipoverty program in Lowndes County, just outside Montgomery. The church office he worked in was burned to the ground, and a local judge who helped him get phone service and electricity faced retribution from local residents, who poisoned 21 of his cows, according to an account by journalist Martin Dobrow.

Weeks before King was assassinated in 1968, Mr. Smith moved to the Washington area, where he worked for federal agencies including the Health Resources and Services Administration and raised two children with his first wife, the former Sandra Hawkins. Together they bought a home in Bethesda, Md., that had a racially restrictive covenant — which was no longer being enforced — barring Black or Jewish ownership.

After he retired in 1994, Mr. Smith volunteered at Washington National Cathedral, where he escorted presidents including Bill Clinton and George W. Bush while serving as head usher. His first marriage ended in divorce, and in 2006 he married Loretta Neumann at the cathedral.

Mr. Smith and his wife, Loretta Neumann, in 2020. (Salwan Georges/The Washington Post)

Mr. Smith, who lived in the Takoma section of the District, was preceded in death by his five siblings. His death was confirmed by his wife, who said he had cancer and congestive heart failure. She survives him, in addition to two children from his first marriage, April Smith Motaung of Columbia, Md., and Daniel “Rob” Smith Jr. of New York; and a granddaughter.

Neumann said that she and Mr. Smith were finalizing his memoir while he was in the hospital and that she planned to self-publish it in the next two weeks through the D.C. bookstore Politics and Prose.

Mr. Smith told interviewers he thought the country had made great progress since he was a boy, although he had grown increasingly worried about the future during the Trump administration, especially after the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. He noted that his father, at least, would have maintained a positive outlook, despite all he had experienced as a child.

“We could never talk negatively about America in front of my father,” Mr. Smith told the Economist. “He did not have much but he really, really loved America. Isn’t that funny?”

Today's Today

Born in Trenton, New Jersey April 28, 1901 - Needham Roberts, one of the first Americans to receive the French Croix de Guerre medal.

Black American History #33

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - School Segregation and Brown v Board

Black American History #32

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - The March on Washington Movement

Black American History #31

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - Black Americans and WW2

Black American History #30

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - Zora Neale Hurston

Black American History #29

Dr Clint Smith - The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment

Tuskegee was not something that happened centuries ago. It didn't end until a year after I had left high school - and I never heard one fucking thing about it for years after that.

Also, Smith makes a great point. ie: "Tuskegee" is invoked to explain how racism was built into the healthcare system here in USAmerica Inc, while inviting the inference that since we've recognized how horrifically unethical it all was, we can dismiss it now as being part of a troubled past, and avoid having to acknowledge the ongoing problems of a racial divide in healthcare delivery that should be apparent to anyone who cares to look.

Black American History #28

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - The Great Depression

Black American History #27

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - Political Thought in the Harlem Renaissance

Black American History #26

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - Arts & Letters Of The Harlem Renaissance

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore - and then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags, like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

--Langston Hughes

Black American History #25

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - The Red Summer of 1919

Black American History #24

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - The Great Migration

Black American History #23

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - The Black Women's Club Movement

Black American History #22

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - Booker T Washington and WEB DuBois

WEB Du Bois quote: 

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife – this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He does not wish to Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He wouldn't bleach his Negro blood in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of opportunity closed roughly in his face.

Black American History #21

Dr Clint Black - Crash Course - Plessy v Ferguson and Segregation

Black American History #20

Dr Clint Smith - Crash Course - Ida B Wells

I have to say right here at the start that it pisses me off that somebody had to stand up and be "Anti-Lynching", and it pisses me off even more that nobody ever taught any this in any of the schools I went to.

Black American History #19

Dr Clint Black - Crash Course - Reconstruction