Black American History #2

Crash Course with Dr Clint Smith

Partus Sequitur Ventrem

"That which is born follows the womb" was a legal doctrine passed in colonial Virginia in 1662 and other English crown colonies in the Americas which defined the legal status of children born there. The doctrine mandated that all children would inherit the legal status of their mothers. As such, children of enslaved women would be born into slavery.

Black American History #1

USAmerica inc is an amalgam of different peoples from different places, with different stories.

And it's not like we're completely different from every other "country". Everyone everywhere came from somewhere else - or from someone else. It's just that here in the western hemisphere, the migration seems to date to a more recent past, and so we think we can get our heads around the history a little easier(?), knowing we don't have to trace our origins back to a time before about 20,000 years ago.

The point there being that everything is derivative. Everything came out of something else - we don't have any kind of history that belongs solely to us.

So we don't have American History without Black History.

Crash Courses - Dr Clint Smith, PhD

The TransAtlantic Slave Trade

Oops

So they finally took that stoopid Confederate Participation Trophy down, and when they went looking for the time capsule that was supposed to be under the cornerstone of the pedestal, they couldn't find it.

But not to worry - they put everything back together, and then promised they'd look for it again later (?)

CBS News:

Crews in Virginia ended a daylong search Thursday after they were unable to locate a 134-year-old time capsule state officials believe is buried in the pedestal of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee that towered over Richmond for more than a century.

State officials were scheduled to remove the 134-year-old time capsule from the cornerstone a day after the large Confederate statue was taken down. But after removing more than half a dozen large, heavy stones, crews were unable to find it.

Workers used ground-penetrating radar devices, a metal detector and other construction equipment to try to locate the copper time capsule they believed was tucked inside or under a cornerstone of a 40-foot tall granite pedestal that the bronze equestrian statue of Lee had been perched on since 1890.

- snip -

While the removal of the statue went quickly and smoothly, the search for the time capsule was marked by difficulties and frustration. Crews had to remove three separate pieces of the cornerstone weighing between 500 and 8,000 pounds each. They also removed a half dozen other large stones around the perimeter of the pedestal so they could search under the cornerstone and the area around it.

After about 12 hours of work, crews ended their search for the day, said Northam's chief of staff, Clark Mercer. Mercer said workers planned to return Friday to put the stones they removed back in place and to insert a new time capsule in the cornerstone. He said it is doubtful workers would resume looking for the 1887 time capsule, but left open a small possibility.

"It's disappointing not to find the time capsule," he said.

"We looked where we thought it was. It doesn't preclude (us) in the future from finding it, but for right now, the mystery will continue."

Dale Brumfield, a local historian and author who has conducted extensive research on the time capsule, said he is sure the capsule is located somewhere in the pedestal, citing a newspaper account of an 1887 dedication ceremony that drew thousands of people.

"I'm positive there's a capsule in there somewhere," he said. "We just can't find where."

I can't find anything regarding any efforts to find the missing time capsule since this piece was published 09-10-2021.

Today's Hero

Charles Jackson French, USN, CPO 1st Class (25 September 1919 - 7 November 1956)

Charlie French was an American war hero from Foreman, Arkansas. He had first enlisted in the United States Navy in 1937 and had completed his enlistment, moving to Omaha, Nebraska where he had family. 

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, French went to the closest recruitment office, and on December 19, 1941, re-enlisted in the United States Navy.

During World War II, Petty Officer First Class French swam 6–8 hours in shark-infested waters near Guadalcanal while towing a life raft with 15 USS Gregory survivors of an attack by the Japanese Imperial Navy. For this action, French received a letter of commendation from Adm. William F. Halsey, Jr. in May 1943. Adm. Halsey was then commander of the Southern Pacific Fleet. The commendation stated:

For meritorious conduct in action while serving on board of a destroyer transport which was badly damaged during the engagement with Japanese forces in the British Solomon Islands on September 5, 1942. After the engagement, a group of about fifteen men were adrift on a raft, which was being deliberately shelled by Japanese naval forces. French tied a line to himself and swam for more than two hours without rest, thus attempting to tow the raft. His conduct was in keeping with the highest traditions of the Naval Service.

French was memorialized on War gum trading cards and in a comic strip. The Chicago Defender named him Hero of the Year.

Lady Day

Real, soul-crushing tragedy was part of Billie Holiday's life, and some would certainly hypothesize that it's what really drives anyone who inhabits The Blues the way a Billie Holiday could.

But that drama doesn't have to be a defining thing. For humans, it can be a strong colorative aspect, and have a deep important influence, but it almost never actually defines the person completely.

We're just kind of amazing that way.

Today's Black History Thing

Julia Chinn

Even though some of Julia Chinn's story has only recently been recovered, I'll go ahead and continue to be pissed off that none of this was taught in the "very progressive Jefferson County public schools" of my tender youth.

WaPo: (pay wall)

He became the nation’s ninth vice president. She was his enslaved wife.
Her name was Julia Chinn

She was born enslaved and remained that way her entire life, even after she became Richard Mentor Johnson’s “bride.”

Johnson, a Kentucky congressman who eventually became the nation’s ninth vice president in 1837, couldn’t legally marry Julia Chinn. Instead the couple exchanged vows at a local church with a wedding celebration organized by the enslaved people at his family’s plantation in Great Crossing, according to Miriam Biskin, who wrote about Chinn decades ago.

Chinn died nearly four years before Johnson took office. But because of controversy over her, Johnson is the only vice president in American history who failed to receive enough electoral votes to be elected. The Senate voted him into office.

The couple’s story is complicated and fraught, historians say. As an enslaved woman, Chinn could not consent to a relationship, and there’s no record of how she regarded him. Though she wrote to Johnson during his lengthy absences from Kentucky, the letters didn’t survive.

Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, who is working on a book about Chinn, wrote about the hurdles in a blog post for the Association of Black Women Historians.

“While doing my research, I was struck by how Julia had been erased from the history books,” wrote Myers, a history professor at Indiana University. “Nobody knew who she was. The truth is that Julia (and Richard) are both victims of legacies of enslavement, interracial sex, and silence around black women’s histories.”

Johnson’s life is far better documented.

He was elected as a Democrat to the state legislature in 1802 and to Congress in 1806. The folksy, handsome Kentuckian gained a reputation as a champion of the common man.

Back home in Great Crossing, he fathered a child with a local seamstress, but didn’t marry her when his parents objected, according to a 19th-century biography, “The Life and Times of Richard M. Johnson.” Then, in about 1811, Johnson, 31, turned to Chinn, 21, who had been enslaved at Blue Spring Plantation since childhood.

Johnson called Chinn “my bride.” His “great pleasure was to sit by the fireplace and listen to Julia as she played on the pianoforte,” Biskin wrote in her account.

The couple soon had two daughters, Imogene and Adaline. Johnson gave his daughters his last name and openly raised them as his children.

Johnson became a national hero during the War of 1812. At the Battle of the Thames in Canada, he led a horseback attack on the British and their Native American allies. He was shot five times but kept fighting. During the battle, the Shawnee chief Tecumseh was killed.

In 1819, “Colonel Dick” was elected to the U.S. Senate. When he was away in Washington for long periods, he left Chinn in charge of the 2,000-acre plantation and told his White employees that they should “act with the same propriety as if I were home.”

Chinn’s status was unique.

While enslaved women wore simple cotton dresses, Chinn’s wardrobe “included fancy dresses that turned heads when Richard hosted parties,” Christina Snyder wrote in her book “Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers & Slaves in the Age of Jackson.”

In 1825, Chinn and Johnson hosted the Marquis de Lafayette during his return to America.

In the mid-1820s, Johnson opened on his plantation the Choctaw Academy, a federally funded boarding school for Native Americans. He hired a local Baptist minister as director. Chinn ran the academy’s medical ward.

“Julia is as good as one half the physicians, where the complaint is not dangerous,” Johnson wrote in a letter. He paid the academy’s director extra to educate their daughters “for a future as free women.”

Johnson tried to advance his daughters in local society, and both would later marry White men. But when he spoke at a local July 4 celebration, the Lexington Observer reported, prominent White citizens wouldn’t let Adaline sit with them in the pavilion. Johnson sent his daughter to his carriage, rushed through his speech and then angrily drove away.

When Johnson’s father died, he willed ownership of Chinn to his son. He never freed his common-law wife.

“Whatever power Chinn had was dependent on the will and the whims of a White man who legally owned her,” Snyder wrote.

Then, in 1833, Chinn died of cholera. It’s unclear where she is buried.

Johnson went on to even greater national prominence.

In 1836, President Andrew Jackson backed Vice President Martin Van Buren as his successor. At Jackson’s urging, Van Buren — a fancy dresser who had never fought in war — picked war hero Johnson as his running mate. Nobody knew how the Shawnees’ chief was slain in the War of 1812, but Johnson’s campaign slogan was, “Rumpsey, Dumpsey. Johnson Killed Tecumseh.”

Johnson’s relationship with Chinn became a campaign issue. Southern newspapers denounced him as “the great Amalgamationist.” A mocking cartoon showed a distraught Johnson with a hand over his face bewailing “the scurrilous attacks on the Mother of my Children.”

Van Buren won the election, but Johnson’s 147 electoral votes were one short of what he needed to be elected. Virginia’s electors refused to vote for him. It was the only time Congress chose a vice president.

When Van Buren ran for reelection in 1840, Democrats declined to nominate Johnson at their Baltimore convention. It is the only time a party didn’t pick any vice-presidential candidate. The spelling-challenged Jackson warned that Johnson would be a “dead wait” on the ticket.

“Old Dick” still ended up being the leading choice and campaigned around the country wearing his trademark red vest. But Van Buren lost to Johnson’s former commanding officer, Gen. William Henry Harrison.

Johnson never remarried, but he reportedly had sexual relationships with other enslaved women who couldn’t consent to them. The former vice president won a final election to the Kentucky legislature in 1850, but died a short time later at the age of 70.

His brothers laid claim to his estate at the expense of his surviving daughter, Imogene, who was married to a White man named Daniel Pence.

“At some point in the early twentieth century,” Myers wrote, “perhaps because of heightened fears of racism during the Jim Crow era, members of Imogene Johnson Pence’s line, already living as white people, chose to stop telling their children that they were descended from Richard Mentor Johnson … and his black wife. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that younger Pences, by then already in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, began discovering the truth of their heritage.”

The Kicker:

In a piece that's all about a woman who was purposefully erased and forgotten, The Washington Post editors see fit to mention her name 21 times versus her husband's name appearing 34 times.

Today's Tweet

Black history is our history - our history is us - and this part of us really sucks.

They hide it from text books for a reason, but this is our history. Never forget what we've been through. pic.twitter.com/zYAAL5mbSG

— George#VotesBlueAlways (@Numbers28) February 6, 2021

Today's Black History Thing

Dr James Derham

James Derham was enslaved at birth in Philadelphia in 1762. As a child, Derham was transferred to and enslaved by, Dr. John Kearsley Jr. under whom Derham studied medicine. From Dr. Kearsley, Derham learned about compound medicine with a focus on curing illnesses of the throat, as well as patient bedside manner. Upon Dr. Kearsley’s death, Derham, then fifteen years old, was moved between several different enslavers before finally ending up with Dr. George West, a surgeon for a British regiment during the American Revolutionary War. He was eventually transferred again, this time becoming enslaved to New Orleans doctor Robert Dove. As an assistant at Dove’s practice, Derham and Dove became friends, and Dove eventually granted Derham his freedom. With some financial assistance from Dove, Derham opened his own medical practice in New Orleans. By 1789, his practice is reported to have made about $3,000 annually. In 1788, Derham and Dr. Benjamin Rush met each other in Philadelphia, and corresponded with one another for twelve years. Derham's final letter to Rush in 1802 is the last record of his existence. It is believed that after the Spanish authorities restricted Derham to treating throat diseases in 1801, Derham left his practice in New Orleans.

Ed Note:

The man pictured above also comes up on a google search as Dr James McCune Smith, the first black man in America to hold formal certification as a Medical Doctor (although, even as a free black, he was denied schooling here, and had to go to Scotland and then France to be trained in medicine).

One of the enduringly shitty things about our beloved country is the fact that we've played so fast and loose with people lives - to the point of rendering very large percentages of our fellow Americans virtually invisible - all while telling ourselves the reassuring lie that we care about what happens to every individual.

In some ways, America is the Disney-fied version of a very dark fairytale.

Today's Today

The first day of Black History Month - which I hope can become outmoded and unnecessary as we continue to flesh out a more complete understanding of American History.

All lives matter when black lives matter too.

Until all of us are free, ain't none of us free.

Lost Cause

Here in Charlottesville, city government recently removed the first of our 3 main Confederate Participation Trophies.

Yay us.

The struggles and the arguments continue.

The New Yorker: (pay wall)

Frederick Douglass was a “from here.” Where I was raised, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a “from here” is the opposite of a “come here,” and much is made of whether you were born on this side of the Chesapeake Bay or arrived later in life. In weighty matters, the question of just how many generations of your family have called this place home can become relevant, too.

One such matter is the Confederate monument at the Talbot County Courthouse, in Easton, a town of about seventeen thousand people. The monument, which is the last in Maryland on public property outside of cemeteries and battlefields, has two parts: a granite base, which was erected in 1914 and bears the names of ninety-six Confederate soldiers with some connection to the county—most carved in stone, others on two brass plaques—and a six-foot-tall statue, added two years later, of a young man with “C.S.A.” carved into his belt buckle and a Confederate flag in his arms. The front of the base is inscribed “To the Talbot Boys / 1861 - 1865 / C.S.A.”

For most of the past decade, that monument has shared the courthouse lawn with another: of Douglass, who was born into slavery some twelve miles from where his statue stands. Probably no one would be more surprised by this arrangement than Douglass himself, whose home state never seceded from the United States and whose home county voted against secession, sending more than three hundred soldiers to the Union Army. And yet there is no monument for the Union dead at the courthouse, or anywhere else in Talbot County.

The absence of a Union monument and the prominence of a Confederate one are part of why many a “from here,” like me, grew up believing that Talbot County was a Confederate stronghold. I love where I am from, so much so that I moved back to the Eastern Shore as an adult and, for years now, I have been one of many residents advocating for the removal of the “Talbot Boys” from the courthouse lawn. Earlier this summer, I thought I might be able to tell the story of how the Confederate monument finally came down. Instead, I’m left to confront why it remains.

Talbot County’s monument was installed fifty years after the Civil War, in an era when the gains of Reconstruction were already being reversed, Jim Crow was under way, and revanchist public commemorations of the Confederacy were spreading across the country. Thousands of squares and streets were dedicated to Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson, and historical markers to Confederate sites and causes went up anywhere that the United Daughters of the Confederacy could inspire local action. So common were these memorials that there were companies devoted to their production. Though defenders of the “Talbot Boys” insist that the statue is a one-of-a-kind effort to honor the local dead, in reality it once had an identical twin, known as “The South’s Defenders,” on the lawn of the Calcasieu Parish courthouse, in Lake Charles, Louisiana. Both statues came from the W. H. Mullins Company, in Salem, Ohio, which had so many Civil War wares on offer that it advertised them in a catalogue: “The Blue and the Gray: Statues in Stamped Copper and Bronze.”

Advocates for the “Talbot Boys” also like to say that the monument has nothing to do with slavery, and that the political beliefs of those who are honored on it and those who erected it are unknowable or distinct from the motivations of Confederate champions elsewhere. In fact, many of those involved left extensive archives of their lives, detailing their thoughts about the Civil War and everything else. The effort to erect Easton’s statue was started in 1912, by a lawyer named Joseph Seth. He was not a Confederate veteran, but he was a sympathizer. He was also active in local politics, eventually becoming mayor, and not long before his election he decided the time had come to honor the “Talbot Johnnies.” The statue was dedicated on June 5, 1916. Ten years later, Seth published a memoir with his second wife, Mary, which recorded his views on, among other things, race relations on the Eastern Shore. “Slaves were held here from the early days of the Colony until the Emancipation Act, but they lived under a paternal, kindly rule,” he claimed.

That does not comport with the narratives of slavery from the enslaved themselves, and certainly not with the most notable account from someone forced to live and work in bondage in Talbot County. In his autobiography, Frederick Douglass wrote of his master:

"He was a cruel man, hardened by a long life of slaveholding. He would at times seem to take great pleasure in whipping a slave. I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose."

At least fourteen of the men whose names appear on the Confederate monument in Easton owned slaves or belonged to slave-owning families, including the man whose name comes first: Admiral Franklin Buchanan, who married into the Lloyd family, which enslaved more than seven hundred people, Douglass among them, at their Wye House plantation. In the passage above, the man whom Douglass is describing worked for the Lloyds. The year before the Civil War began, nearly four thousand people were enslaved in Talbot County. Easton’s port had become a hub for the domestic slave trade, and the town’s slave market was located on the very grounds where the Confederate statue now stands.

The surnames on that statue also appear on local streets, towns, landmarks, and landings: a geography of place and power. Take “Tilghman,” the name of a nearby island, but also of Oswald Tilghman, who survived the war and helped Seth raise money for the monument. Around the same time that it was erected, Tilghman published a “History of Talbot County,” in which he described the death of another one of the statue’s honorees, his relative Lloyd Tilghman, at the Battle of Champion Hill, in Mississippi: “He was laid under the shade of a peach tree where his life’s blood ebbed slowly away, and another hero was added to that long list of martyrs who died for the cause, ‘the lost cause,’ though it be, still dear and will ever remain dear to the hearts of all true Southerners to the end of time.”

The piece goes on at some length, but you get the picture - there's a butt-load of conclusive evidence that those monuments are there to change history by controlling the narrative. They exist because white people were desperate to rationalize their atrocities and to further the agenda of White Supremacy.

By tearing down those monuments, we're not erasing history - we're acknowledging the reality of that history, and trying to accept responsibility for what our history has bequeathed to us.

There is much work to be done here.

Rape-Colored Skin

Finally got around to this. Sorry it took so long.

NYT, Caroline Randall Williams:

I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.

If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.

Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.

I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.

According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.

It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.

What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?

You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.

And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.

This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.

But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.

Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.

To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.

The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.

Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.

Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.

Today's Beau

Justin King - Beau Of The Fifth Column

Quotes

WEB DuBois

Echoes

It pisses me off that I don't know this shit before I learn about this shit.

I went to public schools in what was then a very progressive district, and we never heard one fucking thing about this - or about Tulsa, or Rosewood, or Sanford, or any of the other incidents of outright white supremacist assholery that still goes on in this country even though it gets dressed up in different clothing once in a while and changes its name so we can pretend it's not happening the way POC tell us it's happening.

It pisses me off.

An Approximate Birthday

Bass Reeves (July 1838 – January 12, 1910) was the first black deputy U.S. marshal west of the Mississippi River. He worked mostly in Arkansasand the Oklahoma Territory.[a] During his long career, he was credited with arresting more than 3,000 felons. He shot and killed 14 people in self-defense. 

And he may have been the model for the stories that grew up as "The Lone Ranger".

Bass Reeves was born into slavery in Crawford County, Arkansas, in 1838. He was named after his grandfather, Bass Washington. Reeves and his family were slaves of Arkansas state legislator William Steele Reeves. When Bass was eight (about 1846), William Reeves moved to Grayson County, Texas, near Sherman in the Peters Colony. Bass Reeves may have served William Steele Reeves's son, Colonel George R. Reeves, who was a sheriff and legislator in Texas, and a one-time Speaker of the Texas House of Representatives until his death from rabies in 1882.

During the American Civil War, Bass beat up George Reeves to get out of slavery[5][6][7] Bass fled north into the Indian Territory. There he lived with the Cherokee, Seminole, and Creek Indians, learning their languages, until he was freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which abolished slavery, in 1865.

As a freedman, Reeves moved to Arkansas and farmed near Van Buren. He married Nellie Jennie from Texas, with whom he had 11 children.

Today's Quote

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension, to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

-- Martin Luther King

On Loving

WaPo's RetroPod:



The Daddy State is never far from power. And the stealthy resurgence of the TheoCons in the background of both state and federal politics is becoming more of a problem.

Once we're rid of Cult45, we'll still have a struggle on our hands because theocracy and fascism go together like pie and coffee.

Lost Another One

Frank Robinson, baseballer, badass, decent human being. 

Thomas Boswell, WaPo:

For several days, the death of Frank Robinson had been expected. Editors called reporters to prepare appreciations. But Frank, no respecter of deadlines or demise, didn’t depart on schedule. Some of us who covered him for years enjoyed the thought of Death trying to cope with Frank.

Robinson was the proudest, orneriest, most competitive man in baseball from his arrival in 1956 — as a rookie who hit 38 homers at age 20 — until 2006, when, in his 16th year as a manager, his old fierce eyes still made his Nats players seem tame.

“You know you can’t beat me,” the Grim Reaper says. Frank, silent, just glares and digs in. Robinson didn’t just crowd the plate; he crowded life.

On Thursday, Robinson died at 83. Many will recall his Triple Crown season leading the Baltimore Orioles to a World Series title in 1966. Others will find the most lasting value in his dignified barrier-breaking work as the first African American manager in 1975 with Cleveland and then as manager of the year back with the Orioles in 1989.

- and -

“I’ve always enjoyed working with young people, reaching them and talking baseball. It’s a pleasure to watch someone get better and better until he’s a bona fide big leaguer,” he said. “All a teacher wants is for them to listen and try.”

- and -

For me, (Bill) Russell and Frank Robinson were the next step after Jackie Robinson. Because he had laid the groundwork, they didn’t have to turn the other cheek. They could be their entire selves — or close to it. Remembering what social progress looked like then is a reminder of why it’s worth battling to keep and extend now.

Frank Robinson always had the severe comportment, the hard eye for enemies, the basic sense of right and wrong of a pioneer. He walked into a room, and others stood up straighter, heads higher. Now, we bow our heads in respect.

Wikipedia:

Frank Robinson (August 31, 1935 – February 7, 2019) was an American outfielder and manager in Major League Baseball (MLB) who played for five teams from 1956 to 1976, and became the only player to be named the Most Valuable Player of both the National League and American League. He was named the NL MVP with the Cincinnati Reds in 1961 after leading the team to the pennant with a .323 batting average, and won the AL MVP in 1966 in his first season with the Baltimore Orioles after winning the Triple Crown. Robinson helped lead the Orioles to World Series titles in 1966 and 1970. A 14-time All-Star, Robinson's 586 career home runs ranked fourth in major league history at the time of his retirement, and he ranked sixth in total bases (5,373) and tenth in runs scored (1,829). Robinson was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility in 1982.

In 1975, Robinson became the first black manager in major league history. He managed the Cleveland Indians during the last two years of his playing career, compiling a 186–189 record. He went on to manage the San Francisco Giants, the Baltimore Orioles, and the Montreal Expos/Washington Nationals. For most of the last two decades of his life, Robinson served in various executive positions for Major League Baseball, concluding as honorary President of the American League.

Happy Birthday

Seems like a great way to start Black History Month.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
and yet must be —

the land where every man is free.

The land that’s mine — the poor man’s, Indian’s, Negro’s, ME —
who made America,
whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
whose hand at the foundry, 

whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Langston Hughes (February 1, 1902 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. He moved to New York City as a young man, where he made his career.

He was one of the earliest innovators of the then-new literary art form called jazz poetry. Hughes is best known as a leader of the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. He famously wrote about the period that "the negro was in vogue", which was later paraphrased as "when Harlem was in vogue".

Today's Birthday

Lefty Cooper

Andrew Lewis Cooper (April 24, 1898 – June 3, 1941), nicknamed "Lefty", was an American left-handed pitcher in baseball's Negro Leagues. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006. An alumnus of Paul Quinn College in Waco, Cooper played nine seasons for the Detroit Stars and ten seasons for the Kansas City Monarchs. The Texan was 6 feet 2 inches (188 cm) tall and weighed 220 pounds (100 kg; 16 st).

In defiance of a threatened five-year Negro league ban for contract jumping, Cooper joined a 1927 barnstorming team that toured Hawaii and Japan. He spent most of his later career with the Monarchs. Cooper is the Negro league record holder for career saves. In a 1937 playoff game, he pitched 17 innings. Cooper served as manager or player-manager for the Monarchs from 1937 to 1940, leading the team to the pennant three times during those four seasons.