For nearly a century, Spanish Florida granted asylum and freedom to escaped enslaved Africans in the Carolinas and Georgia, prompting an “Underground Railroad” that ran south. Narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, with Hasan Jeffries and Vincent Brown, from Black History in 2 Minutes (Or So).
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After the Union Civil War victory over the Confederacy, former general William Tecumseh met with 20 black ministers to forge a plan for the 4 million liberated bondsmen. The meeting proposed land ownership – “40 acres and a mule,”a promise President Andrew Johnson would renege on, robbing black families of an economic future, unlike the White families who recieved federal land grants. Narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, with Evelynn Hammonds and Farah Griffin, from Black History in 2 Minutes (Or So).
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After Union victory in the Civil War, the government opened the Freedman’s Bank to provide a safe place for newly-freed black workers to place their funds. By 1871, 37 branches were open in the US, with over 70,000 people depositing $60 million into this bank. Then, in 1873, there was a depression. Narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, with Hasan Jeffries and Vincent Brown, from Black History in 2 Minutes (Or So).
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After the Civil War, Black men were given the right to vote, and more than 2,000 Black office holders were serving at every level of America’s political system. Briefly.
Narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, from Black History in 2 Minutes (Or So).
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Two days before fleeing the mess he made in Washington, lame duck Donald Trump issued an executive order “establishing a statuary park named the “National Garden of American Heroes,” his reaction to the removal of statues celebrating America’s racist past. In keeping with his deep reverence for America’s history, Trump’s imaginary garden is planted with tributes to 244 legendary dead Americans like William F Buckley, Johnny Cash, Alex Trebek, Vince Lombardi, Walt Disney, Lauren Bacall, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Daniel Boone, Kobe Bryant, Johnny Cash, Whittaker Chambers, Julia Child, Henry Clay, Roberto Clemente, Buffalo Bill Cody, Samuel Colt, Davy Crockett, Barry Goldwater, Billy Graham, Charlton Heston, Alfred Hitchcock, Bob Hope, Audie Murphy, Annie Oakey, Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Jackie Robinson, Norman Rockwell, Babe Ruth, Fulton Sheen, Frank Sinatra, Jimmy Stewart, Shirley Temple, Sam Walton, and Cy Young, as well as founding fathers like John Wayne.
Also included are some notable personages who might object to inclusion in this Trump-ordered hodgepodge were they not conveniently expired: Muhammad Ali (Muslim and Civil Rights activist), Hannah Arendt (analyst of Totalitarianism), Dorothy Day (founder of the Catholic Worker movement), Ruth Bader Ginsburg (liberal feminist jurist), Samuel Gompers (labor leader), Woodie Guthrie (radical songwriter), Helen Keller (suffragist, pacifist, radical socialist, ACLU founder), Edward Murrow (journalist), environmentalists Ansel Adams and John Muir, and Civil Rights icons Medgar Evers, Barbara Jordan, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King, Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Rosa Parks, for example.
Don’t get too excited about this. The Executive Order doesn’t specify a site for the “Garden of Heroes,”and there’s no funding, either. In other words, it’s a typical Trump construction project.
More:
“Trump orders creation of ‘Garden of American Heroes’ amid backlash over monuments,” Martin Pengelly, The Guardian
“I Beg Your Garden? Trump Adds ‘Hero’ Names To Statue Garden Unlikely To Take Root,” Barbra Sprunt, NPR News
Executive Order 13934 Revised, January 18, 2021
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Image (alternate “Heroes Garden” concept) by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
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Christmas was once Banned in Boston, and throughout Puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony. Some early American colonists weren’t too keen on Christmas. A video by History Dose.
More:
“Yuletide’s Outlaws,” Rachel N. Schnepper, New York Times
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The Electoral College makes some Americans’ votes more powerful than others. That’s a feature, not a bug. The Founders intended that the votes of Southern slaveholders would count more than those of Northern voters, and their dead hands continue to throttle American democracy today. A Vox video explainer by Madeline Marshall and Adam Freelander.
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A holiday poem from Williams S. Burroughs: “Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons …”
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A holiday poem from Williams S. Burroughs: “Thanks for the wild turkey and the passenger pigeons …”
The Whitney Plantation near Wallace, Louisiana, was founded by German émigré Ambroise Heidel and his family in 1722, and his son Jean Jacques Haydel Sr. converted it to sugar cultivation in the early 1800s. The property passed through several hands before it was purchased by New Orleans attorney John Cummings, who spent 16 years and $8 million of his own money transforming it into a museum dedicated to telling the story of slavery in America.
“The Whitney Plantation is not a place designed to make people feel guilt, or to make people feel shame. It is a site of memory, a place that exists to further the necessary dialogue about race in America.”
— “Telling the Story of Slavery,” Kalim Armstrong, The New Yorker
More:
“Harsh world of slavery focus of Louisiana plantation museum,” Jonathan Kaminsky, Reuters
Video produced by Kalim Armstrong
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