FILM / Jonah Raskin : 'Django Unchained' is Quentin Tarantino in Blackface

Django Unchained:
Quentin Tarantino in Blackface

At times, the movie seems like an advertisement for integration on the bounty hunting circuit, and for friendship between a black and a white man who both kill without compunction.

By Jonah Raskin / The Rag Blog / February 7, 2013

The director, Quentin Tarantino, appears on screen near the end of his new movie, Django Unchained, that has been nominated for several Oscars including best picture, best original screenplay, and best cinematography. In Django Unchained, Tarantino plays the kind of low-life character that he also plays in his classic, Pulp Fiction, which starred Samuel Jackson and John Travolta as a couple of hipster hit men.

Jackson appears in Django Unchained as an old, white-haired servant (yes, an African-American) on a sinister plantation in Mississippi before the American Civil War. He’s as sinister as the white master himself and he dies an agonizing death, as do almost all of the other characters in this retro shoot-‘em-up.

Tarantino makes his actors suffer so, or at least makes them sound as though they’re suffering. They scream and shout and wail as though they’re in extreme pain as they wriggle about bloodstained floors and bloodstained soil. You might think the director was sadistic.

Alas, John Travolta doesn’t make an appearance in this new film, though the two main characters in Django Unchained are hit men as they are in Pulp Fiction. One of them -- Dr. King Schultz -- is German-born; the other -- Django himself -- is a black slave, or rather an ex-slave. Schultz liberates him. He’s the Great Liberator.

For a time, the two men team up to kill outlaws who have prices on their heads and then collect the hefty financial rewards. It’s a good living, though they don’t ever spend it or have the opportunity to enjoy it. At times, the movie seems like an advertisement for integration on the bounty hunting circuit, and for friendship between a black and a white man who kill without compunction.

The bounty hunting life wears thin after a season and the two vicious, albeit virtuous, hit men travel into the belly of the beast of slavery to liberate Django’s slave wife who has a beautiful face, and, on her black back, another kind of beauty, if you can call the scars of a brutal beating beautiful.

Quentin Tarantino’s latest movie is his first set in the American South and it’s the first to have a large cast of African-American actors playing the roles of mostly subservient African-American slaves. Still, in many ways Django Unchained is like many of his previous movies, including Pulp Fiction. Django Unchained offers more pulp fiction -- this time with an historical setting and historical costumes. The dresses are very lovely.

From nearly the first scene to nearly the last, there’s violence on the screen and almost uninterrupted violence all the way through. In that sense, Django Unchained duplicates Pulp Fiction. There are no chase scenes, but there’s a barrage of bullets, buckets of blood, and plenty of unpatriotic gore.

At the end, there’s a big explosion. Django blows up the plantation mansion with its stately white columns and rides off into the night -- not the sunset -- with his wife, whom he has liberated and who speaks German as well as English, but doesn’t seem to have any kind of street smarts.

All on their own, the two carpetbagger gunslingers bring a civil war of their own making to what would soon become the Confederate States of America.

Django’s pal, Dr. Schultz, dies fighting the good fight against the nasty slave owners and for the downtrodden slaves, who don’t lift a black finger to free themselves in this comic melodrama. No, sir, there is no black slave revolt in this picture. The back masses don’t seem to know what freedom is or where to find it. Dr. Schultz has to tell them to follow the North Star to freedom after he gives a group of black men the opportunity to escape bondage.

Here, as in the Westerns of old, it’s the lone gunman who makes a difference, and, though Django’s skin is black, he’s not much different, if at all, from lone white gunmen. He wears a cowboy hat and a holster, rides a horse, carries a gun, and, as one of the characters says of him, he’s “the fastest gun in the South.”

Jamie Foxx plays Django as Samuel Jackson might have played him if he were still a young man. Christoph Waltz plays a wry Dr. Schultz and Leonardo DiCaprio inhabits the role of the white plantation owner, Calvin Candie, a sadistic, sexually perverted Southern Calvinist.

Kerry Washington doesn’t speak much. But she does an admirable job as Broomhilda, Django’s long-suffering wife. Beaten, bound, gagged, and sold down the river, she’s freed by her husband who slays the dragon of slavery -- on one plantation -- and rescues her. She’s the archetypal black maiden; he’s the knight without shining armor but with the virtues of a Christian warrior.

Tarantino offers something for film students, something for lovers of Westerns, and something for his own cult followers. I suppose students and scholars of American history will find scenes to analyze and interpret. The best parts of the movie are pure comedy, as in the very last scene in which one of the characters looks at Django as he rides off, and asks, “Who is that black man?” Those who watched the Lone Ranger on TV will get the reference. Those who love old Westerns will also notice allusions to High Noon.

I found the whole film largely predictable. I knew that Django would rescue his wife and that they would live happily ever after. Surprisingly, I found the torture scenes more graphic and more realistic than the torture scene in Zero Ground Thirty which tracks 10 years or so in the life of the war on terrorism.

Tarantino always was effective depicting both psychological and physical torture. In Django Unchained he shows that he hasn’t lost his touch. Once again, he’s a master, and for all his gestures toward freedom and tolerance, his latest picture feels like yet another exercise in black-faced comedy.

There are no white characters who darken their faces to play black men. But the whole film feels like master Tarantino in blackface, making fun of Hollywood Westerns, Southern crackers, and the kind of Uncle Toms who first appeared in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. How many clichés did I count in Django? There were so many I lost count.

[Jonah Raskin is a professor emeritus at Sonoma State University, a frequent contributor to The Rag Blog, and the author of For the Hell of It: The Life and Times of Abbie Hoffman, and the editor of The Radical Jack London: Writings on War and Revolution. Read more articles by Jonah Raskin on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Sanitizing Black History Every February

Rosa Parks, agitator. Image from Jezebel.
Sanitizing Black history every February

Rosa Parks had a life-long history of activism against injustice, but school children are seldom told the true story about her life of agitation and struggle against oppression.

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / February 5, 2013

I don’t like to read about Black history during February each year because most of what I find is so sanitized. Black history is full of the stuff of human history -- courage, anger, intellect, rebellion, fear, intimidation, foolishness, agitation and, a hundred other descriptors. But what I hear less about than almost anything is agitation.

Dick Gregory used to say that an agitator is that thing in a washing machine that gets the dirt out. Others (notably Jim Hightower) have used that same idea to explain why agitators are needed.

The earliest use of that formulation that I have found is recounted by Mike Miller, a veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, SNCC, and the Industrial Areas Foundation (Saul Alinsky’s organization), in an article about working with SNCC in 1963 in Mississippi:

I went to a mass meeting in Ruleville -- you all know that Ruleville was the home of Fannie Lou Hamer. There were maybe 20, 30 people, but we called that a mass meeting in those days. And at this mass meeting, an old Black man got up, and as he spoke he put an arm up like this, and he started moving it. And he said: "You know" -- his voice was trembling -- "they call you Freedom Riders outside agitators. I got an old style washing machine in my home. It has a thing at the top; it goes back and forth like this." He pointed to his arm. He said: "You know what that thing is called? It's called an agitator. You know what that agitator does? It gets the dirt out.”

The history of Blacks in America is filled with agitators. Of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., was an agitator, but mostly we hear only about his “I Have A Dream” speech. Malcolm X was an agitator, but most of what we hear about him is -- well, we don’t hear much about him in the mainstream media.

But now we have a new book about Rosa Parks that sheds some needed light on the myth that she was just a poor seamstress whose feet were too tired to walk another step when the bus conductor in Montgomery ordered her to give up her seat to a white man.

Charles Blow reviews The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks in The New York Times. The book explains that Rosa Parks had grown up in a family that would not allow its members to be treated as second-class. Parks had been trained for community organization work (agitation) at the Highlander Folk School.

She had encouraged and helped to defend women who had been ordered to give up their bus seats to a white person. She was ready when the bus driver ordered her to do the same, and she refused to move, leading to her arrest and the subsequent Montgomery bus boycott that lasted over a year until the buses were desegregated. She had a life-long history of activism against injustice, but school children are seldom told the true story about her life of agitation and struggle against oppression.

If we go back to the beginning of American slavery, we find many similar stories among Blacks in North America -- stories of rebellion, agitation, and often death. Africans did not go willingly into the slave ships after their capture and detention on the west coast of that continent. These Africans came mostly from the west coast and from two to three hundred miles inland from an area bordered by the Senegal River and what is now Angola.

They were from tropical rain forests and grasslands. They came from tribal backgrounds, as well as from city-states then found in the Niger Delta, and from large, complex kingdoms that had existed for several centuries in the Sudan, with whom Europeans traded. They spoke many different languages and had many different cultural traditions.

The Portuguese began the African slave trade to benefit Portugal about 50 years before slave ships headed for the North American continent. Rebellions on the slave ships led many ship owners to take out what historian Benjamin Quarles has called “revolt insurance.” Beginning in 1522, slave revolts occurred in the Caribbean from Hispaniola to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Martinique, Antigua, Barbados, Jamaica, St. Vincent, and the Virgin Islands, along with a famous one in Saint Dominique (which later became known as Haiti).

By the mid 1700s on the mainland, slaves could be found from Delaware to Texas. In the South, slave owners depended on militias to keep rebellions under control. Thom Hartmann recently explained how this worked :

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who may be planning uprisings.

The same practices were followed elsewhere in the South, where slave patrols kept order among slaves to prevent rebellions and punish those thought to be planning to revolt. Still, slave revolts did occur. Perhaps the largest slave revolt in the continental U.S. was in 1811 near New Orleans. It took both the militias and the U.S. army to quell it.

The unsuccessful revolt planned by Denmark Vesey in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1822 was thwarted by the betrayal of some participants. Slave owners were so fearful that other slaves would learn of Vesey’s plan that a trial record of that history was destroyed so that it could not be seen by slaves or others sympathetic to their cause.

Many Americans have heard of Nat Turner’s rebellion in Virginia, which occurred nine years later, in which about 70 slaves escaped and rampaged from plantation to plantation, killing at least 55 people. Had their ammunition not run out, Turner and his group may have been successful in freeing many slaves, but realistically the odds were stacked against them.

Virginia had over 100,000 men in militias, heavily armed and outfitted, who stood ready to protect the financial interests of the slave owners. It is no wonder that more rebellions did not occur, but when they did, it was because someone was willing to be an agitator against an unjust and inhumane system.

Agitation and its companion -- rebellion -- also made itself known in efforts to escape slavery. Perhaps the most famous agitator for escape to freedom was Harriet Tubman, a Black woman born into slavery. She escaped from slavery when she was 19 and subsequently helped more than 300 other slaves escape.

She reportedly always carried a gun because she had no intention of ever being enslaved again or having the fugitives she helped enslaved. For Tubman, she would either be free or dead: “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man would take me alive.”

Another escaped slave who became one of the most famous Black people of his time, both before and after the Civil War, was Frederick Douglass, who was a lecturer, newspaper editor, and writer. Perhaps Douglass’s most famous words are these:

The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of struggle... If there is not struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without the thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

While I’ve barely scratched the surface of the Black agitators who helped move this country forward and helped it escape its disgusting past, we need always remember that progress does not come without the agitators. Especially during Black history month, we should remember this lesson, and teach our children, as well as the adults, about our agitators, especially our Black agitators.

We need to stop whitewashing these agitators, sentimentalizing and sanitizing what they did, and acknowledge that it was their agitation that made the difference in our struggle to achieve freedom, equality, and justice for all people -- whether they are black, brown, yellow, white, or a blend of colors.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Thom Hartmann : The Second Amendment Was Ratified to Preserve Slavery

Slave patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, enforced discipline on slaves in the antebellum South. Image from America's Black Holocaust Museum.
The Second Amendment was
ratified to preserve slavery

Every Southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well-regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

By Thom Hartmann / Truthout / January 23, 2013

The real reason the Second Amendment was ratified, and why it says "State" instead of "Country" (the Framers knew the difference -- see the 10th Amendment), was to preserve the slave patrol militias in the Southern states, which was necessary to get Virginia's vote. Founders Patrick Henry, George Mason, and James Madison were totally clear on that... and we all should be too.

In the beginning, there were the militias. In the South, they were also called the "slave patrols," and they were regulated by the states.

In Georgia, for example, a generation before the American Revolution, laws were passed in 1755 and 1757 that required all plantation owners or their male white employees to be members of the Georgia Militia, and for those armed militia members to make monthly inspections of the quarters of all slaves in the state. The law defined which counties had which armed militias and even required armed militia members to keep a keen eye out for slaves who might be planning uprisings.

As Dr. Carl T. Bogus wrote for the University of California Law Review in 1998,

The Georgia statutes required patrols, under the direction of commissioned militia officers, to examine every plantation each month and authorized them to search "all Negro Houses for offensive Weapons and Ammunition" and to apprehend and give twenty lashes to any slave found outside plantation grounds.

It's the answer to the question raised by the character played by Leonardo DiCaprio in Django Unchained when he asks, "Why don't they just rise up and kill the whites?" If the movie were real, it would have been a purely rhetorical question, because every Southerner of the era knew the simple answer: Well-regulated militias kept the slaves in chains.

Sally E. Haden, in her book Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas, notes that, "Although eligibility for the Militia seemed all-encompassing, not every middle-aged white male Virginian or Carolinian became a slave patroller." There were exemptions so "men in critical professions" like judges, legislators, and students could stay at their work. Generally, though, she documents how most Southern men between ages 18 and 45 -- including physicians and ministers -- had to serve on slave patrol in the militia at one time or another in their lives.

And slave rebellions were keeping the slave patrols busy. By the time the Constitution was ratified, hundreds of substantial slave uprisings had occurred across the South. Blacks outnumbered whites in large areas, and the state militias were used to both prevent and to put down slave uprisings. As Dr. Bogus points out, slavery can only exist in the context of a police state, and the enforcement of that police state was the explicit job of the militias.

If the anti-slavery folks in the North had figured out a way to disband -- or even move out of the state -- those Southern militias, the police state of the South would collapse. And, similarly, if the North were to invite into military service the slaves of the South, then they could be emancipated, which would collapse the institution of slavery, and the Southern economic and social systems, altogether.

These two possibilities worried Southerners like James Monroe, George Mason (who owned over 300 slaves), and the southern Christian evangelical, Patrick Henry (who opposed slavery on principle, but also opposed freeing slaves).

Their main concern was that Article 1, Section 8 of the newly-proposed Constitution, which gave the federal government the power to raise and supervise a militia, could also allow that federal militia to subsume their state militias and change them from slavery-enforcing institutions into something that could even, one day, free the slaves.

This was not an imagined threat. Famously, 12 years earlier, during the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, Lord Dunsmore offered freedom to slaves who could escape and join his forces. "Liberty to Slaves" was stitched onto their jacket pocket flaps. During the War, British General Henry Clinton extended the practice in 1779. And numerous freed slaves served in General Washington's army.

Thus, Southern legislators and plantation owners lived not just in fear of their own slaves rebelling, but also in fear that their slaves could be emancipated through military service.

At the ratifying convention in Virginia in 1788, Henry laid it out:

Let me here call your attention to that part [Article 1, Section 8 of the proposed Constitution] which gives the Congress power to provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States...

By this, sir, you see that their control over our last and best defence is unlimited. If they neglect or refuse to discipline or arm our militia, they will be useless: the states can do neither... this power being exclusively given to Congress. The power of appointing officers over men not disciplined or armed is ridiculous; so that this pretended little remains of power left to the states may, at the pleasure of Congress, be rendered nugatory.

George Mason expressed a similar fear:

The militia may be here destroyed by that method which has been practised in other parts of the world before; that is, by rendering them useless, by disarming them. Under various pretences, Congress may neglect to provide for arming and disciplining the militia; and the state governments cannot do it, for Congress has an exclusive right to arm them [under this proposed Constitution]...

Henry then bluntly laid it out:

If the country be invaded, a state may go to war, but cannot suppress [slave] insurrections [under this new Constitution]. If there should happen an insurrection of slaves, the country cannot be said to be invaded. They cannot, therefore, suppress it without the interposition of Congress... Congress, and Congress only [under this new Constitution], can call forth the militia."

And why was that such a concern for Patrick Henry?

"In this state," he said,

there are two hundred and thirty-six thousand blacks, and there are many in several other states. But there are few or none in the Northern States... May Congress not say, that every black man must fight? Did we not see a little of this last war? We were not so hard pushed as to make emancipation general; but acts of Assembly passed that every slave who would go to the army should be free.

Patrick Henry was also convinced that the power over the various state militias given the federal government in the new Constitution could be used to strip the slave states of their slave-patrol militias. He knew the majority attitude in the North opposed slavery, and he worried they'd use the Constitution to free the South's slaves (a process then called "Manumission").

The abolitionists would, he was certain, use that power (and, ironically, this is pretty much what Abraham Lincoln ended up doing):

"[T]hey will search that paper [the Constitution], and see if they have power of manumission," said Henry.

And have they not, sir? Have they not power to provide for the general defence and welfare? May they not think that these call for the abolition of slavery? May they not pronounce all slaves free, and will they not be warranted by that power?

This is no ambiguous implication or logical deduction. The paper speaks to the point: they have the power in clear, unequivocal terms, and will clearly and certainly exercise it.

He added: "This is a local matter, and I can see no propriety in subjecting it to Congress."

James Madison, the "Father of the Constitution" and a slaveholder himself, basically called Patrick Henry paranoid.

I was struck with surprise," Madison said, "when I heard him express himself alarmed with respect to the emancipation of slaves... There is no power to warrant it, in that paper [the Constitution]. If there be, I know it not."

But the Southern fears wouldn't go away.

Patrick Henry even argued that Southerner's "property" (slaves) would be lost under the new Constitution, and the resulting slave uprising would be less than peaceful or tranquil:

"In this situation," Henry said to Madison, "I see a great deal of the property of the people of Virginia in jeopardy, and their peace and tranquility gone."

So Madison, who had (at Jefferson's insistence) already begun to prepare proposed amendments to the Constitution, changed his first draft of one that addressed the militia issue to make sure it was unambiguous that the Southern states could maintain their slave patrol militias.

His first draft for what became the Second Amendment had said:

The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed; a well armed, and well regulated militia being the best security of a free country [emphasis mine]: but no person religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.

But Henry, Mason, and others wanted Southern states to preserve their slave-patrol militias independent of the federal government. So Madison changed the word "country" to the word "state," and redrafted the Second Amendment into today's form:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State [emphasis mine], the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Little did Madison realize that one day in the future weapons-manufacturing corporations, newly defined as "persons" by a Supreme Court some have called dysfunctional, would use his slave patrol militia amendment to protect their "right" to manufacture and sell assault weapons used to murder schoolchildren.

Copyright, Truthout. Reprinted with permission of the author.

[Thom Hartmann is a New York Times bestselling Project Censored Award-winning author and host of a nationally syndicated progressive radio talk show. You can learn more about Thom Hartmann at his website and find out what stations broadcast his radio program. He also now has a daily independent television program, The Big Picture, syndicated by FreeSpeech TV, RT TV, and 200 community TV stations. You can also listen or watch Thom over the Internet.]

Editor's note: This article has stirred up something of a storm since it was originally posted at Truthout on January 15. Actor Danny Glover drew the ire of conservative student groups at Texas A&M after he referred to Hartmann's premise during an event honoring Martin Luther King, and film critic Roger Ebert upset some folks when he tweeted that "The Second Amendment was ratified to preserve slavery." Legal scholar Paul Finkelman rebutted Hartmann's argument in an article published at The Root on January 21. But the scholarship of Dr. Carl T. Bogus, writing in the UC Davis Law Review and reported on by Mother Jones, and of author Sally E. Haden, would appear to back up Hartmann's contention.

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Harry Targ : The 'Unfinished Revolution' of the Emancipation Proclamation

Emancipation from Freedmen's viewpoint. Illustration from Harper's Weekly, 1865. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The Emancipation Proclamation:
The 'Unfinished Revolution'

The candidacy of President Obama in 2012 offers a continuation of the struggle for political rights against the most sustained racist assaults by neoliberals, conservatives, and tea party activists since the days of segregation.

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / September 25, 2012

"That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free… -- President Abraham Lincoln, “The Emancipation Proclamation,” January 1, 1863.

The Purdue University Black Cultural Center on September 21, 2012, organized a panel honoring the 150th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, the final version of which was issued by the President on January 1, 1863.

The proclamation declared slaves in the states rebelling against the United States to be free. It did not apply to those border states which had not seceded from the Union. In those states 750,000 slaves were yet to be liberated.

Celebration of political anniversaries provides an important opportunity to better understand the past, how the past connects to the present, and what needs to be done to connect the present to the future. As a participant on this panel I was stimulated to reflect on the place and significance of the Proclamation and the centrality of slavery and racism to American history.

First, as Marx suggested at the time, the rise of capitalism as a mode of production was inextricably connected to slavery and the institutionalization of racism. He described the rise of capitalism out of feudalism and the centrality of racism and slavery to that process:

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black skins, signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief moments of primitive accumulation (Capital, Volume 1).

Second, the Emancipation Proclamation began a political revolution, abolishing slavery in Confederate states, but it did not embrace full citizenship rights for all African Americans nor did it support economic emancipation.

The historical literature documents that while Lincoln’s views on slavery moved in a progressive direction, the President remained more committed to preserving the Union than abolishing slavery. Until the Proclamation, he harbored the view that African-Americans should emigrate to Africa, the Caribbean, or Central America to establish new lives.

As historian Eric Foner wrote: “Which was the real Lincoln -- the racist or the opponent of slavery? The unavoidable answer is: both.” In short, President Lincoln, an iconic figure in American history thought and acted in contradictory ways.

Third, Lincoln’s growing opposition to slavery during his political career and his presidency was influenced to a substantial degree by the abolitionist movement. As an influential participant in that movement Frederick Douglass had a particular impact on Lincoln’s thinking.

Foner points out that on a whole variety of issues “Lincoln came to occupy positions the abolitionists first staked out.” He continues: “The destruction of slavery during the war offers an example, as relevant today as in Lincoln’s time, of how the combination of an engaged social movement and an enlightened leader can produce progressive social change.”

Fourth, the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation was never fully achieved. It constituted an “unfinished revolution,” the creation of political rights for former slaves but not economic justice. The former slaves remained dependent on the plantation system of agriculture; landless sharecroppers beholden to former slave owners.

Fifth, post-civil war reconstruction began to institutionalize the political liberation of African Americans. For a time Blacks and whites began to create new political institutions that represented the common interests of the economically dispossessed. But the collaboration of Northern industrial interests and Southern plantation owners led to the destruction of Reconstruction era change and a return to the neo-slave system of Jim Crow segregation.

Even the “unfinished revolution” was temporarily crushed.

Sixth, over the next 100 years African Americans, workers, women, and other marginalized groups continued the struggle to reconstruct the political freedoms implied in the Emancipation Proclamation and temporarily institutionalized in Reconstruction America. The struggle for democracy culminated in the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, and the rising of Latinos, women, and gays and lesbians.

Finally, the contradictions of victories achieved and the escalation of racist reactions since the mid-1960s continues. And, most vitally, the unfinished revolution continues. The question of the intersection of race and class remains as gaps between rich and poor in wealth, income, and political power grow.

In this historic context, the candidacy of President Obama in 2012 offers a continuation of the struggle for political rights against the most sustained racist assaults by neoliberals, conservatives, and tea party activists that have existed since the days of segregation.

At the same time Obama’s reelection alone, while vital to the progressive trajectory of American history since 1863, will not complete the revolution. The need for social movements to address the “class question,”or economic justice, along with protecting the political gains that have been achieved, will remain critical to our future.

One hundred and fifty years after the Emancipation Proclamation the struggle for democracy, political empowerment, and the end to class exploitation, remains for this generation to advance.

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his book from Changemaker Press which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : The Confederate State of Texas, 1846-1860

Between 12,000 and 15,000 Texas lost their lives in the Civil War. Painting from the Texas Civil War Museum.
The hidden history of Texas

Part VI: The Confederate State of Texas, 1860-1865

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / October 26, 2011

[This is Part 6 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

In 1861, the slave-owning Anglo political leaders of Texas decided that the state should secede from the United States and join the Confederacy during the U.S. Civil War.

According to Alwyn Barr's Black Texans, “as their declaration of causes repeatedly proclaimed, white Texans seceded in 1861, primarily to defend `the servitude of the African to the white race.’” And “as Union armies pushed into Arkansas and Louisiana,” the “slaveholders from each state became refugees to Texas” and “they brought their slaves,” according to Barr's “Black Texans During the Civil War," an essay that appeared in Donald Willett and Stephen Curley’s Invisible Texans.

As a result, “by 1864, the slave population” in Texas “probably grew to 250,000.” In 1862, in Texas’s Smith County, authorities “arrested over 40 slaves and hanged one after hearing rumors of a plot to revolt,” according to the same essay.

White opponents of Texas seceding from the United States to join the Confederacy who lived in Texas were also repressed between 1861 and 1865. As Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas recalled, “some of the more vocal Unionists had to leave Texas” and “James P. Newcomb, editor of the San Antonio Alamo-Express, fled to New Mexico after a mob attacked his press.”

Although most white Texans “continued throughout the war to support the Confederacy as they had supported secession in the first place,” according to Gone To Texas, some organized support for the U.S. government’s Lincoln Administration and the cause of the Union Army did develop inside Texas during the Civil War. As the same book recalled:

Small groups of Unionists living in regions that voted against secession organized internal opposition to the Confederacy... Germans in the Hill County northwest of San Antonio formed a Union Loyal League with its own military companies... In the Spring of 1862 Confederate officials sent Texas troops into the region to disband the military companies and enforce the conscription law, whereupon 61 of the Unionists, mostly Germans led by Frederick "Fritz" Tegener, decided to go to Mexico and from there join the United States Army.

They… were overtaken by a detachment of 91 Texas Partisan Rangers... while camped on the Nueces River. Attacking before dawn on Aug. 10, 1862, the Confederates killed 19 of the Germans and captured nine who were badly wounded. The remaining Unionists escaped... After the battle, state troops executed the nine wounded Germans, and nine of those who escaped were caught and killed before they reached Mexico...

Armed Anglo supporters of the Confederacy in Texas also repressed supporters of the North and the Union in Cooke County between 1861 and 1865. As Gone To Texas notes:

In Cooke County... the passage of conscription led to the formation of a secret Peace Party that opposed the draft and supported the Union. Rumors that the Peace Party planned to... foment a general uprising led to the arrest on October [1862] of more than 150 suspected insurrectionists by state troops...

An extralegal "Citizen’s Court"… found seven leading Unionists guilty of treason and sentenced them to death. At this point, a mob... lynched 14 more of the prisoners and killed two who tried to escape...When unknown assassins killed Col. Young [of the Eleventh Texas Cavalry]…the jury then sentenced another 19 men to hang, bringing the total number of victims to 42. Texas authorities condoned this "Great Hanging at Gainesville"...

The military conscription law that provoked more organized internal opposition in Hill County and Cooke County, Texas, to the South’s Confederate Government had been passed in April 1862 by the Confederate Congress. As a result, all white males in Texas who were between 13 and 46 in 1860 -- except for any white males whose work involved them in supervising 20 or more slaves -- were now in danger of being drafted into the Confederate Army for as long as the U.S. Civil War continued.

So, not surprisingly, “nearly 5,000 Texans deserted from Confederate and state service, and an unknown number avoided conscription” by hiding “in isolated areas throughout the state -- for example, the Big Thicket in Hardin County and the swamp bottoms of northeast Texas” or “in the northwestern frontier counties,” according to Gone To Texas. And, according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History, “draft-dodging was especially common among Austin’s unionists.”

But slightly more than 50 percent of the white males in Texas who were subject to the Confederate government’s draft during the Civil War were unable to avoid being drafted, and between 1861 and 1865 between 60,000 to 70,000 white men in Texas served in either the Confederate Army or in Texas state military units. And thousands of these military conscripts from Texas died during the U.S. Civil War. As Gone To Texas observes:

Approximately 20 to 25 percent of Texas soldiers died while in the army. More than half of these deaths resulted from a variety of illnesses... Deaths in battle and Union prisoner-of-war camps accounted for the other lives lost. The final death toll can be estimated at between 12,000 and 15,000 men, most of them in their twenties and thirties.

According to Austin: An Illustrated History, Texas’s “loss `in bone and blood’” during the Civil War was “proportionately higher than that of any northern state.”

While between 12,000 and 15,000 people in Texas lost their lives as a result of the Civil War, some other Texans apparently made good money between 1861 and 1865. As W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction 1860-1880 recalls:

Texas was one of the Southern states that had considerable prosperity during the war. She was outside the area of conflict; excellent crops were raised and slave labor was plentiful. Many slaves were deported to Texas for protection... so that Texas could furnish food and raw material for the Confederate States; and on the other hand, when the blockade was strengthened, Texas became the highway for sending cotton and other goods to Europe by way of Mexico.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Lamar W. Hankins : Free Speech and the Texas Confederate License Plate

Speciality license plate proposed by the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Image from the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles.
Texas Confederate Battle Flag:
License plates, racism, and free speech

By Lamar W. Hankins / The Rag Blog / October 25, 2011

At first glance, the effort by the Sons of Confederate Veterans to have a Confederate Battle Flag license plate approved by the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles may seem like a conflict between offensive speech and free speech, but the matter is more complicated than that simple contrast suggests.

By way of disclosure, I am a descendant of Confederate soldiers, but I have never considered participating in a group that sought in any way to promote that war as a brave, noble, and just venture. To me, the Confederacy engaged in treason against the United States. A founder of Texas, Sam Houston, opposed secession, but was overridden by those concerned with the economics of slavery, a practice that permeated at least half of what is now the State of Texas.

As recently as 30 years ago, I knew where old slave quarters were located in Georgetown, Texas. The artifacts of slavery can be found all over the eastern half of the state, along with Confederate relics. These reminders of a tragic past are not a part of history in which I take any pride.

The Confederate Battle Flag has been to me a symbol less of the Confederacy than of the Ku Klux Klan. Rightly or wrongly, whenever I see that symbol, I assume the person displaying it is racist. I avoid such people if I can.

But even if that flag had never been used by those opposed to civil rights, I would not see it as something to revere. Why would I revere a symbol of treason that is inextricably tied to the maintenance and promotion of slavery unless I favored those positions? I don’t want to honor my progenitors for their willingness to go to war against the United States of America to preserve a system that permitted the owning of other human beings.

Bravery and courage on behalf of folly are nothing to be proud of. Confederate Texans weren’t defending Texas, as Texas Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson asserts in support of the Confederate Battle Flag license plate. They were trying to destroy the Union. They set in place animosities that linger to this day.

Their insurrection was a terrible mistake, and I’d like to keep that mistake in perspective, not celebrate it. But that is a personal choice, deeply rooted in the right of all Americans to engage in speech of their own choosing, no matter how offensive it is to others. But the Texas organizational vanity license plate system creates a problem even broader than whether the Confederate Battle Flag should appear on a Texas license plate.

The way the Texas Legislature chose to establish organizational vanity plates is at least foolish, if not unconstitutional, but it was another way to raise some money for the state without raising taxes, an approach dear to the heart of almost all legislators. If a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization wants to have its own organizational vanity plate, it must find a state agency to sponsor the vanity plate or get the Department of Motor Vehicles to sponsor it. Once a cooperative state agency is found, the application is presented to the Department for approval.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans secured the sponsorship of Patterson’s Texas General Land Office for its application for their vanity license plate. The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles license board reached a tie vote (4-4) when the matter came up for consideration this past summer, so for now the application has not been approved. But Gov. Rick Perry has appointed a ninth person to the board, so if it comes up for another vote, the matter could remain the same if the new appointee abstains, or be decided one way or the other.

The problem with this system is that an organization is required to get a governmental agency to support its application. This requirement is deeply offensive because it will usually, if not always, assure that organizations promoting controversial views will not be able to have organizational vanity plates.

If a group favoring a woman’s right to choose an abortion wants an organizational vanity plate that has a logo that says “Support a woman’s right to choose,” which governmental agency will be its sponsor? I can’t imagine that any state agency would do so. What if an atheist group wants a vanity plate that says “You can be good without God”? Is there any state agency that would ever sponsor that message?

What about a socialist group that wants to promote its message “Jesus was a Socialist”? No state agency would touch that one. If the Texas Medical Association wanted a special license plate that read “Support Medical Marijuana,” I doubt that any state agency would be the sponsor. And what about a plate that honors the service of conscientious objectors who have done alternate service in lieu of serving in the military? About a dozen specialty plates honor veterans of various sorts, but none honor conscientious objectors.

A few other ideas that would not likely find support from any Texas government agency are “Jews for Jesus,” “Ban all abortions,” “Keep the races pure,” “Republicans for interposition and nullification,” “Wives should obey their husbands,” “Government prayer pleases God,” “The Bible is infallible,” “Gays violate God’s law,” “Evolution is a lie,” and dozens of other bumper-sticker thoughts supported by one group or another, but not popular with everyone.

The Texas organizational vanity license plate scheme discriminates against unpopular viewpoints, just as it may discriminate against the views of the Texas Sons of Confederate Veterans. It’s a tossup right now just how unpopular their viewpoint is, about the only content standard the Department has to follow.

The law provides in part: “The department may refuse to create a new specialty license plate if the design might be offensive to any member of the public, ... or for any other reason established by rule.” The Department could not point me to any such rules it has adopted regarding content (though there are rules about size and legibility), and I could find no content rules in the Texas Administrative Code, where such rules would be published.

Many specialty plates are offensive to me, and I’m a member of the public. There is one for the Boy Scouts, for instance. I find the Boy Scouts license plate offensive because the Boy Scouts discriminate against atheists, agnostics, and gays. I don’t like the ones with religious messages: “God Bless America,” “God Bless Texas,” “Knights of Columbus,” and “Texas Masons.” But apparently the Texas Department of Motor Vehicles didn’t take my offense into consideration, in spite of the law.

With such an amorphous, broad, non-specific standard, discrimination on the basis of the message proposed by some organizations is inevitable. In fact, I don’t see any way to avoid content discrimination on proposed speech under this scheme.

It is never permissible for the government or an agency of government to censor the views of its citizens. To arbitrate the views we can express on license plates is an improper role for government to play. But short of eliminating organizational vanity license plates, there may be a solution to this constitutional dilemma.

The Texas Department of Motor Vehicles could produce a generic design that leaves a small block of an appropriate size into which anyone with such a plate could paste whatever message the person chooses. In this way, all Texans -- including the Texas Sons of Confederate Veterans -- would be free to let everyone know their position on any issue, no matter how offensive or how popular. With this arrangement, the government can make some extra money and the Texas Sons of Confederate Veterans should be as pleased as a hog in mud.

[Lamar W. Hankins, a former San Marcos, Texas, city attorney, is also a columnist for the San Marcos Mercury. This article © Freethought San Marcos, Lamar W. Hankins. Read more articles by Lamar W. Hankins on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : The Slave State of Texas, 1846-1860

Newspaper notice of runaway slave jailed in Bastrop County, Texas, 1855. Image from AfroTexan.com.
The hidden history of Texas

Part V: The Slave State of Texas, 1846-1860

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / October 5, 2011

[This is Part 5 of Bob Feldman's Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

Within a few months after Texas became part of the United States, U.S. troops under General Zachary Taylor’s command were already establishing the disputed Rio Grande boundary line as the new southern border between Texas and Mexico; and some U.S. troops were being sent across the Rio Grande, even further south into Mexican territory, by late March 1846.

After a Mexican cavalry unit ambushed some of the U.S. troops that apparently had crossed the Rio Grande in a provocative way on April 25, 1846 (killing 11 U.S. troops, wounding six, and taking 63 more as prisoners), U.S. President Polk used the incident as a pretext to get the U.S. Congress to declare war on Mexico on May 13, 1846.

And after U.S. military troops occupied Mexico City on Sept. 14, 1847 (during a war in which 13,283 U.S. troops died and 4,152 were wounded), the Mexican government was eventually forced to agree to sign the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo on February 2, 1848. As a result of this treaty, “Mexico gave up all claims to Texas," "agreed to a new frontier with the United States," and "lost two-fifths of her territory,” according to Robert R. Miller’s book, Mexico: A History.

In 1847, a year after Texas became a state within the USA, around 142,000 people -- not counting its remaining Native Americans -- were living in Texas. Of the 142,000 non-indigenous residents of Texas in 1847, nearly 39,000 were African-American slaves. Although around 3,000 slaves escaped into Mexico from Texas between 1836 and 1851 (and 1,000 more African-American slaves also escaped into Mexico from Texas between 1851 and 1855), the overall number of enslaved African-Americans who lived in Texas dramatically increased between 1847 and 1860. As Professor Alwyn Barr noted in his essay, “Black Texans During the Civil War”:

Further immigration of slaveholding settlers from the United States and the development of a slave trade by land and water from the southern states brought the slave population in Texas to 182,566 by 1860, along with a small group of free Blacks who numbered less than a thousand... African Americans formed 30 percent of the Texas population on the eve of the Civil War in the Anglo-dominated region that extended a little west of Fort Worth, Austin, and San Antonio...

At least 25 percent of Anglo families owned slaves in Texas. Over 2,000 Texans held 20 or more bondsmen... 60 families owned 100 or more slaves. By 1860 David and Robert Mills stood at the pinnacle of the planter class with 344 bondsmen. Slaves formed majorities of the population in 13 counties... The life span for slaves averaged about 50 years, some five years less than for whites...

Around 95 percent of Texas’s black slaves in 1860 worked without pay on either Texas farms or Texas plantations. According to Alwyn Barr’s Black Texans, “the vast majority of slaves in Texas lived in rural areas.” But “over a thousand” black slaves also “resided in both Galveston and Houston by 1860,” and African-American slaves who were owned mainly by white businessmen and upper-middleclass professionals also lived “in Austin, San Antonio, and other large towns,” according to the same book.

In Austin, for example, according to David Humphrey’s Austin: An Illustrated History:

Slavery was an integral part of the life of the town. Of Austin’s 3,500 inhabitants in 1860, about 1,000 were slaves. While free blacks numbered less than a dozen, enslaved blacks formed almost 30 percent of the population, a greater percentage than in such Texas cities as Houston and Galveston.

More than a third of Austin’s Anglo families owned slaves. Among the town’s prosperous lawyers, merchants, doctors, ministers, and high-government officials, slave-owning was the rule rather than the exception. A handful, such as Episcopal Bishop Alexander Gregg, postmaster William Rust, and physician John Alexander, owned more than 20 slaves...

Since most Spanish-speaking residents of Austin had been expelled by a vigilante committee of Anglo residents of Austin in October 1854, only a few Mexican-Americans still lived in Austin in 1860.

Between 1846 and 1860, the total number of people living in Texas -- not counting the remaining Native American residents -- increased by around 325 percent, to 604,215. Around 75 percent of the people who lived in Texas in 1860 were farmers; and about 75 percent of the 420,891 white people who lived in Texas in 1860 were headed by settlers from the Southern states.

But among the white residents who weren’t from the Southern states, about 20,000 were German-born, some of whom -- like Adolph Douai -- were political refugees from the suppressed 1848 revolutionary movement in Germany. Coincidentally, the politically radical Douai was one of the first known Marxists to live in Texas.

According to Herbert Aptheker’s 1989 book, Abolitionism: A Revolutionary Movement, in the early 1850s Douai began publishing the San Antonio Zeiutung -- “which described itself as a social-democratic newspaper.” But “within one year of its existence, the Austin State Times (19 May 1854) was suggesting: `The contiguity of the San Antonio River to the Zeitung, we think suggests the suppression of that paper; pitch in.’" And “a year later, the paper closed and Douai fled for his life to Philadelphia,” according to Aptheker’s book.

With a population of 8,235, San Antonio was the largest city in Texas in 1860. The second-largest was Galveston, whose population was 7,307. Only 4,800 people lived in Houston, 3,500 in Austin, and 500 in Dallas.

Nothing much was manufactured inside Texas in 1860, but Texas was the 5th-largest cotton-producing state in the United States; and 90 percent of the cotton grown in Texas was produced by Texas farmers or Texas plantation owners who owned slaves.

About 75 percent of the African-American slaves in Texas then were owned by the wealthiest 15 percent of the people, while the poor whites of Texas -- who composed about 25 percent of its white Anglo population by 1860 -- only owned 1 percent of the property. So by 1860, not surprisingly, around 67 percent of all state and local political offices in Texas were occupied by Texas property owners who owned slaves.

But according to W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880, “the division of the planters and poor whites was less distinct” in Texas “than in many other Southern states” in 1860, and “there was plenty of rich land” where “the poorest white men could get a start.”

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : The Alamo and the Republic of Texas

Battle of the Alamo. Art via Son of the South.
The hidden history of Texas

Part 3: The 1827-1836 years under Mexican rule/2

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / September 7, 2011

[This is the second segment of Part 3 of Bob Feldman's new Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

After Mexican President and General Santa Anna ordered his brother-in-law -- Mexican General Martin Perfecto de Cos -- to move more than 700 government troops into Texas in September 1835, the predominantly Anglo rebels opened fire on some of these Mexican Army troops in October 1835 in Gonzales, Texas.

And “by early November 1835, the rebellion had defeated Mexican forces everywhere except in San Antonio,” according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas. The following month, on Dec. 5, 1835, the armed Texas rebels also defeated Mexican General Cos’s troops in San Antonio and thus gained control of that city.

In early 1836 Santa Anna gathered an army of 6,000 Mexican troops and ordered 3,000 of these troops to march toward San Antonio in late February 1836. In response, the Anglo rebel leaders ordered San Antonio evacuated -- except for the armed men under William Travis’s command (later joined by additional volunteers) that included at least eight armed men with Spanish surnames and a few non-combatant civilian family members and African-American slaves.

The armed men and additional volunteers under Travis's command -- and the noncombatant civilians who were not evacuated -- stayed behind in an abandoned Franciscan mission, The Alamo, that had been converted into a fort.

Some facts about what occurred at the Alamo remain in dispute, but the following appears to be accurate. For 10 days, Santa Anna’s troops besieged the Alamo and demanded that the armed men inside, most of whom were Anglo rebels, surrender unconditionally. But when Travis and his armed group refused to surrender, Mexican President Santa Anna ordered his troops to attack the Alamo on March 6, 1836.

As a result, 600 Mexican troops were killed and all of the estimated 189 armed combatants who remained in the Alamo at that time were killed by the Mexican troops. A few noncombatant civilians inside the Alamo survived the battle, as did the few men under Travis's command who had left the Alamo as couriers between late February and March 6, 1836.

After the battle at the Alamo Texas rebel groups began to take up the battle cry, “Remember the Alamo!” in their subsequent armed clashes with Mexican federal government troops. Meanwhile, a convention of rebels at Washington-on-the-Brazos had, on March 2, 1836, declared Texas to be the independent “Republic of Texas," with David G. Burnet, a land speculator with the Galveston Bay & Texas Land Company, as its first president.

Coincidentally, both the commander of the white Anglo rebel troops in the Alamo, William Travis, and one of the most famous defenders of the Alamo, Jim Bowie, were apparently either involved in the slave trade or at least owned slaves (as did former Tennessee Governor Sam Houston, one of the leaders of the Anglo settler revolt of 1835-1836 that led to the creation of the independent Republic of Texas).

As Alwyn Barr wrote in an essay, titled “Black Texans During the Civil War,” that appeared in a 2003 book called Invisible Texans: Women and Minorities in Texas edited by Donald Willett and Stephen Curley:

Anglo-American immigrants from the United States brought with them Black slaves, whose numbers had risen to about 5,000 when Texans revolted against Mexico in 1836... James Bowie and James Fannin had smuggled slaves into Texas, while Sam Houston and William B. Travis both owned bondsmen. Slaves represented at least 15 percent of the population in the new Republic of Texas.

So, not surprisingly, the March 1836 Constitution of the new independent Republic of Texas was a pro-slavery document that legalized slavery in Texas and reversed the legal ban on the importation of slaves into Texas which the Mexican Congress had enacted in 1830. As Gone To Texas observed:

Section 9 of the General Provisions... guaranteed that people held as slaves in Texas would remain in servitude and that future emigrants to the republic could bring slaves with them. Furthermore, no free black could live in Texas without the approval of [the Republic of Texas’s] congress, and any slave freed without the approval of congress had to leave the republic. Most of the leaders of the Texas Revolution were southerners and the new republic would protect their "Peculiar Institution”...

After the fall of the Alamo, the armed conflict between the separatist Texas rebels and the Mexican government’s troops only lasted another six weeks. In late March 1836, a unit of 365 Texas rebels (under James Fannin’s command) was surrounded by a much larger number of Mexican Army cavalry troops (under Mexican General Jose de Urrea) near Goliad, Texas. Then, in accordance with Mexico’s recently-passed “piracy” law, Santa Anna ordered all 365 Texas rebels executed on March 27, 1836, following the surrender of Fannin and his unit to General Urrea’s cavalry.

But on April 21, 1836, 800 armed Texas rebels, under former Tennessee Governor Sam Houston’s command, attacked 1,400 troops of Santa Anna’s Mexican Army near the San Jacinto River, killing 630 of Santa Anna’s troops and capturing another 733. And the following day Houston’s Texas separatist troops captured Mexican President Santa Anna, himself.

While he was held as a prisoner by Texas rebel troops, Santa Anna was forced to sign the Treaty of Velasco on May 14, 1836, in which he agreed to withdraw all Mexican troops to the other side of the Rio Grande. In addition, the Rio Grande was made the independent Republic of Texas’s new southern boundary -- although when it was part of the Mexican state of Coahuila y Texas, the southern boundary of Texas was actually considered further north on the Nueces River.

Not surprisingly, the Treaty of Velasco that Santa Anna was forced to sign while imprisoned was subsequently repudiated by the Mexican government and by Santa Anna (after he was finally released nine months later and sent back to Veracruz, Mexico on a U.S. warship by U.S. President Andrew Jackson). The Mexican government refused to recognize the independence of Texas and the separatist Republic of Texas or to agree that Texas’s land was no longer a part of Mexico’s territory until 1848.

Following the signing of the Treaty of Velasco in May 1836 and the withdrawal of Mexican troops, the Anglo settler-colonist leaders of the 1835-36 separatist “Texas Revolution” almost immediately tried to persuade the U.S. government to annex their newly independent “Republic of Texas.” So, not surprisingly, Northern opponents of slavery, like Benjamin Lundy and U.S. Congressional Representative John Quincy Adams, insisted that the Texas “revolution had resulted from a conspiracy to add more slave territory to the Union,” according to Gone To Texas.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Hidden History: Slavery in 'Coahuila y Tejas'

Mexico in 1825, including the state of Coahuila y Tejas. Image from Wikimedia Commons.
The hidden history of Texas

Part 3: The 1827-1836 years under Mexican rule

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / August 24, 2011

[This is the third installment of Bob Feldman's new Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

By 1830 legalized slavery was prohibited in most states of Mexico and in some northern states in the United States. Yet legalized slavery in Texas was not permanently abolished until the middle of the 1860s.

Between 1827 and 1829, both state and federal government authorities in Mexico continued their efforts to end the enslavement of African-Americans in Mexico many years before the enslavement of African-Americans was finally ended in either the United States or Texas, following the U.S. Civil War of the early 1860s.

Article 15 of the Coahuila y Tejas State Constitution of 1827 stated that “No one shall be born a slave, and after six months the introduction of slaves under any pretext” in Texas “shall not be permitted.” And on Sept. 15, 1829, Mexican President Vicente Guerrero issued a decree that emancipated all slaves within the Republic of Mexico.

On Dec. 2, 1829, however, the Anglo settlers who lived in the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas and owned more than 1,000 African-American slaves, were then legally allowed to ignore Mexican President Guerrero’s Sept. 15, 1829 emancipation decree and to continue to redefine their imported slaves as “indentured servants,” in order to evade the 1824 Mexican law that prohibited the further importation of slaves into Mexico.

But on April 6, 1830 Mexico’s Congress passed another law which more strictly prohibited importation of more slaves into Texas under any guise by the Anglo settlers.

In 1830 the number of Spanish-speaking Mexicans who lived in Texas (and mostly earned their living as ranchers and small farmers) numbered 4,000, while the number of English-speaking Anglo settlers who lived in Texas (usually as either slave-owning cotton plantation owners or non-slave-owning white farmers) numbered 10,000.

So the Mexican government decided it would no longer allow more Anglo settler-colonists -- who were mostly into establishing an economic system in Texas based on slave labor and exporting cotton -- to immigrate to Mexico. As a result, the Mexican Congress’s Law of April 6, 1830 also prohibited any further immigration into Mexico’s Coahuila y Tejas state by settlers from U.S. territory. In addition, this law also imposed new customs duties on imports and exports from Mexico that financially hurt the Anglo settlers who were involved in exporting cotton from Texas and importing other goods to Texas.

Since the border between the United States and the Mexican state of Coahuila y Tejas was too long for the Mexican Army to guard completely and secure effectively, Anglo settlers continued to enter Mexico in the early 1830s, as “illegal aliens,” and by 1834, the number of white Anglo settlers in Texas had jumped to 20,700, while the number of Spanish-speaking “Tejano” residents within the Texas region of Coahuila y Tejas was still only 4,000.

After some of the Anglo settlers in Coahuila y Tejas held a convention in 1833 -- which asked for both repeal of the Mexican Congress’s Law of April 6, 1830 (that prohibited further immigration of settlers from the United States) and for Texas to become a separate Mexican state and no longer just a region of the predominantly Spanish-speaking state of Coahuila y Tejas -- the 1830 law was repealed by the Mexican government in late 1834.

In addition, the Mexican government then “offered considerable self-government at the local level” to the Anglo settlers in Coahuila y Tejas, and “during the early 1830s Anglos in Texas received important concessions such as trial by jury and use of the English language” from the Mexican federal government, according to Randolph Campbell’s Gone To Texas.

Yet when the demand for a separate, predominantly white Anglo state of Texas within the federal republic of Mexico was rejected by the Mexican government after Stephen F. Austin presented it in Mexico City, Austin apparently then wrote an inflammatory letter in which he advised the Anglo settlers in Texas to form a separate state “even though the general government” of Mexico “refuses to consent.” This inflammatory letter, however, was intercepted by Mexican government authorities; and Austin was then imprisoned by the Mexican authorities for a year.

According to Gone To Texas, among the reasons the predominantly white Anglo settlers in Coahuila y Tejas wanted a separate state for themselves within Mexico was that “most Anglos definitely thought themselves inherently superior to Mexicans” and “most Anglos at least accepted slavery, whereas Mexican officials threatened to destroy the institution.” In his 1996 book Black Texans: A History of African Americans in Texas, Texas Tech University Professor of History Alwyn Barr also observed:

Mexicans generally accepted black people, especially mulattos, more readily than did the... Anglo population... Because of the favorable legal and social conditions, Benjamin Lundy, a white abolitionist, and Nicholas Drouett, a mulatto who had retired as an officer in the Mexican army, sought permission to establish a colony of free blacks from the United States during the 1830s. The Mexican government reacted favorably, but most whites in the United States and Texas opposed the project as an impediment to their westward movement...

White Texans, overwhelmingly southern in background, brought with them favorable views of slavery and unfavorable views of black people... Mexican opposition to the importation of slaves did slow Anglo immigration and act as a major source of discontent prior to the Texas Revolution in 1836...

So in 1835 the predominantly white Anglo settlers armed themselves and began organizing for an armed rebellion against Mexican government rule in Texas. A number of Spanish-speaking Mexican settlers in Texas (like a land speculator with the Galveston Bay and Texas Land Company named Lorenzo de Zavala) supported the armed rebel Anglos.

And, according to the Texas State Historical Association’s Texas Almanac website, an East Texas merchant of Jewish background (and a friend of former Tennessee Governor Sam Houston) named Adolphus Sterne “became a principal source of financial backing for the Texas Revolution” of 1835-1836.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Bob Feldman : Texas Under Mexican Rule

Texas colonizer Stephen F. Austin (with his father, Moses Austin, inset on right). Painting from the Fort Bend Museum / Wikimedia Commons.
The hidden history of Texas

Part 2: The 1821-1826 years under Mexican rule

By Bob Feldman / The Rag Blog / August 16, 2011

[This is the second installment of Bob Feldman's new Rag Blog series on the hidden history of Texas.]

White English-speaking Texans of wealth have exercised a special influence over the direction of Texas history for many years. Yet it wasn’t until Dec. 21, 1821, that the first white Anglo, Mary James Long, was born on Texas soil.

And long before any white Anglos from the United States had settled in Texas in the early 19th-century, Spanish-speaking Texans had already, in the 18th century, developed the cattle ranching techniques such as the round-up, branding, roping, and herding from horseback, for which Texas later became well-known throughout the world as a result of Hollywood movies during the 20th century.

White Anglos only began crossing the border from Louisiana and into New Spain territory in Texas around 1815. So, not surprisingly, in the early 1820s the number of Native Americans who (as members of tribal nations like the Cherokees, Delaware, Shawnees, etc.) lived in Texas -- 20,000 -- was still greater than the number of white Anglo settlers who lived in Texas.

But in November 1820, a white Anglo named Moses Austin (accompanied by his African-American slave, Richmond) went to San Antonio and met with local authorities to talk about setting up an Anglo settler colony in not yet densely-populated Texas. And following Moses Austin’s death in June 1821, his son -- Stephen Fuller Austin -- established a settler-colony in Texas in December 1821, on land granted by Texas’s then-governing authorities.

Since thousands of acres of Texas’ best farmland were being offered by Stephen F. Austin to prospective Anglo settlers at a much cheaper price (10 cents per acre) than what land was then selling for in the United States -- and on credit -- the number of Anglo settler-colonists in Austin’s Texas colony quickly increased during the 1820s.

Under the Empire of Mexico’s Colonization Law of January 1823, each Anglo family who settled in Austin’s colony was given 4,423 acres of land in Texas if they planned to raise cattle stock and 177 acres of land in Texas if they planned to just be farmers. In addition, the Anglo settler-colonists were required to be only of Catholic background and were also required to free all the African-American slave children they owned when the slave children reached the age of 14.

Although the Empire of Mexico’s Colonization Law was voided by Mexico’s new federal republican government by March 1823, the land grant to Austin’s colony in Texas continued to be recognized as valid by the new Mexican federal republican government. But under the March 28, 1825 Colonization Act passed by the state government of Coahuila in Mexico (of which Texas was now a part), Anglo settlers in Austin’s colony had to agree to become both Mexican citizens and Catholics -- in exchange for being given land in Texas (for less than $100 in fees) by Mexico’s governing authorities.

There were only seven African-American slaves in Texas -- living around San Antonio -- according to an 1819 census, and the same 1823 Empire of Mexico law that required slave children to be freed at the age of 14 also prohibited the sale or purchase of African-American slaves by the Anglo settlers in Austin’s colony.

But the newly-arrived white Anglo settlers soon began to create an economy based on the enslavement of African-Americans within Texas, and by 1825, Austin’s Anglo colony included 69 white slaveholders -- mostly settlers from the southern United States region -- who owned 443 slaves of African-American descent.

A white settler from Georgia, Jared E. Groce, for example, brought 90 slaves with him when he settled in Texas, establishing a plantation there in 1822, and apparently became one of the wealthiest settler-colonists. And around 25 percent of the 1,800 people who lived in Austin’s colony in Texas by 1825 were African-American slaves.

In his Gone To Texas, professor Randolph Campbell indicated the economic motive and the ideological reason for the white Anglos who settled in Austin’s colony deciding to set up a slave labor-based economic system in Texas during the 1820s, when he wrote:

A trend toward cash-crop agriculture developed almost immediately... Cotton production depended on slavery, which in turn provided the strongest link between Texas and the American South... Anglo-Americans made slavery an institution of significance in Texas beginning in the 1820s because they saw it as economic necessity... Free labor could not be hired where land was so inexpensive... Most Texas immigrants... held racist views that allowed them to see nothing wrong with the practice of whites owning blacks in order to profit from their labor...

So, not surprisingly, a few years after the Republic of Mexico legally prohibited the further importation of slaves of African-American descent into Mexico in 1824, a minority of the Anglo settlers in eastern Texas, led by Haden Edwards, declared their independence from Mexico on Dec. 21, 1826 and attempted to establish an independent "Republic of Fredonia."

But the independent Republic of Fredonia did not gain the support of either Stephen F. Austin or most of the other Anglo settlers in Texas in 1826 -- and once Mexican government troops arrived in the Republic of Fredonia on Jan. 4, 1827, the Republic of Fredonia quickly ceased to exist.

[Bob Feldman is an East Coast-based writer-activist and a former member of the Columbia SDS Steering Committee of the late 1960s. Read more articles by Bob Feldman on The Rag Blog.]

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Harry Targ : Lessons from the Underground Railroad

Hariett Tubman leads group to freedom. Art from catsdogs.glogster.
Follow the drinking gourd:
Lessons from the Underground Railroad

By Harry Targ / The Rag Blog / July 5, 2011

When the sun comes back,
and the first Quail calls,
Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.

Chorus:

Follow the drinking gourd,
Follow the drinking gourd,
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.

The riverbank will make a very good road,
The dead trees show you the way.
Left foot, peg foot traveling on,
Following the drinking gourd.

The river ends between two hills,
Follow the drinking gourd,
There's another river on the other side,
Follow the drinking gourd.

When the great big river meets the little river,
Follow the drinking gourd.
For the old man is a-waiting
for to carry you to freedom
If you follow the drinking gourd.

(Old song directing slaves on their escape, in modern times popularized by Pete Seeger and the Weavers)

“Dad, didn’t you ever go to elementary school?”

(My daughter responding to my enthusiastic report on a two-day trip along the Underground Railroad)

I just returned from an inspiring two-day trip to southern Indiana and Ohio, visiting three sites along the Underground Railroad. I was familiar with the history of African Americans’ active resistance to slavery, such as armed revolts, and forms of passive resistance, including purposive manipulations of master/slave relationships.

However, my knowledge of the underground flights to freedom was limited.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, as many school kids know, slaves fled the plantation dictatorships to travel north to so-called “free states.” They continued their journey to Canada where slavery was outlawed. In 1850, the controversial Fugitive Slave Law passed Congress which strengthened the hand of slaveholders in their efforts to stop the Underground Railroad. It declared that although slavery was prohibited outside the South, slaveholders and bounty hunters could travel north to retrieve their human “property.”

Escaping slaves, therefore, could not regard themselves as secure until they reached Canada.

While the flight of slaves was largely unplanned, African American slave society was replete with secret directions for escape transmitted through songs such as “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and “Go Down Moses.” Even the quoting of certain scripture in Black churches was designed to give information on routes to the North and possible safe houses to seek. The courage, creativity, and will to freedom of the slaves were extraordinary.

A trail of safe houses in the “free” state of Ohio was created to give runaway slaves sanctuary, food, and directions for moving further north, ultimately to Canada. Ohio was north of the Ohio River, and Kentucky on the river’s southern banks was still a slave state.

Safe houses existed in Indiana, Michigan, and elsewhere in the Midwest and the East. Those providing sanctuary were both white and Black abolitionists. In Ripley, Ohio, John Rankin, a white Presbyterian Minister and long-time abolitionist, and John Parker, a former slave and local entrepreneur, risked their livelihoods and their physical security to provide safe havens to fleeing slaves.

In the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law it became a crime for northern abolitionists to provide such sanctuary. Northerners were obliged by law to cooperate with slaveholders, blood thirsty bounty hunters, and local law enforcement officials in the brutal kidnapping of those who sought their freedom.

In my travel along the Underground Railroad, a trip that ended at the exciting new museum in Cincinnati, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, I learned about the ingenuity of the runaway slaves and the abolitionists in their construction of this long road to freedom.

Much of the story of the Underground Railroad has only been reconstructed in the last 30 years or so. The paths to freedom embarked upon by the slaves, their level of organization, and the numbers of those who tried to escape and who succeeded remain unclear as do the names and activities of abolitionists.

Information at the time about the Underground Railroad, of necessity, was shrouded in secrecy for reasons of security and for the most part narratives of the trials and tribulations of slaves and abolitionists come from memoirs of abolitionists written after the Civil War.

Historians debate any number of elements of the story of the Underground Railroad. But the historical narrative that I experienced on a simple guided tour left a deep impression on me, particularly on what seems to me to bear relevance to our continuing work today.

Contrary to paternalistic accounts of the slave system that many of us were exposed to as children, the slaves, against all odds, were courageous and possessed an extraordinary ingenuity. Slave society was built on a profound level of human solidarity such that the successful flight to freedom of each and every slave was built on the common struggles of entire communities.

Language, songs, community leaders such as “the old man waiting for to carry you to freedom,” and the sacrifices of men and women to get some of their kin “over Jordan” were the collective responsibility of every family and community.

Abolitionists, white and Black, refused to accept the slave system. They were willing to put their lives on the line to oppose an oppressive and immoral system.

The abolitionists were the first revolutionaries in U.S. history after the formation of the new nation. Some were motivated by a conception of the slave system as a system of super-exploitation of the labor of the slaves by the ruling class of cotton producing slave owners. Others were motivated by religious passion.

Quakers, Presbyterians, and people of other faiths deemed slavery an immoral system that contradicted God’s law. For them, the laws of society, such as the Fugitive Slave Law, were superseded by God’s law. And still others, mostly the Black abolitionists, combated the slave system because they experienced it directly and because it was their brothers and sisters who suffered under its yoke.

Examining the slave system and the laws that gave it sustenance suggests a perverse feature of the U.S. constitutional system. Throughout U.S. history, and particularly during the period of slavery, the Constitution and the political system have, on the one hand, opposed immoral laws such as the Fugitive Slave Law, and, on the other hand, accepted them because of the necessity of political “compromise.”

The Fugitive Slave Law was the result of compromise dictated by demands from pro-slavery advocates in contention with anti-slavery advocates. California would be admitted into the federal union as a free state at the same time that southern bounty hunters would be allowed to enter “free” states and kidnap runaway slaves. Ohio was a free state but slave owners, or their henchmen, could lawfully enter the state to retrieve their “property.”

The United States political system has been based on this system of “compromise.” Abolitionists said “no” to what was seen as compromise. They viewed the Fugitive Slave Law as hypocrisy.

The lessons of the Underground Railroad parallel our politics today. First, the story of the Underground Railroad and the slave question is one instance among many in which what is called “compromise” is in fact hypocrisy. Lofty principles continue to be endorsed which are defied in common practice.

The Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973 declared that women have the right to control their own bodies, but health care services are denied to them if they make certain choices. Moreover, health care workers risk death if they provide services that are guaranteed by the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court.

In the 19th century slavery was outlawed in Northern states but slave holders and bounty hunters could kidnap former slaves to be brought back to their owners.

Second, there is a continuity in the flight to freedom from slavery to the present. In the 1980s, during the Reagan wars on Central America, refugees came north to avoid death squads or because of desperate economic circumstance. Central American activists in the United States risked arrest providing sanctuary for those fleeing repression.

Today, modern day bounty hunters, federal agents, and local police pursue immigrants, defined as illegal, who were driven from their homes by global economic policies. They are often kidnapped, detained, and deposited in their home countries irrespective of the local circumstances. The anti-immigration movement and draconian state laws such as those in Arizona are contemporary variants of the story of the Fugitive Slave Law.

On the other hand, resistance, in the best of the tradition of the Underground Railroad, continues as those most victimized rise up to seek their freedom. They work in solidarity with political progressives in common struggle to create a better world for economic and social justice, and for freedom.

It is an old story: “Follow the drinking gourd.”

[Harry Targ is a professor of political science at Purdue University who lives in West Lafayette, Indiana. He blogs at Diary of a Heartland Radical -- and that's also the name of his new book which can be found at Lulu.com. Read more of Harry Targ's articles on The Rag Blog.]

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