We are told to celebrate the 4th of July a day supposedly to honor and embrace freedom, which we have yet to receive. They also want us not to forget 911 and remember the Holocaust, but remarkably “they” don’t want to remember slavery or the sins of their fathers. So on this day, let’s remember the slaves who built America. And that’s my thought provoking perspective…
I am the creator and administrator of a FaceBook Group, BLACK EMPOWERED MEN, where all are welcome to join. Someone posted this in the group to which I found it to be an amazing piece of knowledge.
When you think of great women the great conductor has to be at the top or the list. Early in the life of Harriet Tubman, she suffered a traumatic head wound when she was hit by a heavy metal weight thrown by an irate overseer, intending to hit another slave. It struck Tubman instead, which she said “broke my skull.” She later explained her belief that her hair, which “had never been combed and stood out like a bushel basket” might have saved her life.
Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her owner’s house where she remained without medical care for two days at which time she was immediately sent back into the fields to work. The injury caused disabling seizures, headaches, powerful visionary and dream activity, and spells of hypersomnia which occurred throughout her entire life.
In 1849, after escaping to Philadelphia she immediately returned to Maryland to rescue the rest of her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state and eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme secrecy, Moses never lost a passenger.
“There was one of two things I had a right to,” she explained later, “liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.” Slaveholders in the region never knew that “Minty,” the petite, five-foot-tall, disabled slave who had run away years before and never come back, was behind so many slave escapes in their community.
She also carried a revolver and was not afraid to use it. Once a slave agreed to join her expedition there was no turning back – and she threatened to shoot anyone who tried to return. Tubman told the tale of one voyage with a group of fugitive slaves, when morale sank and one man insisted he was going to go back to the plantation. She pointed the gun at his head and said: “You go on or die.”
One of her last missions into Maryland was to retrieve her aging parents. Her father, Ben, had purchased Rit, her mother, in 1855 from Eliza Brodess for twenty dollars. But even when they were both free, the area became hostile to their presence. Two years later, Tubman received word that her father had harbored a group of eight escaped slaves and was at risk of arrest. She traveled to the Eastern Shore and led them north into Canada.
In fact, by the late 1850’s they began to suspect the white abolitionist John Brown was secretly enticing their slaves away from the Eastern Shore before his ill-fated raid on Harper’s Ferry. Tubman was introduced to the insurgent John Brown who advocated the use of violence to destroy slavery. Although she never advocated violence against whites, she agreed with his course of direct action and supported his goals.
Like Tubman, he spoke of being called by God, and trusted the divine to protect him from the wrath of slaveholders. She claimed to have had a prophetic vision of meeting Brown before their encounter. Tubman did help Brown as he began recruiting supporters for an attack on slaveholders and referred to her as “General Tubman.”
Her knowledge of support networks and resources in the border states of Pennsylvania, Maryland and Delaware was invaluable to Brown and his planners. Unlike other abolitionists like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison who did not endorse his tactics, Brown dreamed of fighting to create a new state for freed slaves, and made preparations for military action. After he began the first battle, he believed slaves would rise up and carry out a rebellion across the south. He asked Tubman to gather former slaves then living in Canada who might be willing to join his fighting force, which she did.
Tubman was busy during this time, giving talks to abolitionist audiences and tending to her relatives causing her to be unaware of the actual attack. So in the autumn of 1859, as Brown and his men prepared to launch the attack on Harpers Ferry, Tubman was not present. The raid failed; Brown was convicted of treason and hanged in December. His actions were seen by abolitionists as a symbol of proud resistance, carried out by a noble martyr. Tubman herself was effusive with praise. She later told a friend: “He done more in dying, than 100 men would in living.”
She was the first woman to lead an armed expedition in the Civil War. She guided the raid on the Combahee River, liberating more than seven hundred slaves. In addition, during the war she worked as a cook and nurse, and then as an armed scout and spy. After the war, she retired to the family home in Auburn, New York, where she cared for her aging parents. She was active in the woman’s suffrage movement until illness overtook her and she had to be admitted to a home for elderly African-Americans she had helped open years earlier.
Tubman returned to Auburn at the end of the war. During a train ride to New York, the conductor told her to move into the smoking car. She refused, explaining her government service. He cursed at her and grabbed her, but she resisted and he summoned two other passengers for help. While she clutched at the railing, they muscled her away, breaking her arm in the process. They threw her into the smoking car, causing more injuries. As these events transpired, other white passengers cursed Tubman and shouted for the conductor to kick her off the train.
Her constant humanitarian work for her family and former slaves, meanwhile, kept her in a state of constant poverty, and her difficulties in obtaining a government pension were especially taxing for her. Tubman spent her remaining years in Auburn, tending to her family and other people in need. She worked various jobs to support her elderly parents, and took in boarders to help pay the bills. Tubman’s friends and supporters from the days of abolition, meanwhile, raised funds to relieve her poverty.
As Tubman aged, the sleeping spells and suffering from her childhood head trauma continued to plague her. By 1911, her body was so frail that she had to be admitted into the rest home named in her honor. A New York newspaper described her as “ill and penniless,” prompting supporters to offer a new round of donations. Surrounded by friends and family members, Harriet Tubman died of pneumonia on March 10, 1913. Just before she died, she told those in the room: “I go to prepare a place for you.”
Harriet Tubman, in my opinion, was the most courageous woman who ever lived, and my personal hero. Hidden in the tiny “dash” on her marker is her life’s work of being the great conductor of the Underground Railroad, a scout, spy, and nurse during the Civil War.
Harriet Tubman was born Araminta Ross sometimes referred to as “Moses.” The date of her actual birth is suspect because as a slave accurate birth records were not kept. Therefore, no one can say for sure as to the actual date. She always proclaimed her birth as 1825 but most historians believe she was born around 1820 or 1821.
After escaping from the slavery into which she was born, she made thirteen missions to rescue over seventy slaves using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. She once remarked that she could have saved a lot more if they had only known they were slaves. Her courage was that of unimaginable proportion because death was the penalty for such work.
Early in her life, she was told that she was of Ashanti lineage from what is now Ghana where her grandmother was captured. Her mother, Rit, struggled to keep their family together as slavery tried to tear it apart. Edward Brodess sold three of her daughters separating them from the family forever.
Once a trader from Georgia approached Brodess about buying Rit’s youngest son Moses; she hid him for a month, aided by other slaves and free blacks in the community. At one point she even confronted her owner about the sale. Finally, Brodess and “the Georgia man” came toward the slave quarters to seize the child where Rit told them: “You are after my son, but the first man that comes into my house I will split his head open.” Brodess backed away and abandoned the sale.
Because Tubman’s mother was assigned to “the big house” and had scarce time for her own family, as a child Tubman took care of a younger brother and a baby. At the age of five or six, she was hired out to a woman named “Miss Susan” as a nursemaid. Tubman was ordered to keep watch on her baby as it slept. When it woke or cried, Tubman was whipped.
She told of a particular day when she was lashed five times before breakfast. She carried these scars for the rest of her life. Threatened later for stealing a lump of sugar, Tubman hid in a neighbor’s pig sty for five days, where she fought with the animals for scraps of food. Starving, she returned to Miss Susan’s house and received a heavy beating.
Tubman was beaten and whipped regularly by her various masters to whom she had been hired out. She learned to protect herself from such abuse by wrapping herself in layers of clothing but cried out as if she was not protected. Tubman also worked as a child for a planter where her job was to go into nearby marshes to check the muskrat traps.
Even after contracting the measles, she was sent into waist high cold water. She became very ill and was sent back to her master. Her mother nursed her back to health, whereupon she was immediately hired out again to various farms. As she grew older and stronger, she was assigned to grueling field and forest work: driving oxen, plowing, and hauling logs.
Tubman’s father Ben was released from slavery at the age of forty-five, as stipulated in a former owner’s will, though his real age was closer to fifty-five. He continued working as a timber estimator and foreman for the Thompson family, who had owned him as a slave.
Several years later, Tubman contacted a white attorney and paid him five dollars to investigate her mother’s legal status. The lawyer discovered that a former owner had issued instructions that Rit, like her husband, would be manumitted at the age of forty-five. The record showed that a similar provision would apply to Rit’s children and that any children born after she reached forty-five years of age were legally free, but her owners ignored this stipulation.
Around 1844, she married a free black man named John Tubman. Although little is known about him or their time together, the union was complicated due to her slave status. Since the mother’s status dictated that of her children, any children born to Harriet and John would be enslaved. As a result of her master’s death the likelihood that Tubman would be sold increased and the family would be broken apart as their master’s widow would sell the family’s slaves. Tubman refused to wait for her owner’s family to decide her fate, despite her husband John’s efforts to dissuade her.
She escaped to Philadelphia and returned to Maryland to find her husband. However, John had married another woman named Caroline. Tubman sent word that he should join her, but he insisted that he was happy where he was. Tubman at first prepared to storm their house and make a scene but decided he was not worth the trouble. Suppressing her anger, she found some slaves who wanted to escape and led them to Philadelphia. John and Caroline raised a family together until he was killed sixteen years later in a roadside argument with a white man.
It is said, that she freed hundreds but when asked she said I could have saved many more if they only knew they were slaves. I don’t know what it says on her final marker but it should contain a simple inscription that says – “Servant of God”. In my opinion, she was the most significant black woman in our history! And that’s my Thought Provoking Perspective…
I recently had a conversation with a group of young people, none of which lived during the age of government segregation. Each had strongly convoluted opinions about the era that were not based in fact. This made me think about how much the current world view has changed the reality of black life, as it relates to a historical perspective.
First, white folk never wanted it and chatted go back to Africa at the time. It was never intended to be fair or equal! I am not suggesting that integration should not have happened, but it did have a negative impact on black life and the future of African Americans in many ways. Two prominent ways were in the areas of family and black business.
One thing that happened, for sure was that the black community stopped supporting the businesses in their own communities. After segregation, African Americans flocked to support businesses owned by whites and other groups, causing black restaurants, theaters, insurance companies, banks, etc. to almost disappear. Today, black people spend 95 percent of their income at white-owned businesses. Even though the number of black firms has grown 60.5 percent between 2002 and 2007, they only make up 7 percent of all U.S firms and less than .005 percent of all U.S business receipts.
I took the opportunity to educate these young people that in 1865, just after Emancipation, 476,748 free blacks – 1.5 percent of U.S. population– owned .005 percent of the total wealth of the United States. Today, a full 135 years after the abolition of slavery, 44.5 million African Americans – 14.2 percent of the population — possess a meager 1 percent of the national wealth.
If we look at relationships from 1890 to 1950, black women married at higher rates than white women, despite a consistent shortage of black males due to their higher mortality rate. According to a report released by the Washington DC-based think tank the Urban Institute, the state of the African American family is worse today than it was in the 1960s, four years before President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act.
In 1965, only 8 percent of childbirths in the black community occurred out of wedlock. In 2010, out-of-wedlock childbirths in the black community are at an astonishing 72 percent. Researchers Heather Ross and Isabel Sawhill argue that the marital stability is directly related to the husband’s relative socio-economic standing and the size of the earnings difference between men and women.
Instead of focusing on maintaining black male employment to allow them to provide for their families, Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act with full affirmative action for women. The act benefited mostly white women and created a welfare system that encouraged the removal of the black male from the home. Many black men were also dislodged from their families and pushed into the rapidly expanding prison industrial complex that developed in the wake of rising unemployment.
Since integration, the unemployment rate of black men has been spiraling out of control. In 1954, white men had a zero percent unemployment rate, while African-American men experienced a 4 percent rate. By 2010, it was at 16.7 percent for Black men compared to 7.7 percent for white men. The workforce in 1954 was 79 percent African American. By 2011, that number had decreased to 57 percent. The number of employed black women, however, has increased. In 1954, 43 percent of African American women had jobs. By 2011, 54 percent of black women are job holders.
The Civil Rights Movement pushed for laws that would create a colorblind society, where people would not be restricted from access to education, jobs, voting, travel, public accommodations, or housing because of race. However, the legislation did nothing to eradicate white privilege. Michael K. Brown, professor of politics at University of California Santa Cruz, and co-author of“Whitewashing Race: The Myth of a Color-Blind Society” says in the U.S., “The color of one’s skin still determines success or failure, poverty or affluence, illness or health, prison or college.”
Two percent of all working African Americans work for another African American’s within their own neighborhood. Because of this, professionally trained Black people provide very little economic benefit to the black community. Whereas, prior to integration that number was significantly higher because of segregation people in the black community supported each other to sustain their lives and families.
The Black median household income is about 64 percent that of whites, while the Black median wealth is about 16 percent that of whites. Millions of Black children are being miseducated by people who don’t care about them, and they are unable to compete academically with their peers. At the same time, the criminal justice system has declared war on young Black men with policies such as “stop and frisk” and “three strikes.”
Marcus Garvey warned about this saying:
“Lagging behind in the van of civilization will not prove our higher abilities. Being subservient to the will and caprice of progressive races will not prove anything superior in us. Being satisfied to drink of the dregs from the cup of human progress will not demonstrate our fitness as a people to exist alongside of others, but when of our own initiative we strike out to build industries, governments, and ultimately empires, then and only then will we as a race prove to our Creator and to man in general that we are fit to survive and capable of shaping our own destiny.”
Maybe this proves that once past truths are forgotten, and the myths that are lies are born with an unfounded reality detrimental to all, but those who seek to benefit. As I have often said, “I firmly believe education is the single most important ingredient necessary to neutralize those forces that breed poverty and despair. We can change the world but first, we must change ourselves.” And that’s my thought provoking perspective…
I have lived long enough to have seen many things but the Republican Convention looks to me like a Nazi or Klan rally. Deception is at the root of the devil’s plan!
It is a unique phenomenon in what we are seeing in the news every day, which has been this way for such a long time. Knowing how the corrupt police forces in America brutalize and kill black people on a daily basis. I don’t want to see anyone killed, but somehow they did not think that one day there would be retaliation. We never see any punishment or consequences for the police who murder and abuse the lives of its black citizens. They trained these guys, sent these guys off to war, and there are some who can’t take it anymore.
They have so much fear of terrorism, but fine with it from the police and claim not to see it when they do it. In this world where the KKK is still not listed by them as a terrorist organization, they condemn black people for taking a stand and saying “enough is enough”! There biggest fear is that 40 million black people might get angry all at once and rise up in a Nat Turner style action. I predict that it is going to be a LONG HOT SUMMER!
The Black Lives Matter Organization is not anywhere close to the terrorist group that the KKK, but it is the word black in Black Lives Matter that seems to be the problem for the racist who call the organizers “racist” for the use of the word black. They try to change the narrative to all kinds of things like All Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter, but the fact remains they are killing black lives for virtually no reason!
The first public view of raw police brutality was the video of the Rodney King beat down. However back in the day, they had public lynching’s for entertainment which was not that much different, but today the group designed originally to be slave catchers killed black Americans with impunity over and over again. They have always created laws to benefit them like Stand your Ground and the many Open Carry Laws for them to use against black people. This might well be “the chickens coming home to roost”. And that’s my thought provoking perspective…
The word terror and terrorist are used so much in today’s lexicon that most people have forgotten how it is connected to the American society. It is horrible indeed, and many atrocities are associated with the word; sadly it is hardly if ever associated with white folk. Today, if they commit or involved with an act that is terror, they call it something else; even if they have to invent a word that sounds gentler. For instance, if they riot or behave badly – it’s called mental illness!
Dr. King said white people are the greatest purveyors of violence on the planet. Wherever they are or have been, they brought violence. I will not attempt to go too far back in history or back to the caves of Europe where they came from because even his-story tells of the act of a barbarian, treachery, and thefts from all other cultures. They have always had a way of twisting the facts, usually in the name of God to support the evils of their kind.
Let me just start with Columbus, who they say discovered a place that had already existed for centuries. He raped and pillaged the already inhabited island stealing everything he could people included. They made him a hero for his dastardly deeds. Then they came to the mainland of North America and did the same thing – taking the land and killing most of its inhabitants. A history of terror followed causing the Native population to be annulated.
Following these acts of terror, they raided Africa, stealing about one-third of the continent’s population, bring them across the ocean in chains, and made them slaves. I know you know what was to follow at the hands of these people of this hue – terror for centuries! Now, they will never admit their sins, again always going back to Christianity or God. When in fact, what they have done to human beings just in America is the worst crime known to humanity.
Yes, it was those people who create an ISIS type terror group called the KKK. This was a group including many former Confederate veterans founded the first branch of the Ku Klux Klan. The first two words of the organization’s name supposedly derived from the Greek word “kyklos,” meaning circle. In the summer of 1867, local branches of the Klan met in a general organizing convention and established what they called an “Invisible Empire of the South.” This terror group still exists today.
They like to use the word civilized and for the record there was nothing civil about the austerities inflicted on people of color was and is a disgrace! So this is why white people lie about history and the sins of their fathers. Most often, white folk will say “why won’t you leave this in the past”. Like it never happen but it did and needs to be remembered! One could say that this thing called freedom is nothing more than a racist spread across the world. Fact is they don’t care about anyone of color! And that’s my thought provoking perspective…
President of JT Wills Consulting, Speaker, Author, Writer, Blogger, Professor/Teacher, Radio Host, member and past officer of several Business, Community, College Board’s, a Volunteer, and friend to many. Regardless of the worldly titles given, I prefer to be called a man.
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Just a Season is a luminous story into the life of a man who, in the midst of pain and loss, journeys back in time to reexamine all the important people, circumstances, and intellectual fervor that contributed to the richness of his life...
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When you think of great women the great conductor has to be at the top or the list. Early in the life of Harriet Tubman, she suffered a traumatic head wound when she was hit by a heavy metal weight thrown by an irate overseer, intending to hit another slave. It struck Tubman instead, which she said “broke my skull.” She later explained her belief that her hair, which “had never been combed and stood out like a bushel basket” might have saved her life.
Harriet Tubman, in my opinion, was the most courageous woman who ever lived, and my personal hero. Hidden in the tiny “dash” on her marker is her life’s work of being the great conductor of the Underground Railroad, a scout, spy, and nurse during the Civil War.
I recently had a conversation with a group of young people, none of which lived during the age of government segregation. Each had strongly convoluted opinions about the era that were not based in fact. This made me think about how much the current world view has changed the reality of black life, as it relates to a historical perspective.
It is a unique phenomenon in what we are seeing in the news every day, which has been this way for such a long time. Knowing how the corrupt police forces in America brutalize and kill black people on a daily basis. I don’t want to see anyone killed, but somehow they did not think that one day there would be retaliation. We never see any punishment or consequences for the police who murder and abuse the lives of its black citizens. They trained these guys, sent these guys off to war, and there are some who can’t take it anymore.
The word terror and terrorist are used so much in today’s lexicon that most people have forgotten how it is connected to the American society. It is horrible indeed, and many atrocities are associated with the word; sadly it is hardly if ever associated with white folk. Today, if they commit or involved with an act that is terror, they call it something else; even if they have to invent a word that sounds gentler. For instance, if they riot or behave badly – it’s called mental illness!
Thought Provoking Perspectives
Thought Provoking Perspectives 