(A family picking peas in their garden, Flint River Farms, near Montezuma, GA. May 1939; historical photo from Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund)
Ding over at Bitch Ph.D. has an extraordinarily good post up, Black History Month: A Case for Voting Black that is also a result of her watching Henry Gates' African American Lives. She relates some of the research in the documentary to her own family stories of how crucial land ownership became to African-American trying to undo the effects of slavery, and all the ways their land was eventually stolen from them (a process going on at this moment). Her comment about having land sums it up: "It acts like a bracket around early black families: you were property and now you have property."
She also ties the struggle to own land and develop economic security to the history of lynching, which lasted as a strong form of terrorist activity in this country until the 1960s and whose enduring symbol -- the noose -- has not died one iota (The Jena 6; Professor Madonna Constantine).
Regarding lynching, Wikipedia cites a number of good sources:
'In The Strange Career of Jim Crow, the historian C. Vann Woodward wrote of the post- World War I period: "The war-bred hopes of the Negro for first-class citizenship were quickly smashed in a reaction of violence that was probably unprecedented. Some twenty-five race riots were touched off in American cities during the first six months of 1919, months that John Hope Franklin called 'the greatest period of interracial strife the nation had ever witnessed.' Mobs took over cities for days at a time, flogging, burning, shooting, and torturing at will. When the Negroes showed a new disposition to fight and defend themselves, violence increased. Some of these atrocities occurred in the South — at Longview, Texas, for example, or at Tulsa, Oklahoma, at Elaine, Arkansas or Knoxville, Tennessee. But they were limited to no one section of the country. Many of them occurred in the North and the worst of all was in Chicago. During the first year following the war more than seventy Negroes were lynched, several of them veterans still in uniform."
'The executions of 4,743 people who were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1968 were not often publicized. It is likely that many more unrecorded lynchings occurred in this period. Lynching statistics were kept only for the 86 years between 1882 and 1968, and were based primarily on newspaper accounts. Yet the socio-political impact of lynchings could be significant. In 1901 the state of Colorado restored capital punishment, in response to an outbreak of lynchings in 1900. The state had abolished capital punishment only in 1897.
'Most lynchings were inspired by unsolved crime, racism, and innuendo. 3,500 of its victims were African Americans. Lynchings took place in every state except four, but were concentrated in the Cotton Belt (Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, Texas and Louisiana).
'Members of mobs that participated in these public murders often took photographs of what they had done. Those photographs, distributed on postcards, were collected by James Allen, who has published them in book form and online, with written words and video to accompany the images.
'Retaining incriminating evidence is not uncommon for sadistic criminals and in a study conducted by Robert R. Hazelwood, M.S. it was reported that of the sadistic criminals studied: "Forty percent of the men took and kept personal items belonging to their victims... which included... photographs... and some of the offenders referred to them as 'trophies'."
In her post, Ding links to James Allen's exhibit biography page for her at their website states:
'In 2003, Mark co-directed with Alferdteen Harrison the Unsettling Memories Conference, for which she and Harrison received the Public Humanities Achievement Award from the Mississippi Humanities Council. The conference, which Mark describes as an “exciting and terribly sad five days,” brought together artists, civil rights activists, and historians to address through art three of the most devastating moments in southern culture: the Cherokee removal, slavery, and lynching. “It was as if humanity and what we see as our souls and our ability to love and perceive each other as human beings was taken into question,” she says. “When you have slavery, when you have lynching, when you have the Cherokee removal – how can we even be America? The notion of democracy is potentially devastated by that.” She compares these moments in American history to the war in Iraq, the torture scandal at Abu Ghraib, and FEMA’s response to Katrina. “It’s those exact kind of moments, when our democracy tilts on its side and becomes something we can’t even recognize,” she says. “People will be writing about Katrina for the next 300 years. We can’t even look ourselves in the face.”'
(Rebecca Mark beside Dean's Cottage, Newcomb Institute, Tulane, New Orleans)
Dave Neiwert at Orcinus, which should be your number one online source for information about the Klan and other hate groups, published a ten-part series on Eliminationism in America. In an earlier essay, The Elimination Game, Dave defined eliminationism as "a kind of politics and culture that shuns dialogue and the democratic exchange of ideas for the pursuit of outright elimination of the opposing side, either through complete suppression, exile and ejection, or extermination."
Part Six of his series, Strange Fruit, talks about lynching, in particular drawing the line between lynching as a form of terror control vs. lynching as a form of eradication. The latter led to "sundown" towns. In a later essay, How to Out a Sundown Town, Sara Robinson at Orcinus explains this as "American towns that once had small African-American communities -- which, at some point, simply up and vanished. The historical fact is that if you're a middle-class white American living in the north or west of the country, the odds are overwhelmingly good that the town you live in, right now, is a sundown town -- or was one at some point in the not-so-distant past."
How, then, do we find our way beyond this legacy? In her post, Ding speaks eloquently about the idea of reparations, and you should go read it because she says what I think and feel. But, with your promise that you won't settle for anything less than her complete essay, I'll excerpt some of her beautiful language here:
"What I want is a deeper, more public acknowledgment of how slavery impacted and drove our capitalist system, and how our nation's participation in the slave trade laid a foundation for practices, industries and institutions that not only continue to have an adverse affect on communities of color today but still provide the elite in this country with wealth and prosperity. That's not too much to ask, is it?"
EXTRA RESOURCES:
African-American Land Ownership statement by the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund
Website for Homecoming, a PBS special about African-American land loss and chronicle of black farmers from the Civil War to the present ("In 1920 there were nearly one million black farmers in America. In 1999 there are less than 18,000.")
The African-American Mosaic, Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History & Culture
Saturday, February 9, 2008
MORE ON AFRICAN AMERICAN LIVES: LAND AND REPARATIONS
Thursday, February 7, 2008
ALABAMA WHITE/BLACK GENEALOGY
(1824 map of Northwestern Alabama at Mississippi border showing location of my ancestors' land grants)
From the time of the American Revolution until 1818, what was known as the Mississippi Territory (today's states of Mississippi and Alabama) was variously controlled by France, Spain, Great Britain and several Indian nations, particularly Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Cherokee. To travel beyond Georgia, U.S. citizens had to obtain a passport from whichever nation held the territory they were crossing.
However, the U.S. relentlessly used every means at its disposal to make this territory their own, and by 1820, both Mississippi and Alabama had been largely stolen from its Native peoples and was being opened to white expansion. My Armstrong, Randolph, Ussery and Fuller ancestors from the Scots enclaves around Montgomery Co., North Carolina relocated westward, first going to Monroe County, Mississippi (on the border with northwestern Alabama), then obtaining land grants in the watershed of Bear Creek, Chickasaw Nation, what is now Franklin and Marion Counties, Alabama.
They were the first white people to live on the lands they received. As best I can determine, the people they displaced were Chickasaw, who had attempted to adopt European agriculture and treat peacefully with the U.S. -- fat lot of good it did them, not with Andrew Jackson in the White House. My Scots forebears hated governmental interference except when it stole other people's land and gave it to them.
My ancestors, like most of the whites pouring in, were fleeing soil they had exhausted by the over-cultivation of cotton. They obtained rich land of the Black Belt and Tennessee Valley. With them they brought slave labor and the plantation system, though on a smaller scale than the Delta region. During the first half of the 1800s, a steady demand for cotton made this the U.S.'s leading export.
I cannot find a record of my direct ancestors owning slaves in Mississippi or Alabama. They were cotton farmers, but also seemed to raise horses for income. By 1860, my main lines migrated northwest to Sharp County, Arkansas, where they did not own slaves, either. This is where they were at the time of the Civil War and where every male between the age of 14 and 55 served in the CSA.
I'm currently working on an intensively researched essay about my Confederate ancestry, trying to puzzle out where my family's CSA service is typical or unusual and how that might have handed down current family values. In the meantime, I turned to this one branch of interrelated families today because I've been writing a section of my novel Ginny Bates that has to do with the ancestry of Allie Billups, an African-American lesbian character whom I located as having grown up in the Franklin/Marion County, Alabama region. I'm looting my own family background (where it applies across racial lines) and knowledge of the area to create a back-story for Allie.
Last night, Henry Louis Gates Jr. (a pre-eminent African-American historian and genealogist) aired the second installment of his African-American Lives epic on PBS. I was riveted, again, and realized the history of the Great Migration needed to be in Allie's story as well.
At the taking of the U.S. Census in 1860, Franklin County, Alabama was 45% African-American (of which all but 13 were slaves) and 55% European-American. Currently, however, Franklin County is about 90% white, 4% black, and 5% Latino. The average for Alabama is 71% white, 26% black, which means Franklin County is off skew. 
(Slave quarter from Belmont Plantation, Colbert Co. AL which was formed from Franklin Co. AL, 1936, taken by Alex Bush; from Back of the Big House: Cultural Landscape of the Plantation)
One African-American genealogy site states "Subject to the effect of the formation of Colbert County from the northern part of Franklin in 1869, by the 1870 census, the white population of Franklin County had decreased almost 34% to 6,693, while the "colored" population decreased over 84% to 1,313. (As a side note, by 1960, 100 years later, the County was listed as having 20,756 whites, about twice as many, but the 1960 total of 1,231 "Negroes"was only about one seventh of what the colored population had been 100 years before.) Where did all the freed slaves go, that were not in Franklin or Colbert County in 1870? Dallas, Montgomery and Mobile counties in Alabama all saw increases in the colored population between 1860 and 1870, so that could be where some of these freed slaves went. Between 1860 and 1870, the Alabama colored population increased by 37,000, to 475,000, a 17% increase. Between 1860 and 1870, the Alabama colored population increased by 37,000, to 475,000, a 17% increase. Where did freed slaves go if they did not stay in Alabama? States that saw significant increases in colored population during that time, and were therefore more likely possible places of relocation for colored persons from Franklin County, included the following: Georgia, up 80,000 to 545,000 (17%); Texas, up 70,000 (38%); North Carolina, up 31,000 (8%); Florida, up 27,000 (41%); Ohio, up 26,000 (70%); Indiana, up 25,000 (127%); and Kansas up from 265 to 17,000 (6,400%)."
I haven't yet done the research to trace this demographic, or to discover the particular effects of the Great Migration on Franklin County during 1900-1930, when blacks fled the South for Northern cities in the largest movement of people this country has seen. However, I am keeping in mind the bigger idea, which is that if black people chose to abandon Franklin County in huge numbers as soon as they were emancipated, their living conditions there were worse than other counties in the South. As Gates' program indicated, with no money, no skills except farming, and no region seeking them, newly-freed slaves were overwhelmingly sucked back into the near-slavery of sharecropping by the time Reconstruction had been betrayed by the Republican Party. Yet Franklin County blacks, in particular, opted to share-crop elsewhere no matter the rigors of relocating.
(Laura Clark, former slave from Sumter County, Alabama, photograph possibly by Ruby Pickens Tartt, ca. 1938, from Back of the Big House: Cultural Landscape of the Plantation)
In 1985, I went to Franklin and Marion Counties as part of a general genealogy research trip across the South. Of all the places I visited, it was the one place where I felt frightened for my safety as a lesbian and as a woman traveling with other women (not necessarily the same thing). There was no friendliness to strangers to be found by me and my companions, despite my accent and our serious attempts at charm. The poverty was strong, but other equally poor places still had people who would talk to us. I located the land where my ancestors had farmed -- a neighboring tract even had a still-standing dog-run log cabin from the early 1800s on it -- and when I walked the clay soil, what came to me was not my people reaching out over time (which often happened to me on these trips) but desolation.
(Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan)
We arrived there after having the day before visited Ivy Green, the home of Helen Keller, now a museum filled with photos of her life with Annie Sullivan. In the back yard was the famous well and pump. I had been overjoyed to see it, to claim a woman-loving connection with this extraordinary leader. From there, we'd gone to the Coon Dog Memorial Cemetery near Tuscumbia, Alabama, another place which had moved us deeply with its headstones, often primitive, extolling the love of men for their dogs. Thus, I was taken off utterly off guard by the depression I felt in Franklin County. 
(The pump at Ivy Green where Helen Keller learned the word for water)
Something is there to be uncovered. Since my ancestors were on the white side of that equation, I want to know why. I'll keep you informed.
In the meantime, do whatever you can to catch your PBS station's viewing of African-American Lives. Family histories this time include those of Tina Turner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Don Cheadle, Chris Rock, Maya Angelou, Morgan Freeman, and six others. It's better than the first go round in 2006. There'll be an additional two hours' shown next week as well. The website has an incredible timeline and set of sources. Gates' is permanently affecting the lives of those folks whose ancestry he traces (he made Chris Rock weep with one discovery) but also rewriting American history in a manner we've ardently needed. Watch it.
RESOURCES FOR FRANKLIN CO., ALABAMA:
Genealogy for Franklin Co., AL
African-American genealogy for Franklin Co., AL
Native American genealogy for Franklin Co., AL
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