Malcolm X: The Ballot or The Bullet

Check out these links on Malcolm X's timely speech:
AUDIO
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRNciryImqg

TRANSCRIPT OF SPEECH
http://www.cis.aueb.gr/Besides Security/TALKS/TALKS-10-X (The Ballot or the Bullet).pdf

Malcolm X explains Black Nationalism
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TO6Co8v2XjY

Definition and History of Black Nationalism
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_black_nationalism/

Black Power & Urban Politics by Albert Cleage (1968)  
http://www.hippy.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=116 

 

 

Check out  this video on voting

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQ2j8zSxPgU 

Check out this video on why we should vote

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UX_vBf1XTEE

Check out video on Freedom Summer

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_81kkJDvrUQ

Check out video of President Lyndon B. Johnson's speech on the 1965 Voting Rights Act

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxEauRq1WxQ

The 1965 Voting Rights Act

The Voting Rights Act of 1965

The 1965 Enactment

By 1965 concerted efforts to break the grip of state disfranchisement had been under way for some time, but had achieved only modest success overall and in some areas had proved almost entirely ineffectual. The murder of voting-rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi, gained national attention, along with numerous other acts of violence and terrorism. Finally, the unprovoked attack on March 7, 1965, by state troopers on peaceful marchers crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, en route to the state capitol in Montgomery, persuaded the President and Congress to overcome Southern legislators' resistance to effective voting rights legislation. President Johnson issued a call for a strong voting rights law and hearings began soon thereafter on the bill that would become the Voting Rights Act.

Congress determined that the existing federal anti-discrimination laws were not sufficient to overcome the resistance by state officials to enforcement of the 15th Amendment. The legislative hearings showed that the Department of Justice's efforts to eliminate discriminatory election practices by litigation on a case-by-case basis had been unsuccessful in opening up the registration process; as soon as one discriminatory practice or procedure was proven to be unconstitutional and enjoined, a new one would be substituted in its place and litigation would have to commence anew.

President Johnson signed the resulting legislation into law on August 6, 1965.  Section 2 of the Act, which closely followed the language of the 15th amendment, applied a nationwide prohibition against the denial or abridgment of the right to vote on the literacy tests on a nationwide basis. Among its other provisions, the Act contained special enforcement provisions targeted at those areas of the country where Congress believed the potential for discrimination to be the greatest. Under Section 5, jurisdictions covered by these special provisions could not implement any change affecting voting until the Attorney General or the United States District Court for the District of Columbia determined that the change did not have a discriminatory purpose and would not have a discriminatory effect. In addition, the Attorney General could designate a county covered by these special provisions for the appointment of a federal examiner to review the qualifications of persons who wanted to register to vote. Further, in those counties where a federal examiner was serving, the Attorney General could request that federal observers monitor activities within the county's polling place.

The Voting Rights Act had not included a provision prohibiting poll taxes, but had directed the Attorney General to challenge its use. In Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections, 383 U.S. 663 (1966), the Supreme Court held Virginia's poll tax to be unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment. Between 1965 and 1969 the Supreme Court also issued several key decisions upholding the constitutionality of Section 5 and affirming the broad range of voting practices that required Section 5 review. As the Supreme Court put it in its 1966 decision upholding the constitutionality of the Act:

Congress had found that case-by-case litigation was inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate amount of time and energy required to overcome the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment, Congress might well decide to shift the advantage of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil to its victims.

South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S. 301, 327-28 (1966).

The 1970 and 1975 Amendments

Congress extended Section 5 for five years in 1970 and for seven years in 1975. With these extensions Congress validated the Supreme Court's broad interpretation of the scope of Section 5. During the hearings on these extensions Congress heard extensive testimony concerning the ways in which voting electorates were manipulated through gerrymandering, annexations, adoption of at-large elections, and other structural changes to prevent newly-registered black voters from effectively using the ballot. Congress also heard extensive testimony about voting discrimination that had been suffered by Hispanic, Asian and Native American citizens, and the 1975 amendments added protections from voting discrimination for language minority citizens.

In 1973, the Supreme Court held certain legislative multi-member districts unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment on the ground that they systematically diluted the voting strength of minority citizens in Bexar County, Texas. This decision in White v. Regester, 412 U.S. 755 (1973), strongly shaped litigation through the 1970s against at-large systems and gerrymandered redistricting plans. In Mobile v. Bolden, 446 U.S. 55 (1980), however, the Supreme Court required that any constitutional claim of minority vote dilution must include proof of a racially discriminatory purpose, a requirement that was widely seen as making such claims far more difficult to prove.

The 1982 Amendments

Congress renewed in 1982 the special provisions of the Act, triggered by coverage under Section 4 for twenty-five years. Congress also adopted a new standard, which went into effect in 1985, providing how jurisdictions could terminate (or "bail out" from) coverage under the provisions of Section 4. Furthermore, after extensive hearings, Congress amended Section 2 to provide that a plaintiff could establish a violation of the Section without having to prove discriminatory purpose.

Source: http://www.justice.gov/crt/voting/intro/intro_b.php

                                                                                                            

Toward a Vision of Beloved Community

Click on link below to check out article by Rev. Shirley Strong on the meaning of the beloved community:
http://www.chaplaincyinstitute.org/rev-shirley-strong/toward-a-vision-beloved-community

Where Do We Go From Here?

Isaiah 58:1-12 - The Message

1 "Shout! A full-throated shout! Hold nothing back - a trumpet-blast shout! Tell my people what's wrong with their lives, face my family Jacob with their sins!

2 They're busy, busy, busy at worship, and love studying all about me. To all appearances they're a nation of right-living people - law-abiding, God-honoring. They ask me, 'What's the right thing to do?' and love having me on their side.

3 But they also complain, 'Why do we fast and you don't look our way? Why do we humble ourselves and you don't even notice?' "Well, here's why: "The bottom line on your 'fast days' is profit. You drive your employees much too hard.

 4 You fast, but at the same time you bicker and fight. You fast, but you swing a mean fist. The kind of fasting you do won't get your prayers off the ground.

5 Do you think this is the kind of fast day I'm after: a day to show off humility? To put on a pious long face and parade around solemnly in black? Do you call that fasting, a fast day that I, God, would like?

6 "This is the kind of fast day I'm after: to break the chains of injustice, get rid of exploitation in the workplace, free the oppressed, cancel debts.

7 What I'm interested in seeing you do is: sharing your food with the hungry, inviting the homeless poor into your homes, putting clothes on the shivering ill-clad, being available to your own families.

8 Do this and the lights will turn on, and your lives will turn around at once. Your righteousness will pave your way. The God of glory will secure your passage.

9 Then when you pray, God will answer. You'll call out for help and I'll say, 'Here I am.' A Full Life in the Emptiest of Places "If you get rid of unfair practices, quit blaming victims, quit gossiping about other people's sins,

10 If you are generous with the hungry and start giving yourselves to the down-and-out, Your lives will begin to glow in the darkness, your shadowed lives will be bathed in sunlight.

11 I will always show you where to go. I'll give you a full life in the emptiest of places - firm muscles, strong bones. You'll be like a well-watered garden, a gurgling spring that never runs dry.

12 You'll use the old rubble of past lives to build anew, rebuild the foundations from out of your past. You'll be known as those who can fix anything, restore old ruins, rebuild and renovate, make the community livable again.

Excerpt from introduction by Vincent Harding

Introduction by Vincent Harding

The last book written by King—his final reflections after a decade of civil rights struggles

Read the introduction by Vincent Harding.

In 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., isolated himself from the demands of the civil rights movement, rented a house in Jamaica with no telephone, and labored over his final manuscript. In this prophetic work, which has been unavailable for more than ten years, he lays out his thoughts, plans, and dreams for America's future, including the need for better jobs, higher wages, decent housing, and quality education. With a universal message of hope that continues to resonate, King demanded an end to global suffering, asserting that humankind-for the first time-has the resources and technology to eradicate poverty.

New Book: Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?

 

Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered the annual report at the 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on August 16, 1967, in Atlanta, Georgia.  

Dr. King projected in this speech the issues which led to Poor People's March on Washington.

Check out links on the speech and Martin Luther King, Jr. biography.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4id6TXqzYA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diLhFvXXPto


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foXJIPYTqsc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHFWide96CQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VorFJ6PzWzI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXiEN-9UplQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fYs_sWrqPaY

TRANSCRIPT of Speech
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/628.html

http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/kingpapers/article/where_do_we_go_from_here/

Martin Luther King, Jr. BIOGRAPHY
http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/encyclopedia/enc_martin_luther_king_jr_biography/

Please Come to the JSU Reading Community Book Discussion

       
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
6:00 p.m.
Cyber Cafe (in H.T. Sampson Library on JSU's campus)
Angela D. Stewart, Archivist of the Margaret Walker National Research Center will lead the discussion of Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro for the JSU President Reading Community
Click on link to check out photos from the discussion of The Souls of Black Folk:
http://presidentreading.wordpress.com/

Another perspective on the African American educational experience

Check out this article by consevative scholar, John McWhorter on what should be taught in African American Studies program:
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2009/09/by_john_mcwhorter_while_this.html

Check article on race and education reform
http://atlantapost.com/2010/10/06/ignoring-race-in-education-reform-will-do-more-harm-than-good/

Check out reprint of interview with John Henrik Clarke
http://www.africanaonline.com/2010/09/john-henrik-clarke-bad-boy-of-academe/

I. The Seat of The Trouble

The first chapter of The Mis-Education of the Negro is entitled "The Seat of the Trouble". 
The "Educated Negroes"
Carter G. Woodson, while having a Ph.D. in history from Harvard himself, feels that "educated Negroes" are the "seat of the trouble" in chapter I. 
There are several reasons why Dr. Woodson feels this way.

1.  Educated Negroes are taught to despise African people, history and culture.
2.  Few are taught African/African American history, literature and culture in school.
3. African/African American inferiority is drilled into African American students from preschool-post- 
    graduate education.
4. According to Woodson, most African American students are subjected to educational lynching
5. Northern and Western universities are not designed to adequately prepare African Americans who reside  
    in the American South
6. Schools of theology promote an interpretation of the Bible that justified slavery and justifies segregation
    and peonage
7. Schools of business administration prepare African Americans to be employees and not business owners.
8. Schools of journalism do not prepare to students to own and operate newspapers in the African American
    community
Woodson summarizes the "seat of the trouble" thusly:

When a Negro has finished his education in our schools, then, he has been equipped to begin the life of an Americanized or Europeanized white man, but before he steps from the threshold of his alma mater he is told by his teachers that he must go back to his own people from whom he has been estranged by a vision of ideals which in his disillusionment he will realize that he cannot attain.

Marian Wright Edelman video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MwHCCro66Vw

21st Century African American Education Issues

Check out  link to read a Harvard Education Review classic reprint on empowering minority students
http://her.hepg.org/content/j261357m62846812/fulltext.pdf

Check out this strategic plan developed by the State of Washington to address the needs of African American Students
http://www.wce.wwu.edu/Resources/CEP/METT/2006/African%20American%20Strategic%20Plan.pdf

Check out "A Dream Deferred: The Future of African Education:
http://www.collegeboard.com/dreamdeferred/downloads/dream-deferred-program-2010.pdf

Building Skills for America’s Future

Source: http://www.ed.gov/blog/2010/10/building-skills-for-america%e2%80%99s-future/
Today [October 5, 2010, President Obama announced the launch of a new initiative Skills for America’s Future – an effort to improve industry partnerships with community colleges to ensure that America’s community college students are gaining the skills and knowledge they need to be successful in the workforce.
In his remarks before the start of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board (PERAB) meeting today, President Obama laid the vision for Skills for America’s Future program:

The idea here is simple:  we want to make it easier to connect students looking for jobs with businesses looking to hire.  We want to help community colleges and employers create programs that match curricula in the classroom with the needs of the boardroom.
We’ve already seen cases where this can work.  Cisco, for example, has been working directly with community colleges to prepare students and workers for jobs ranging from work in broadband to health IT.  And all over the country, we know that the most successful community colleges are those that partner with the private sector.  So Skills for America’s Future would help build on these success stories by connecting more employers, schools, and other job training providers, and helping them share knowledge about what practices work best.  The goal is to ensure that every state in the country has at least one strong partnership between a growing industry and a community college.  Already, companies from UTC to Accenture to the GAP have announced their support for this initiative, as well as business leaders like my friend Penny Pritzker and the Aspen Institute’s Walter Isaacson.   I hope other business leaders will follow suit, and I’m also setting up a taskforce to work directly with the business community on this effort.

The President also emphasized the importance investing in education as a means of investing in our long-term economic growth.

But what I won’t do is cut back on investments like education that are directly related to our long term economic performance.  Now is not the time to sacrifice our competitive edge in the global economy.  And that’s why I disagree so strongly with the proposal from some on the other side of the aisle to cut education by 20% in next year’s budget.  It’s a cut that would eliminate 200,000 children from Head Start programs; a cut that would reduce financial aid for eight million college students; a cut that would leave community colleges without the resources they need to meet the goals we’ve talked about today.  That just doesn’t make sense to me.

President Obama understands that the education and skills of the American workforce is crucial to our ability to compete in the global economy. That’s why the President has set a goal of having an additional 5 million community college degrees and certificates by 2020, and called on PERAB to develop new steps to ensure that those degrees and certificates will provide graduates with the skills they need to get ahead in their careers.
To respond to the President’s call, PERAB reached out to private sector employers, labor leaders, philanthropy organizations, and policy leaders within the Administration solicit their views on the workplace development challenges of the 21^st century.  Many employers identified public-private partnerships as one of the most effective ways to ensure that college graduates and certificate earners have the skills they need to be successful in the workforce.
The Skills for America’s Future initiative will match up the employers like PG&E, United Technologies, McDonald’s, Accenture and Gap Inc. with community colleges in every state to develop curricula and programs that will prepare graduates to excel in the workforce.  To learn more about this initiative visit www.SkillsForAmerica.org.
Tomorrow, Dr. Jill Biden will host the first ever White House Summit on Community Colleges, an effort to bring together bring together community colleges, business, philanthropy, federal and state policy leaders, faculty and students to discuss how community colleges can help meet the job training and education needs of the nation’s evolving workforce.  Leaders from the Skills for America’s Future will be leading a breakout session during the summit to discuss best practices for building robust, successful partnerships.
You can join the conversation as well, by submitting your ideas and comments in our online dialogue on community colleges.  Visit WhiteHouse.gov/CommunityCollege to get started.

Mis-Education in the 21st Century

Miseducate: To educate improperly

What does mis-education mean in the 21st century especially for African American children?

Check articles and data produced by Apple computer on the challenge of 21st Century education:
http://ali.apple.com/acot2/challenge/

Mis-Education of the Negro LINKS

The Mis-Education of the Negro
By Carter G. Woodson
Download the Study Guide
http://www.asalh.org/files/Miseducation_Study_Guide.pdf


Why read Mis-Education of the Negro?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dRvezBtRB1I


Excerpt from Chapter 1 of Mis-Education of the Negro
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXq3z2BHYZg


Dr. Adele Logan Alexander discusses the origin of African American History Month
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJBIM2hygYQ

Download the entire audiobook or individual chapters
http://www.movementunes.com/Miseducation/Miseducation.html

The Mis-Education of the Negro FACEBOOK page
http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Mis-Education-of-the-Negro/103740466331843

Carter Godwin Woodson

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. 

Carter G. Woodson 

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated. 

Carter G. Woodson 

Check out these videos on the life Carter G. Woodson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkBEjJH1j5U


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1T8N6oB0A

Carter Godwin Woodson

                       

Carter Godwin Woodson, Ph.D. (1875-1950)

"The Father of Black History"

Historian, educator, author, and publisher. Born in 1875 in New Canton, Virginia. The son of freed slaves, Woodson worked as a sharecropper and a miner to help his family. He began high school in his late teens and proved to be an excellent student. Woodson went on to college and earned several degrees. He received a doctorate from Harvard University in 1912—becoming one of the first African Americans to earn a Ph.D. at the prestigious institution. After finishing his education, he dedicated himself to the field of African American history, working to make sure that this subject was taught in schools and was studied by scholars. For his efforts, Woodson is often known as the "Father of Black History."

In 1915, Woodson helped found the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (which later became the Association for the Study of Afro-American Life and History). The next year he established the Journal of Negro History, a scholarly publication. Woodson also formed the African-American-owned Associated Publishers Press in 1921, which produced several of his own works, including The Negro in Our History (1922) and Mis-Education of the Negro(1933).

Woodson lobbied schools and organizations to participate in a special program to encourage the study of African American history, which began in February 1926 with Negro History Week and was later expanded and renamed Black History Month. To help teachers with African American studies, he created the Negro History Bulletin in 1937. While Woodson died on April 3, 1950, his work continues on. Every February, students around the United States spend time learning about the subject closest to his heart—African American history.

© 2010 A&E Television Networks. All rights reserved.

Final Thoughts on The Souls of Black Folk

Check out the celebration of centennial of the publication of The Souls of Black Folk led by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. at Du Bois' alma mater Harvard University.
http://forum-network.org/lecture/web-du-bois-souls-black-folk


Today we complete our formal discussion of The Souls of Black Folks, any final thoughts?

Dr. Du Bois originally published the essays that comprise The Souls of Black Folks from 1896-1901 and the completed book of essays was originally published in 1903, over 100 years ago.  This essays reflected his thinking at the dawning of the 20th Century.  Du Bois was not perfect, his essays reflect his elitism, paternalism, and sexism.  His essays also reflect that he was born to free mother in New England three years after the end of the Civil War.  They also reflect his education and erudition, he was educated at three of the best educational institutions in the world at that time:
Fisk University
Harvard University
University of Berlin
The essays also reflect his growing participation in the Niagara Movement and predate the founding of NAACP.  While I do not agree with all of Du Bois' arguments and I recognize that were other voices speaking out about African American issues during the early 20th Century, Du Bois was a public intellectual par excellence, whose commitment to scholarship, writing and activism have not been matched.  Our next author Carter Godwin Woodson was a superior public intellectual who raised the general public awareness of Africa and the Diaspora.

Du Bois is often criticized as not being an institution builder.  But I think he was an institution builder, he just built different types of institutions, he created or help create: the Niagara Movement, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, The Crisis, The Phylon and the academic discipline of sociology.

What are your thoughts?  Thank you for participating in our discussion of The Souls of Black Folk and spread the word about the blog as we begin our discussion of Mis-Education of the Negro.

XIV. "The Sorrow Songs"

Check out this clips of Sorrow Songs:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knQvjDgRZoM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pGe-OB8wzXk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlLPu2Sr1ZU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn4o4QF-HWc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8NGQGIogys

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EJSkJlh_fg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcPRfN8SMco

XIV. "The Sorrow Songs"

Jubilee Hall at Fisk University














Du Bois' graduation class at Fisk

X. Of Faith of The Fathers

Du Bois writes toward the end of this essay:
To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees postive personal advantage in deception and lying.  His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain.  Patience, humility, adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage.


Paul Laurence Dunbar writes about this dilemma in his poem, "We Wear the Mask"

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,--
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
          We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
          We wear the mask!

X. Of Faith of The Fathers

My church, Farish Street Baptist Church, ca. 1930


The tenth essay in The Souls of Black Folk is "Of Faith of the Father".  The poem is from "Dim Face of Beauty" by Fiona MacLeod  and the musical notation is from the Negro spiritual, "Steal Away"
Check out link of Mahalia Jackson and Nat King Cole singing "Steal Away":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-O5hz5KnSdc

This essay is a reworking of an article Du Bois wrote for The New World: A Quarterly Review of Religious Ethics and Theology (December 1900): 614-25 entitled "The Religion of the American Negro".

In this tenth essay Du Bois described the religion of the African American before emancipation.  Three things stood out for Du Bois in describing African American religion:
1. The Preacher
2. Music
3. Frenzy or Shouting

Du Bois plainly displays his New England high church bias when he describes African and African American religion.  Du Bois the stuffy, conservative, snob is front and center in this article.  He refers to West African religion as heathenism and probably only approves slightly more of rural Southern African American  and Northern storefront religious practices. 

Du Bois claims:
The Negro Churcb of to-day[1900] is the social centre of Negro life in the United States, and the most characteristic expression of African character.

In 2010, can the same claim be made about the African American church?

Uplifting the Race

Throughout  The Souls of Black Folk and especially in the ninth essay, "Of the Sons of Master and Man", Du Bois, writes about racial uplift.  Today we largely criticize "racial uplift" as elitism and it was elitism.  But the elitism in racial uplift was both a weakness and a strength.  People like Du Bois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Mary Church Terrell, Booker T. Washington and others felt an obligation to help the masses of African Americans.
Kevin Gaines in his book,  Uplifting the Race, argues:

. . .in its emphasis on class distinctions and patriarchal authority, racial uplift ideology was tied to pejorative notions of racial pathology and thus was limited as a force against white prejudice.

I agree with Gaines that buying into the same racial stereotypes whites had against African Americans hindered the effectiveness of racial uplift, but I feel it was a start.  Racial uplift was better than folding hands and turning up noses and saying I got mine now you get yours the best way can.  Racial uplift built churches, schools, and other self-help organizations. 



Mary Church Terrell
And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long. With courage, born of success achieved in the past, with a keen sense of the responsibility which we shall continue to assume, we look forward to a future large with promise and hope. Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.

IX. "Of the Sons of Master and Man"

W.E.B Du Bois writes:

 Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon the law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression.  The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy or consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

Check out this link from Howard University School of Law on race and justice.

http://www.c-spanarchives.org/program/ID/221714


Check out this article by Charles Ogletree and  Johanna Wald, "After Shirley Sherrod, We All Need to Slow Down and Listen" Washington Post, Sunday, July 25, 2010
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/23/AR2010072304583.html

Have attitudes changed in the 21st Century?  Let's talk about.

IX. "Of the Sons of Master and Man"

The ninth essay in The Souls of Black Folk is " Of the Sons of Master and Man"  This essay is based on the article, "The Relation of the Negroes to the Whites in the South" published in the Annals of the American Academy of the Political and Social Sciences (July-December 1901): 121-40.
The lines of music are from the Negro spiritual "I'm A Rollin'"

Listen to the Alfred Street Baptist Church Male Chorus sing "I'm A Rollin'"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7ktp6cy4hY

Du Bois wrote:
The world-old phenomenon of the contact of diverse races of men is to have new exemplification during the new century.  Indeed, the characteristic of our age is the contact of European civilization with the world's undeveloped peoples.

It is then, the strifr of all honorable men of the twentieth century to see that in the future competition of races the survival of the fittest shall mean the triumph of the good, the beautiful, and the true; that we may be able to preserve for future civilization all that is really fine and noble and strong, and not continue to put a premium on greed and impudence and cruelty.

SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST



   Herbert Spencer


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfBVyutexm0


Herbert Spencer (born April 27, 1820, Derby, Derbyshire, Eng. — died Dec. 8, 1903, Brighton, Sussex) English sociologist and philosopher, advocate of the theory of social Darwinism. His System of Synthetic Philosophy, 9 vol. (1855 – 96), held that the physical, organic, and social realms are interconnected and develop according to identical evolutionary principles, a scheme suggested by the evolution of biological species. This sociocultural evolution amounted to, in Spencer's phrase, "the survival of the fittest." The free market system, without interference by governments, would weed out the weak and unfit. His controversial laissez-faire philosophy was praised by social Darwinists such as William Graham Sumner and opposed by sociologists such as Lester Frank Ward. Liked or loathed, Spencer was one of the most discussed Victorian thinkers.

The Function of Today's HBCU

In 1903 Du Bois stated:

The function of the Negro college, then, is clear; it must maintain the standards of popular education, it must seek the social regeneration of the Negro, and it must help in the solution of problems of race contact and cooperation.

What is the function of the HBCU today?

The Talented Tenth: An Assessment by Nell Irvin Painter

Nell Irvin Painter on the Talented Tenth

Who is the Talented Tenth? This time-bound phrase comes from Du Bois's 1903 essay, "The Negro Problem," quoted in the Appendix of The Future of the Race, and begins: "The Negro race, like all races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men." These exceptional men--and Du Bois did mean men--would "guide the Mass away from the contamination and death of the Worst." The Talented Tenth would shoulder the task of uplifting the race without succumbing to money-grubbing selfishness; their formal education signified their intelligence and enlightened character. In 1903, the Talented Tenth was broad-minded and big-hearted by definition.

The passage of forty-five years diminished Du Bois's assurance. By 1948 he had revised his appraisal, and that revision also appears in the Appendix. He confessed the error of his assumption that altruism flowed automatically from higher education. The Best Men had not become the best of men. He lamented that the Talented Tenth had mostly produced self-indulgent egotists who turned their training toward personal advancement. Meanwhile, Du Bois had been learning to respect the masses from reading Marx. Nonetheless, he still cherished a hope that a new, self-sacrificing Talented Tenth of internationally minded men--still men--would ally African-Americans to the peoples of the Third World and uplift the colored masses universally. . . .

Du Bois never saw the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the age of affirmative action, which provided unprecedented opportunities to men like Gates and West. Du Bois died before the growth of the largest African-American middle class in history. He also died long before the invention of black women's studies, whose tenor often varies from what black men have to say.

Source:  http://www.nellpainter.com/cv/reviews/R34_FutureRace.html

VI. Of the Training of Black Men"

The sixth essay in The Souls of Black Folk is "Of the Training of Black Men"

Du Bois argues in this essay that "we are called to solve the problem of training men for life".  This essay originally appeared the September 1902 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine.  Click on link to read the essay as it appeared in the Atlantic Monthly:  http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/blacked/dutrain.htm

Click on link to read earlier articles Booker T. Washington wrote in Atlantic Monthly on the education of African Americans:  http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/blacked/washaw.htm

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/flashbks/black/washbh.htm


In his argument for the broad liberal arts training of African Americans,  Du Bois quotes an excerpt of Matthew 6: 25:

Is not life more than meat, and the body more than raiment?"

A more recent translation of the entire verse reads like this:

 Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more important than food, and the body more important than clothes?

Jesus in Matthew 6: 25 and Du Bois in this essay are railing against materialism, but what is materialism?
Bob Deffinbaugh in an online commentary describes materialism as:

Materialism, however, has nothing to do with how much money you or I have in the bank. It has little to do with whether you drive a Rolls Royce or a Rambler. Materialism is primarily an attitude toward money and its importance. Materialism is an attitude which attaches to money and material goods more importance than they deserve. To go one step further, materialism is primarily a matter of reversed priorities. You cannot identify a materialist by an audit, but only by exposing his attitudes.

Source: http://bible.org/seriespage/fatal-failures-religion-4-materialism-matthew-619-34#TopOfPage

Why is the argument against materialism important?
Du Bois argues in the essay that:
The tendency is here, born of slavery and quickened to renewed life by the crazy imperialism of the day, to regard human beings as among the material resources of a land to be trained with an eye single to future dividends?
What do you think?

V. "Of the Wings of Atalanta"

The fifth essay in The Souls of Black Folk is "Of the Wings of Atalanta".  It begins with stanza six of John Greenleaf Whittier's poem "Howard at Atlanta" (1869).  The musical bars are from the obscure Negro spiritual, "The Rocks and Mountains".  "Atalanta" is a romantic way of spelling Atlanta and alludes the Greek myth a free spirited woman named Atalanta who would only marry the man who could beat her in a foot race.  Du Bois compares the city of Atlanta to that free-spirited woman.

The most important topic Du Bois discusses in this essay is the function of the university.  This discussion is as important in 2010 as it was in 1903 when Du Bois published The Souls of Black or in 1933 when Carter G. Woodson published the Mis-Education of the Negro.  The discussion of the function of the university extends beyond the industrial arts versus classical education debate of the early twentieth century.  It even extends beyond the university to elementary and secondary education.  Documentaries like "Waiting for Superman" and "The Lottery" highlight how crucial a topic the function of thehee university and more broadly speaking the function of education is.

Du Bois in the essay, "The Wings of Atalanta" argues that:

The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.

 Check out the trailer for "Waiting For Superman"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKTfaro96dg

Check out Amos Wilson talking about the function of education
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6ShE9IONGQ

Check education clip:
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fnh9q_cQcUE


Check out on 21st Century Educational Realities:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vc1hgMl3uUk

Another kind of College Administrator: John Hope

    


If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then
 

   




If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.
John Hope

June 30, 1906, John Hope became the first Black president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. John Hope was an important African American educator and race leader of the early twentieth century. Twenty-three years later, in 1929, Hope went on to become the first African American president of Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). Under his leadership, Atlanta University became the first college in the nation to focus exclusively on graduate education for African American students. As a race leader, Hope was steadfast in his support of public education, adequate housing, health care, job opportunities, and recreational facilities for blacks in Atlanta and across the nation. He also supported full civil rights in the South during an era when African Americans were expected to accommodate a system of inequality.
To accomplish his goals, Hope embraced several civil rights organizations, including the Niagara Movement, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the southern-based Commission on Interracial Cooperation. He was also very active in such social service organizations as the National Urban League, the “Colored Men’s Department” of the YMCA, and the National Association of Teachers in Colored Schools. Hope was very well known among both blacks and whites in the early twentieth century. Buck Franklin, the father of the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin, was so impressed with Hope’s social and educational leadership that he named his son after Hope.
John Hope’s early life contributes much to an understanding not only of racial identity but also of class, color, and caste among African Americans, especially in the South. Born of a biracial union in Augusta on June 2, 1868, he belonged to a small black elite whose history predated the end of slavery. His father, Scottish-born James Hope, immigrated to New York City early in the nineteenth century and eventually moved to Augusta, where he became a prominent businessman. His mother, Mary Frances Butts, was a free African American woman born in Hancock County, Georgia. Although Georgia law prohibited interracial marriages, Hope’s parents lived openly as husband and wife until his father’s death in 1876.
Hope’s education prepared him for his life’s work. Though he quit school after the eighth grade to help his struggling family survive, he decided five years later to complete his education and attended a preparatory school in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1886. He went on to earn a B.A. degree in 1894 at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. Hope eventually decided to become a professional educator, teaching first at Roger Williams University, a small black liberal-arts school on the outskirts of Nashville, Tennessee. In 1897 Hope married Lugenia Burns, who would also become a prominent race leader and social activist. They moved in 1898 to Atlanta, where he took a teaching position at Atlanta Baptist College, which became Morehouse College in 1913. It was in Atlanta that Hope first met and befriended prominent black leaders and educators like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois.

Something to think about . . .

As we conclude our reading of "Of Booker T. Washington and Others" Du Bois' third essay in The Souls of Black Folk, there are several quotes I would like for us to think about:

Honest and earnest criticism from those whose interests are most nearly touched,--criticism of writers by readers, of government by those governed, of leaders by those led,--this is the soul of democracy and the safeguard of modern society.

Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys.

We have no right to sit silently by while the inevitable seeds are sown for a harvest of disaster to our children, black and white.

His [Booker T. Washington] doctrine has tended to make the whites North and South, shift the burden of the Negro problem to the Negro's shoulders and stand  aside as critical and rather pessimistic spectators; when in fact the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to the righting these great wrongs.