My curiosity piqued by the decision by Ron DeSantis to attack the AP black studies courses in Florida high schools, I went back and reread the third chapter of my book Autobiography of An Ex-White Man. If you want a clear, transparent, well-written statement of the essential outlines of the true history of the United States, take a look at it. It is, in a sense, a summary of what I learned from my colleagues during my 16 years as a professor of Afro-American Studies.
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piqued
As an ex-white man and as an atheist and as a philosopher do you have a place in your heart for a Black Jesus or the Black Church?
The footage of the funeral was quite moving
"The first Africans came to North America in 1619...." (p.64)
Not so.
In the late 1980s, workers excavating a new subway line in downtown Mexico City stumbled upon a long-lost cemetery. Documents showed it had once been connected to a colonial hospital built between 1529 and 1531—only about 10 years after the Spanish conquest of Mexico—for Indigenous patients. As archaeologists excavated the buried skeletons, three stood out. Their teeth were filed into shapes similar to those of enslaved Africans from Portugal and people living in parts of West Africa. Now, chemical and genetic analyses confirm these individuals were among the first generation of Africans to arrive in the Americas, likely as early victims of the burgeoning transatlantic slave trade.
During the 16th and 17th centuries, tens of thousands of enslaved and free Africans lived in Mexico. Today, almost all Mexicans carry a small amount of African ancestry....
The men's presence in a hospital for Indigenous people highlights the largely forgotten diversity of early colonies in the Americas, Flewellen says. "We need to break out of the binary of just Native [American] and European experiences" and remember that Africans were part of the story as well.
https://www.science.org/content/article/three-men-were-buried-mexico-500-years-ago-dna-and-bones-reveal-their-stories
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[I]n 1526 another Spanish explorer, Lucas Vázquez de Ayllón, tried to establish a Spanish settlement at San Miguel de Gualdape in what was then La Florida (the current Georgia or South Carolina coast.) The Ayllón group included both Spaniards and African slaves.... But the settlement collapsed. First, some of the Spaniards mutinied against Ayllón. Then the African slaves burned down the mutineers’ housing and went to live with Native Americans in the area....
A letter from Spain’s King Charles V dated April 20, 1537, gave DeSoto permission to take 50 Africans, a third of them female, to Florida.... Many of them deserted him to live with the Native Americans in Florida....
Over the succeeding decades, black slaves helped build the Spanish colonial infrastructure, including most notably St. Augustine, Fla., in 1565, the oldest city in the United States.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/23/everyone-is-talking-about-thats-not-actually-when-slavery-america-started/
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If we are to credit the narrative of Cabeça De Vaca ... at least two Negroes accompanied the Narvaez expedition in Florida in 1528.... A few Negro slaves accompanied the great expedition of Hernando de Soto when it came to Florida in 1539 and numerous Negro slaves came with DeLuna when he made an unsuccessful attempt to settle on Pensacola bay in 1559....
Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, who founded the first permanent [European!] settlement in what is now the United States in 1565, made elaborate plans for the conquest and colonization of Florida.... Menéndez did have some Negroes with him who were put to work on his fortifications.
Edwin L. Williams, "Negro slavery in Florida," The Florida Historical Quarterly 28(2):93 (1949)
I assume that the title Autobiography of an Ex-White Man is a riff on
this.
I stand corrected. Thank you all for this information, which I had not seen. And yes, my title is a deliberate reference to the famous novel
I will acknowledge that I was not familiar with Autobiography Of An Ex-Colored Man or its author. So I looked up the biography of James Weldon Johnson. What struck me, aside from his achievements as a writer, professor and civil rights leader was the unpredictability of life, which can be cut short by an unforeseeable tragedy. Mr. Johnson and his wife were killed in 1938 while vacationing in Maine when the car Mr. Johnson was driving was struck by a railroad train. This reminded me of the tragic death of John Nash, the mathematician and Nobel Prize winner and subject of A Beautiful Mind. He and his wife had returned from a trip to Norway in 2015 where he had received a prize for his work in mathematics. They were supposed to be picked up by a limousine when they landed at Newark airport, but their flight arrived 5 hrs. early, so they decided to take a taxi. The taxi driver lost control of the vehicle on the NJ Turnpike and crashed, killing Prof. Nash and his wife, who were not wearing seatbelts and were ejected from the taxi.
When I was a baby, not yet old enough to walk, my father's youngest brother was gravely wounded when some white men ran his car off the road in North Carolina. The nearest hospital wouldn't accept him as a patient because it was for whites only, despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act several years earlier. He died a few hours later.
That's a sad story. And, unfortunately, one whose basic facts are not unique, I wd guess.
One of Tony Morrison's books is being banned in Florida for High School students to read. Teachers may be fined for keeping banned books out in classrooms.
I hope they do not ban any books about the Jewish Holocaust. This banning is getting way out of control.
They shouldn't ban any books on the Battle of the Bulge in the 1944 Ardennes. It ended on January 25, 1945.
The Russians are positioning between 200K to 500K troops in Eastern Ukraine. A new offensive is planned between now and February 15. My grandfather told me that the Russians won the Eastern front against the Germans by throwing countless waves of men into battle.
When I was in public school, my Uncle bought me a game called Patton Strikes Back for the PC. The first time I played it I was heavily defeated.
Three years ago I finally, after all these years, figured out how to beat the game at highest difficulty. The trick is you must retreat & clump your American divisions together around & inside cities or towns that are strong checkpoints. Before the Germans are able to destroy all of your divisions, the weather clears up and your P-57s and P-51s are able to knock out the German supply lines. This brings about the full defeat of the German divisions & their eventual defeat.
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