I went to a coin shop today. It deals in coins and silver and jewelry. They bought silver off of me. These are the days. And while I was there, I looked around and the walls were covered in these fantastic photographs of a bygone age. Of great families, posed in their finest clothes. Pictures from the 1900s and before. Pictures of families regal. And all the photos, framed in thick silver, were of people of color. Black men and women and children. The kind of photos you can imagine in great houses, of a bygone age. I asked the proprietor, a pale man, about the pictures. He said they come from auctions, estate sales, or people down on their luck. And that he did not know who any of the people were. And it struck me hard, that all those generations, that all that regalness, and all that striving toward… could end up on a strangers wall…. forgotten and moldering. It struck me hard, how history if we do not preserve it, is lost, becomes the property of another man. ********** A lot has happened since the last post. Illinois senator Barack Obama, in a historic presidential race, 40 years removed from another historic presidential election has become the first Black president of the United States of America, if not the first Black president of the Americas. Let’s ponder the past a little, before we get into the present and the future. John Hanson, a moor, was the first president of the Confederation of States, from 1781 to 1782. One of the seven Presidents that held sway prior to George Washington, and the reorganization of the Government as the United States Government. However that’s open to some interpretation, with some recently claiming him to be Swedish and others British. And others trying to confuse him with a later John Hanson who was also a moor. And others presenting doctored pictures that proves he can’t be a moor, etc, etc. In recent years many sites have popped up to debunk the idea of John Hanson, the Moor, who led a nation. So what do you believe with so much new hands in the pot? Well you have to look at the history around those early years of the Americas. We like to imagine that slavery opened up fully formed in America, with master and chattel the defacto standard. Thus eliminating the concept of a Moor being in a leadership role in early America. We think of our past as being this cookie cutter thing, that confirms our present prejudices, when nothing could be further from the truth. The history of America, is far more complex, and far more miraculous than most see, or acknowledge. The history of the founding of this nation is not the history of master and slave, at least it doesn’t start off that way. It is the history of Guides and their benefactors. The Pale man came to Africa as a conqueror. But Africa of the 15, 16, and 17 centuries did not conquer easy. More often then not they got a bloody nose for their trouble. But the pale man had a word, that began to work, where plain force failed… diplomacy. It opened up trade, and talks, and he gained gifts of land, and gifts of men. Usually the best and the brightest. Protectors, guides of dark men to pacify the unmapped lands of the new world. African frontiersmen opening up the plains, traveling the routes, making the deals with the Native Americans. The founders and shapers of what would be America, her mapmakers, her clock makers, her road makers, were Moors. Those same Moors who had descended on Italy, who had for 500 years embraced Spain, were directed now to a new land… and new mysteries to unlock. The progression from adventurer/champion to slave is a slow and arduous one. Racism is a luxury of pampered men, it is not something embraced when you need to conquer new worlds. In the wild frontier, you have the person who will keep you alive. Who will carve cities out of a wilderness. And those men were Moors, men such as Estevan. Estevan was one of the great explorers of Texas, as is popular in modern retellings, he is often called incorrectly a slave when he was a guide. One of many guides given to the pale man by dark kings. Greedy, easily swayed, easily cozied up to Kings, who increasingly traded their best and brightest to the pale man, to take him through those places… beyond which there be dragons. Early 16th century Texas explorations are rife with stories of Moors who made inroads into lands that no-one else could. And this went for all of the Americas. So by the time you get to the 17th and 18th centuries, you have towns named after Moors, some have intermarried with the Native Americans, and you have the beginnings of this rough parity. The tremblings of this idea of Nation. It’s a miraculous time, and is starting to become a troubling time, as you begin to get this transition from Free society to Indentured servant society. Benjamin Banneker, like all the Moors, brings the beginnings of this rough brilliance to the new lands. But they notice that the gifts of guides, becomes demands of indentured servants, and this becomes… with time… demands for slaves. For grist for the mill. The west is becoming a machine of Industry, due in no small part to the Moors. And the power of the kings of the dark lands is waning, civil wars, kingdom against kingdom, and plain greed, by the 18th century the Kingdoms of the Dark Lands… are toppling. And what the pale man once asked for he now compels. The Industrial revolution, sparked in no small part by Moors, has become the weapon by which the pale man, will bring a continent to its knees. John Hanson’s presidency, indeed as was the whole period of the Confederation of States, was at the end of a very sheltered and relatively harmonious period for the United States. Indentured servants rather than slaves were the rule of the day, and slaves could still buy their freedom, and were still considered human. You were apt in this period to still see white and black indentured servants and slaves. However, all that, in less than a handful of years would change beyond recognition. While the Americas were contentedly playing house, the British, French, Portuguese had found a profitable and economic imperative for slavery. Sugar cane. From the late 1600s to the 1700s the West Indies is where the money was made. Economics and Evil go hand in hand. People will do anything to make money. But you can only push people so far, and by the end of the 1700s, revolution was erupting in the West Indies. Most notably, and most successfully, in one lone island state… war was waged… and war was won. The French Colony of Santo Domingo sees an unprecedented uprising. The year was 1791, and the man’s name, the Black Devil, who routed Napolean’s forces… was L’Overture. And the nation he forged the western world would never forget… nor forgive. He would name the new Island-Nation… Haiti. Waves of White Refugees fleeing the bloodbath in Santo Domingo, flood US Ports. The year is 1793. And all the pieces are almost in place, for America to become… the last, best hope… for slavery. The last piece was a year away. It would come from a man called Eli Whitney, and hell would come with it. Eli Whitney when I was growing up was a man of color, nowadays history has rewritten the creator of the Cotton Gin as a Pale Man. I’m sure someday soon they’ll do the same for Benjamin Banneker and Crispus Attucks and john Hanson… and all those who gave their last, best measure. But Eli Whitney, regardless of his changing color, what he was, was the Oppenheimer of his age. He opened a Pandora’s box, that began slavery in earnest…. the American version. The capitalist version. His invention of the Cotton Gin in 1794 (along with his assembly process four years later for firearms) signaled both slavery’s most virulent days and its end (because a system at its worst, destroys itself), this is the late 18th, and 19th century with its wholesale stampede for human beings to be captured, branded, beaten, shipped, dehumanized, defiled, bred like cattle for meekness. This is where the doctrine of Willie Lynch, a British slave owner in the West Indies, a doctrine first delivered to the colonies in a 1712 speech… really took hold, and was improved upon. Now with the loss of Santo Domingo, the birth of Haiti, the creation of the Cotton gin, the profitability of cotton, and the mass production of weapons… now America was ready to embrace.. horror. The new immigrants to the Americas, were rich and powerful men who had lost much with the disturbance in the West Indies. They did not plan to make the same mistakes in the Americas. They knew now, to get them as young as possible, separate families… destroy famailial ties and the concept of generations, instill bastardy as a point of course, remove them from their spiritual center, their religion, their gods, and instill in them a twisted doctrine that they were born to serve and to submit. Pit one against the other, and keep them apart. Put woman against man, and young against old. And this way… you will have no more Haitis, no more cursed L’Overtures. This is the short,barbaric part of American history. And it has to do with money and comfort. It is the profitability of cotton, It is the rise of the south, and it is a period of fantastic growth, and unbounded inhumanity. and the coming civil war. This is where you get into the history, that Americans feel comfortable teaching in school. That in a time of change people of African ancestry were abused chattel, and nothing more. Only they are incorrect. In the furnace of ignorance, wisdom came. And in the furnace of fear, courage came. And there were always more… L’Overtures. Always more Nat Turners. Always more Frederick Douglasses, Always more Harriet Tubmans. The American west was forged out of escaped slaves, looking in the taming of new lands, to escape the persecution of old ones. The wonders of those bloody hundred years between Haiti’s Liberation to the end of the American Civil War, are amazing and inspiring. And culminate not in freedom being given by any military ploy ( which is all that the Emancipation Proclamation was– an edict to incite revolution in states in rebellion… and no the civil war was not fought over slavery… it was fought like any war— for power… the war was the unavoidable conclusion of a nation living by binding others in horror, finding itself ultimately as bound) but freedom being won, the only way it is ever won, by making the institution of slavery hell for slaver as well as enslaved. That’s why I migrate to the side of John Hanson being a moor. All the miraculous milestones of that age of calamity and change… revolve around moors. And my bones, these bones that much blood was spilled in the making, my bones… scream “moor”. A racial memory perhaps. This country puts so much effort into whitewashing the contributions of people of color in this hemisphere, they want African history to consist of nothing more than those places… where you fall down. And this country, and this world, owes far too much to those places where people of color stood up… to forget it. To forget it, or retreat from it, is a disservice not just to people of color, but to the spirit and freedom of all people. We end up with history repeating itself. With failed sons, of failed slave-owners, trying to reinstate failed slave states. We waste time repeating history, looking backward, when the worlds needs us desperately to go forward. Haiti almost 300 years ago, painted the way to freedom in blood. And for that unequaled triumph the western world has been trying to destroy this small island nation ever since. People raise their voices over Palestine. You raise your voices for Iraq. Raise your voices over Haiti. Stop the occupation and Mass Murder, and the attempts by the US Government backed by the UN to turn back the clock. US and UN troops out of Haiti Now!. This would be a far different hemisphere, a far worse one I fear, if not for what that nation did by standing up. Never have so many, owed so much… to so few. Here’s your chance to begin paying back. Get informed and get involved by going to the sites below: http://www.ijdh.org/ http://www.haitianalysis.com/ http://www.hurah-inc.org/ http://www.margueritelaurent.com/index.html http://www.haitiansupportproject.org/ http://www.sodahaiti.org/projects.html http://www.lambifund.org/ http://answer.pephost.org/site/PageServer?pagename=ANS_haititribunal This is a historic time, but only if we move forward rather than back. I will be the first to say I had and I have doubts about Barack Obama. Even though I voted for him, that was a vote against McCain and the Bush regime, rather than for Obama. He is no John Hanson, and he is no L’Overture, if he were he would not be in the position he is in now. As his support (and McCain’s) of the 700 Billion Dollar Wall- Street bailout showed… he is a company man. Arguably beholden to interests which are not the interests of the poor or the middle class. But I am willing to be wrong, and to be surprised… by a man with the convictions and the desire… to heal the world rather than further hurt it. So I hope Obama will be worthy of the trust placed in him, grow worthy of it if he is not, and begin to retire some of the anti-Black and anti-people of color policies that this nation has continued to support. from the armed occupation of Haiti, to the persecution of Cuba and Venezuela. Time will tell. All this to warn that perhaps the day will come, 300 years removed, where someone says… “Barack Obama wasn’t a Moor, wasn’t Black…. he was Swedish…. he was English.” The moral? History not jealously guarded ends up like those pictures I saw today on a coin dealers wall… the property of another man. And that is an end… to be resisted.