A little more on Black History Month 2015

There have been some people questioning Woodrow Wilson's legacy lately, which is a reasonable thing to do. There has also been some resistance because you can't judge people in history by present day standards, and then they drag in Jefferson and Washington having slaves.

I do see the point of reserving some judgment on historical figures because we are supposed to be more advanced now, though some people really make you wonder. It still doesn't necessarily apply to Wilson in the same way it applies to Washington and Jefferson. Washington and Jefferson probably were pretty much in line with the common thinking of their day; Wilson was setting things back.

Wilson took integrated government departments and started segregating them again. He applauded a racist film as "history written in lightning" - it wasn't history and as a professor he should have known better. He had to work at not knowing better. Wilson was behind his times.

Knowing that in the early days of the American colonies that Africans came as indentured servants who earned their freedom and got land and worshipped in integrated churches might be a reason to justify questioning Washington and Jefferson, but I am thinking of something else today.

In Philadelphia we toured Constitution Hall, but we also went through the Eastern State Penitentiary, an old prison. It was built on the "Pennsylvania system" or "separate system", kind of like prison-wide solitary confinement. That took me back to Port Arthur in Tasmania. My understanding was that they only followed the separate system for the first year of imprisonment and then the convict would be transferred into the general population. What I remember most clearly though was that many of the convicts developed mental illness from the solitary confinement, and it still has the worst psychic energy of the entire site. If you are going to be affected by bad vibes anywhere, it will be there.

At Eastern it was driven home more that this was really seen as a humane way of treating the prisoners. The people who planned it out had really good intentions, but it wasn't effective there either. You can cause a lot of damage without meaning it.

It makes me wonder. Before I learned about Wilson's racism I was inclined to think of him as trying to do good, with his participation in the talks after World War I and trying to set up the League of Nations at least showing an interest in world peace. Maybe he thought Birth of a Nation was just really well made and saw the potential of film for history. (No.)

The League of Nations fell apart and the way they resolved WWI really set the stage for WWII. That's not all on Wilson, but this was a man who was actively working to oppress a people that had already faced centuries of oppression. I'm sure he didn't think of himself as evil, but what he was doing was evil. How could that man be an effective force for peace?

I want to bring up two more things. One is a quote from W.E.B. DuBois' Niagra Movement speech from 1905:

"We are not more lawless than the white race, we are more often arrested, convicted, and mobbed."

Still true, and some people are only starting to believe it because of video footage, but it has been true all along. More interesting is that if you look at the rest of the speech, they are asking for suffrage and education for everyone.

http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/niagara-movement-speech/

It is worth reading the full speech, but now I want to go back a few decades before that, with this summary of Reconstruction from Albion W. Tourgee:

"[They] instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot box and the jury box to thousands of White men who had been barred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule in the South. They abolished the whipping post, the branding iron, the stock and other barbarous forms of punishment which had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all that time no man's rights of person were invaded under forms of law."

That benefited everyone, including the poor whites. In fact, these projects disproportionately helped the poor whites, because they were able to keep using them when Jim Crow pushed the African Americans out.

Then they needed to do it all over again, and they kept doing it. There are still people fighting it, once more rolling back voting rights, pulling money away from schools, and everything that has been done before.

There are a lot of things that could be said that would be relevant, but I'm just going to go back to DuBois' speech, because this is important, and it's true.

"Either the United States will destroy ignorance or ignorance will destroy the United States."