JAZZMAN CHRONICLES:
TRUE HISTORY
TRUE HISTORY: ORIGINAL SINS
My Heroes Have
Always Killed Cowboys
By Jack Random
There has been some discussion of
reparations for slavery as candidates vie to succeed Donald Trump as President
of the United States. All
Americans should be taught the dark side of our history alongside the good for
only then can we wipe the slate clean, turn the page and address the challenges
of the future. Only then can we
have a candid discussion on the question of reparations not only for slavery
but for the many sins of our past.
There was a time when Manifest
Destiny governed the history of
America. Those days are gone. We know now that our nation was born in
genocide and built on the backs of African American slaves. We have chosen to ignore the
fundamental truth for far too long.
Columbus was a killer.
Cortez was a killer. We can
no longer assume that those who stood in the beginning of our founding are
heroes. They are not. They were in some cases heroic but they
are not heroes today.
The legacy of racism in America
runs long and deep. The father of
our country was a slaveholder.
George Washington owned two hundred slaves. To his credit he freed his slaves after his death. Thomas Jefferson, who owned over 600
slaves, did not. He infamously
impregnated his slave mistress Sally Hemings, with whom he had five
children. He publicly condemned
the barbarism of slavery and proposed a gradual emancipation, retraining and
re-colonization of slaves to Africa but his intellectual opposition yielded to
his financial interests. He needed
slaves to maintain his standing in a racist society. Other slaveholder presidents include James Madison, James
Monroe, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, Zachary Taylor, William Henry Harrison
and Martin Van Buren.
GEORGE
WASHINGTON
George
Washington did not chop down the cherry tree. That was a myth invented by his first biographer. Washington was not a super hero. He was a man with all the flaws of
humanity and many of the failings of his time. He was not only America’s first president but also America’s
first slaveholder president and the first to kill Native Americans. He did so as a young man in the British
army in the French and Indian War.
As president he set the policy of westward expansion that would become
known as Manifest Destiny. He
wrote that he wanted to take Indian lands peaceably and at a fair price but he
favored force whenever the natives refused. The term he used for Indian removal was “extirpation.” That term refers to uprooting and utter
destruction. Thus Washington can
justly be characterized as the Founding Father of the Great American
Genocide. [1]
JAMES
MADISON
Credited as a
primary framer of the constitution, James Madison purportedly believed in
emancipation of the slaves but he did not free his own slaves and he infamously
drafted that part of the constitution that gave slaves 3/5ths of a person value
for purposes of apportioning congressional representation. Without that provision – a provision
that would poison congress until the Civil War and the 13th
Amendment – slavery might well have been abolished decades sooner than it
was. At best Madison’s beliefs and
policies on race were complicated and contradictory. At worst he was hypocritically racist like most of his
“progressive” contemporaries. [2]
THOMAS
JEFFERSON
Those of us
who treasure the legacy of Jefferson’s words – we hold these truths to be
self-evident that all men are created equal –
have learned to become apologists.
If you, we rationalized, lived in his times and under his circumstances,
you also would have accepted the norms of those times. It is more difficult to rationalize his
sexual abuse of Sally Hemings though that also was a common practice in the
days of slavery. Moreover, despite
his support of the Slave Trade Act of 1807 barring American participation in
the international slave trade, Jefferson reportedly wrote that blacks were
inferior to whites “in mind and body.”
[3, 4] The more you look
for Jefferson’s redemption, the stronger the case for impeachment grows.
JAMES
MONROE
James Monroe,
fifth president and founder of the Monroe Doctrine, supported a movement headed
by Speaker of the House Henry Clay to remove African slaves from the American
continent and transport them back to Africa. Monroe seized land on the West African coast for that
purpose. It would later become
Liberia. It should be noted that
Abraham Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, also once supported repatriating slaves
back to Africa.
ANDREW
JACKSON
The president
most deified by the Trump White House and often pictured in the background of
his presidential statements is Andrew Jackson. The seventh president from the state of Tennessee, he made
his name as a military leader in the Battle of New Orleans during the War of
1812. He recruited and fought
alongside Cherokee and Choctaw warriors, many of whom he grew up with, only to
turn on them when the war was won.
Despite a decision by the Supreme Court upholding the independent
Cherokee nation, Jackson enforced the Indian Removal Act by ordering the
rounding up natives in Georgia and Tennessee and marching them to Indian
Territory on what would become known as the Trail of Tears.
ANDREW
JOHNSON
The
seventeenth president, succeeding the assassinated Lincoln, Andrew Johnson did
everything in his power to undermine Reconstruction and the 13th
Amendment. He elevated
slaveholders with amnesty and restored voting rights. He nullified the order granting all emancipated slaves 40
acres and a mule. He paved the way
for the Jim Crow laws the deprived blacks of civil rights and voting rights for
over a century. For all that he
did and his clear racist beliefs, Huffington Post gave him the honor as the
most racist president in history – at least until now. By my reckoning, he is the second most
racist president named Andrew.
WOODROW
WILSON
This came as a
recent revelation to me but it shouldn’t have been. Known as the founding father of the United Nations, Wilson’s
racism was well known to historians and those who knew him. He was a defender of segregation at a
critical time in race relations.
At the Versailles Convention in 1919 Wilson was credited with killing a
Japanese proposal recognizing the principle of racial equality. Born in Virginia, raised in Georgia and
South Carolina, a descendant of confederate soldiers, he openly defended the Ku
Klux Klan and is quoted in the infamous movie The Birth of a Nation: “The
white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation…until at last
there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the
South, to protect the Southern country.”
President Wilson screened the racist screed at the White House. [5]
LYNDON
JOHNSON
The president
who did more than any other to fulfill the promise of civil rights was at heart
a southerner. He had no qualms
about using the N word and reportedly used it a lot. His term for the Civil Rights Act of 1957 was: the N
bill. Prior to his elevation to
the vice presidency LBJ was a reliable member of the Dixiecrats. When he nominated Thurgood Marshall to
the Supreme Court he told his biographer:
“When I appoint a N to the bench, I want everyone to know he’s a
N!” He once told his chauffer
Robert Johnson: “No matter what
you are called, N, you just let it roll off your back like water and you’ll
make it. Just pretend you’re a
goddamn piece of furniture.” Given
Johnson’s attitude toward blacks, his legacy of civil rights may best be
interpreted as a political strategy.
[6]
RICHARD
NIXON
Like Donald
Trump, Nixon reportedly did not believe he was racist but his words left no
doubt. The greatest of all
mistakes Nixon committed was to leave a tape-recorded record of what he and
those he communicated with really thought. Of course, he did not believe it was a mistake at the
time. He believed it was an honest
record of what civilized and educated individuals actually thought. A conversation with president-to-be
Ronald Reagan recently came to light.
It left no doubt that the conservative Republicans most venerate has
secured a place on the list of racist presidents. Nixon called numerous friends and advisors to quote his
friend Reagan on the inferiority of blacks. In fairness, Nixon was an equal opportunity bigot. He frequently made disparaging remarks
about Jews, Mexican Americans, Italian Americans and Irish Americans. [7]
RONALD
REAGAN
Reagan did not
know he was being recorded so he spoke his mind. He had just observed a United Nations vote in which he
concluded – wrongly as it turned out – that delegates from the African nations
had tipped the vote against American interests. He compared the diplomats to monkeys and suggested that they
looked uncomfortable in shoes.
Reagan said: “Last night, I
tell you, to watch this thing on television as I did. To see those monkeys from African nations. Damn them! They’re still uncomfortable wearing shoes!” Nixon laughed. [8]
MARK
TWAIN
Samuel Clemens
– aka Mark Twain – is a giant of American literature. Much has been said and written about his liberal use of the
N word in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
and Huckleberry Finn. At the time of Tom Sawyer the author
had no convictions toward slavery either way but by the time he wrote Huck Finn
he recognized the inhumanity and immorality of the institution. [9] While his views toward blacks are
subject to controversy, his attitude toward American Indians is not. He openly challenged James Fennimore
Cooper’s depiction of the noble savage and consistently described natives as
disgusting people prone to drunkenness and violence. Twain’s racism toward Native American has few defenders
outside the white supremacist community.
NATIVE
GENOCIDE: INDIAN WARS
When Shawnee
war chief Tecumseh was away recruiting Choctaw warriors to unite against the
white invasion in 1811, Indiana Governor and future president William Harrison
ordered the attack and burning of Prophetstown on Tippecanoe River. In the war that followed, Tecumseh was
killed at the Battle of Thames and the hope of uniting the tribes died with
him.
By the end of
the Indian Wars in the late 1800’s the Native American population had declined
from an estimated 5 to 15 million in the time of Columbus to less than
238,000. By any standard or
definition, that is genocide on a grand scale and it was inflicted
systematically and deliberately by a series of racist presidents and
congressional leaders who believed the European white man was superior and
therefore destined to rule the American continent from sea to shining sea.
Among those
who are celebrated for their participation in the Great American Genocide: Davy Crockett, George Armstrong Custer,
General Philip Sheridan and Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Benjamin
Harrison, who disgraced the nation by awarding twenty medals of honor to the
soldiers who massacred the disarmed Lakota Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee. [10]
Teddy Roosevelt aided the cause of hunting the buffalo to the edge of
extinction in an effort to cut off the primary source of living for the plains
Indians.
The 26th
president of the United States once said:
“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are dead
Indians but I believe 9 out of 10 are and I shouldn’t like to inquire too
closely in the case of the tenth.”
[11]
In the end no
one in the American government escapes responsibility for acts of cruelty,
betrayal and inhumanity to the tribes who cared for the land before the whites
came.
In 2012, in
response to a lawsuit brought by representatives of the American Indians for
mismanagement of tribal lands and accounts, under the presidency of Barrack
Obama, the American government agreed to pay $3.4 billion in settlement to the
surviving natives – $1.9 billion
toward Indian lands and $1.4 billion to individuals. Whether this settlement is considered the fulfillment of
treaty obligations or reparations for past inequity or both, it would seem to
offer precedent and a case for reparations. [12]
MEXICAN
CESSATION & REPATRIATIONS
In the wake of
the Mexican-American War circa 1848, Mexico gave up claim to more than half of
its territory, a vast expanse of land including present day California,
Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico and part of Wyoming. People of Mexican ancestry who did not wish to relocate
south were granted citizenry. In
the latter half of the nineteenth century political instability in Mexico
created a wave of immigration. The
Southern Pacific Railroad and other companies anxious to exploit a cheap labor
force welcomed the immigrants and even sent envoys south to recruit immigrant
workers. [13]
Anglo
Americans resented the new workforce, giving rise to the stereotype of lazy,
stupid Mexicans. Angry mobs killed
thousands of Latinos from California to Texas. When America faced the Great Depression, white Americans
blamed Mexican Americans for taking their jobs and the era of “repatriations”
began. An estimated two million
people of Mexican descent were forcibly uprooted and sent south – regardless of
their citizenship status. Colorado
ordered all Mexicans to leave the state in 1936 and erected a barrier on its
southern border. In one incident
in 1931 Los Angeles police rounded up some 400 Mexican Americans without regard
for legal status and shipped them to Mexico. Adios, mes amigos!
The Great
Repatriation is another less violent form of genocide for which reparations
should and must be considered.
JAPANESE
INTERNMENT
After Pearl
Harbor President Franklin Roosevelt ordered the internment of over 110,000
Japanese Americans in camps scattered across the country. Over sixty percent of the interned were
American citizens. The US Census
Bureau assisted the administration’s efforts by providing confidential
information and the Supreme Court upheld the internment with one of its more
convoluted decisions in that it asked not to be considered precedent. In 1980 President Jimmy Carter
initiated a review of the internment and in 1988 President Ronald Reagan signed
into law an official apology. The
law authorized payments of $20,000 to each survivor of the camps. The government eventually dispersed
over $1.6 billion to some 82,000 survivors. That is equivalent to approximately $3.4 billion in today’s
dollars. The Civil Liberties Act
of 1988 is an important legal precedent for historic reparations. [14]
SUBJUGATION
OF WOMEN
White males
were granted the right to vote in the year 1789 in the US Constitution. African Americans were granted freedom
with the thirteenth amendment in the year 1865. Five years later they were granted the right to vote. Fifty years later in the year 1920
women were granted their right to vote by the nineteenth amendment. How do you begin to quantify fifty or
one hundred and twenty years of the right to vote? Does it have a monetary value? What would this nation look like had women had the right to
vote from the nation’s birth?
Would women still suffer from substandard wages? Would women have equivalent power in
the halls of congress? Would women
have equal standing in the world of business and finance?
FOREIGN
GRIEVANCES
Traditionally
Americans have justified their engagements in foreign wars and interventions
with rationalizations of the greater good. The Cold War and the Domino Theory were used to justify an
estimated three million dead in the Vietnam War. Islamic terrorism, the September 11th attack and weapons
of mass destruction were used to justify hundreds of thousands dead in the Iraq
War. Neither justification is
valid. Even if you believe in the
Domino Theory, Ho Chi Minh should have been our ally in Vietnam. He pleaded with the United States to
abandon colonialism to no avail.
In any case, there can be no justification for the terror we reigned on
that small Southeast Asian nation.
The
justification for the Iraq War is even thinner. Iraq was a sworn enemy of Al Qaeda and possessed no weapons
of mass destruction. The Shock and
Awe we brought down on those unfortunate people remains to this day but it is
the shock of shame and the awe of knowing we were completely in the wrong.
How do we gage
our debt to Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and all those Latin American nations we
attacked to secure our financial and strategic interests?
REPARATIONS
The question
of reparations is long overdue.
The precedent has been set.
We have acknowledged the sins of our forefathers. They include genocide by extermination,
genocide by relocation, slavery, systematic discrimination in all facets of
life, denial of civil liberties and denial of the right to vote. Aggrieved minorities are due
retribution. Justice demands
payment for rightful grievances.
There are
problems of course. There are many
who refuse to acknowledge the plain truth. There are many who choose to believe the mythology of
American history. There are those
who claim to believe that discrimination against white Anglo-Americans is the
leading problem of inequality.
These individuals may or may not be ignorant of the truth. They may be victims of warped education
and maleficent propaganda.
We must do
everything in our power to replace willful mythology with true history but it
is not enough. It is clearly
impossible to even consider reparations as long as our government is actively
engaged in crimes against humanity and abuses of human rights. Only after we bring our current
offenses to a halt can we begin to address reparations for the past.
When that day
comes we will acknowledge our debt and the solemn fact that it can never be
fully repaid. For now, we must go
about the business of changing our government and reclaiming our nation. For now we must be content to believe
that the truth will prevail and to know that the debt once acknowledged will be
addressed.
Jazz.
1. “George Washington’s Tortuous
Relationship with Native Americans.”
By Colin Calloway. Zocalo,
August 2, 2018.
2. “James Madison’s Lessons in Racism.” By
Noah Feldman. New York Times
Opinion, October 28, 2017.
3. “These are the most racist
presidents.” By Jess Bolluyt,
Cheat Sheet, November 21, 2018.
4. “The Eleven Most Racist U.S.
Presidents.” Ibram X. Kendi,
Contributor. Huffington Post, May
28, 2017.
5. “Woodrow Wilson was extremely racist –
even by the standards of his time.”
By Dylan Matthews. Vox,
November 20, 2015.
6. “Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights
hero. But also a racist.” By Adam Serwer. MSNBC, April 11, 2014. Update April 12, 2018.
7. “A history of racism is woven into the
US presidency.” By Russell
Contreras. Associated Press, July
30, 2019.
8. “Ronald Reagan’s Long-Hidden Racist
Conversation with Richard Nixon.”
By Tim Naftali. The
Atlantic, July 30, 2019.
9. “Mark Twain’s Inconvenient
Truths.” By Shelley Fisher
Fishkin. Stanford Magazine,
November-December 2007.
10. “When Native Americans Were Slaughtered
in the Name of Civilization.” By
Donald L. Fixico. History, March
2, 2018. Updated August 31, 2018.
11. “Teddy Roosevelt Laid Bare.” By Tim Stanley. History Today, Volume 62, Issue 3,
March 2012.
12. “US finalizes $3.4 billion settlement
with American Indians.” CNN
November 27, 2012.
13. “The Brutal History of Anti-Latino
Discrimination in America.” By
Erin Blakemore. History, September
27, 2017. Updated August 29,
2018.
14. “Senate Votes to Compensate Japanese
American Internees.” By Irvin
Molotsky. New York Times, April
21, 1988.
