Tag: Texas

Our Women Who Make Us Proud

On By thewriterfredIn Black Culture, Black History, Black Literature1 Comment

Since the month of March has been designated Women’s History Month, allow me to take this opportunity to brag on some of the very outstanding women of color that we have right here in San Antonio, Texas. Now I don’t mean to offend my fellow brothers of color, but we have to admit that over the centuries we’ve had some awfully dynamic sisters. As far back as Phyllis Wheatley the great 18th Century poet through the 20th Century, our women have always been out front in our struggle to overcome prejudice, racism and bigotry. I’ll refrain from trying to name them all, for fear I might leave out too many.

ObamasWith the advent of the 21st Century that trend of strong, charismatic women continued. First Lady Michelle Obama has given this country a real lesson in class, dignity, brains and a compassion for all people. And I am proud to proclaim that we do have a number of women who emulate First Lady Obama right here in San Antonio. Allow me to share with you, the reader, a few of those outstanding women.

PierceThe two matriarchs of the Black culture in San Antonio are Aaronetta Pierce and Ruth Jones McClendon. These two pillars of the community have been leaders in the arts and in politics respectively for over thirty years in this city. Ms. Pierce has been a strong advocate for arts and has served on numerous boards over the years. She was a very close friend to the late great Maya Angelou, who loved to come to San Antonio to write. Ms. Pierce was the first Chair of the Martin Luther King Commission that organizes the march every year on the great man’s birthday. Because of her outstanding leadership on that committee, San Antonio has the largest and most effective King Day March in the country.

Former State Representative Ruth Jones McClendon has been the premiere Black office holder in the city. She served on the local city council for two terms and has been State Representative for District 120 of the Texas House of Representatives since 1994. In those years she established an impeccable record as an effective legislator for the Eastside of San Antonio, which encompasses a high percentage of the Black population. She recently retired because of failing health.

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Following in the footsteps of these legendary women are two new and refreshing Black women ready to take over the helm of leadership, both acknowledging that they follow on the shoulders of giants. Mayor Ivy Taylor accomplished the unthinkable when she won the office of Mayor in a hotly contested race in a city with only a 7% Black population. I have written about her accomplishments in a previous post on this blog in which I pointed out how proud she made us with her victory.  Mayor Taylor has an excellent career in front of her that could possibly lead to the governor’s seat in Austin.

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Barbara Gervin-Hawkins, sister to the legendary great NBA Basketball star, George Iceman Gervin, is the other woman of color who is a rising star in the political world. She is now in a two-person runoff for the vacated Legislative seat previously held by Ms. McClendon. Her opponent is an ex city councilman who has been removed from the political scene in the city for many years. You might call it his “last hurrah” for notoriety. Ms. Gervin-Hawkins has a proven track record as an effective organizer of a number of successful operations that have been of great help to the residents of the district. She is the Executive Director of the George Gervin Academy, a school that has welcomed young people who have been removed from the public school system, and need a helping hand to get their life in order. The Academy has graduated over one thousand students with high school diplomas and now these young people have gone on to build productive lives.

Mayor Taylor and Ms. Gervin-Hawkins are only two of a larger number of women of color in San Antonio who are making a difference in the lives of the young people in the African American community. Hopefully, as these two new dynamic leaders move forward in their careers, they will never forget that they are the recipients of the dedicated work by such women as Fanny Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Shirley Chisholm and of course Barbara Jordan. If they prove to be as competent leaders as these stellar women of color, then we all can be assured that our communities are in good hands.

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Sanitizing History

On By thewriterfredIn Black Culture, Black History, Black Literature, Race1 Comment

Recently when a young ninth grade student in Pearland, Texas noticed that his World Geography textbook referred to Blacks, forcibly taken out of Africa, as immigrant workers voluntarily coming to this country to work in the fields in the south, he alerted his mother. She immediately exposed that distortion of the truth on Facebook. It created uproar of protest. The textbook publisher, McGraw Hill, then went public and announced that they would correct the error on their digital format and also begin to replace the textbooks if requested by the various school districts.

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The most surprising aspect of this fiasco was the publisher’s suggestion that the error was not deliberate and they actually displayed a degree of contrition, almost apologetic. There is no way that the ultra-conservative Texas State Board of Education, the seventeen member body that reviews and adopts instructional material for the public schools throughout the state, was not aware of that particular distortion of the truth. It was just another attempt to sanitize the country’s history of all its blemishes.

The dominant culture has no qualms distorting its past, in order to protect its image for their young. The truth is that cultures exist for the future, but they are built on the past. With that being the case, those responsible for perpetuating the history of the American culture are strapped with a very serious problem. In today’s contemporary world, if their children knew the truth about their ancestors, chances are good they would dislike them. The way to solve that problem is to make the bad guy look good, and they can do that since they write the history books. Both the Americans and the British have been extremely competent in practicing that deception.

Immediately following the end of slavery there was a deluge of plantation novels, written for the purpose of justifying slavery, or an attempt to sanitize an ugly period in the country’s history. Popular author Thomas Nelson Page fictionalized the content slave, who bemoaned freedom and longed for the days when “Dem wuz good ole times, marster de bes’ Sam ever see.” What Page wanted to remember and celebrate in his dialect stories was, “that relation of warm friendship and tender sympathy” between the races. (Leon F. Litwack, Trouble In Mind, Vintage Books Edition, New York 1998, pg. 187) The author Joel Chandler Harris created the Uncle Remus character, which willfully entertained generations of white children with his stories of the simple but happy slave. Harris perpetuated myths about the character and contentment of Blacks, and their enduring love of the white folks they served. (Ibid, pg. 187) There were many more writers who attempted to change the country’s perception of slavery. In another work, Martha S. Gielow published her collection, Mammy’s Reminiscences, in 1898 that glamorized life in the slave quarters. Finally, in the most blatant attempt to interpret the history in a distorted way, Thomas Dixon wrote two novels, The Clansman (which was adapted to the screen play Birth of a Nation) and The Leopard’s Spots.

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To his dismay and disappointment, Paul Robeson got caught up in that trap while living in England. He was offered the role of the African Chief Bosambo in the film, Sanders of the River. Robeson was excited about his role because he believed the movie would represent an important milestone, as the first comprehensive film on the African culture. However, what it turned out to be was a glorification of British colonialism and imperialism. The message in the movie suggested that the British occupation of Africa was necessary in order to curb the savage nature of the Africans on the continent. Sanders of the River made money, perhaps because it glorified the white man’s Empire, but proved to be an embarrassment to Robeson. (Martin Duberman, Paul Robeson: A Biography, New Press, New York, 1989, pg. 180.

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This practice of deception has been a constant throughout the history of this country. The method may be much more sophisticated today than in the past, but it still exists. Proof is in the description of Africans as workers and not slaves in the McGraw- Hill Geography book. The problem in the state of Texas is that the approved textbook material comes from a contingent of conservatives, determined to protect the positive image of this country that has prevailed over the decades. However, we are not without recourse. What we must do is write our own interpretation of history, and make it available to our young outside the boundaries of the classroom. This calls for parents to take a more active interest in their children’s education. It calls for the ministers to have culturally related classes in their churches on Saturdays. It calls for more of our writers to produce works that tell the truth about our past. It calls for those million Black men who took the time out of their schedules to congregate on the mall in Washington, D.C. to also congregate at home with their child and share with them their history. It calls for all of us to read, study, and become more knowledgeable about our past.