The other day I told a friend about the year I got a chance to watch a Brown Thrasher build a nest in a tall shrub near my carport. I watched her pick up pine needles and leaves, and craft them together until a nest was in place.
I watched her sit on her eggs. Then later still, I heard the sound of chicks; and finally I saw her nudge them out of the nest. Her babies were gone. She left the nest as well. That nest stayed intact, however, for several years.
Then I remember when the late Dr. Sadye Young told me about her father who built whole houses without any floor plans. Although she was then a retired college professor, Dr. Young knew her way around a house. She had learned certain aspects of building because when she was a child, she often accompanied her father when he was building a home. My eyes brightened because my late maternal Uncle Frank could do the same thing.
Both of these men built foundations, installed plumbing, wiring, and etcetera without any floor plans. Neither of these men had college degrees. Both had been apprentices of carpenters, plumbers, and electricians. But neither of them set foot in a college classroom and majored in architectural engineering. Yet, the homes they built stood the test of time.
Dr. Young’s father and my uncle had something in common with each other and with that Brown Thrasher. They built homes from scratch. They relied on their observations, practice, and their skills, not on architectural drawings. That Brown Thrasher relied on her instincts.
The current state of affairs in this country is going to require all of us to go back to some basics that many of us have lost. We all have instincts, yet we no longer use them. My late maternal grandmother (born in 1886) could predict when it was going to snow simply by observing whole flocks of birds gathering.
We now rely quite heavily on gadgets and technology and self-appointed pundits to tell us everything. But real knowledge comes from reading, research, study, practice, listening, and observation. It is only when we do all of the above that we can trust our gut instincts again.
As Felon 47 attempts to destroy one institution after another, we better ready ourselves to rebuild from his wreckage. Depending on how bad the damage is, we need to prepare to rebuild from scratch which is made more difficult by a population accustomed to having everything done with the press of a button. It is not going to work like that this time.
This is not a full book review. I don’t have the strength to do that right now. Yet, when you are a historian there are certain books that stay with you because they are so provocative. One of them is “Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland” by Christopher R. Browning.
People often forget that the Holocaust in Nazi Germany didn’t just extinguish millions of Jews, but it also exterminated Afro-Germans, Gypsies, LGBTQIA, and people with disabilities. Anything or anyone that was viewed as defective was subject to be put to death. But that’s not exactly what I want to write about here.
The title of this book says it all. This battalion was charged with the duty of marching groups of Jews out to a ditch, having them lay in that ditch; then the battalion would shoot them to death.
The first time they carried out this heinous order, most of the men balked at having to carry out such an awful task. Several men vomited at the sight of the murders; others ran and went AWOL. Yet, most of the men stayed behind and followed their orders.
By the time I got to the end of this book, I was mortified. That same battalion that initially balked at killing Jews that were laid in a ditch now carried out the orders with precision and without blinking. They became professional killers doing a job, not men who once had some empathy, sympathy, and consciences.
We prefer to believe that most people cannot be manipulated and threatened in order to convert them into monsters under the appropriate circumstances. “Ordinary Men“ showed me that it was relatively easy to find and nurture the dark side of human beings.
Those of us who are fighting as hard as we can against the excesses and abuse of Felon 47 need to remember one thing—Felon 47 and the Muskrat are only TWO men. They cannot do what they are doing without willing accomplices.
Stay the course my Fellow Resisters. But watch the people around you and watch your back; and NEVER normalize or explain away bad behavior even when it’s yours.
“Intersectionality is a metaphor for understanding the ways that multiple forms of inequality or disadvantage sometimes compound themselves and create obstacles that often are not understood among conventional ways of thinking.” — Kimberlé Crenshaw
Recently, I responded to a question about the factors that stymied women’s quest for suffrage during the mid-to-late 19th century. I brought up the pragmatism and egalitarianism of suffragist and abolitionist Lucy Stone whose legacy remains largely overlooked. And therein lies the problem.
Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton have rightfully earned their place in Women’s history. They battled for the vote in ways almost unimaginable. Yet, they both held racist and classist views. Now before you start yelling about how both of them worked in the abolitionist movement, spare me. You can be anti-slavery and still not think the slave is your social or political equal. The inability to shake off one’s sense of entitlement has extreme consequences for everyone.
When lawmakers decided to include Black men as voters in the 15th Amendment without including the franchise for white women, both Stanton and Anthony were rightfully livid, but livid to the point where they then fought against the passage of the 15th Amendment altogether. It passed, however, in 1869 and was ratified in 1870.
Stanton wrote that it was unconscionable and dangerous to give the vote to Black, Chinese or Irish men because they were inferior. Anyone that did not fit a strict Anglo-Saxon and native-born status was considered inferior. Additionally, neither Stanton nor Anthony had thought about Black women voting at all.
Stone broke with Anthony and Stanton over their racism. Orator, writer, abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass cut his ties to Anthony and Stanton as well. The tragedy was that Douglass had attended the Women’s Conference at Seneca Falls in 1848 and had been a huge and early advocate for women’s rights. Moreover, it was Lucy Stone’s brilliant oratory that had inspired Susan B. Anthony to join the suffrage movement.
Stone read the political winds correctly. She formed the American Woman Suffrage Association which concentrated on gaining women the right to vote on a state-by-state basis. She knew that Congress was not going to grant the franchise to everyone.
Stone believed that the enfranchisement of Black men was progress. Although she was disappointed that the 15th Amendment did not include women’s suffrage, she did not believe that denying the franchise to others would help women in the long run.
Black men, rather than white women, were granted the right to vote first for a variety of reasons. As a historian, I know that the Republican Party in the 1860s was the party of Lincoln (not the sh*t show it is now) that freed Black American slaves. They controlled both the House and the Senate in 1867 to 1869. They knew that recently freed and enfranchised Black men would inevitably vote Republican and increase the party’s political dominance.
Granting the franchise to white women would have mixed political results as many white women still believed in the lost cause of the South in spite of its loss during the Civil War. They would have voted Democrat which was then the favored party of the former slave-holding South.
Some of Stone’s ideas were tied to her upbringing. She came from a hardworking farming family in Massachusetts. Both of her parents were abolitionists. While quite young, she, along with Lucretia Mott and Abby Kelly Foster helped William Lloyd Garrison establish the American Anti-slavery Society which was founded in 1833.
All of her brothers attended college. Yet, Stone had to postpone her education. She taught school for several years and was able to scrape up enough money to attend Oberlin College, the first college in the nation to accept Black people and women. When she graduated in 1847, she became the first woman in Massachusetts to earn a college degree.
Stone had planned to remain a single woman because she feared losing her independence to a husband. She finally yielded to Henry Browne Blackwell’s persistence. Blackwell was also an abolitionist and women’s rights advocate. Blackwell would learn years later that Stone finally decided to marry him after he met and aided a young slave with her owners while traveling on a train.
When Blackwell asked the girl would she rather be free, she answered “yes.” Blackwell and an accomplice helped get the young girl off of the train and away from her owners. It was that act of liberation that won Stone over.
While neither Stone nor her contemporaries Anthony and Stanton lived long enough to see women receive the right to vote, their different approaches and beliefs underscored a perpetual problem in the quest for women’s equality and the right to vote.
Stone never stopped fighting for the rights of Black people as she continued her fight to get the vote for women. She believed that both causes were interrelated. The same cannot be said of Anthony and Stanton.
The fight for the right to vote for women was often fractured by racism well into the 20th century. Stone’s stances on racial equality and equal rights for women cost her some popularity among some white women. Anthony and Stanton emerged as the face of white women’s suffrage. Yet, Anthony and Stanton also emerged as suspect to Black men and women.
After Lucy Stone died of stomach cancer in 1893, her only child, Alice Stone Blackwell reached out to the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and began the process of repairing the divided women’s suffrage movement. They created a new coalition. Alice Stone Blackwell followed her mother’s mantra to make the world better.
Lucy Stone deserves more historical attention than she receives. Her example should be emulated precisely because she understood the “intersectionality” of gender and race (and the political implications that go along with it) long before Black scholar and lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term and defined the theory in the late 20th century. Stone recognized that, no matter how different gender and race may appear, women’s equality was inextricably linked to racial equality. You must fight for both, not just one or the other.
If you blow up the photo below you will see a letter written to me from the late Congressman John Lewis from 2008. If you look in the lower right corner of this photo you will see a photo insert of a red file folder about an inch thick. These are all the letters I have received from my representatives over about 4 decades. This was when you received their responses via snail mail.
Letter from Congressman John Lewis and File folder of letters
These days, your representatives respond to you by email. I urge you to call them, contact them, and then print their email responses.
I miss my phone and letter debates with the late John Lewis. I still remember one of our debates that descended into a full fledged argument in a grocery store parking lot in our town of Atlanta. That’s the beauty of being in Atlanta. Many of your elected officials live and shop where you do. So, you can give them your opinion while you check out your groceries.
I bring this scenario up because there is something very different when you receive a physical letter as opposed to an email. The letter has a real signature. Each one of these letters are a personal piece of history. Politics today is quite impersonal—and it is messing everyone up.
We are now confronted with politics as only spectacle—the pithy quote on social media, the doctored video that creates a sense of urgency when there is no need for urgency, or the edited video that creates a fictional persona instead of showing the real person behind the title.
I’m glad Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez are hitting the road and going on tour to talk to people all across the United States to find out what real people are thinking.
Communication from a distance is fine. Technology has made it possible for us to share an idea with thousands of strangers. Yet…
No matter how easy posting on social media, text messaging and sending emails are, there is no replacement for speaking to someone face-to-face or listening to a live voice or reading a real letter with a real signature. That personal touch is sorely lacking in both the Democratic and Republican Parties, and it is destroying democracy with almost the same degree of swiftness as Felon 47’s cruel policies.
It is one thing to put your finger up in the wind and assume what you need to do to be re-elected. It is quite another to look a constituent in the eye and answer a tough question or admit you don’t have the answers. Democratic voters are starving for that attention; and I pray our elected officials figure this out before it is too late.
I’m delighted that folks have decided not to shop on February 28th as an act of solidarity to demonstrate to businesses what our buying power means. It’s a great beginning, but to have real impact boycotts need to last for months or years.
Let me share the following. The image on the left is the now boarded up storefront of what was Buzz Coffee and Winehouse in my hometown Atlanta. The image on the right is from a few years ago. It’s myself and my brother-from-another-mother, actor, writer, poet, cultural curator, and James Baldwin expert Charles Reese. We took this photo sitting at Buzz’s tables on the sidewalk drinking hot coffee out of big mugs.
Buzz was a neighborhood hangout where you might get to view a photo or art exhibit. You might stop by for a breakfast sandwich or piece of pastry. You ran into people you knew and you met people you didn’t know but soon found out the trip was worth it in order to meet them.
Buzz closed a few years ago because the money-grubbing c*nt that owned this little strip of property where Buzz was located raised the rent until the owner of Buzz could no longer afford to stay open. The owner has vowed to reopen somewhere, but so far I haven’t seen any signs of a new location.
Now, there’s a Starbucks about a mile down the street further southwest. I have nothing against Starbucks or people who enjoy Starbucks coffee. Yet, I won’t be going there to get a cup of coffee, just like I won’t be buying Folgers that supports Project 2025.
I only suggest this. When you’re keeping your money in your pocket, take a good hard look at the small businesses in your neighborhood and ask yourself how you can help them? Ask yourself what products can you do without permanently? Then just do it.
Leslye Joy Allen 