I remember the first time I heard someone say, “If you want to hide something, hide it in a book.” The comment depressed me.
When you are a historian, you have books everywhere. You have to read all the time. I have not seen the top of my dining room table in nearly 15 years as it is covered with stacks of books. Books occupy every nook and cranny of my home.
With the United States ranking 36th in the world for literacy, with a 79% literacy rate, with only 25% of literate adults reading above the 6th grade level, we are already dumb. We can expect to see more decline in literacy with Felon 47 living on Pennsylvania Avenue.
So, I have a proposal. It might not change anything, but it is worth a try. Walk out of your door with a book in your hand or tucked under your arm everyday for at least a month.
Let kids and other adults see you walk with that book. And don’t say you can’t do this. You have carried books before when you were in grade school.
Make your book/s visible at your job, on a trip to a store. Hell, go for a walk with your book until someone asks you why you always have a book in your hand or under your arm. And then have the audacity to tell them why.
We historians often find data in some file in an obscure archive, in letters written by someone’s grandmother, in photos, newspaper clippings, legal records. Our discipline demands that we dig, analyze, rethink and revise, constantly. I liken our work to studying the function of each piece in a Chess game. We get different perspectives about the same set of circumstances depending on which Chess piece we examine.
I was a mediocre Chess player. I had a few friends who played like champions. So, I often just watched them play. I remain, however, fascinated by the game’s objectives and, specifically, the roles of Pawns and Queens.
Pawns are the most numerous pieces in Chess; they are the foot soldiers. Each player has eight Pawns. A Pawn can move one or two squares forward if that move is its first move. After the first move, a Pawn can only move one square forward unless the square is blocked by some other piece. A Pawn can capture or attack another piece, however, by moving diagonally to the left or right.
The Pawn is the only piece in a Chess game that can change ranks. Depending on the skill of a Chess player, a Pawn can become a Bishop, a Rook or a Queen. In spite of a Pawn’s ability to advance to a higher rank, it is still considered the lowest ranking piece in the game. It is only worth one point.
The objective of the game is to capture your opponent’s King where that King has no way out, which means Checkmate. While the King is considered the most important piece in the game, it is the Queen that is considered the most powerful piece.
Queens are the only pieces that can move across the board in any manner as long as they are not successfully blocked by other pieces. If you lose, it is highly likely that you lost because your opponent’s Queen checkmated your King. Chess players feel much more confident when they have successfully captured or blocked her.
You can still win the game without capturing the Queen, but you have to be extremely strategic and precise to do so. You can also win without making good moves with your Pawns, but it is highly unlikely.
Chess is now over 1,500 years old. While there is some skepticism about its precise origins, many Chess historians believe that the Indian board game called “Chaturanga” was the earliest predecessor of Chess. There were many other versions that followed, but are too numerous to mention here.
In early versions of Chess, there was a piece called “Vizier” or “Advisor” for centuries. In the 1500s, in the era of great and powerful Queens in Europe, like Spain’s Isabella and England’s Elizabeth, “Viziers” or “Advisors” were redesigned and renamed “Queens.” You can learn an awful lot of world history just by examining Chess.
So here’s the deal: There is no such thing as a Chess game where Queens/Women Heads of State/Women in general are not powerful and flexible while the Kings/Men Heads of State/Men in general are highly important but who have or exercise fewer tactical moves.
There is also no such thing as a Chess game where Pawns/Foot Soldiers/Laborers are not essential to success, even while they are considered less important.
Apply any and all of the above to what you see happening in the United States and the world right now. I refuse to tell you how to analyze and interpret this history because there are so many interpretations and analogies that can be extrapolated from this board game.
All I will say is that nothing is going to change or be corrected without the skill of devoted Pawns, and the power and daring of Queens.
“…the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower.” — Martin Luther King, Jr.
“God is your first and your last teacher. God is your harshest teacher: subtle, demanding. Learn or die.” — Octavia Butler, (from “The Parable of the Sower, 1993)
I woke up before dawn annoyed that January 20, 2025 is inauguration day for Felon 47 and it is also the federal holiday celebrating the birth and life of Martin Luther King, Jr. I also could not help thinking about how our abuse of the earth has contributed to the fires in California.
A week ago, I re-read Octavia Spencer’s prescient novel “Parable of the Sower.” Butler’s protagonist Lauren, the daughter of a preacher, lives in a safe and comfortable, walled-up cul-de-sac. Outside those walls are desperately poor people, racial and economic inequality, and drug addicts that use a drug called “pyro” that makes its users want to set fires.
Lauren tries to convince others to accept that the world has changed and will continue to change. The others prefer to pretend nothing has happened to the earth and its inhabitants.
Butler predicted ecological disaster by fire coming over 30 years ago, and named her novel after a biblical parable. Right after I finished reading the book again, I thought about how M. L. got his name.
Many people do not know that M. L. (what we called him here in Atlanta) was born Michael King, Jr. I knew many elderly Black Atlanta citizens who called him “Mike” their entire lives.
His father, best known as “Daddy King,” attended a World Baptist Conference in Germany in 1934. Reborn and rejuvenated after he learned more about the philosophies of Protestant reformer Martin Luther, Daddy King soon renamed himself and his son “Martin Luther King, Sr. and Jr.”
In 1957, “Michael King, Jr.” was officially changed to “Martin Luther King, Jr.” on his birth certificate. There are other stories about why and when Daddy King changed their names, but I like this story the best.
I bring this up because another story goes that when the German Protestant leader Martin Luther was asked what he would do if he knew the world was going to end tomorrow, he allegedly answered, “I would plant an apple tree today.”
While I am a believer in Goddess/God, I am not particularly religious. I know too well how organized religion has failed us in so many ways. I am, however, a historian who finds truth and sustenance in some parts of the Christian Bible that the incoming administration and so many preachers and billionaires have totally corrupted.
In the Bible’s Parable of the Sower, Yeshu’a ben Yosef (bka Jesus) tells a story about a farmer who sows seeds in four different types of soil. It is not until the farmer’s seeds are sowed in good soil that he yields a good crop. In this parable, which has many lessons, Yeshu’a emphasized that we must pay attention to where we plant our seeds if we expect anything to grow. We yield a good harvest when we take responsibility for how and where we do our planting.
To place seeds in the ground is an act of faith. When you plant, you do so with the faith that you will yield something. You do it with the belief that you, or your loved ones, will live long enough to reap the reward, be it vegetables or fruits or flowers or justice or equality.
On this Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday, may we go forward intentionally, reminded that we are obligated to be good stewards of the earth that we do not own. California’s fires are the result of our excess and failure to clean up the earth which is the only home we have.
May we plant in the best soil, in the best social and educational policies, in the best radicalism, in the truth. May we sow our seeds in our gardens and farms and tend them with a faith that tells us we will reap a good harvest and that we will have enough to sustain us in order to stave off the worst excesses of the incoming administration. May we humble ourselves, unlike Felon 47 and his underlings, and remember that we live on this earth that we did not create and will die whether we are paupers or billionaires. May we learn the life lessons of one of the best sowers, namely Martin Luther King, Jr.
Harriet Tubman was a nurse, a scout, and a spy for the Union Army during the Civil War. She is best known, however, as a leader of the Underground Railroad where she led many African American enslaved people from the state of Maryland to head north to Canada.
A majority of Black American runaway slaves never made it to Canada, which was the intended destination. Most of them landed somewhere in the Northeast where American chattel slavery was abolished during the 18th through the early 19th centuries.
I want to point out two things about Tubman and about Black American women during the late 19th century.
First, Tubman always kept a rifle or gun under her dress just in case one of her runaway slaves decided to run back to their plantation. After all, these journeys required hundreds of miles on foot while they worried about bounty hunters who searched for runaways in order to reap financial rewards. Slave patrols roamed all night looking for slaves out after dark without permission. If a slave was caught, punishment was severe, and occasionally fatal.
Tubman let her fellow Black freedom-seekers know that she would shoot them dead before she allowed any one of them to run back to their former owners who would inevitably beat them until they confessed about her mission, which would jeopardize the safety of everyone involved. All of the slaves who headed North with Tubman believed her. She never once had to use her gun.
Second, Tubman was clear about her mission to free and save her people. Her demand to, “Kill the Snake before it Kills you,” was her reference to the slave-holding Confederacy and its Army in the American South.
She did not necessarily want anyone to be killed, but she underscored that the Confederate Army was the Snake; and the Snake had to be stopped no matter the casualties it suffered.
During Reconstruction (1863 to 1877) after the Civil War ended, the Republican Party of the North sought to solidify its political dominance and economic control over the South. So, by 1870 it gave Black men who were former slaves the right to vote.
In spite of the fact that no women were granted the franchise, Black families sat down together and decided together how to cast that one vote afforded to male adults in their households. Many Black men were escorted to the polls by their wives, sisters, and mothers who also hid guns and rifles under their dresses just in case some white southerner/s, aka snake/s, decided to harm these Black male voters.
In this new year of 2025, we are again at a moment in our history where our capacity to protect ourselves and those we love, and our capacity to survive economically and to be free is at stake.
We must face the reality that we may have to do things we never thought we would ever have to do in our lifetimes. We must do more than complain about our representatives who are complacent, thereby complicit, about the objectives of the incoming administration.
We do not yet know what we may have to do. But I think about all of those Black women in the late nineteenth century prepared to protect Black men who were going to vote for the first time in their lives.
I also think about some of my sheroes like Congresswoman and former presidential candidate Shirley Chisholm. I think about her mentee, Congresswoman Barbara Lee. I think about the fact that Black Panther Party membership was 70 percent Black women. Then I think of Vice-President Kamala Harris and former First Lady Michelle Obama.
After I remember all of these sisters I admire, I then think of my late maternal grandmother who was a coed at then Clark College during the Atlanta Race Riot of 1906 with her gun under her dress for her protection. I then remember my paternal aunt who had molotov cocktails thrown at her during protest marches in the 1960s, and one thrown in her home because she dared to register Black folks to vote.
Then I remember Tubman’s order to “Kill the Snake before it Kills you.” Then I prepare myself in the event I have to carry out this order, figuratively and literally.
In this current political climate in the United States, there is something that every member of the Left/Resistance needs to remember: People that only respect violence and who cheer violence will typically have to be dealt with violently. They don’t respond to reason or kindness or common sense. You will not write them away or blog them away. Calling them names won’t work either.
You’re going to have to accept that they are monsters. You don’t reason with monsters anymore than you reason with poisonous snakes. This is what you need to remember about MAGA supporters and those nuts that stormed the capital on January 6, 2021.
I am not going to teach a full history lesson in this blog. Yet, it would help you to review the French Revolution (1789-1799) where crops failed and the economy tanked while the nobility and the clergy paid almost no taxes as commoners bore the brunt of taxation and starvation while Louis XVI kept spending on himself.
You also would do well to study France’s Maquis (“the underbrush”) which was its underground guerilla movement that fought against the Nazis during World War II. In some instances they were successful; in others they were not. Yet, you better recognize that American insularity and that feeling we tend to embrace that says, “We will be okay as long as we protest and go through the courts,” will not necessarily save us.
In the next four years we may have no other choice but to get our hands dirty. Even worse, our obsession with the internet, and the attention we receive from it, may eventually work against us. Some strategies do not need publicity. We need more face-to-face private conversations whenever possible.
So, here’s a few good articles about the Maquis, including its African and Afro-Muslim participants, and the current research historians are still working on.
Leslye Joy Allen 