Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

Reprint from February & April 1997

Over the years we’ve had the opportunity to meet and interview historians, artists and thought leaders. One friendship we formed and particularly cherish, was with Professor William H. Mackey, who held class every Thursday evening in the basement at 850 St. Marks Ave.
Below are excerpts from extended interviews at www.ourtimepress.com

“The education system has a long history of dehumanizing people,” Mackey says. “The truth is not being put out there. It’s a continuing struggle trying to steer away from misdirection and miseducation. It’s so easy to delude ourselves into thinking that what we are being told is what really is. Positive insanity is the only rational outlet. I believe we can do it ourselves and learn everything we need to know right in the village. It’s not a new way of thinking. But I would never tell you what to think. I will advise you not to compartmentalize anything. Everything ties in. Knowledge is all around, if you use all your senses, you’ll find it.”

On Power, Comfort Zones, Demons.
Now when you talk about children not developing or progressing because they come from troubled or so-called dysfunctional homes — our children? — that’s a whole ‘nother thing. I ask, “Is that actually true?”
 I am in the counter-class. I’m an idol-smasher. My empirical experience — and I don’t pass it off as some kind of laying down of the final word — has convinced me that the problem in society is not so much in terms of family, but in terms of the people in the society that make the decisions. That power thing!
 Some people might say that’s an easy cop-out. But I’m prepared to explain this. History shows us whenever a society is in trouble it has this tendency to blame the least powerful unit in the society. Let me give you an example: in the society we live in, the concept of power is based on race–and I’m using this objectively. This is not a passionate thing. This is observation. It has always been based on race, particularly in terms of how power is distributed or not distributed.
 No ruling class likes to have its comfort zone disturbed. Whenever it is messed with, there is a tendency to blame someone, the designated demons, the bogeyman. That term is not used so much as I am aware of, these days, but when I was growing up in the South, it was standard procedure to hear a white mother say to their children, “If you don’t behave, I’m going to get the bogeyman after you!”, while pointing to a Black person.

 What is being done here? You’re deliberately creating a concept of the demon. And things that threaten them are always considered anything or anyone of darker hue. How does it tie in? Very simple. When you look for a demon to blame, you are looking to escape responsibility. That’s why the term scapegoat exists in this society. In earlier societies, if something negative happened and the group or clan could not explain it, they took an animal and beat it and hoped to God this would please the gods! What you are doing is protecting your comfort zone. Once you can convince yourself that these things are happening to me because of some outside force, and these are the folks who are doing these things and causing these things to happen to our family, it may not change things from happening but it absolves you of any responsibility and guilt. Now, more and more, as a society becomes more sophisticated, there is a need for more denials.

 The demon could be Blacks, Muslims, Native Americans… anybody who is different. And the less concrete information you know about others, outsiders, the more you demonize them. You don’t even think about it. You wake up in the morning. If it’s raining, you say, “Oh yeah, it is so and so’s fault. It’s a bad day; they did this.”
 All this has to do with disturbing the comfort zones of those folks for whom the system theoretically works. Now let’s go back and look at the concept of family in this society. My grandmother, Harriet Sibley Weston, didn’t know what the hell a behaviorist was. When I didn’t behave, I got my butt handed to me. But do we know all victims or perpetrators? As society becomes more technologically oriented, as more and more of these new inventions and new creations come online, they’re supposed to make life easier for you, but they really don’t. Who’s at fault? Is it me? Is it you? Do we really want to deal with this? One of the things that’s very difficult for people in a so-called techno-society to deal with is that they have been programmed to think that things are going to get better, but it isn’t. This is a culture that constantly thinks in terms of progress, meaning progress on whatever level you’re on. It means that whatever happens this week, you’re supposed to be on a higher-level next week, always be moving upwards. No retrogression. Just progress. And what’s it all based on?  Statistics.

The Fifteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, ratified on February 3, 1870, says that the right to vote cannot be denied or abridged on the basis of race, color, or prior condition of servitude. The Fifteenth Amendment is often grouped with the Thirteenth Amendment, ending slavery (1865), and Fourteenth Amendment, securing citizenship (1868), as one of the “Reconstruction amendments,” which were passed by the radical Republican-dominated Congress following the Civil War.

In effect, the Fifteenth Amendment secured the right to vote for African American men. As many as one million African American men registered to vote throughout the South, where in many districts African Americans constituted the majority or near-majority of the population. This expansion of political power also resulted in a dramatic increase in political representation as African American men were elected to local, state, and federal offices throughout the North and South.

Many of the gains provided by the Fifteenth Amendment proved to be only temporary, however, because many white Americans strongly opposed black political power. Following the end of Reconstruction, many southern states quickly enacted laws that limited the voting power of black citizens in order to restore white supremacy. In some places, African Americans faced additional taxes or the threat of losing their jobs, homes, or even their lives if they tried to vote. By the 1890s, most black communities in the South were effectively disenfranchised by these state and local policies, despite the Fifteenth Amendment. During the 1960s, securing equal voting rights became one of the central issues of the civil rights movement, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. From the Digital Public Library, https://dp.la

Free The Ballot
America is not fully free so long as the ballot is fettered in any part of the United States of America. The right of the Negro citizen to vote is embedded in the Fifteenth Amendment of the federal constitution. In a number of states the right-to-vote amendment has been frustrated, negated and butchered.

In the South there is only token Negro voting on an average basis. In a number of Southern counties with more Negro citizens than white citizens there are no Negro voters. This is a tragic commentary on American democracy. Excuse given for such racial denial of voting is the preservation of “white supremacy” and to prevent “Negro bloc voting”. The bogey of “Negro rule” and the preservation of “white rule” are other scares.

Still much is said of “States’ Rights” and “local rule.” Yet local rule should be based upon the rule of the local people. States’ rights envision a respect for personal and individual rights. Southern politicians tend to distort the theory of states’ rights and to misapply the idea of local rule.’

The Fifteenth Amendment bestows upon the Negro citizen a right which constitutionally cannot be removed by state action or states’ rights doctrines. Yet that very thing is being done in the South and the Congress has been indifferent and laggard about using its authority and power to protect, guard and actuate the Negro citizen’s right to vote in the South.

A number of bills have been introduced in the Congress seeking to implement the Fifteenth Amendment. The Republican Administration and the Democratic Majority Leadership together with individual lawmakers have submitted bills designed to make voting rights practical opportunities for the Negro group. Introduction of bills, press releases about them and the criss-cross of quibbling partisan criticism, do not always produce legislation.

Therefore if the President of the United States actually means that he is for meaningful voting by the Negro group in the South he is going to have to begin to fight with all of his power for such legislation. He probably will need to carry the fight to the people in a special nationwide civil rights speech. We would like to see President Eisenhower carry the fight for practical voting opportunities to the people and exert bold and uncompromising leadership for the right to vote.

In the meantime, those who want Negro voting opportunities established and materialized in the South should build a fire under Congress. A hard fight is a hand and the Southern lawmakers in Congress are tough, skilled and experienced counter fighters, let Congress have no peace of mind, no easy conscience and no happy time at the polls until adequate civil rights legislation is passed in the current session.

When Reconstruction ended in 1877, southern whites used violence, economic exploitation, discriminatory laws called Black Codes, and political disenfranchisement to subjugate African Americans and undo their gains during Reconstruction. Kansas and other destinations on the Great Plains represented a chance to start a new life. Kansas had fought to be a free state and, with the Homestead Act of 1862, the region offered lots of land at low cost. As a result, between the late 1870s and early 1880s, more than 20,000 African Americans left the South for Kansas, the Oklahoma Territory, and elsewhere on the Great Plains in a migration known as the “Great Exodus.”

These African American migrants, or Exodusters, came primarily from Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, and Tennessee. Some participated in organized recruitment efforts to establish black colonies in Kansas. Others just picked up and left, often traveling by steamboat to St. Louis, where they received help to get the rest of the way. One prominent promoter of the Exodus was Benjamin “Pap” Singleton, who organized several colonies in Kansas and recruited African Americans from Tennessee to move there. The peak of the Exodus occurred in the spring of 1879 when 6,000 migrants arrived in Kansas in only a few months.

For many Exodusters, the “promised land” of Kansas proved more punishing than they had hoped; the land was difficult to cultivate, and building homes and businesses with few resources proved challenging. The Exodus slowed in the 1880s and, by 1900, the population of many of the rural Exoduster towns and settlements began to decline.

The Exodus demonstrated that formerly enslaved people were claiming their freedom of movement—the power to decide where they would travel and live that slavery had denied them. In doing so, they sought better lives for themselves and rejected the violent white supremacist regime that was taking hold in the post-Reconstruction South. The predominantly black communities the Exodusters created provided important models of black self-government and community building in the West at the end of the nineteenth century.