Our Time PressThe Local Paper with the Global View

Part 1: We Came Before Columbus
Part 2 : Were the economic benefits to Europeans of owning African-Americans as chattel property? The returns must have been enormous. We see companies today traveling around the world seeking the most slave-like conditions they can find. Whether it’s 23-cents-an-hour in Haiti or a dollar-a-day in Malaysia, by buying labor so low and selling the output so high multinational corporations like Nike and Disney are market phenomena and widely admired in the financial communities. So if paying low wages is good, then paying no wages is better. The combination of stolen land and stolen labor at the coming industrial age made the United States( in those early years) the greatest ground-floor opportunity of all time, a ground floor that was constructed and financed by the labor of Africans.
The Middle Passage

“The period of the 1500’s and 1600’s came after a thousand years of great independent states in West Africa,” said Professor Henrik Clarke. “After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the -great independent states of West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western
Slave Trade.”
As any other nationalities, when Africans were brought to this hemisphere, they came carrying their many languages and their learning. But unlike any other nationality, everything else was taken from them, and they were delivered physically and psychologically decimated and naked on these shores. Those that survived the 240 years of the Middle Passage (1619-1859) found themselves now Africans-in-America, held captive by a people who viewed them as property enough to be bought and sold, but human enough to be raped.

Forbidden their own languages, the Africans began to use local words to identify objects and their environment. They standardized on the local language, whether it was French, Portuguese or English. For the Africans, this learning process had to be done in an atmosphere of terror, where killings and beatings were only a glance away. As the centuries passed, and as American slavery centered more in the southern United States, many Africans escaped into the north or joined others in the tribes of the indigenous people.

Communities were formed from the Seminoles of Florida to the Brooklyn, NY districts of Weeksville and Vinegar Hill.
Escapees Organize in the North Escapees to the north found each other and worked together to build their communities from the dirt ground up.
By the 1800’s, the Africans had positioned themselves to build schools and large churches. In the pamphlet “Weeksville Then and Now,” authors Joan Maynard and Gwen Cottman show the importance of learning and self-help to the Africans. The pamphlet has a replica of “The Freedmen’s Torchlight”, a community newspaper published by the African Civilization Society, which was housed in its own building on the comer of Dean Street and Troy Avenue in Brooklyn, NY. Dated December 1866, a year after the Civil War ended, “It included stirring statements of its philosophy of Black self-help, information on the Freedmen’s schools, featured moral anecdotes and listings of their contributors. The front page was devoted to the Alphabets, Basic English, Arithmetic, Geography and view of the nature of God and Man. In this way, the newspaper also served as a textbook for the newly freed slaves to learn reading and writing.” “Some organizations prior to and during the development of Weeksville were the New York Society for Mutual Relief, founded in 1808; the African Woolmen Society, founded in 1810; the Brooklyn African Tompkins Society, founded circa 1827; and the Weeksville Assistance Society, circa 1854. A chapter of the Prince Hall Free and Accepted Masons started in Brooklyn with the formation of Widows Sons Lodge, No. II in 1849.” And then there were the churches. “Brooklyn’s first Black church, the Bridge Street African Wesleyan Methodist Episcopal Church, was incorporated in 1818. Along with Siloam Presbyterian, founded in 1849, these churches were terminals on the slave escape route called “the Underground Rail-
road”.

The publishers of Our Time Press, Legacy Ventures and Senegalese chef Pierre Thiam hosted a conversation with Randy Weston & Billy Harper, Sunday, December 29 in celebration of the African Rhythm kings’ new “The Roots of the Blues” album. We thought the process of pulling together such an event in just five days would be the highlight of our Christmas. We thought wrong.
The first guests to arrive were the percussionist Candido de Guerra Camero (“Candido”) and arguably the greatest sax player to ever come out of Houston, Billy Harper. And other superstars flowed in, one
after the other.

We were too much in awe to even think about what had been accomplished in so short a time. We knew enough to know, it wasn’t about us; it was about the maestros: Randy, Billy and the gracious Fatoumata, Randy’s wife, put out the call, sans social media backup, and nearly 50 star musicians, blues impresarios and Weston/Harper fans showed up. In terms of a music movement, that Sunday afternoon into evening was the sweetest of suites.

Gnawan musicians, introduced by Mr. Weston, performed sensational music cross-legged on the floor. Their music and beats never once clashed with the soft sounds of The Roots of the Blues CD playing in the background. Weston and Harper talked about classical blues, traversing the world from Africa to their respective hometowns of Brooklyn and Houston, and back. It was more than a memorable experience. It was like opening the door to all the music that ever was. It was like being in the presence of all the musicians of the Diaspora that ever existed.
When Candido, the great Cuban-born percussionist– one of the first to use Congos in jazz music– walked through that basement gate, we were opening a door of return to Blues roots. Everyone the master percussionist had ever performed with — Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Kenton, Billy Taylor, Babatunde Olatunji, Machito, Gene Ammons and so many
more — accompanied him. The Sunday celebration marked the 40th anniversary year of Candido performing with Weston on the album Tanjah. Prior to that session, the musicians, great friends, first recorded together on Randy’s 1960 groundbreaking Uhuru Afrika album.
Coming up this year is the 40th Anniversary of Weston and Harper’s first recorded collaboration, although the musicians first met in 1972. Their presence at the Conversation recalled the great Max Roach, Duke Ellington, Dexter Gordon, Hubert Laws. It conjured up the spirits of Billie Holliday and Mahalia Jackson – the two women singers who ever
brought Weston to tears, he informed us. The soundtrack of The Roots of the Blues played throughout the
afternoon as guests communed in the presence of the hosts’ ancestors — with images, notes, diaries, journals, mementos scattered in corners of the parlor, on the piano and in “Pierre’s kitchen”.

Only thing missing were the children, peeking from the banisters, in awe of grown people grooving and the presence of something colorful, great and grand, something for them to tell, to read, to sing. And to pass on. But author Carol Friedman remembered them, leaving on the piano two gifts in her popular, hip Nicky the Jazz Cat series.

From beginning to end, four hours from the moment the door opened to God’s libation – a downpour, and Candido’s entrance, pure love making a visit, it was all cool and kind of blue, all about, good words, good people and good vibes.
More on the “Conversation” will be presented in the February Black History Month issue of Our Time Press; “Ancestral Calling” edition of Our Time AT HOME and other local and regional community newspapers. (BG)

For information on Weston and Harper’s latest album, visit:
www.randyweston.info