Here was the traditional device by which those in charge of any social order mobilize and discipline a recalcitrant population – offering the adventure and rewards of military service to get poor people to fight for a cause they may not see clearly as their own.
I think of Charles Sherrod. He was a SNCC “field secretary” and one of those young people who went into the toughest towns in the deep South to set up Freedom Houses and help local folk organize to change their lives.
And even the privileged minority – must it not reconsider, with that practicality which even privilege cannot abolish, the value of its privileges, when they become threatened by the anger of the sacrificed, whether in organized rebellion, unorganized riot, or simply those brutal individual acts of desperation labeled crimes by law and the state?
The “mystique” that Friedan spoke of was the image of the woman as mother, wife, living through her husband, through her children, giving up her own dreams for that. She concluded: “The only way for a woman as for a man, to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own.
Democrats and Republicans to elect Rutherford Hayes in 1877 set the tone. Whether Democrats or Republicans won, national policy would not change in any important way.
In Wisconsin in 1856, the LaCrosse and Milwaukee Railroad got a million acres free by distributing about $900,000 in stocks and bonds to fifty-nine assemblymen, thirteen senators, the governor. Two years later the railroad was bankrupt and the bonds were worthless.
They teach us that the supreme act of citizenship is to choose among savior, by going into a voting booth every four years to choose between two white and well-off Anglo-Saxon males of inoffensive personality and orthodox opinions.
And Bernice Johnson, who organized the Albany Freedom Singers and was expelled from Albany State College for her determined involvement in the movement.
But how can the judgment be made if the benefits and losses cannot be balanced because the losses are either unmentioned or mentioned quickly?
It is roughly estimated that Africa lost 50 million human beings to death and slavery in those centuries we call the beginnings of modern Western civilization, at the hands of slave traders and plantation owners in Western Europe and America, the countries deemed the most advanced in the world.
Aldous Huxley: “Liberties are not given, they are taken.
Perhaps the most important thing I learned was about democracy, that democracy is not our government, our constitution, our legal structure. Too often they are enemies of democracy. Certainly this was the experience of African-Americans in this country for two hundred years.
The President of the United States isn’t going to solve our problems. The problems are too big.
By 1850, fifteen Boston families called the “Associates” controlled 20 percent of the cotton spindleage in the United States, 39 percent of insurance capital in Massachusetts, 40 percent of banking resources in Boston.
Indeed, in 1976, fifteen years after he arrived and was arrested, Charles Sherrod was elected to the Albany city commission.
What black men, women, children did in Albany at that time was heroic. They overcame a century of passivity, and they did it without the help of the national government. They learned that despite the Constitution, despite the promises, despite the political rhetoric of the government, whatever they accomplished in the future would have to come from them.
Bacon gave his reasons for the rebellion in a paper called “Declaration of the People.” It blended the frontiersmen’s hatred of the Indians with the common people’s anger toward the rich. Bacon accused the Berkeley government of wrongdoing, including unfair taxes and not protecting the western farmers from the Indians.
But slave importation became illegal in 1808.
A historian who studied Boston tax lists in 1687 and 1771 found that in 1687 there were, out of a population of six thousand, about one thousand property owners, and that the top 5 percent – 1 percent of the population – consisted of fifty rich individuals who had 25 percent of the wealth. By 1770, the top 1 percent of property owners owned 44 percent of the wealth.
He estimates that perhaps 250,000 slaves were imported illegally before the Civil War.