|
Recent Books on Lynching in America
Sherrilyn A. Hill,
On the Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of
Lynching in the Twentieth-First Century
(Review)
Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in
America (2000) /
100 Years of Lynching (1996) /
Southern Horrors and Other Writings; The
Anti-Lynching Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892-1900
(1996)
Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930
(Blacks in the New World)
(1993)
Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and
the Mob
(2004) /
At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of
Black America (2003)
*
* * * *
America
With Its Pants Down
Or the Evils of Bush's
Self Righteousness
By Rudolph Lewis
I am quite embarrassed and dismayed by the
pornographic imagination exhibited in the photos from Abu Ghraib
prison near Baghdad. These photos document US soldiers
humiliating and abusing Iraqi prisoners. Still I am not
altogether surprised and shocked by this new revelation.
African-American men especially realize from our experience
(past and present) the cruel extent to which America is willing
to go to sustain the dominance and superiority of the
privileged.
The April siege of Falluja made that obvious.
Military generals to avenge the death and mutilation of four
American mercenaries gave orders to soldiers in the field that
led to the killing of hundreds of Iraqis (men, women, and
children) and the horrific disruption of the lives of hundreds
of thousands of Iraqi citizens. The battalion only ceased its
actions when it became an international public embarrassment.
Now that the covers have been pulled back and
we see vividly in personal terms the wrongness of America’s
brutal occupation of Iraq, little room is left for gloating by
those of us who were opposed to this war. Led by Bush &
hawkish Republicans, we rushed, stepped blindly and too eagerly,
into what Senator Robert Byrd labeled as “the
mouth of hell.” This exposé of photos puts to shame
President Bush’s assertion that “America is the light of the
world.”
Those of us who opposed the war against
Vietnam remember My Lai (1969) and the other American military excesses
in countering the insurgency of the Vietcong—the dropping of
napalm, killing civilians, the relocation of entire villages,
the prostitution of the entire people. Some of us believe,
however, that we lost that war because the politicians were too
soft, lacked resolve. These same people who misread the Vietnam
past now engineer the war in Iraq believing that our war machine
is invincible, that none can stand up against our
state-of-the-art technology and our technical intelligence.
 |
The human element is shunted aside as a
tertiary matter. For our military, what is important first and
foremost is to dominate the enemy, to pacify him, make him heel
like a trained dog. Secondly, these societies we dominate, we
want to reorganize them in our own image—economically,
philosophically, and spiritually. But this is indeed the rub,
this arrogance of the present US government and regrettably a
substantial number of Christian Americans.
Though often argued to the contrary, we have
little respect for non-Anglo-American people. The Arab world and many others, including
some Americans, believe that the actions of the six soldiers at
Abu Ghraib are only the tip of the iceberg of horrid
humiliations suffered by Iraqi prisoners and the population in
general as a result of Bush’s “war on Saddam.” With their usual Madison Avenue aplomb Bush
and his crew have rushed to clean up, what is evident to all,
systematic torture and abuse of Iraqis. Their spiel is that the
behavior of those spiritually sick soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison
is unique and that these young men and women do not represent
the attitudes and hearts, the “true nature,” of Americans.
And they will be punished. |
Naturally, few of us, especially the family
of these soldiers, feel comfortable with the Bush response and
his displacing and leveling the blame on those least responsible
for this fiasco. His “sorry” has little meat on it.
The mother of Private Lynndie R. England—the female soldier who “flashes jaunty thumbs-up signs in
several photographs” and holds a leash tied to the neck of a
naked Iraqi man on the floor and who wears the broadest
of smiles of a college fraternity bash—believes “our
government is deceiving. . . . They tell you what they want you
to know. They make this person look as bad as she can. But
everything she did she did because someone high up told her
to" (Washington Post, 5/6/04).
|
The accused soldiers—including Specialist
Sabrina Harman from Virginia, Specialist Jeremy Sivits, Sergeant
Frederick and Specialist Charles A. Graner—contend that they were just
following orders from intelligence officers and interrogators
when they abused prisoners. “Specialist Joseph M. Darby, a
Maryland native, “has been commended by military investigators
for turning over evidence of the abuse” (Washington Post,
5/6/04).
But isn’t that at the heart of the
problem—too many of us just follow orders, dance jauntily to
he who pays the piper—a phenomena some of us refer to as
“getting ahead.” One of the Iraqis abused and photographed,
Hayder Sabbar Abd, a Shiite, claimed that he was neither a
combatant nor a terrorist and had been locked up in various
prisons since June 2003. These nude photos for intelligence were intended not only to
intimidate other prisoners, but also as tourist souvenirs and
feel-good mementos for soldiers enduring the bloody threats of
Iraqi “insurgents.” |
 |
On the level of the grunt soldier, these
“sadistic, blatant, and wanton criminal abuses” were a boost
to a psychology that desired to substantiate symbolically
American dominance and American belief in the deficiencies of
Iraqis and Muslim culture. This behavior is not far removed from
white Americans (male and female) lynching
blacks in the midst of a raucous picnic party.
The use of nudity and sexuality (simulating sexually
explicit acts) as a means to utterly humiliate these Iraqi
prisoners was no accident, but deliberate and intentional. This
type of abuse has a foundational history in American culture.
That is, these pornographic photos of torture say far more about
the perverted and deficient aspects of American middle-class
culture.
It would be foolish to hope that this
photographic exposé will bring to a close the brutality and
cruelty perpetrated by America’s military occupation of Iraq.
Bush and his Republican colleagues will refuse to acknowledge
that the savagery exhibited in these photos is a systemic
manifestation of an unnecessary war.
So America will “stay the course.” For
there is still money to be made and careers to be sustained and
imperial power that must be secured.
But as the old folks used to say, “A hard
head makes a soft ass.” Bush’s resolve to transplant a
Jeffersonian democracy in the midst of the Muslim Mideast will
come to nothing more than bankrupting the American economy, the
ruin and waste of tens of thousands of American and Iraqi lives,
and the international mockery of America’s civil religion as
expressed by our shining prince, George Bush.
America would be better served if its
military in Iraq packs up, cuts its losses, and returns home.
I’m afraid that the stomachs of our rulers will need much more
blood and more horrific destruction of lives and property before
we reach that resolve as a nation.
For certain, if the African-American people
had been consulted about this war we would not now be in this
mess. Cover-up artists Condoleeza Rice and Colin Powell, black
showpieces for the Bush regime, clearly are not representative
of African-American sentiment. They too are on a leash.
Thus, my greatest regret about this human tragedy
is that Americans generally do not value our experience (as an
oppressed people) and the wisdom we have gained from that
experience as much as it does our self-abasing humor and our
rapping rhythms.
* *
* * *
A Junior Aide Had a Big Role in Terror Policy—Mr. [John
C.] Yoo is often identified as the most aggressive among a group
of conservative legal scholars who have challenged the
importance of international law in the American legal system.
But his signature contributions to the policies of the Bush
administration have had more to do with his forceful assertion
of wide presidential powers in wartime. While Mr. Yoo has
become almost famous for some of his writings - the refutation
of both his academic and government work has become almost a
cottage industry among more liberal legal scholars and human
rights lawyers - much less is known about how he came to wield
the remarkable influence he had after Sept. 11 on issues related
to terrorism.
 |
That Washington tale began about
a decade before Mr. Yoo joined the administration in
July 2001, when he finished at Yale Law School and
won a clerkship with Judge Laurence H. Silberman of
the United States Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit, a keen spotter of young legal
talent and a patriarch of the network of
conservative lawyers who have occupied key positions
throughout the Bush administration. By then, Mr. Yoo
already thought of himself as solidly conservative.
He had grown up with anticommunist parents who left
their native South Korea for Philadelphia shortly
after Mr. Yoo was born in 1967, and had honed his
political views while an undergraduate at Harvard.
From the chambers of Judge Silberman, Mr. Yoo moved
on to a clerkship with Justice
Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, stopping
briefly at Berkeley.
Justice Thomas helped place him with Senator
Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, as general counsel on
the Senate Judiciary Committee. |
Along the way, Mr. Yoo passed up a chance to
work in the Washington office of the law firm Jones Day, where
he caught the eye of a senior partner, Timothy E. Flanigan.
After five years that Mr. Yoo spent at Berkeley, writing on
legal aspects of foreign affairs, war powers and presidential
authority, the two men met up again when Mr. Yoo joined the Bush
campaign's legal team, where Mr. Flanigan was a key lieutenant.
Mr. Flanigan became the deputy White House counsel under Alberto
R. Gonzales. Mr. Yoo ended up as a deputy in the Justice
Department's Office of Legal Counsel, or the O.L.C., a small
unit of lawyers that advises the executive branch on
constitutional questions and on the legality of complex or
disputed policy issues. After the attacks of Sept. 11, Mr. Yoo -
the only deputy with much expertise on foreign policy and war
powers - began dealing with the White House and other agencies
more directly than he might have otherwise. . . .
"John Yoo, given his academic background and
interests, was sort of the go-to guy on foreign affairs and
military power issues," Mr. Flanigan said in an interview,
referring to the legal counsel office staff. "He was the one
that Gonzales and I went to to get advice on those issues on
9/11, and it just continued." The torrent of opinions that Mr.
Yoo churned out in the months that followed was striking,
notwithstanding the research and writing assistance he had from
lawyers on the office staff. Although only a portion of those
documents have become public, copies of some still-confidential
memorandums reviewed by The New York Times give a flavor of
their sweeping language. . . .
Mr. Yoo's belief in the wide inherent powers
of the president as commander in chief was strongly shared by
one of the most influential legal voices in the administration's
policy debates on terrorism, David S. Addington, then the
counsel to Vice President
Dick Cheney. Documents and interviews suggest that those
views have been part of the legal arguments underpinning not
only coercive interrogation and the prosecution of terrorism
suspects before military tribunals but also the eavesdropping
program. Some current and former officials said the urgency of
events after Sept. 11 and the close ties that Mr. Yoo developed
with Mr. Addington (who is now Mr. Cheney's chief of staff), Mr.
Gonzales, Mr. Flanigan and the general counsel of the Defense
Department, William J. Haynes II, had sometimes led him to
bypass the elaborate clearance process to which opinions from
the legal counsel office were normally subjected.
Mr. Yoo's January 2002 conclusions that the
Geneva Conventions did not apply to the conflict in Afghanistan
and that the conventions' minimum standards did not cover
terrorists touched off a long, hard-fought battle within the
administration, in which lawyers for the State Department and
the military services strongly disputed his views. Thereafter,
several senior officials said, those lawyers were sometimes
excluded from the drafting of more delicate opinions. For
example, they said, Mr. Yoo's much-criticized 2002 memorandum
with Mr. Bybee on interrogations - which said that United States
law prohibited only methods that would cause "lasting
psychological harm" or pain "akin to that which accompanies
serious physical injury such as death or organ failure" - was
not shared with either State Department or military lawyers,
despite its implications for their agencies. . . .
NYTimes
* *
* * *
’03 U.S. Memo Approved Harsh Interrogations—The Justice
Department in 2003 gave military interrogators broad authority
to use extreme methods in questioning detainees and argued that
wartime powers largely exempted interrogators from laws banning
harsh treatment, according to a memorandum publicly disclosed on
Tuesday. In a sweeping legal brief written in March 2003, when
the Pentagon was struggling to determine the appropriate limits
for its interrogators, the Justice Department gave the Pentagon
much of the same authority it had provided to the
Central Intelligence Agency in a memorandum months earlier.
Both memorandums were later rescinded by the Justice Department.
The disclosure of the 2003 document, a detailed 81-page opinion
written by
John C. Yoo, who at the time was the second-ranking official
at the Office of Legal Counsel at the Justice Department, is
likely to fuel the already intense debate about legal boundaries
in the face of a continuing terrorist threat.
Mr. Yoo’s memorandum is the
latest document to illuminate the legal foundation that Bush
administration lawyers used after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
to give the White House broad powers to capture, detain and
interrogate suspects around the globe.
The thrust of Mr. Yoo’s
brief has long been known, but its specific contents were
revealed on Tuesday after government lawyers turned it over to
the
American Civil Liberties Union, which has sought hundreds of
documents from the Bush administration under the Freedom of
Information Act. Some legal scholars said Tuesday that they were
amazed at the scope of the memorandum. “This is a monument to
executive supremacy and the imperial presidency,” said Eugene R.
Fidell, who teaches military justice at
Yale Law School and the Washington College of Law at
American University. “It’s also a road map for the Pentagon for
fending off any prosecutions.”
The memorandum gave the
military broad latitude to use harsh interrogation methods. It
reasoned that federal laws prohibiting assault were not
applicable to military interrogators dealing with members of
Al Qaeda because of White House authority during wartime. It
also argued that many American and international laws would not
apply to interrogations overseas.
NYTimes
* *
* * *
Memo: Laws Didn't Apply
to Interrogators—Justice Dept. Official in 2003 Said
President's Wartime Authority Trumped Many Statutes Yoo's 2003
memo arrived amid strong Pentagon debate about which
interrogation techniques should be allowed and which might lead
to legal action in domestic and international courts. After a
rebellion by military lawyers, then-Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld in December 2002 suspended a list of
aggressive techniques he had approved, the most extreme of which
were used on a single detainee at the military prison at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The prisoner, military investigators
later would determine, was subjected to stress positions,
nudity, hooding, exposure to dogs and other aggressive
techniques. Largely because of Yoo's memo, however, a Pentagon
working group in April 2003 endorsed the continued use of
extremely aggressive tactics. The top lawyers for each military
service, who were largely excluded from the group, did not
receive a final copy of Yoo's March memo and did not know about
the group's final report for more than a year, officials said.
Thomas J. Romig, who was
then the Army's judge advocate general, said yesterday after
reading the memo that it appears to argue there are no rules in
a time of war, a concept Romig found "downright offensive."
Martin S. Lederman, a former lawyer with the Office of Legal
Counsel who now teaches law at
Georgetown University, said the Yoo memo helped create a
legal environment that allowed prisoner abuses at
Abu Ghraib.
"What else could have been
the source of belief in Iraq that the gloves were off and all
laws could be disregarded with impunity?" Lederman asked. "It
created a world in which everyone on the ground believed the
laws did not apply. It was a law-free zone."
In a 2004 memo for the Navy
inspector general's office, then-General Counsel Alberto J. Mora
objected to the ideas that cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
could be allowed at Guantanamo and that the president's
authority is virtually unlimited. Mora wrote that he spoke with
Yoo at the Pentagon on Feb. 6, 2003, and that Yoo "glibly"
defended his own memo. "Asked whether the President could order
the application of torture, Mr. Yoo responded, 'Yes,' " Mora
wrote. Yoo denies saying that.
Washington Post
* *
* * *
In Iraq Was I a
Torturer?—Unlike Ben, Darby didn't witness any abuse; he
came across the torture photos by accident. The desert heat had
warped his own snapshots, so he asked Cpl. Charles Graner for
some pictures, hoping for images of camels and tanks. Scrolling
through the CD, he laughed when he saw the pyramid of naked
Iraqis. Then he got to the simulated-fellatio pictures. He
insists he's not a goody-two-shoes tattletale or a saint by any
stretch. "I'm as crooked as the next MP," he explains. "I've
bent laws and I've broke laws." Months earlier, Graner (who is
now serving a 10-year sentence) had shown him a photo of a
prisoner tied up in a stress position and said, "The Christian
in me knows this is wrong, but the corrections officer in me
can't help but love to make a grown man piss himself." Darby
says he was too tired to think much about it. It took him three
weeks of soul-searching to decide whether he should turn in the
photos. He finally took them not to his superior officers but to
the Army investigation office, where soldiers can report
everything from sexual harassment to theft—a breach of the chain
of command that many would later hold against him. Four months
later,
Darby was sitting in the
Abu Ghraib mess hall; CNN was on, showing Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld's congressional testimony on prisoner abuse.
Darby had no idea his tip—which military investigators had
assured him would remain anonymous—had led to a national
scandal. He heard Rumsfeld name various people who'd provided
information—"first the soldier, Spc. Joseph Darby, who alerted
the appropriate authorities … My thanks and appreciation to him
for his courage and his values." Darby dropped his fork midbite.
Oh shit. He felt 400 pairs of eyes on him. Seymour Hersh had
already published his name, but as Darby says, "Who reads the
damn New Yorker?" His mom was dying of cancer; now, the
compassionate-leave request he had filed a week before was
rushed through. When his plane touched down stateside, officers
were there with his wife. They escorted the couple to an
undisclosed location where they lived with around-the-clock
security for the next six months. He didn't get the formal thank
you he'd expected from the Army, though a personal letter from
Rumsfeld arrived at one point -- asking him to stop talking
about how he'd been outed.
When the Abu Ghraib photos
splashed on television sets, people in Cumberland watched,
hoping their loved ones weren't involved. Not all were so lucky.
Kenneth England saw the pictures of his daughter, Lynndie, as
did the welders and machinists who work with him at the CSX
railroad. They supported him as best they knew how: by not
mentioning it. While Pentagon flacks spun the scandal as the
work of a few bad apples from Appalachia, people in the area
hung yellow ribbons and "Hometown Hero" posters for the accused
MPs. Reservists' wives organized candlelight vigils.
"Everybody needs his time
over there to mean or count for something," Sgt. Ken Davis, a
teetotaler nicknamed Preacher Man by the other MPs at Abu
Ghraib, told me. "It has to be right in the greater scheme of
things. But if the U.S. government was truly at the helm,
ordering the abuse, then it actually means nothing. And now we
live with ghosts and demons that will haunt us for the rest of
our lives." Davis, who has a clean, bleachy smell to him and
says "dang" a lot, was in some of the photos, and he says he
reported the abuse to his superior. For that, people at the
police department near Cumberland, where he worked, call him a
narc. He's become an Abu Ghraib junkie, attending the trials,
testifying at some, collecting photos and evidence,
corresponding with the accused.
AlterNet
* *
* * *
Exposure: The woman
behind the camera at Abu Ghraib—On her first night at the
prison, Specialist Sabrina Harman, a twenty-six-year-old M.P.
from Virginia, wrote a letter home to the woman she called her
wife:
|
Kelly
Its 9:00 pm and we can hear
shots—no white lights are allowed to be on at night
no leaving the building after dark. I hope we aren’t
here long! We drove in and two helicopters were
landed taking prisoners off.
I’m scared of helicopters
because of the dream. I think I wrote it down
before. I saw a helicopter and it looked like the
tail was swaying back and forth then it did it again
then a huge flame/round shot up and it exploded. I
turned around and we were under attack, I didn’t
have my weapon (gun) so all we could do was hide
under these picknick tables. So back to the prison .
. . we get to our buildings and I step out of my
truck right in front of a picknick table.—I almost
freaked out. I have a bad feeling about this place.
I want to leave as soon as possible! We are still
hoping to be home X-mas or soon after.—
I love you.
I’m going to get some sleep.
I’ll write you again soon.
Please don’t give up on me!
Sabrina
|
Like many young reservists, Harman had joined the Army to help
pay for college. She had never imagined that she’d see war, and
Iraq often felt unreal to her; “like a dream,” she said. Then
she had that dream—about a gunman shooting at a helicopter from
a date palm while she hid, unarmed, beneath a picnic table—and
it was all too real. “And it kind of came true, maybe two or
three weeks later,” she said. “Down the road, they started
shooting helicopters from date trees.”
That was in Al Hillah, a
Shiite town near the ruins of ancient Babylon, sixty miles south
of Baghdad, where the 372nd M.P.s had been stationed since they
started arriving in Iraq, in May. Having sat out the Shock and
Awe phase of the invasion at Fort Lee, in Virginia, they were
sent in through Kuwait shortly after George W. Bush, standing
beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner, declared, in May of
2003, that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended”—and in
Al Hillah, during that first summer of the war, they had. The
M.P.s felt safe walking the streets; they made friends among the
Iraqis, played with the kids, shopped in the markets, shared
meals at the outdoor cafés. Their headquarters, in an abandoned
date-processing factory, were minimally fortified, and were
never attacked. Their mission was to provide combat support for
the First Marine Expeditionary Force, which controlled the city,
and to train local policemen for duty under a new national
government. They understood their presence to be temporary,
expecting that America would hand over the country to
democratically elected Iraqis by summer’s end, then get out of
the way.
To Harman, the assignment
felt like a peacekeeping mission, not a tour of combat, and she
wasn’t complaining. She was known in the unit as someone who
hated to see or do violence. “Sabrina literally would not hurt a
fly,” her team leader, Sergeant Hydrue Joyner, said. “If there’s
a fly on the floor and you go to step on it, she will stop you.”
Specialist Jeremy Sivits, a mechanic in the company’s motor
pool, said, “We’d try to kill a cricket, because it kept us up
all night in the tent. She would push us out of the way to get
to this cricket, and would go running out of the tent with it.
She could care less if she got sleep, as long as that cricket
was safe.” That made Sivits laugh, but he worried that she
wouldn’t survive a firefight. Joyner agreed. “As a soldier, you
can’t allow your heart to get in the way sometimes, because the
moment you do you may get killed or may get someone else
killed,” he said. “But with Sabrina, I think she would have made
a better humanitarian than a soldier, and I don’t mean that in a
negative way.” Sivits couldn’t figure why she had joined the
military. “She was just too nice to be a soldier,” he said. . .
.
|
“I
just started taking photos of everything I saw that
was wrong, every little bruise and cut,” Harman
said. “His knees were bruised, his thighs were
bruised by his genitals. He had restraint marks on
his wrists. You had to look close. I mean, they did
a really good job cleaning him up.” She said, “The
gauze on his eye was put there after he died to make
it look like he had medical treatment, because he
didn’t when he came into the prison.” She said,
“There were so many things around the bandage, like
the blood coming out of his nose and his ears. And
his tooth was chipped—I didn’t know if that happened
there or before—his lip was split open, and it
looked like somebody had either butt-stocked him or
really got him good or hit him against the wall. It
was a pretty good-sized gash. I took a photo of that
as well.” She said, “I just wanted to document everything
I saw.
That was the reason I took photos.” She said, “It was to
prove to pretty much anybody who looked at this guy, Hey, I was
just lied to. This guy did not die of a heart attack. Look at
all these other existing injuries that they tried to cover up.”
NewYorker |
 |
*
* * * *
Update
The Banality of Bush
White House Evil—Five years after the Abu Ghraib
revelations, we must acknowledge that our government
methodically authorized torture and lied about it. But we also
must contemplate the possibility that it did so not just out of
a sincere, if criminally misguided, desire to “protect” us but
also to promote an unnecessary and catastrophic war. Instead of
saving us from “another 9/11,” torture was a tool in the
campaign to falsify and exploit 9/11 so that fearful Americans
would be bamboozled into a mission that had nothing to do with
Al Qaeda. The lying about Iraq remains the original sin from
which flows much of the Bush White House’s illegality.
Levin suggests — and I
agree — that as additional fact-finding plays out, it’s time for
the Justice Department to enlist a panel of two or three
apolitical outsiders, perhaps retired federal judges, “to review
the mass of material” we already have. The fundamental truth is
there, as it long has been. The panel can recommend a legal path
that will insure accountability for this wholesale betrayal of
American values.
President Obama can talk
all he wants about not looking back, but this grotesque past is
bigger than even he is. It won’t vanish into a memory hole any
more than Andersonville, World War II internment camps or My
Lai. The White House, Congress and politicians of both parties
should get out of the way. We don’t need another commission. We
don’t need any Capitol Hill witch hunts. What we must have are
fair trials that at long last uphold and reclaim our nation’s
commitment to the rule of law.
NYTimes
* * *
* *
Report of the
Research Committee
on Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings
Thomas Jefferson Foundation
January 2000
Conclusions
Based on the
examination of currently available primary and
secondary documentary evidence, the oral histories
of descendants of Monticello's African-American
community, recent scientific studies, and the
guidance of individual members of Monticello's
Advisory Committee for the Robert H. Smith
International Center for Jefferson Studies and
Advisory Committee on African-American
Interpretation, the Research Committee has reached
the following conclusions:
Dr. Foster's
DNA study was conducted in a manner that meets the
standards of the scientific community, and its
scientific results are valid.
The DNA study,
combined with multiple strands of currently
available documentary and statistical evidence,
indicates a high probability that Thomas Jefferson
fathered Eston Hemings, and that he most likely was
the father of all six of Sally Hemings's children
appearing in Jefferson's records. Those children are
Harriet, who died in infancy; Beverly; an unnamed
daughter who died in infancy; Harriet; Madison; and
Eston.
Many aspects of
this likely relationship between Sally Hemings and
Thomas Jefferson are, and may remain, unclear, such
as the nature of the relationship, the existence and
longevity of Sally Hemings's first child, and the
identity of Thomas C. Woodson.
The
implications of the relationship between Sally
Hemings and Thomas Jefferson should be explored and
used to enrich the understanding and interpretation
of Jefferson and the entire Monticello community.—Monticello
* * *
* *
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: A Brief Account
Thomas
Jefferson (April 13, 1743 –
July 4, 1826) was the principal author of the
Declaration of Independence
(1776) and the
Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom
(1777), the
third
President of the United States
(1801–1809) and founder of the
University of Virginia
(1819). He was an influential
Founding Father and
an exponent of
Jeffersonian democracy.
Sarah "Sally" Hemings (Shadwell,
Albemarle County, Virginia,
circa 1773 –
Charlottesville, Virginia,
1835) was a
mixed-race
slave owned by
President
Thomas Jefferson
through inheritance from his wife. She was the
half-sister of
Jefferson's wife,
Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson by their father
John Wayles. She was notable because most
historians now believe that the widower Jefferson
had six children with her, and maintained an
extended relationship for 38 years until his death.
When Jefferson's relationship and children were
reported in 1802, there was sensational coverage for
a time, but Jefferson remained silent on the issue.
Four Hemings-Jefferson children survived to
adulthood. He let two "escape" in 1822 at the age of
21 and freed the younger two in his will in 1826.
* * *
* *
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American
Controversy
By Annette
Gordon-Reed
Attorney
Gordon-Reed (law, New York Law Sch.) presents a
lawyer's analysis of the evidence for and against
the proposition that Jefferson was the father of
several children born to his household slave Sally
Hemings. Gordon-Reed is not concerned with Jefferson
and Hemings as much as she is with how Jefferson's
defenders have dealt with the evidence about the
case. Her book takes aim at such noteworthy
biographers as Dumas Malone, who has been quick to
accept evidence against a liaison and quick to
reject evidence for one.—Library
Journal
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The Women
Jefferson Loved
By Virginia
Scharff
According to historian Scharff,
Thomas Jefferson’s “most closely guarded secrets,
the most fiercely maintained silences, all had to do
with the women he loved.” It stands to reason that
in order to fully understand a man as tremendously
gifted and as deeply flawed as Thomas Jefferson, one
must also understand and appreciate the women who
collectively formed the foundation of his life and
shaped the nature of his legacy. Although
Jefferson’s mother, daughters, granddaughters, wife,
and enslaved mistress were all fascinating women who
played distinct roles in his life and legend, they
were also creatures of their time and place, living,
enduring, and playing by the rules of a patriarchal,
male-dominated society. By studying these women
Scharff not only opens a window to the heart and
soul of one of our nation’s founders but also
resurrects their own contributions to our nation’s
history.—Booklist |
 |
The chapter on Sally
Hemings does not add much new information, but it certainly lays
out the facts we know in a comprehensive and well organized
fashion. Much like Professor Gordon-Reed, the author carefully
explains the strange dual-family existence that prevailed at
Monticello, and how servants integrated with the Jefferson
family as they all lived together. As regards the two daughters,
they too emerge from the historical darkness and we learn a
great deal about them and their important role in TJ's life and
activities. As I read each chapter, I learned all manner of
things of which I had not been aware, and I have read a lot of
material on TJ. So women are central to the story, but there is
also an abundance of additional facts and perspectives that very
much enhance the book. —Ronald
H. Clark
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Salvage the Bones
A Novel by Jesmyn Ward
On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.— WashingtonPost
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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posted 6 May 2004
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