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Books by Marcus Bruce
Christian
Song of the Black Valiants: Marching Tempo
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High Ground: A Collection of Poems /
Negro soldiers in the Battle of New Orleans
I Am New Orleans:
A Poem
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Negro Ironworkers of Louisiana, 1718–1900 /
The Liberty Monument
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Marcus Christian
Portrait of a Poet
By
Betsy Petersen
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So let us pause here
to carve our records
upon these rocks
by the light of a
hand-cupped candle
held high in a hostile
wind. . . .
Marcus Christian, "Hieroglyphs on Granite"
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He rocked back and forth on his heels and toes, a small
man with a big voice and the presence of a great
conductor, as he recited the litany of insurrection:
“The New Orleans Christmas Eve plot of 1835. The
Alexandria plot of 1837. The Vermillionville plot of
1840. The plot of 1842 in Madison, Concordia and Carroll
parishes. The Donaldsonville plot of 1843.
“This is another
one of those lessons where you can use your own judgment
about taking notes.” Marcus Christian told his students,
“because frankly, you won’t find any of this on the
exam.
Marcus Christian
has just finished his first semester as special lecturer
in English and history and writer-in-residence on the
faculty of Louisiana State University in New Orleans; he
taught History 195, The Negro in Louisiana, one of the
first black studies” courses to be offered at
LSUNO.
About 30 students were assembled in
the small bright, austere classroom on this particular
day, and about two-thirds of them were white. “I want
you to understand,” Christian told them. “You can’t
understand slavery unless you understand all these
insurrections.”
From the flood of
facts, vivid, terrible images emerged: of slaves in
irons, “packed like sardines in the holds of the ships,
getting free on their chains and coming up on deck and
these fights breaking out”; of a rebellious slave,
“sentenced to receive 350 lashes”—pause—“and to wear
irons for two years”; of conspirators whose “heads were
severed from their bodies and mounted in front of the
churches in New Orleans.”
In a voice dripping
with sarcasm he told of Celestin, a principal in one
abortive insurrection: “Guide by natural sentiments of
humanity, like a faithful slave, he revealed the plot to
his master.” And, in response to the students’ rueful
laughter, Christian said innocently, “I don’t know why
you’re laughing.
“See, it pays sometimes; sometimes
it pays to be an informer,” he continued. “The city
council paid $2,000 for Celestin’s freedom.
“But after he was given his freedom
he was put out,” he added. “I think the militant persons
in here would like to hear that.”
The lecture was a
race against the clock. One of the students was
Christian’s appointed timekeeper, and occasionally he
broke off to ask her, “How much time we got left, lady?”
Not enough. He finished in a rush, quoting from memory
in ringing, passionate tones the words of William Lloyd
Garrison: “‘Let this covenant with death and agreement
with hell be annulled . . . I will not equivocate; I
will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch, and I
will be heard!’”
The classroom was quiet. “The
gauntlet was down,” Christian said. “The Civil War
began. Questions?”
“Were any of these
insurrections successful?” a student asked. “Why, no,”
Christian answered softly, “none were successful—because
Mr. Abe Lincoln had to sent them free.”
Christian’s
lectures are drawn from his mammoth unpublished book on
the Negro in Louisiana, a four-inch thick bundle of
onionskin manuscript he calls “the family Bible.” He
started the book during the Depression, when he worked
on the
Federal Writers’ Project; in 1943, he received a
Rosenwald Fellowship for further study in the field.
Articles and poems
of his have appeared in Negro journal like
Crisis,
Opportunity and
Phylon, and in general-circulations papers
including
The New York Herald-Tribune, the
New Orleans States and the
New Orleans Item. He has been a contributor to
The Louisiana Weekly for years, and a series of
articles in that newspaper spearheaded the assault of
New Orleans Negroes on segregated public transportation
here.
“Do you like to ride the bus?” he
asked a visitor. “I do, too—especially now that we have
desegregation.”
Books, manuscripts,
tape recordings, clippings, mementoes, unbound books of
poetry are crammed into every available space in
Christian’s office, a back room in his friend *Carlton
Pecot’s insurance agency on North Claiborne Avenue. His
office at LSUNO, which he has occupied for just a few
months, shows his unmistakable imprint, too, the mark of
a man who is forever saying, “Here, I want to show you
something,” and dragging yet another book or poem or
scrapbook off the shelf to illustrate his point.
Christian served as
university librarian at Dillard University in the 1940s
and gave three lectures a year there during that time,
but he has not been a student anywhere since his 13th
year.
“I got all my
degrees in my father’s primary school,” he said.
Emmanuel Banks Christian was the village school master
in Mechanicsville, La., now part of
Houma; said his son, “I was very fortunate to have
the father I had.”
It was his father
who introduced him to poetry:
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My little twin sister and I,
we’d get up there on his lap and he’d put one of
us on each knee, “we’d say, ‘Look what funny
noises Papa makes in his throat.’ |
“My first poetry
was ordinary American poetry that you get in books,”
Christian said. “Longfellow,
Stevenson,
Whittier. But we didn’t learn
Whittier’s abolitionist poetry. He was the official
poet of the abolitionists, but they didn’t tell you that
in school.
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I declare, they had some
of the most sainted men in that abolitionist
movement. You know, half of them were not
interested in furthering the Negro’s cause,
but they were thrown into it, they were
sucked in, it was like a vortex: Suddenly
you are sucked into the thing, and that
settles it, and when you get into it, if
you’re any sort of man, you stand up and
say, ‘Okay, there now, this is mine.’
Elijah Lovejoy, he was
held up to the people in Ohio where he was
killed, he told them he couldn’t do
anything. He said, ‘God has put my hand to
the plow and it’s no use saying turn back. I
cannot help myself, I have set my hand to
this, even if it means my death. . . . |
“And it did mean
his death,” Christian said, his voice dropping to a
whisper.
Much of Marcus
Christian’s poetry tells how it is to be black and
oppressed, tells it sometimes with biting, acid humor,
sometimes with passionate anger. Though he won’t reveal
his age—“in these days of Negro militancy you do a man a
disservice if you mention anything over 30”—he was
writing poems like “Wing-Shadows” long before the dawn
of the civil rights movement. That poem, a rather long
one, uses as a metaphor for slavery a huge eagle who was
slain by the Civil War but whose corpse continues to
smother black Americans:
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Beneath these wings my heart, with one
accord,
Keeps the Commandments of the Lord
Of Earth, who says,
Passing me by through all the endless
days:
“Good Nigger!” |
“But some day, In some way, By a
twist of fate,” the poem goes on, “I may become the
target of the Great . . .” And then,
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. . . goaded to frenzy by the
lash,
Like some beast maddened,
Through the earth I’ll crash,
Keeping some half-crazed vow;
My hand against all men
—my life at stake—
The mark of Cain and Ishmael on my
brow—
Dark laughter in my throat
and red death in my wake! |
“I was showing the
line that’s drawn between the Negro who’s good and the
Negro who’s bad,” Christian said.
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You
hardly know what time you’re going to end up
on the bad side, there’s such a thin
dividing line. I can go out of here right
now and something’ll happen out there and
I’ll get in a quarrel and the first thing
you know I’m it.
Well,
in that situation the average Negro figures,
‘I’ve got to sell my life and I might just
as well sell it as dearly as possible.’ He
on the warpath, to kill just because he’s
going to be killed, so he says, ‘I’ll just
take as many whites with me as I can.’ |
"Some young blacks like this poem,"
Christian said with a touch of scorn, because it sounds
militant.
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Some of these militants
are saying, ‘What did you do? You’ve been
writing poetry and writing articles all
these years, well what did you ever do? One
Watts will do more than you ever did.’ |
“Well does one
Watts really do more?” Christian said softly. And then,
his voice growing louder.
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I’m
willing to bet you that those people who
burned down Watts, in one way or another
they’re going to pay for it. The Negro’s
going to pay for it, he’s going to pay in
some way.
“There’s one thing the black militants might
just as well realize, and that’s this, there
are still more whites in America than there
are Negroes, and there’ll be a good while. |
“Unless you steal upon the people
and make revolution, you’re not going to make it,” he
continued.
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And a minority can hardly
make revolution unless it’s very well
planned, and we never could plan it.
Because, as I’ve told you about the slave
insurrection; by the time you get together
an insurrection somebody comes in and tells.
It’s somebody who likes white people well
enough, white people been kind to him. You
can’t blame him, he’s just doing what the
other man’s doing, looking out for number
one. |
“The type of
revolution the black militants are preaching just won’t
happen,” he said. “But there is a revolution, there has
already been a revolution in this country. There’s a
great revolution,” he said to his visitor, “because
right now, lady, you sitting here talking with me alone
would be enough to send all the police in town round
here. I’m showing you there’s already been a revolution
in so many ways, and it will go on, and it will go on
gradually.”
Now History 195, a
product of the gradual revolution, is over, and Marcus
Christian is preparing for his poetry course (English
63, Section I, Introduction to Creative Writing), which
will begin Feb. 2. “I’m doing fine in history,” he said,
“but I’m telling the students to get set: “When I get in
poetry, I’m going to be wild, man, wild!”
Source: DIXIE
18• January 19, 1970
*In
1950 Carlton Pecot and another black man became New
Orleans policemen....Mayor Morrison and his subordinates
placed the new black patrolmen carefully....They
assigned the new men to the juvenile bureau...dressed
them in plain clothes, and tucked them away in a
predominantly black district where very few white voters
dared to venture. This cautious manipulation worked
superbly. They were hardly noticed." [Edward F. Haas.
DeLesseps S. Morrison and the Image of Reform, 1946-1961
(Baton Rouge, 1974), 77-78]—Nutrias
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Marcus Bruce
Christian
Selected Diary Notes
/ Selected Poems
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Selected Letters
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Profiles on Marcus Bruce Christian and the Federal
Writers Project
Bryan, Violet Harrington.
The Myth of New Orleans in Literature.
Knoxville: University of Tennessee, 1993.
Clayton, Ronnie W. “The Federal
Writers Project for Blacks in Louisiana.” Louisiana
History 19(1978): 327-335.
Dent, Tom. “Marcus
B. Christian: A Reminiscence and an Appreciation.”
Black American Literature Forum, 1984, Volume 18,
Issue 1, pp. 22-26.
Hessler, Marilyn S. “Marcus
Christian: The Man and His Collection.” Louisiana
History 1 (1987):37-55.
Johnson, Jerah. “Marcus B.
Christian and the WPA History of Black People in
Louisiana.” Louisiana History 20.1 (1979):
113-115.
Larson, Susan. “Poems in the Key of Life.” Times-Picayune (Book Section), July 4,
1999.
Lewis, Rudolph. “Introduction.”
I Am New Orleans and Other Poems by Marcus Bruce
Christian. Edited by Rudolph Lewis and Amin Sharif.
New Orleans: Xavier Review Press, 1999. Reprinted in
revised form in Dillard Today 2.3 (2000): 21-24.
Lewis, Rudolph. “Magpies,
Goddesses, & Black Male Identity in the Romantic Poetry
of Marcus Bruce Christian.” Paper presented at
College Language Association, April 2000, Baltimore, MD.
Lewis, Rudolph. “Marcus
Bruce Christian and a Theory of a Black Aesthetic.”
Paper presented at the Zora Neale Hurston Society
Conference held June 1999 at University of Maryland
Eastern Shore. Published in ZNHS FORUM (Spring 2000).
Peterson, Betsy. “Marcus Christian:
Portrait of a Poet.” Dixie 18 (January 1970).
Redding, Joan. “The Dillard
Project: The Black Unit of the Louisiana Writers’
Project.” Louisiana History 32.1 (1991): 47-62
Source:
Wikipedia
posted 31 January 2011
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Southern Journey
A Return to the Civil Rights Movement
By
Tom Dent
A black
youth reared in segregated New Orleans, Dent
went to Mississippi for the civil rights
movement, and that experience stuck with
him. So in 1991, he decided to work his way
south from Greensboro, N.C., to Mississippi,
skirting both large cities and important
officials, to talk to (mostly) black folk
and to assess the movement's legacy. At
times, Dent's meandering approach lacks
depth and is unwieldy, but his personal
connection to his inquiry informs his story
with commitment. In Greensboro, the
unresolved gap between blacks and whites,
exemplified in an anniversary celebration of
the city's historic sit-ins, remind Dent "of
the strained interracial meetings of the
1950s." |
In Orangeburg, S.C., a black academic
tells him ruefully that many social-work students go
into "criminal justice" lacking the broader awareness of
the politics behind the new programs. In Albany, Ga.,
Dent discerns signs of material progress but deep
divisions not only between the races but also within the
black community. In Mississippi, where he sees black
political victories as having had a relatively small
payoff, he becomes convinced that a new black
organization is needed to supplant the NAACP to address
national political issues of special concern to blacks
(education, unemployment) and to monitor cases of police
and official abuse and discrimination. Though not quite
a complete plan, it's a constructive response to Dent's
conclusion that the civil rights movement opened up
doors, but "once inside, well, there was hardly anything
there."—Publishers
Weekly
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Allah, Liberty, and Love
The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom
By Irshad Manji
In Allah, Liberty and Love, Irshad Manji paves a path for Muslims and non-Muslims to transcend the fears that stop so many of us from living with honest-to-God integrity: the fear of offending others in a multicultural world as well as the fear of questioning our own communities. Since publishing her international bestseller, The Trouble with Islam Today, Manji has moved from anger to aspiration. She shows how any of us can reconcile faith with freedom and thus discover the Allah of liberty and love—the universal God that loves us enough to give us choices and the capacity to make them. Among the most visible Muslim reformers of our era, Manji draws on her experience in the trenches to share stories that are deeply poignant, frequently funny and always revealing about these morally confused times. What prevents young Muslims, even in the West, from expressing their need for religious reinterpretation? What scares non-Muslims about openly supporting liberal voices within Islam? |
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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Weep Not, Child
By
Ngugi wa Thiong'o
This is
a powerful, moving story that details the
effects of the infamous Mau Mau war, the
African nationalist revolt against colonial
oppression in Kenya, on the lives of
ordinary men and women, and on one family in
particular. Two brothers, Njoroge and Kamau,
stand on a rubbish heap and look into their
futures. Njoroge is excited; his family has
decided that he will attend school, while
Kamau will train to be a carpenter. Together
they will serve their country—the
teacher and the craftsman. But this is Kenya
and the times are against them. In the
forests, the Mau Mau is waging war against
the white government, and the two brothers
and their family need to decide where their
loyalties lie. For the practical Kamau the
choice is simple, but for Njoroge the
scholar, the dream of progress through
learning is a hard one to give up.—Penguin
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Predator Nation
Corporate Criminals, Political
Corruption, and the Hijacking of America
By
Charles H. Ferguson
If
you’re smart and a hard worker, but your
parents aren’t rich, you’re now better
off being born in Munich, Germany or in
Singapore than in Cleveland, Ohio or New
York. This radical shift did not happen
by accident. Ferguson shows how, since
the Reagan administration in the 1980s,
both major political parties have become
captives of the moneyed elite. It was
the Clinton administration that
dismantled the regulatory controls that
protected the average citizen from
avaricious financiers. It was the Bush
team that destroyed the federal revenue
base with its grotesquely skewed tax
cuts for the rich. And it is the Obama
White House that has allowed financial
criminals to continue to operate
unchecked, even after supposed “reforms”
installed after the collapse of 2008.
Predator Nation
reveals how once-revered figures like
Alan Greenspan and Larry Summers became
mere courtiers to the elite.
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Based on many
newly released court filings, it details the extent of
the crimes—there is no other word—committed in the
frenzied chase for wealth that caused the financial
crisis. And, finally, it lays out a plan of action for
how we might take back our country and the American
dream.—Read
Chapter 1
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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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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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