AUGUST 10, 2015

Photo: Frank Micelotta/Getty

Sunday 9 August 2015

By DeRay McKesson

McKinney, Texas, June 2015. Photograph: Shawn Roller via Tumblr

Mike Brown should be alive today. He should be home from his first year at college, visiting friends and enjoying summer as he prepares to return to campus.

The movement began one year ago as Brown’s body lay in the street of Canfield Drive here in Ferguson, Missouri, for four and a half hours. It began as the people of St Louis came out of their homes to mourn and to question, as the people were greeted by armed and aggressive officers. And the movement was sustained by a spirit of resistance that refused to be silent, that refused to cower, that refused to bow to continued hostility from the state.

We did not know each other’s names last August, but we knew each other’s hearts.

I will always remember that the call to action initiating the movement was organic – that there was no organizing committee, no charismatic leader, no church group or school club that led us to the streets. It is powerful to remember that the movement began as everyday people came out of their homes and refused to be scared into silence by the police. It is powerful, too, to remember the many people who came to stand with us in Ferguson, the many people who were radicalized in the streets of St Louis and then took that deep spirit of resistance to their own cities and towns, leading to sustained unrest across the United States.

In those early days, we were united by #Ferguson on Twitter – it was both our digital rallying cry and our communication hub. Back then, we were on the cusp of learning how to use Twitter as an organizing tool in protest. And once the protests began to spread, we became aware of something compelling and concise, something that provided common language to describe the protests: the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter. 

As marginalized people, we have always faced erasure: either our story is never told, or it is told by everyone but us. 

If not for Twitter and Instagram, Missouri officials would have convinced you, one year ago, that we simply did not exist. Or that we were the aggressors, rather than the victims. That we, and not they, were the violent ones.

But social media was our weapon against erasure. It is how many of us first became aware of the protests and how we learned where to go, or what to do when teargassed, or who to trust. We were able to both counter the narrative being spun by officials while connecting with each other in unprecedented ways. Many of us became friends digitally, first. And then we, the protestors, met in person.

Social media allowed us to become our own storytellers. With it, we seized the power of our truth.

Ferguson, August 2014. Photograph via @deray/Instagram

There is nothing romantic about teargas. Or smoke bombs, or rubber bullets, or sound cannons.

I will never forget the first time I was teargassed, or the night I hid under my steering wheel as the Swat vehicle drove down a residential street. I will never forget that it was illegal – in St Louis, in the fall of 2014 – to stand still.

I remember these moments because they happened. Not because I enjoyed them, or because I want to re-live them. I remember the way the teargas made my face sting – I remember the time that officer shot pepper spray into my left eye as I was leaving a protest – because these things happened. They happened in 2014, during a period in America when many were seduced into believing that the police were infallible or that these things would never happen in America. 

These moments continue to happen to us in 2015.

I am often asked what it is like to be on the “front line”. But I do not use the term “front line” to describe us, the protestors. Because everywhere in America, wherever we are, our blackness puts us in close proximity to police violence. Some of us have chosen a more immediate proximity, as we use our bodies to confront and disrupt corrupt state practices. But every black person is in closer proximity to police violence than we sometimes choose to acknowledge: in many ways, we are all on the “front line” – whether we want to be or not.

We did not discover injustice, nor did we invent resistance last August. Being black in America means that we exist in a legacy and tradition of protest, a legacy and tradition as old as this America. And, in many ways, August is the month of our discontent.

This August, we remember Mike Brown. But we also remember the Watts Rebellion, and the trauma of Katrina – three distinct periods of resistance prompted or exacerbated by police violence.

Resistance, for so many of us, is duty, not choice.

Canfield Road, 2014. Canfield Road, 2015. Photograph: Adrees Latif/Reuters

In a year, the truth about police violence has been exposed. And the truth alone has been so damning that it has radicalized people all across the world. It is now commonplace for people and even the mainstream media to question police narratives.

In the past year, the movement has focused primarily on police violence that can be seen and its impact, centered on broken bodies and death. But the police are violent in ways that cannot always be seen – the violence against the hearts, minds and souls of black folk. We must begin to address the sexual and emotional violence inflicted upon us by the police, too. We must begin to address the assaults on our self-worth and potential, too. 

Naming this violence means one thing: the police and the state must change. It is not our job to shift the skin and identities into which we were born. It is up to systems of law enforcement, and the systems and structures that sustain its presence, to change.

The work in protest for the past year largely focused on exposing and convincing – in peeling back the layers of police and state violence and helping people understand. In that sense, the movement did well. As we move forward, there is an acknowledgment that strategies and tactics will change – that the strategies and tactics we used to expose and convince may not be those used to solve the problem.

We have exposed the terror of police violence. But the terror continues. The police have killed 700 people in 2015 so far. In the next phase of the movement, we will build common language around solutions – around how to end police violence, around how to win. 

As much as this fight is about systems and structures, it is also a fight about hearts and minds. We will work hard to teach people that the safety of communities is not predicated on the presence of police – that safety is a more expansive notion than policing. Safety is strong schools, access to jobs, workforce development and access to healthcare, among many other things. 

The solution-work will likely fall into two separate but critically related areas: removing barriers, and building and rebuilding.

There is much to be done to tear down systems and structures that oppress people, like mandatory minimum sentencing, broken-windows policing and police contracts that provide officers with protections that ensure they will never be held accountable for the crimes they commit.

And just as a path through a mountain is made passable not just by removing the stone but by supporting the mountain from crumbling back in on itself, we know that no barrier will ever truly be removed until a corresponding structure, system or policy has positively taken its place. In the place of mandatory minimums and broken windows must be a sensible approach to policing, particularly drug enforcement and proactive community building strategies. Contracts must be rewritten and police policies adjusted so that police and citizens alike receive the same set of protections and presumption of innocence under the law. 

There is no one solution that will end police violence. Our work in the coming phase will be to help people understand a set of complex solutions, simply.

In this moment, as we reflect on where we are, how we got here and where we are going, I am reminded of the difference between accountability and justice – and of our commitment to both. Accountability is the consent decree between the US justice department and the Ferguson and Cleveland police departments, and the reparations for the victims of the torture of the Chicago police department. Accountability is important, but accountability is not our ultimate goal. Accountability is not justice.

We seek justice – not an abstract justice, but a living, breathing, tangible justice. Justice is a living Mike Brown. Justice is a playing Tamir Rice. Justice is Sandra Bland at her new job. Justice is Rekia Boyd with her family. Justice is Mya Hall with her friends. Justice is no more death. 

We did not start this. We have never started any of it. They kill(ed) us. They creat(ed) systems to harm us. We did not start this. We are fighting to end it.

We are, and have always been, more than our pain. We will win.

>via: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/09/ferguson-civil-rights-movement-deray-mckesson-protest

Special Journal Issue:

“Afro-Asian Feminist and

Queer Formations”

(Abstract Submission Deadline: September 15, 2015)

>via: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/63225

>via: https://cutbank.submittable.com/submit/45798

Sustainable Arts Foundation

>via: http://www.pw.org/writing_contests/writing_awards

P-DASH

“George Stinney”

Music video for P-Dash’s song “George Stinney,” which follows the true story events of the youngest person ever put to death in the United States. This music video, which chronicles the fourteen-year-old’s investigation, trial and execution, was shot primarily with a RED Dragon, and two Blackmagic Production Cameras for supporting coverage, over two days on location in Lawrenceville, GA and Newnan, GA. Edited in Adobe Premiere Pro utilizing multi-cam sequencing. Visual effects done in Adobe After Effects. Color graded in DaVinci Resolve. Mastered in 4K UHD.

SUPPORT REAL RAP
Available on iTunes and Amazon
www.cdbaby.com/pdash2
www.iampdash.com

By Hanna Hurr

>via: http://www.maskmagazine.com/the-dropout-issue/struggle/post-ferguson-mix-antagonisms

photo by Alex Lear

I MET MYSELF

I met myself coming around the corner one day, and I almost didn’t recognize me.

We so seldom see ourselves as we actually are. Even in a mirror we often see what we hope to be or what we fear we are, exaggerating both flaws and beauty. But when we see ourselves in the faces of others, then we really see.

Would you know yourself if you saw yourself the way others see you?

Of course, when we are young—or at least when I was first moving beyond my teen years—it never occurred to me that the past had anything deep to do with me personally. My father was from the country. I was from the city. I didn’t really see how his life was shaping my life. One African proverb says you can’t truly judge the man until the man has reared a child. So when can you truly judge the child?

Somehow, in the way most of us in America have been acculturated, I thought of myself as distinct from my parents. I did not consciously know their ideas about life except by inference in terms of what they encouraged and/or discouraged in me, and therefore I was blissfully unaware that much of my own ideas were shaped and influenced, if not outright determined, by the ideas my parents held.

When my mother was battling Hodgkin’s disease, she would have her three sons take turns driving her across the city to the hospital that was located in the next parish to the west of New Orleans. During these long drives for chemotherapy treatment she would talk to each of us, not about anything in particular, but many years later I realized she was consciously spending her last days conversing with her sons.

I’ll never forget how well she knew us, how after hurricane Betsy hit my mother had written a long letter to her youngest sister, my aunt Narvalee who was by then living out in California, a single mother with one child, my first cousin Frieda. My mother was a college graduate and a third grade school teacher. I knew she could write, but she opened her letter saying if she could write like Paul in the bible or like me, Lil Val. Wow, my mother admires me as a writer.

That was in 1965 three years before I joined the Free Southern Theatre and became a professional writer. By 1973 she was dead. If she saw me now, would she still admire me; would I remind her of the young man she loved; or would I be so strangely changed that she would know who I was but not know the me who came to be over the intervening years between now and when she last saw me back in the early seventies? I wish I could see me the way she would see me if she looked at me today, she who knew me before I knew me.

Have you ever had a long talk with someone who knew you well but had not seen you in over ten years? Say, you’re having a quick drink with Gilbert after seeing him at Walgreen’s; he was purchasing a prescription for diabetes medication and you were getting a refill of blood pressure medicine. Gilbert was your best friend from elementary school with whom you used to share lunch. You and Gilbert had even planned and literally started to run away together just for the romanticized adventure of two adolescents exploring the world away from the dictates of parents.

Or maybe you are hugging Eric and laughing with your arm still around his shoulder and he is playfully punching you in the chest the way y’all used to do while playing sandlot football games on the crisp autumns of weekends decades ago, and Eric would laugh at something you said and retort, “boy, you still talking all that shit.”

Or maybe it was Woodrow you encountered.  He was coming out of Picadilly’s, and you were going in planning to meet your wife for dinner. Woodrow was someone you used to laugh with pulling pranks in high school and now, even though he walks with a cane and has only half a head of hair, Woodrow gains your admiration as he tells you about the business venture he’s started. His enthusiasm is contagious as he describes all the wonderful skills and information he’s learning. His eyes are animated as he leans into you, one hand familiarly resting on your right shoulder as he describes the joys of getting into a whole new area and keeping up with thirty-year-old guys who are not even half his age.

Or you see Sandra in some office hallway, she who could outrun a cheetah back in eighth grade. She is still slim and vivacious. She greets you not only with a girlish giggle and bubbly “hello” but waves a well-manicured hand at you while balancing a cup of steaming coffee in her other hand; she’s married and has a beautiful diamond ring that literally shoots off a flashing rainbow of refracted lights as she waves good-bye. Seeing her brisk walk and the swing of her lithe hips makes you self-conscious about all the weight you’ve gained.

I temporarily quieten some of my concerns about who really knows me by insisting people who have not seen me in years can not really know me. The two questions—who knows me and do I know me the way other people know me—take turns as the focus of my mind.  Then I wonder how much of me today is the old me that friends knew decades ago.

The old folks say it’s easy to change your mind but hard to change your ways. Is the way I am today more or less the way I was way back when, and if so where did that constant part of me come from? Was I born the way I am, or are all of us shaped by our interactions with and responses to our nurturing environment?  Over a life time do we remain essentially the same or is it possible to fundamentally transform ourselves?

The things we think about can surprise us. Where did that come from, we ask ourselves while looking around to see if anybody saw us thinking these crazy ideas.

I remember riding a subway in Manhattan. I hallucinated for a minute and thought I saw my mother and father at a train stop, standing close to each other. My old man handsome, with a dimpled smile and a seriousness dripping from his eyes, his dark head held high; my short mother looking up, her eyes shining. He had one hand lightly on her waist, and she was leaning into him, two hands caressing his chest. I had never seen my mother touching my father like that, never thought of them as head-over-heels infatuated with each other. But there they were.

Suddenly I started wondering about what momma and daddy were thinking and feeling, how it was to be young and black in the late forties. How did fighting in two wars affect him: once in the pacific and later in Korea?  Before she died, my mother’s younger sister told me why we used to alternate going by the Robinson’s on Mardi Gras one year and the Robinson’s coming by us the next. Frank Robinson and my father were best friends, and daddy asked Mr. Robinson to look out for mama while daddy was in the war. I wonder now how it was to be a pregnant woman with two small children and her man returning to war after surviving World War II.

I can’t believe how dumb I was to ignore them. How could I be so uninterested in the roots of myself. Even though in my early manhood years I served in Korea on a missile base located on a remote mountaintop, I never really discussed Korea with my father. Like most youth, I was too self absorbed to want to learn anything about my origins or any of me that wasn’t actually embodied in my physical person.

When I was still in elementary school I gave a Frederick Douglass speech and won a prize in a church contest, and later in junior high school, playing Crispus Attucks, I jumped out of a closet—well, actually from behind a curtain—hoisting a sword fashioned from a coat hangar, proclaiming “I’m a proud black man who is willing to fight and die for my freedom.”

I liked that kind of black history but ignored my father’s fight to be hired as a laboratory technician at the Veterans Administration Hospital. He wrote letters all the way to Washington. DC, kept arguing his rights and finally a directive came down to hire him. They did, but they wouldn’t promote him even though he was the best lab tech they had, so good that he was the one training the college interns, some of whom were hired after his training and even promoted because they had a degree while he languished in lower grade positions because he had no sheepskin. I never heard him complain about mistreatment—was I deaf or did he just silently suffer, nobly carrying on despite slights heaped on him?

Now that I’m old as history, now that my teenage years are on page five hundred-and-something in the American history book, the textbook someone had thrown on the floor, in the corner of our classroom; now that what I went through does not seem relevant to what teenagers today are going through; now I want to know my father’s history, I want to embrace my mother’s hardships.

There they were again and again, at each train stop. That must have been me my mother was carrying in two arms, gently bouncing up and down. I had on a funny, green knit hat swallowing my big head. I am the elder of their three sons.  Should I get off and at least walk close to them, hear what they are saying to each other?  Look, my mother is talking to me.  What was she saying? Before I can muster the courage to stand up and go eavesdrop on my parents, the train pulls off. I am strangely more anxious about how I bungled the chance to get to know my parents when they were standing at the last stop than I am curious about what I will see at the next stop.

But the next stop is my stop. I get up and wait at the door as the train jerks to a stop. The door abruptly opens.  People pour in and out of the train simultaneously. As I push through the throng, I look up and down the platform. They are not there. My parents are gone, or more likely, never were here. I feel alone, making my way in the world.

I promise I will never forget my parents as young lovers. I was so fortunate that they were my fate—Inola and Big Val. My mother, a school teacher who never forced me to do homework and who did not even try to dissuade me from taking an F in high school one trimester because I didn’t want to do an assignment a teacher forced on me. My father forcing us to grow food in the city and pick up all the trash on our block to keep it clean but who never once tried to discourage us from picking up the gun in the sixties—that was my brother on the cover of Time magazine brandishing a shotgun during the take over at Cornell University. Big Val and Inola always encouraged us to fight, and they never made us conform to anything.

It is obvious to me now, but I have not always recognized this truth: I can not fully know myself if I don’t intimately know my past, intimately know the forces that shaped and influenced me, the people who gave birth to me, and especially the culture and era within which I lived. My head was spinning as my mental fingers tapped the codes of past experiences into the calculator of my consciousness. I was literally engrossed in my own world.

So there I was coming around the corner thinking all these thoughts, totally unaware that I was about to really peep who I was; suddenly I see someone I grew up with. That person looks old as they hug me, greet me, and playfully say, heyyyy man, long time no see. They enfold me in a long, warm embrace, holding the me they remember. I am struggling to remember their name.

In that moment I see both their obvious joy and also see how much they have changed, how they have aged. I wonder what they are doing, what is their life like, what part of the city they live in, what kind of work they do, all the personal profile sort of information. That’s when I had this weird desire; I wanted to be able to fully embrace myself and know myself the way this old friend thinks they know me, and I was really curious to know myself from the perspective that my parents knew me.

I wanted to know all of me, and that’s the moment when I had a news flash: now that your life is almost over, who are you really?

Am I only who I think I am or am I really the complex summation of all that I have also been in relation to others and in response to the world within which I have lived.

As I walked to my car I had a funny thought: my mind is not me. My mind may in fact be the biggest impediment to me getting to know me. Maybe my mind is the least reliable map of who I have been, a distorting lens when it comes to recognizing the self.

All personal intentions aside, all individual desires sublimated, all intellectual self-reflections and second guesses ignored, is it possible for any of us to truly know ourselves without the help and input of others who know us? Is it possible to move beyond letting our minds judge who we are? Would it be too overwhelming to consider letting the world we live in judge who we are? Can we shed the shackles of our own mind and be both free and fortunate to see ourselves the way others see us? And if that portrait was actually presented to us, would we recognize ourselves? 

—kalamu ya salaam

August 6, 2015

BLACK SAILORS

WERE ESSENTIAL TO

THE DEVELOPMENT

OF THE EARLY U.S.

As in Africa, the development of the U.S. as a world power has been largely accomplished by the use of rivers and seas for commerce. Today 95% of America’s foreign trade flows through our port systems. Nearly every black family in America has some family member who has worked or traveled by sea. I remember the tale of my great-uncle Nick’s sea chest. He was a merchant seaman in the 1940s and left his chest at the family home. My dad, a curious 11-year-old, opened his chest and found his first pack of cigarettes. It is important to recognize the contributions of black sailors in the history and development of the U.S.

By Nick Douglas, AFROPUNK Contributor

Civil War Sailor

Sea and river ports like Boston, New York, Baltimore, Charleston, and New Orleans were essential to the development of commerce in the U.S. They were home to large, skilled African-American populations that repaired, outfitted and manned vessels, and African-American dockworkers that unloaded and loaded cargo.

Black sailors brought their knowledge, traditions and expertise to the New World with the first explorers and conquistadores. An African, Pedro Niño, piloted Columbus’ ship the Santa Maria in 1492.  

African sailors had been exploring the African coast by water for millennia before the 1st whites began to explore the continent in earnest in the early 1400s.

Frederick Douglass as a black sailor

Early Egyptians were famous for their elaborate barges which transported people, goods and services along the Nile. Cleopatra was known to spend fortunes on the barges she used to demonstrate her power while she sailed the Nile inspecting her empire. Her vessels and fleets carried her across the Mediterranean to Rome before the birth of Christ.  

Africa’s rivers and coastline were essential to the development of the complicated and advanced economies and societies that developed there. In the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries white slave traders exploited the knowledge and navigation skills of Africans along ancient trade routes like the Gambia River to access population centers in Central Africa for capture and sale into slavery in the Americas.

Marcus Garvey

African sailors adapted their skills to navigate the many rivers in the U.S. and showed their expertise landing vessels on the coast of the Americas. African-American boatmen and sailors were known and trusted for their seamanship and boating expertise from the times of earliest white settlements in the U.S.

By the late 1700s/early 1800s 20% of all U.S. sailors were Africans or African-Americans. Many of the sailors were slaves loaned out to ships by their masters. Often slaves negotiated with their masters to ship out during winter months.

Some black sailors were free men like Paul Cuffe, who captained and owned several vessels in the late 1700s. James Forten made a fortune making sails in the early 1800s. Denmark Vesey was a sailor for many years before he started a successful carpentry business; in 1822 he was hung for allegedly conspiring to incite a slave uprising in Charleston, South Carolina. In the 1820s and 1830s my ancestor Joseph Decoudreau served as a mechanic on ships that traveled the trade route between the Caribbean, Mexico and New Orleans.

Matthew Henson

Other black sailors were escaped slaves who sought refuge from slavery by going to sea. By the 1830s the sight of black sailors was common in most American seaports. Frederick Douglass was a slave and a skilled caulker in a Baltimore shipyard in the 1830s. He escaped to freedom using a black “Sailor’s Protection Papers” stating he was a free black sailor and disguising himself in the dress of a sailor to board a train to Philadelphia.

More than a few enslaved sailors used ports in Haiti to jump ship to freedom after Haitian independence in 1804. Haitian authorities were more than happy to grant free status to slaves that requested help. After getting papers in Haiti that showed them to be free they simply boarded another ship bound for their home port.

Black sailors have been part of every major U.S. military conflict, beginning with the Revolutionary War. An estimated 10,000 black sailors fought for the British, who not only impressed (enlisted by force) black sailors but promised freedom to black sailors who served against the Americans.

Civil War Sailor

Ships provided black sailors numerous opportunities that they were not able to take advantage of on land. Because of sailing’s rigid hierarchy at sea, black sailors enjoyed the status of their rank on board ship. This meant that black ship pilots, captains and mates could command white sailors of lower ranks. They enjoyed the same pay as whites for their rank and could negotiate their pay before signing on vessels. This gave black sailors a rare opportunity to assert their individual rights in a way they were not allowed to on land.

Black sailors became citizens of the world and important people in their communities and the communities they visited. They became an important (and sometimes the singular) communication source between black communities. Many black sailors were multi-lingual and interacted with societies throughout the Americas, Europe and Africa.

Black sailors from the Northeast ports of Rhode Island and Boston provided verbal descriptions of what was happening in the North to isolated Southern black communities. Northern Black sailors carried news that was suppressed via newspapers, magazines and books that were prohibited in the South. David Walker sewed his powerful anti-slavery pamphlet the Appealinto seamen’s coats in his hometown of Boston. Northern black and white sailors distributed the Appeal in port cities like Charleston and New Orleans in the South.

Black sailors were such effective communicators of anti-slavery news and resistance that Southern slave owners often feared them more than free people of color. This was especially true after the revolution started in Haiti. In 1822 South Carolina passed the “Negro Seaman Act” which allowed sheriffs to arrest black sailors for the duration of their ship’s stay in port. In 1830 North Carolina also passed a law that prohibited any interaction between sailors and residents while the sailors were in port. In 1834 New Orleans passed a similar law.

Black sailors helped their home communities and families by carrying on entrepreneurial trade in the ports and cities they visited. They used money that they earned, along with the goods that they carried and were able to buy and sell, to support their families, help form black benevolent societies, and help their communities and churches.  

While black sailors enjoyed many benefits which other black people on land did not, the life of a black sailor was exceptionally hard. Difficult working conditions, the inherent dangers of the sea, long absences from home and racial prejudice were still part of their day-to-day existence.   

After Reconstruction, whites tried to re-create a near slave society by tying black people back to the land. The number of black sailors dropped, due in part to increased competition with white sailors, and stricter racial policies for hiring sailors. The ingenuity and tenacity of some black sailors circumvented these policies. Two well-known examples are African-American sailor Matthew Henson who accompanied Commodore Perry to the North Pole, and Marcus Garvey who founded the Black Star Steamship Line.  

In no place was the history of the black sailor more important and so little known than in U.S. literature. The first six autobiographies by African-Americans published in the U.S. were written by black sailors. Yet little of this unique literature is shared or taught in American schools.

We can honor all black sailors’ contributions to the American experience by searching out their accounts and reading and sharing them.  Below is a small list of books by or about black sailors.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavuas Vassa, The African written by Himself . This story documents his life from being taken from Africa as a young boy and enslaved as a sailor, to his freedom in the U.K. This moving first-hand account of his life at sea and on land, connect life in African, the Middle Passage, and life in the U.K. in a completely unique way, showing the rich character of black people on both continents.

The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher. The story of John Jea stolen from Africa as a child and sold to a Dutch couple in New York. He earns his freedom and visits South America, England and Amsterdam as a free sailor and a preacher. His autobiography includes poetry which makes him one of the first African-American poets ever published.  

Narrative of the Uncommon Suffering and Surprise Deliverance of Briton Hammon, A Negro.  A narrative of Briton Hammon’s capture by Indians, imprisonment in Cuba, and eventual return to New England after  13 years of sailing adventures and misadventures.

Black Jacks: African-American Sailors in the Age of Sail by W. Jeffrey Bolster, One of the most complete histories of African-American sailors during the early development of the U.S.

++++++++++++
* Nick Douglas is the author of Finding Octave: The Untold Story of Two Creole Families and Slavery in Louisiana. He has a blog www.findingoctave.com/contact.html for readers who may want to contact him.

>via: http://www.afropunk.com/profiles/blogs/op-ed-black-sailors-were-essential-to-the-development-of-the

Sat, Aug 8th, 2015

How American

journalists covered

the first use of

the atomic bomb

Christopher B Daly (TC) : 

 

Seventy years ago this week, the US military revealed the greatest (and best-kept) secret of the Allied effort to win World War II. The use of the atomic bomb proved to the world that it was indeed possible to make one. But how had it been possible to keep the secret? And how did US journalists break the news?

From New York to Oak Ridge

In April of 1945, General Leslie Groves of the US Army approached the managing editor of The New York Times. Based on the research for my history of journalism, Covering America, my belief is that this was a critical step in finally informing the public. The general wanted to borrow the Times’ science writer, William Laurence, for the remainder of the war.

Without many more preliminaries, Laurence headed off to his new assignment in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. There, Groves pulled back the shroud protecting the nation’s biggest wartime gamble and introduced Laurence to the Manhattan Project.

The Army wanted a civilian on board who could help with drafting press releases, writing news stories, and explaining the vast and complex undertaking to the general public.

Laurence was a good choice. A native of Lithuania, Laurence had immigrated to the United States as a teenager and attended Harvard and Boston University. At the Times, he had pioneered covering science for a general newspaper and had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1936.

Once attached to the Manhattan Project, Laurence had virtual carte blanche to travel to the various bomb-making sites around the country, interviewing the top scientists and engineers, and he soon knew more about the project than all but a handful of the thousands of people working on it.

In July, Laurence went to a site near Alamagordo in the New Mexico desert to witness the first test explosion of an a-bomb, code-named Trinity.”

It was Laurence who wrote the (false) press release that the Army used to concoct a cover story. The few civilians in the surrounding areas who saw the great flash on July 15 were assured that there was nothing to worry about, just an old ammo dump that had blown up. In fact, the Army was exposing everyone in the surrounding states to their first dose of airborne radiation.

A New York Times exclusive

In gratitude for Laurence’s services, the Army tipped the top management of the Times on August 2 about the impending use of the bomb against Japan, so the paper could prepare.

On August 6, 1945, the world first learned about the atomic bomb when the United States dropped it on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, the Army Air Corps struck again, this time at Nagasaki. On board one of the aircraft on August 9 was Laurence.

As the official journalistic witness to the Manhattan Project, he was now the first American civilian to observe the use of the terrible new weapon in war. His detailed, poetic narrative (which appeared in the Times a month later) began simply: “We are on our way to bomb the mainland of Japan.”

As the hours ticked by en route to the target, Laurence mused in print about the morality of setting out to wipe an entire city off the map.

He asked himself if he felt any pity for the “poor devils” who would be obliterated by the bomb. His answer: “Not when one thinks of Pearl Harbor and of the Death March on Bataan.” In other words, he figured (as did many Americans) that the “Japs” had it coming.

Then, over Nagasaki, Laurence and the crew beheld the existential chaos unleashed by splitting the atom:

Awe-struck, we watched it shoot upward like a meteor coming from the earth instead of from outer space, becoming ever more alive as it climbed skyward through the white clouds. It was no longer smoke, or dust, or even a cloud of fire. It was a living thing, a new species of being, born right before our incredulous eyes.

At one stage of its evolution, covering millions of years in terms of seconds, the entity assumed the form of a giant square totem pole, with its base about three miles long, tapering off to about a mile at the top. Its bottom was brown, its center was amber, its top white. But it was a living totem pole, carved with many grotesque masks grimacing at the earth…

It kept struggling in an elemental fury, like a creature in the act of breaking the bonds that held it down. In a few seconds it had freed itself from its gigantic stem and floated upward with tremendous speed, its momentum carrying into the stratosphere to a height of about 60,000 feet…

As the mushroom floated off into the blue it changed its shape into a flowerlike form, its giant petal curving downward, creamy white outside, rose-colored inside. It still retained that shape when we last gazed at it from a distance of about 200 miles.

Laurence’s critics

Laurence struck a note of awe at the dawn of the atomic age. In the coming weeks, he elaborated on the theme in a series of Pulitzer Prize-winning articles in the Times, explaining for a lay audience the basic principles of atomic energy.

In recent years, Laurence has been criticized by some journalists who believe that he was compromised as a reporter because of his attachment to the military.

He was also faulted for downplaying the effects of radiation, and some have called for the Times to return the 1946 Pulitzer Prize awarded to Laurence.

In addition, it should be noted that, for all the poetic power of his Nagasaki piece, there were limits to Laurence’s perspective; he was seeing the experience from the point of view of the attackers.

Through no fault of his own, he was peering outward and downward at an object, not observing the individual human agonies unfolding on the ground.

There were, of course, no Allied journalists on the ground in Japan at the time of the bombing, although an advance unit streamed into the country as soon as peace was declared and the occupation began.

Reporting from the ground

Among the first in was Homer Bigart of the New York Herald Tribune, who went with a group of journalists to Hiroshima in early September 1945.

His reporting attempted to reckon the loss of lives – which he put, fairly accurately, at 53,000 dead and 30,000 missing and presumed dead – and then went on to describe the ruins. Starting about three miles from the center of the blast, Bigart reported seeing signs of destruction, typical of what he had seen in bombed cities in Europe:

But across the river there was only flat, appalling desolation, the starkness accentuated by bare, blackened tree trunks and the occasional shell of a reinforced concrete building.

He reported that residents were still dying, at the rate of about 100 a day, mostly from burns and infection, and he hinted at some of the problems eventually recognized as radiation sickness.

Hiroshima, 1945. The United States is the only nation who ever has used nuclear weapons against another people in anger.

The following year, the reporter and author John Hersey visited Hiroshima for the New Yorker magazine. He stayed longer than Bigart had been allowed to, and he created one of the masterpieces of war correspondence.

Through meticulous reporting, Hersey followed the experiences of six individuals who had been in Hiroshima on the morning the bomb exploded. Moment by moment, scene by scene, he recreated the thoughts and actions of each of those survivors, from the minutes before the blast through the first few days and weeks that followed. His reporting was finished in August 1946.

When his editor at the New Yorker, Harold Ross, got a look at the material, he decided to dispense with all the rest of the contents scheduled to run and devoted the August 31 issue to Hersey’s account.

Hiroshima – The unfathomable scale of human suffering and dehumanization.

In the mythology surrounding this piece, it is often said that Ross cleared the entire magazine for Hersey’s story. In fact, Ross decided to rip out all the editorial matter, but not the ads or entertainment listings.

Thus, Hersey’s somber masterpiece appears disconcertingly alongside ads for “perma-lift” bras and the “latest hilarity” from S J Perelman, as well as full-page spreads offering civilian versions of such familiar items as the Willys Jeep.

Hersey’s story is a key document of 20th-century history as well as a touchstone for the human imagination in the nuclear age.

His hyperfactual tale of immense suffering has become part of the worldview of most people on the planet. He said almost nothing in his own voice – no pontificating, no summarizing.

Instead, he brought particular people to life by setting them in action and thereby showing the reader what had happened.

The account of the bombing was quickly published as a book, titled simply Hiroshima, which became a bestseller and has remained in print ever since.

Many consider it the greatest work of journalism by an American.

Christopher B Daly, The Conversation    –    Christopher B Daly is Professor of Journalism at Boston University.

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