Thoughts from "African American Activism," part 3

Part Three!  Woo!

A few weeks ago, Rhodes graduate and current Vanderbilt PhD candidate Anthony Siracusa came to speak the rhetoric of violence within the framework of the history of Memphis.  Siracusa delivered a fascinating and thought provoking talk, covering just about everything during his 40+ minute overview.  One of the things from the evening that really stuck out to me was the way in which Anthony grounded his talk in a discussion of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade.  It seems that the best way to frame any exploration into the violent aspects of hegemonic whiteness, especially in the context of white policing of black bodies and criminalization, is with a dive into the history of the slave trade in North America.  It’s a linear presentation structure that works very well…back in March, author Timothy Tyson used a very similar approach to begin his talk on his recent book the blood of Emmett Till, and it was effective in that context as well.

                Another fascinating element of Siracusa’s talk was his use of the phrase “Politics of Being.”  This phrase wasn’t really fleshed out during the course of the night (I’m assuming I’ll just have to read one of Anthony’s books, which I’m sure are imminent), but I was fascinated with the way Siracusa linked the phrase to both the non-violent tactics of the civil rights era and also with the broad range of ideas that we have discussed in class that deal with the concept of prioritizing human space as not just survival but also activism.  This being said, I’m sure the “Politics of Being” has much more well defined parameters then the space I’ve carved out for it will allow, but nevertheless his use of the phrase certainly sparked my interest.  I’m excited to see where and how I encounter Siracusa’s work in the future.

Thoughts from "African American Activism," part 2

Part Two, featuring Chance, Acid Rapper, Soccer-Hackey-Sacker

Back in June of 2016, Chance the Rapper took part in a discussion at the University of Chicago entitled “the Art of Activism.”  The hour-long talk ranged across a number of topics including family, Chance’s relationship with the music industry, and religion, but ultimately, it centered around the intersection between art and activism, specifically, the relationship that rap and hip-hop artists maintain with activist traditions.  I’ve pulled a couple of clips from the talk that I felt were particularly relevant to our class discussions in the last few weeks.  The first clip centers around a concept that Chance references over and over during his talk, that of the “free artist,” and in the second, Chance breaks down the tension that exists between different schools of activist thought, a concept he sums up as the choice between “the mouth and the fist.”

"Free Artist" Clip

Use of the phrase “free artist,” is interesting for two reasons.  First, Chance is careful to place himself in the long lineage of black musicians who have fought to maintain control of their artist license, a decades-long fight for agency that ties in closely with the activist traditions we are looking at.  Secondly, I immediately related Chance’s term “free artist” to the idea raised in class last Thursday, “What does freedom mean?”  For Chance and other musicians who follow a similar vein of thought, freedom means control of one’s artistic process and product.  For others artists, freedom means the opportunity to chase a record deal, regardless of the circumstances.  I’m fascinated how this dynamic parallels the dynamic found between the different schools of thought within black activism around the turn of the century (Integration vs. Washington’s economic focus, etc.)

The Mouth and the Fist

Chance’s statement, that “there’s a lot of thought that goes into deciding…whether to be a mouth or a fist,” is really a great summation of the tension within 19^th century black activism between physical and intellectual resistance.  I noticed this tension most clearly while reading David Walker and the Nat Turner confession a few weeks back.  When I watched Chance’s talk, I immediately drew parallels between David Walker as “the mouth” and Nat Turner as “the fist.”  I can acknowledge that this is somewhat of a limiting comparison, but I’m struck by how relevant Chance’s phrase felt in relation to the tensions that we have explored in class discussions.

I’d encourage you to watch the whole clip if you’ve got some free time!

Thoughts from "African American Activism," part 1

This is a write-up I did last spring for one of my classes.  I think it's both interesting and of decent quality, so I thought I'd throw it out there.  It's about bikes n' stuff! Check it out!

I recently came across a 2013 interview on blackenterprise.com with Mikel Madison, the Atlanta-based owner of Fixie Bicycle Gallery.  Madison was born and raised on the west coast and moved to Georgia looking for freelance design work.  He noticed how many bicyclists lived and worked in the Edgewood neighborhood of Atlanta, and, decided to open a bicycle repair shop out of his loft as a sort of “side hustle”.  Using skills learned from his father, an electrician, Madison gradually widened the scope of his small business, expanding to a brick and mortar location in 2010.  He considers himself a “bike enthusiast” who caters to Atlanta’s growing “hip” population, a market that is growing as more and more young people in urban centers are beginning to view bicycle transportation as a viable option (ahem, Memphis, ahem).

                The interview focuses largely on how Madison navigates the mostly-white world of custom made bikes as a black business owner and bicycle enthusiast.  When reading the article, I expected both individual and systemic racism to be stated obstacles in Mikel’s story, and they were: he briefly mentioned racist encounters he has faced as a customer in other Atlanta bike shops, and also touched on what I’d call “white pricing” within the bike customization industry (essentially, pricing to the customer’s means and not to actual costs).  An element of racism that I wasn’t expecting to encounter in Mikel’s story, however, was the peculiar situation of wholesale bike-equipment distributers who were uneasy about partnering with an up-and-coming black entrepreneur until he had obtained a permanent storefront.  Some of this reluctance could have been tied to market dynamics, but one has to acknowledge that being shut out by wholesale distributers for that reason alone (and come on, how many small-industry, customization start-ups begin expansion having already secured a storefront??) probably has at least partially biased/racist roots.

                Another interesting point that comes up during the course of Mikel’s interview involves the complicated realities of gentrification.  When asked why he had chosen to open a storefront space on Edgewood Avenue, Mikel points out that the building’s two story, loft-above-store-below layout meant that he would only have to pay one rent instead of two.  He also describes how he set up shop in the area “before this area underwent it’s makeover.  There weren’t any cool restaurants or hangouts here…”  Later in the same line of thought, though, he makes clear that he identifies with the longstanding tradition of the black business owner who resists gentrification: “I’ve been trying to stay on this block because I think it’s important for something like this to be in this neighborhood. I think it is important for black business to be in this neighborhood, especially with Sweet Auburn being gentrified, I want to keep my little foothold in the community.”  These two quotes illustrate Fixie Bicycle Gallery’s duality; on the one hand, in 2010, FBG was a sleek, new, hip concept in the vanguard of Edgewood’s gentrification, while in 2013, it had become a stalwart black business that pays lip service (at the very minimum) to anti-gentrification rhetoric within Atlanta’s black business community.  Surviving the thin margins that define custom-build, hipster bike shops remains difficult enough without the aforementioned biases and racism that have shaped Fixie Bicycle’s development.  Nevertheless, Mikel Madison’s Fixie Bicycle Gallery keeps on rolling.

Chamber of Reflection

Have you ever had to break yourself down to the barest components, examine them one by one, and then put yourself back together from the ground up?

I have.  I believe firmly that all people go through some version of this process at one point or another during one's course of life.  For some, the process might be as simple as looking in the mirror and taking a moment to reaffirm one's commitment to core values or beliefs.  For others though, the process may look like a breakdown, or an odyssey, or an anguished night spent tossing and turning, mind racing and limbs trembling at the possibilities that seem stunningly vivid in the small hours of the morning.

For me, the process took several anguished nights.  I won't go into detail about what led to my dismantling, but long story short: I made an awful mistake, changed someone's life forever, and hurt many people close to me in the process.  The first question I made myself answer was a simple binary.

"Yes or No?  Am I a monster?"

While this question may seem overblown or over dramatic, I realized that I earnestly needed to be honest with myself.  If the answer was yes, I am a monster, then all of my issues were solved with horrible finality.  If I was to my core a monstrous person, then there was no reason for me to even attempt to dig myself out of the pit.  Monsters are the antithesis of the dream of humanity; they occupy (like Vico's Giants) the perpetual now, and are not governed by any fear of regression or dream of improvement.  They merely exist, intent only upon satisfying selfish needs with reckless abandon, without giving a second thought to the damage they inflict to those around them.  If I was merely a monster, masquerading as a man who had feelings, and dreams, and fears, and a sense of the continuity of life, then it was better for me to stop denying my true form and merely live, unhappily but unfettered, as one who has no place in time.  This, obviously, was the way out.

I answered No, and to this day I am glad that I forced myself to have that internal conversation.  Once I had overcome this question, the rest of the process seemed to fall into place, and I was able to look at my life from the perspective of a one who wants desperately to improve, rather than one crippled by self doubt and given over to a steady decline into vice, which was a state of affairs that seemed plausible (as ridiculous as it seems for a twenty year old college student to consider, I certainly thought about the possibilities).  Looking at matters of the heart, of one's core personality, within a stringent "right or wrong" parameter is dangerous; it presupposes that life will always present us with clean, black-and-white questions that we answer with formulas or facts, rather than with feelings or urges or impatience.  Life choices are (and will remain) messy, and that is an absolute fact as far as I'm concerned.  Narrowing situations down to simple binaries, therefore, is a particularly fallible way of making decisions, I think.  Under certain situations though, situations similar to the one I described above, I think it works as well as anything else.  

Honestly?  I'm not really sure why I wrote this.  Sometimes it's just good to take a second, look back, and reflect on the twisted roads that lead us to the places we need to be, for better or for worse.

Did Custer Love Libby?

Yes, but it's complicated.

George Armstrong Custer was, by all accounts, deeply in love with Elizabeth (Libby) Bacon Custer.  The massive volume of letters they shared are filled with proclamations of devotion and desire, and memories of golden afternoons spent together.  It's important to understand, however, the distinct possibility that "love" for this famous couple had a very different meaning than the modern sense(s) of the word.  To illustrate, I'll tell you a story.

The year is 1867.  George Armstrong Custer is in the field with a cumbersome detachment of cavalry, infantry, and artillery.  Elizabeth is at "home," stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, the headquarters of the US 7th Cavalry (her husband's command).  Custer's orders are simultaneously simple and maddeningly vague:  protect frontier settlements and civil installations in the area of modern day Kansas by catching (and if necessary, attacking) hostile Cheyenne raiders.  Trying to catch lightning fast, highly adaptive raiders (these war parties of the Great Plains were known as "the finest light cavalry in the world") with unmotivated US army troops was proving to be an impossible task.  Custer and his men are exhausted and frustrated; George, aside from the trials of his current assignment, is preoccupied with thoughts of his wife.  Actually that's too nice of a way to say it: Custer is increasingly obsessed with thoughts of Libby, and his, um, desires are interfering with his ability to command.  After another raid occurs, and yet again Custer's men fail to apprehend the raiders, Custer reached a tipping point.  He dashed off a letter to Elizabeth, instructing her to rendezvous with him at a nearby fort.  

Custer makes a shocking addition to his request.  He states that if the possibility of Elizabeth being captured by Cheyenne warriors arose while she was traveling across the plains, it was the duty of the soldiers traveling with her to kill her, in order to keep her out of enemy hands.  Now, it is true that life for captives on the plains was not an easy one; hard labor was a given in such a situation, and the threat of sexual assault was very real.  Once a captive was taken as part of the spoils of a successful raid, though, the captive was usually spared from death, which leads me to question Custer's motive.  Stephen Ambrose, author of Crazy Horse and Custer, speculates that Custer probably valued Elizabeth's purity above all else, and I agree with this sentiment.  What is even more shocking for me though is the fact that when Elizabeth learned of the order, she agreed with her husband's opinion on the issue.  Surely Elizabeth Custer, an intelligent, powerful, and confident woman, didn't value her own objectified purity (and thus her "usefulness" to her husband) above her own life?

The rendezvous never occurred, and Custer was later subject to a court martial when, in a similar fit of impulsiveness, he went AWOL in order to be with his wife.  Without more documentation on the episode, though, we are left only with speculation.  Was it the white man's fear of "savages" roaming the plains that led Custer to take such drastic action?  Or was Custer more in love with Elizabeth's purity then he was with Elizabeth as an individual?  Was this unspoken attitude a norm within the multitude of hardships on the frontier, or was Custer unique in an obsessive, jealous desire to keep Elizabeth for himself in every way, including in death?  More than likely, we will never know these answers conclusively.  What we can know is that the romance that George and Libby Custer shared had many layers, and that unsettling truths about what Custer thought of his wife may lie hidden beneath.

The Most Sad Question

The most sad question which I get from visitors to the Custer Battlefield Museum is a simple one:

 "What were all the Indians doing together?  Why were all the tribes in the same place?"

This question is interesting to me, and strikes me as the root problem that people encounter while attempting to understand the Battle of the Little Big Horn.  The question has many answers, so let us begin with surface level explanations.  Official accounts from Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho traditions state that the Native Americans travelled to the banks of the Little Big Horn and set up camp after hearing of a large herd of antelope nearby.  A "larger" answer to the question: the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho had moved into the Powder River Country (and regions further north) in order to take advantage of treaty provisions, which gave them access to the vaguely-organized Unceded Territories in the Montana and Dakota territories as hunting grounds.  As buffalo on the plains grew scarce, these remaining independent tribes often found themselves hunting and sharing territory in unprecedented ways.  As is always the case when speaking about cultural groups, there is no absolute "rule" for how these interactions played out; in the case of the Little Big Horn encampment, the individual tribes were able to function in shared camps due to the strength of age old alliances, resource necessity, and the powerful presence of Sitting Bull, who's medicine at the time of the gathering was seen to be some of the most stable and impressive in Sioux history.

Now lets zoom out.  We have a surface level, academic answer, that satisfies the factual requirements and which flesh out the actions of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho peoples in the days leading up to Custer's defeat.  The real answer to the question, in my mind, is also simple, albeit tragic and, in some sense, numbing:

The Native Americans encamped on the banks of the Little Big Horn river, in June of 1876, were merely living.  

They had no motive.  They were not organizing as a form of formal protest, or gathering in order to make a statement or a stand against the encroachment of settlers, nor were they gathering as a basis for a military expedition (in any organized, society-wide sense).  Each of these presuppositions which people bring to our museum are wrong, and in bringing these incorrect assumptions into a study of the Battle of the Little Big Horn, people miss what is, in my mind, a crucial aspect of the battle.  

George Armstrong Custer, the American icon who made a name for himself by riding at the fore of brash, bloodthirsty cavalry charges, deliberately attacked a civilian gathering as a fully-empowered agent of the United States government, and, as was his custom, proceeded with every intention of cutting warriors off from their families, taking hostages, and killing nearly indiscriminately in order to garner a sufficient margin of victory.

George Armstrong Custer had used this take-no-prisoners approach to Indian warfare before.  At the Battle of the Washita, 1868, Custer and the 7th Cavalry surrounded, surprised, and slaughtered a group of Cheyenne led by Black Kettle, a respected advocate for peace within the Cheyenne tribe.  The Cheyenne group believed that they were living under the protection of a nearby US Fort.  Casualty estimates for the "battle" vary, but a general consensus puts the number of non-combatant dead (women, children, and the elderly) between one-third and one-half of the entire casualty count.  Custer proceeded to burn the camp and all the possessions left within, slaughter a herd of around 800 Indian ponies, and then withdraw his troops (and the remainder of the camp, now prisoners) in order to report back an inflated Indian body count.  The military establishment of the day viewed this methodology of surprise attacks against stationary camps as extremely effective, even commendable; Custer was widely celebrated as an accomplished Indian fighter following this slaughter, a bloody lesson about the value of Indian life in the eyes of US Army leaders.

Now, on to the battle itself.  Prior to the Battle of Little Big Horn, Custer divided his command into three detachments.  He ordered Major Reno into the valley below with companies A,G, and M, with instructions to launch a direct attack on the unsuspecting encampment.  One can only imagine the horror that took place in those moments: Reno's troops dismount, quickly form a skirmish line, and prepare to fire a volley into the surging, panicking mass of humanity, which was engaged just moments before in the peaceful pursuits of a lazy summer afternoon.  Reno's troops fire, again and again; Springfield bullets smash into teepees, ponies, possessions, women, children.  According to validated testimony, two wives and three daughters of the famed warrior Gall were killed in Reno's initial assault, his entire family, and he was by no means the only one to suffer such needless tragedy in those opening minutes.  The callused command to fire on such a defenseless position speaks volumes about Custer's priorities in the battle; the rage and thirst for revenge that must have seized the hearts and minds of the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho warriors after this attack is, truly, unfathomable.

Eyewitness testimony states that later in the battle Custer, after dividing his third of the command again along Battle Ridge, attempted to ford the Little Big Horn River and take two companies directly into Sitting Bull's encampment.  Scholars of the battle agree that Custer was most likely attempting to get in between warriors outside the camp and the noncombatants still within, which included women, children, and the elderly.  If this hypothesis is correct (all evidence suggests that it is), than it's more than reasonable to conclude that Custer was planning to use the captured noncombatants as a deterrent against further attacks from the warriors.  Had Custer succeeded in his plan, it's almost certain that noncombatant casualties would have risen, as the 7th Cavalry had little to no regard for indigenous life in the heat of battle (as evidenced by the previous instances).

These facts help underscore the realities of both Custer as a commander and of the Indian Wars in general.  Total war was encouraged, celebrated as the only method by which the warriors of the northern plains could be subdued; Sioux, Arapaho, and Cheyenne noncombatants (along with those of countless other tribes) often suffered horribly in the US Army's pursuit of Indian removal, and the Army's value of plains Indian life was despicably low.  It's a sordid reality, friends, and it must be understood in order to understand the true magnitude of the Battle of the Little Big Horn.

June 22th, 2016

I'm starting this blog because it's 1:30 in the afternoon.  I work at 3.  If I nap, and then have to get up and go to work, I know for a FACT that I'll be cranky.  That's a bitch, isn't it?  All I really want to do right now is sleep, and instead I'm vertical, putting thoughts to paper and generally putting a lot more effort into my afternoon than was strictly necessary.  But that's definitely not out of character.  Oh SHIT I started a sentence with "but," I should probably just throw in the towel now, right?  I don't know internet...maybe this was the wrong call.  Maybe I should have just taken a nap.  Maybe I shouldn't have gone to college, maybe I don't actually have what it takes to consistently write grammatically correct thoughts in a sequence that other people can understand.

Nah.  I'm good.

I am calling this blog "thoughts and prayers" because, well, that's the best way to describe its general purpose and ALSO because I'm a cynical liberal college student from the Bible Belt who's ready for that phrase to be used in a new context.  I don't pray anymore, at least not in any formulaic sense of the word; however, I do a lot of miscellaneous, unspecified thinking, and wishing.  So perhaps those thoughts and wishes can be seen as a sort of prayer, in some vague sense of the word; concentrated effort into improving something about the world, or myself, through study and thought.   Maybe that's insane sounding, but to me, it's a better option than having those thoughts and wishes be a waste of energy.

Alright so quick overview:  I'm Max, I'm a rising junior at Rhodes College studying history and international studies in some combination of major and minor.  I love to read, novels, articles, op-eds, pretty much anything really.  I love to write, mostly because I have a lot of opinions on things, and writing on the internet is a pretty decent way of sharing those opinions.  I listen to a lot of NPR, exercise when I can, watch soccer, play soccer, listen to/explore the world of music, and research all kinds of historical questions.  This blog will be a little bit of everything, but mostly, I'm just looking for a place to empty out my head every once in a while, to share my thoughts and ideas and rants and musings and whatever else.  I'll probably be the only person reading this, and that's fine by me.  Fortunately, writing as a form of catharsis doesn't require applause, or even an audience.  Okay, so that's it.  Have a good afternoon, internet.  "Check back soon!" he shouts into the bottomless void.