MANNERS

MANNERS Manners matter materially in the lives and in the well-being of everyone: babies, infants, children, teens , adults, athletes, entertainers, fans, spouses , siblings, elders, families, public officials, employers, employees, customers, vendors, solicitors, police, preachers , teachers, clients, lenders, borrowers, servers, professionals, beggars, friends, neighbors, online , offline . The fact is manners describe our relationships with people. Manners are like lubrications, ball-bearings, cushions, heat , air conditioning. Manners feel. Manners feel . Manners feel . Manners are some of our earliest lessons that we learn at home. Saying “yes, no, yes ma’am , yessir, excuse me, thank you, I am sorry , forgive me, allow me, trust me, help me, congratulations, may I, how are you, how do you feel, condolences, etc. “ Manners are also doing right, behavioral codes, governing interactions. Manners address behaviors , like—speak when spoken to; don’t poke around in other people’s business; stay in your lane when driving; obey the law; observing table manners; dressing properly for special occasions; raising children properly to respect the persons and property of others; disciplining with deterrent love. “Home training” are manners. Parents know that a badly behaved child reflects directly back upon them, especially in school and church! Mothers cut their eyes sharply at disobedient children. Their eyes silently “you’d better straighten up and fly right!” Daddies glances glint “greetings.” In larger families, older siblings are trained early to be responsible for their younger siblings’ behaviors, manners, as well as remaining responsible for themselves to their parents , and to the younger ones. Manners are the cords that wrap us up in that “inextricable web of mutualities” that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr spoke eloquently of . We are here together. We must make the best of our being here together by observing “The Golden Rule”—“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Respect yourself . Respect others! Manners matter materially in our lives. Amen.

ENLIGHTENMENT ERA LIARS

ENLIGHTENMENT ERA LIARS Why was it necessary for certain “Enlightenment era” Anglo-Saxons, “whites,” to lie for so long, for so notoriously, so inaccurately about ancient Africans’ history, philosophy, mathematics, technology, and then, to continue lying about these forward for centuries? Millions of Africans who were marooned from Africa, were transshipped across the Ethiopian Ocean ( renamed the “Atlantic Ocean” after 1800) emaciated, enslaved, from the fifteenth century through eighteenth century. These African were the direct descendants of the ancient Africans who are celebrated by the classic authors as the “tallest, handsomest and most just of men, the favorites of the gods.” They were already being held captive in the Americas in the 17th & 18th centuries. Their labor, know-how , ingenuity , creativity, elasticity, beauty, endurance & power, were already being exploited as slaves . African slaves had for centuries been kidnapped by credulous tribesmen, stowed in barracoons for European traders. Trades were made for slaves in the New World, then shipped overseas, by millions. Did not centuries of African captivity and enslavement, cultural destruction, family separation, repeated resales into chattel slavery , forced illiteracy & innumeracy, more than prove the innate inferiority that whites’ enlightenment lies had claimed? Why did whites’ descendants further have to compound abusive misprision by lying, by consistently misrepresenting the truth? These “white” men, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, James Madison, were all said to have been learned men. As such, they would have been, at least, minimally, familiar with the great Greek and Roman classics of Homer, Diodorus Siculus, Herodotus of pre-Christian era. Just as surely, were these early American Presidents, “our founding fathers”, aware of the works was of Plato, Aristotle and others . These wise Greeks, these ancient authors , wrote effusively of the Africans’ ingenious gifts to ancient civilizations, to whom all later civilizations were indebted; particularly the United States of America! These enlightened men knew better. They had to have known better to have had the gall, the temerity to secede from England, the mother country! They knew; even if the tribally-locked-in Africans themselves did not know better of their own ancient black African forbears’ place in history! Whether the enslaved Africans’ collective racial amnesia was due to brainwashing by later foreign conquerors; whether it was due to later forced migrations, to flee subjugation (as Dr. Chancellor Williams claims in THE DESTRUCTION OF BLACK CIVILIZATIONS); or whether amnesia was due to the death of preexisting cultures of written recordation, instruction, or for others, forgetfulness of past, happened. I must conclude, therefore, that because my surmise is that “the founding fathers” knew of the ancient Africans’ foundational contributions to global civilizations, by reason of their having been learned men who read the ancient classics where the truth is lain plain; which later tribalized Africans did not know of their forbears, America’s founding fathers feared that someday Africans might rediscover their true divine capacities, their former identities as the founders, of arts and sciences, not their flunkies; as the original leaders, not the “inferior” followers! Such knowledge may surely destabilize, destroy slavery, whose secret efficacy rests upon circumscribed minds, hearts, ambitions, behaviors in circumscribed circumstance. That is why Thomas Jefferson lied in his book NOTES ON THE STATE OF VIRGINIA, “Query XIV” (1785) that was first privately published; generally republished since. He lied about black people’s allegedly innate intellectual incapacity and black women’s (whose sexuality he demeaned as akin to that of “orangutans”), despite his trysting with one such sister, Sally Hemings, his own enslaved woman, and slave breeder. Thomas Jefferson’s lies were also doubly exposed by his famous 1791 exchange of correspondence with the great Benjamin Banneker, of Maryland, a free, self-taught black man, who was also an astronomer, mathematician, actuary, surveyor of African descent , who had completed the survey of Washington, D. C., after Pierre L’Enfant left the major work incomplete. Benjamin Banneker had also constructed an accurate-time-keeping wooden clock, (America’s first). Banneker was also a landowner, farmer, who had famously published an almanac (with Jefferson’s endorsement) in five states, Maryland , Virginia , Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey for six years until death in 1806. In conclusion, the enlightened founding fathers lied because it was in the nation’s economic interest to lie to Africans and to lesser whites and others about the utter worthlessness of the enslaved Africans, to justify their heinous Labor conscriptions. Their lie is belied in books of integrity. But if one does not read, the lie ceases to be a lie; rather it becomes truth of our destiny!

IN PRAISES OF ELDER SIBLINGS

In praise of elder siblings. We learn a lot from older siblings. I did anyway. My big brother Buddy was my ace boon coon! He taught me many things from his Gary, Indiana, perspective . Women, dancing, signifying, gang banging, sex, boxing. Buddy’s real name was Elvis Mitchell Coleman, jr. He wore a process a/k/a a “conk” as a teenager. He was a player! I met Buddy, for the first time, in 1957. I was six. Buddy was twelve. He and Hazel, Buddy’s big sister and mine were born to Daddy’s first wife, Inez, who died in childbirth . They lived with their maternal grandparents in Gary; attended Roosevelt High School “The mighty Velt”. Daddy took us to Mississippi to visit his parents, after they first arrived. We had big fun and high adventure in the country, including being saved by Big Mama from the dogs! The dogs were trained to protect the hogs that me and Buddy were irritating with corncobs laying about for amusement. We barely made it safely onto the screened-in back porch before Big Mama shooed the growling dogs away with her flapping apron and her voice ! Hazel Jean was a pretty girl. I was not as close to her as I was Buddy, because she was a girl. Girls hung with girls. Guys with guys in those days. But music was one thing that we could all collaborate on. They loved Ike and Tina Turner—“Darling? Yes, Tina? It’s starting to get next to me!” Of course, Jerry Butler, Gene Chandler , Jackie Wilson, the Sherrelle’s and more were worn out on the record player! My beloved brother Buddy is now gone. And my lovely sister Hazel is as lovely as ever. I feel their spirits whirling around. I offer this encomium in love to them both.

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

“On the contrary, the absence of this primary faith is the presence of degradation. As is the flood, so is the ebb . Let this faith depart, and the very words it spake and the things it made become false and hurtful. Then falls the church, the state, arts, letters, life. The doctrine of divine nature being forgotten, a sickness infects and dwarfs the constitution. Once man was all; now he is an appendage , a nuisance . And because the indwelling Supreme Spirit cannot be wholly gotten rid of, the doctrine of it suffers this perversion, that the divine nature is attributed to one or two persons , and denied to all the rest, and denied with a fury. The doctrine of inspiration is lost; the base voice of the majority usurps the place of the doctrine of the soul. Miracles, prophesy, poetry, the ideal life, the holy life, exist as ancient history merely; they are not in the belief, nor in the aspiration of society ; but when suggested seem ridiculous. Life is comic or pitiful as soon as the high ends of being fade out of sight, and man becomes near-sighted, and can only attend to what addresses the senses.” P. 67, “An Address to Harvard Divinity School Class of 1838,” THE ESSENTIAL WRITINGS OF RALPH WALDO EMERSON (2000)

THOMAS PAINE ON EUCLID

“I know, however, but of one ancient book that authoritatively challenges universal consent and belief, and that is ‘Euclid’s Elements of Geometry;* and the reason is, because it is a book of self-evident demonstration, entirely independent of its author, and of everything relating to time, place, circumstance. The matters contained in this book would have the same authority they now have, had they been written by another person, or had the work been anonymous, or had the author never been known; for the identical certainty of who was the author, makes no part of our belief of the matters contained in this book.” *[Euclid, according to chronological history, lived three hundred years before Christ, and about one hundred years before Archimedes; he was of the city of Alexandria in Egypt.] P.69, “Part Two,” AGE OF REASON by Thomas Paine (2014)

BAPTISM OF MALACHI

Me and pastor John Hunter of FAME church (LA) administering baptism to Malachi Alexander Coleman, younger brother of Jalen Imhotep @ August 2009

SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM

Capitalism is a byproduct of slavery not the cause of it. Chattel slavery historically preceded capitalism and Adam Smith. Having the order correct, clarifies many things

GEOMETRY IS EGYPTIAN

GEOMETRY IS EGYPTIAN “The evolution of the idea of the fourth dimension of space covers a long period of years . The earliest known record of the beginnings of the study of space is found in a hieratic papyrus which forms part of the Rhind Collection of the British Museum and which has been deciphered by Eisenlohr. It is believed to be a copy of an older manuscript of the date 3400 B.C. , and is entitled ‘Directions of Knowing All Dark Things. ‘ The copy is said to have been made by Ahmes, an Egyptian priest between 1700 and 1100 B.C. It begins by giving the dimensions of barns; then follows the consideration of various rectilinear figures, circles, pyramids, and the value of pi (). Although many of the solutions given in the manuscript have been found to be incorrect in minor particulars, the fact remains that Egypt is really the birth-place of geometry. And this fact is buttressed by the knowledge that Thales, long before he founded the Ionian School which was the beginning of Greek influence in the study of mathematics, is found studying geometry and astronomy in Egypt.” P. 45, “Historical Sketch if the Hyperspace Movement,” THE MYSTERY OF SPACE by Robert T. Browne (1919, 1977)

WONDERS OF ENOUGH SPACE

WONDERS OF ENOUGH SPACE Space is healthy to life. Air to breathe . Room to stretch. Space to sleep, walk, run, play, grow. Lack of space warps personality; is confinement, is jail. Containment depresses, represses, suppresses the wingspan of souls. Space is healthy and very necessary. I think of space as I read the mentally stimulating book of philosophy , THE MYSTERY OF SPACE: A STUDY OF THE HYPERSPACE MOVEMENT AND AN INQUIRY INTO THE GENESIS AND ESSENTIAL NATURE OF SPACE by Robert T. Browne (1919, 1977). Thoughts of space animate me again while reading NANNIE HELEN BURROUGHS: A DOCUMENTARY PORTRAIT OF AN EARLY CIVIL RIGHTS PIONEER, 1900-1959, edited and annotated by Kelisha B. Graves (2019). Therein Dr. Graves summarizing the chapter, “Racial Violence, Social Justice, Politics, and Democracy,” writes “She believed that black people had an equal inheritance in the Bill or Rights, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. Even if Burroughs admonished black people to never abandon their patriotism, she simultaneously maintained that African Americans were a unique group with their own flavor and spirit. As she argued , black people needed space and opportunity to express their difference through ‘cultural things’ (‘The Challenge of the New Day’).” P. 94-95. I thought also of the capacious space that I experienced as a child in Mississippi romping on our grandparents’ farm with my cousin, Howard Smith. We watched birds fly , busted watermelons on the ground and devoured them head-first! I thought of Meacham Park where we lived next to a wooded area and a big field where I led my siblings on “explorations;” or where I flew my kites high into the sky. I thought about Rock Hill, Missouri, five miles east of Meacham Park, where we lived a mere four houses away from the green haven of the campus of Steger Jr. High School’s twenty acres, more or less, of: a rocky winding creek, baseball fields, basketball courts , cross-country track, football fields, practice fields, flowers, trees, the architectural splendor of our school building, itself, whose windows let in sunlight and afforded us lush visages. I thought of the Dunbarton Campus where our Howard University Law School moved after our first year on our main campus, off Georgia Avenue. I wrote of the space at Dunbarton, nestled amid mansions, embassies, azaleas & old growth trees, behind which streamed Rock Creek amid a wooded secluded space of brush , fern, moss. An open field behind our law school led down to its Walden-like respite from wearing case law. Our law school was up Connecticut Avenue on Upton Streets in far northwest Washington, D.C. My article was titled “Dawn of Dunbarton.” It appeared in Howard’s “New Directions Magazine” in 1974. I have known space. I love space. I am enamored and predisposed towards space. Our home has lovely space inside and outside for which I give God the glory. As everybody needs love, —oh yeah—everybody needs space: human, plant, animal, mineral, microbe, solar, lunar, galactic, aquatic. Everything needs space! Amen.

RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX

WE ARE THE RIDDLE OF THE SPHINX We who are Africans and diaspora Africans must study everything, everyday, to be able to learn what is true, and what is false about history. We have been lied to about ourselves. We have been reconfigured, historically reconstructed by successive waves foreign conquerors, invaders, traders, priests, philosophers, archaeologists, for over 2500 years , dating all the way back to before Rome, to back before Alexander of Macedonia , to back before Cambyses of Persia, back, way back. We did not know that we were “black”. We did not see our color as substantively meaningful. They did. They do. More than colors, though, they saw our fabulous arts, science, medicine, jewelry, foodstuffs, navigation, mathematics, medicine, philosophy, schools, temples, monuments, writings, mathematics, beauty, ancient mastery as simply irresistible. Our history was so ancient it merged with prehistory. So much, even surviving elders, priests, learned people, had forgotten too much of it. Two million years is a very long time. We desiccated like a dry bone in a desert. We ossified! We were members of nations, of tribes. It is quite a terrible thing even to be able to be lied to about oneself! Don’t you know yourself? To be ignorant of oneself , of one’s history, of genealogy, of cosmology. That bespoke ignorance of oneself! Ignorance of self-awareness allows one to view oneself as unnecessary as unnatural; as unworthy, basically inhuman. That such ignorance might befall woebegone Africans who were sold by their naive and stupid tribesmen for centuries to Christians and Muslims, is more easily understood , than that native, remaining Africans did not know any better than this! Forgive me, please, Dearest Reader, for venting, bewailing our fate as African Americans. Yet, but for our fate, sad as it was, I would not be here. Nor would you! It was necessarily the foreordained case, indeed, divinely, cosmologically the case, that we Africans need to have experienced what came before, so that we may thus become, what we must now become, in order to extricate ourselves from our privileged state of despondency! “Privileged?” Privileged yes! Fact is that in 2020, despite the Covid19, despite Donald Trump and his billionaire cronies , despite their white supremacy, white terrorists, and black terrorism & credulity; despite it all, and whatever! We are still here! We are naturally privileged to speak the ever-expanding English language, ‘lingua francs’ of earth.We are alive! We are Americans. We reside in the richest, most militarily, financially, scholastically, culturally, powerful nation on earth, that we have and still do materially contribute to! And we are still climbing, still rising to our divine destiny! We are a riddle of the Sphinx! Amen!

PRIZE OF DIVINITY

THE PRIZE OF DIVINITY “It will be discovered finally, perhaps , that the energy spent in elaborating complicate series of analytic curiosities has been misappropriated. It will then be necessary to turn the attention definitely to the study of that which lies not at the terminus of the intellect’s ‘modus vivendi’, but which is both the origin of the intellect and its eternal sustainer—the intuition, or life itself. This can result in nothing less than the complete spiritualization of man’s mental outlook and the consequent inevitable recognition of the underlying and ever-sustaining one-ness of all vital manifestations... “Just as the tide flowing in flows out again, thereby restoring the ocean’s equilibrium , so the mind ascending in one generation beyond the safety mark has its equilibrium restored in the next century by a relinquishment of the follies of the former.... “There is but one life, one mind, one extension , one quantity , one quality , one being, one state, one condition, one mood, one affection , one desire, one feeling, one consciousness. There is also but one number and that is unity. All so-called integers are but fractional parts of this kosmic unity. The idea by the word ‘two’ really connotes two parts of one unity and the same is true of a decillion, or any number of parts. These are merely the infinitesimals of unity and they grow less in size and consequence as the divisions increase in number. The analysis of unity into an infinity of parts is purely an ‘a posteriori’ procedure. That it is an inherent mind process is a fallacy. All our common quantities, as the mile, kilometer , yard, foot, inch, gallon, quart, are conventional and arbitrary and susceptible of wide variations. As the basis of all physical phenomena is unity; it is only in the ephemeral manifestations of sensuous objects that they appear as separate and distinct quantities.... “Under the most charitable allowances, therefore, there can be but two quantities—unity and diversity; and yet not two , for these are one. Unity is the one quantity and diversity is the division of unity into a transfinity of parts. Unity is infinite, absolute, and all-inclusive. Diversity is finite although it may be admitted to the transfinite, or greater than any assignable value. Unity alone is incomprehensible . In order to understand of its nature, we divide into a diversity of parts; and because we fail to understand the transfinity of the multiple of parts we mistakenly call them infinite. “When analysis shall have proceeded far enough into the abysmal mysteries of diversity; when the mathematical mind shall have been overcome by the overwhelming perplexity of the maze of diverse parts, it shall then fall asleep and upon awakening shall find that wonderfully simple thing—‘unity.’ It is the one quantity that is endowed with a magnitude which is both inconceivable and irresolvable. The one ineluctable fact in the universe is the incomprehensibility and all-inclusivity of ‘one-ness.’ It is incomprehensible, inconceivable and infinite at the present stage of mind development. But the goal of the mind is to understand the essential character of unity, of life. Its evolution will then stop, for it will have reached the prize of divinity itself whereupon the intellect exalted by and united with the intuition shall also become one with the divine consciousness.” P. 41-44, “Prologue,” THE MYSTERY OF SPACE (1919, 1977) by Robert T. Browne

DAVID WALKER AND EARLY FREEDOM WRITERS

DAVID WALKER’S ‘APPEAL, ‘ OTHER EARLY AUTHORS David Walker, author of his iconic “Appeal” of 1829, is credited as being the ‘first’ African American freedom pamphleteer, and “black nationalist”. I found this very doubtful, given James Forten , Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, Paul Cuffee, Robert Purvis, Prince Hall, Olaudah Equiano, Phyllis Wheatley and other 18th-19th century black writer-freedom fighters . Don’t get me wrong. This is not to diminish the power of David Walker’s work, which still informs me years later. l thoroughly loved reading “David Walker’s Appeal in four Articles: Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America”. I read “Appeal” in high school and was amazed that there’d been so many so-called “black militants” of the 1960s-early 1970s, who did not read it, nor, for that matter, not read much of anything ! The fact remains, however, that David Walker, was not the first, nor was he the only black pamphleteer, author, writer, affirming black personality . As early as 1813, sailmaker James Forten, had published anonymously a successful diatribe opposing legislation in Pennsylvania threatening to take away voting rights of free blacks in Pennsylvania. Of equal note, was Richard Allen’s and Absalom Jones’ 1794 “A Narrative of the Proceedings of The Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in the year 1793.” Although published in pamphlet form, it described ,salutarily, their African Methodist Episcopal Church’s and African Episcopal Church’s valiant work saving white people from near-death, nursing, sanitizing , burying the dead, in the Philadelphia’s Yellow Fever epidemic of 1793. This is not to diminish but to contextualize David Walker. Along these lines, David Walker, was a Prince Hall mason, member of the African Lodge, No. 459, Boston, dating provisionally at 1776, formally dating from 1784 . That is the site of the first Masonry lodge of Africans in America. Prince Hall had received its Charter directly from the Grand Lodge of London, England, when the American whites refused one. Around the same time, Guinea’s Olaudah Equiano, also known as Gustavas Vasa, wrote a very revealing autobiography (1789) describing his capture in Africa ; his enslavements in Caribbean, North America and later liberation. He recounts his fruitful antislavery efforts in Great Britain, his maritime experiences, his education, his sailing to ports of entry in multiple environments. “The Interesting Narrative of Olaudio Equiano” was published in 1789, the year the American government opened. So, he may be the first of the stable of esteemed authors of African American narratives. His book is as vitally wonderful as its peers. I dare not omit gifted poet, Phyllis Wheatley , whose 1773, “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” was the first book of poetry to be published by an African American. Although not autobiographical it was as spiritually exhortative as male peers’. Wheatley was the most famous African in the world in 1773. Contrary to unwarranted criticism by some contemporary African Americans, she was no “Uncle Tom” as this poem attests :