GREAT HEART WARM SPIRIT

GREAT HEART, WARM SPIRIT Late Missouri State Senator, Hon. Harold S. Caskey, did the Amen Society of Butler, Bates County, a tremendous favor in 2008, when he corralled the last $11,000 in donations from local businesses needed to allow completing the purchase and installation of our United States Colored Troops (USCT) memorial statue that now sits on the Courthouse lawn in Butler. We members of the Amen Society, a scion of the now-defunct Brooks Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, (AME), in Butler, had launched an effort to raise the funds needed to commission erection and dedication of a statue honoring the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry. They had fought (and won) the “Battle of Island Mound,” outside Butler, October 28-29, 1862, defeating a band of Confederate cavalry guerrillas that was twice their size! We launched our memorial fundraising effort in 1999 to commemorate the now-forgotten , too-long-unacknowledged, memory of those fallen soldiers: black free men, escaped slaves, and a Cherokee Indian from Oklahoma, who had fought and died heroically in the first battle of the American Civil War (our “Freedom War”) that black men unofficially fought. Prior to it, black men had not been allowed to fight for their people’s freedom in what was then regarded as a “white man’s war .” I had read LIKE MEN OF WAR : BLACK TROOPS IN THE CIVIL WAR, 1862-1865 (1998) by Andre Noah Trudeau while I was then the pastor of Brooks Chapel AME Church. None of our church members nor any attendees of our small, 3-member congregation, located 60 miles south of Kansas City, had ever heard of the battle, much less of the fallen volunteer-soldiers. We resolved as a congregation to rectify that horrendous historical situation! To consecrate, to console, the desolate remains of those nameless fighting men! Thus, we formed the Amen Society to popularize our memorialization efforts in the local community and more broadly. After garnering $19,000 from a period beginning in 1999, our spirits had sagged, as had our fundraising. It was then that we began sniping at each other out of frustration at our stalled project. By now, in 2008, our first local president, and church pianist, Mrs.Elmora Burton was dead , and I was away from Butler, now pastoring a church in St. Joseph, Missouri. But, I had to come back for a pep rally and for a prayer meeting to assure the Amen Society that God did not bring us thus far to leave us! To hold on faithfully to God! Then came an unexpected blessing! Late Sen. Harold Caskey called our church and Amen Society treasurer, Mrs. Mildred Wright, to ask how much we needed to finish completing our memorial statue ? Mrs. Wright told him that we still needed $11,000 to complete paying our sculptor, Joel Randal of Muskogee , Oklahoma, and to pay for having our statue mounted. Senator Caskey replied “You’ll have the money this afternoon !” He then solicited and received $1,000 from eleven local businesses which he gave to Millie! She paid Joel Randal, our patient, gifted sculptor, who completed our statue! Transported and supervised mounting ! We dedicated it on October 2008 in a public ceremony with a parade, speakers, food. I was among the speakers. During my brief remarks I told the outdoors, seated audience that the work needed to realize that honorable day’s unveiling was attributable to many people, some wishing to remain anonymous . “But one critically important person is now sitting behind me on the dais. If I were to fall over backwards, I would fall directly into his lap!” I said. Senator Harold Caskey, a blind man, was seated directly behind me, and seated beside smiling Congressman Emmanuel Cleaver, who applauded! Sen. Harold Caskey nodded and smiled enthusiastically! Great man! God bless his memory as well as our colored soldiers’! Amen!

RACE MATTERS

RACE MATTERS IF BLACK LIVES DO NOT

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)