Saturday, December 30, 2017

UPDATE: Route reversed. Protest Walk Jan. 6 on Gaston Ave. and Junius Street in Dallas.

UPDATE: The route will be reversed starting at 2400 Gaston Ave.

This is the next event, Jan. 6, 2018, 2pm starting at 7340 Gaston Ave. Walks will be done once a month in Dallas on the streets.

This is the "No Confederate Streets" page.

https://www.facebook.com/events/303683380120314/

The walk will be down Gaston Ave. until the end, then switch over and walk back up north east on Junius Street. I will be taking video of the entire walk. I am thinking of a Ricoh V camera.

UPDATE: The walk will be UP Gaston Avenue then down Junius Street.

I will be writing people on the street before hand to express support. I will be sending them a bibliography and a paper on why the street names need to be changed.

This is the link for Gaston Ave.

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/gaston-avenue.html

This is the link for Junius Street.

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/junius-street.html

Junius W. Peak besides being a Confederate soldier was a Ku Klux Klan member during Reconstruction in Dallas. Neo-Confederates celebrated the KKK in Reconstruction as the heroic effort of the ex-Confederate solider.

Both web pages have historical resources and they have a two-page bibliography on slavery and violence against African Americans in American history.

I will be including with my letter the bibliography and a position paper on why changing Confederate named streets is important.

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/why-changing-the-name-of-confederate-streets-is-important.html

For both streets I am mapping historical items to individual addresses.

For Junius Street is it violence against African Americans.

For Gaston Ave. it is Moses Roper's slave narrative of his escapes. His sufferings along the way constitute a sort of stations of the cross.

You can view the tables of the mappings at the street web pages.

I will be filling in the tables and updating them over the next few months. The tables themselves also have resources that a person could look up on the web or read.

Once I get video of my walk, I will be producing a video in which the issues of neo-Confederates, Reconstruction KKK, and other topics can be explained in the video of the walk.

I am doing this as a project of remembering.

Along with the bibliography and position paper there will be a letter which I have yet to write. I will post it in this blog posting when it is finished.

I am thinking of asking people along the way to express their support either by walking with me or having at their house or on their lawn a symbol of support. I am thinking of maybe a poster of E.G. Porter, a Dallas African American who was attacked for trying to be a juror.

Or some symbol to represent support.

I am also studying street name changes in South Africa where they are getting rid of apartheid street names. Contacting some scholars, getting some papers, reading articles.


Sunday, December 24, 2017

Christmas dawn protest of Dallas Plantation Christmas. UPDATE: UPDATE 2: Sunspot video interview at Arlington Hall.

UPDATE 2: Sunspot video interviewed me and you can see it on Facebook at this link.

https://www.facebook.com/sunspotvideo/videos/1561764790572078/

UPDATE:

We did the event. An activist DFW group Round Table showed up and did a video interview.

This is my first video attempt. I am going to be using the Tripod next video. The video is also on the Facebook event page and will be put up on the www.templeofdemocracy.com page in the Dallas section.



This is the event starting at 7:20 am. dawn.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1740278132945526/

Will be reading slave narratives from this book.

 


We had this to say:

"Organizations that meet at the replica plantation house show contempt for African-Americans as well. When the owners of properties like The Claridge, 21 Turtle Creek, 3525 Turtle Creek, The Mayfair, The Vendôme and The Wyndemere take part in lighting up Lee Park, we see how the upper classes of Dallas embrace a duplicate Robert E. Lee plantation and adorn it to celebrate the birth of Christ. What does it say about the Dallas Christian community that this doesn't raise a cry of disgust?"

This is how Dallas celebrates a Confederate Christmas at the one-third replica Arlington Hall. This is not just an old building, it was built to celebrate Robert E. Lee.

We have a web page on Arlington Hall also. http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/arlington-hall-and-oak-lawn-park.html

There is a web page on Arli













Following the example of the American Anti-Slavery Society mailed every residence in the Mayfair a letter asking them to support changing the name Lee Parkway to something else.


Click on photo to see the entire image. The Mayfair page is at:

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/mayfair.html  At this page you can read all 142 pages.

This is the Lee Parkway page. http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/lee-parkway.html

Went to the post office on Dec. 21, 2017 and mailed 142 individual letters to each residence of the Mayfair condominiums. This was a followup after a Lee Parkway Protest.
http://newtknight.blogspot.com/2017/11/protest-at-lee-parkway-dallas-texas.html#.Wj_Qld-nGiM

Click on image to see the entire image.



Each letter was different in that it referenced a different account of slavery and contained a page or two photocopy of the account from a book of slavery narratives. The letter also had a one page bibliography of books on slavery.

The books used were, “American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses,” editor Theodore Dwight Weld, 2011, A DocSouth Book Edition, Univ. of North Carolina, originally published in 1839 by the American Anti-Slavery Society and “Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies,” edited by John W. Blassingame, Louisiana State University Press 1977.

These books are available. https://lsupress.org/books/detail/slave-testimony/ for Blassingame's book. For "Anti-Slavery As It Was," there are reprints, but you can also download it from http://www.archive.org. You can download it as a PDF or in other formats.
https://archive.org/search.php?query=title%3A%28American%20slavery%20as%20it%20is%29

It was based on a mailing campaign of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1835 where the Society mailed anti-slavery pamphlets to leaders in the slave states. A mob attacked the post office and burnt the Society's mail in the street. This is a link to the story.

http://postalmuseumblog.si.edu/2010/07/americas-first-direct-mail-campaign.html

It was also based on "Saturday Night Live" skit "Tech Talk" spoofing critics of the iphone5.

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/tech-talk-iphone-5/n27749?snl=0


This is part of a larger project mapping narratives of slavery to addresses on streets named after Confederates in Dallas. There will be a pdf file of the map for download. On the backside will be the assignments of the slave stories.

I will be walking the streets named after Confederates and will be writing people along the streets asking them to join in.

The first two streets will be Gaston Ave. and Junius Street. Junius was a Klansman in Dallas during Reconstruction and so the historical narratives assigned to Junius will be those of white terror attacks on African Americans during Reconstruction. I am going to be using this source.

http://freedmensbureau.com/texas/index.htm

The web pages for Gaston Avenue and Junius Street are still under development but these are the URLs.

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/gaston-avenue.html

http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/junius-street.html

The page for Ervay Street is an example of a more developed web page. You will notice that the street pages will often supply historical information.
http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/ervay-street.html

I will be publishing a position paper on Confederate named streets.

This is the Facebook page for De-Confederating Dallas.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/1983418798539308/

On Dec. 25th at dawn I will be reading slave narratives at Lee Parkway and around Arlington Hall in protest of Dallas monument to a plantation Christmas. I will have a separate posting on it.

Will the residents of Mayfair reconsider their position? They might. I can't preclude that they won't give it their consideration. I think though a message has been sent out that the superficial narratives crafted by the Mayor's Task Force on Confederate monuments will not be accepted by everyone and they will be challenged.

This is one of the 142 letters. You can read all of them at the page for Mayfair given previously. The bibliography I mailed follows the letter.

December 19, 2017
Edward H. Sebesta
Resident
Dear Resident:
This letter is inspired by a campaign of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) in 1835 in which they mailed anti-slavery printed materials to leaders in the slave states. It is also inspired to some extent by the very famous Saturday Night Live comedy skit, “Tech Talk,” about the iphone5 in response to the Mayfair resident complaints about the inconvenience of having Lee Parkway name changed.
I think that there is a failure in Dallas to understand the importance of changing the name of streets named after Confederates since antebellum slavery remains too much an abstraction and not enough a horror that happened to real people. So I enclose a short account, “L.M. Mills’ Story,” pp. 502, from Blassingame’s “Slave Testimony,” LSU Press. It tells of the vile degradations of slave trading. On page 504 is this account, “At Glasgow, Mo. I saw a woman sold away from her husband. She had a two month old baby in her arms and was crying. A driver asked what she was bellowing about. She said she didn’t want to leave her husband. He told her to shut up, but she couldn’t and he snatched her little baby from her and threw it into a pen full of hogs.” This account might be something to consider while you gaze down on the one-third Arlington Hall replica, a monument to Dallas’ plantation mentality.
I also enclose a bibliography of books on slavery to provide an opportunity to learn about the history of slavery. My plan is to try to assign a slave story, or an appropriate story from history, to every address on a Confederate named street in Dallas. For Cabell Drive I have gotten a list of the members of the 1st Kansas USCT killed at Poison Springs, for Junius Street a very long list of African Americans murdered in Reconstruction Texas.
However, let’s not forget the grievances expressed by the Mayfair Residents Nov. 1, 2017 at city hall. (http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/mayfair.html) I have been informed that the City of Dallas will automatically change the address for your water bill. Many bills you get have a box in front in which you can check for address changes which you write on the back. Further the post office will continue to deliver mail using the old address for some time. Hopefully this will provide a relief from any night terrors you might have over the address change.
I think if you take the suffering of millions of slaves seriously, if their lives mattered to you, a street named after a Confederate would be intolerable as would be an obscure Himmler alley even though that alley might out of the way, short, and not be known to the general public.
There is an opportunity to learn from the South African experience where they have changed over 800 places named after apartheid leaders. A list of links to news articles is at http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/street-name-changes-in-sou….
On November 1, 2017 the president of the Mayfair HOA could have stated that the Mayfair residents support this great historic change happening in the former slave states and though it would be a minor inconvenience they would like to see the Lee Parkway name changed.
A person might assume that no one wants to live on a street named after someone who fought to preserve the loathsome institution of slavery. A person might assume that residents on a street named after a person who fought to preserve slavery would be repulsed by the name that and they would want it changed whether anyone else was concerned or not. Evidently the residents aren’t that bothered by a street named after Robert E. Lee nor that repulsed. Instead on November 1, 2017 the president of the Mayfair HOA and five others confirmed the worst stereotypes of what the attitudes of affluent white Dallas residents might have.
I think also the November 1, 2017 Mayfair speakers before the Dallas city council have provided a window into the mentality of Dallas elites. We should not be surprised that the racial issues of our city persist generation after generation. If a street name is too much a bother, can it be expected that any challenging effort will be taken to address Dallas’ racial issues?
Given the obvious expressed indifference to the moral issues involved in the Lee Parkway name I don’t think it is surprising that juries again and again let police officers get away with the murder of African Americans.
However, the future is still to be made. The Mayfair HOA could ask the city to expeditiously change the name of Lee Parkway. They could set an example for the city and indeed the nation.
James Mellon’s dedicates his 1988 book, “Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember,” with the following, “For All The Slaves, White and Black, Living and Dead, And Especially For Those Whose Suffering Was Never Known Or Has Been Forgotten.” Perhaps over this holiday season you can reflect on the suffering of the slaves.
Sincerely Yours,
Edward H. Sebesta

This is the bibliography:

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF BOOKS ON SLAVERY – Compiled by Ed Sebesta 12/11/2017.


1. “The Slave Trade,” by Hugh Thomas, 1997, Simon and Schuster. An excellent book on the slave trade from late medieval times to the 19th century. Reveals that the so-called age of exploration was driven by the slave trade and not very much by spices.

2. “The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition,” by Manisha Sinha, 2017, Yale University Press. Excellent book.

3. “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave & Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” by Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs, with introduction by Kwame Anthony Appiah. Modern Library Edition.

4. “Narrative of the Live of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave,” by Frederick Douglass, with related documents, edited by David W. Blight, 2016, Bedford Series in History and Culture, Bedford/St. Martins.

5. “Arguing about Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress,” William Lee Miller, originally Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. for hard cover and Vintage Books for paperback. A dramatic reading.

6. “Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery,” by Leon F. Litwack, originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in hardcover and then paperback Vintage Books, 1979. All of Litwack’s books are engaging and well worth reading.

7. “Frederick Douglass,” by William S. McFeely, W.W. Norton & Co. 1991.

8. “The Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston,” by Albert J. von Frank,” 1999, Harvard University Press.

9. “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism,” by Edward E. Baptist, Basic Books, 2016.

10. “Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies,” edited by John W. Blassingame, Louisiana State University Press 1977.

11. “American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses,” editor Theodore Dwight Weld, 2011, A DocSouth Book Edition, Univ. of North Carolina, originally published in 1839 by the American Anti-Slavery Society.

12. “Help Me to Find My People: The African American Search for Family Lost in Slavery,” The John Hope Franklin Series in American History and Culture,” Heather Andrea Williams, 2012.

Thursday, December 21, 2017

Nathan Bedford Forrest Statue removed in Memphis, Sons of Confederate Veterans efforts for naught.

The Nathan Bedford Forrest statue and the Jefferson Davis statue were both removed and the land on which they stood sold.

There are TWO major issues here. One is the impact of the statue removal. The other is the removal of the statue in defiance of the Tennessee Historical Commission.

Some news coverage.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/21/us/memphis-confederate-bedford-davis-statues/index.html

http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/confederate-statues-removed-memphis-sells-public-parks-51926430

http://www.wbir.com/article/news/local/memphis-removing-confederate-statues-from-downtown-parks/51-501227211

It has gotten attention from some international media.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/21/memphis-tennessee-citizens-cheer-overnight-removal-of-two-confederate-statues

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42441875


PART ONE:

This is very important for multiple reasons.

First, the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) invested a lot of effort to keep this statue in place and the statue is being removed anyways. Second, it should tell the Sons of Confederate Veterans that they really don't have much influence in keeping a statue in place nor any real support in an urban public.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans just have the courts where they can make up claims and get them dismissed promptly.

This is really going to demoralize the Sons of Confederate Veterans. Also, it is going to affect the composition of their membership since with Confederate monuments coming down, membership in the SCV is not going to be normalized and the membership remaining will be more extreme as the members who really aren't that much into neo-Confederate ideology leave.

Third the vote for removal was unanimous and included both statues. It sets a precedence that the goal is to get a complete de-Confederation of the city and that it is something everyone should support. It rejects foot dragging like in Dallas and half-way measures like in Dallas.

Fourth, the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in Memphis was the most important monument to Forrest. It was a large metal monument, probably bronze, and it was in a major city.

Fifth, it makes all the other efforts to memorialize Forrest seem anomalous. In various locations where there are items to memorialize Forrest, the local municipalities accommodation or support of memorializing Forrest will be less acceptable and recognized as the racist agenda that it is.

Sixth, it gets the ball rolling in Confederate monument removal moving again. It puts more pressure on Dallas and also Richmond where I think the establishments thought the issue was going to die down and they could just stall some more or hope it goes away. The Richmond establishment's retention of Confederate monuments will really show Richmond's true nature.

As each statue comes down elsewhere it will become more and more apparent that Richmond's establishment mentally live in a metaphysical Confederacy in which Richmond is the capital.

PART TWO:

It seems that this statue removal was done by a legal means to avoid a Tennessee law put in place to keep Confederate monuments in place.

Earlier the Tennessee Historical Commission issued a denial of the request to remove the statues. It is becoming fairly common story that the local and state historical societies and commissions are defenders of the Confederacy. Here we have Preservation Dallas with its maneuvers to keep the Confederate memorial in Pioneer Park. Their name really should be Preservation White Dallas.

What judge will be willing to make the ruling to put it back up?  What will happen if city council members are jailed? What would be the public's response to an attempt to put a statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest back up? It could put the nation into turmoil. I can only imagine the Republicans in Tennessee are thinking carefully about what they do and the 2018 elections, especially after Roy Moore has gone down to defeat.

I am sure that there are Alabama mayors and city council members paying close attention to Memphis and what happens next.

If this method of removing the Confederate statues works, I think there will be renewed calls in other Tennessee cities to remove monuments. Elected officials who point to Tennessee law will have pointed out to them the example of Memphis and be told, "Where there is a will there is a way."

De-Confederation is still unfolding. It may seem stopped, but things are happening here and there and there are only pauses.


Wednesday, December 13, 2017

Republican Moore defeated by Democrat Doug Jones is super Republican State. Neo-Confederacy, Steve Bannon defeated

I stay up last night until 100% of the precincts were in to make absolutely sure that Roy Moore was defeated. Turns out that Doug Jones defeated Roy Moore by 1.5% so there won't be an automatic recount. Roy Moore didn't concede but started talking about God being in control. Well maybe God is in control and he wanted Moore defeated.

https://www.politico.com/interactives/elections/2017/alabama/special-election/dec-12/?lo=ap_b1

However, before celebrating too much, Roy Moore did win with the white electorate. It was the turn out of the African American community which saved us. Moore won white voters "by more than-2-to-1 margin, 68 to 30 percent," according to the article of the following link.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/13/alabama-jones-moore-exit-polls-294159?lo=ap_c1

The article referenced by the above link said that African Americans voted for Doug Jones by "96 to 4 percent." Hopefully Doug Jones appreciates fully that fact. Perhaps the Republicans are not going to defend the Confederacy so much.

This is a big loss for Steve Bannon whose Breitbart has campaigned strongly in defense of Confederate monuments as well as for Donald Trump who has also campaign strongly in defense of Confederate monuments.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-think-bannon-made-an-ass-of-himself-republicans-rejoice-in-breitbart-chiefs-alabama-humiliation


This is Politico's take on the election. Key item is that Republicans are now fearing what the 2018 mid-terms will bring. Though it is a long ways away.

https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/13/alabama-senate-jones-moore-takeaways-294163

I can tell you that it has energized Democrats. Locally on Facebook they see 2018 mid-terms as having a tremendous potential.

Tuesday, December 12, 2017

David A. Love in "The Grio" reports on Roy Moore

Mentioned in this article in The Grio.

David A. Love has been kind enough to reference my work on the Confederate Christian nationalists and give a link to the pdf of our paper at the Canadian Review of American Studies at the Univ. of Toronto.

https://thegrio.com/2017/12/12/alabama-senate-race-future-of-south/


Roy Moore perhaps might be our first neo-Confederate U.S. Senator

The following article by Matthew Sheffield brings to the public's attention that Alabama Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore is a neo-Confederate.

https://www.salon.com/2017/12/12/never-mind-the-sex-scandals-roy-moore-is-a-son-of-the-confederacy/

The public is going to discover that there is an ideology against the 17th Amendment which has U.S. Senators directly elected and not selected by state legislators.

The public is going to discover that there is an ideology against women voting.

The public doesn't realize to the extent neo-Confederate ideology is percolating through the conservative movement.

This development is not without precedent. It used to be Republican office holders pandered to or joined the Council of Conservative Citizens and many were interviewed in the Southern Partisan.

The mainstream media wasn't interested. They were concerned about shaking out an extra electoral vote in some former Confederate state.


Thursday, December 07, 2017

"Virginius Dabney and the Problem of the White Moderate"

An excellent article by

https://altrightorigins.com/2017/10/25/problem-white-moderate/

What is interesting is that even though the evidence is overwhelming about the racism of Virginius Dabney, there is someone who is willing to obscure and mislead regarding the historical record.

I am glad to see that Phil Magness, a history professor at Berry College, is being called out on this.


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