The Historical Importance Of An Invisible Creek

The brief summer of 2014 which followed the brutal winter of 2013-14 gave your author every reason in the world to be out enjoying the bounty of nature and not wanting to stare at a screen or gather hordes of photos together in an attempt to make sense out of the North American experience.  Well, winter is upon us once again and he finds himself indoors a lot more, even while he takes in the chilly air with confidence that he lives in Michigan and not northern Manitoba.  I've been doing a lot of reading lately, as well as a lot of listening.  The United States is currently in the midst of some of the most bitterly divided political warfare that it has seen in some time, Mexico is busy trying to deal with the fact that perhaps helping PRI regain entrenchment has done little to support growth in the country, to say nothing of stem the tide of violence from the drug cartels, and Canada sleeps above all this in some false sense of superiority.  Some jump into the fray completely ignorant of history and reason and foretell of the apocalypse; others claim they are on intimate terms with both the past and the cause of righteousness and yet present to the public rather obvious revisionist viewpoints of who said what in some document, religious or otherwise, made by a court hundreds of years ago, perhaps not even from our shores. 

Life goes on.  Freedom is maintained enough that most in North America, and yes, including Mexico, individuals can choose to tear away the veil of ignorance and find out the facts behind the truths in our larger story.  That's what this blog is about, my own journey to discovery about our story here in North America, and not just about great people or events or even transitory concepts.  Instead, I take a look at even the small things.  My latest read seems to be taking me for a ride down that particular path; Sarah Vowell has been entertaining and informing me about how taking a look at the small things can help one understand how the bigger picture fits together.  Better put by a really good friend, she takes a look a reality through the perspective of one within the fishbowl.  After all, this is why those who study history and geography even bother to look at details even when the facts are largely laid out in plain sight for them; happenings like revolutions are a bit more complex than the slogans which ignite the passions which drive them.  Sometimes we need to tear down the sacred statues and become iconoclasts in order to prevent such revolutions from turning away from said passions and into the realm of pure legalistic precedent.  Alright, so maybe I have also been reading some of that iconoclast Gore Vidal.  The thing is, I'm back to share some more of what I have found.

And what better little thing to then bring to attention than this charming little discovery:

Does not look like much, does it?  I am sure that most people would never recognize it as anything other than a slight depression in the ground which for some reason was bridged rather than filled and paved like the rest of the surrounding city.  In reality, this is what remains of Dock creek, a small tidal creek that perhaps served as the mark for where William Penn decided to center his capital city of Philadelphia.  The "dry water feature" rests buried in a lovely park behind Carpenters Hall, meeting place of the first Continental Congress ,and, as such, another relic of the city's past that gets largely ignored by the visiting public in favor of bigger, grander things like Independence Hall.  Today, aside from the depression in the ground, the only thing that lets the walker know that anything different was ever here is a plaque set up by the National Park Service.  The plaque lets people know that this center of the famous seat of American political birth was full of not only the gassy overtures of politicians, but also plain, simple swamp gas.  Much like inheritor Washington and predecessor London, this first capital of the United States was a rather wet and marshy affair that has otherwise transformed and been paved over.

Of course, the modern face of Philadelphia tends to look a lot more like this:

Chestnut street at 4th, looking west.

And, as expected, this:

Passyunk and 10th, turning south onto 10th.

She started out as the last grasp of the Atlantic's dominance against the fall line.  This is what makes this little creek so interesting, really.  Philadelphia, you see, is unlike many other cities in that it falls not soundly with the "North", is definitely not part of the "South" either, and while hardly on the ocean and farther away from salt water than even Washington, is definitely more coastal than inland.  Many houses here have gardens that feature a magnolia alongside a spruce, fitting for a city that can be buried by snow in the odd winter and yet experience a summer every bit as unpalatable as any given city further south.  In essence, we have a city that had a noticeably longer growing season than what could be offered by New England and the Hudson valley, thus suitable for plantations, yet not idealistically part of a colony founded otherwise for the sake of individual liberty (in contrast to Jamestown) in which the good land could be used for families of farmer-workers.  We thus have a city founded not in consideration to proximity to the coast and thus the broader market, and yet not so far removed from it as to be deaf to the siren song of international commerce. 

Here we have a city founded on the principles of religious tolerance and a degree of personal liberty that also had an increasing number of African slaves imported into it in the mid-eighteenth century.  Proudest son of the city, Benjamin Franklin, otherwise later noted to be something of an abolitionist, did not actually free his slaves until after the Revolution.  As the creek was covered over, so too was slavery, and the city and her history were simultaneously whitewashed; the colonial federal style look was abandoned for a lot of marble even as Pennsylvania passed the first abolition act in the United States in 1780.  The creek gives us two lessons: not everything is as simple as it seems, and nothing on this earth is immutable.  So, let's take a stroll further up the creek...

Harriet Tubman And Johanna Dominguez

I'll probably get back to the real posting soon, but just two things for today to pass along to my readers:

1. Harriet Tubman is getting a shout out today on Google's front page.  She is extremely important not only for persons of color in this country (or the world in general) but also for women who long struggled for enfranchisement.  Like many other fine Black people of the 19th century, she also contributed to the development and enrichment of cultural and intellectual life in central New York, namely in Auburn.  She is honored in statues and memorials in many places, and at two National Park sites, one being Women's Rights National Historical Park in nearby Seneca Falls, NY, and the other in the newly created Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Monument in Church Creek, MD.  In nearby Cambridge, MA is a dedicated museum to Harriet run by the Harriet Tubman Organization.

The two areas offer the visitor a major contrast between the sides of the abolition struggle.  Safe, tranquil central New York is and was largely agrarian, domestically serene and proper, and somewhat removed from the rest of the major stress areas on the Underground Railroad.  It was close to the safety of Upper Canada in either Niagara or Kingston, and by and large the reception given to liberated Black people was much warmer than elsewhere in the North.  The eastern shore of Maryland, however, is and was still relatively wild and swampy, as well as deep enough into the Slave States to make this perhaps one of the most stressful parts of an escape to freedom further north.  I'll let such distinctions speak for themselves, with the mention that swamps are pretty amazing places when one is not running in terror.

2. A friend of mine has recently started diving into a blog project regarding human-induced climate change.  While I often teeter carefully on the political abyss here on American Voyages, I have not been shy to present blatantly obvious evidence, admittedly at face value, that something is going on with our planet.  I present her post and take on what is happening in the Albertan Boreal forest and Boreal-Prairie Interface because it is very scary.  Factually speaking, the Boreal forest is perhaps the last great wilderness remaining on the planet, doing all the wonderful things that forests do in a very vast scale.  In North America, the Boreal world connects the east and the west by means of the all-encompassing north in a series of ecosystems and biomes that bear similarities enough that one cannot otherwise tell the difference in some landscapes if they were standing in Alaska or Labrador.  I roughly consider the Boreal world here to be found wherever the shaggy but noble Black Spruce (Picea Mariana) can be found in the wild:

Yes, even down in the Poconos or in rare remnants in southern Michigan or nearby Southern Ontario.  Where one finds Black Spruce, one finds cool, damp conditions that even the hardiest temperate species can't tolerate.

That said, I do confess to another bias, notably that I am pretty much from this world of spruce, bogs, granite, sand, Ericaceae of extraordinary abundance, the Aurora Borealis, a lot of Cree, Moose, and tons of other amazing things.

Near Deux-Riviers, Ontario.  This is a more southerly example of the Boreal world.

Passions and home spirit aside, the boreal world is notable for not only still being generally unbroken by the hand of humans, but also packs in a ton of carbon and pretty much serves as one of the biggest positive storage spaces in the planetary carbon cycle.  Start digging up fossil fuel from and burning or otherwise destroying any part of the Boreal landscape and there are going to be very consequences for the rest of the world.  Natural consequences aside, the Cree are also fighting an uphill battle over the poisoning of their Albertan homelands.  While this would not be the first time a treaty has been broken or bended between the First and Second Born, uh, come on, we can surely do better by this stage in the game?

Anyway, I could go on for days about this subject, and I probably will as things get worse.  I consider the Tar Sands issue to be something to go to legitimate war over.  In the meantime, I'm passing a long Johanna's article because anything that exposes this travesty for what it is worth is definitely getting shared:

Click here for the blog!

I'm excited to see what she can do actually.  While I tend to try and link to other blogs with North American significance, and Johanna is definitely more of a citizen of the world, this piece is not only covering continental news but news with a global impact and is definitely worth broadening the horizons of our coverage here.

The First Underground Railroad

I know I have been on a kick about the Carolinas, Georgia, and Northern Florida lately, but the truth is that this region was an incredibly diverse and storied region until it fought for the wrong side of history during the Civil War.  Yes, here there was the hearth of the house of Southern elite slaveholders and their belles, but there were also the non-slave holding Second Born Georgians, First Born, Spanish, French (of both Hugenot and Royal varieties), long forgotten Austrians, and of course Black people which would soon, through economic reasons, come to outnumber all of these groups.  Needless to say, I also have long loved the majestic world of palm and pine which thrives here in an otherwise humid, bug-infested wild country.  When I recently began to read more about both the birth of slavery and its opposition among abolitionists and freedom-seekers here, I just had to share what a powerful crossroads in history this truly difficult land had become.

No one can argue against the fact that the Spanish colonizers were brutal and racist in their treatment of the First Born, and that they enjoyed watching their conquered subjects tend the fields for them.  That said, it was the English colonizers who were real pros at commercial exploitation of the new land and exotic peoples from just about anywhere on the planet.  The Spanish, you see, were plunderers less than merchants (they kicked out a good portion of their merchant class when they told every Jew in Spain to head out of town in 1492), and they were also enthralled by the concept of converting the planet to Roman Catholicism.  In contrast, the English also plundered, but on a smaller scale (except maybe in India), so as to better gradually set up favorable economic conditions for their cult of free-enterprise.  Oh sure, they had religion too, many Protestant varieties of it in fact, but their concept of spreading the faith was pretty much centered on trying to get freedom for themselves to contemplate and pray as they so wished, which they had to cross an ocean for in the face of Anglican and then Calvinistic and then lip-service Anglican successions of power.  They rejoiced when the First Born converted, but otherwise just regarded them as pagans who could either be helpful to setting up commercial security or harmful in trying to dismantle colonial progress.  The French were another story altogether, and that one takes a while to explain...

Anyway, the Spanish would not hesitate to bring over Africans for use as slaves, but seeing as how plantations of cash crops were but one of many different agendas behind the otherwise important gold-plundering and conversion game, race slavery never developed to the same degree that it did in the English colonies.  Again, this is not to say that it did not happen; many Black communities can be found in Cuba and the Dominican Republic, and a few traces of where African slavery did make inroads into Mexico can be found in Veracruz and Guerrero, the two important states of colonial landing of the Mexican coast.  The ban on a Spanish-run slave trade made importation of Africans difficult, if nothing else.  When they wanted slaves, the Spanish could run to the English or Dutch for their needs, which further compounded the general aloofness from the enslavement of Africans.  What's more, racial hatred did not develop in nearly the same way throughout New Spain than it did it the English colonies.  As I state in my post about the most important event in North American history, while the Spanish came as conquerors and extractors, they also often fell in love with the land and the people of the New World.  Mexicans to this day are largely Mestizos of heritage reaching back to both sides of the Atlantic.   Yes, you can find hatred towards the First Born in the Spanish-descended elite of El Salvador or Argentina, but by and large the rest of modern Latin America is a culture resulting from pure exchange rather than separation. 

So it was that when a few runaway slaves heading south from the Carolinas made their way into Florida, they were not immediately chained up and re-enslaved in their new home of Florida.  Rather, they were not only welcomed, but encouraged to keep coming.  Those who chose a more colonial existence in St. Augustine would be required to convert to Catholicism, but often times the Black refugees found a happy existence with the First Born of the area.  Further north, they often helped the refugees through to their freedom, which as usual was a very difficult and terror-filled trip to safety, but down here in the still-largely natural hot and humid subtropical lushness, they had the advantage of not being readily followed by the prone-to-malaria and easily sweat-able northern Europeans.  The Spanish authorities figured that they would be so grateful to make their way into waiting freedom and safety that they would rise up in arms with them, Black beside colonist, against English advances from Georgia.  They were not wrong. 

Some stayed in town, some even enlisted in the Spanish forces.  Others left to form new societies of their own in the wilds, and sometimes they came across the First Born and formed a new culture of this encounter.

Public domain.

You can read more and see some pictures here.  Actually, that website can tell you quite a lot about some of the Black experience I never knew existed.

What Martin Luther King Jr. Day Means

My apologies for the not a lot of activity around here lately.  I did come across something that made me want to jump into a few posts, though.  First:

Q: You really don't talk about the Black experience a lot.  Why not?

A: I generally consider myself well-informed as to the details of said experience, but I am intimidated by my overall lack of specialized knowledge therein.  I like to do topics of posting some amount of justice, which leads to perfectionism, which leads to putting off posting.  That said, my recent love affair with gobbling up every last detail of everything Southern has started to lead me into a lot of reading on the Black experience.  It's not a world entirely foreign to me either; I have a fair degree of involvement in religious ministry in Rochester, NY and Detroit, MI where I can definitely say I got immersed in various facets of the Black experience.  One of the most amazing features I came across was the prevalence of town hall style democratic participation, something that one would figure is entirely absent from any large developed areas and relegated mostly to the land of small farming towns in Indiana or Iowa. 

The two mentalities are not so different that they have never existed in unison; most Black people living in the United States and Canada, at least before the Second World War, were agriculturally focused and lived in smaller communities.  The first Black people seeking a better life in Canada settled not in Kingston or Montreal but in Amherstburg (just south of Windsor, Ontario) or in Oro-Medonte, a largely rural community about an hour and change north of Toronto.  In the United States, before employers like Ford attracted many Black people through equal pay and hiring opportunity, racial demographics were spread pretty even between rural and urban areas; cities were often full of struggling immigrants who were often responsible for creating discriminatory conditions no better than in the more timid parts of the South.  This might have been due to a distaste for even more competition in addition to any racism passed on the other groups already living here by such times.

This was nothing compared to what Black people were dealing with in the South, however.  Read the following article to get a taste of just what that meant, and just what yesterday's public holiday means:

http://m.dailykos.com/story/2011/08/29/1011562/-Most-of-you-have-no-idea-what-Martin-Luther-King-actually-did

It's sobering, to say the least.  It puts things into perspective, like the question "Why don't I talk about the Black experience a lot?"  I decided to wait a day until posting this so the hysteria of everyone wanting to post about it died down and we could look at things from a vantage of reality over popularity. 

Is It Racist To Like Southern Gardens (Or Anything)?

A little interlude before we head back to Charleston.  In fact, this sort of sets up that post, trying to look at Southern Gardening from a different historical background and responding to a very serious question/accusation that I received e-mailed to me about recent posts on the South:

Q: Surely you are aware of the intense racism and inhumanity that plagues your beloved Southern "culture", polite gardens or architecture or otherwise?  The South is an embarrassment on this country and you are exposing some personal racist tendencies toward history here.

The South has amazing agricultural and gardening potential.  The lowcountry affords a long growing season which can account for the vast majority of the year, while the backcountry offers moderation in the region's otherwise blistering summer sun and enough winter chill to permit northern delights to slip in the scenery.  Naturally speaking, there is so much of everything right in soil, sun, and moisture that nature can run rampant here given the chance to.  This can result in seemingly unstoppable plagues of kudzu, but it can also result in an incredibly potent power behind natural reclamation. 

American Voyages has thus far taken us on a tour of the landscapes of the South and the sentiment they have held for the region's inhabitants, both first and second born.  In some cases, the flora and fauna are beloved and considered quintessential to understanding the character of the culture which has developed here.  In others, such as with the many pines of the region, the backdrop has been simply wallpaper and, at best, a bonus feature.  Here, as in so many other places, exotic species often have taken center stage in the hearts and minds of those controlling the landscape.  And why not?  Especially in an age where so many pleasures are deemed to come best from artificial sources, reveling in biological beauty and charm is hardly something to be looked down upon, exotic or native model notwithstanding.  If I lived in the South, I would surely experiment would any number of palms, broadleaved evergreens, azaleas, amaryllis, hardy citrus, etc.  The attraction is hardly a new one, either.  Compared to the continental winters experienced in New England and as far south as Philadelphia, the Virginians and Carolinians found that when they had acquired enough security and basic economic vitality, they could start living dreams perhaps even out of the reach of their rank back in England. 

Of course, some of these dreamers did so at the expense of their fellow, enslaved, human persons, but there were also those who did not.  The ordinary Virginians and Carolinians, and certainly almost all of the Georgians found that while they might not have had the same amount of leisure time to devote to gardening as their richer social masters, gardens here could sometimes take off on their own with just a little bit of prodding.  Grand, cultivated estates of said social masters were concerned with mimicking the fancy Stuart-era estates back in England, complete with more boxwood hedge than is healthy, but these estates do not live on in modern gardens the way that the organic development of the common man's garden would.  As for the ranks of slaves which made the great estate grounds possible, they too would leave an indelible mark on gardens and agriculture, often in the work of very famous individuals like George Washington Carver.  Carver, in fact, was my first real exposure to Black anything.  Yes, there are Black Canadians, and in fact we even have national historic sites dedicated to Black Canadians over yonder, but I did not grow up in any particular part of Ontario where I came across a Black person short of seeing a film clip of Martin Luther King Jr. marching across the bridge at Selma. 

When I was 12 we moved to southeastern Michigan, but perhaps in preparation to understand my new surroundings, my parents took me to the Henry Ford Museum and associated Greenfield Village.  At the time, there was an extensive exhibit on the work of Carver, along with a very excellent actor portraying the man in the next best thing to his flesh and blood presence.  Together with some of the people also on the tour, who happened to have dark skin, I saw my first Black people, and my impression was that they were pretty amazing with plants.  Since that time I have come to learn that no small portion of the agricultural prowess of this nation is in part to the work of men and women like Carver, and many of them, White or Black or whatever, have brought us to where we are today.  In spite of poverty, slavery, and denial to expensive formal education, these people, many from the "horrid, racist South" delivered to the rest of us from their situations complete gems. 

That said, gardening and agricultural history is still an unfurling topic of discovery for me.  Perhaps I should have become an ethno-botanist instead of the direct variety, but I find myself hungry as heck for an area of ethno-botany that does not get a lot of press these days, that of the common people of the South.  Yes, there are giant confederate flags painted on top of gas stations near airports in Atlanta and Memphis.  Yes, there are people who think that the world revolves around their little patch of free, white Alabama.  Guess what?  Those types also live in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and even (gasp) Southern California.  We ought never to throw out the blessings of an entire region because of a few dull stars out there in the human firmament.  In the meantime, I'm going to remain interested in Southerners like Elvis Presley and Jackie Robinson who helped to kick the crap out of the underlying racism in this country.  I'm going to remain curious about settlement patterns of Mississippi and Alabama by ordinary settlers not intent on setting up huge plantations or killing any Creek or Chocktaw in sight.  Finally, to quote Janisse Ray, I'm definitely going to be interested in gardens with subtropical elements and growing seasons that I absolutely drool in envy over. 

The South, you see, was saved not by some post-bellum Yankee restoration plan or home-grown politician trying to reclaim a ridiculous sense of false inheritance, but by the White, Black, or Native person next door. 

12 Years A Slave In Review

\Last post I promised some palm trees, and I do not intend to disappoint, but I would also like to serve up a review of a film I saw last night, namely 12 Years a Slave.  It's an incredible film with art direction that puts director Steve McQueen into the same artistic pantheon as Rossellini or Bergman and is a much needed dose of reality in an age when popular images of the plantation era are given off as something of slapstick racism at best or a romantic confession at worst.  As we celebrate the victory over chattel slavery won at Vicksburg and Gettysburg this very year, we ought to be mindful that such fighting was far from merely over some sick, twisted defense of States' rights.  Yes, there were many underlying causes of friction between Union and Confederacy, but ultimately, to claim that slavery was not the source and summit of cause for a nation being torn apart is a fundamental disrespect to a very painful and sacred chapter in the history of humanity.  

And oh yes, there are palm trees, and an absolutely incredible look at the American Southern landscape, or at least the low country therein.  In following the kidnapping and enslavement of freedman Solomon Northrup, the film takes us from the upper Hudson Valley in New York down to Washington (past an incredible shot of a human being made into property, fittingly, under the shadow of the temple of the United States Congress.  From then on we get to see quite a bit of the Deep South in low country Louisiana, complete with palms of the Sabal genus, magnolias, baldcypress (Taxodium Distichum), Live Oak (Quercus Virginiana), and an absolute TON of Spanish Moss (Tillandsia Usneoides).  Now normally, this is among the most lovely setting of vegetation anywhere on this earth.  Everything is green, lush, luxuriant, and yet not overly confining so as to create an overbearing jungle.  

A street somewhere in Beaufort, SC.  While this is a semi-cultivated landscape (I noticed that among ordinary neighborhoods gardens and planting were allowed to flow without a lot of pruning), you can tell from the trees and shrubs that neither canopy nor sky reign supreme on their own.  We will revisit the general concept in a later post.  Everything just looks organic, flowing, and relaxed really, like much of the South.

Yet for the most part in the film, McQueen has set out to have the camera fix on a focus and lighting that makes the whole thing look sickly and tired.  Instead of incredible drapes of moss, we see trees festered in it along with baldcypresses, tupelos, and magnolias that are defoliated and gangly.  This compliments the plantations where Solomon, now re-named Platt (which can mean, for Louisiana especially, flat in French or alternatively an old word for silver in English), gets pushed around to.  With the exception of Mr. Ford's manse, we hardly see grand, polished estates.  The houses are dirty, the interiors are sparse, and even the masters of the manor are looking a bit disheveled.  There are stomping forced dances rather than graceful ballrooms full of lovely dames and debonair gentlemen.  The whole set up does little to implore the viewer to lament the tragic romance of a soon-to-perish Antebellum South.  Once Mr. Ford is removed from the scene, any semblance of that lovely imaginary world vanishes, house, people, landscape, and all.  

But we did see a little bit of that in this film, which McQueen uses to great effect to prove a point.  Solomon gets treated well, the landscape looks a bit more inviting (even while things are in a swamp along the Red River and we see little of cotton picking, cane gathering, or other typical agricultural ventures).  We see the slaves clearing a little land, constructing buildings, even encountering some of the First Born who were wandering the last vestiges of what they could find before Europeans totally changed their world.  The action is that of exploration, encountering a new, albeit uninvited world.  Things look more exotic than sedate New York or distressingly urban Washington, and definitely more relieved than stressful slave market New Orleans.  We see a decent plantation with a well-mannered Ford and a true-to-form, if insensitive, lady of the house.  Solomon's talents are appreciated, and he sets into survival mode while also thinking about escape.  Overall, it seems as if things could be a lot worse.  We see construction and creation.  Feeling complacent?  We are reminded very sharply that for all his generosity of spirit and apparent gentility, Ford is still a slave owner who treats people as property.  As such, we also see our first overseers and start hearing "Nigger" almost every other line.

The swamps then start looking less luxuriant and more nauseous, those broad-limbed oaks start looking more like little other than convenient lynching posts, and the moss and palmettos start reminding us that this place is hot, uncomfortable, and malarial.  Moving on to the next plantations, we see less of a settlement with slavery-made-possible ornamentation and more of a series of work farms meant to use humans purely for profit.  Notably, in the shabby houses and clothing of the owners, we see very few fruits of such overwhelming profit, as if to say that even could slavery be economically justifiable, it simply has not fit the bill even then.  Speculatively, this makes one question just how much wealth really got passed around at the expense of an entire race.  We see a lot of labor, poverty even in the middle man plantation owners, and the fancy scenes of Gone With the Wind left only in the hands of a select few at the very top.  There is possible political commentary on present economic conditions here, but more than likely, this truly is reaching (this is slavery, a bit more intense than a wage issue...  right?)  Instead we go for less speculation and more reality and see that even the master of the house does not put on his Sunday best every day when things are 95 and dripping.  The house might afford a little mess during the cultivation periods.  See how many different ways things are already being twisted? 

If anything, that is what is supremely brilliant about this film.  Yes, we do see a lot of brutality and a cold bucket of water thrown at us in the face of a disconnect of 150 passing years of fading memory.  More so, however, we also see attempted justification for the rape of not just an entire people, but all peoples.  We get to see peace feelers trying to pave the road for a defeat for humanity.  Even when we see Patsy constantly dragged into the mud and slashed open within an inch of her life, completely broken and crying in some of the most emotionally honest acting ever seen...  we try to rationalize.  We can't though.  The music alone keeps reminding us that we are faced with something first and final about the way things are between people.  In the end we see one human being turn another one into something less than animal.  In the end, we have hope.  The moss looks graceful again and whitewash covers blemishes and dirt.  A man's soul stares into our own through eyes that should cause anyone truly humble to melt onto the floor.  My readers, go see this film.  Take your older children, or any children, that will understand even the mere difference between right and wrong.  I dare say it will awaken in all a new spirit of seeking understanding and exploration into not just North American, but human history in general and sympathy, if not empathy, for the suffering.  Would that there were films of this caliber for the other darker places in our continental history.  

In the meantime, check around here more frequently for a bit more of a look at the better side of the South.  If you do see the film, this might give you an appreciation for how McQueen managed to strip the veneer off the image.  After all, as God created her, the low country is a truly amazing place. 

Parks In The News: Three New National Monuments.

http://www.npca.org/news/media-center/press-releases/2013/national-parks-group-applauds-7.html

The United States now has 401 national park units!  President Obama designated them protected sites of national interest today.  Two of the sites help us to discover more of the heritage of Black people in the country, centered especially on the Civil War era.  The other gives Delaware something to finally put on the map.

Detroit, the Third-World City?

This post is something I have wanted to write for a long time.  I have taken nearly a week off from the blog preparing for it, or more so hesitating to write it, but the last few weeks have seen some, well, aggravating developments in a long line of blunders made by the Detroit City Council, coupled by yet more media attention lavished upon former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.  

In 1701, Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac was travelling up the Detroit river when he cast his eyes upon a length of short bluffs on the west bank of the river.  They were covered in towering beech-maple forests pierced by even grander White Pines and were surrounded by ash swamps absolutely loaded with beaver.  A defensible location approximately halfway into the Great Lakes teeming with fur bearing mammals featuring much milder winters than anything back in Quebec proper must have seemed like paradise to any resident of New France.  Cadillac thought so, for he founded a city here.  Fifty years later, it was to rival Montreal and New Orleans, the other two great cities of New France, in size.  In 1760 she changed hands, but not cultures.  Detroit remained a French-Canadian city into the early 19th century, and many residents in the metropolitan area still bear French last names, as do the city street names and grid pattern up and down the river on both banks.  Though not as immediately recognizable as a heart of Franco-North American heritage, Detroit has every right to lay claim to being a part of this history.  

Time and people have marched on.  Lured by the same promise of free land that attracted the first Canadians here, Americans came to the region, if not in the same great numbers that they flocked to newly minted Chicago.  Perhaps this was because Detroit and Michigan were north of the beaten path, and a little too close to Upper Canada for comfort.  Still, immigrants and escaped, later freed African Americans came to settle here throughout the 19th century.  Detroit was heard of a destination even in Mexico, and the city boasts one of the oldest Mexican communities in the northern United States, established now for over a century.  While she grew alongside the other great old cities of the Northeast and Great Lakes, she positively exploded when Henry Ford and other industrial innovators set up shop here in the early 20th century.  Ford and the other industrialists offered incredible opportunities, including high wages for even entrance-level factory workers and hiring policies that dismissed any notion of racial segregation.  

Even as the mansions of the wealthy sprang up to rival the finest estates in New England and New York, even as skyscrapers and a cityscape to rival New York and Chicago rose from the lit, paved streets laid out in a Parisian pattern, the ordinary Detroiters saw a piece of the pie and could afford comfortable lives of their own.  Relations with Canada had significantly warmed by the turn of the century, and while Detroit had once been off the beaten path, it was now an international gateway, one made even more prestigious by proximity to alcohol-loaded Ontario during a rather dry time in the United States.  Best of all, Detroit was, and remains, on a powerful corridor running from Chicago to Montreal, a corridor which is every bit as urban, wealthy, and sophisticated as the east coast of the United States.   By the second world war, she was the fourth largest city in the United States, and among the wealthiest.  48302, the zip code for Bloomfield, MI, in fact, is the second richest zip code in the country after 90210, made so not by celebrity but by the automobile.  

So what happened?

Why do people now associate Detroit with something far more grim?  Why do photographers come here only to take shots of urban decay and abandoned buildings that look as if they would have once been palaces and theatres to rival the sights in Vienna and Paris?  Why do people associate the name Detroit only with what is wrong in America?  When people think of the word they sometimes re-arrange the last two vowels to spell "riot".  Well, Detroit sure did have a riot to end all riots.

Black Day in July

It's a good video, so I thought I would provide a bigger link for it here than just a line leading to YouTube.  Gordon Lightfoot is a folk singer from central Ontario, a major influence on none other than Bob Dylan, and perhaps one of the finest bards on matters relating to the Great Lakes region.  

Detroit might have been a northern city of a great dream of economic and racial equality, but it was still paralyzed by racial tension that gripped far more than just the southern United States.  These days, the city has turned from a diverse population into one that is vastly Black, even as the ever-expanding suburbs have taken in that former diversity.  Non-institutional segregation has given way to a seeming exclusivity, but this is not the sole reason why Detroit has changed so much, no matter how many people want to blame a race for the downward slope of a once great city.  The wealth, power, development, and greatness just got so dispersed in the ever-expanding donut of the suburbs that it faded from view.  Who cares about a suburb, after all, if the city it satellites is a second string attraction?   Anyway...

What was that about race?  Better yet, what was that about racism?  Oh, and not just White on Black.  Black on White.  Everyone on everyone else.  We have had so much racial tension here since the 1920's that it is hard to posit a place where the madness began, but I am going to say that two people encapsulate just how divided and exclusionary the lifeblood of Detroit has become:

Coleman Young, first black mayor of Detroit and an emblem of reverse-racism.

Orville Hubbard, segregationist mayor of Dearborn and an emblem of overt racism. 

Young was the mayor of Detroit from 1974 to 1993, while Hubbard was the mayor of Dearborn from 1942 to 1978.  On first glance, why yes, these times are far, far too long to be dominating the politics of any governing body.  During Young's time as mayor, Detroit shrank in population by well over half, became known as the murder and arson capital of the United States, and presided over city-councils dominated by pro-Black segregationists and some of the most corrupt civic leaders, well, anywhere in the world.  He personally fought to racially integrate the city's civil services and was committed to a crusade against racism, at least as he defined it.  Most baby-boomers and older residents of the metro area consider him to be the worst thing to ever happen to Detroit.  More neutral viewers of history consider him to be a man who did not try to veil his opinions and could hardly be blamed for just how volatile and dangerous the situation of the city became during his time in office.  His motto might best be summed up as "integration and social-equality at all costs, <expletive>".

Hubbard, on the other hand, was determined to keep his neighboring city of Dearborn out of the hands of what he deemed to be forces that were killing Detroit, and yes, he very much disliked integration of Whites and Blacks.  Ironically, Dearborn has since become a largely Arab-American city and largely added to the multiculturalism of the metro area.  Whereas Young's intentions might at least be debatable, Hubbard's were never in question; he openly detested anyone who was Black.  His motto might best be summed up as "keep your Black <expletive> out of my city."

So who do you think is talked about more when thinking about the history of the metro area?  Young.  Hubbard hardly even gets a mention, which is pretty sad.  When suburbanites see abandoned neighborhoods, long deceased businesses and factories, crumbling churches and overgrown parks, they decry the remaining residents of the city rather than think back on what might have been had they, you know, stayed and worked things out.  When city residents look out at the suburbs and look around again at their own neighborhoods, and I say this from personal experience in working in the city of Detroit, I have seen many look at the situation as if it were inevitable, and even inescapable because of race, rather than, you know, try to make a better city.  It does not help when much of the city and county leadership is corrupt beyond the dictionary definition of the word.

I simply tell all of these "historians" the same message.  It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with attitude.  Race is simply an excuse.  A powerful excuse, if the history of the world has anything to say about it, but an excuse.  Detroit is no longer French-Canadian.  Do I blame my own race for this downfall?  No.  Does this seem ludicrous to us now?  Indeed it does.  Back in the 18th century though, it would have been the talk of the town.  The change in power and hands of one group into another would have been discussed as "only natural, seeing as how Catholics and Frenchmen at that hate liberty, modern advancement, and true, English (or later, American) civilization".  

So what about the title?  Is Detroit simply a third-world city and a scary place full of "those people"?  Take a look at the scene below and tell me this is a slum and not a modern North American city:

No.  Detroit has gone through some rough patches, and (especially in our older generations) is still a bit overburdened by racial tension, or more so, the racial excuse.  There are some rather scary areas, but then there are scary areas in Los Angeles and New York as well.  We also have so many amazing things about us  too.  Come by next post for a better look on what Detroit actually is, and even better, what it can become.