"COMBAHEE RIVER RAID"

 COMBAHEE RIVER RAID”

Last week during our time at Tybee Island, we took time to visit the historical marker at the Combahee River, riding over the Harriet Tubman Memorial Bridge, to cross the River.  I posted photos and a short narrative about Harriet Tubman’s leading Union soldiers to make a raid on Confederate rice plantations and to free as many enslaved people as possible.  After that posting, several people thanked me for it and also expressed surprise about this raid.  In the raid, Tubman actually freed more enslaved people than she had in all her trips down South during the 1850’s.

In light of that surprise, I want to go into a bit more detail and encourage you to read more about it on your own.  It is one of the many sagas of Tubman’s life, a life filled with courage, risk, danger, and liberation.  The best version of the River Raid is Edda L. Fields-Black’s “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War.”  It won the Pulitzer Prize last year.

After a decade of leading people to freedom in the decade of the 1850’s, Tubman signed up to work for the Union after the Civil War began.  She worked as a spy, scout, nurse, and cook, and then she was assigned to Port Royal, South Carolina in 1862 to work with people who had formerly been enslaved.  Port Royal was part of the Beaufort, South Carolina area, and it had been captured by Union troops in 1861.  The white planters had fled, leaving behind 10,000 newly freed people.  Tubman was assigned to work with them and begin to help them acclimate to life as free people.  All of this work was called the Port Royal Experiment, in which the Union wanted to see how easily formerly enslaved people could transfer into freedom.

The Union Army leaders quickly saw Tubman’s extraordinary abilities, even though she was illiterate.  They asked her if she would be willing to continue her role as a spy in enemy territory.  She agreed to do it, and she left the relative safe territory of Port Royal and went to islands and even inland to make contact with people still held in slavery, as well as to pick up information on the movements of the Confederate army.  Though she had some trouble understanding the language of the Gullah based people held in slavery there, her innate intelligence and skills soon helped her relate to those still held in slavery.

During this time, she came up with a plan that had several purposes:  a guerilla raid on the mainland to free enslaved people and to destroy the crops of the white planters, to give the Black Union soldiers experience in facing off with the Confederate army, and to be used as a weapon of terror for the Confederacy:  the Black Union soldiers were invading white territory and freeing enslaved people, while destroying crops and plantations.  The Union commanders were skeptical at first, but Tubman and Union colonel James Montgomery, who was trained in guerilla warfare, convinced the leaders to try it.  Montgomery would lead the 300 Black troops, while Tubman would provide the intelligence and guide the boats up the Combahee River.  Tubman then spent time as a spy in the area around the river, alerting the enslaved people that a possible escape was on the way – they should be ready to go on a moment’s notice.  The notice that it was time to go:  the steam whistles of the Union boats blowing several times.

On June 2, 1863, three Union boats went up the Combahee River and landed near the place where the ferry crossed the river.  The steam whistles blew, and in short order, enslaved people poured out of the woods, acting like the Hebrews leaving quickly from Egypt.  Tubman’s friend and first biographer Sarah Bradford recorded Tubman’s narrative in 1869, and here is part of it:

“I nebber see such a sight. We laughed, an' laughed, an' laughed. Here you'd see a woman wid a pail on her head, rice a smokin' in it jus' as she'd taken it from de fire, young one hangin' on behind, one han' roun' her forehead to hold on, t'other han' diggin' into de rice-pot, eatin' wid all its might; hold of her dress two or three more; down her back a bag with a pig in it. One woman brought two pigs, a white one an' a black one; we took 'em all on board; named de white pig named Beauregard and the black pig named Jeff Davis.  Sometimes de women would come wid twins hangin' roun' der necks; 'appears like I never see so many twins in my life; bags on der shoulders, baskets on der heads, and young ones taggin' behin', all loaded; pigs squealin', chickens screamin', young ones squallin'.”  Tubman later told another interviewer that it reminded her of the story of the children of Israel fleeing Egypt.

Tubman and the Union army freed at least 735 people that day – it was chaotic and dangerous and stunning.  Tubman had led a raid that stabbed at the heart of the Confederacy – freeing their enslaved people and destroying the rice plantations (which the Africans had taught the white people to grow).  Less than a month later, the Union Army drove the Confederates back at Gettysburg, and Grant captured Vicksburg (and my hometown of Helena), giving the Union control of most of the Mississippi River.  Tubman also put the idea of guerilla warfare into the minds of the Union generals.  Two years later General Sherman would employ much of the same tactics as he led the March to the Sea in Georgia.

Tubman was extraordinary in all that she did, and we should honor her and give thanks for her magnificent witness.  Yet, we dishonor her if we lift her so high that we lose sight of her ordinary beginnings as an illiterate, enslaved woman on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.  She had cunning and courage for sure, but her story reminds us that we can do some of that too.  In these days of the sewage of the Trumpster flowing over the land, we will need to find ways to tap into that cunning and courage of Harriet Tubman.  May she be our North Star in these troubled days

"MORE HOPEFUL WORK"

 “MORE HOPEFUL WORK”

In these days when there are so many terrible and dispiriting events around us, I want to focus this week on some great work in a terrible place.  One of the unintended consequences of the Voting Rights Act and the end of neo-slavery was the mass incarceration that followed, including the huge uptick in the arrest, incarceration and conviction of Black people, especially Black men.  If we could not keep Black men down by preventing them from voting, we decided to keep them down by using the criminal legal system as a way to do it.  In 1965, the USA incarcerated 109 people per 100,000 population.  In 2024, that had increased to an astounding 580 per 100,000 – by far the highest rate in the world.  

When I was doing prison reform work for the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons in the early 1980’s, we operated on the premise that if we could demonstrate how much it cost to keep people incarcerated, then perhaps some of the conservative people who defended the incarceration system so strongly would change their minds and join us in seeking reform.  What we learned in that work, however, was that the white supremacy that undergirded the incarceration system was so deep that the cost of incarceration was not relevant to the issue.  That was a hard lesson, but it helped us to understand better how mass incarceration developed.

One of the people whom I met in that work in the 1980’s was John Cole Vodicka, who was then the Louisiana director for the Southern Coalition.  He remains one of the best organizers on incarceration issues whom I have ever met.  He and spouse Dee and Caroline and I became friends in those days, and we have remained friends ever since.  John and Dee have lived in Athens, Georgia, since 2018 to be near their children and grandchildren.  Since he has been in Athens, John and Steve Williams have started a Courtwatch and Bail Fund, in which they and other volunteers attend court in Athens to observe how defendants are treated.  In this work, they have helped their church to found the Oconee Street United Methodist (OSUMC) Bail Initiative, which seeks to help people to get out of jail while awaiting adjudication of their charges.  In his fine occasional blog called “Bearing Witness,” John shared this info about their bail program:  

“Typically, the OSUMC Community Bail Initiative tries to keep an eye out for pretrial prisoners who remain in our jail because they are without any monetary resources. Twenty-seven times now we've posted bonds as low as $1.  The highest bonds we've posted thus far were when I handed over $670 to the ACC sheriff's office to first spring Antonio C. from pretrial captivity in August 2022, then another $670 in January 2024 to get Louis P. out of jail.  In October 26, 2024, we posted $670 on behalf of Latif A., who until his bond was reduced to $500 spent 271 days of pretrial confinement in our jail. Since June 2021, we've gotten 157 men and women out of jail or off probation. We’ve also purchased 11 one-way bus tickets for people we’ve bailed out so they can leave Athens and return to family or friends elsewhere. Far more than half of those we’ve bailed out were homeless.  Many were essentially living hand-to-mouth, some with mental health diagnoses, others hounded by alcohol and/or drug-related issues.  Most were locked up after allegedly committing misdemeanor nuisance crimes or drug-related felony offenses.  As a result of their marginalization in our community, and their poverty, these women and men spent a combined 5,437 days in our jail before their cash bonds were posted or bus tickets purchased.”  

    John and his colleagues do such great work that the state of Georgia passed a law in 2024 that severely limited the ability of non-profit organizations to bail people out of jail.  SB 63 was signed into law by Gov. Brian Kemp in May 2024, and the law took effect on July 1, 2024.  Among other things, SB 63 prohibited charitable organizations—including faith communities—from posting bonds for more than three persons per year.   John and Steve joined forces with Barred Business to sue in federal court to stop the law from being enforced in Georgia. They were able to obtain a preliminary injunction on July 12, 2024 from U.S. District Judge Victoria Calvert.  The state appealed that decision to the Eleventh Circuit, and last week, a three-judge panel heard the case.  They should decide the case in the next few months, and if there is any justice at all, the Eleventh Circuit will strike down this unconstitutional law.

    So, I give thanks for John and Steve and their colleagues who do such fine and fundamental work.  If you would like to know more, contact John at johncvodicka@gmail.com. And, if you’d like to make a contribution towards their work, send it to John at 92 Brooklyn Rd., Athens, GA 30306, made out to “OSUMC Bail Fund.”  You’ll be glad that you did.  

"IS NEO-SLAVERY DEAD?"

 “IS NEO-SLAVERY DEAD?”

Last week I wrote about the Voting Rights Bill of 1965 finally bringing an end to neo-slavery, which had replaced slavery after 1880.  And, for 40 years, that end of neo-slavery looked to be the holding.  The Voting Rights Act (VRA) had strong support on both sides of the political aisle.  The “preclearance” clause of the VRA had to be renewed every five years, just in case the racism of the white South had suddenly disappeared.  It was renewed every 5 years, and indeed, in 2006 under a Republican-led Congress with Republican President George W. Bush, the VRA was extended for 25 years.  It looked good for the advancement of voting rights for all citizens.

In 2005, however, President George W. Bush appointed John Roberts to be the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, replacing the retiring William Rehnquist.  One of Roberts’ specific goals was to strike down the VRA, because he felt that it was unconstitutional, especially the “preclearance” clause of  VRA.  This goal of Roberts’ came despite the fact that SCOTUS had ruled in favor of the VRA.  I’m grateful to my friend and colleague Joe Ingle for pointing out Jamelle Bouie’s excellent column on Roberts and his history with VRA in the August 6 New York Times.  I won’t repeat that column here, but it was very helpful background on this issue.  If you haven’t read it, check it out.  If you can’t find it and want access, let me know, and I’ll get it to you.

The election of Barack Obama as President in 2008 scared the clothes off of many white people in the country.  As valuable and powerful as it was to many of us, to many people classified as “white,” it was an abomination.  Remember Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the time saying that the main goal of Republicans  was to deny Barack Obama a second term as President?  That was not just a political statement.  It also welled up from that deep reservoir of white supremacy that courses through American history.  Then, in 2010, the Tea Party emerged in opposition to Obama and racial equity, and by the middle of the decade, it had morphed into MAGA, with Donald Trump as its standard bearer.  

In 2012, the perfect case for Roberts came along.  Shelby County, Alabama (not far from Birmingham), sued in federal court to strike the preclearance clause of the VRA, indicating that with the election of a Black president, that clause was no longer needed.  The federal judge who heard the case upheld the VRA, as did the federal appellate court, but then Shelby County appealed to SCOTUS.  In 2012, SCOTUS agreed to hear the case.  Roberts and his buddies on the court (Scalia, Thomas, Alito, and Anthony Kennedy) argued against the 2006 action of Congress to renew the VRA for 25 years.  They railed against the “preclearance” clause, especially because it was aimed only at particular states that had demonstrated racial bias in the past in their suppression of voting rights.  To no one’s surprise but to the chagrin of many of us, SCOTUS overturned the preclearance clause of VRA but left the rest of the VRA intact.  

That decision has caused many problems for voting rights in the country.  The current shenanigans of the Texas legislature would be virtually impossible with the “preclearance” clause still intact.  All of the voter purges in Georgia and other states would not be possible.  The strict laws on who can vote when and even on voter IDs would not be possible.

So, let’s be clear here – the purpose of MAGA and SCOTUS at this point is to get back as closely as possible to the pre-1965 days, when white supremacy had enough strength to make neo-slavery viable again.  As Bouie points out in his NYT column, SCOTUS has agreed to take another case for its next term:  Louisiana v. Callais, in which redistricting most Black voters into just one district (out of 6 districts) is in dispute.  Since SCOTUS ruled in 2019 that gerrymandering and redistricting is a legitimate political process, it seems clear that another pillar of the VRA will likely be struck down.  If that happens, the VRA is dead, and neo-slavery may be on the way back.  

How can we prevent this?  Well, the answer is both simple and complex:  register to vote, get others registered to vote, and then VOTE while we still can.  In the 2024 Presidential election won by Donald Trump over Kamala Harris, TEN MILLION people who voted Democratic in the 2020 election did not vote.  Two million of those may have voted for Trump in 2024, but there were eight million other voters who stayed home.  That staying home clearly cost Harris the Presidency and gave us the disaster that is the Trumpster.  If we do that again in 2026, democracy is lost and neo-slavery is back.  So, you know the answer.

"THE END OF NEO-SLAVERY"

 “THE END OF NEO-SLAVERY”

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the end of neo-slavery in the United States.  On August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed into law the Voting Rights Act, which effectively ended neo-slavery in the USA.  This law ratified the right to vote expressed in the 14th and 15th amendments, and it provided for federal oversight of all elections, and required federal preclearance for all changes in voting rights laws, especially in the South.  The political gymnastics being performed currently in the Texas legislature gerrymandering would have been greatly slowed down by the original wording of the Voting Rights Act, but some of its provisions were struck down by the current SCOTUS in 2012 and 2021 (more on that next week).

And, yes, the most litigated amendment to the Constitution is the 14th Amendment, which basically does four things:  guarantees citizenship to anyone born or naturalized in the US (Trump is litigating that now); forbids states from interfering with the citizenship rights guaranteed by the Constitution; provides for due process under the law; and provides for equal protection of all citizens under the law.  With all of this work accomplished in the 14th Amendment, it is easy to see why it is the most litigated amendment of all in the Constitution. In one of those July blessings that I mentioned last week, it was ratified on July 9, 1868.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 grew out of the 14th Amendment, and it sought to protect the voting rights of all citizens.  In that sense, it ended neo-slavery in the USA, especially in the South.  I say “neo-slavery” because that it is a much more accurate description of life in the South from 1875-1965 than “Jim Crow.”  The term “Jim Crow” mitigates the horror that Black people experienced growing up in the white-dominated South, and “neo-slavery” should replace it in the history books as a description of race history in that period. To use the term “Jim Crow” as a description of this period is to diminish the reality of the horrible repression and oppression of those years.

     I learned this term from Doug Blackmon’s fine book “Slavery by Another Name,” (which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009), in which he argues that neo-slavery ended in 1946 at the end of World War II.  I remember Doug coming to Oakhurst to talk with our Supper Club about his book, and he made a very powerful presentation about his thesis that the years 1875-1945 were just “slavery by another name,” hence the title of his book. Although I learned a lot from his book, I do have one disagreement with his timetable on “neo-slavery.” From my experience growing up in the neo-slavery South from 1946-1964, the power of neo-slavery was still so strong in those years that “neo-slavery” should remain as the description for the years up to 1965, not 1946.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 had a profound effect on life in the South, as evidenced by the rapid increase of Black people elected to office.  It had a long and difficult history, and its importance was shown in the deep resistance of Southern white Democrats leading up to its passage.  Perhaps only a skilled white Southern politician like President Lyndon Johnson could get it passed, and even he was reluctant to bring it to the floor of the Senate, where it originated.  The civil rights marches from Selma to Montgomery changed the directory of that arc bending towards justice.  The march on March 7, 1965, that ended in police violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge exploded into the national consciousness (see Ava Duvernay’s movie “Selma” for more background on this).  A second march on March 21 drew great participation, and President Johnson scheduled it for a vote in the Senate, where his arm-twisting overcame a filibuster. There is a great photo of Johnson corralling his longtime friend Sen. Richard Russell of Georgia, seeking to get his vote for the bill. Johnson was not successful with Russell, but he was successful with enough Senators that the bill passed and was sent to the House, where it passed overwhelmingly.  As Johnson noted, his embrace of the Voting Rights Act meant one other great change in the South – a switch of Southern white voters moving from the Democratic party to the Republican party.

The Voting Rights Act was one of the signal achievements of the Civil Rights movement and of American history.  Its effect was so deep and powerful that the resistance has been great since its passage, and indeed, SCOTUS has significantly weakened it over the last decade, seeking to allow white people to limit voting rights by people of color as severely as possible.  The Trumpster movement is built on this white resistance to the idea that “all people are created equal,” and his push to get Texas to gerrymander even further before the 2026 midterm elections is an indication that he wants to hold the white majority in the House in order to further return us to a time of white supremacy and maybe even neo-slavery.  As the history on the Voting Rights Act shows us, this repressive and oppressive stream runs deeply in us and through us.  We’ll look more closely at this history and its present status next week, but in the meantime, please re-train yourself to talk about “neo-slavery” rather than “Jim Crow.” And, take it out into the streets.