Janelle Monáe – “Cold War” Live @ Outside Lands in San Francisco | Video
August 17, 2010 by Verse
I personally can’t get enough of this song!
This weekend Janelle Monáe performed at the Outside Lands 2 day festival on the main stage as well as a more intimate performance where she delivered this rendition of her current single “Cold War” from her debut album The Archandroid which is out now.
Idi Amin Died Today; Watch “General Idi Amin Dada” (Portrait of A Dictator)
Today in history… Idi Amin Dada, the military dictator and President of Uganda from 1971 to 1979, died August 16th, 2003, in Saudi Arabia, where he’d been living in exile since 1979. Most are likely most familiar with Forest Whitaker’s interpretation of Amin, in the 2006 film, The Last King of Scotland, for which he earned an Academy Award.
But if I may instead/also direct your attention to director Barbet Schroeder’s 1974 documentary on Amin, titled, General Idi Amin Dada, made while he was very much at the height of his power. Schroeder was given unprecedented access to the dictator, who was influential in the making of the film, but it’s far from propaganda material.
It’s worth reading up on how the project came together. The Criterion Collection blog has an essay on the film which you can read HERE, before or after you watch the full 90-minute documentary, which I embedded below:
2010 WABASH PRIZE FOR POETRY
Final Judge: JANE HIRSHFIELD
Judge: JANE HIRSHFIELD
Prize: $1000
Now Accepting Submissions
First Prize: $1000 and winning entry published in Winter/Spring 2011 issue
GUIDELINES FOR SUBMISSIONS
Deadline: October 1, 2010
1. For each submission, send up to three poems.
2. A $15 reading fee (check or money order) payable to Sycamore Review must accompany each submission. The reading fee includes a copy of the prize issue.
3. Additional poems (beyond the initial three) may be included. Increase the reading fee $5 for each additional poem.
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Send 2010 Wabash Prize for Poetry submissions and reading fee to:
2010 Wabash Prize for Poetry
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Writer's Digest Popular Fiction AwardsAlso, check out the winners of the 2nd Annual Writer's Digest Popular Fiction Awards. Winners were listed in the August 2007 issue of Writer's Digest. Click here for a full list of winners. -->
A Short Story Competition from Writer's Digest
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The Grand Prize-Winner will receive a trip to the Writer's Digest Conference in New York City, $2,500 cash, $100 worth of Writer's Digest Books and the 2011 Novel & Short Story Writer's Market.
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The Teacher's Voice Poetry Contest
2010 Poetry Contest1st Prize: $150 Book Award
2nd Prize: $100 Book Award
3rd Prize: $50 Book AwardReading/Contest Fee: $10
Extended Deadline: September 4th, 2010All winners and as many contestants as possible
will be published online in a congratulatory issue
dedicated to new, beginning, and emerging unpublished poets.An editorial board of writers & educators will judge the work.
Submissions will be accepted from only unpublished poets:
prior publication in school or local community publications is acceptable.
Those connected with the production of The Teacher’s Voice are not eligible.
We accept simultaneous submissions and will consider all submissions for publication
Guidelines: All styles & aesthetics are welcome, but the poems must reflect on teaching
and/or education in the United States or abroad. Please submit up to three poems, any
length, along with SASE for notification of contest results. Include a check or money order
for $10.00($2 for each extra poem).Your name should appear only on a separate page with the
title of each poem, along with mailing and email addresses. We shred and recycle all
work not used unless a SASE is included.Poetry Contest
The Teacher's Voice
P.O. Box 150384
Kew Gardens, NY 11415
Stephen G. Hall. A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xv + 334 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3305-6; $22.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8078-5967-4.
Richard M. Reid. Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina's Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. xvii + 420 pp. Illustrations, maps. $40.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8078-3174-8.
Crandall A. Shifflett, ed. John Washington's Civil War: A Slave Narrative. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. xxxiii + 106 pp. $36.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8071-3301-9; $16.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8071-3302-6.
Reviewed by Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie (Howard University)
Published on H-CivWar (August, 2010)
Commissioned by Martin JohnsonSlaves, Soldiers, and Scholars
Once upon a time, U.S. historians happily examined slavery without slaves, the American Civil War without black troops, and nineteenth-century historiography without African American historians. Such oversights have become increasingly unacceptable over the past two generations. Today, few historians examine slavery without paying serious attention to the enslaved, while slave narratives have moved from the periphery of abolitionist propaganda to U.S. literary classics. Scholars interested in the military history of the American Civil War usually view it as a war involving three types of soldiers--Unionist blue, Confederate grey, and United States Colored Troops (USCT) blue--with the latter deemed indispensable to the outcome of the conflict. Indeed, one persuasive assumption is that the Confederacy was doomed to defeat precisely because it could not employ black troops to support, fight, and defend a new slave-based nation in the making. The recent rise of the black intellectual in the public arena has sent scholars scurrying back into the past to seek the origins of black scholarship. This is no doubt fueled by the existence of a successful class of black intellectuals working and producing in the academy. The reasons for this transformation are harder to agree upon, although one would have to point to the rise of social history, the multicultural dream of modern America, and the scholars’ hope of creating a more complete picture of the nation’s past. These three books by Crandall Shifflett, Richard Reid, and Stephen Hall provide a useful gauge with which to measure how far we have come since those “happy” days. They also suggest how much more work there is to be done.
Since 1776, there have appeared over two hundred book-length autobiographies of former slaves published in the English-speaking Atlantic world. The primary objective of the slave narrative was to challenge and refute proslavery justifications for the continuation of the American institution of slavery. Its zenith was the antebellum era of the 1830s through the 1860s. The major producers of this challenge were former slaves who had escaped from the Southern prison of slavery and provided first-hand accounts of both its egregious horrors as well as its more subtle human indignities. The image of the contented slave took a battering from the onslaught of ex-slaves’ public testimony to American barbarism. Former slaves continued to publish their memoirs long after the legal abolition of U.S. slavery in 1865. John Washington’s “Memorys of the Past” written in 1872 was one such example.
Washington was born in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on May 20, 1838. His early childhood, with its rural play, church meetings, corn shucking, harvest-time, and Christmas celebrations, was “most plasant” (p. 1). Recent scholarship suggests that Washington’s recollections are more useful as a means of appreciating rituals of slave communal life around family, church, festivals, etc., rather than buttressing the old proslavery view of the contented slave. As a young boy, he learned his letters, a formidable challenge in a society in which it was illegal for slaves to be literate. The early 1850s passed “in the usual routine of Slave life with its Many sorrows and fears and fiting [sic] hopes of Escape to Freedom” (p. 27). In 1860, Washington was hired out to work in a tobacco factory in Fredericksburg where he “learned the art of preparing Tobacco for the mill” (p. 29). Two years later, he was working as a steward and “bar-keeper” at the Shakespear House. After the town was captured by Union troops in the spring of 1862, Washington worked for the Union army as a guide and a general’s orderly. He eventually moved to Washington DC where he labored as a stevedore, liquor factory bottler, and house painter, while his wife Annie worked as a dressmaker. By 1880, the couple had raised five sons. Washington may have relocated to Boston where his son William lived because he died in Massachusetts in 1918, at the age of eighty.
One of the surprises about this edition of Washington’s slave narrative is its editor. Crandall Shifflett, a history professor at Virginia Tech University, is best known for his studies of postbellum tobacco Virginia and the Appalachia coal region.[1] He is not known for writing on the slave experience. During the early 1990s, however, Professor Shifflett came across Washington’s memoir. It had been microfilmed at some point and left to gather dust in the Library of Congress. The excitement of making this discovery was enhanced by the fact that it involved an individual in a geographical area with which the historian had personal connections.
Professor Shifflett is to be commended for providing us with another slave narrative. He is right with regard to the memoir’s historical significance: it bears “eyewitness from the slave’s point of view” (p. xii). His reproduction of Washington’s hand-drawn map and its redrawing is very useful, and I hope to use it with my students as an example of slaves’ creativity. Finally, the history of this edition’s production is quite interesting. David Blight’s A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped To Freedom, Including Their Own Narratives of Emancipation (2007) includes Washington’s memoir. According to Professor Shifflett, the claim by various reviewers thatProfessor Blight discovered the memoir, together with the Massachusetts Historical Society’s refusal to release any of Washington’s additional materials except to the New York Times, a literary agent, and Professor Blight, constitutes foul play. This tension is less important than what we might learn from Washington’s experiences.
There are some problems with Professor Shifflet’s edition. Washington’s memoir runs thirty-nine pages; yet the editor’s comments that follow upon each chapter are nearly twice as long. Their usefulness is overridden by too many local details on Fredericksburg and Civil War military history, topics that interest the editor but obviously held much less relevance for Washington, let alone those interested in the slave narrative genre. A good example is chapter 8, “First Night of Freedom”: Washington’s memoir runs seven pages and details his welcoming of Union troops, his work for them, and, interestingly, the hesitancy of some slaves to join Union lines; yet the editor’s comments run to thirteen pages devoted largely to Fredericksburg’s occupation, military campaigning in Virginia, and biographies of local politicians and army officers.
Moreover, because he is not an historian of the slave experience, the editor uses dated sources for important topics such as the slave community, Nat Turner, slave psychology, hired slave workers in tobacco factories, slave songs, slave workers in Confederate armies, etc. Professor Shifflett also makes some questionable assertions. The description of Turner’s revolt as “infamous” (p. 5) seems a little incongruous for the editor of a slave narrative. Washington’s recollections do not demonstrate “gloating” over freedom, but rather how fundamental such a condition was to him and no doubt to others like him (p. 75). The editor might be right that “Many slaves did believe that Union soldiers were ‘devils’ come to devour them and their children” (p. 44), but where is the supporting evidence? Moreover, Professor Shifflett’s lack of familiarity with a rich historiography means that he misses some obvious points. Some recent historians’ emphasis on work as being the central experience of slavery is challenged by Washington’s memoir because work merits occasional rather than constant comment.[2] Washington’s “first great Sorrow” was witnessing the domestic slave trade with “Men, Women and children and all Marched off to be Sold South, away from all that was near and dear to them” (p. 11). His vivid recollection of such cruel familial separations resembles those of elderly former slaves in Virginia interviewed during the 1930s who also never forgot those times.[3] These memories also cast serious doubt on the reach of paternalist relations into former slaves’ lives argued in the editor’s first book.[4]
These latter points highlight the edition’s greatest drawback. Washington is individualized when his life story reveals so much more about the collective nature of enslavement and the struggle for freedom. For instance, his repeated comments regarding slaves escaping to Union lines gets some comment from the editor but require much more serious treatment of this vital component of freedom’s experience during the Civil War. Instead, Washington is constantly pushed back into his locality rather than that locality being drawn upon as a means to engage the broader experience of slaves and freedom struggles.
About the same time that Washington joined invading Union troops in 1862, black men began to join Union armies throughout occupied parts of the American South. After the passage of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in January and the creation of the Bureau of Colored Troops in May 1863, free blacks and slaves enlisted en masse. By the end of the American Civil War, around 179,000 black men had served in the Union army and about 18,000 in the Union navy.
The first chroniclers of these black soldiers were contemporary abolitionists. They not only praised their valiant exploits, but they rarely missed an opportunity to link blacks’ military service with the path to citizenship. Freedom’s first generation pursued this linkage through the first scholarly treatments of black troops in William Wells Brown’s The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (1867), George Washington Williams’ A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865 (1888), and Joseph T. Wilson’s The Black Phalanx: A History of the Negro Soldiers of the United States in the Wars of 1775-1812 and 1861-65 (1888). Outside of the quietude of the library, black veterans kept their deeds alive through local commemorative meetings as well as the establishment of black militia companies in the U.S. South.[5] While rusty swords were hung up, the pen scribbled as veterans published memoirs praising the courage and resolution of black troops. Christian Fleetwood’s The Negro as a Soldier (1895), James Shaw’s Our Last Campaign (1905), and Memoirs of Freeman S. Bowley (1906) all deliberately celebrated the national service of black troops at a time when black men were losing their civil rights through Southern states’ disfranchisement policies and the establishment of segregated and unequal public services. These fin de siècle memoirs used the past to challenge contemporary iniquities. Many of them are accessible in microfilm alongside John Washington’s slave narrative at the Library of Congress.
Over the last several decades, there has been a serious scholarly effort to reevaluate the role of black troops during the American Civil War. The major contributors include Dudley Taylor Cornish, Joseph T. Glatthar, Edwin S. Redkey, Noah Andre Trudeau, Keith Wilson, and members of the Freedmen’s Southern Society Project led by editor-in-chief Ira Berlin. Their work has helped us understand black troops’ military contributions, wartime experiences, nascent struggles for civil equality, and constructions of masculinity. This revisionism has also taken more public forms. In 1989, Edward Zeick’s film Glory dramatized the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment to great critical acclaim. A decade later, a monument memorializing the USCT was unveiled on U Street in Washington DC. In short, black troops are now at the very center of the military exploits of the American Civil War.
Enter Richard Reid, associate professor of history at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada. The previous editor of a regional study on nineteenth-century Canada,[6] Dr. Reid surprisingly provides the first state study of African American soldiers in the Union army. Union army incursions into the eastern part of North Carolina by early 1862 unsettled the institution of slavery and encouraged many slaves to seek out federal lines. Once Washington realized that fugitive slaves constituted a very powerful military weapon in their war against secessionist states, black regiments were authorized. Dr. Reid provides a very readable narrative of this process. Nearly six thousand mostly rural slaves between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight were organized into four regiments. The 1st North Carolina Colored Volunteers, 2nd North Carolina Colored Volunteers, 3rd North Carolina Colored Volunteers, and 1st North Carolina Colored Heavy Artillery were subsequently turned into the 35th, 36th, and 37th Colored Infantry and the 14th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery respectively, and represented the state between 1863 and 1866. White officers from Massachusetts led them because thirteen white regiments served in North Carolina after the Union invasion, the Bay State’s governor John Andrew supported the use of black troops, and white soldiers saw an opportunity for fast-track promotion. These regiments provide the basis for the structure of Freedom for Themselves. The first chapter covers the organization and training of these four black regiments. The following four chapters provide narrative accounts of each regiment, emphasizing their mobilization, combat operations, fatigue duties, Reconstruction service, and demobilization. The last three chapters focus on the civilian experience of these black soldiers, especially the wartime experiences of their families, their service in the postwar South, and their experience as veterans in a defeated region, a point often lost in discussions of triumphant black troops returning to Northern states. The attention to communities off the battlefield is an important component of the new historiography on Civil War soldiers.
The book’s documentary sources are military records, roster lists, military description books, and morning reports located at the National Archives. Reid has unearthed some fine illustrations of black soldiers and veterans and white officers, while the bibliography lists major works on the USCT. It represents a serious research effort for a scholar who has not written on the topic before and is certainly to be recommended as a useful reading list on black troops for graduate students.
One of the major objectives of Freedom for Themselves is to narrate the “spectrum of black military experiences and changing white responses” (p. xiii), and it succeeds admirably. Thus, the 37th Colored Infantry was beset with organizational and operational difficulties unlike the 35th and 36th Colored Infantry regiments, while the 14th U.S. Colored Heavy Artillery was never prepared for combat. The artillerymen served as a regulated labor force for which they received little acknowledgement, while the three infantry regiments battled and skirmished in South Carolina and Florida, winning great praise for their martial efforts. Demobilization differed for each regiment. The wartime experience of the families of black soldiers varied enormously. On the other hand, there were some significant similarities. The refugee camps were harsh places for soldiers’ families--just as refugee camps are today several months after Haiti’s devastating earthquake. Most black soldiers faced the usual military routine of tedium and fatigue duty, although they were probably doing more of the latter than white troops. Black veterans no doubt shared the belief that they had won freedom for themselves as well as comparable difficulties facing them in a defeated Southern state.
There are a few errors. The number of black sailors in the Union Navy was double Dr. Reid’s total of 9,500 (p. xii), while his claim of “dozens” of black soldiers murdered by Confederate troops at Fort Pillow in 1864 is a serious underestimate (p. 357). More important, the success of Freedom for Themselves raises a number of questions. Where do we go from here? Will more state and regimental histories round out our knowledge or just get us bogged down in more and more minute case studies? Does this study of 4 out of 179 USCT regiments mean that we now have 175 to go? Also, while the attention to Northern white engagement with Southern black slave soldiers and its transformation from skepticism to belief works well, less successful is Dr. Reid’s analysis of the interaction between Northern free black soldiers and Southern slave soldiers. This topic deserves much more attention because it gets at regional diversity, community formation, and questions of leadership often assumed rather than examined. Finally, what about the question of black soldiers who deserted their regiments? Dr. Reid touches on this point (pp. 166, 263, 274), but it deserves far more attention precisely because it provides a fundamental challenge to the hallmark of black troop historiography, namely loyal blacks in blue.
Moreover, for all its research and diversity, Dr. Reid’s work still rests on the unquestioned assumption that fugitive slaves had to be attracted to federal lines before they would fight against slavery. This ignores not only their resistance as slaves exemplified in Washington’s memoir, but also the revolutionary significance of their flight as self-emancipators en masse who made it clear to the Washington political and military establishment that their mass actions contained the key to victory over disunion. Professor Shifflett makes the same assumption in his comment that slaves and their families escaped to Union lines (p. 70). But as James Shaw, colonel of the 7th USCT, put it in his memoir Our Last Campaign: “The black man believed, long before we dreamed of it, that the war would result in his freedom.... If he could get away and join our forces he did so” (p. 31). Or in Washington’s words: “Day after day the Slaves came into camp and Every where that the ‘Stars and Stripes’ Waved they seemed to know freedom had dawned to the Slave” (p. 65).
The slave narrative and black troop histories epitomize intellectual production during the nineteenth century. To those of us who research and publish on nineteenth-century black life, it seems a little strange that this was ever in question. Putting aside the pro-black propaganda of many abolitionists, even defenders of Southern slavery were in little doubt about the impact of the black pen. How else to explain Southern legislatures’ banning of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World during the 1830s; the implementation of the gag rule from 1837 onward tabling any proposals to discuss the issue of slavery, including those emanating from black citizens; and restrictions on the dissemination of slave narratives and black newspapers in the region during the final antebellum years? Despite their vehement opposition, these defenders of the Southern faith were rarely stupid enough to believe that such works were exclusively the work of white Northern abolitionists and outside agitators.
If you ask those interested in the development of black history, or to be more precise the changing nature of black historians practicing history, they will usually come up with one of two narratives. The first is that there was little serious black history until the 1960s when the Black Freedom Movement forced the study of the past from the streets into the universities, libraries, schools, and professional organizations. The alternative view is that black history emerged from the pioneering scholarly and institutional efforts of W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson, its founding fathers.
There are those, however, who have taken a more careful look at the development of black historical production. These include John Hope Franklin, August Meir and Elliot Rudwick, for whom George Washington Williams’s two-volume History of the Negro Race (1883) made him the father of modern black history, especially during the moment of the professionalization of American history. A year later, for instance, saw the establishment of the American Historical Association. A very different approach is that offered by John Ernest’s Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861 (2004), in which the author draws upon a variety of written sources, public commemorations, and popular memories to provide a much more labile understanding of the origins of black history. For Dr. Ernest, “liberation historiography is a mode of historical investigation devoted to praxis, a dynamic process of action and reflection, of historical discovery in the service of ongoing and concrete systemic reform” (p. 18).
Dr. Stephen G. Hall, an assistant professor of history at Ohio State University, characterizes the first approaches as modernist and the second as postmodernist. He rejects the former because it ignores so much black intellectual production from the nineteenth century. He is more in sympathy with the latter, but insists on the importance of the written word and textual production as critical indicators of black intellectual competence. In this vein, Dr. Hall’s adherence to the black historical text and literate production is reminiscent of those scholars of the Underground Railroad who insist that letters, pamphlets, and written messages were more important in its implementation than secret signs in quilts, unwritten verbal codes, and various mysterious paraphernalia popular among some students of slave runaways.
A Faithful Account of the Race seeks to explain the “origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation” (p. 3) of black historical writing from its inception in the early nineteenth century through its professionalization in the early twentieth century. Dr. Hall’s major conceptual approach is what he calls “intellectual culture.” Black intellectuals drew upon cultural survivals and protest culture but their “intellectual weaponry” was the jeremiad, the Bible, classicism, Romanticism, realism, scientism, and objectivity to wage war on negative racial stereotypes (p. 234). For Dr. Hall, this armory not only indicates a rich intellectual tradition worthy of examination and understanding in its own terms, but needs evaluation within its own historical specificity because too many past commentators have dismissed it as a-historical based upon “modernist ideas of what constitutes history” (p. 231).
Although A Faithful Account of the Race draws upon archival materials, black newspapers, and numerous secondary sources on nineteenth-century African American, Southern, and U.S. history, its primary documentary base is black history texts written during the nineteenth century. These provide the beginning and ending of the overall chronology of the book: Jacob Oson’s A Search for Truth (1817) through the establishment of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) in 1916. The six chapters are each bracketed by black history texts: thus, chapter 4 covers the years 1863 to 1882, beginning with William Wells Brown’s The Black Man (1863) and concluding with Joseph Wilson’s Emancipation: Its Course and Progress (1882). Despite differences of emphasis, as well as changing historical conditions, each chapter is primarily concerned with the social milieu and textual analysis. Thus, James Pennington’s 1841 Textbook of the Origin and History of the Colored People is examined for its didactic usage of biblical genealogy, ancient history, and modern scholarship, while George Washington Williams’s History of the Negro Race (1883) with its charts and tables reflects a much more scientific and statistical approach toward the past, with an emphasis on progress.
This is a fine first book by Dr. Hall. It is persuasively argued and succeeds in enhancing our understanding of the development of early black history. It is clearly organized: the chronological approach gives the reader a sense of the changing nature of black historical practice. It is also well written. Most important, its subject of nineteenth-century black history texts is thoroughly researched. It reflects, if the intellectual historian does not mind, the author’s heart and soul.
There are, however, some problems. Factual errors abound. The first name of the author of Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920 (1993) is Evelyn, not Elizabeth (p. 314). The Dutch abolished colonial slavery in 1863, not before 1850 (p. 153). Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire was first published in 1776, not 1738 (p. 74). The massacre of black troops at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, occurred in 1864, not 1863 (p. 135). Christophe would have had a hard time ruling southern Haiti in the 1820s because he committed suicide in 1820 (p. 33). There are debatable interpretations. Commemorative cultural events were not “spontaneous” affairs (p. 229). This is why I titled my last book Rites of August First.[7] To describe the brilliant Afro-Atlantic modernist intellectual C. L. R. James as only an “historian” seems a trifle reductionist (p. 113). Important history texts are overlooked. Osborne P. Anderson, John Brown’s fellow conspirator in 1859, wrote A Voice from Harper’s Ferry, published in 1861. This first official history of Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry gets no mention. Can one seriously discuss Hampton Institute and ignore the work of its historian Robert F. Engs, Educating the Disfranchised and Disinherited: Samuel Chapman Armstrong and Hampton Institute, 1839-1893 (1999) or refer to African American emigration to Haiti and not engage Chris Dixon’s African America: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (2000)? I note these problems only because they detract from an otherwise admirable book.
My most serious reservation about A Faithful Account of the Race is the incongruity between its textual analysis and the broader public sphere. On page 11, we read: “What I suggest throughout this study is that the black public sphere ... is deeply informed by American and European intellectual life, and people of color throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries viewed themselves in terms articulated by David Walker, as ‘citizens of the world.’” I agree but cannot help noting several ways in which such universality is not pursued. Take Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, for instance. This work has been thoroughly examined by Sterling Stuckey through to Peter Hinks and deservedly so.[8] Dr. Hall offers little that is new in his comments on the text. The more serious problem, however, is that in simply focusing upon the history in the text in the desire to make Walker into an historian of ideas, he ignores the more vital and profound public importance of the work. That was its independent production by Walker, its dissemination by sailors in Southern ports, and its legislative banning in Southern states. None of these points are new, of course, but by replacing them with textual analysis, Hall downplays the “black public sphere.”
Second, Dr. Hall does a fine job of fleshing out William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872) and its self-production, dissemination, and reception (pp. 137-49). Its success made this reviewer want more of the same in the analysis of other texts as a way to document how black intellectuals engaged in an emerging free-market print culture. Third, there are several places where Dr. Hall refers to black writers publishing on black history in the newspapers (Hampton Institute teacher Anne Scoville’s articles in the Southern Workman, p. 206), but these are rarely systematically explored. Indeed, there is a whole new project here investigating the nineteenth-century press for articles, essays, and documents on black history by both black and white, U.S. and other, scholars. Fourth, Drs. Du Bois, Woodson, and Wesley all wrote doctorates on subjects beyond race: anti-slave trade laws; West Virginia’s secession; and, American labor. Yet all ended up writing faithful accounts of the race. This fascinating transformation is never explained in Dr. Hall’s concluding chapters.
Finally, the second and third chapters virtually ignore some of the most important historical production by African Americans from the 1830s through 1860s. I am referring to West Indian Emancipation speeches delivered annually every August First to both commemorate British colonial abolition as well as to mobilize for the abolition of American slavery. Many of these orations were subsequently reproduced either in abolitionist newspapers or as separate pamphlets. Robert Banks, a West Indian clothier in Detroit, Michigan, spoke at such an event on August 1, 1839. He reviewed the history of both the English slave trade as well as anti-slave trade opposition. “We must not sleep at our post,” he told the assembly, “and wait for our friends to carry on the work alone, but must apply our own shoulder to the wheel.” “Let this day,” and its heroes Granville Sharpe, William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, William Pitt, and Charles Fox, “live in our memories and in the memories of our children.” The speech was subsequently published.[9] Banks’s address reveals several things. The shift from pamphlets to books was not quite as marked as Dr. Hall would suggest. These orations are a rich source of uninvestigated historical references. The link between past and present clearly implies a usable past. Perhaps most remarkable of all, these speeches reflect black thinkers constructing a teleology of British history in the United States! The fact that they were often overly optimistic about British freedoms should not detract from the importance of their intellectual endeavors. These are only some of the more pronounced ways in which to really get at the connection between early historical production and the public sphere. I respectfully suggest that research in such areas might prove more efficacious than Dr. Hall’s concluding call for more institutional and biographical studies for African American historiography.
Where do we go from here? I think these three works suggest several directions. First, we should digitalize. Washington’s slave narrative should be added to the excellent slave narrative Web site at the University of North Carolina, while some of the early black history texts examined by Dr. Hall should be part of a new Web site. Second, the light complexion of John Washington together with that of 25 percent of the sergeants of the 35th Colored Infantry (and perhaps even some of Dr. Hall’s black historians) requires more investigation into how white privilege could cross the color line. Third, we should expand the temporal and spatial dimensions of slaves, soldiers, and scholars. What about early black histories produced in the English-speaking Atlantic world from Canada through to the Caribbean? Even though it is not sufficiently explored for the tastes of this reviewer, the focus on the universal history of early black scholars is very suggestive as a means to pursue a transnational type of thinking. What similarities and differences existed between slave soldiers during the American Civil War and slave soldiers during other military struggles over slavery in Haiti, Latin America, and Cuba? Finally, I think we should never underestimate the radical tendencies of these slaves, soldiers, and scholars. John Washington and North Carolina black troops were revolutionaries because they self-emancipated and sought to destroy the institution of slavery, a process that took Washington (the place) much longer to fathom. Black scholars were not simply practicing various forms of intellectual endeavor armed with moral truth. They sought to challenge the very epistemology upon which existing intellectual traditions rested, especially historiography. We can lose sight of these social and political challenges from the cloistered corridors of the academy on the hill.
Notes
[1]. Crandall A. Shifflett, Patronage and Poverty in the Tobacco South: Louisa County, Virginia, 1860-1900 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1982), and Coal Towns: Life, Work, and Culture in Company Towns of Southern Appalachia, 1880-1960 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991).
[2]. Ira Berlin and Phillip D. Morgan, eds., Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1993).
[3].Charles L. Purdue, Thomas E. Barden, Robert K. Phillips, eds., Weevils in the Wheat: Interviews with Virginia Ex-Slaves, (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1976).
[4]. Shifflett, Patronage and Poverty.
[5].David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Gregory Mixon, “Black Southern State Militias, 1865-1910,” manuscript in progress.
[6]. Richard M. Reid, ed., The Upper Ottawa Valley to 1855 (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1990).
[7]. J. R. Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007).
[8]. Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
[9]. Robert Banks, “An Oration, Delivered at a Celebration in Detroit, of the Abolition of Slavery in the West Indies, Held by Colored Americans, August 1st, 1839” (Detroit: Harsha and Bates, 1839): 1-15.
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at: http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.
Citation: Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie. Review of Hall, Stephen G., A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America and Reid, Richard M., Freedom for Themselves: North Carolina's Black Soldiers in the Civil War Era and Shifflett, Crandall A., ed., John Washington's Civil War: A Slave Narrative. H-CivWar, H-Net Reviews. August, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=30387
Sonia Sanchez on the State of Black Books
By: Nicole MoorePosted: July 27, 2010 at 11:59 AM
The Root talked to the acclaimed poet during the Harlem Book Fair about the future of African-American literature, what she's reading now and more.
Sonia Sanchez is a poet of the highest order. She is consistent in her nonconformist call to arms and to love. The author of more than 14 books -- including Wounded in the House of a Friend, Homegirls and Handgrenades, Shake Loose My Skin and the newly released collection of poetry Morning Haiku, her first in more than a decade -- drenches her words in honey goodness so they sound like the sweetest thang you've ever heard:
"This is not a small voice you hear / this is a large voice coming out of the cities / This is a love colored with iron and lace / This is a love initialed Black Genius / This is not a small voice you hear." ("This Is Not a Small Voice," 1995)
But as sweet as her words sound, they still have the ability to cut deep. The award-winning poet, activist and scholar infuses her writing with the type of historical and cultural significance and power that makes each word sharp as a razor blade and as hard as any Tupac lyric.
It's no wonder that the producers of this year's Harlem Book Fair, which took place July 17, decided to honor Sanchez. "Women in Word and Power" was this year's theme, and appropriately, the fair featured a number of dynamic female authors, including Terry McMillan, Bernice McFadden and Gloria Browne-Marshall, but it seemed as if everyone was there to see the woman whom Maya Angelou has described as "a lion in literature's forest."
I had the opportunity to spend some time with Sanchez on that hazy, hot Saturday afternoon on 135th Street, and she shared her thoughts on the future of black books and street lit and also talked about which books she's reading now.
Nicole Moore: Are you more excited or saddened by the future prospects of black literature?
Sonia Sanchez: Well, my dear sister, because there is something called black literature, I am always excited about it. It just means that people are still writing, that they're still pushing the idea of black literature. In America, they still don't believe black literature exists. We've had to push the idea of black literature, of Latino and Asian literature, of lesbian and gay literature. It all exists right here. There is a different kind of literature other than white literature that continues to permeate everything.
NM: How do you feel about the proliferation of "street lit"?
SS: I'm delighted that young people are writing. I'm delighted even about street literature. I believe we should write everything. Everybody else writes everything; why shouldn't we? When I was growing up, I used to read what we called racy literature. I was at the library every bloody day, and racy literature kept me reading, and then one day I finally got to Pushkin. I think reading is better than watching the "idiot box" because what it says is that the spirit of fire and the spirit of words resides in all of us, and we are going to express it in many ways.
NM: What books are you reading now?
SS: I'm usually reading five or six different books at a time. I'm reading Dreams in a Time of War by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. I remember when Ngugi was writing this book because I was writing the first part of my memoir at the same time. The joy of this memoir is simply that he talks about his views as a boy during World War II. So we get a wonderful sense of who he is as a young man.
I'm reading the biography -- the only biography -- of John Oliver Killens [John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith Gilyard], a great novelist who died too early, too young. I make sure all of my students read him.
I'm also reading Isabel Allende's new book, The Island Beneath the Sea (La isla bajo el mar). I just love Isabel and what she writes and the musicality of her work.
I just got in the mail yesterday Nairobi Heat, a detective novel by Mukoma wa Ngugi, Ngugi's son, that I can't wait to start reading.
And I'm reading the manuscript for this new anthology on rap, so I'm immersing myself in Chuck D, Rakim and Talib Kweli. I'm so happy this book is happening and that they asked me to write a blurb for it because they said I was one of the older people who support young rappers. And I do. I get up in the morning now and I play Rakim's "Casualties of War" to remind myself about the dead bodies that come home every day because of the two wars we are involved in.
Nicole Moore is founder and editor of theHotness.com and can be found on Twitter @thehotnessgrrrl.
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Tuesday, August 17, 2010
Sharing the AfroEuropean Experience. My visit to the 25th yearly Bundestreffen in Germany.
Last weekend I was in Germany. ISD (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland – Intiative Black People in Germany) organized the Bundestreffen for the 25th time in a row. This means 25 years of black German coming together, 25 years of theater, dance, workshops, debates, presentations, films, music, knowledge sharing, book selling and more. All focused around the black German experience, and actually by extension, the experience of being black in the Western world. The Bundestreffen doesn’t seem to be on its way out, it is alive and kicking and apparently there to stay.After knowing it for years I wanted to experience it for myself and took off to Helmarshausen, a little village in Hessen, in the geographical heart of Germany. I am not German but I felt that I could relate to this community being African and European at the same time. And checking googlemaps I realized it wasn’t even that far, just a 4.30 hours drive.
I had questions to ask, questions about the why and the how of these meetings. To my knowledge such an organization in Germany is unique to Europe. I don’t know of any equivalent initiatives in France, the UK, Holland, Belgium, Portugal or Spain, although many of these countries have big local communities of African descent.
But I discovered that exactly because black Germans aren’t that many, the need to come together at a Bundestreffen is much bigger than let’s say in France, where most black people do not live isolated from other black French. According to wikipedia there are 500.000 AfroGermans in Germany, representing just 0,62% of the total population. They are scattered all around Germany and grew up in schools and towns where they were often the only black person around. These people have very different roots going back to Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, the Caribbean, the USA, Brazil … but all have their German roots in common, all speak the same language and have a common experience of being perceived as black and foreign while feeling at home in Germany.
The need to share this experience stimulated them to come together, so they wouldn’t have to feel isolated as ‘strangers’ in a white world. But they also did it for their children so that they would grow up with people having the same experiences and learning that the predominant image of blacks in media and education doesn’t fit reality.
AfroGermans are those people who are culturally German, who grew up in Germany and are part of Germany, but who experience being perceived as foreigners because of their physical features and sometimes non-Germanic names. I wrote about this feature on a European level before in my article on the AfroEuropeans (What is AfroEurope?).While there are communities of Nigerians, Rwandans, Ghanese, Sudanese and others in Germany, these people are not the focal point of the Bundestreffen I think. The black people I met at the Bundestreffen are not strictly speaking immigrants but mostly Germans who happen to be black. They were born and/or raised there. They feel home in Germany and although they have an earnest interest in their black roots, they know that they belong to Germany. Unfortunately Germany, just as most European nations, is still not aware of its postcolonial diversity.
Still, this experience is not unique to the postcolonial era. History tells us that for centuries there have been black people in Europe making European culture their own. These people have mostly lived isolated lives but some of them became famous as artists, scholars or even politicians (Soon I will write an article about that). ISD and other initiatives try to make people aware of this heritage that is all too often ignored and which can help Europe to accept its postnationalist diversity. ISD makes black Germans also aware of the fact that they are not alone, that they can share their feelings with fellow black Germans.
I drove off on Saturday afternoon. I found the place easily. It was a big hostel in a little rural village surrounded by fields, forests and hills. A very nice spot indeed with old typical German houses of wood and stone. I arrived there around 6.30pm, the sun was still shining and the scenery was beautiful and relaxing.
When I entered the building I introduced myself to a friendly lady at the book stand. She knew about this website which was a very nice surprise. I asked her who I should talk to to stay for the night. She brought me to one of the organizers and I was warmly welcomed. First I had supper. I met Stephen while cueing for the buffet. He asked me if I just arrived and we started to chat. We shared the same table with an African American living in Germany for 15 years now. From then on the talking started and I met a lot of interesting people. It was an awesome experience, like meeting some lost family members …With them and many others I shared experiences about living as a black person in a predominantly white European world. Experiencing racism the hard way but also the much more subtle and hidden kind of racism, the one that’s much harder to pinpoint and therefore frustrating. We talked about the common troubles we have defining our identity as a black person who relates to European culture, how we feel home and rejected at the same time.
I wasn’t the only non-German there. There were some people from France, the US and Canada who joined German friends. But there were also Austrians and Swiss who share the same German language. I am blessed to speak German too what made contact easier and comfortable although most people there could speak English too.
I realized also that although many of them know about the black American experience they hardly know about the black communities in Germany’s neighboring countries. In France you won’t find a Bundestreffen but there is the CRAN (Representative Council of Black Associations) who represents blacks politically and academically. In the UK there are several black British organizations promoting black solidarity and representation on all levels of society. In Spain there is the Alto Consejo de las Comunidades Negras . In my home country Belgium and its closest neighbor The Netherlands I don’t know of any structural representation of black people or afro descendents as a whole, although we are many of us and most do come together with their respective black communities (be it Congolese, Rwandan, Senegalese, Surinamese, Antillean, …). Maybe that’s the reason I went to the Bundestreffen, to be inspired and stimulated for a meeting of all Belgians of black descent, and by extention to think about an AfroEuropean Congress for the future. Because I know that, safe for the language, we have more in common than differences.
I had interesting conversations with several of the visitors. I met up with some who were also there for the first time. They had known of the Bundestreffen for a while but didn’t know what to expect. Eventually they came, alone or invited by friends or family. Nobody was disappointed, although some were initially scared it would be some kind of radical black power (anti-white) event. But it was nothing of the sort. It was all positive vibes. Still, I wondered if white people would be welcome to join this event (as I didn’t really see any) and when asking I discovered it actually was a topic of discussion within the community. I was thinking about the reason why a white person would want to come there, except to have an outsider’s view and an anthropological perspective. Isn’t that missing the point though? As the Bundestreffen seemed to be about sharing and participating and not about staring at each other, it seemed to be as a chance to talk with each other, and not about being talked about … well, I know I’ll have to develop my thoughts further on this subject, but this experience made me think about this.
The Bundestreffen is not just a meeting of black Germans though. Even if I didn’t notice white people it represents diversity within German society. The age of the participants ranged from 1 year old till around 50 years old, having parents, kids, teenagers and young adults intermingling. Also sexual orientation and gender is an open topic at the Bundestreffen, black gays and hetero-sexuals, men and women, all are just as much involved in the activities and responsibilities. There were families and individuals, couples and singles, punks and hiphoppers, artists, architects, artisans, lawyers and business people. You name it and they were there. A fact not always as common place in society in general or in black communities throughout the Western world. But ISD has succeeded in bringing all this people together.
All this made this whole experience very rewarding and fulfilling. Although I have my life, friends, loved ones and family in Belgium the experience I had last weekend in Germany brings something extra to my life: the ability to express my identity with others without having to explain nor having to excuse myself for cherishing my black ancestry while being part of Europe.
Of course not all black Germans want to relate to this event. Some told me they know other black Germans who don’t want to come to the Bundestreffen. They either don’t feel the urge to share their experience or find the whole thing rather communitarian (self-apartheid). I understand that. All individuals forge their identity differently, and not all feel the need to come together. When I talk with my sisters about being black in Europe we do not agree about everything, sometimes we are even opposite to each other. I wondered if my youngest sister would even want to come to such an event. I counted approximately 150 people there last weekend, while there are many more AfroGermans all over Germany. For very different reasons they didn’t come to this event although they may support it from a distance. But of course others don’t support it. I think that this is a logic consequence of human diversity. Therefore I am not tempted to say that ISD speaks for all AfroGermans, just as this website doesn’t speak for all AfroEuropeans. But it is a platform to discuss the matter if needed and it is first of all a network to share experiences.
Going to the Bundestreffen made me happy. I think that black people of the Western world have something extra here. In contrast to white Europeans we have an identity that transcends language and national borders, we can therefore being more European than all Europeans put together, more Western than any Westerner. We have a natural link with the black experience in the US and Brazil, we can relate to people experiencing other cultures, speaking other languages and living in different countries and continents. We are the outcome of the history that Europe created for itself and we have a ‘community of experience’ that goes beyond the unity that Europe tries to forge for itself.
While creating racism in the course of the last 5 centuries (and legally abolishing it just 50 years ago) Europe created a people that can be stronger than any European people before. It created solidarity among us. Our potential unity is a logic consequence of more than 500 years of European colonial history. It is therefore global, i.e. international, intercontinental, multilingual and intercultural. Grown out of a bloody and absurdly violent past, I can’t do anything but see the present and future beauty of all this. Thanks again to ISD and all the people at the Bundestreffen for making me experience this.
Trailer/Poster – “Music From The Big House” (Prison Blues)
From acclaimed director Bruce McDonald, the documentary is called Music From The Big House, and centers on Rita Chiarelli, an award-winning Canadian blues singer, who decides to make a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the blues – the Louisiana State Maximum Security Penitentiary a.k.a Angola Prison. And the film is what resulted. Check out its Facebook page, HERE, and its website HERE. A fall release date is planned…):
The Documentary
From acclaimed director Bruce McDonald, teaming with an Emmy and Oscar nominated documentary producer, comes a rare and exclusive musical journey. Rita Chiarelli, an award-winning recording artist, has decided to take a pilgrimage to the birthplace of the blues—Louisiana State Maximum Security Penitentiary a.k.a Angola Prison. She never imagined that her love of the blues would lead her to play with inmates serving life sentences for murder, rape and armed robbery.
In what was once the bloodiest prison in America, inmates relatives will be invited to listen alongside other prisoners, to hear remarkable voices singing stories of hope and redemption. Let yourself be swept away by one of Blues’ most soulful pilgrim daughters who is finding out if music really is an escape.
It’s time to make a new soundtrack.
Exclusive: BP Oil Spill Coverup
by Rick Outzen
Rick Outzen is publisher and editor of Independent News, the alternative newsweekly for Northwest Florida.
August 17, 2010 | 2:02am
A shrimp boat loaded with oil booms head out to the Chandeleur islands on May 7, 2010. Shrimp fishermen were hired by BP to help with the clean-up effort. (Jason Andrew / Getty Images)
While officials claim most of the oil from America's worst-ever spill has disappeared, fishermen hired by BP are still finding tar balls—and being instructed to hide their discoveries.Two weeks ago, as federal officials prepared to declare that some three-quarters of the estimated 5 million barrels of oil released into the Gulf over three months had disappeared, Mark Williams, a fishing boat captain hired by BP to help with the spill cleanup, encountered tar balls as large as three inches wide floating off the Florida coast.
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Reporting his findings to his supervisor, a private consulting company hired by BP, the reply, according to his logbook came back: "Told—no reporting of oil or tar balls anymore. Don't put on report. We're here for boom removal only," referring to the miles of yellow and orange containment barriers placed throughout the Gulf.
Williams' logbook account, which I inspected, and a similar account told to me by a boat captain in Mississippi, raises serious concerns about whether the toll from the spill is being accurately measured. Many institutions have an interest in minimizing accounts of the damage inflicted. The federal and local governments, under withering criticism all summer, certainly want to move on to other subjects. BP, of course, has a financial incentive.
The miraculous disappearance of the oil and the pending transfer of $20 billion to Ken Feinberg, who is independently overseeing the claims fund, have resulted in the oil giant cutting back its response operations. With a recent halving of the Vessels of Opportunity program, which hired fallow charter and commercial fishing boats, captains and deckhands are now less reticent to describe their experiences.
This includes Mark Williams, who worked in the program until he was deactivated last week. Williams' saga is typical. In May, he arrived in Alabama from Atlantic Beach, Florida, to captain a charter boat. He got one day of red snapper season before Roy Crabtree, NOAA Fisheries Southeast regional administrator, shut down the Alabama waters for fishing.
• New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu talks to The Daily Beast• Rick Outzen: BP’s Worthless CEO Shuffle• Full coverage of the oil spill"That morning [June 1], we took a charter out to the 'Nipple' and saw what looked like a lot of grass," said Williams, referring to the part of the Gulf where the continental shelf gets very deep, a favored habitat for large fish. "When we got closer, we saw it was mattes of oil in solid slicks. By that afternoon, oil was getting in our reels. Crabtree shut down fishing the next day."
For the rest of June and much of July, Williams worked off and on as a deckhand on boats enlisted in the Vessels of Opportunity program, including a boat called Downtime that in early June first sighted tar balls and oil sheen in the Pensacola Pass.
Williams was also part of the skimming operations at Orange Beach when miles-long mattes of oil washed on to its shores the following weekend. Untrained, Williams remembers putting more than 100 pounds of oil-soaked absorbent boom in debris disposal bags that he was later told should have held no more than 20.
Subsequently, Williams saw seven large shrimp boats, with two Coast Guard vessels accompanying them, five miles off shore. "Plumes were everywhere," says Williams, referring to thin layers of crude oil floating on the water's surface. "Every time another boat would approach the shrimp boats, the Coast Guard would get on the radio and tell the boat to veer back to shore." Williams says he believes the boats were putting dispersant on the oil, even though the Coast Guard has denied using dispersant off the Florida and Alabama shores. "The plumes were gone the next day," Williams says.
Back in Florida on July 27, his boat, Mudbug, was activated into Vessels of Opportunity. While the media, BP, and the Coast Guard were reporting no more oil, Williams and other boat captains were assigned to find it.
Three days later, Williams found remnants of dispersant in a canal in Santa Rosa Sound north of Pensacola Beach. He reported it to his supervisor, who worked for a company that BP hired to help with cleanup, O'Brien's Response Management.
Williams wrote in his logbook, "Returned p.m. for check-out. [Supervisor] said, 'Oh, they sent someone out there and it was algae'—No fucking way—Idiots."
O'Brien's was founded in 1982 by Jim O'Brien, a retired Coast Guard officer, who originally called his firm O'Brien Oil Pollution Service, ironically known in the industry as "OOPS." Over the years the company has been acquired and merged with other response companies; it was hired by BP and Transocean prior to the April 20 explosion of the Deepwater Horizon rig as an emergency-response consultant.
On Saturday, July 31, Williams found a "tea-type" stain on the water and followed it toward Fort Pickens, which is the western tip of Pensacola Beach. He wrote in his logbook, "We found massive tar balls—both in quantity and size, in small gulley. They ranged from ping-pong ball to coconut in size not 3' from beach line."
After that, Williams was taken off spill and tar ball watch and put on boom removal. In an inlet north of Pensacola Beach, his crew sighted more tar balls. He wrote in his logbook: "Middle of Sound to off-load boom. 1" to 3" tar balls—floating—must be old—told [supervisor] at end of the day." That's when he was told not to make the report, but rather to simply gather up the boom.
“We found massive tar balls–both in quantity and size, in small gulley.”
Williams was deactivated from Vessels of Opportunity last week. Last Tuesday, the day before he was dropped, the boat captain wrote, "Coming back p.m. from Ono Island. Counted 12 oil plumes small in comparison to offshore between range marker and decon barge." This was a week after Carol Browner, a top energy adviser to President Barack Obama, announced 75 percent of the oil had been contained, evaporated, or dispersed.
Williams never believed the reports that the oil had disappeared. "It's out there and we will see it continue to wash up on our beaches," he says.
The Daily Beast received a similar account from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, where commercial fisherman Mike Stewart of Ocean Springs has tried to get state officials to recognize that oil and dispersants remain in the waters off their shores.
Since the first of August, Mississippi fishermen have found oil in the marshes of their barrier islands, seen massive fish kills and scooped up submerged oil in Pass Christian. Nonetheless, Bill Walker, director of the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources, declared on August 9, "there should be no new threats," and issued an order for all local coastal governments to halt oil disaster work being funded by BP money that was granted to the state.
Walker challenged anyone to prove there was still oil in Mississippi waters by calling his office. As of Friday, August 13, Walker told media that he had not received any phone calls.
"That's a bunch of bull," says Mark Stewart in telephone interview with The Daily Beast. "There is oil all through the water column. We've proved it, and they do nothing about it."
Stewart even has a video on YouTube showing his crew dipping an absorbent cloth into the Gulf water three-quarters of a mile off the Mississippi beaches. When it's pulled out of the water after less than two minutes, the cloth is covered with oil. There is so much oil on the surface that it reflects sunlight like a mirror. There, too, the commercial fishermen are concerned about the dispersants.
"They say the oil is gone," Stewart said on the video. "We disagree."
Stewart, a third-generation fisherman, was in Vessels of Opportunity for 70 days before being laid off August 2. He tells The Daily Beast part of his time in the program was play-acting for visiting dignitaries. "Whenever a government official would be flying over our boat, we were told to put out all our boom and start skimming for show, even when there wasn't any oil."
The Daily Beast asked BP officials about the shrinking number of vessels involved in Gulf cleanup. BP spokesman John Curry says: "We have no certain number of vessels for the program. It will be adjusted based on the need. Less oil means less resources are needed."
When asked about Williams' claims that he had been instructed by O'Brien's supervisor not to report oil, Curry said, "I am not aware of it. We will work as long as the work needs to be done. You will need to check with the contractor about this specific claim."
The Daily Beast did contact Tim O'Leary, O'Brien's vice president of communication services, and relayed Williams' account. O'Leary says that he is unaware of any issues near Pensacola, but agreed to check further. The Daily Beast gave him until the end of the day for a deadline—O'Leary subsequently left a message that he needed more time to respond. O'Leary's response was: "We have checked with our on-scene supervisor regarding this allegation. He denies that any such order was given to Vessels of Opportunity participants."
Correction: This article initially reported 5 billion gallons of oil were released in the Gulf; it has been updated to 5 million barrels.
Rick Outzen is publisher and editor of Independent News, the alternative newsweekly for Northwest Florida.
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