This Date in History: The Impending Crisis of The South

[lawtig02]

Out the window of our apartment in #WestHarlem I can see The Cotton Club (not the original but the one opened in 1971) and just down 125th is #TheApolloTheater. A long way from #Bonlee am I. Tar Heels have certainly preceded me here though. Today two from similarly small NC places, #Burgaw and #Brevard that literally landed within blocks of our apartment to make their mark come to mind.



The first is ‘Burgawian’ Reverend James A. Forbes, Pastor Emeritus of the interdenominational #RiversideBaptistChurch. Riverside has been an impactful place in many ways large and small but perhaps is most remembered as the pulpit from which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his first anti-Viet Nam War sermon on April 4, 1967. As a seminary student Forbes spent time in #ChapelHill as an intern at #BinkleyBaptistChurch working with Rev. Robert Seymour. He was the young African American man that Preacher Seymour and a young Coach Dean Smith accompanied to the segregated Pines Restaurant in 1961 to challenge Jim Crow.



The other North Carolinian is the ‘Brevardian,’ Jackie ‘Moms’ Mabley (Loretta Mary Aiken 1894-1975) the comedian. Mabley confronted and defied color but also gender and sexuality barriers during her career. She came out as a lesbian in the early 1920s. In 1939 she was the first female comic to perform at the Apollo. While as a young performer she did it all - sang, danced, acted - she eventually settled into the character of Moms - clad in house dress, floppy hat and affected a toothless and disheveled older lady demeanor who spiced her routines with double entendres and risqué tales well-told. Most recently Wanda Sykes beautifully recreated her for an episode of “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.”



Both Reverend Forbes and Moms Mabley left North Carolina, and The South, so as to pursue their respective callings. Both were faced with terrible resistance - much of it (all of it?) racist. This has to be recognized and related in schools and public venues - their stories and others like them cannot be silenced as is the goal of so many hard at work today to shut down the unsightly and uncomfortable Truths of our Past. Fight friends. Vote please. Teach by all means.



That leads to today’s On This Day: #OTD (June 24) in 1933 #Harlem’s Apollo Theater opened. https://aaregistry.org/story/the-apollo-theater-opens/ ALSO: https://www.apollotheater.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/WalkofFame_Moms_final4.pdf

This is a terrific post, donbosco. I enjoy everything you post here but this one was particularly excellent. Thanks for sharing!

 

[donbosco]

It’s a bummer to think of all the basketball talent in NC back in the day who didn’t get to play college ball at a major program in their home state (i.e., one of the NC ACC schools) due to segregation. In addition to Sam Jones, there was Walt Bellamy, Lou Hudson, Happy Hairston, Willie Porter, among others. And there was probably a lot of talent that really didn’t get the chance they deserved due to segregation, thus we don’t know who they are today.

Fun fact: The first black basketball player from NC to play at a predominantly white university in NC was Asheville’s Henry Logan, who went on to Western Carolina. He made his varsity debut in 1964, three years before Charlie Scott would make his varsity debut at UNC. Logan is widely believed to be the first black player to play at any predominantly white college or university in the South.

I've mentioned this before but I met Henry Logan just a couple of years before he passed away when my wife and I were looking at a house (to buy) that was a couple down from his own. I was standing in the yard and he walked by, said hello and asked if I was thinking of buying. I said yes and we struck up a conversation. Eventually we exchanged names. I think he was very surprised when, hearing his name, I kind of stepped back and said, "THE Henry Logan?" We talked a bit of hoops and of all things I did not get his autograph.

He was amazing.
I know that at one time there was a man in Asheville that was working on a documentary about his life. I don't think it has ever come out though.

Maybe this is a trailer for it?

 

[Icky Mettle]

I've mentioned this before but I met Henry Logan just a couple of years before he passed away when my wife and I were looking at a house (to buy) that was a couple down from his own. I was standing in the yard and he walked by, said hello and asked if I was thinking of buying. I said yes and we struck up a conversation. Eventually we exchanged names. I think he was very surprised when, hearing his name, I kind of stepped back and said, "THE Henry Logan?" We talked a bit of hoops and of all things I did not get his autograph.

He was amazing.
I know that at one time there was a man in Asheville that was working on a documentary about his life. I don't think it has ever come out though.

Maybe this is a trailer for it?

BTW I stand somewhat corrected. While it’s true that Henry Logan was the first black basketball player to play at a predominantly white school in NC and probably the entire South, so was his college teammate and classmate, Herbert Moore, who was also a high school teammate of Logan’s.

 

[donbosco]

#OTD (June 25) in 1963 the Right-Wing of the North Carolina General Assembly Ramrodded legislation known as “The Speaker Ban” through on the Final Day of the Session. Most Never Read It -- Just Did as They Were Directed. An Unconstitutional Embarrassment, it Damned North Carolina and Threatened Accreditation of all the UNC System schools, first and foremost, UNC Chapel Hill.



Students and President William Friday Fought the Bill as it crippled the University’s ability to provide a free and robust education with access to the broad spectrum of ideas and ways of seeing and thinking. The bill most specifically prohibited “the use of any state-supported college or university facilities by anyone who was a communist, had advocated the overthrow of the United States or North Carolina Constitutions, or had pled the Fifth Amendment when questioned about communist or subversive activities.” The word communist was the ‘red flag’ or better said, the ‘red meat’ for that segment of the public racked with Cold War paranoia but the bill was also written so as to potentially forbid or otherwise make it so problematic as to essentially bar a person who opposed segregation or other, as interpreted by the courts at the time, seemingly constitutional practices.



Locally, WRAL TV commentator Jesse Helms reveled in the curtailing of campus speech while nationally other Cold War pundits and politicians who saw Red everywhere welcomed the opportunity to attack college professors freely.



Students and the university administration immediately recognized that ‘The Speaker Ban’ threatened to make North Carolina a Right Wing Echo Chamber where only voices sanctioned by Segregationist or Red-=Baiting Conservatives could discuss, debate, or otherwise be heard on UNC System campuses. In 1963 that system consisted of UNC, N.C. State, and Women’s College (UNCG). UNC Charlotte, UNC Asheville, and UNC Wilmington would join in 1969 and ten more, including the HBCUs (A&T, ECSU, WSS, FSU, NC Central), Pembroke State (a historically American Indian campus), The NC School of the Arts, and ASU, ECU, WCU completed the grouping in 1971.



While the system administration fought the bill in traditional ways, students set out to “roil the waters” by directly confronting it. UNC Student Government, led by Student Body President Paul Dickson, and students representing other campus constituencies (George Nicholson, Robert Powell, James Medford, Eunice Milton, John Greenbacker, Eric Van Loon, Ernest McCrary, Gary Waller, Stuart Matthews, John McSween, and Henry Patterson were all plaintiffs in a subsequent law suit), challenged the law by inviting two speakers, Historian Herbert Aptheker and Fred Wilkinson, the Executive Director of the National Committee Against Repressive Legislation and the First Amendment Foundation that would violate the bill. Wilkinson’s work was in challenging prohibitions against free speech while Aptheker was a historian who applied Marxist methodology to interpret African American History, a field of study radical in its own right at the time.



UNC refused to permit the speakers, who were escorted off campus. This was expected and both then spoke from a Chapel Hill town sidewalk but across a knee-high stone wall where students gathered to listen on campus. Five years of court battles finally resulted in “The Speaker Ban” being declared unconstitutional.



Today much cleverer tactics from Modern Conservatives threaten the entire UNC System’s capability to provide a broad Liberal Arts Education. The Right Wing has gained control of the General Assembly and has managed to also create of the system Board of Governors a cast of proxies who have in turn set about making sure that the system President and Chancellors of the individual campuses are themselves part of the plan to tamp down critical thinking and efforts to diversify that threaten a traditional status quo resembling pre-Speaker Ban times. Across the 16 campuses these efforts by the majority in the General Assembly are ongoing. The Right holds most of the power and may yet make of the system schools mere shells of themselves. Time will tell. Elections have consequences. Decide how much you care. Speaker Ban Roiled UNC-Chapel Hill Campus

 

[donbosco]

Invented at the Research Triangle Park, NC, #OTD (June 26) in 1974, the first Bar Code was used.

Bar Code, Retailing Innovation, Product of IBM and RTP

On June 26, 1974, a scanner at a supermarket in Troy, Ohio scanned a pack of chewing gum. It was the first product to be checked out by Universal Product Code, an invention largely credited to Research Triangle Park scientist George Laurer.The first barcodes were developed by New Jersey engineer...

www.dncr.nc.gov

 

[donbosco]

(This one needs some work)



The name Hinton Rowan Helper stuck in my memory, as did the title of his 1857 book, ‘The Impending Crisis of The South: How to Meet It,’ from my first read of Hugh T. Lefler’s ‘North Carolina; History, Geography, Government,’ in the 7th grade at #BonleeElementary. In that text, Lefler depicted H.R. Helper’s book as a catalyst for the enmity between North and South that underpinned the Civil War. Helper, from Davie County, NC, wrote that slavery had impaired the region’s economy, especially the earning possibilities of poor, landless whites. So Helper came out, at least to me from reading Lefler at 13, as an anti-slavery class warrior.


For Lefler he stood for the small farmer and the poor white. Helper was forced out of The South after the 1857 publication of ‘The Impending Crisis’ in fact, and viewed as a traitor to his homeland for fueling the abolitionist arguments. The book was burned and banned throughout the future Confederacy.


Only later did I learn that Helper was a virulent racist and that a good deal of his anti-slavery sentiment stemmed from hatred of African Americans and a desire to see THEM banished from the nation. The more I have read, the more complex becomes the story and Helper’s own ways of seeing come increasingly to represent that of a muddled “thinker.”


Earlier in life, in 1850, before the fame associated with ‘Impending Crisis,’ Helper trekked to California for the Gold Rush and there he encountered a multiplicity of races and ethnicities, brought together as only the glitter of gold can do, and according to historian David Brown, was distressed by the chaotic liberty of it all. Brown goes on to suggest that in California Helper’s racism may have begun to take a more sophisticated form in a pseudo-scientific nod to Darwinism. He also went bust there but did write his first book, ‘Land of Gold’ about that time, fleshing out his vision of the benefits of a racially pure society that would damn him and twist into knots his thinking for the rest of his days.


‘The Impending Crisis’ had value in bolstering the abolitionist argument against the institution of slavery but it also galvanized the Southern Slaveholding class to more deeply play their race cards, lest poor whites in the region recognize that indeed, slavery impoverished all but a very few. An intriguing addendum at least is the life of Hinton R. Helper to current discussions of ‘The Peculiar Institution,’ i.e., slavery, and perhaps a good reminder that recognition of the complexity of humanity always requires revision of the narrative.


In 1861 Lincoln named him Ambassador to Argentina and while there he married an Argentinian. Beginning in 1867 he lived for a time in #Asheville. It was apparently the only place in the South he felt was safe - indications are that there he went about lonely but unbothered. Sadly his wife lost her eyesight and with their son returned to Buenos Aires. He was involved in a railroad scheme-A Canada to Argentina line-that was a bust. Penniless and alone, an unrepentant racist, he committed suicide at 80 by opening up the gas in his Washington DC flat. There is more to his life - I don’t know much about how the years in South America went.


Late in life he was involved in a railroad scheme-A Canada to Argentina line-that was a bust. Penniless and alone, an unrepentant racist, he committed suicide at 80 by opening up the gas in his Washington DC flat.


And now to the “On This Day” RECAP: #OTD (June 26) in 1857 the 1st Advertisements for ‘The Impending Crisis of The South’, an economic rebuke of slavery appeared. Lincoln’s GOP embraced the book and pro-slavery forces banned it. Helper painted slaveowners as vile and said that violence in the pursuit of freedom was the right of the enslaved. Helper became a villain in The South. Lincoln appointed him Consul in Buenos Aires (1861-66). After returning to the US from Argentina he lived for a time in #Asheville#AVL. Also see: https://www.ncpedia.org/biography/helper-hinton-rowan Over time he grew increasingly racist and committed suicide at 80.