Black and White In America: Sherrod, Obama, Jackie Robinson,Pee Wee Reese, and The Fort Pillow Massacre
Tuesday, July 27th, 2010Shirley Sherrod, whose father was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, was fired from her Department of Agriculture position, because of an edited version of her speech.
Columnist Maureen Dowd,from the New York Times, on The Shirley Sherrod Affair:
“The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one. ”
Ms Dowd longs for Bill Clinton, “(he) never needed help fathoming Southern black culture.”
The continued mishandling of Black-White relations in this country by the President comes from a simple fact. The first Black President in American History does not have a drop of slave blood in his veins, or bloodlines, or consciousness.
He really doesn’t know anything about America outside of the Ivy League and Chicago politics. He has no idea of GRACE, as practiced in America. It was incumbent on the first black President of the USA to develop a gravitas of moral authority on this issue; President Obama has failed to do that.
We all know who should have been the first Black President of the United States, and that was Jackie Robinson; with courage, Jackie could make a grown racist change his habits. That is the definition of Grace in this country.
“Photo provided by bassosfamily.com”
“Dodger greats Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese”
Mrs. Robinson, who embraced Reese’s widow, Dorothy Reese, after the services, remembered, “When Jack first entered (the Major Leagues), there were still a lot of people who didn’t know if it was the right thing to do. Pee Wee used all of his leadership skills and sensitivity to bring the team together… Pee Wee was more than a friend. Pee Wee was a good man.”
She said of the poignant moment when Reese hugged her husband as a show of support, “I wanted to hug him. For everything he did for Jack, and for my family.”
Reese was an eight-time All Star who played on seven pennant winners and one World Series champion in Brooklyn. He died at age 81 after a two-year fight with lung cancer.
The book, Teammates, the story of Reese and Robinson’s friendship, is used in elementary schools today, to teach children about racial tolerance.
Carl Erskine, a pitcher on the team, also remembered Reese’s role in helping Robinson break the color line in baseball. “Think of the guts that took,” he said. “Pee Wee had to go home (to segregated Louisville) and answer to his friends…I told Jackie later that (Reese’s gesture) helped my race more than his.”
Joe Black, a former Brooklyn pitcher and one of the first Blacks in Major League Baseball, said, “Pee Wee helped make my boyhood dream come true to play in the Majors, the World Series. When Pee Wee reached out to Jackie, all of us in the Negro League smiled and said it was the first time that a White guy had accepted us.”
He continued, “When I finally got up to Brooklyn, I went to Pee Wee and said, `Black people love you. When you touched Jackie, you touched all of us.’ With Pee Wee, it was No. I on his uniform and No. 1 in our hearts.”
“The relationship between the two players began shortly after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. Reese, the club’s shortstop and team captain, who grew up in the segregated South, steadfastly refused to sign the petition and even went against friends and some family in accepting Robinson.
Reese Putting His Arm Around Robinson
Then, during a game in Cincinnati in May 1947, with Robinson facing death threats and the taunts of racist hecklers, Reese went out of his way to support Robinson by publicly walking over and putting his arm around his teammate’s shoulders. “
What President Obama fails to understand is that Race Relations in America has never been about a rapprochement between white liberals and black folks. That’s Oprah crap. Race Relations in America, as in the case of the courage of Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson, has always been about AMAZING GRACE, the redemption of white racists. Frederick Douglass understood that, Martin Luther King understood that; Shirley Sherrod understands that.
The key point of electing the first black American President was not so he could enjoy flying about on AIR FORCE ONE, but to leave a permanent moral distaste against racism in the mouths of American racists. President Obama has failed in a key aspect of his job, the projection of moral authority, especially as it concerns Race Relations.
How could that have been accomplished?
The first person ever to have been invited to the White House should have been Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson.
The first Fourth of July of the Obama Presidency should have been spent, with President Obama and his family laying a wreathe at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, the site of the infamous Fort Pillow massacre, where Nathan Bedford Forrest massacred black Union troops, who had surrendered.
When I was developing my Civil War screenplay, THE BURDEN OF HEAVEN, I went to Fort Pillow; it is ghost ridden. There, amid the ghosts of both the murdered and the murderers, Obama, the first black American President, should have stood and sung out with his family, that hymn written by a slave ship captain who became a minister, AMAZING GRACE.
, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”
President Obama should exorcise the sins of Nathan Bedford Forrest, has to be done. And it should have been done before he accepted a Nobel Peace Prize.
Mr. President, Go to where the ghosts are, find them and show them how far America has come. Have courage when you are among the ghosts.
SIDEBAR
THE FORT PILLOW MASSACRE
“… in his Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant, who was not present at the battle, wrote of the battle:
“Forrest, however, fell back rapidly, and attacked the troops at Fort Pillow, a station for the protection of the navigation of the Mississippi River. The garrison consisted of a regiment of colored troops, infantry, and a detachment of Tennessee cavalry. These troops fought bravely, but were overpowered.I will leave Forrest in his dispatches to tell what he did with them.”The river was dyed,” he [Forrest] says, “with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” Subsequently, Forrest made a report in which he left out the part which shocks humanity to read.”
We began this blog with a quote from Maureen Dowd of the New York Times;let us end this Blog with a dispatch from The New York Times reported on April 24, 1864:
The blacks and their officers were shot down, bayoneted and put to the sword in cold blood… . Out of four hundred negro soldiers only about twenty survive! At least three hundred of them were destroyed after the surrender! This is the statement of the rebel General Chalmers himself to our informant.”
Fort Pillow, where the ghosts areFor the Sarah Palin/Confederate side of our Homeric Civil War, may I suggest the Reader read the following Blog.
