Kenneth C. Davis's Blog, page 110

Don't Know Much About® "Brown v. Board of Education"

Every day, eight-year-old Linda Brown wondered why she had to ride five miles to school when her bus passed the perfectly lovely Sumner Elementary School, just four blocks from her home. When her father tried to enroll her in Sumner for fourth grade, the Topeka, Kansas, school authorities just said no. In 1951, Linda Brown was the wrong color for Sumner.

In 1951, the law of the land remained "separate but equal," the policy dictated by the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling. "Separate but equal" kept Linda Brown out of the nearby Topeka schoolhouse and dictated that many public facilities, from maternity wards to morgues, from water fountains to swimming pools, from prisons to polling places, were either segregated or for whites only.

Exactly how these "separate" facilities were "equal" remained a mystery to blacks: If everything was so equal, why didn't white people want to use them? Nowhere was the disparity more complete and disgraceful than in the public schools, primarily but not exclusively in the heartland of the former Confederacy. Schools for whites were spanking new, well maintained, properly staffed, and amply supplied. Black schools were usually single-room shacks with no toilets, a single teacher, and a broken chalkboard.

If black parents wanted their children to be warm in the winter, they had to buy their own coal. But a handful of courageous southern blacks—mostly common people like teachers and ministers and their families—began the struggle that turned back these laws.

Urged on by Thurgood Marshall (1908–93), the burly, barb tongued attorney from Baltimore who led the NAACP's Legal Defense and Educational Fund, small-town folks in Kansas, South Carolina, Virginia, and Delaware balked at the injustice of "separate but equal" educational systems. The people who carried these fights were soon confronted by threats ranging from loss of their jobs to dried-up bank credit and ultimately to threats of violence and death.

In 1951, one of these men was the Reverend Oliver Brown, the father of Linda Brown, who tried to enroll his daughter in the all-white Topeka school. Since Brown came first in the alphabet among the suits brought against four different states, it was his name that was attached to the case that Thurgood Marshall argued before the Supreme Court in 1953.

There had been a change in the makeup of the Court itself. After the arguments in Brown v. Board of Education were first heard, Chief Justice Fred M. Vinson, a Truman appointee, died of a heart attack. In 1953, with reargument of the case on the horizon, President Eisenhower appointed Earl Warren (1891–1974) chief justice of the United States.

Certainly nobody at the time suspected that Warren would go on to lead the Court for sixteen of its most turbulent years, during which the justices took the lead in transforming America's approach to racial equality, criminal justice, and freedom of expression.

In the Brown case, Warren led the Court to a moment of needed unanimity. The decision was announced on May 17, 1954. As the New York Times banner headine proclaimed, "High Court Bans School Segregation"

"Separate but equal" was no longer the law of the land.

In Simple Justice, a monumental study of the case and the history of racism, cruelty, and discrimination that preceded it, Richard Kluger eloquently assessed the decision's impact:

The opinion of the Court said that the United States stood for something more than material abundance, still moved to an inner spirit, however deeply it had been submerged by fear and envy and mindless hate. . . . The Court had restored to the American people a measure of the humanity that had been drained away in their climb to worldwide supremacy. The Court said, without using the words, that when you stepped on a black man, he hurt. The time had come to stop.

Of course, Brown did not cause the scales to fall from the eyes of white supremacists. The fury of the South was quick and sure. School systems around the country, South and North, had to be dragged kicking and screaming through the courts toward desegregation. The states fought the decision with endless appeals and other delaying tactics, the calling out of troops, and ultimately violence and a venomous outflow of racial hatred, targeted at schoolchildren who simply wanted to learn.

 

This material is adapted from  Don't Know Much About® History which will be reissued on June 21, 2011 in a newly revised, updated and expanded 20th Anniversary Edition.

Don't Know Much About® John Brown

Abolitionist martyr? Or terrorist? Born on May 9, 1800, John Brown has always posed that awkward question in American history.

 

I am quite certain that the crimes of this guilty land will never be purged away but with blood.

–John Brown at his execution (November 2, 1859)

Viewed through history as a lunatic, psychotic, fanatic, visionary, and martyr, Brown came from a New England abolitionist family, several of whom were quite insane. A failure in most of his undertakings, he had gone to Kansas –then in the midst of a mini Civil War over slavery– in 1855 with five of his twenty-two children to fight for the antislavery cause, and gained notoriety for an attack that left five pro-slavery settlers hacked to pieces.

After that massacre at Pottawatomie,Kansas, Brown went into hiding, but he had cultivated wealthy New England friends who believed in his violent rhetoric. A group known as the Secret Six formed to fund Brown's audacious plan to march south, arm the slaves who would flock to his crusade, and establish a black republic in the Appalachians to wage war against the slaveholding South. Brown may have been crazy, but he was not without a sense of humor. When President Buchanan put a price of $250 on his head, Brown responded with a bounty of $20.50 on Buchanan's.

Among the people Brown confided in was Frederick Douglass; Brown saw Douglass as the man slaves would flock to, a "hive for the bees." But the country's most famous abolitionist attempted to dissuade Brown, not because he disagreed with violence but because he thought Brown's chosen target was suicidal. Few volunteers answered Brown's call to arms, although Harriet Tubman signed on with Brown's little band. She fell sick, however, and was unable to join the raid.

On October 16, 1859, Brown, with three of his sons and fifteen followers, white and black, attacked the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, on the Potomac River not far from Washington, D.C. Taking several hostages, including one descendant of George Washington, Brown's brigade occupied the arsenal. But no slaves came forward to join them. The local militia was able to bottle Brown up inside the building until federal marines under Colonel Robert E. Lee and J. E. B. Stuart arrived and captured Brown and the eight men who had survived the assault.

Within six weeks Brown was indicted, tried, convicted, and hanged by the state of Virginia, with the full approval of President Buchanan. But during the period of his captivity and trial, this wild-eyed fanatic underwent a transformation of sorts, becoming a forceful and eloquent spokesman for the cause of abolition.

While disavowing violence and condemning Brown, many in the North came to the conclusion that he was a martyr in a just cause. Even peaceable abolitionists who eschewed violence, such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, overlooked Brown's homicidal tendencies and glorified him. Thoreau likened Brown to Christ; Emerson wrote that Brown's hanging would "make the gallows as glorious as the cross."

The view in the South, of course, was far different. Fear of slave insurrection still ran deep. To southern minds, John Brown represented Yankee interference in their way of life taken to its extreme. Even conciliatory voices in the South turned furious in the face of the seeming beatification of Brown. When northerners began to glorify Brown while disavowing his tactics, it was one more blow forcing the wedge deeper and deeper between North and South.

This material is adapted from Don't Know Much About History. More information about Brown and his role in the conflict that led to the Civil War can be found in Don't Know Much About the Civil War.

Revised, updated and expanded edition scheduled for release in June 2011.

The paperback edition has been released with a new cover to mark the 150th anniversary of the Civil war.

DKMA Minute-A Nation Rising: A Video Q&A with Author Kenneth C. Davis

With the publication of A NATION RISING (Smithsonian/HarperCollins) on May 11th, bestselling author Kenneth C. Davis answers some questions about his career and new book.

JUST IN: Advance Praise for A NATION RISING:

Davis is a fine writer who uses a fast-moving narrative to tell these stories well.

–Jay Freeman, Booklist (May)

Advance Praise for A NATION RISING–

"With his special gift for revealing the significance of neglected historical characters, Kenneth Davis creates a multilayered, haunting narrative. Peeling back the veneer of self-serving nineteenth-century patriotism, Davis evokes the raw and violent spirit not just of an 'expanding nation,' but of an emerging and aggressive empire."

-Ray Raphael, author of Founders

Teachers–Join the Conversation

On Tuesday May 17 at 4 PM (Eastern Time), I will be participating in my first webinar via the National Council for the Social Studies. Register here

 

"Bestselling author Ken Davis invites teachers to join in an interactive discussion about teaching American History in more exciting ways. Davis, known for his down-to-earth, non-academic style, will present a brief introduction on what excites him in his study of American History, and what he's learned in twenty years of talking to Americans about what they "need to know about American History." Then he will open up the webinar to questions and comments from teachers.

"This is not a lecture, but a dialog," says Davis, who hopes you will join the session and share your ideas and experiences about what works in the classroom."

Happy Birthday, Harper Lee

Born April 28, 1926 in Monroeville, Alabama –Nelle Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird.

If you only publish one book, may as well make it a good one. For Harper Lee it was To Kill A Mockingbird (1960),  the story of Scout Finch, a girl growing up in a small Southern town.  Scout and her brother Jem wake up to the intolerance and racial hatred around them when their father, Atticus, takes on the legal case of a black man accused of raping a white woman. To Kill a Mockingbird won the Pulitzer Prize in 1961, and in the last ten years, it has been far and away the most popular selection for "One Book, One Community" reading programs—for example, every Vermont resident was encouraged to read the novel in 2011.  Do you know why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird?  Take this quick quiz on the beloved coming-of-age novel (adapted from Don't Know Much About Literature, a collection of literary quizzes.)

 

1.    In what fictional town is To Kill A Mockingbird set?

2.    In which real Alabama town were nine black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in 1931?

3.    Which character in To Kill a Mockingbird did Lee base on her childhood friend Truman Capote?

4.    What is the name of Scout's reclusive neighbor, whom she begins to understand better at the end of the novel?

5.    Who won an Oscar for his role as Atticus Finch in the 1962 film version of the novel?

 

Answers

1.    Maycomb, Alabama.

2.    Scottsboro.  The case of the "Scottsboro Boys" provided real-life inspiration for Lee's novel.

3.    Dill Harris, Scout Finch's friend and neighbor.  Lee was the prototype for one of Capote's characters: Idabel Tompkins in Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948).

4.    Boo Radley.

5.    Gregory Peck.  Another of Peck's great roles from literature was in the 1956 film Moby Dick; he played Captain Ahab.

 

And by the way, it is a sin to kill a mockingbird because all they do is "make music for us to enjoy."

Don't Know Much About® Poetic Last Lines

it's the final Last week of National Poetry Month. So fittingly, here's a Pop Quiz on some notable closing lines of poems.

 

"Nevermore!" It might be difficult to end a poem on a more dramatic note than Edgar Allen Poe did in "The Raven."  Can you name the poets who created these ending lines?  Bonus points for the name of the poem.

 

1.    Till human voices wake us, and we drown.

2.    My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

3.    and so cold

4.    And eternity in an hour

5.    Petals on a wet, black bough.

6.    Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Adapted from Don't Know Much About Literature, a collection of literary quizzes I wrote in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

Answers

1.    T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

2.    Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers"

3.    William Carlos Williams, "This Is Just To Say"

4.    William Blake, "To see a world in a grain of sand"

5.    Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro"

6.    Sylvia Plath, "Daddy"

 

Poetry Pop Quiz #2

In honor of National Poetry Month in April, I posted a quiz on poetic first lines earlier this month. Here is another.

(If you've been following my Poem of the Day posts all month on my Facebook page or on Twitter, you should recognize several of these. All are worth reading. Or rereading!)

"Gather ye rose-buds while ye may," wrote Robert Herrick, the 17th Century English poet, to open a poem encouraging ladies to marry while they were young and beautiful ("To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time").  This line of Herrick's poem, which gained popularity as a song, is now an iconic admonition to enjoy our lives on Earth.  Now gather ye wits, and see how many of these famous first lines you can identify.

1.    Something there is that doesn't love a wall

2.    I, too, dislike it, there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle

3.    Bent double, like old beggars under sacks

4.    By the rude bridge that arched the flood

5.    Come live with me and be my love

6.    God moves in a mysterious way,

7.    Hog Butcher for the World

8.    Little Lamb, who made thee?

9.    The art of losing isn't hard to master.

 

The answers are below. This quiz was adapted from Don't Know Much About Literature, written in collaboration with Jenny Davis.

Answers

1.    Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

2.    Marianne Moore, "Poetry"

3.    Wilfred Owen, "Dulce et Decorum Est"

4.    Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Concord Hymn"

5.    Christopher Marlowe, "The Passionate Shepherd to His Love"

6.    William Cowper, "Light Shining Out of Darkness"

7.    Carl Sandburg, "Chicago"

8.    William Blake, "The Lamb"

9.    Elizabeth Bishop, "One Art"

 

Don't Know Much About® the Bay of Pigs

In the long catalog of America's recent foreign policy fiascoes, the Bay of Pigs Invasion occupies a lofty position among the worst debacles. The 50th anniversary of the failed CIA-sponsored invasion of Cuba begun on April 17, 1961 is now being quietly marked.  In Cuba, it is still a cause for celebration.

During the past 50 years, Communism rose and fell in Europe, relations with Red China were transformed, and Middle Eastern tyrants were embraced, tolerated or toppled. But the Cuba of Fidel Castro has remained a stubborn thorn for every American President since Dwight D. Eisenhower. Castro's regime, which took over Cuba in a 1958 revolution, has survived coups, assassination plots, economic war and one attempted invasion.

What: For most of the 20th century, the Cuban economy –all the sugar, mining, cattle, and oil wealth– was in nearly total American control. American gangsters had a rich share of the casinos and hotels of Havana. The Spanish-American War had also given the United States the base it still controls at Guantanamo.  Then Castro and his rebels took over and turned the island into a Soviet-dominated Communist state. Almost since the time Castro came to power, the CIA began to plan his overthrow.

Who: In 1961, the CIA plotted to invade Cuba with a small army of anti-Castro refugees and exiles called La Brigada. Supported by CIA-planted insurgents in Cuba who would blow up bridges and knock out radio stations, the brigade would land on the beaches of Cuba and set off a popular revolt against Fidel Castro.

When: On April 17, 1961, some 1,400 Cubans, poorly trained, under-equipped, and uninformed of their destination, were set down on the beach at the Bay of Pigs.

By the end of the day on April 19, the invasion was over– a total disaster for the Cuban exile army. The toll was 114 Cuban invaders and many more defenders killed in the fighting; 1,189 other exiles were captured and held prisoner until they were later ransomed from Cuba by then- Attorney General Robert Kennedy for food and medical supplies. Four American fliers, members of the Alabama Air National Guard in CIA employ, also died as part of  the invasion, but the American government never acknowledged their existence or their connection to the operation.

Why: Poor planning, dated information about Cuba, and a complete lack of coordination doomed the ill-fated invasion force. Once the assault was underway, Castro poured thousands of troops into the area. Overwhelmed, the brigade fought bravely, but they lacked ammunition and, most important, the air support promised by the CIA. In Washington, Kennedy feared that any direct U.S. combat involvement might send the Russians into the non-Communist enclave of West Berlin, possibly setting off World War III.

The abject failure of the invasion was a total American humiliation. And it would bring Cold War America to its most dangerous flash point  when the Cuban Missile Crisis later unfolded in October 1962 as the emboldened Soviets, thinking Kennedy indecisive, tried to place missiles in Cuba.

In the view of many historians, the Bay of Pigs debacle also helped create the mind-set that sucked America into the mire of Vietnam. Having failed so completely in their attempt to rid Cuba of Communism, Kennedy and his advisers sought to counter the spread of Communism in Asia. And another fiasco began.

 

The Kennedy Library offers a page on the Bay of Pigs along with contemporary documents.

This post was adapted from Don't Know Much About History where you can read more about the impact of the Bay of Pigs on American policy and the Cold War era.

Don't Know Much About® Thomas Jefferson

Among America's iconic Founding Fathers, is there a more complicated and contradictory figure than Thomas Jefferson? Scientist, humanist, Enlightenment thinker, writer, architect, politician. He was all these things. The confusion over this genius comes from one basic question: How could the man who wrote, "All Men are Created Equal" and "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness" go home to a Monticello plantation, completely dependent upon slave labor?

Even Jefferson's birthday is confusing. History books say he was born on April 13,1743. But the grave marker at Monticello says he was born on April 2. That one is easier to answer than some of the larger contradictions in Jefferson's life. Jefferson was born while the old Julian calendar was still in use in Protestant England and its American colonies. So the April 2 date is called "Old Style" (O.S.). When Great Britain and America finally came around and adopted the Gregorian (named for Pope Gregory) Calendar in 1758, Jefferson's birth date was changed to April 13.

Thomas Jefferson's Grave Marker at Monticello (Photo: Kenneth C. Davis, 2010)

Birth date aside, Thomas Jefferson is such a fascinating and confounding personality because he more than anyone embodies the "Great Contradiction" in American history. How could a nation dedicated to ideals of  freedom and liberty continue a system that enslaved human beings in the cruelest of ways?

That contradiction is nowhere more evident than in Jefferson's original draft of Declaration of Independence.

A few years ago, at the New York Public Library, I had the thrilling experience of seeing Jefferson's handwritten copy of his original draft of the Declaration of Independence.  We may take the words for granted now. But Jefferson gave full voice to the idea that we all possess "inalienable rights." That we are "created equal."  That we have basic rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." That governments exist to advance those human rights, and only with the "consent of the governed."

This document was written on both sides of two pieces of paper. In his careful, flowing script, Jefferson included all of his original wording to show what the Congress in Philadelphia had changed, underscoring words and phrases that had been deleted. Those alterations, Jefferson, thought were "mutilations." Distressed by the editing, he made these "fair copies" of his original some time after July 4th. (The document held by the New York Public Library is one of only two known surviving copies.)

The most startling of these changes is a paragraph about what Jefferson calls "this execrable commerce" — slavery.  Jefferson charged –rather ridiculously, of course– that King George III was responsible for the slave trade and was preventing American efforts to restrain that trade. The section was deleted completely. But it is striking to see Jefferson's bold, block lettering when he describes:

an open market where MEN should be bought & sold

He clearly wanted to underscore his belief that slaves were MEN. The contradiction is stunning, troubling, and difficult to resolve. Jefferson knew slavery was wrong. He believed, like fellow slaveholder George Washington, that it would end. But both men were inextricably tied to the slave society and economy, even though they believed that the "peculiar institution" would gradually die out.  On that point, both men were grievously wrong and the 150th anniversary of the Civil War's opening on April 12 is a grim reminder of that.

Of course, part of the cynicism in Jefferson's case is due to the rumored relationship between Jefferson and slave Sally Hemings. Even Monticello now acknowledges that relationship probably existed, a contention first raised publicly in 1802 by muckraking newspaperman James Callender, a former Jefferson ally who was disgruntled when Jefferson did not offer him a post in the government. In recent years, Monticello has also gone a long way in addressing the question of slave life at the plantation.

Jefferson, who died on July 4, 1826 –the 50th anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration– and his deep contradictions are the perfect reminder that politicians are people –even the marble gods like Washington and Jefferson. Their all-too human flaws are proof of that as well as the fact that history books once tried to hide these flaws by pointing to the past with pride and patriotism.

Those flaws are explored in several of my books, including Don't Know Much About History, Don't Know Much About the Civil War and most recently A Nation Rising, in which I write about Jefferson's bitter relationship with his first Vice President, Aaron Burr, a man Thomas Jefferson tried to destroy using every political tool at his disposal as President.

I have always felt that seeing a man like Jefferson as human and not a demigod does not diminish his accomplishments as a leader, philosopher, champion of religious freedom and rationality and builder of a great university. If anything, those accomplishments become all the more remarkable.

 

Don't Know Much About® Poetic First Lines

"April," as T.S. Eliot told us, "is the cruellest month."

It is also National Poetry Month. That idea was inaugurated in 1996 by the Academy of American Poets. So to test your poetic wits, a quick Pop Quiz on some famous first poetic lines… Then go read the whole poems.

"Let us go then, you and I."  With this opening line, T.S. Eliot invites his reader into the mind of his uninspired, indecisive narrator in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." A poem's first line can set a scene, as Walt Whitman's "When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed" does.  Or it might intrigue the reader, as when Emily Dickinson writes, "I heard a Fly buzz—when I died" (Poem 465).

Who opened their poems with the famous lines below?  See how many poets you can identify.

 

1.    How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

2.    anyone lived in a pretty how town

3.    Take up the White Man's burden–

4.    'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

5.    In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn

6.    It so happens I am sick of being a man.

7.    I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

This quiz is adapted from Don't Know Much About Literature

Answers

1.    Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "Sonnet 43."

2.    e.e. cummings, "anyone lived in a pretty how town."

3.    Rudyard Kipling, "The White Man's Burden."  This 1899 poem encouraged Americans to colonize the Philippines and other former Spanish colonies.

4.    Lewis Carroll, "Jabberwocky" from Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There.

5.    Samuel Taylor Coleridge, "Kubla Kahn."

6.    Pablo Neruda, "Walking Around" (trans. Robert Bly).

7.    Allen Ginsberg, "Howl."